Faith Matters Foundation's video: How can we approach even terrible events in church history in a way that deepens our faith

"I think we reject church history and the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament for the same reasons. Because we want to take one standard and we want to just sort good vs bad, right? And it's almost what Jesus told us not to do in that parable of wheat and tears, because He's going, it's all mixed together! You can't tear the one out without tearing out the other. So when I go to church history, I try to have an open mind... And one way I talk to people about it is I say, so often in the past we've used church history as evidence for the truth of our faith. Right? Set that aside. Approach this as laboratories of discipleship. People are experimenting with what it means to be a disciple, what it means to be a chosen people, to seek God under different conditions, dealing with different things with their own problems. Once you do that, it's fascinating, right? And sometimes it really works and sometimes it falls apart in tragic and instructive ways. And so I really try very hard to suspend judgment a little bit in church history and get in and empathize with people. And as I do, I consistently find myself deepened. It deepens my faith to study church history because I see how people like really did it in the struggle of life." Hear more from James Goldberg in "Let Me Drown with Moses," episode 136 of the Faith Matters podcast! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g5iICrl0QMQ&t=1809s