I know Fr. Andrew Stephen Damick. I can highly recommend him as both a speaker, author, and podcaster. He wrote a post recently that I would like to recommend. It says in a much more scholarly way than I have what the problem is with the current approaches to history. Look at the quote below and then go read it.
One of the criticisms of Orthodoxy’s understanding of its own history (not to mention, Roman Catholicism’s) is that there really is no unbroken Christian tradition of anything at all, that Church history is really just about multiple movements, doctrines and practices that cannot coherently be traced back to the Apostles. This is essentially one version of the historiography of the anti-ecclesiologists. If there is no true Church, then there certainly cannot be any true tradition of continuity.
This historiographical doctrine (and it is indeed a doctrine) is believed despite the fact that the Church Fathers throughout the centuries manifestly regarded themselves as being nothing other than true successors to the Apostles, the inheritors of an unbroken tradition. Indeed, nearly every Christian prior to the Reformation who bothered to write anything down about it saw the Church in this way. Following the Holy Fathers, the phrase so often written not just in the various writings of the saints but even explicitly in the decrees of the Ecumenical Councils, is not just an appeal to authority, but a genuine theology of history, resting on the belief that Christ indeed established His Church and would never permit it or the faith given “once for all” to be vanquished. For St. Irenaeus of Lyons (2nd c., not even a century removed from the Apostles), apostolic succession (and all that entails) was the only reliable guarantor of doctrinal orthodoxy.
So the historical deconstructionist critic of Church tradition essentially has to say that he knows better than the Fathers and their Christian contemporaries did, that when looking at an incomplete and fragmented set of textual data—which is their only possible approach, like archaeologists sifting through broken pots and bone fragments—he can see the situation more clearly than those who were closer in time, language, culture and place to the Apostles: Theythought that they were really just passing on the faith given to them by their fathers in the faith, but I can see that they were just fooling themselves. …
When the varieties of Protestantism began to confuse me, I decided to look for continuity in Church history. Surprise! I eventually became an Orthodox Christian. The Protestant rationalizations for all the variations arising from the same foundation- Sola Scriptura- are in my point of view a real weak point for them. But how to show them this without making them defensive . . .
Amen and Amen! Also, it significant that the “one holy catholic and apostolic Church” is an object of faith, confessed as such in the same breath as faith in Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.
Further, Tradition is found, not only in the Byzantine Orthodox Churches, but also, to a very large degree, in the Oriental Orthodox Churches, the Assyrian Church of the East, and the Roman Catholic Church, all of which, of course, trace their origins directly back to the Apostles. The consensus among these bodies is very high, probably at least 90%, and even higher when Rome is left out of the picture.
I heartily agree.