Is history important? 

“Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.” – Orwell, 1984

What is history?

• Not the same thing as the past.  “In practice, much of what we call ‘history’ leaves out many of the most important aspect of life.  It generally does not deal with the vast stretches of time during which life goes on normally, during which people fall in love, have families, raise their children, bury their dead, and carry on with the small acts of heroism, sacrifice, and devotion that mark so much of everyday life – the ‘unhistoric acts,’ as George Eliot wrote in the closing words of Middlemarch, of those ‘who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.’ – Wilfred McClay
  • Remembering what has been preserved (in artifacts and oral tradition). Training ourselves to analyze what has been preserved. And interpreting their meaning and importance and virtue
  • In order to make some sense

Therefore: history requires collecting materials, discerning the reliability of those materials, judging the actors within their settings, and, in order to profit practically – bridging the gap between the past our the present.  Simply put, there’s a lot of wisdom involved.  

Does the Bible encourage learning history?

• In several places the people of God are urged to remember
  • Deut 6; Psalm 78; Hebrews 11; Christianity is a historical faith 
    • Not only ideas (karma) or techniques (get up early in the morning); But grounded in historical occurrences – Creation/ Exodus/ Exile/ Crucifixion/ Resurrection/ Pentecost; Marc Bloth (French, secular): “Christianity is a religion of historians” “It is in fact more important for us to know what God did to Israel, to his Son Jesus Christ, than to seek what God intends for us today…. I find no salvation in my life history but only in the history of Jesus Christ.” – Dietrich Bonhoeffer
• • Reading Scripture is always a look across the centuries.Particularly, the Creation account highlights the dignity of the human race; the Incarnation further exalts the human race – we are pointed to a high estimation of humans in all places and times.We are not to be conformed to the world.  An understanding of other places and times can give us a better awareness of the definition of the world we’re in and thus a keener sensitivity to how it almost imperceptibly acts on us. We are part of the Church – born anew saints through Jesus Christ by the power of the Spirit in the call of the Father – that lived in other places and other times.  Why wouldn’t we be interested in our brothers and sisters fallen asleep, and the work of God in and through and around them?   
  • God is working out His will, almost entirely through ‘secondary causes,’ in all times and in all the earth.  To study history is to observe the judgment of God.

Any other benefits to history?

Every generation rewrites the past. In easy times history is more or less of an ornamental art, but in times of danger we are driven to the written record by a pressing need to find answers to the riddles of today. We need to know what kind of firm ground other men, belonging to generations before us, have found to stand on. In spite of changing conditions of life they were not very different from ourselves, their thoughts were the grandfathers of our thoughts, they managed to meet situations as difficult as those we have to face, to meet them sometimes lightheartedly, and in some measure to make their hopes prevail. We need to know how they did it.

In times of change and danger when there is a quicksand of fear under men’s reasoning, a sense of continuity with generations gone before can stretch like a lifeline across the scary present and get us past that idiot delusion of the exceptional Now that blocks good thinking. That is why, in times like ours, when old institutions are caving in and being replaced by new institutions not necessarily in accord with most men’s preconceived hopes, political thought has to look backwards as well as forwards. John Dos Passos, “The Use of the Past”

Good, Christian ways of looking at history

• With charity
  • Look at Hebrews 11 and Romans 4McClay’s generous appraisal of American presidentsHerbert Butterfield: A historian should be a “recording angel” rather than a “hanging judge.”  Christian historian Beth Schweiger: “In history, the call to love one’s neighbor is extended to the dead.”With discernment and an acknowledgement of depravity.   
    • “All have sinned” “The two things, celebration and criticism, are not necessarily enemies.  Love is the foundation of the wisest criticism, and criticism is the essential partner of an honest and enduring love.  We live in a country, let us hope, in which our flaws can be openly discussed, and where criticism and dissent can be regarded not as betrayals or thought-crimes but as essential ingredients in the flourishing of our polity and our common life.” – Wilfred McClay “History is the most humbling and humanizing of subjects. It opens reality to us in all its gorgeous variety, from the earthbound lives of ordinary peasants and servants to the rarefied universe of the mighty and wealthy, and the astonishing range of human experience in between. It seeks to provide a balanced and honest record of humanity’s achievements and enormities alike, generous enough to acknowledge the mixture of motives that every one of us flawed humans bring to life’s tasks.”Wilfred McClay
  • • Ashley Cruseturner “History represents the preservation of our collective past as well as the study of change over time…The role of the historian encompasses a sacred duty to offer a multi-dimensional picture of the past (and the people of the past) in the context of the past.”
• • • Not simplification, one way or the other.  Pulling out a fact or a quotation and allowing that to color one’s whole view of a person.  That is…anti-historical Not “historical presentism”: the application of contemporary moral judgments or worldviews to the past.  
  • Humility
    • History is just a slice out of the past – what we do know vs what we don’t know will always be the gnat and Mt. Everest
    • Our evaluations are very much subject to error and we should maintain an openness to new information.
      • “So very difficult a matter it is to trace and find out the truth of anything by history.” – Plutarch
      • See the Boston Globe Jacoby article
    • We’re vulnerable to the soundbites and media frenzy too:

Report of the Scholars Commission

After a careful review of all of the evidence, the commission agrees unanimously that the allegation is by no means proven; and we find it regrettable that public confusion about the 1998 DNA testing and other evidence has misled many people. With the exception of one member, whose views are set forth both below and in his more detailed appended dissent, our individual conclusions range from serious skepticism about the charge to a conviction that it is almost certainly false…Our dissenting member believes that there is not sufficient evidence to state conclusively one way or the other whether Thomas Jefferson fathered any children by Sally Hemings.

After such knowledge, what forgiveness? Think now

History has many cunning passages, contrived corridors

And issues, deceives with whispering ambitions,

Guides us by vanities. Think now

She gives when our attention is distracted

And what she gives, gives with such supple confusions

That the giving famishes the craving.

-T. S. Eliot “Love Song…”

Something like a conclusion:

I find that a Christian view of history is clarified if one considers reality as more or less like the world portrayed in the works of J. R. R. Tolkien. We live in the midst of contests between great and mysterious spiritual forces, which we understand only imperfectly and whose true dimensions we only occasionally glimpse. Yet, frail as we are, we do play a role in this history, on the side either of the powers of light or of the powers of darkness. It is crucially important then, that, by God’s grace, we keep our wits about us and discern the vast difference between the real forces of good and the powers of darkness disguised as angels of light. – George Marsden