1.3 – Why Do We Study History? (9 min video)

Transcript

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Alright, well today we’re actually going to ask the question and give some answers to why do we study history specifically. Now usually when I ask this question, I get a pretty good answer and a pretty similar answer. I usually have students that say, “Well, it’s so we can avoid the mistakes of the past.” And yeah, that’s absolutely true, and in fact I think I have that as one of the reasons I’m going to give you today. But I find that reason by itself to be almost a little bit too negative or maybe a lot too negative. Surely there’s something more to it than just avoiding the mistakes of the past. And besides, sometimes just because you know what the right thing is and you know how the past has gone, that doesn’t necessarily mean that you actually choose the right thing. There has to be a proper affection there, which is really what we’re after in the classroom and through education, and through submitting ourself to the wisdom of the past. So, what are some of the reasons for actually studying history? Well, number one, I’ll have you write this down, is we study history to remember who God is and to remember what he has actually done. You look through the scriptures, you’ll find that the word remember is used heavily throughout the Bible. In fact, there are some 300 variations of the word remember throughout the scriptures. You’ll find throughout the scriptures, even just in the book of Genesis, for example, you’ll find God remembering people like Noah. Like God remembered Noah, or he remembered Abraham, or he remembered Rachel. Later on, we’ll hear about how God remembers Hannah, or how he remembers his covenant with Israel. That’s over and over again. When Jesus was born, he was brought to the temple. Zechariah, who was waiting to see the Messiah, He said this, he said that God shows mercy to our fathers and he remembers his holy covenant.

In Psalm 30 and Psalm 97, we are commanded to give thanks when we remember God’s holy name. We’re commanded throughout the Scriptures to remember certain events like the Exodus or the rebellion of God’s people in the wilderness or to remember things like Jesus’ teaching or in Hebrews, to remember the resolve we had when we first came to the faith, when we first really believed or knew that we believed.

In Hebrews 11, all of the great ancestors who had incredible faith are praised. It’s a memory of all of these guys who went before us, all these people who went before us who were by no means perfect, but who were people who were redeemed, people who actually had faith.

So part of the reason we study history is to realize, okay, God is consistent. He is always there. He is always working out a story of redemption. Secondly, and this goes back to what Francis Bacon said about history, we study history because it gives us a certain gravity. Or to use Francis Bacon’s terms, history makes us grave. The reason why it makes us grave and gives us kind of a gravity and kind of grounds us to the earth. It’s really an image of death because one of the things that history does, and you’ll especially see this with the study of antiquity, is it shows you how all civilizations, all cultures eventually decay and fall apart over time.

Nothing that man has actually made can survive forever. So history reminds us of just how fragile we actually are in how much in need of redemption we are, which is the third point, really.

The third reason we study history, or one of the many reasons you could say we study history, is to show the consistent redemption of an infinite God.

The way that the author Frederick Buechner talked about this was he described God’s redemption as the magnificent defeat. And what he meant by that was that whenever it seems like things are as dark as they possibly can be, Whenever it seems like things are not going the direction they’re supposed to be, that’s when the redemption comes. What Tolkien called the eucatastrophe, where you have this redemption brought out of this incredible darkness and apparent defeat. It’s not really a defeat at all. In other words, there’s a hopeful view to history that even if the church declines and decays, it never goes away and it always comes back because God is faithful in everything he does.

He’s faithful in his promises. That’s why John Briggs was able to say this. He said, “The Christian faith does not have “to contort itself to embrace the hard facts of history.” Meaning, we don’t have to rewrite the awful things that we have done in the past. Because, John Briggs goes on, he says, “Christianity admits that the tragedy of history “cannot be avoided, we do sin. But Christianity claims that there is a power, a power beyond us, that redeems the actual tragedy. Fourth, we study history to know our own past and thus to know our own identity. See, one of the things that history tells us is it tells us who we actually are. And in fact, as Christians, our primary concern in the faith is with events that actually happen. In fact, if you look at what we believe and the most important things about what we believe, they’re all connected to actual events. That’s why J. Grosven Machen was able to say that the student of the New Testament should primarily be a historian. The center and the core of all of the Bible, the Old Testament as well, is history. In other words, the study of history should remind us that God is faithful. That’s how we combat things like worry and fear and anxiety by remembering Christ says, “Do not fear, for I have overcome the world.” Fifth, we do study history to know the heroes. We study history to know that heroes are men and women who were faithful, but were also sinners. They were men and women who knew how to repent. But we also study history, six, to know the villains. To know that there are men and women who have been unfaithful, There are men and women who were no more or no less sinful than the heroes.

Their difference was that they never repented. And really, when we look at the heroes, we should see something to imitate and emulate, but all the time recognizing that they were fallen people whom God used.

When we look at the villains, we should not simply judge them and say, oh, look at how awful this person is, because we should recognize that that would be us without the grace of God.

So history should be something that is constantly teaching us humility. Seventh, yes, like I told you earlier, we do study history to avoid the mistakes of the past, to know the mistakes of the past and to avoid them in the future.

Recognizing, of course, though, that sometimes when we make a mistake, it’s usually not simply because we didn’t know. Most of the time, it’s because we wanted to pursue something simply because we wanted it even though we knew it was actually wrong. So history should be a constant reminder of sanctification. It should be constantly reminding us of, “Oh yeah, man has fallen and man is messed up apart from God.” It should be constantly pointing us to the need for who Christ is and what he has done. Finally, and this really isn’t truly finally, there are so many other things we could say about why we study history, But part of the reason we study history is to be great storytellers.

That’s why Stratford Caldecott said that the education of the imagination is the education of the heart. Or why Ben Howell says that the goal of teaching history is always the same, it’s romance. It’s to know that there really is a story of redemption that has been working its way through all of history and continues right down to the present day, right to your town and right to you.

That’s the marvel of history and why knowing, yes, world history is important, but also knowing your family history is just as important.