1.4 – Why History? (15 min video)

Transcript

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– Well, today we’ll talk about that question, why study history? So let’s get right to it. Number one, we study history to remember who God is and what he has done. If you look at our faith, if you consider the creeds, you consider the various confessions have been written by Christians throughout the centuries, they always focus on specific events.

They always focus more specifically upon what God is doing within history. So we are called to remember him. In fact, it’s over 300 times in the scripture that the word remember is actually used. We’re told, for example, that God remembers Noah. He remembers Abraham, he remembers Rachel and Hannah. Or when John the Baptist is born, his father Zechariah notes what God is doing and says that God shows mercy to our fathers and he remembers his holy covenant.

So we’re told first of all, that God remembers us. He doesn’t forget us. He doesn’t forsake us. But then we’re also commanded to remember who he is and what he has done. So their commands to remember the Exodus, the Red Sea crossing. Their commands to remember the wilderness rebellion, to not fall in that again. Their commands to remember the teachings of Jesus or to remember the resolve that we had upon first believing in Him. The apostles, when they frequently would preach, especially in the book of Acts, you’ll see them going through a catalog of the stories of God’s faithfulness in the Old Testament, pointing to the fact that now he has fulfilled his promises through the incarnation, the crucifixion and the resurrection.

That’s why John Briggs can say that the birth of Jesus and his life is quote, “Reality breaking in on time.” Or Oscar Coleman writes, “If we consider the Christian faith from the point of view of time, we should say that the scandal of the Christian faith is to believe that these few years, the years of Jesus here on earth, which for secular history have no more and no less significance than any other periods, these few years are the center and the norm of the totality of time.

But the New Testament claims no less than this. When all things began, the Word already was, but the Word became flesh. He came to dwell among us and we saw his glory. Such glory as befits the Father’s only Son, full of grace and truth. We’re called to remember that, to know that it has happened and to share that, which we’ll see with the disciples who became the apostles. Secondly, we study history, and to quote Francis Bacon, “We study history because it makes us grave.” It gives us a sense of gravitas, which is a word that yes, we get both gravity and the grave from, but it’s a word that properly means a heaviness, a weight. History has a sense of kind of sobering us. It has a way of causing us to look at life more seriously because you can study history and you can see the decay of all things, the decline of all lives and civilizations.

You can see the entire history of a character or the entire history of a civilization. That’s why Richard Weaver says that awareness of the past is an antidote to both egotism, like the sense that we’re all it, or to a shallow optimism. He says it restrains optimism because it teaches us to be cautious about man’s perfectibility and to put a sober estimate on schemes to renovate the species. Meaning, if we look to modern technology, or we look to modern science, or we think, ah, we’re getting better as a culture, we’re progressing, or if we think we’re evolving, if we think those things, history has a way of reminding us that, hey, people have thought that throughout time, and they have failed miserably.

It turns out that the human condition, it turns out that the issues that we face, such as death, that has not gone away since the fall.

It’s a reminder that we need redemption, which is really the third point of studying history. History shows us the redemption of an infinite God. After all, the gospel story is rooted in historical events. Tolkien, if you remember, called it the eucatastrophe, the good disaster. He recognized that history doesn’t simply go in a circle like the ancients thought. It doesn’t simply repeat itself with no purpose. Yes, people do repeat the mistakes of the past ’cause they don’t learn from them, but history from a Christian worldview, it’s linear. It moves in a line. It has a very clear beginning, a beginning of time itself at creation, but it’s also working towards a final judgment and also a final redemption. It has an end. Therefore, knowing what that is, that end is, and knowing our hope and who Christ is, we can have hope as we look at history.

That’s why one of Augustine’s biographers, Henry Chadwick, says that when Augustine looked at history, he viewed it as an epic poem. Or it’s why John Briggs, again, writing about history, it says that history is kind of like a tapestry. Only instead of seeing the design that God is weaving on the front, we merely see it from behind. We see all of the knots. We see splashes of color here and there, but we don’t see the true beauty of it, not yet. He also writes that the Christian faith does not have to contort itself to embrace the hard facts of history. We don’t have to pretend that the people of the past, including Christians, including our own family members and our own relatives, our own ancestors, you name it, we don’t have to pretend that they weren’t sinners. We don’t have to pretend that they didn’t do horrible things. And here’s why he says that. He says, “History, or rather Christianity admits “that the tragedy of history, it cannot be avoided.” That’s because we’re fallen. But it claims, Christianity claims, that there is a power that redeems tragedy. That despite the fact that we’re fallen and messed up, God still uses us, and that’s a sheer act of mercy and grace. Fourth, we study history to know our own past, and thus to know our current identity, how we got here, and even to see our future trajectory.

Cicero said that not to know what took place before you were born is to remain forever a child. If your knowledge of history is only of the most recent events, or even just of say the modern times, then you have a very shallow view of history, which is probably why you’re taking this course. which is why I find it’s so helpful to read of the stories of the past, even thousands of years ago, ’cause you find out that mankind hasn’t really changed. We have always been in need of redemption and always will be until that final glorification in heaven. Lord Acton said it like this. He said, “History is not a burden on the memory, but it’s an illumination of the soul.” History tells us who we are by telling us what God has done. Therefore, it shows us what he’s done in our culture’s past, but more significantly, it shows us how he is still working. Thus, it can combat the fear and the anxiety that we have in the present day, because it can show us how God has been faithful in the past lives of those that we read about, but especially becomes something living to us when we see how God has been faithful in the lives of our family, or especially in our own lives.

Fifth, we study history to know the heroes. Now, I will say this, kind of as a side note, that history is mostly a study of the common people. In fact, there’s a curious verse in Psalm 90 written by Moses in which he says, “Establish, Lord, the work of our hands.” It’s curious because that was written by Moses while he was leading a rather stubborn people 40 years in the wilderness, never making it into the promised land.

They left no buildings behind, no real monuments, so to speak. So was the work of their hands actually established? The answer is yes. The work of their hands, the people themselves, what really matters to God was actually established. And the thing about history is that really history is the movement of common people, but yes, there are named characters. There are the heroes, for example. But it’s important to remember what makes them heroes. Leland Rykand, talking about Old Testament heroes specifically, knows that they are heroes who experience a tragedy narrowly avoided. If you look at the characters of the Old Testament, you’ll see a lot of mess. You’ll see a lot of sin. You’ll see a lot of ways in which their lives could have gone much worse than they actually did. Sometimes the Old Testament seems like a Greek tragedy where death is demanded by fate for the sins committed. But the reality of the Old Testament is it’s filled with God’s mercy and grace pointing towards the New Testament and the New Covenant. So really the heroes of the Old Testament are really the heroes of history, period. They are the ones who are always fallen, they’re always sinners, but by God’s grace, they repent. If you want to define what makes a hero a hero, it’s the one who knows how to repent, who knows how to be on their knees. Six, we study history to know the villains. The villains are equally fallen to the heroes. Now, they’re really no worse, nor are they any better, of course. The problem with villains, and what doesn’t make them heroes, is they never repent. They cannot see any hope. They cannot see beyond their own present circumstances, and they tend to think that it’s all upon them. And they cause a whole lot of suffering, destruction, and misery in their wake. But even all of that suffering has a purpose. T.S. Eliot writes that even now in the sordid particulars, and we’ll see sordid particulars this year, he says, “Even now the eternal design may appear.” In Psalm 76, the psalmist says that even the wrath of man, man and all of his anger and destruction, even that praises God, because he uses all of that for his purposes.

He calls Cyrus the great, his tool, his instrument. So the villains are often a warning to us to of course not be like them, but they’re also humble reminders that had it not been for the grace of God, we would be like that. Seventh, we study history to avoid the mistakes of the past. That’s actually one of the most common reasons given for studying history. Even Aldous Huxley recognized it when he said that men do not learn very much from the lessons of history is the most important of all the lessons of history.

It’s one of those consistent things that we forget the past. That’s why we’re called to remember these stories over and over again, especially the stories of the scripture. Lord Acton says it like this. He says, “History must be our deliverer, not only from the undue influence of other times, but from the undue influence of our own, from the tyranny of the environment and the pressures of the air we breathe.

It’s very common for us to think that the things going on in our life or in our world are all consuming and no one has ever faced these before and it’s all just coming to an end. And we kind of panic. History reminds us that, hey, God’s people, they’ve been here before. They’ve actually been here over and over again, and he has been consistently faithful. Finally, and eighth, we study history to give us a sense of place. A sense of place that we belong in that long line, that long thread of history of God’s people. It’s by the study of history that we see the example the saints of old. We can know as Hebrews 11, 4 reminds us of one of those saints, Abel, that through his faith, though he died, he still speaks.

Let me conclude with John Briggs once again, who says, “History set in a context of a theology of beginnings and ends, history enables the Christian to see something of the true thickness of events.

or she can see them not only in their contemporary setting, not only in their setting in human history, but in the relation to, “In the beginning God and I will come again.” That is the privilege of history. From the beginning where God creates everything out of nothing and makes it good to the end when he will indeed come again.