Yes History Matters

Two new books make the case against ahistoric Christianity:

Take away the history of a people or a culture or a nation and you effectively take away the people, the culture, and the nation. We are today what has gone before in our past. Being unmoored from our own past makes us quite vulnerable. If you want to conquer a people, you in part deprive them of their own past, their own history.

Too often we see history being erased or rewritten, and that is how all totalitarian states have taken and held on to power. Unhook a people from their past and they are more easily and readily moulded into whatever image you want for them.

Speaking of which, I just spotted on the social media a short video clip featuring Jordan Peterson. It may have been out for a while now, and although it is quite brief, I thought what he had to say on “Traditions and Your Place Within History” was worth sharing:

Why do I have to study history? Well, you’re a historical being. You need to know who you are and where you came from and what you stand on, why you think the things you think, what is the appropriate manner to live. Those aren’t optional questions – well they are, because you can fail to answer all of them, but then you live in a chaotic, desolate, nihilistic wasteland of anxiety and hopelessness. The alternative is to place yourself in the proper tradition. And you have to understand what proper tradition is, and part of that understanding is to start to grapple with the complexities and realities of those traditions.

I say these things by way of introduction to two new books. I will not here do proper reviews of them, but I can alert you to their value, and pull a few quotes from each. Both have to do with history and its importance. These volumes happen to be penned by Christians, but what they have to say can be of help to others as well.

Sarah Irving-Stonebraker, Priests of History: Stewarding the Past in an Ahistoric Age (Zondervan, 2024)

The Sydney-based author and academic was for a long time an atheist and critic of Christianity. But as she informs us in this book, she eventually left her atheism and is now a committed Christian, who currently lectures in History and Western Civilisation at Australian Catholic University.

The book’s twelve chapters are treated under three main headings:
-How We Lost Our Connection to History
-Why We Need History
-How History Can Help Us

Throughout she emphasises the need – especially for believers – to see the peril of being cast adrift from history. What she says early on about her own spiritual journey very nicely ties in with the quote that I featured by Peterson above:

The path of my conversion from atheism to Christianity is woven throughout this book. What strikes me now is the extent to which I was living an ahistorical life during my mid-twenties at Oxford. As I mentioned earlier, I had no grounding in any larger narrative; my life was primarily a quest for self-discovery, self-fulfilment, and personal happiness. I did not see myself as a part of any enduring historical communities that might help frame a deeper purpose for my life. In fact, I would have been deeply suspicious of such an idea.

 

These sentiments will be particularly familiar to those of us who belong to the millennial and Gen Z generations, but I suspect people of all ages will recognise much of this ahistorical tendency. It is part of a worldview, that is, a framework of assumptions that shapes how we orient ourselves towards, and interact with, the world. A number of scholars have produced insightful studies of various aspects of our contemporary worldview in Western societies, including the idea of “expressive individualism,” which emphasises authenticity, self-expression, and the reduction of moral judgements to matters of personal taste or preference. (xx-xxi)

And as you will see in a moment, that quote also ties in with the Trueman volume which I will discuss in a moment. But two more brief quotes are worth offering here. Both deal with the urgent need for us to overcome the overt ahistoricism found in so many parts of the church:

When we view our history as irrelevant, we dispense with the way we have practiced these biblical traditions as well as the story and identity that we could pass down through the generations. Perhaps we dispense with the peace, perhaps we dispense with the sending, or perhaps we dispense with the reverent awe of remembering Christ’s forgiveness for sins when we celebrate the Lord’s Supper. Yet these practises could be especially valuable to us today in discipling and forming not only us, but also our younger brothers and sisters in the church. They are growing up in a rootless, radically atomised age in which they are consistently told to dispense with the past and go and invent themselves. The Christian message is a better story. It declares that we do not have to invent ourselves but rather we can be part of a people with a story. We know who we are because we are known by God and are invited into his historical people. (p. 50)

And again, from her conclusion:

I am particularly concerned that ahistoricism is seeping into many parts of the church, leaving Christians rootless, unmoored from their history, and largely unequipped to grapple with the ethical complexities of the past. We are thus rendered even more susceptible to the idols of non-Christian culture. The Ahistoric Age also has dire consequences for discipleship; Christians are increasingly living without inherited identity that frames the practises of formation and discipleship. (p. 211)

And all of this nicely ties in with a second brand new volume that also speaks to this matter.

Carl Trueman, Crisis of Confidence: Reclaiming the Historic Faith in a Culture Consumed with Individualism and Identity (Crossway, 2012, 2024)

This book is an expanded reworking of his previous book, The Creedal Imperative (Crossway, 2012). And it also ties in with another earlier work of his, The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self: Cultural Amnesia, Expressive Individualism, and the Road to Sexual Revolution (Crossway, 2020).

Given that I already have those two volumes, I wondered if it was worth getting this one. The answer is yes, it is. Both of those previous books spoke of how “expressive individualism” is not only a defining feature of modern secular culture, but sadly also of so much of contemporary Christianity – certainly some of the evangelical forms of it.

Believers have lost a sense of their own Christian history by living lives focused mainly on self and their own rather small worlds. The bigger picture of what God is doing in the church, and what he has being doing over the centuries, is largely lost on us.

And failing to appreciate the need for the great church creeds of the past is part of this. I have already made the case for the importance of the historic creeds of the church, and have included in that piece a reference to his earlier work on this topic: https://billmuehlenberg.com/2024/01/29/on-creedal-christianity/

Related to this, we have too many current Christians running with the mistaken notion of ‘No creed but Christ.’ They not only are unfamiliar with the great confessions and creeds of the past, but they actually look down on them. That too I have discussed elsewhere: https://billmuehlenberg.com/2011/01/31/creedless-christianity/

Trueman addresses all this and more in this valuable volume. Here I can offer just a few quotes to give you a feel for the case he is making. In his introduction he lays out his concern:

The fact that I am a confessional Christian places me at odds with the vast majority of Christians today. That is ironic, because most Christian churches throughout the ages have defined themselves by commitment to some form of creed, confession, or doctrinal statement. This is the case for the Eastern Orthodox, for Roman Catholics, and for Lutheran, Reformed, and Anglican Protestants. Some streams of Baptists also have confessions; and many independent churches today that may not think of themselves as confessional have brief statements of faith that define who they are and what they believe. Furthermore, as I argue later, even those churches and Christians who repudiate the whole notion of creeds and confessions will yet tend to operate with an implicit creed.

 

Despite this, it is true to say that we live in an anticonfessional age, at least in intention if not always in practice. The most blatant examples of this come from those who argue that the Protestant notion of Scripture alone simply requires the rejection of creeds and confessions. Scripture is the sole authority; of what use therefore are further documents? And how can one ever claim such documents have authority without thus derogating from the authority of Scripture? These arguments have a certain specious force, but I argue in chapters 1 and 2 that while the reasons for anticonfessionalism are manifold, many of them are driven more by cultural forces of which too many are unaware. Awareness of these forces, by contrast, may not automatically free us from their influence but can at least offer us the opportunity of subjecting them to critique. (p. 3)

He examines in detail why this ahistoric anticonfessionalism exists, why it is wrong, and how we can proceed to a more sure foundation. And given that I know what some of my Catholic friends are already thinking here, let me offer a final quote as found in his conclusion:

The last two decades have seen some high profile conversions from evangelical churches to Roman Catholicism. It is difficult to generalise, but a couple of themes seem to have emerged as factors and many of these: evangelicalism lacks historical rootedness, and evangelicalism lacks serious doctrinal weight in long-term stability, with its preference for experience, activism, and mere Christianity (whether at the liberal or the conservative end of the evangelical spectrum). I believe there is an alternative to Rome: it is confessional Protestantism. By that, I do not mean the confessional Protestantism that cherry picks which bits of various Protestant confessions it likes, assembling an eclectic and minimal conservative Protestant consensus. I mean true confessionalism, one that adheres to a particular confession and connects it to a particular church order and polity. That is confessional Protestantism as the Reformers and their successors would have understood it. It is also Christianity as Paul would have understood it: the church, and only the church, is the divine institution, existing by the command and will of God, for the preservation and proclamation of the faith. It also meets both of those perceived lacunae in evangelicalism: it provides historical roots and serious theology. (p. 173)

My intent here, as always, is not to enter yet again into sectarian warfare. It is to simply to highlight these two new books. As an indication of my ecumenical credentials (!), and as is so often the case, a concluding quote from G. K. Chesterton will not go amiss here:

The disadvantage of men not knowing the past is that they do not know the present. History is a hill or high point of vantage, from which alone men see the town in which they live or the age in which they are living. Without some such contrast or comparison, without some such shifting of the point of view, we should see nothing whatever of our own social surroundings. We should take them for granted, as the only possible social surroundings. We should be as unconscious of them as we are, for the most part, of the hair growing on our heads or the air passing through our lungs. It is the variety of the human story that brings out sharply the last turn that the road has taken, and it is the view under the arch of the gateway which tells us that we are entering a town. Yet this sense of the past is curiously patchy among the most intelligent and instructed people, especially in modern England….

[2019 words]