History Explains the Present (Short Read)

Estimated reading time: 5 minutes

The better we know our history, the more we will find that history explains the present in a way which helps us make sense of our current experiences.

My First Love

My first love was history—dinosaurs, soldiers, and lost civilisations. I would read book after book about history, whether they were Horrible Histories or Penguin Classics. I watched Dad’s Army and MASH and anything about knights, Romans, and Egyptians. I wanted to dress up as my favourite characters and join in with the stories of the past.

At secondary school, where I really did not have a great time at all, history and my history teacher were a refuge from the storms. I could lose myself in these ancient worlds buried beneath the sands or stroll through palaces with kings and queens. I learned their stories and was taught to see how they informed my own.

Everything Is Joined Together

Nothing exists independently. Everything exists in the context of everything else. The present is always informed by the past.

As an undergraduate at Durham, I read theology and planned to specialise in church history. My love of history and my growing faith were brought together. But the tutor I wanted took study leave, so I studied systematics instead. But always with an eye to history, to the broad context in which the people I was reading had lived.

A World of Two Extremes – Only History or Only Progress

We increasingly live in a world of two extremes.

Some focus only on the new. Everything is better when it is new and different. Progress means moving forward; it means changing from what was to become something else. The past is forgotten. Anything older than twenty years is ancient history in the world of rolling news and the relentless cycle of content.

Others focus only on the past. Everything was better in the old days. Change is inherently threatening. It is better to preserve what remains of our fading glory and try to return to the way things used to be.

I think both extremes are wrong.

We Need To Understand The Past To Be Wise About Our Future

Richard Chartres, the previous Bishop of London, once said that: a person with an understanding of history but no sense of destiny is a very boring fellow. But a person with a sense of destiny, and no understanding of history, is a very dangerous character indeed.

Or, those who don’t understand the past are doomed to repeat its mistakes.

I think there is a real need to reclaim a love for and engagement with history if we are going to be able to make sense of our world.

When I was appointed to my current corps, the first thing I did was research its history. I learned about why there are so many canals, the history of the cloth mills, and its link to the sheep farms of the Cotswolds.

It helped me understand the changes in the area, why poverty existed in the villages, and to see the roots of the stories told by the people who live here. I learned how John Wesley had come and built a chapel that I now preach in, which taught me how wealth has moved in and out of the town with the changing industries and how that had affected the church demographics.

Understanding the history of a place or a people just means to understand it’s stories.

Narrative History and Telling New Stories

Our lives are told in stories. Our past does not consist of dates and facts but of relationships, stories, and events that made a difference. The same is true for history.

I think that Christians and the church more generally need to be grounded in the stories and history of their faith.

Teaching and telling the stories of the people throughout Christian history have made a difference because of how they lived their lives, so we can learn from their examples. The stories we tell each other shape our perceptions of the world.

We interpret our own personal narrative through the stories that we have learned that have influenced our development. When we share those stories, we have a shared framework of understanding and a readily available system of instructive metaphors.

This is why I think it’s really important to tell the stories of our past.

Knowing the historical and cultural context in which the great doctrines of our faith came into being. Understanding what factors were involved in shaping the faith that we have inherited from those who have gone before us.

The task of anyone looking at historical events is to try and understand them in the context in which they occured without reading back into them with our own cultural lenses. The more accurately and the more truthfully we understand our past the better we will understand our faith today.

But equally, we cannot be trapped by the past. The past must inform the present, it cannot control it. By knowing that we inherited our faith from two thousand years of people reflecting on who Jesus was, we will better understand our role in safeguarding the legacy of that faith.

Bringing The Past Into The Present

I hope that you’ll go and spend some time in the past. When you read the Bible, learn to ask about what else was going on when it was written. What is the context of the events that will help us understand them? When thinking about the things we do or don’t do in worship or the words of the songs we sing, start to ask where they came from and why we have them now.

When confronted with a tricky decision, we need to ask whether people have faced a similar decision in the past and learn from what they did.

To borrow from the great Ted Lasso – Be curious, not judgemental. There are loads of great places to start. Podcasts and TV shows and books on every part of history. For the Army, there are the heritage centres and museums, the Facebook groups and magazines and journals and blogs (like mine 😄) which ask questions about our past.

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