Some Thoughts on History

I recently read Grant Wacker's excellent essay "Understanding the Past, Using the Past: Reflections on Two Approaches to History," from the book Religious Advocacy and American History (1997). Wacker makes some excellent points about the nature of history as a discipline and how it relates to religion. It's worth quoting at length:

"All but the most obtuse readers readily see that the discipline's natural tendency is to debunk. Readers quite reasonably begin to worry when they learn that all religious artifacts, including their own, can be substantially if not wholly explained without recourse to God. They desperately want to believe that their most cherished views about life and the after-life were discovered, not invented, and they shudder when historians suggest otherwise. Religious folk recoil when they find out that other men and women have fashioned intellectual and moral universes dramatically different from their own. It is important to note that the problem here is not pluralism per se, but the recognition that other men and women, holding other points of view, came to those positions intelligently and with moral integrity. As far as that goes, religious folk resist being studied at all, or treated as though their beliefs and rituals were a quantifiable part of the natural world. And for many the most upsetting part of all is to learn how shabby their own story - the story of their own tribe, their own sect - really is, for all too often it proves to be a tale of small-minded men and women inflicting large-minded cruelties upon anyone who got in their way.
"So how does an internal approach to the past help believers cope? How does it de-fang the serpent of the historical study of religion, and especially of one's own religion? Not by telling lies, to be sure. Not even by telling little lies of prudent omission. Rather it serves them by letting the dead speak just as they were, eloquent and stammering, mellifluous and gasping. Thoughtful souls, newly burdened with an acute sense of humankind's "terrible predicaments," as Herbert Butterfield put it, may emerge from their encounter with the past feeling "a little sorry for everybody." If the price of such chastening is a sharpened vision of human pretension, the reward may be a heightened sense of divine faithfulness generation after generation. Yet such enrichment becomes an available resource only if believers take the fifth commandment, to honor their fathers and mothers - their forebears - with utter seriousness. And here it is worth remembering that the fifth commandment was the first commandment of the second table of the Law, the table that told folks how to get along with each other after they had taken care of the seemingly more manageable task of getting along with God."

The Church's story is one with many twists and turns, and its certainly not one of unflagging faithfulness. There is a need to face this past with candor, however, as Wacker so eloquently points out. Lies of omission and distortion does no favors for the cause of the Gospel. Neither does dismissing the religious traditions or experiences of others. We have no reason to deny that people of all faiths can and do have encounters with God. They interpret them through the beliefs and framework of their religion, just as I do as a Christian. The difference is that I believe that Jesus Christ provides the fullest expression of God and his relation to humans. Whether this is true is obviously a point of contention, but that does not mean that my religious experience or anyone else's can be dismissed simply for being interpreted differently. A completely secular or agnostic interpretation of what I call the presence of God might simply be that such experiences are entirely generated by our minds, or psychological pressure, or chemical predispositions. The question is then one of the adequacy of the explanation. I won't take the time right now to offer my view on why I feel that I really do experience the Triune God and not just self-generated mental experiences, though suffice to say I do believe that this is the case.

My point is only that taking a dismissive attitude towards the religious traditions and experiences of others is harmful and misguided, because as Wacker notes, these other traditions represent many people with rational and moral integrity. Looking at the past means that we must take our own history seriously, and the history of others. We must let our forebear's speak for themselves; with wisdom, with prejudice, with finitude, with sinfulness, with grace. The past offers hard questions and uncomfortable events, but trying to twist it or downplay its blemishes is not only dishonest, it also shows a lack of faith in the God who has chosen to place treasure in jars of clay. The Church universal, and all its sects and denominations, bear witness to the revelation of God in Jesus Christ, and its deep and complicated history, skeletons and all, is part of this legacy. This may raise some troubling questions and provoke anguished soul searching, but that is part of the humility that we as Christians ought to embody.