I am an historian. So I belong to a “faith” of sorts whose adherents do not dwell in the past, as outsiders sometimes think, but who do, certainly, dwell on the facts of the past. We also dwell on the teeming interpretations of the human past, including those interpretations forced on us, and all, by the momentum of recent and contemporary events. For example, how many of us have taken a stronger interest in the history of Islam lately?
I teach courses in the history of world societies. Among the achievements most desired of any given semester is to wrest from the minds of typical American students certain errors of conception or adequacy: history repeats itself / we study history so that we can better understand the present, and so forth. My students will recognize my assertion (I hope they were listening) that history absolutely does not “repeat itself.”
To start with, history is not an entity capable of such action. I do concede that people tend to do the same kinds of foolish (or not so foolish) things. So human actions are in some sense iterative, but our behaviors do not necessarily constitute history despite their being actions in the fleeting present and thus quickly artifacts of the past. History is the product of human efforts to search for information about and to narrate a meaningful past. I hope historians produce a valid and reliable narrative when they do these things. I hope they do so well. On our campus, in my classroom, I hope that a balanced but distinctively Christian perspective both enhances and is enhanced by the process.
As to whether people read or otherwise study history in order to understand the present, I think it is enough to say that many people in many professions do certainly read a lot of history. Some of it was written long ago, some of it is as fresh as yesterday. All of it is subject to interpretation in each new generation, including our own.
As a startling revelation to many folk, let me mention some evidence that human events are ever new and that our present circumstances are changeable. This is not new information, but it comes from a statement based on continuing reflections about the relative standing of the “West” and the “Rest” of the world. Philip Jenkins wrote about it in “Believing in the Global South,” in the December 2006 issue (No. 168) of First Things.
Jenkins wrote about the current and continuing boom in the growth of Christianity–but not in North America, not in Europe, and not among Euro-Americans. As was reiterated frequently at the Baylor Pruitt Symposium in 2005 the majority church is, and is to be, darker-skinned, female, poor, and pentecostal evangelical, or Catholic. The “global South” of South America, Africa, and South, Southeast, and East Asia will be progressively dominant. Jenkins stressed that for the rest of us the challenge is to recognize the significance of “the change in belief and practice in the growing churches of the Global South.” (p. 13)
My lectionary reading today from Matthew 3 included the statement of John the Baptizer that “His winnowing fork is in his hand, and he will clean out his threshing floor and will gather his wheat into the storehouse.” (v. 12) Among the arresting statements in Jenkins’ article was his assertion, “The more time one spends with southern Christians, reading the Bible through their eyes, the harder it is to see the Bible as simply a historical text.” He meant that Christians of the global South easily identify with biblical themes and things such as harvest activities, sacrificial observances in worship (evoking the sacrifice of the Lamb), praying for one’s daily bread because one is truly, actually, hungry, casting out demons, experiencing wonderful healings of mind and body–these are not abstract, remote phenomena, but integral to their experience of liberation in Christ Jesus.
Even more arresting: that western, mainline, Euro-American Christians have little similar experience (though I would allow for a few exceptions), so much so that the Bible is an entirely different book for us, that Christians of the global South have, today, more in common with the Hebrews of the Old Testament and the Christians of the early church.
When I consider the nature of our priorities, not only in living and serving, but in biblical interpretation and our politics of interpretation and denominationalism in the Euro-American West, I see how, and why, we struggle all the more to understand and to accommodate the social and cultural forces around us. While we are still powerfully Western and dominant, we are weak in matters the poor and harrassed of the global South understand better through daily experience. When Jesus said “Blessed are the poor in spirit” (Matthew) and “Blessed are the poor” (Luke) his words surely rang truer, more transformatively, than we Westerners can understand intuitively or experientially. May I suggest that we need our brothers and sisters of the global South to provide us wisdom in these matters? What do you think?