Related articles and links |  1 of 4

In a time of war, everything seems to hinge on The Now. But more than ever, it is really a time when we must be in touch with our history—especially, our sacred history.

But why?

These are our "Top ten reasons to read Christian History."

No, this is not a plug for Christian History magazine, which I edit. You can read Christian History in many other places: Biographies, histories of Western civilization (e.g. Jacques Barzun's From Dawn to Decadence), and in novels (e.g. Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin). You can even "read" Christian History on the walls of museums, like the Art Institute of Chicago.

And this, in fact, is …

Christian History is everywhere in our culture. No matter what your religious background (or lack thereof), you just can't understand the modern, Western world—including its wars—unless you know your Christian History.

I was interviewing for an academic position at a small midwestern college, and the committee asked me this: How would you convince our undergraduates to take a course in Christian History? I answered: I would suggest they look around them. So many aspects of American culture come from Christian sources: Biblical expressions embedded in our language.

Christian ethical positions—though dimly remembered and now honored most often in the breach. Assumptions about who human beings are and what we're doing on this planet—although again, fragmented and unmoored from the theology that once anchored them. Musical styles—even rock and roll owes much to slave spirituals and gospel "shouts."

There's more. Holidays—Easter, Christmas, even Halloween may all include "pagan" elements, but their frame of reference was always thoroughly Christian. Oh, and let's not forget St. Patrick's Day. Art—stroll through almost any Western art exhibit and just try to avoid Christian references, explicit and implicit. Science—I won't repeat the list of "Christian fathers of the scientific revolution."

If you live in America, or anywhere in the West, your whole environment is soaked in "leftover Christianity."

It liberates you from the tyranny of the present—and of the recent past. In his inaugural lecture as Professor of Medieval and Renaissance Literature at Cambridge on Nov. 29, 1954, the ever-quotable C. S. Lewis put it like this:

"I don't think we need fear that the study of a day and period, however prolonged, however sympathetic, need be an indulgence in nostalgia or an enslavement to the past. In the individual life as the psychologists have taught us, it's not the remembered past, it's the forgotten past that enslaves us. And I think that's true of society. … I think no class of men are less enslaved to the past than historians. It is the unhistorical who are usually without knowing it enslaved to a very recent past." (From a radio adaptation of Lewis's inaugural lecture as Professor of Medieval and Renaissance Literature given at Cambridge on Nov. 29, 1954; see issue 7: C. S. Lewis.)

During wartime, Lewis sharpened the point. In the essay "Learning in War-Time" in The Weight of Glory, he compared the reader of history to the man who has lived in many places. This man "is not likely to be deceived by the local errors of his native village; the scholar has lived in many times and is therefore in some degree immune from the great cataract of nonsense that pours from the press and the microphone of his own age."

Life is too short to learn by experience. To echo Lewis's words, "the scholar has lived in many times." What a rich way to grow in wisdom. Though experience can be the best teacher for some things, for others it does not take us far at all.

next page... |  1 of 4

March (Web-only) 2003, Vol. 47