Yesterday: The Key that Unlocks Today

Freedom from the tyranny of the present can be found in our heritage.

By a triple birthright, American evangelicals bring a healthy skepticism to the past—even to our own history. As children of the Reformation, we cling to Scripture rather than tradition as authoritative. As Americans, citizens of “the first new nation,” we dislike granting one generation authority over another, and we cherish commitments that we make ourselves rather than those handed down to us. We are prone to dismiss conventional wisdom and hidebound systems. As heirs of fundamentalism, finally, we bristle at the suggestion that the natural historical process, rather than the supernatural, governs the course of events. Such a legacy has made it difficult for evangelicals to bring the past into focus, and difficult as well to use the past to gain a truer image of ourselves. Whatever our strengths in seizing the moment in God’s name, we evangelicals are inexperienced in practicing fellowship with Christians across the centuries. But since we do not practice this kind of fellowship, we lose a great privilege—nothing less than discovering where we ourselves, and our ideas and prejudices, stand in the stream of the centuries. To use an image of C. S. Lewis, we need practice in opening windows to “the clean sea-breeze of the centuries.”

The Value Of The Past

What is to be gained by availing ourselves of the experience of Christians in the past? Can we spell it out clearly here? The first thing to say is that throughout redemptive history, God himself has appealed to his people on the basis of his history with them. This is true in the Old Testament, most noticeably in the mighty dct of the Exodus, the “Magna Charta” of the children of Israel (Deut. 6:20–23; 26:5–10). The eminent Christian historian Herbert Butterfield has even suggested that, more than anything else, it was the power of its historical memory that held Israel together as a people. In the New Testament, the Book of Hebrews offers similar counsel to heed those who, though dead, are still speaking (11:4). Surrounded by such a cloud of witnesses (12:1), we become empowered to run with perseverance the race set before us.

On a personal level, such fellowship across generations can serve to inspire, warn, instruct, and broaden. God, to be sure, can give such gifts in any number of ways, natural and supernatural. But he normally uses human agents to stir up his people. For those whose Christian walk has become mediocre plodding, there is no source of inspiration better than an encounter with Bernard of Clairvaux, Saint Francis, or John Wycliffe from the Middle Ages; with Martin Luther, John Wesley, Menno Simons, or the other Protestant founders; with the Countess of Huntingdon who inspired both revival and social reform in the eighteenth century; with missionary pioneers such as Adoniram Judson; or with those such as Richard Allen, founder of the African Methodist Episcopal church, whose faith overcame great barriers. Just as the past can deliver us from smallness of vision, so can it also caution against error, excess, and failure. How foolish to think that we cannot learn vivid lessons from the mistakes of those who have already run the course.

The Tyranny Of The Present

By its instruction, history can also deliver us from the tyranny of our own times, the conceit that we are necessarily wiser than our fathers and mothers—what C. S. Lewis called chronological snobbery. Through reading Christian classics we can sit at the feet of John of the Cross to learn about prayer, of Martin Luther about grace, of John Calvin about faith, of Jonathan Edwards about revivals. And we can hear the message of the poets, Charles Wesley on the new creation, William Cowper on depression, and Count von Zinzendorf on the blood of Christ. Exploring the length and breadth of historic Christendom can also broaden our thinking in the best sense. It removes the blinkers of our own limited backgrounds—whether Arminian. Calvinist, fundamentalist, Catholic, Lutheran, Church of Christ, Pentecostal, or whatever—and opens us to the riches of God’s work in other traditions. I shall never forget the personal benefit when, as a Presbyterian college student, I first encountered the works of John Wesley and Martin Luther.

Yet beyond these benefits, there is an even more compelling reason to acquire an intimate knowledge of the past. When we gain such an acquaintance, we can begin to comprehend the characteristic assumptions of our own age, particularly its blindnesses, those unexamined habits of mind about which future generations will ask, “But how could they have thought that?” C. S. Lewis advocated the reading of old books as “the clean sea-breeze of the centuries,” precisely for this reason. Only the past, he said, could provide steady coordinates to orient the Christian in the contemporary world:

“Not that the past has any magic about it, but because we cannot study the future, and yet need something to set against the present, to remind us that the basic assumptions have been quite different in different periods and that much which seems certain to the uneducated is merely temporary fashion. A man who has lived in many places 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 for the great cataract of nonsense that pours from the press and the microphone of his own age.”

Christians are never immune from the cultural values of their age and are always in danger of equating Christianity with contemporary ideals. But history, by analyzing the sources of such values and assumptions, can identify some of the formative cultural elements that have either shaped or distorted our understanding of God and his revelation. We can thereby begin to differentiate between what is normative and what is time bound. In exploring the untested assumptions that shape us, the role of the historian is like that of the psychologist. So writes George Marsden:

“In somewhat the same way that unconscious and subconscious factors influence our psychological development, deep-seated cultural patterns, ideals, values, and assumptions exert a subtle and often unrecognized influence on everyone in that culture. To the extent that these influences remain unconscious we are controlled by them; but to the extent that we are made conscious of these influences we are in a position to discriminate among them and to exercise a degree of control over them. So, as the analyst brings unconscious psychological factors into consciousness by tracing their roots back to their childhood origins, the historian brings cultural patterns, ideals, values and assumptions to consciousness by tracing them back to their historical origins.”

The benefits of Christian history are clear enough: an immediate relevance for clarifying both the gospel and the taken-for-granted assumptions of the contemporary world. Yet learning to think historically is neither simple nor self-evident, particularly for those who—like many evangelicals—become enthusiastic about its promise but are unskilled in discerning its lessons. The chief obstacle is the assumption that opening windows to the past is a snap, as simple as turning a latch. In fact, it is a delicate procedure many have abused in haste.

Thinking About The Past

The simplest and most appealing way to think about the past, in fact, is the most dangerous. It is to survey the historical landscape with a vigilance for that which is similar to, or that which anticipates, the present. Thus, the ecumenist, when coming to history, finds its direction and movement in ecumenical successes, the high-church devotee in the church’s organic development, the pacifist in peace movements, the fundamentalist in militant defenses of the truth, the social activist in examples of reform. Once we begin with our own commitments, the selection of the facts to fit them is all too easy, the more so since selectivity is usually unconscious. The parts of the story that we underline are very often merely just the ones that seem important because they bear out our own convictions.

Yet ironically, such a search for similarity in the past saps history of its relevance: the past becomes little more than a screen upon which we project our own concerns. Rather than offering genuine insight into our own times, the past becomes just one more medium to convey positions we already hold. To approach history this way is tragic, for it means that we lose the ability to learn from the past. Yet it is also very common and may in fact be done in a variety of forms, four of which deserve mention.

The Past As Mirror

Some of us are so zealous about our own commitments that the past does nothing but mirror back our own preconceptions. We readily study the past, and often become enthralled by it. But by a subtle and often unconscious process we pick out of the historical tapestry only those strands that reinforce our own points of view. This selective use of history is rife on both sides of such contemporary debates as the nature of Christian political responsibility, the inerrancy of the Bible, and the role of women in the church. Apart from any of the specific issues at stake, the tragedy is that we come to believe that we are atuned to the wisdom of the ages when, in fact, the sound we really hear is but an echo of our own voice. The past thus offers no critical perspective on our own times at the exact moment when we think we have become its devoted pupils.

The Past As Escape

A quest to recover history can also be misplaced if it does not begin by coming to terms with one’s own history. Christians who do not have a strong sense of history often overreact when they first catch the allure of the past. It is then easy to overshoot the mark when trying to recover the historic riches of the church. In our own day, for instance, it is easy enough to understand the surprising number who have shed an informal, low church heritage—often, in America, a tradition without tradition—for the historic continuities found in the Episcopal or Catholic churches. In an extreme example, one group that came out of the “Jesus Movement” of the 1960s has now swung so far in the direction of reverencing tradition that it has formed a new “Orthodox” church that seeks relations with the Eastern branches of Christendom, supposedly the purest strains of early Christian tradition.

What is more perplexing is that so often this impulse to find continuity begins by a decisive and unthinking break from one’s own history and tradition. A double irony is involved when people claim to exalt history on the one hand, and have no respect for their own tradition on the other. In the first place, it is patently ahistorical to assume that one can, by a sheer act of will, rend those ties that Providence has allowed naturally to grow, attempting instead to graft one’s soul onto stock that appears more acceptable. The action of not taking seriously the work of God in one’s own tradition and in one’s own personal development speaks much louder than a river of words about the importance of returning to Christian roots. The second irony is that those who attempt to escape their own history generally do not understand it, and thus will likely be shaped by it long after asserting their independence.

The Past As Golden Age

A third misuse of history is the call for Christians today to emulate the virtues of some bygone era—the early church fathers, the world of Saint Thomas in the thirteenth century, the period of the Reformation, the Puritan era, the age of Wesley, or the early American republic. Christians should walk up and down the breadth of historic Christianity, to be sure. But they run great risk in holding up any one age as a model or a panacea for contemporary ills.

This search for a historic golden age generally involves a false comparison: lining up the best of a past period or movement against the stark reality of the present, with all its failure, inconsistency, and hypocrisy. This is a common tendency whenever Christians become troubled about their own times. They are then naturally prone to look for ways to shore up virtues that seem to be slipping away. By searching out evidence in the historical record, they hope to stabilize the present with firm historical moorings.

This tendency often leads us to contrast our own secular and permissive age, for instance, with an idyllic picture of the early American Republic as a Christian nation. There is, however, a threefold problem in depicting such a standard from which we are said to have fallen. Often, to be sure, the specific claims about the earlier period may be true. In this case, the claim is that early America was generally Christian in the structure of its law, its institutions, and its culture.

Yet the fallacy lies in what remains unsaid, in the failure to recognize how profoundly different the world of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century was from our own, and in the method by which such an image of the past is constructed. In the first place, the myth is extremely selective. It fails to take into account significant countervailing evidence: the 80 to 85 percent of Americans who at the time of the Revolution were not church members, the success of unchristian currents of thought in beguiling the generation of the founding fathers, the institution of slavery that Christians allowed to be legitimated in the Constitution, the testimony of Christians from that generation who were painfully aware of the rampant ungodliness in their society, and the paltry influence of Christian thinking in their politics.

If the first mistake is presenting a half-truth, the second is wrenching events and ideas from their original context. To depict early America as a Christian nation, without further clarification, leaves the impression that the only difference of consequence between that age and our own is between strong faith and weak, genuine courage and feigned, serious thinking and shallow, noble purpose and selfishness. Assuming the similarity of past and present, this vision overlooks the profound Christian legacy that Western society enjoyed in the early modern period—capital for which individuals in that day were not themselves responsible and which we today find largely spent. It also ignores major elements of change. In the infant republic, nine out of ten citizens (i.e., white males) could claim a heritage that was British and Protestant. The radical pluralism—of ethnic origin, religion, and culture—that has developed in the two centuries since the Revolution places almost every public decision today about religion or morality on a new footing. Whatever positions Christians may take in responding to a secular world, working to turn back the clock—as if nothing had changed in the meantime—is the surest means of failing to meet the challenges that are uniquely today’s.

The third fallacy of depicting such a golden age of Christian influence concerns the method by which we reconstruct the past. The danger is simply that we project an image of our forebears that combines the happy solution of our own difficulties and the realization of our own deepest longings. In doing so, we not only become dishonest with respect to the historical record, but also counterproductive in helping our own age. Rather than stirring people to action, a falsely idealistic view of the past leaves a bitter residue: the conviction that God, who moved mightily among his people in ages past, is strangely silent amidst our own trouble and perplexities.

The Past As A Chain Of Cause And Effect

Christians are taught that the basic issues of life are simple: to trust as a child, to speak with a simple yes or no, to love unfeignedly, to maintain undivided loyalties. All of this presupposes that God has made plain to us the difference between truth and error, light and darkness, and that he ordained the goal to which certain kinds of thought and behavior predictably lead. It seems reasonable, therefore, that the record of human history, if intelligible at all, would mirror divine morality in such a way as to enable us to see clearly the right and the wrong and to chart precisely the triumph of good and the disastrous consequences of evil. History, in this view, is something that clarifies the difference between the broad road and the straight and narrow; it serves as a beam of unrefracted light illuminating the meaning and purpose of life.

Yet the more we actually examine the way things have happened, the more we are driven from the simple to the complex. This is the central dilemma for anyone coming to study the past, as Herbert Butterfield suggests in The Whig Interpretation of History. The problem becomes even more exaggerated for the Christian who expects history to echo in unmistakable tones the manifest purposes of God as revealed in Scripture. “The truth of history,” Butterfield wrote, “is no simple matter, all packed and parcelled ready for handling in the market place.” History is not unrefracted light, confirming the ultimate validity of ideals themselves, but light as it breaks up into color in the external world, introducing us to the role of ideals in the lives of fallible women and men. The historian is not free to speculate with the theologian or philosopher on what might or should have happened; he must faithfully observe principles “caught amongst chance and accident; he must watch their logic being tricked and entangled in the events of a concrete world.”

The natural response to such complexity is to simplify the historical process in order to reclaim for history a more certain voice. Christians in particular are prone to abbreviate the historical record, pruning from the past what is messy in order to enjoy clear illustrations of true and false teaching, avoiding the complex in order to find inspiring examples of godly and ungodly living. We do this less by a conscious principle of exclusion and more by the initial assumption that the past speaks only in such affirmative tones. Yet for all its clarity and illustrative power, such “history” is an optical illusion that distorts the past and compromises the truth.

The real mistake is in overdramatizing the historical process, imputing historical change to some direct agency, and patching all evidence into a neat story that vindicates those priorities that we hold dear and that seem to us self-evident. We forget that the unfolding of history rarely affords front-row seats for observing the clash of antithetical world views. More often, what we see in the real world of individuals and groups is a mingling of truth and error. We behold vivid strengths coupled with vivid weaknesses. We find opposing points of view that seem to grasp truth in part but not in full. We discover people unaware of what really controls their thinking. We come across admirable goals that end in disastrous outworkings, evil intentions that eventuate in good, and positive outcomes that no one at first seemed to desire.

The time of the American Revolution offers just such a situation. No clearly defined contest existed between Christian and Enlightenment thinkers to see who would serve as the architects of the American republic. For all the Christian values resonant in that culture, the thinking of men such as James Madison or John Witherspoon can at best be described as a patchwork of Enlightenment and Christian notions. They were surprisingly unself-conscious, furthermore, about the sources of their ideas or the ends to which they pointed. Equally ambiguous was American Christianity in the years before the Civil War. That period offers us contrasting solutions to moral and national problems, both of which seem valid but incomplete: zealous social activists, like the abolitionists Arthur and Lewis Tappan, who cared not a whit about sound theology; and zealous defenders of the faith, such as Charles Hodge at Princeton, who with the best theological arguments kept pressing social issues at arm’s length.

A similar error is the assumption that we have the capacity to trace all historical events back to their primary human agents. If we think we can always discern the connections between personal causes and large-scale social effects, we are in grave danger of telescoping the complexity of interactions that make up the historical process into a simple progression. And we are in danger of believing that we can invariably tell how specific individuals with particular intentions were the exact causes of certain events.

But history usually reveals no simple link between cause and effect, intention and outcome. The complications of human affairs are often too great for our capacities. They regularly cheat us of their purposes and deflect their labors to unpredictable ends—unpredictable at least to human wisdom. The rise of religious liberty, Butterfield suggests, was not the logical outworking of either Protestantism or Catholicism, but actually of the prolonged clash between them and the resulting rise of religious indifference. Out of this clash of will, something emerged that neither side had sought. In a similar irony, the American Revolution became imbued with a religious cast not because Christians of that era were especially adept at applying Christianity to politics, but because so many people of religious fervor came to consider the political order of as much ultimate concern as the church itself. The same kind of intensity that Jonathan Edwards used in proclaiming the need for repentance and faith, John and Samuel Adams displayed in declaring the need for political liberty. In this sense the American Revolution represents more the product of a residual Christianity, its base deeply eroded, than it does the infusion of genuine Christian principles into politics.

Redemptive History

Christians, of all people, should not be surprised that the historical process is deeply ironic. Redemptive history, after all, is one story after another of God turning the intentions of men, good and bad, to his own better and wiser purpose. Joseph’s brothers intended to kill him, but God deflected this evil to the rescue of an entire people. “You intended to harm me; but God intended it for good” (Gen. 50:20, NIV). From the monarchy, which Israel had erected in defiance, God raised up the house of David in whose seed all nations would be blessed. In history’s ultimate irony, death and hell were crushed at the cross even as they exulted in momentary triumph.

The complexity and irony of history blast all our cherished notions and pet theories. But they do convey to the Christian a strong word of consolation. History, fortunately, is subject to neither the designs of evil men nor the frailty and foibles of good ones. While the past does provide an ample measure of vision, direction, warning, and inspiration, its complexity forces us, in the final analysis, to admit that the process defies our limited comprehension. We must analyze the past as carefully as we can. And we must continue to act in the present on the basis of our best analyses of the past. But we should never be overconfident or presumptuous. We should never think that we have mastered history. “It would not be strange,” noted C. S. Lewis, “if we, who have not sat through the whole play, and who have heard only tiny fragments of the scenes already played, sometimes mistook a mere super in a fine dress for one of the protagonists.” Admist the complexity of the historical record, a “labyrinthine network” in Butterfield’s words, we are left with nothing historical in which to trust—nothing save the mighty arm of God, which, by breaking into history, closed the yawning gates of hell and turns even the clenched fist of man’s wrath to his praise.

Nathan O. Hatch is associate professor of history at Notre Dame University, South Bend, Indiana. The article is adapted from The Search for Christian America (Crossway, 1983), edited by Hatch with George M. Marsden and Mark A. Noll.

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