History matters

I took one history class as an elective in college, 1st semester American history. I sometimes rolled out of bed just in time to slide into the back of the auditorium. It seemed completely impractical at the time, and I couldn't wait to get past all these boring requirements so I could move on to what really mattered. But if you look at my reading stack today, a good chunk of those books are history. Why the change?

My about-face was sparked at the 2012 Ligonier Conference on The Christian Mind. Dr. Robert Godfrey gave a brief overview of American Christianity, tracing the trends and movements to where we are today. One of those trends is that we have stopped thinking about how we think. This intrigued me because I had recently gone through a major shift in my theology. I came home and began to trace the genealogy of what I used to believe. I had been influenced by teachers who had someone influence them, who had someone influence them... But who were these people? This wasn't necessarily to blame someone.¹ I wanted to know where I had gone wrong and why. As I read more, I began to see that theology is intertwined with history and philosophy because people are affected by the events and the prominent thinkers at any the given time. 

But this digging into the past has spread beyond theology to why we think about people the way we do. In my desire to advocate for domestic violence awareness, I want to learn what has been the attitude through history toward women inside and outside of the church. As the conflict over race is heating up, what has been the history of racial relations inside and outside of the church?

This has made for some fascinating but often heavy reading, but it's worth it. If we don't learn from the past, we may get it wrong in the present because our current ideas didn't just spring out of nowhere. Just look at the recent Trinity debate as an example. By jettisoning church history, many of us accepted an understanding of God that would have been condemned as heresy by the early church. Is there a parallel with these other issues? I think there is. 

False ideas are easily propagated from one generation to the other. We may accept them blindly, or we may think we've discovered something grand and new when it's just an old error that's been recycled. So don't be like me and think that history is boring and has no relevance to today. History matters.

1. Okay, I admit to blaming Charles Finney for a period of time. Anytime something went wrong with the car or the house, we would say, "It's all Finney's fault!"