HISTORY AND THE CHRISTIAN FAITH

Devotional by Roger Griffin, Ph. D.
September 15, 1996

History has been my hobby since I was a child and my profession for about a third of a century. I've always loved it and still do. Even so, I sometimes still struggle with what history really means. I do not mean what the term means. We all have useful enough definitions of the concept known as history. Rather, does history itself have any meaning? G. K. Chesterton once characterized history as being "only a confused heap of facts." One wag put it more bluntly when he defined history as "just one damn thing after another." If these people are right, then history has no meaning, it makes no sense.

The ancient Greeks believed that history had a meaning, but it was ultimately a depressing one. It was that individuals, movements, indeed, entire civilizations are cyclical. They rise to heights of achievement, happiness, etc, then fall to depths of failure, despair, and destruction, perhaps rising and falling again and again. There is no real beginning and no end. The events in these cycles were understood as being determined by fortune, capricious gods or the natural consequences of human pride and arrogance.

The Hellenistic and Roman Stoics taught that, although humans are subject to blind fate, they should face that fate with courage and integrity. While Stoicism has much to commend itself as a way to deal with the difficulties of life, it is still based on a pessimistic and fatalistic view of history.

Twentieth-century secular thought owes much to the views of the ancients of the pagan classical world and much else, as well, to suppositions based on Darwin's ideas about the origin and evolution of species, including our own. Many people believe that history and prehistory before it paint a bleak picture of humanity being the result of a savage struggle between creatures in nature who have survived--or not survived--according to some random process over which they have no control or even influence. To many persons, the future of humankind and all other living things will continue this struggle into the dark and unpromising future.

Standing over against these views is another, implicit in the later Judaism of the years of exile and explicit in Christianity. It is that history is moving toward an end in which God brings history to completion, to an end which is Good and Perfect. Christians find in the New Testament of the Bible words of hope, of victory, of a reign of Christ with those faithful to him in a peaceable kingdom that shall know no end. Most Christians affirm this concept; most creedal statements and confessions of faith strongly affirm it.

The problem for Christians who teach history or study it for in any sense, as all of you have (and do), is that often the facts of history do not fit our belief, our faith. In some ways, history does bear out the progress of the Gospel. The message of Christ's love has spread through much of the world over the past two thousand years. But, within six hundred years of its founding, Christianity was largely dislodged from its home base in Palestine and, within another few centuries, from most of the other lands where it first flourished.

It is true that some ideals based on Christ's teaching have permeated human behavior, have made a difference. In some places, at least, there is more justice, more compassion, more respect between persons and groups of persons. But, through the centuries of history since the time when Jesus walked the earth, Christians have killed millions of other Christians and non-Christians, practiced discrimination against various groups of "different" people, and often exhibited hatred instead of love. As we all know, our own century has witnessed in the supposedly Christian West a level of brutality never practiced before on such a scale in the history of the world.

So what are we to believe? There are are no easy answers for thoughtful, history-minded Christians. But there are some words from Christ himself that we can ponder. Jesus did not promise a history of progress but of persecution. He talked of crosses to bear before there would be crowns to wear. But he also said that he was going to his Father's house to prepare a place there for his people, and that, in his stead, he would send the Spirit of God to comfort and encourage us. Most important, he promised, "I will be with you, even to the close of history."

Amen.