One of the biggest threats to American Christianity is our failure to acknowledge our history.
This coming Fall, I have the privilege of co-teaching a course, “American Baptist History & Polity,” offered through the American Baptist Churches of Maine’s Institute for Ministry. To prepare for this course, over the past few months, I have occupied myself quite intensely with the history of the Baptist tradition.
The book I am currently reading, Baptists through the Centuries: A History of a Global People (David Bebbington) offers a masterful single volume treatment of the origins and development of Baptists worldwide. Bebbington writes about debates surrounding baptism, state involvement in religion, revivalism, and the famous controversies over liberalism and fundamentalism, all of which feature in the movement’s rather short (nearly 400 year) history.
In reading about the history of the Baptist tradition, I am constantly reminded of that proverbial maxim from Ecclesiastes: “There is nothing new under the sun” (1:9b). This isn’t to say that all the debates we are having today –over human sexuality, faith and politics, the role of the state in religion, etc.– have already taken place in these exact forms. No, of course not.
It is to say, rather, that looking at the grand sweep of human history, the kinds of debates we are having today, the viewpoints we have difficulty shedding, the tendencies we have trouble even noticing, fit within the historical landscape. They do.
The very point I am trying to make is one that has been made already in the philosophical movement known as historicism. Without boring you with a full retinue of 19/20th century German philosophers, historicism can be helpfully defined as:
“The belief that an adequate understanding of the nature of anything and an assessment of its value can be gained by considering it in terms of the place it occupied and the role it played within history.”
Everything that is happening today, everything we’re debating, fighting for, losing sleep over, makes sense, given the social, political, and intellectual forces of our 21st century reality.
Why do young(er) liberals have such trouble relating to old(er) conservatives? Why are certain interpretations or questions off-limits in certain circles? Why do we value one kind of religious expression and disparage another? These questions can be (mostly) answered via history.
This, of course, puts an awful lot of stock in history-writing, and becomes a bit iffy given how bias-inflected all history-writing is. However, in studying the history of the Baptist tradition, I find myself saying over and over again, “That’s why we’re having this debate! That’s why they think the way they do! That’s why I feel so strongly about this,” etc., etc., etc.
Failing to attend to our history, or presuming we can live ahistorically –i.e., immune to the powerful effects of social, political, and intellectual forces outside our control– results in a Christian faith that is arrogant and, might I say, dangerous.
It leads to a faith that supposes one can reach over thousands of years of tradition, interpretive habits, theological leanings, and reach into the pure, unvarnished treasure-trove of Scripture, unstained by what lies between.
It leads to a faith that supposes we are the ones getting it right, that the personal, spontaneous relationship-focused religion of modern America (taking just one example) is genuine while the formal, ritualistic, more-academic faith of our European forebears, is not (please bear with my simplifications).
It leads to a faith that supposes we possess the only reading of the Word of God and that to debate such a reading is to deny both Scripture and orthodoxy as a whole.
Such an approach to religion, however –an ahistorical approach, if we can call it that– can itself be explained (I think) via history.
I won’t burden you with a list of titles charting the history of American Evangelicalism. But like every other trend of human activity, every other behavioral pattern, every other observable distinctive, the faith of Evangelical Christians in modern America exists squarely within history.
All branches of Christianity throughout the ages are culturally inflected, generational expressions of a community’s lived faith in Jesus Christ. Every movement within the history of the church is stitched like a quilt-square next to movements which came before and after, surrounded by the fabric of culture all around.
The way we are, the thoughts we think, the questions we ask; they make sense given the grand sweep of history. But now that we know this: how ought we to live our distinctly modern American Christian lives?
Well, first, I’d say: take the time to know your tradition and its history. Perhaps this means admitting for the very first time that you have a tradition and live within it.
Discover your tradition, your movement, and the swirling of cultural and religious forces which gave rise to whatever “ism” that is. (And for all my non-denominational friends, I hate to burst your bubble, but yours is a tradition too!)
Then, I encourage you to recognize and study other traditions and their histories. Start by befriending some Lutherans, Anglicans, Pentecostals, Roman Catholics. Read about their history, their debates, their councils.
Look at their values and tendencies in relation to the movements and forces which shape their history. And rather than esteeming one as better or “more right” than another, take the time to appreciate the unique particularity of their tradition.
Everyone exists within a tradition; we might as well just admit it. The best we can do, then, is name our tradition, learn what we can about it, and appreciate the diverse traditions of others.
“There is nothing new under the sun,” says the author of Ecclesiastes. All the more reason, then, to take the time to observe what is under the sun, and to appreciate exactly where we (and others) stand beneath it.
Jonah Bissell
Pastor