“I’m just . . . disconnected,” a friend said, pausing before emphasising the last word. I was chatting after church with some young adults, and one of them, with her characteristic candour and insight, touched on something.
This sense of disconnection was the same thing I was hearing from my students at university. In contemporary culture, many people are rootless, atomised, and unsure of where they belong.
When life is all about self-invention, history is deemed irrelevant. And yet the culture of “you do you” is producing an epidemic of loneliness, an “anxious generation” (to use Jonathan Haidt’s term), and rapid polarisation as people desperately try to find meaning and purpose in the myriad of idols of this world, from politics to wellness to transhumanism. People are yearning to be part of a larger story.
This is an opportunity for Christians. God invites his people to be part of a much larger historical story. If we understand something about why history matters biblically, and how to steward it well, then history can help us speak the gospel into this rootless age.
Living in a Rootless Age
As a history professor, I often ask my students, “What is our contemporary society’s vision of the good life?” Their answers are almost always some version of this: “Finding and then being your true self.” This culture holds that unleashing one’s true potential is the key to finding happiness.
This obsession with self-fulfilment is connected to a deeper pathology, that is, the view that because there’s no God, there’s no ultimate story about where humanity has come from and where we’re going. The past is deemed irrelevant to what our culture values most, which is the freedom to be ourselves and enjoy the life we desire. This is the first characteristic of what I call our Ahistoric Age.
A second characteristic is a growing ignorance of history. We have little understanding even of the historical origins of the ideas we most value. Consider, for example, the widespread debate over issues such as human rights.
Despite the intensity of these discussions, few people understand where the concept of human rights emerged. Fewer still recognise the extent to which human rights are grounded in the biblical conviction of the imago Dei and the spiritual equality of all humanity.
The third characteristic of our Ahistoric Age is ideology. When our society engages with the past, history is often reduced to an ideological battleground. Many believe the past is something from which we need to emancipate ourselves, and that history is just an ongoing story of victims and oppressors. Less overtly, we look with instinctive superiority toward the past and disdain for its traditions.
In sum, most contemporary culture views the past with attitudes of irrelevance, ignorance, and ideology. And yet, this isn’t the attitude toward history that the Bible takes.
What Does the Bible Say About History?
The Bible teaches us that history matters. It matters because we have a God who acts in history. His plan of salvation — creation, fall, incarnation, resurrection, and one day new creation — is carried out in history.
In the Old Testament, God takes a real historical people, the Hebrews, for himself as his “treasured possession” (Ex. 19:5). They come to know Yahweh through his mighty acts in history. In Christ Jesus, God himself steps into human history. Jesus’s life, death, and resurrection is the centre of history and the fulfilment of God’s promise that he will dwell with his people: “Long ago, at many times and in many ways, God spoke to our fathers by the prophets, but in these last days he has spoken to us by his Son, whom he appointed the heir of all things, through whom also he created the world” (Heb. 1:1–2).
Second, the Bible instructs God’s people to pass down their history and to learn from it. When God gives the Ten Commandments in Exodus, he reminds Israel of what he has done in history: “I am the LORD your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery” (Ex. 20:2). And in Deuteronomy, the Israelites are to teach these things to their children (Deut. 6:7). Numerous Psalms retell the story of Israel so we don’t forget God’s mighty works (e.g., Ps. 78).
In the New Testament, Paul reminds the church of their forebears, the generation of Israelites delivered by God from slavery in Egypt and led through the wilderness, and yet who disobeyed, despite their salvation. Paul says that “these things happened to them as an example” and “were written down for our instruction” (1 Cor. 10:11). In 1 Corinthians, Paul describes the passing down of the historical story of Jesus’ death and resurrection (15:3–4).
Third, the study of the past is part of humanity’s responsibility to create and spread civilisation as we rule as God’s image-bearers. The creation mandate given in Genesis 1 is to “be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it, and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over every living thing that moves on the earth” (v. 28). Adam and Eve were to tend and keep the garden, and their cultivation was to spread beyond Eden and across the whole earth.
Understanding the history of human societies is part of God’s design for how we tend and keep his creation and fill the earth with civilisation that glorifies him. And this understanding isn’t limited to professional historians. – TGC.
