In his book, Humble Apologetics, John Stackhouse Jr. speaks of the ahistoricism that blights contemporary Western culture. There is a widespread lack of historical consciousness that, more often than not, serves to prevent people from giving Christianity a fair hearing. Stackhouse quotes C. S Lewis: “the Present occupies almost the whole field of vision. Beyond it, isolated from it, and quite unimportant, is something called ‘The Good Old Days’ – a small, comic jungle in which highwaymen, Queen Elizebeth, knights-in-armour etc. wander about.” Of course, Lewis was writing about a generation ago. Nonetheless today (as in Lewis’ day) people can often be quite ignorant of, and even sceptical, about history. Stackhouse warns that this disregard for history “as something that frames our current experience and as something from which we can learn important information is not recognised enough by apologists” (pp. 50).
I think he’s quite right. The ahistoricism Stackhouse speaks of chimes in nicely with current postmodern epistemological doubt and a consumerist focus on instant gratification – arguably as much hallmarks of contemporary Irish culture as Canadian or American culture (the context in which Stackhouse is writing). People are generally focused on the now to the degree that the past (and certainly the long-ago past) becomes irrelevant and somewhat disassociated from the immediate present. Perhaps the barrage of media imagery, the twitching of screens and the instant flicker of digital technology causes us to loose our sense of a concrete continuum of history.
As Stackhouse says, for most, the past is not a righly complex continuum made up of a variety forces that require patient interpretation. Instead, for many, Christianity is purely a simplistic collection “of tableaux that sit fixed in one’s mind as stark moral lessons: Christianity mounted bloody Crusades against noble Muslims; Christians burned hapless women as witxhes…Christians oppressed women and spoiled sex…Christians abused the earth.” And yet, Christianity depends fundamentally upon what happened in the past; particularly in the career of Jesus and what the Bible (the New Testament documents, for a start) says about it. As such, apologists must consider how to respond to this ahistoricism that is so dominant in our culture.
This is one reason why I think Church historians often make wonderful apologists. D B Hart, for example, is (as far as I know) a Patristics scholar who specialises in the Greek Fathers (http://davidbhart.blogspot.com/). His book, Atheist Delusions: The Christian Revolutiuon and Its Fashionable Enemies engages in extensive historical apologetics in the opening chapters, demonstrating from a close study of history the groundlessness of so many contemporary myths born of the prevalent ahistoricism Stackhouse speaks of.
Another church historian, writing within the context of the Presbyterian tradition, is Carl Trueman (http://www.reformation21.org/carl-trueman/ ). Having done much of his advanced study within the realm of seventeenth century church history (focusing mainly on the Trinitarian theology of John Owen), Trueman is surprisingly well equipped to engage in incisive contemporary apologetics. As far as I know, he has published two volumes of collected articles (The Wages of Spin and Minority Report). Both are replete with brilliant and quirky articles; one such article, for example, links the likes of John Calvin with digital radios and schmaltzy car-salesmen. Another explores the connections between a very unlikely pair of thinkers; Carl Henry and Edward Said. Like Hart, Trueman often delves into the dank corners of church history to unleash a salvo of crippling and on-the-botton critiques of modernity and contemporary atheism. In the case of both theologians, a deep grasp of church history makes for riveting, cutting-edge apologetics.
D B Hart writes: “much of modernity should be understood not as a grand revolt against the tyranny of faith, not as a movement of human liberation and progress, but as a counterrevolution, a reactionary rejection of freedom which it no longer understands, but upon which it remains parasitic. Even when modern persons turn away from Christian conviction, there are any number of paths that have been irrevocably closed to them – either because they lead toward philosophical positions that Christianity has assumed successfully into its own story, or because they lead toward forms of “superstition” that Christianity has renedered utterly incredible to modern minds. A post-Christian unbeliever is still, most definitely, for good or ill, post-Christian. We live in a world transformed by an ancient revolution – social, intellectual, metaphysical, moral, spiritual – the immensity of which we often only barely grasp.”
The ancient revolution – perhaps the only true revolution in the history of the West – is, of course, Christianity. If we are not careful to safeguard and communicate history effectively, we will slip into the mud of ahistoricism and lose our capacity to understand the infinite scope and beauty of that ancient revolution. And this pained world, esconced on the drab tides of modernity, will lose out on the splendour and bounty of the Christianity it has unmoored itself from.
Signing off -
The Scribbling Apprentice.
No comments:
Post a Comment