Contemporary Western culture is profoundly ahistorical, Sarah Irving-Stonebraker reasons in her latest book, Priests of History: Stewarding the Past in an Ahistoric Age. The Australian professor devotes the first quarter of the book to making the case that, around 2010, the occidental world entered this “phase of late modernity,” to which she assigns the moniker “the Ahistoric Age.” Of course, as a professor of History and Western Civilization at Australian Catholic University, Irving-Stonebraker is well aware that each of the characteristics she identifies as marking this new era have roots deep within the history of the West. But it is their coalescence at the close of the first decade of the 21st century, a union fueled by social media, that she sees as justifying this date-setting. Although one can reasonably argue that it was the Enlightenment’s war against tradition that especially set the West on its pathway of ahistoricism, there is little doubt that a major force shaping late modernity is its view of the past as both irrelevant to and dangerous for modern life. History, at best, contains interesting and entertaining bits of trivia. But wisdom? No, that’s found by looking to the present and to the future.
Irving-Stonebraker isolates five major characteristics of our “Ahistoric Age.” There is the tendency to hubristically view the past as “a source of shame and oppression” from which we must liberate ourselves. This attitude toward the past is intimately tied to so-called identity politics and matters of race and gender, and is especially manifest in the rise of the brutalism of “cancel culture.” The Western penchant for exalting the individual over the community is the second mark of contemporary ahistoricism. It has led to a profound sense of alienation from the past and is manifested in the modern malaise of loneliness. Third, there is simply a deep ignorance of the past. This benightedness is facilitated by the emphasis on STEM subjects in educational curricula from primary school to university. Irving-Stonebraker notes that many of the most ardent discussions in her university classes focus on the issue of human rights. But when she has asked these same students about the historical backstory of these rights, they know virtually nothing about these roots. “I find this odd and sobering,” she rightly comments.
Whereas in the past, the stories from history helped to provide meaning and purpose, there is a widespread mentalité that history is aimless and devoid of meaning. Though Irving-Stonebraker does not cite Aldous Huxley at this point, his Brave New World (1931) seems to have anticipated our contemporary attitude. Suffusing Huxley’s dystopia were those infamous words of the industrialist Henry Ford as reported in the Chicago Tribune during the summer of 1916: “History is more or less bunk. … We want to live in the present, and the only history that is worth a tinker’s damn is the history that we make today.” Finally, Irving-Stonebraker sees our inability to discuss the complexities of history, its “greyness,” if you will, without anger and outrage as the fifth symptom of this Ahistoric Age.
Sadly, far too many Christians share this contemporary view of history. The British pundit Malcolm Muggeridge, who converted to Christianity in the 1960s, once declared that “history is nonsense.” In his book-length account of his conversion, he makes the startling statement that, “in the case of the greatest happenings such as Christ’s life and death, historicity is completely without importance. It is very important to know the history of Socrates because Socrates is dead, but the history of Christ doesn’t matter because he is alive.” More recently, in the worship wars that have raged across the landscape of western Evangelicalism, there have been some who have argued that the hymnody of the past needs to be relegated to the dustbin of history, as its words and images are like a foreign language to the modern worshipper. As Irving-Stonebraker observes, where such ahistoricism has impacted the church, there are doctrinal drifts from the great tradition of orthodoxy, the embrace of a therapeutic and consumerist approach to life in the church, along with a tendency to repackage worship as entertainment and a retooling of leadership in the image of the corporate executive. The antidote is a rich understanding of the past, which, being a “foreign country,” challenges these ecclesial distortions.
Irving-Stonebraker is convinced that Christians especially should value the past: “History … is the key to understanding God,” she argues with a quote from her fellow Australian Peter F. Jensen. She goes on to detail the numerous ways that historical study and reflection can help the church: It anchors Christians to the great traditions of biblical orthodoxy. By exposing them to the riches of the past, it fosters a sense of the sacred and a love for beauty. It develops empathy as believers seek to listen to the voices from the past, many of them our brothers and sisters in Christ, who disagree on matters secondary and tertiary. And in all this, there is growth in humility, which Basil of Caesarea rightly saw as the treasure chest of all the virtues, and which Christian thinkers from the Apostle Paul to Jonathan Edwards have identified as being at the core of Christian discipleship and maturity. This is also an antidote to the shoddy Christian ruminations about history that are all too common in North America and that become fodder for various ahistorical ideologies. Often found on various forms of social media, such “ahistoricists” use the past to feed what seems to be perpetual outrage and take delight in the lambasting of Christian brothers and sisters over nonessential issues.
To help facilitate a productive engagement with the past, Irving-Stonebraker devotes more than half her book to various biographical examples that illustrate the ways that the study of history can help Christians. From the Australian athlete and statesman Sir Doug Nicholls to Isaac Watts, the “father of English hymnody,” she culls wisdom with regard to matters of race and discipleship, on how best to steward our time, the vital role that the past plays in our intellectual formation, and how to recapture a sense of transcendence and emphasis on beauty. She sees two main tasks for Christian historiography—and she includes here not only academic historians like herself but all Christians as those who should heed her counsel. Believers are called both to “tend the past” and “keep it.”
These concomitant duties are found in the tasks set before Adam in Eden: He was placed there so as to “tend and keep” (Gen. 2:15, NKJV) the garden. Building upon the observation of the biblical scholar G.K. Beale that these are priestly duties, and also employing a statement from the 17th-century English chemist Robert Boyle that Adam was a “Priest of Nature”—Irving-Stonebraker’s first book, the groundbreaking Natural Science and the Origins of the British Empire, had a significant chapter on Boyle—provides the image of the student of the past as “a priest of history.” On the one hand, like the first gardener in Eden, the student of history must “tend” the soil of the past and uncover stories that, for one reason or another, have been forgotten and yet are “important.” The second area of the priestly duties of the historian is that of “keeping” the garden of history. Whereas the first task, tending the past, involves uncovering forgotten elements of history, this second task is a conservative one of “guarding and passing down the past.”
Of course, but which stories are important enough for time and energy to be devoted to uncovering them? Who or what determines importance? The stories that Irving-Stonebraker gives as representative examples that need to be recovered all relate to issues of race, certainly a key issue today. But the impression given—though doubtless unintended since Irving-Stonebraker is critical of presentism—is that the stories that need to be recovered are determined by what are burning issues of the contemporary scene. My own areas of historical research are the British and Irish Baptist communities of the long 18th century. Since I shifted in the 1990s from a focus on the Cappadocian Fathers in the fourth century and Augustine in the fifth century—figures whose thought had been subjects of my master’s and doctoral theses—I have wrestled with questions of relevance and importance. No one doubts the importance of those patristic authors, but few outside my Baptist denomination have an interest in the figures I have now researched in depth for the past three decades. Of course, despite what others might say, I deem the stories of these Baptist communities as vitally important, with rich lessons for all God’s people today. So, the question of who or what determines the important stories to be recovered needs to be discussed.
Concluding this monograph on history’s importance is the author’s personal history, specifically, the story of how she became a Christian, a “historian’s testimony.” A few hints as to how she became a Christian are found before this final coda. As an atheist studying Boyle’s thought, Irving-Stonebraker confesses in the section of the book on Boyle that she “found something beautiful and compelling” about Boyle’s worldview. The details of what that was and how it gave her an overarching metanarrative for making sense of the past is found in this closing section of the book. And unique in historiographical monographs, Irving-Stonebraker’s closes with an invitation to become part of that community that is intimately bound to history, namely the people of Christ.
