As Dr. Daniel Williams points out in a recent post, John MacArthur became famous for his expository sermons. My own biblical and spiritual maturity was reinforced by listening to his sermons for many years during my early twenties. My mother recently mentioned she heard something from MacArthur in passing so she put him back on my radar.
Around last Christmas, inspired by listening to Joan Baez's Christmas album, I started to look into the history of some of the most cherished Christmas songs. I stumbled upon this sermon by MacArthur that illustrates a great example of what a wonderful tradition we inherit as Christians. The fact that "Hark! The Herald Angels Sing" had some of the greatest writers and composers from Christian history, from Charles Wesley and George Whitefield to Felix Mendelssohn, is a point often lost to us in our ahistorical age. As MacArthur notes, having Wesley, Whitefield, and Mendelssohn as writers would of course make the song very, very good, and why, like MacArthur, I look forward to singing it every holiday season.
As a new book, Priests of History: Stewarding the Past in an Ahistoric Age, by Dr. Sarah Irving-Stonebraker makes clear, we live in an ahistorical age, and it is having a negative impact for Christianity. Using C. S. Lewis's saying that we need good philosophy at the very least to supply an answer to bad philosophy, the same goes for bad history (and oh boy, there is a ton of it out there, especially online). But the fact that there is a ton of bad history floating around, oftentimes expressed with an authoritative confidence often lacking among professional historians who after decades of study tend to speak in humble tones, means that history really does matter.
We are still constantly talking about history even if some of what goes for history is misguided or simply wrong. Moreover, we do a disservice to everyone (past, present and future) when, for example, we have forgotten that a beautiful Christmas hymn was composed by three past masters of the Christian past. This is just one legacy among many that deserves celebrating.
Irving-Stonebraker's book in our historical context is interesting especially in comparison to rumors about a contemporary revival of sorts in global Christianity. As I prepare for the upcoming semester, I finally started reading historian Tom Holland's mammoth book Dominion about the impact of Western Christianity on human history (see Tim Keller's review). In some ways, we have become so ahistorical that a non-Christian historian needs to write a popular tome about Christian history for our day and age to remind us about its influence.
In fact, Holland needed this memory jolt since he had bought into some of the assumptions about the overall social-cultural benefits that came with modern secularization. What Holland's work provides is a sort of truth telling about much of what we consider our most cherished secular, liberal and democratic beliefs, including human rights: these ideas are rooted in the Christian legacy. The fact that he co-hosts perhaps the most popular podcast "The Rest is History" compliments the impact his reading of history has on contemporary times.
Holland's popularity corresponds with the work of Justin Brierley, both his book and podcasts. In fact, it was listening to Brierley's podcasts that I found out about Holland's research. Brierley engages both skeptics and believers in a space where beliefs are taken seriously. His thesis is that the so-called secularization thesis is wrongheaded and religion is going nowhere, or it is not as malicious as the New Atheists of the 2000s made it out to be. But more importantly, the benefits of Christian belief, in our age of what seems like omnipresent meaninglessness, is in re-enchanting the contemporary landscape, through the very best of Christian spiritual disciplines.
An example of the shift in views about Christianity can be seen in a recent survey that declares a sudden growth in church attendance in Europe. What is significant about this work is that the rise in religious interest comes from 18-25 yr old people. There seems to be a growing hunger for spirituality, at the very least. Obviously, aspects of secularization has done a number on European society (declining church attendance in the U.S. reveals as similar problem). However, as encouraging as this survey is, there is also the fact that many people of that age are unchurched, lacking even a basic knowledge of biblical sayings or stories. In some ways this is a refreshing opportunity to tell the story of Christianity especially the church history aspect of it.
Irving-Stonebraker and Holland both point out that Christian history has remarkable stories left to tell. If we are teachers of a generation of students who have not really heard these tales before then what a great opportunity to find ourselves in today. Instead of complaining about our ahistorical age, it is better to be prepared to provide answers to people's potential curiosity, and better to approach history with a position of hospitality rather than weaponize it for some ideological agenda. That type of history may sometime gain a following, but often gets forgotten in history.
History at its best is when it can tell a story that will then be passed on from another storyteller. The success of church history has always been its ability to connect, inviting one into this larger story.
Eventually I will find this literary reference, but one anecdote that stayed with me from graduate studies was a comment theologian Stanley Hauerwas once made about another famous hymn. Hauerwas points out that if you are looking for a way to move away from the hyper-individualism of American Christianity then you need to find a path toward the communal nature of the church, as portrayed in history. Therefore, he notes that the hymn "I Love to Tell the Story" does a good job of poetically in song that expresses that Christians are included in the greatest story ever told in history. It might be an old, old story, but it is still worth telling.