Losing our yesterday. . .

Quotes about from those who laud the study of history to those who abhor it.  We seem to have gone past Henry Ford's rebuke (history is bunk) and learned to despise our past.  We are not only more and more ignorant of that past but more and more uncomfortable with it.  That says a great deal about us -- more about us than our yesterdays.

Part of the gift of victory is the ability of the victorious to write history.  Of course, those who lost are rightfully suspicious of and antagonist toward the privilege of victory.  Remarkably, the victors are not all self-congratulatory.  We have written some honest and fair surveys of our history over the years -- even before we had a woke culture to tell us how bad it was.  At least we knew our history.  We may have struggled to come to terms with the darker parts of that history but we knew its study was valuable and its familiarity was key to any hope of improvement.

I wish I could say that feeling remained.  The fruits of many methodologies are born in both our suspicion of how history has been told and our delight in painting with a broad brush the offenders and their offenses according to modern standards.  In studying Scripture we learned to be skeptical that we could ever really know the Jesus of history but it was enough for us to know that the Jesus of history was certainly very different than the Christ of the Bible.  Everything became a conspiracy theory and the center of the story was always different than what the text said.  This discomfort with history has moved well past religion and made us strangers to our own stories.  Either we have rewritten those stories or we have stopped telling them.  In either case, we have become strangers to our past.

Losing our yesterday will do little to improve our tomorrow.  What it will do is divide us even more and leave us conflicted, isolated, and ignorant.  The perfect example of this is how liberals and progressives snuggle up to the Palestinian cause, Islam, and terrorism against the Jews and Israel.  Do we really think that our American ideals have more in common with the terrorist and theocratic rule of Middle Eastern Islamic nations than they do with Israel?  It is a catalyst of ignorance and idealism that have made friends from those who should be enemies -- unless these same progressives and liberals are okay with the oppression of women and the death penalty for homosexuals.

I wish this were simply a crisis of conflicting values but it is more.  As we lose touch with our own history and lose confidence with the accuracy of its story, we are left with nothing to guide us but feelings and a distorted sense of what is right and what is wrong.  How else can we reconcile a culture which insists upon the fundamental right of one child to decide his or her gender while refusing to affirm that same child's fundamental right to life.  As yesterday becomes a stereotype or caricature of itself we find ourselves more broken, divided, suspicious, intolerant, and violent today.  What this breeds is not only today's ills but a dark future.

Christianity once had a powerful role in sustaining the story of our past.  In the university as well as in practice, Christianity honored our forefathers as well as God's work in time to deliver us from the tyranny of the moment.  The more Christianity loses its anchor in Scripture and its awareness of God at work in time, the less our culture has to guide us in the present or the future.  The great danger today is not simply the evils that we call good but our inability to understand what is happening to us because we have learning nothing from our past.  From the Psalms to the Gospels, Christianity is the retelling of the old, old story of Jesus and His love.  We don't just need that in Church.  We need to tell our old, old story in our schools and universities.  The loss of hope in our tomorrow is fed by the loss of our yesterday -- in religion and in life.