Chronological Snobbery

Time is the landscape of our lives. When the first Spirit confronted Ebenezer Scrooge with his own personal history, he chose to explain away his past choices in light of his present accomplishments. The Spirit of Christmas Past listened patiently, then responded by saying “You have explained what you have gained; I will show you what you have lost.” You can’t know what you’re losing out on unless you look back at your story with humility.

CS Lewis understood this. He knew that every generation has blind spots and quirky habits which need to be corrected. Naturally, you can’t correct a present problem by applying present thinking to it; present thinking is too often the culprit, and at any rate it's caught in the same web. Lewis recommended that we open ourselves up to the past and allow the elder generations to speak to us. He knew that many people just assume that the present is always superior to the past (because we have better technology) so he warned us about “chronological snobbery” – assuming we’re right, or better, than people living in the past just because we exist today.

When it comes to seeing ourselves with clarity and humility, the church has a natural advantage. After all, the bible is essentially a record of past events in which God spoke to (or about) his people. It’s the story of God acting, and people reacting. It’s relationship as history, and the Spirit of the Past speaks more loudly and more often from its pages than either the Present of the Future. The long history of God’s people has become our history as well. We’ve been welcomed into it.

But the church has gone on to become many different things. It spread eastward into the heart of the Mongol empire when that was the largest empire on earth. It spread into Africa, putting down deep roots in places like Egypt and Ethiopia. It managed to spread to corners of India and Japan where it remained, nearly forgotten by the world, for centuries. It germinated in the Greek-speaking Eastern Roman empire, and of course it shaped the post-Roman history of Europe, and from there, the whole Western Hemisphere.

Because the church is a world-wide phenomenon without borders or ethnic categories, its history is far more complex than that of the oldest nations. It encompasses languages and wars, persecution and prosperity, egregious sins and failures, stormy dissension and rifts, political watersheds and anonymous minorities, sinners and saints and fools. Every tear shed and every victory won is ours to cherish and to learn from.

Have we?

Do we allow those voices from our past to enter our contemporary conversations and dialogues? Do we even understand the forces which have pushed and moved our modern American Church Culture (such

as it is) into its current habits and forms? If the believers of yesterday could speak to us in our world, with our concerns and convictions, what might they say?

Until we know that, how can we bring them into the conversation?