Don't know much about history...

I was a history major in college, and I have always appreciated good commentary on the importance of history in informing responsible citizenship in the world. In the past several years, it has seemed to me, more and more, that a good knowledge of history can also offer the church a powerful reminder of the prevalence of human pride and sinfulness over time.

In a recent op-ed piece, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. (pictured at right), casts a historian's eye on the necessity of knowing history for a nation to understand the world in which it exists. He writes, "As persons deprived of memory become disoriented and lost, not knowing where they have been and where they are going, so a nation denied a conception of the past will be disabled in dealing with its present and its future."

Schlesinger is talking about our current experience in Iraq. He compares our mis-adventures there to America's experience in Vietnam in the 1960s and 70s, marveling at the similarities between the two.

But his observations hold a lot of relevance for the church as well, even though that is not his intention. If the church does not take stock of its own tradition - both great triumphs and utter failures - it will bumble along with no mission and no purpose other than as some kind of weak panacea to the anxieties of its members. We must realize that our tradition makes us who we are. Only by identifying ourselves within the Christian story can we recognize ourselves as the people of God who are called to witness to God's plan for the salvation of the world.

"History is the best antidote to delusions of omnipotence and omniscience," Schlesinger writes. "Self-knowledge is the indispensable prelude to self-control, for the nation as well as for the individual, and history should forever remind us of the limits of our passing perspectives."

Just so, our own history reminds us that qualities like omnipotence and omniscience can only be ascribed to God. We do have only passing perspectives, and the self-knowledge of that fact can lead us into the humility and trust that are necessary qualities for discipleship to Jesus Christ.