I wrote this review of Mark Noll's book, The Old Religion in the New World, back in January for the research study I'm doing on the history of Christianity in America. Don't feel any obligation to read it—in fact, not doing so will save you from using up ten minutes of your life unnecessarily. The only reason I'm posting it here is to test out how Posterous embeds PDF files. The book, however, unlike my review, comes highly recommended if you are looking for a good introduction to the factors that shaped American Christianity. Go and read the book.

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I first heard about Pripyat a couple of years ago. Pripyat is an abandoned city built in the 1970s primarily to house those who worked at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant, located in the north of the Ukraine close to the border of Belarus. It was abandoned in 1986 following the disaster at the plant. The ferris wheel you see in the photo to the left has become somewhat iconic—an amusement park had been built there just prior to its evacuation. It was never officially opened.

The nearly 50,000 residents of Pripyat were evacuated in short order. They were not allowed to take any of their belongings with them, save the clothes on their backs. In the years following the disaster, as radioactive levels in the region began to drop, looters ran rampant through the city, taking every valuable thing in sight. Though the city still stands today, it is decaying; not only have the looters done a great deal of damage to the existing structures, but the natural environement and time have taken their toll as well.

It is easy for us, I think, to look at disaster like Chernobyl as just an abstract even in history. We are far removed from it, not so much by time, but by the vast expanse that separated the worlds of the Soviet Union and the rest of the Western world.

Earlier today I was looking at photos of the abandoned city, and on the website where I had found them, a number of people had commmented that the images were "hauntingly beautiful." To be honest, I was quite disturbed by the comments. There is nothing "beautiful" about Pripyat. To begin with, its construction was typical of the Soviet era—long rows of uniform apartment blocks entirely lacking in character and aesthetic sensibility, built to house the faceless masses that would keep the communist machine running. And then an explosion, following which 50,000 people are forced to leave their whole life behind, carrying with them only their memories, whatever they could fit in their pockets, and for many, radioactive isotopes in quantities that would later claim their lives or the lives of their loved ones.

Perhaps the decaying, empty city is appropriate, reflective of the incredible brokenness of the lives of its residents, almost irreparable. It hardly needs to be said that here we see the effects of sin in an especially poignant way.

It is hard for us to enter into that brokenness, to understand what they went through. There was a short film shot partly on location in Pripyat in 2008, called The Door (it was nominated for an Academy Award) Only fifteen minutes long, the film conveys in a powerful way that brokenness, and the horror the residents of Pripyat lived through that fateful year. If you watch this film, I am certain that you will never again be able to think of the disaster at Chernobyl as an abstract historical event. I've embedded it below.

Κύριε ἐλέησον. Lord, have mercy.

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There is a little town in western Ontario called Chesley. It's largely a farming community and I likely would not have even heard of it except that I have relatives living just outside of it. Recently, I learned something interesting about the town. It houses a small, Presbyterian Reformed church, which would be rather inconsequential if not for one peculiar claim to fame.

If you are into Reformed theology, you will likely be familiar with the name of John Murray, the noted systematic theologian who taught at Westminster Theological Seminary for many years. Murray was good friends with William Matheson, who was the pastor of the church in Chesley around the same time Murray taught at Westminster. Their friendship had been solidified during a controversy in the Free Presbyterian Church years earlier. Murray would often travel to Chesley to visit Matheson and preached in the church on quite a number of occasions, especially after Matheson died in 1957. In fact, Murray would say of the church, “I think I feel most at home here and at Chesley of all the places I visit.” You can read more of the story of the church here.

Perhaps this is only of interest to me, but I thought it was worth sharing. My relatives might be interested to know that their little town has a small place in Reformed history.

Incidentally, the photo of the 14th concession on the Wikipedia page for Chesley is taken by my dad. My grandparents live just over the rise on the right side.

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Oliver O’Donovan, the noted ethicist, says this about history in his contribution to the first volume of David K. Clark and Robert V. Rakestraw’s edited collection, Readings in Christian Ethics:

Within Christianity one cannot think or speak about the meaning of the world without speaking also of its destined transformation. The problem of evil is met, not by asserting a profound cosmological order in the present, but by confident announcement of God’s purposes for the future. He who has come to earth as the meaning, has come also as the Purpose or Fulfillment. To understanding the coming of Christ it is necessary to expect the second coming.

There are, of course, notoriously, two ways of living in expectation. We can believe in the value of intermediate transformation, ‘preparing the way of the Lord’, and so commit ourselves to a life of activity; or we can feel that the ultimate transformation renders all penultimate change irrelevant, and so resign ourselves to a life of hopeful suffering. But what these two attitudes have in common is far more important than what differentiates them. They both take a negative view of the status quo. There is no natural purpose to which we can respond in love and obedience. The destiny of nature has to be imposed on it, either by our activity or by God’s. The purpose of the world is outside of it, in that new Jerusalem which is to descend from heaven prepared as a bride for the bridegroom.

Any thoughts?

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Amidst the various characterizations of evangelicals, one that always stands out in my mind as particularly significant is the lack of historical consciousness. Discontinuity and indifference with the past seems to raise little concern, and the result is most clearly seen in weak ecclesiologies and eclectic theologies. The only historical period that evangelicals might find some continuity with is that of the early church; however, it should be noted that this is often premised on a very deficient and uninformed view of the ancient church.

A church culture full of historical amnesiacs is cause for deep concern, and contributes in large part to my desire to study and teach history and historical theology. I was pleased the other day to come across an insightful statement in the introductory portion of a collection of essays edited by Carl R. Trueman and R. Scott Clark entitled, Protestant Scholasticism: Essays in Reassessment, which I've been working through in preparation for a class on post-Reformation theology I'll be auditing next week. In their words:

Historical theology is concerned to locate theologians and theologies within their particular contexts, and in this task history in the more general sense serves primarily to illumine theology, in much the same way that background studies illumine one's interpretation of any historical text. To use the language of modern hermeneutical theory, history provides the means for understanding the horizons of our subjects, points us to which questions can legitimately be asked, and reveals which questions, through their anachronistic presuppositions, are irrelevant. When pursued in this way, using a framework of interpretation sensitive to the critical questions of historical method, historical theology is free to perform an extraordinarily important function in the academy and the church: it relieves the individual of today of the burden of reinventing Christianity of the past in his or her own image; and it also prevents unhistorical romanticism about earlier epochs in the history of the church, a problem prevalent both in Barthian and, more especially, conservative pietistic traditions. Careful, thoughtful historical investigation reveals that the church has always been more or less imperfect, and that there have been no golden ages, patristic, medieval, or Reformation, despite what conservatives and liberals have asserted to the contrary.

These observations, in my estimation, get to the heart of the evangelical problem. Theological conversation is dominated by terminology expressing the desire for things that are new. Everything needs to be "rethought" and "reworked" if it is to have any credence today; or, in the case of those who attempt to look back to the New Testament church, "reclaimed" and "rediscovered." To be sure, careful reflection on our theology is crucial, and that requires not that we approach theology with a sort of tabula rasa, but with an earnest effort to critically engage the past recognizing the communal nature of theology, one that spans the centuries.

Now, granted, there are significant historiographical questions to address here and to merely state that evangelicals lack historical consciousness without accounting for the various reasons for this is to fall into exactly the same error. Evangelicals, like any other Westerners, are historically-conditioned. We can never understand the various nuances of a certain culture without recognizing how that culture's history has shaped it. For the Western world, as C. T. McIntire and Ronald A. Wells state in the introduction to their book, History and Historical Understanding,

the twentieth century has been an unnerving one...If we accept with E. H. Carr that history is a dialogue between present and past, the present from which we reflect on the past fills us with disquietude. The main difference between our perception of the relationship between present and past and that of earlier [perceptions] is that we have lost that most elementary, yet crucial, support of their historiography—the view of history as progress. Moreover, we have no broad agreement on any comparable or more adequate view of history to put in its place. It would seem that the events of our century warrant belief not in progress but in the possibility of endless crisis.

This reality undoubtedly contributes to the disconnect of modern evangelicalism to the past. What stands out so prominently in a survey of the history of the church is unfortunate events and circumstances like the abuse of power by church leaders, the terrible wars of religion, the fragmentation of the church, and the bitter and endless disputes over seemingly insignificant doctrinal points and emphases. Little wonder, then, that with such an ugly and marred history the modern church wants little to do with the past.

Still, there is no excuse for turning a blind eye to history. Trueman and Clark's point that we don't need to bear the burden of reinventing Christianity and theology should come as a welcome breath of fresh air. In its attempts to do theology apart from the wisdom of the past, evangelicalism, despite illusions to the contrary, does not free itself from the perceived shackles of history and tradition. Instead, it tacitly enslaves itself to the short-sightedness of ahistorical autonomy. Theology is never done in a vacuum; to live as such is simply arrogant, even idolatrous.

It remains the more difficult yet necessary challenge to view history through the perspective of the covenant and the Kingdom—to see God actively at work in history to faithfully build His church and gather His people and His creation together under His rule in order to bless them and redeem them. The work of the Christian historian and historical theologian centers on bringing this reality to light and helping the people of the church see themselves in the context of a story that encompasses all of history and time. We cannot (and should not) avoid the fact that each period of history and historical theology has its imperfections. The solution, though, is not to do away with the past but to engage in careful and honest reflection on what history teaches us.

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