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Why study the past? The quest for the historical church

Reviewed by Stephen Copson.

Why study the past? The quest for the historical church

Rowan Williams

2005

128

£8.95

Darton, Longman and Todd

ISBN 0 232 52549 8

Preachers use characters or episodes from the past to encourage, inspire or berate their congregation. The Archbishop of Canterbury makes the case for the value of an  historical perspective. History is not value free. We construct stories from the evidence that we have and in church history the story told is the activity of God in the world. Yet we recognise too that we cannot wholly inhabit the world of the past: it is also a foreign place to us.

There are times when the context of Christian belief has so altered that what was familiar became strange. In naming the strangeness, the church has been enabled to define itself afresh. Dr Williams illustrates with two examples: from the early church he notes how the mark of martyrdom under persecution was superceded by the concept of being ‘resident aliens’ as Christianity was accepted in the Empire. Then in late medieval Europe as the nation state supplanted the Church as the guarantor of public order, so the Reformation shaped church for Protestants and Catholics alike.   

A sensitive historical method neither invests the past with perfection nor projects back the present to create a false continuity. Bad history denies its complexities. God’s story finds coherence through people and movements and language. Tradition is not static. It is the charismatic memory of the church and Christians participate in the liturgy and prayers and saintly examples by embracing their words and actions in such a liberating way that fresh possibilities emerge for the church, neither recapitulation nor repetition but God doing something new - continuous and yet different. The question is, where is the church?

Is this a book only for ministers interested in history? I think not. Christianity is an historical religion and we cannot avoid the task of interpreting the past. Why study the past? In short because it offers us resources to think in varied and creative ways about who we are and the world that we are in.