I recently had the privilege of speaking on the podcast that my church, Campus Christian Fellowship, does here in Kirksville. Since it is the time of COVID-19, our sermons every week are delivered to house churches via podcast, and our Wednesday services have been replaced with special podcast speakers. So, for your listening enjoyment, I’ve included the podcast below as well as my manuscript.
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If you’d like to listen to more great sermons from CCF or check out their website, use the buttons below! They have meant a lot to me in my college career, and it was amazing to get to give back to them in this way.
Manuscript
Hello. Welcome to the CCF Wednesday Podcast. My name is John Jones, and I am a junior history and linguistics double major here at Truman. If you do know me, hello friend! And if you don’t know me, hello soon-to-be-friend. You may recognize me from around campus or from CCF, or you may know me as that tall guy with long curly brown hair, that’s not Jacob Nicholson. Alternatively, you may know me from either a small group that I’ve led or been in, or that in the pre-masking days, as one of those lucky people at the front of Violette Hall 1000 leading worship. Of course, all of that is a little different now, but that’s for another time.
When Mere Gleason first reached out to me for talking on this podcast to talk about the intersection between our school work and our faith, I was really excited. But I’m also a history major, so I planned on taking the last spot available so that I would get to look back at everything that was already said by the other great people this semester and kind of use that as a basis, citing my sources along the way. And then, funnily enough, by special request, I ended up being the very first person on the docket. So here I am, unable to cite the primary sources of those that came before me and finding myself in the new position of being the first to do this. God always has had a funny sense of humor.
So, first things first: while I am both a history major and a linguistics major — because I decided to double down on low job availability after college — I have always considered myself to primarily be a history guy. I was probably around 4 or 5 years old when my dad first introduced me to what would make me want to go into history: Indiana Jones. I originally wanted to be an archaeologist, running around dusty old tombs and setting off traps and all that. But in middle school, I had a teacher that made us look up the median salaries for the jobs we wanted when we grew up, and that’s when I decided to take on the history teacher side of Indiana Jones instead of the archaeologist side. So that leads me to today, where my current plan is to get a doctorate in history and become a college professor.
But that’s not what this podcast is about; instead, I’m supposed to talk about how I view my major contributing to a greater understanding of God working in the world. But there already lies a problem. Like I said before, I am a historian. My job is to look backward, not to the current state of the world. And the phrase “God working in the world” is what we language nerds would refer to as present active indicative form, meaning that it is happening right now, in this moment. It’s hard to speak of present actions and how it relates to the world right now. As a historian, we must view the present through the lens of the past, and, conversely, view the past through the lens of the present. I can look backward in an attempt to understand some truths that have always been evident or in an attempt to understand what may happen in the future based on what has already happened in the past. And as the philosopher George Santayana once said, “Those who forget the past are doomed to repeat it.”
I can’t tell you how many times I tell people I’m a history major and they seem to be put-off by the idea of studying history; how many times people have told me there’s no sense in spending a life reading about other people’s accomplishments and people long past. But the thing is that I think that if we all took our history a little more seriously, we could learn a lot from it. The Israelites took their history very seriously, and if there’s one thing I’ve learned in my two-and-a-half years at CCF, it’s that if the ancient Israelites paid attention to something, we probably should too. And simply put, I think that if the Israelites cared about their history, we should care about history too. And I think that if we worked to understand our history and the history of the Bible even half as well as the Israelites tried to understand their history, then I think we would be far better off as twenty-first century Christians.
I think the problem that most people I’ve interacted with have with history is that they’ve only ever been exposed to history in the high-school sense of the word. They are given a set of names and dates, with little to no reasoning behind them, told to memorize them for a test, and then forget them and start preparing for the next set of names. If this is how you are taught to interact with history, then I understand why you would question my life choices. But the thing is, that’s not how I view history, and I don’t think that it’s how Christians should view history either.
History is, ultimately, storytelling. It’s the art of figuring out how different things connect with each other to show how one presupposes the other, how one event can cause a domino effect over time, or to understand how two things, once thought to be wildly different, are actually connected. The ancient Israelites understood this to an incredible extent. When the Israelites sat down and wrote the Book of Kings, they tried to understand how the actions that their nation was currently taking at the time led to the situation where they were in that moment. And they saw that immorality and idolatry were the two things that were driving the Israelites away from God. They looked around themselves and saw these truths. But when they wrote the Book of Chronicles, hundreds of years later, and addressing the same time period as before, their focus shifted. They still understood the truths that they pointed out in the Book of Kings. But after a couple hundred years of retrospection, they found that the root of the problems Israel was facing at that time was not just the immorality and idolatry that was highlighted in 1st and 2nd Kings, but ultimately the power and allure of Empire and Injustice they discussed in 1st and 2nd Chronicles.
This is what good history allows us to do. The answers that they came up with at the time of Israel’s downfall — that immorality and idolatry were running rampant — were not wrong, but they didn’t tell the complete story. Only after time had passed and they could examine that time again, did they arrive at perhaps a truer interpretation: injustice and the lust for empire was what destroyed them. This is a historical approach. They looked back and attempted to work out those hidden and interconnected things that caused the situation that they were. And understanding how to approach the stories in the Bible as texts that interact with one another and help to explain each other is a historical practice that can drastically change how you interact with the Word.
What’s happening in the Bible is not sets of isolated incidents. The Jews and Jesus knew their history. They constantly referenced their history — in their stories, their genealogies, and their songs — as a way of reminding themselves from where they came and to help them know how to move forward. If you were to ask a first century Jew what their absolute favorite part of the Tanakh was, I guarantee you that they would say that they love those long and boring genealogies that we always seem to skip over today. To them, those long lists of names were not just blocks of texts that the ancient writers threw in there to stuff their page count — those names were regular reminders of their long and arduous history. The parables of Jesus, the letters of Paul, the visions of the prophets, all of these are chock-full of these little references that are used to establish a fuller understanding of what message they are trying to get across. The Jews looked to their history in an attempt to understand how to move forward, especially in times of trouble and tribulation. If you understand the history and culture and contexts that they are referencing, it can drastically change how you view the Scriptures and how you view Jesus and how you view God. And it’s important to note that as children adopted into the family of God, it’s our history too, in a way. My father was a wandering Aramean as well.
And I think that this has been one of the problems that I had with the Church whenever I was growing up. As someone with a strong historical bent, and who was raised by parents that loved dragging their four kids to history and art museums literally across the entire country, I’ve always had a bit of a beef with the messages taught in churches I grew up attending. It always irked me when people would give messages at church that seemed horribly cherry-picked and lacked the greater historical context of what was happening in the message. I’ve met some people that have thought, “There’s no need to study the Old Testament. Jesus has come, and fulfilled those prophecies. It’s best not to waste your time on that and just spend your time on the New Testament.” But my issue with this sentiment is that, while we do believe that Jesus is our Savior, I also think that ignoring the Old Testament, ignoring the history of the Jews and of the Bible, creates a whole host of other problems. You can give a fantastic message on the Feeding of the 5,000 that happens in the four gospels, and give a great message about the provision of God. But if you don’t know and understand the cultural significance of the Jewish numerology system, how the five loaves and two fish Jesus uses can stand for the 5 books of the Torah and the two Tablets of Moses, and the twelve baskets that are left over show how there’s always enough left for all twelve tribes of Israel, you’ve missed how Jesus is actively referring to the idea of God’s Word being the only sustinence they need. You can listen to Mark’s account of the Crucifixion, but if you don’t know the context and history in which the Roman Emperors were crowned, then you don’t understand how Mark is showing the Romans how Jesus went through his own coronation ceremony to become a Universal Caesar while on the cross. You can read about the Last Supper and how Jesus says the phrase “This is my blood, poured out for you,” but when you recognize that he does this during the Passover’s third cup of wine that has always symbolized God’s redemption and the slaying of the Passover lamb in Exodus, you view the Last Supper in a different light. And this is not a condemnation of those that don’t understand these references, only a plea for the reason why we should know our history. There are so many more things like this scattered throughout the entire Bible.
When you understand the history, the culture, and the context of the world that the Bible was written in, you learn new things about the stories you’ve been told your whole life. That alone is worth the study of history to me. Growing up, I was taught that there is always another layer of interpretation, context, or knowledge to be understood in the Bible. The acknowledgement of this truth was actually one of the big reasons I decided to stay at CCF after the first Sunday church service of my freshman year at Truman.
One of the main things that we as Christians are called to do is to work to bring order into the chaos that permeates through the world. In the beginning of Genesis, the world is described as “formless and void.” If you were around a couple years ago, you may remember Reed Dent describing it as “wild and waste.” And God brings order to this chaotic nothingness through his creation in the first chapters of Genesis. I believe that we are called to do the same, in whatever occupation or field we are in. We are called to bring order to the chaos in the world, to usher in little slices of heaven on earth. Other professions bring order into the world through very tangible ways — a physical therapist restores order to a broken body, a counselor helps bring order to someone’s mind, a builder arranges the pieces of a house into an order that allows it to serve a proper function. But a historian is different; since our work is based in the past, we must bring order to the world through another way. We hope that in our endeavor to understand that which came before us, we bring order to the chaos of the past. We hope that a desire to understand the contexts of what we study would allow us to better recognize the deeper truths within the stories of the Bible and the texts we study. We hope that by understanding the past, we can learn from our mistakes and draw closer to God. We pray that in our doing so, we do not forget our past, and that we don’t repeat our faults in the future. May it be so.
May the peace of the Lord Christ go with you, wherever he may send you.
May he guide you through the wilderness and protect you through the storm.
May he bring you home rejoicing at the wonders he has shown you.
May he bring you home rejoicing once again into our doors.
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