By james art 
The ring of hysteria of those who shout that we must stand on the “right side of history” emanates from the hollowness of their argument. As events now show, those with the least understanding of history – or who are even hostile to history – are senseless, rootless and baseless.
In short, ahistoricists are on the wrong side of something they don’t even understand.
Look at the building in the picture above. It hit social media the other day and I was immediately struck by the depth – literal and metaphorical – of this image. Here is the accompanying description:
Fascinating! A multi-layered past! Yet if you didn’t dig under that topmost building, you’d never guess that the other buildings—all that hold it, all built after serving their time—had ever existed.
And yet there are! In a prominent place. In a regular site 🙂
The strength of Sarah Irving-Stonebraker’s new book Priests of History: Managing the Past in an Ahistorical Age is her deftness in revealing the past on which so many modern assumptions are based. Or rather, a set of contemporary assumptions. Assumptions that, well, that assume, came out of nowhere. Or, as in the case of our metaphor, rose from the ground without a foundation.
Loud, proud, mean, vicious and with the full confidence that it can build a cultural edifice without something or someone other than the will to power.
Associate Professor Irving-Stonebraker rejects these assumptions with all the deftness of an archaeological dig, demonstrating again and again that the current crises we face are based on the ahistorical zeitgeist. But she is more than just a conservative, as if conservatism alone is what will help.
No. It convincingly shows that the edifice of the West is built on a Christian foundation and one that has allowed the West to reach the point it is today. And when we throw away Christianity, our building will shake.
Her image of Christians as priests of history” is beautiful. We are not so much history’s soldiers, or even its guardians, as its priests, who “care and care” for the past, that the future may rise into something good, true, and noble.
Irving-Stonebraker states that just as the famous Christian scientist Robert Boyle called his peers “priests of nature”, the role of the church and individual Christians is to be “priests of history”, to care for it, to protect it, showing why it matters. And she has strong words for the church in all of this, as it is not just the progressive secularist that is the problem.
As you can see from the following quote, we have been drinking from a bad fountain:
Are Christians just rootless consumers living in an eternal present? The loss of the sacred and transcendent character of God is a symptom of how acculturated we have become to a secular ahistorical worldview: if there is no God, all things are ordinary. There is nothing divine and nothing transcendent, and the past is irrelevant.
Which means, if nothing else (and there’s a lot more) that this book is a discipleship project. Christians live like non-Christians – if not in words, then certainly in imagination. And then some.
And these words come from a respected historian who grew up an atheist and who—like Peggy Lee in her song “Is That All There Is?”—began to wonder if this is.
For Peggy, it was love and sex. For Irving-Stonebraker, it was the achievement of Oxford and Cambridge and the career she had always wanted. Sound familiar? Irving-Stonebraker’s personal story is woven into the book and is warm, engaging, and invigorating.
I am convinced that even if we do not see a mass return to Christianity in my age, we are seeing the first signs of a return to the historical truths of Christianity in our ahistorical age. And this book is just one sign of that. This is the first in a series of books I’m reading, including the upcoming new book by Rod Dreher: Living in Wonder: Finding Mystery and Meaning in a Secular Age.
Dreher was too crisp for some in his last two works, which were pushbacks—and good ones—against the culture wars. But in this new May, he too has seen the signs. There’s something going on. Buy both books now!
Not that all is well. This search for the transcendent. As Ross Douthat warned in The New York Times a few years ago, the search will unearth some pretty ugly stuff. Nothing uglier, I might add, than the likes of this retweet from the increasingly irritated Australian writer/anti-Semite, Clementine Ford, who tweeted this beauty:
And on top of that, it turned out that he still had something to say about the historical Jesus:
Ford is a house without a foundation. A house of ill repute that will one day collapse around her. And it’s easy to get mad at this stupidity, because as with any stupidity, it will eventually become dangerous stupidity.
The answer is not to get angry. Well, not very angry. Rather, let us direct our anger to the care and concern of history in the manner of the priests that we are. So when the foundations of the lives of the people around us – and indeed the culture around us – prove unable to hold them, we can then show the support of the faith that has been handed down for two thousand years.