Some years ago a group of distinguished historians wrote a book entitled, If, or History Rewritten. Some of the interesting “ifs” they discussed were: “If Lee had not lost the battle of Gettysburg,” “If the Franks had not stopped the Moors at Tours,” “If the Dutch had kept New Amsterdam,” “If Booth had missed Lincoln,” & “If Napoleon had escaped to America.”
But finally there are no “ifs” in history. People did what people did. What happened is what happened. History is what is history. This is history on the first level. Ah, but understanding “what is or was” is always an art, for events always happen midst a fabric of others events within a web of various meanings. Yes, things happened as they happened, but the art of the historian is to interpret the truth & significance of those events as grasped by the historian for the historian’s own time & place. The writing of history is history on the second level. Thus past interpretations of history become part of history.
As artists offer different renditions of a given scene, shading, coloring, symbolizing, & giving perspective to convey a certain meaning, so too with the historians’ written art. As a piece of art, no writing speaks for itself. Like a painting, every historian’s work, including the Bible, must be interpreted.
When we learn to read ancient documents to catch the slant the author(s) put on things not only by what is said & the way it is said, but by what is not said or maybe even repressed, we are thinking as historians ourselves & thus taking history to a third level. History is not only what happened that got recorded & reported, history is who does the reporting & why, & history is how we read it & what we gain from it. History is a living, moving target, & every re-telling or re-reading extends the history. Because we change as our personal history changes old stories take on new meanings when we re-visit them later in life.
When we read the Bible, we are by necessity historians ourselves asking not only what happened but why it was reported this way & not that. When on this third level we become historians ourselves, we must do what historians have always done: seek the truth & the significance of the past for the present by asking, “What does this mean?” But this question pushes us beyond history into theology, which answers the next question, “What does this tell us about God, ourselves, & our relationships with others?”
The first & last context for understanding anything & everything is theology. From beginning to end, for better or for worse, each of us is a theologian seeking for “the meaning of it all.” The biblical writers were both historians & theologians, seeking to put life stories into a divine context. Like historians, there are both competent & incompetent theologians creating either adequate or inadequate theologies.
Followers of Jesus are really making the claim that he is the ultimate theologian, for he himself is “the meaning of it all.” Of course, not everyone who claims to follow Jesus is a competent theologian thinking the thoughts of Jesus after Jesus. There are many theologians who lack a competent grasp of life & history & so develop & market an inadequate theology.
Every generation examines the past from new perspectives, asking different questions & coming up with new insights. Answers or readings that were satisfactory to people hundreds of years ago or when we were children should not satisfy an adult who is alert & alive to the world we live in today. The task of education in the Church is to help every adult become a competent modern historian so everyone can become a developing contemporary theologian. As we read the Bible together historically, we will be better equipped to deal with life as theologians so we can follow Jesus, the consummate theologian, in our own time.
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