Overcoming Our Ahistoric Age

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Sarah Irving-Stonebraker
Our story of being saved is a story in which I’m actually saved into a historical people. And so if I am grafted, therefore into God’s people, like the body of Christ, the church in history, then I should be living into a story and a people who don’t it’s not just horizontally, but actually through time, and therefore I’m actually commanded in God to be like I’m actually saved into a people and into a community.

Collin Hansen
It pains my history loving heart to admit but most people today simply ignore the past. Some will twist history for partisan gains. Few can sit underneath the wisdom of the past and learn to discern God’s work in this fallen world, still marked by His grace. But I have found Sarah Irving stone breaker to be a reliable, inspiring guide for receiving that wisdom. Her new book, priests of history, stewarding the past in an ahistoric age, published by Zondervan reflective offer stories, examples and arguments that will change you, whether you’re already convinced of Christianity or still wrestling with its claims. Sarah’s Associate Professor of History and Western civilization at Australian Catholic University in Sydney, Australia. She received her PhD from the University of Cambridge and held a junior research fellowship at the University of Oxford. She converted from atheism to Christianity while an assistant professor at Florida State University. And you know, that’s a story that we’ll discuss, because historian conversions are kind of our thing. On gospel bound, Sarah writes this, history lies at the heart of who human beings think they are, where they have come from, and where, if anywhere, they think they are going. Well, Sarah joins me now on gospel Island to discuss the five major characteristics of the ahistoric age, the wrong side of history and much more. Thanks for joining me, Sarah,

Sarah Irving-Stonebraker
thanks so much for having me. Colin, it’s great to be here.

Collin Hansen
Alright. Well, we gotta start here, and I think this question might take us a little bit longer than some others, but tell us how you became a Christian.

Sarah Irving-Stonebraker
Oh, gosh. Okay. Well, Australia, as you probably know, and your audience probably know, is, is actually quite a secular country. And I grew up in a completely, sort of non Christian home, and I had, however, always kind of wanted to be a historian from about the age of nine, but sort of the path to Christianity actually didn’t really begin until I was at university, actually at grad school, at the University of Cambridge and then at the University of Oxford. And basically what happened was that I began to have experiences that will, first of all, kind of unpicked all the kind of simple caricatures that I’d held about Christianity. I mean, I basically, kind of grown up secular household, but also somebody who was an intellectual and a budding academic, somebody who thought that Christianity was particularly sort of anti intellectual. And one of the first things that happened, actually, was when I was an undergraduate at the University of Cambridge, I was reading for my PhD thesis, 17th century. We now call these guys natural philosophers, really the founders of modern science. These are people like Robert Boyle, one of the founders of modern chemistry, Robert Hawk, one of the founders of the modern experiment, Isaac Newton, with some really well known names. And the first thing that really happened was that it struck me that they took their faith incredibly seriously. And what at first I just kind of dismissed as window dressing, I had to kind of recognize was entirely, I mean, not just compatible with the way they were thinking about their scientific work, but actually that their theology was at the very heart of it. I mean, I remember one day I was reading Robert Boyle’s work, and this is a disquisition on experimental philosophy in the 1600s right? And he’s quoting Psalm eight. And I remember just sort of thinking to myself, how, well, just wondering how it is that he could kind of reconcile what I thought was a kind of inherent tension right between Christianity and science. I guess that’s the first thing. It didn’t make me a Christian or anything, but it began to unpick that kind of caricature I’d held of Christians. But then really, one of the major things that happened was that when I was a junior Research Fellow. This is a kind of postdoctoral research fellowship that I had at University of Oxford. Some friends and I heard that one of the famous philosophers, atheist philosophers, Peter Singer, is very well known. He’s sort of like the Richard Dawkins in the sort of atheist philosophy world. I. Um was coming to give a series of lectures at the University of Oxford on ethics, and I kind of went along with some of my friends, thinking that singers lectures would kind of just be really encouraging to me and kind of just affirm all the kind of atheist convictions I had about ethics. But actually what I heard almost pulled the carpet from beneath my feet. It’s kind of left me. I’ve used this phrase like intellectual vertigo, because that’s what it was. Because basically what happened is that I sort of expected that singer would affirm ideas that I’d always kind of held to be some of my deepest moral intuitions, for example, about the value of human life that I had always kind of assumed were compatible with atheism. But actually, what singer made quite clear, because he is an atheist, right, is that there is no inherent value, or even sort of sense of the equal value of human life. And I kind of went back and read singer’s work, that, you know, a lot of his philosophical work, and that also contributed to this kind of unraveling, I suppose, of my atheism, and you kind of actually kind of think that’s quite funny in a way, because today, you know, we tend in the Christian world to kind of go through this period of hearing about a lot of people who like deconstruct their faith, right? But actually, what happened to me was I kind of deconstructed my atheism. I had to God made me deconstruct my atheism. And so anyways, reading about Peter singer’s work and basically coming to realize that my deepest moral intuitions, the things I thought were most important about human life, its equal value and its dignity, were actually not able to be sustained by atheism at all. But again, you know, it doesn’t, doesn’t make me a Christian, but it, it kind of leaves me questioning. And then one kind of lonely winter in Oxford, where I’d sort of remained in Oxford, all my friends had kind of gone home. I hadn’t gone back to Australia. That winter, I was sitting in the library, and I realized that my the desk that I always sat at, was in front of the theology section. And to be honest, I still was too reticent even to pick up a Bible, but I picked up a book of sermons, and I think I’d basically been wondering whether or not there was actually anything to this. And sort of, you know, in my arrogance, always growing up and sort of dismissed Christianity. But when I began to read these sermons, I was given a glimpse of a profoundly rich picture of who humanity is and what this story is of a God who is in the process of redeeming this broken world and this broken humanity that was far deeper than I’d ever thought, was ever thought had anything to do with Christianity, and that just, I mean, I remember, so, for example, in one of the sermons, talk about Psalm 139 which is the psalm in which the, you know, the Psalmist is talking about God fashioning me within my mother’s womb and giving me basically this completely different picture of who humanity is, you know, made by God, rather than living this kind of life of self invention, which is how I lived, and it was just so profoundly compelling to me. A few months later, I moved to i So immigrated right from the UK over to the United States. I moved to Tallahassee, and one of my friends, a new faculty member at Florida State, like me, gave me CS Lewis’s Mere Christianity. And I remember reading that book and that and Lewis, you know himself, of course, having gone from an atheist to a Christian, nothing had ever spoken to me like Mere Christianity. And then after reading that, one day, I decided to rock up to church by myself on a Sunday morning at this point. You know, the other thing that’s going on here is that part of this is, as I’ve told it, like it’s, you know, it’s a really intellectual story, right, of deconstructing atheism and realizing just how incredibly compelling the story that the Bible tells us is. But it’s also a very personal kind of element to all of this too, which is that I also realized I’ve been kind of living this life of self fulfillment, you know, which is very much the way that we live these days. You know, when we think about the good life as kind of relentless self invention and self creation. And the more I live like that, the more I realized that no matter how much I had, I had so much, you know, achieved these kind of childhood dreams of Oxford and Cambridge and so forth, and it left me empty. And so when I rocked up to church that Sunday morning in Tallahassee, there was both this kind of intellectual yearning, but also this kind of spiritual yearning too, because there was a sense that this kind of life of self discovery and a life completely rootless, right? This is where they I think this is where me, being a historian, comes in, too, right? There’s a yearning for some kind of rootedness, some kind of groundedness outside of myself, both, I think, in time, but also in the sacred, which is also something I’d always dismissed as an atheist. And I went to church that Sunday morning. They celebrated the Lord’s Supper, and I’d never been baptized as a child. Of course, no non Christian parents, so I just kind of sat in the pews, and I’m listening to this ancient liturgy of the Lord’s supper with Biblical words of Christ talking about, you know, pouring out His blood for people and for the forgiveness of sins. And I guess that was probably the last kind of pivotal moment, to be honest, because that took me into a place in which I felt I actually got quite emotional at that moment, sort of privately in the pews, because I actually felt that I’d been running from God my entire life, and that I was a profoundly broken person, that actually the Bible story of sin was deeply true about not only the world, but about who I was, and that this offer that God had to to draw me back to himself and to love me, and to ground me in his love, which is outside of myself and and in his people, his historical people outside of myself, was something that was so profoundly compelling. So a few months later, this part, this point, like in my late 20s, I sat in my apartment in Tallahassee in a closet, like, literally, you know, a closet a walk in in Australia. This is quite funny, because we call them a wardrobe. We call it a closet in America. So I sat in my in my closet, and and I remember praying that sinners, prayer actually, and and giving my life to Christ, yeah.

Collin Hansen
How did you decide to tell that story in the context of this book making an argument for history, you didn’t have to do that. I think you telling this story is part of what the what makes the book so compelling. I haven’t really seen something like this before. I love it. And how did you decide to tell that story embedded within the broader argument you were trying to make about how we approach history today? Yeah,

Sarah Irving-Stonebraker
yeah. Well, since I’ve been a Christian, one of the ways that God’s been growing me, and you know, it’s been over a decade now, is that he’s made me think seriously about, okay, what God has given me incredible gifts and experience. How do I marry my faith and my work my calling in life as a historian, and particularly in really secular countries like Australia, I think there’s a tendency and a temptation to be private about your faith, and one of the things that God’s called me to do, I think, is to give me the courage to be open about it as a public intellectual, and to speak and to try to actually write as a historian and not separate my faith from my work. So I suppose that’s the kind of background there. And I’ve been encouraged by my really good friend who actually knew me as an atheist when I was in Cambridge, Rebecca McLaughlin, who first actually got me to share my faith story. And she kind of encouraged me to do this, and it’s taken a while. So that’s the first thing. But the other thing, in terms of the question about, like, Okay, why this book, and why weave this story into this book, is that I think now more than ever, we’re actually, I’m just so struck by how disconnected and ahistorical our culture is, and it seems that it’s even more important now for people who are professional historians like me, or people trained in history like you and so many others, to actually speak into the public and remind not only the sort of I think speak actually evangelically into the public, but also to other Christians and to say actually history matters. It matters biblically, and it matters for us to kind of communicate the gospel to this really a historical world and and here’s why. And so in in kind of writing this book, I was really drawn to try to articulate just a, how a historical our cultural moment is at the moment, and B, why history matters. And so it seems that, you know, one of the clear ways to do that is to actually kind of speak as a historian, talk about my own faith, and actually also talk about the way in which history gives us a grounding of as Christians, and gives us the kind of grounding I think that God wants us to have speaking and living into the fact that, you know, God is a God who acts in history. We’re part of his historical people, and therefore doing that in an age in which we could hardly have a greater need for it than right now.

Collin Hansen
Well, I would be happy to spend our whole time just following up on that story and just talking about historiography and the way things are playing out. But I do want to make sure that we cover some of the specific arguments of the book. Let’s talk about the part of the backbone of this book, priest of history, stewarding the past in an A historic age, which are the five major characteristics of the ahistoric age. As you list them, I’ll go ahead and read them so you don’t have to see if, if you remember them word for word. But number one is, we believe that the past is merely a source of shame and oppression from which we must free ourselves. Number two, you. We no longer think of ourselves as part of historical communities. Number three, we’re increasingly ignorant of history. Number four, we do not believe history has a narrative or a purpose. Number five, we are unable to reason well and disagree peaceably by the ethical complexities of the past that is the coexistence of good and evil in the same historical figure or episode, Sarah. What was the moment when these ideas really came together, they coalesced and you knew that you needed to write this book?

Sarah Irving-Stonebraker
I think there were probably a series of moments. It was probably actually more like a little season in my life, but it was a time in which I was at a previous institution, before I joined my current university, large public university in Western Sydney, and I was talking to my students, actually, and, you know, teaching history in that context. And I was basically talking to them about what they think our culture’s understanding of the good life is all about and about why, you know, why they should study history. And basically the kind of response I would keep getting from them was that the good life is in our cultural moment. Basically to live a good life is about sort of finding and being my true self. That was the kind of continual phrase, you know, you do. You sort of constantly self invent, like inventing ourselves and creating ourselves. And related to that was this sense, therefore, that you know the past. How is the past relevant? If life is all about self creation, right? We’re not part of anything which is given. And they didn’t see. It was very clear to me that they didn’t see that there are any kind of enduring traditions or historical narratives, or a sense of themselves as being part of a historical people that would be kind of like the primary starting point for them making sense of themselves and their life and the world. Actually, it was highly kind of atomistic. And that was kind of the moment I realized, hold on this kind of like rootlessness and disconnection, which so, you know, so many cultural commentators are kind of pointing out, is really characteristic about of our moment. I actually think it has so much to do with a historicism too, like this kind of sense that the past is irrelevant, because we’ve now entered this age in which we think that life is primarily about inventing themselves. And when I was, when I was going through that kind of season of, you know, talking to my students about the kind of question, that was kind of the moment when I thought, hold on a minute. I think I need to write a book which kind of speaks into this. Because while we have a lot of kind of discussion about this cultural moment, and, you know, its effects on, say, mental health, for example, or disconnection and rootlessness. And a lot of good discussions there, but it just seems as if we haven’t actually identified the fact that there’s a profoundly ahistorical nature to all of this. And it’s time for a historian and a Christian to kind of speak into that

Collin Hansen
related to this, Sarah explain how teaching history as a profession, as a discipline, especially at the collegiate and above level, could have changed so much so quickly, because some of these things do go back decades, maybe even centuries. But some of these things, it’s really literally in the last decade where this has happened. How do you explain that? How does that happen? It’s interesting.

Sarah Irving-Stonebraker
You’re right. There are really, really long historical routes to all of these tendencies, but I think a number of things have coalesced in the last decade or so, not least a kind of broad cultural anxiety in countries in the West, especially about how we think of ourselves and how we engage with the past, and I think part of that, I think it’s accelerated, especially since sort of like the 1960s and 1970s but part of that is a kind of profound sense that if we’re now in a in a cultural moment in which there’s there’s no real way of articulating a shared sense of The good, as it were, that we all have these kind of It’s a highly kind of liberal, or post liberal kind of moment in which, Look, we all have our kind of private conceptions of the good. Therefore, is that there is no kind of public understanding of the good anymore to which we kind of orient our societies. Or education. One of the kind of consequences of this is the idea that, well, education therefore has to kind of simply kind of expunge the past of anything that seems like it might be a force of domination or oppression. And so we tend to therefore think that history is really just about power plays, because we there’s no kind of common sense that the past might actually have something to teach us, because the minute that we think in our current culture that we might be able to hand down something from the past, we’re immediately almost kind of entrenched in an ideological battleground about what it is that is handed down, because we are so kind of polarized in our contemporary society. D and particularly, look, there’s so many complex factors here, but particularly in terms of the way that the academy in Western countries has kind of developed as well. You know, intellectuals as a kind of and the intelligence here, as it were, as a kind of group, have become increasingly secularized. There’s all kind of, there’s all kinds of kind of issues going on with that too, that questions, primarily questions of power, basically. And seeing the past purely in terms of a power play and reducing it to ideology, has sort of trumped any previous sense that we had, that education was about, sort of certainly engaging with like the good and the evil or the, you know, the bullies and saints, as John Dixon puts it, of history, but also passing down the fact that there is something of enduring historical importance there. We’ve kind of moved away from that, I think, in the last decade.

Collin Hansen
There’s a couple notes that you also strike in the book that I think are worth mentioning here for the listeners and viewers. You also note quote social media accentuates the ahistorical sense that life is all about relentless self creation. Kind of you mentioned a little bit of that earlier with your students, and you described this as an existential burden. And I think you do see this, especially with younger generations. So it comes out often with with teachers realizing the changes that students are bringing into the classroom and their personal lives. And another one you mentioned, quote, If I am primarily a self determining person, then there is little point in studying history, since history is constituted by stories external to myself, about processes, ideas and communities of various forms, peoples, nations, classes and so forth. So we tend to assume that his that we are right by default, and we have nothing to learn from the past, and it has nothing, and there’s no, no bearing on our self creation narrative today. That’s definitely a recipe for being ignorant, as you mentioned, of history, but then also as when engaging history, not from a posture of having anything to learn, but simply manipulating it for contemporary political or cultural discourse. This question should have been my first one, Sarah, but what is a priest of history to tell? Well, what’s the priest of history,

Sarah Irving-Stonebraker
right? So this is, this is the sense that I have that, okay, sure, there’s a, there’s a problem in our culture of a historicism, but really I wanted one of the book to be a kind of vision of a way forward, because I actually think that in the Bible and in the Christian tradition, there is a way we have all kinds of kind of images of how it is to that God wants us to engage with the past in fruitful ways. And the metaphor, like priests of history, which is also the title of the book, actually comes from the idea that I I actually draw upon as a Christian historian, that guides me in how to and how I think all of us professional, non professional historians, can actually engage well with the past. And this is the idea that to be a priest of the past is actually to kind of tend. It’s this Old Testament idea of, well, what are the priests do? They tend and they keep God’s presence. And I think that if we as historians, if we tend and we keep the past, and that involves two kind of things. You know, to tend something is to kind of cultivate it to it’s this kind of progressive work of uncovering stories that perhaps we’ve overlooked, but also to keep that conservative work of passing down heritage, passing down intellectual traditions that actually engaging with the past as this process of like tending and keeping actually, really gives us an image of a way of the way forward, and that, you know, there’s actually a little story from my own kind of conversion, actually, about why I chose this metaphor of the priests of history, and why it was so formative for me. I remember when I was in Cambridge reading the work of Robert Boyle, that devout 17th century Christian. He so he’s, he’s a scientist, but he uses this metaphor that I was struck by even at the time, where he he actually talks about the scientist as a priest of nature. And therefore he had this kind of image of his own vocation as a scientist to be tending and keeping the natural world in a way that glorified God. And so, you know, years later, when as a historian, I was really deeply thinking through, you know, how do I as a Christian approach the past? It was Boyle’s metaphor, actually, that came back to me. And I remember even thinking about it at the time, realizing that, you know, even as an even as an atheist, when I was in Cambridge, realizing, oh, Boyle has this framework for how to understand his vocation, and yet, as an atheist, I have nothing, you know, to understand my like, do I have any kind of sense of what history is all about? They didn’t at the time. But now, you know, all these years later, it’s Boyle’s metaphor which comes back to me, and I think it is so helpful. People when we think about it as a way of thinking about history, to steward the past, right to tend and to keep the past.

Collin Hansen
But that is a rare approach from historians today, even though, as stewards of ideas, these are ideas that changed everything. People took them seriously. I just don’t understand how you can credibly say that you study the past when you don’t take seriously the motivations that people offer themselves for why they’re doing things. It seems like an enormous position of privilege to be able to say you may think that this theology guided something like the discoveries of the scientific revolution. But we know it’s because of this you find that to be not very interesting. Yes,

Sarah Irving-Stonebraker
your life and well, and it’s very patronizing, too. I mean, actually, in my book, I remember that, you know, there’s actually some pretty interesting examples of this, because one of the things that I do in the book is tell, you know, stories about people in in the past. And one of the ways in which contemporary historians do this kind of dismissal of the reasons that people give for their motivations, it actually happens, actually in sort of conversion stories of slave narratives. I remember, like in the in the part in the book, I talk about Mary Prince, for example, who is a woman in the British Caribbean in the 18th century, and she is converted to Christianity, becomes an advocate for abolitionism in the British Empire. Then travels to England, incredibly important historical figure. And the interesting thing is, she writes this, you know, true accountant, autobiography, right, of her own conversion to Christianity and history, like in contemporary historians, like, you know, advocates full of everything that she supported. And yet, the one thing that they do do, the secular ones, is kind of completely dismissed, that her faith could have meant anything to her. And it’s such an interesting illustration of the way that, yeah, not only just the contemporary but the contemporary Academy, and their approach in the past, their approach to Christianity, but also the fact that, you know, often in the past, it’s actually the Christian story that gets overlooked actually

Collin Hansen
tell us why you think saying the wrong side of history is just emotivism, and as you describe a rhetorical sleight of hand,

Sarah Irving-Stonebraker
right? Yeah. Look, this is the kind of phrase that’s often used today to, kind of it illustrates, I think, the degree to which today, when we talk about history in the public sphere, there’s a tendency to just when we do talk about it, just kind of reduce it to our contemporary ideological or political battles. And so phrases like that are so quickly used, not all the time, but so often they’re quickly used to kind of dismiss somebody and not actually engage well with their argument. And so almost, it’s kind of clever in a way, because it looks as if you’ve engaged with the past, but you haven’t really say, Oh, you’ve engaged, you know, this person’s on the wrong side of history, which gives this sense that you have engaged with some understanding of what history is and what that issue is that they’ve engaged with, and why it’s alongside of history. But actually it’s just a kind of way of dismissing them. But I think there’s, you know, far better way of engaging with things that we disagree with, which is, and I think Christians have all the kind of models to do this well, but to actually engage with and disagree well about the past. And I think, like in the book, for example, there are stories of how people can do this in the past, to engage with, say, the sin in the part, like in history, and yet do that without doing the culture wars thing today, which is to just kind of condemn or to cancel, one of the things that I actually taught this to my students last week, but good old Frederick Douglass, who, you know, all your American audience knows, but gosh, in Australia, and this actually speaks to how ignorant we are of history today. How tragic is it that my students in Australia, hardly any of them had heard of Frederick Douglass, so I had this wonderful week. Yeah, yeah, totally. So this is why I think you know, this is a clarion call to historians, to kind of, you know, pass down, pass down, the past and the past of other countries too, right? This matters, I think, to Australians. But here’s an example, right? Like so Frederick Douglass, when he writes, What to a slave, is the fourth of July. How fascinating is it? And I brought this out with my students, that he is able to actually use the Bible to condemn the sin of slavery, and yet he says at the end, and yet, I do not despair of this nation, and talks about the fact that no there is a kind of hope. There’s a there’s a pathway to repentance from America, for the United States and. And so despite the fact that he can condemn sin because he’s a Christian and it’s able to realize that sin, you know, exists in all of us, you can condemn that sin without despairing of the kind of hope for repentance that God gives. And actually talk about that with my students. Is look at this. Here’s Frederick Douglass Right writing in the decade before the US Civil War. And he is able to engage with the sin that he, more than anyone else, has, you know, has every reason to kind of think that perhaps, you know, one might cancel or obliterate the past, or simply kind of condemn, and yet he can condemn the sin, but engage well with it. And then I get the students to kind of talk about the fact that, you know, maybe this is something of a model for us. Maybe today, we can kind of engage with both the good and the evil in the past, because these things are complex, and there are ways to actually engage with complexity without reducing it just to culture wars. Now,

Collin Hansen
a lot of people, even if they’re pretty dialed into some of these conversations, they may not realize that the way Christians understand history in a linear fashion is unique to Christianity, and it is actually a figment, maybe not unique, but particular to Christianity, and a particular contribution of Augustan city of God, which is What you learn about in the book. I’m wondering, though, Sarah, in what sense can we learn from the past if we’re simply progressing toward the future? Because so much of what we’re seeing about this overcoming the past or ignoring the past is because, by definition, because it’s in the past, therefore we’re progressing past it. It’s the wrong side of history, because the arc of history bends toward justice. We see from King in there. So if history is progressing forward, what can we learn from the past? Because, after all, things are getting better, right? Well,

Sarah Irving-Stonebraker
yeah, okay, so that’s, there’s a really interesting statement, because there’s a lot of things going on there, right, yeah. So you’re talking about a kind of weird idea of history. Depends how it’s, you know, we can depend, depends how kind of, you know, nerdy and historical we want to get here. But also, there’s a kind of eschatology that you’re importing there as well.

Collin Hansen
Really quickly, I’m also referring here to some of the pushback to Christianity from some history, especially the fourth turning contributions. So people who are pushing back against Christianity, saying, See, it’s actually an ahistorical it’s it’s a problem for history because it’s going forward, but if history repeats itself, if it’s more circular, then, of course, it makes more sense that we would study the past. See what I’m saying there.

Sarah Irving-Stonebraker
Yeah, it’s interesting. I think maybe the kind of broader way to respond to this is to say is to think biblically for a moment, to think, look biblically. We know that that Christ will come again, but I’m not sure that there is any sense that, while there is obviously, you know, there are clear mark, you know, the abolition of slavery in the British Empire and things like, there are clear moments of progress. But I don’t think there’s any biblical sense that we should assume, therefore, that all societies are merely bending towards.

Collin Hansen
It’s not always up and up.

Sarah Irving-Stonebraker
Exactly.

Collin Hansen
In history’s progress.

Sarah Irving-Stonebraker
Yeah, exactly. Sin remains. And there’s this big biblical problem called sin which remains, right? What better illustration for example than I mean, yeah, look around the world today. We’re not we have not found a utopia. And indeed, you know, sex trafficking means that there is human, you know, slavery in the world today in a different form, but perhaps even numerically, because of the world’s population, just as many more people in slave today than there were. So I think we have to be really careful about ideas about progress. But I think so that’s a kind of, maybe, that’s a broad kind of response to that. But I think the other thing is to say, particularly to a kind of Christian, Christians thinking about history and how it can be helpful to us, is to remember that, you know, biblically, God does tell us to to actually learn from our past, right? And we get this in the Old Testament. We get in the New Testament, we get the fact that in the Old Testament, you know, Israel is God’s treasured possession, part of this historical story that they then have to pass down. And Paul, in his letters in the New Testament, again and again, tells the early church. You know, these things were sort of written down for us so that we can learn from them, so to speak. And we learn from these stories, and we pass them down. And I think moving sort of abstracting from that to a level of, you know, thinking about how Christians live today, what I think is really important is that Christians today need to learn from the past, and can actually, you. Live historically. What I mean by that is that, you know, when you become a Christian, you are adopted into a historical people. This is not a consumer, you know, preference, or a kind of choice, like a tribal identity, or something that we might find in, you know, sort of the, the sort of social, social media tribes. No, this is a historical people. And there is therefore a sense of grounding and belonging, but also like literally, spiritual practices and intellectual traditions and liturgies and music and doctrine and all the things that make a community, relationships that endure throughout time. And these are historical practices that I think if we actually learn from the past, we can pass down. And this is why, in the last part of the book, I talk about these different areas of our life in which Christians should turn to the past actually, as a way of of actually really helping them live in the present. So for example, you know, there are ways of actually redeeming our time, tending and keeping our time in the past that Christians have practiced for centuries. Sometimes, you know, today, we tend to think that liturgy is something or set hours of prayer throughout the day. These are things that only Catholics do. But actually, you know, there’s a whole tradition of Protestants engaging in things like, and I’m actually literally quoting a 16th century, early 17th century term here, Protestant meditation, for example, or using the Book of Common Prayer to shape liturgies. I mean, actually, it’s so fascinating, I think, especially for evangelicals really, to discover just how historically grounded Protestantism was in the past. And this is so interesting, because I think one thing that, you know, evangelicals tend perhaps to do a little bit too easily today, is to kind of, is to is to not think of the past that much and to think, oh, you know, historical tradition, that’s all Catholicism. We can’t, I don’t want to go there. But actually, one of the really interesting things about Protestant history is that they were so deeply grounded in traditions and practices, spiritual practices, intellectual practices and ways of turning and keeping time, ways of I mean, gosh, if you look at Protestant poets like George Herbert in 17th century, JS bar using Actually beauty and poetry and literature to engage with and praise God’s transcendence. So I just think there’s so much in the past that, in answer to your question about, you know, why go to the past if we’re simply moving towards the future that actually we need more than ever in the world today.

Collin Hansen
There’s another question that might be a little bit of a pushback, I could anticipate to some of the arguments in your book you write, when we know where we came from, we know who we are, in what sense, Sarah, would that not be true? And I’m wondering here about even the Christian conversion narrative, things like such were some of you. You’re not that people any longer. You’re a new creation. So in some senses, looking back on your history doesn’t always necessarily tell you, tell you who you are. How do you respond to that?

Sarah Irving-Stonebraker
Oh, wow. I’m kind of thinking about that biblically first of all, and then kind of historically, because I think you know the point biblically, especially in the New Testament, in Paul’s letters, is that you know it’s only if you understand that you were dead in your trespasses. I mean, gosh, this is something I remind myself of so often, like I was dead in my trespass. Only if we remember that we were dead in our trespasses as Christians, can we actually realize just the grace that God has has given us, because it Yeah, only by having that story, only by remembering the past, we actually realize that we are now a new creation, adopted into this, into this, new people. I think the one other thing I would add to that is that, you know, when talk about the kind of the the tendency of contemporary evangelicals to sometimes kind of think you know why look at the past. We’re just kind of moving towards the future. I wonder gently whether perhaps there’s a kind of a quiet acculturation to individualism there too, which is not particularly difficult, so that what you were saying really only makes sense if I just think that my story of salvation is just a story about me, but actually, biblically, our story of being saved is a story in which I’m actually saved into a historical people, and so if I am grafted, therefore, into God’s People, like the body of Christ, the church in history, then I should be living into a story and and a people who don’t exist, not just horizontally, but actually through time. And therefore I’m actually commanded in God to be like I’m actually saved into a people and into a community. And that’s I. Think that’s actually biblical, but sometimes it’s hard to see today because contemporary culture is so highly individualistic. But actually I think the Bible is far more historical and far more collective in that sense of being called into this long historical community of God’s people than we might sometimes realize.

Collin Hansen
One thing that’s particular about American culture when you’re speaking about evangelicals, that they are such a large percentage of the American population, maybe anywhere between 20 and 30% or so, that it’s not as though American evangelicals are set apart from the broader concepts of American individualism, which we could see through covid. How much more individualistic Americans are? They say Australians are there, but also that American evangelicals, if anything, are more individualistic than the broader population. So I think that’s an accurate explanation for why that dynamic might be, how it might play out within the church. Let’s close on a commendation here again, we’ve been talking with Professor Sarah Irving Stonebreaker and her book priests of history, stewarding the past in an A historic age. We talked about a lot of reasons why teaching history is an uphill climb today, unfortunately, in many places across the United States, history departments have have shrunk, and part of history majors have declined massively. I do think it is a yes, it’s part of the broader trend of individualism that you identify in the book. It’s also part of the more recent trend of the total culture war, capture of history departments in so many ways, and both of which are highly discouraging for people like me who are trying to advocate for these different things. But you’re on the ground. You’re teaching students all the time. How do you help students find inspiration, purpose, the meaning that comes outside themselves. How does history help you to do that? Help them to see that?

Sarah Irving-Stonebraker
In a word, it comes from the meaning of story actually. Because when it comes down to it, I think that you know what is history? History is about stories that help us make sense of and stories in the past that have helped people and societies make sense of who they are. And I think on a ground level, in the classroom, I am basically engaged in, I mean, I’m a historian of ideas. So historian of like, where do our ideas about, you know, politics or democracy, or, you know, human rights and so forth. Where do all these ideas come from? And one of the things I found actually kind of most encouraging about being called by by God to be in this job, and also in a university context, where I can’t do this theologically, right? It’s not, it’s not a scenario in Bible college, but I can actually engage with students in stories that help them make sense of the past, because they’re able to see how others have made sense of their own story. And when you actually have a have an understanding of how, for example, people in the past have lived in, you know, say, the 17th century, in the context of British colonial expansion, thinking about Francis Bacon here, trying to kind of wrestle with that and think that through, and tell a story about what this is all about, and the past and the present and the future. You actually give students something of a kind of model of how to do that themselves, and therefore how to then go back into their own lives and think, Okay, what are the stories that I’m part of? Am I just my own story? Is life just about me, or actually, am I part of a larger story of the past and a present and future? And It’s my prayer that the way that I do this at university. In the way that we do this as Christians is such that actually the ultimate story with the past and the meaningful present the future, that gives meaning and hope is the story that God has called us to be in story of his people, you know, broken and yet redeemed, and hoping and waiting is coming again.

Collin Hansen
I want to end Sarah with quoting you again, a beautiful vision you lay out for Christian history, you say quote, approaching the past through this priestly vocation involves first, the work of tending and cultivating, which involves uncovering overlooked histories, bringing historical injustices to light and recognizing the sins of the past, including our own. And second, the conservative work of keeping, guarding, protecting and passing down historical knowledge and practices, habits and traditions. End quote, well, that’s a great vision. I love that vision. Thanks for setting that example. Cass. In that vision, and ultimately writing one of my favorite books of 2024. Thanks, Sarah.

Sarah Irving-Stonebraker
Oh, thank you so much, Collin, it’s been so much fun.