Why Study History? by John Fea

Author:John Fea
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: REL033000, History—Religious aspects—Christianity
ISBN: 9781441244550
Publisher: Baker Publishing Group
Published: 2013-08-29T16:00:00+00:00

Summing Up

If you are a Christian, I hope that this chapter was useful in helping you to think about the resources within your faith that can help you be a thoughtful student of the past. What if we took the imago Dei seriously in our pursuit of history? How might this theological reality shape the history curriculum of a school or college? Rather than teaching courses in non-Western history or the history of American minority groups because we want a diverse curriculum or want to meet certain standards of political correctness, we should try to see through God’s eyes the people who have inhabited this world—people with inherent dignity and worth. Of course, it is also important to remember that humans are inherently flawed, and as Matthew 7:1–5 reminds us, we should be very careful about removing the plank from our own eye before we try to remove the speck from the eyes of those whom we encounter in the past. Human sin not only explains why some humans have acted wrongly in the past but also humbles historians who are charged with the task of making sense of such people’s lives. A belief in the imago Dei and in the sinfulness of humankind can go a long way, as we will see in the next several chapters, toward using the study of the past as a way of working toward a more civil society and a more compassionate Christian faith. And I hope this chapter has at least served as a caution to those who want to condemn the past or use it to teach a moral message. Historians always stir the moral imagination, but they do so implicitly. As storytellers we cannot help but describe things that are “good” and things that are “bad.” The human experience is a drama with many ethical twists and turns, but the historian is not always in the business of using his or her voice to preach.

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