Tomorrow is the eightieth anniversary of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, and I want to take the opportunity to honor my late father, Edwin McKenzie. As you’ll see, December 7^th loomed large in his life more than once.

Dad was not yet in the service in 1941. He graduated from high school in the little town of Athens, Tennessee in the spring of that year and enlisted in the U.S. Navy not long after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor the following December. After a few weeks of basic training in San Diego, he was assigned to the destroyer U. S. S. Mahan as an electrician’s mate and headed for the South Pacific. For the next two years he served constantly in the theater of war, taking part in the campaign for Guadalcanal, the Battle of the Santa Cruz Islands, and a variety of smaller operations around New Guinea and the Admiralty Islands.

In early 1944 Mahan was ordered back to California for overhaul and Dad was granted a thirty-day leave upon arrival. He took the train from San Diego to Chattanooga, and then a bus from Chattanooga to Athens, arriving on a Sunday evening in late April, where he was met by a host of family, friends, and Margaret Lee Hale, the woman he had proposed to countless times since leaving Athens.

My parents had met for the first time in the summer of 1937, shortly after my father’s family moved back to Tennessee from California. My mom, all of twelve years old at the time, was in despair (as she told the story), because there was not a single boy in all of Athens that she was interested in marrying. That changed when she met Ed at a town baseball game, and although she protested, she was secretly glad when her girlfriends invited him to her upcoming 13^th birthday party. Ed arrived bearing gifts—a handkerchief and Evening in Paris perfume—and won Margaret Lee’s heart.

The couple became sweethearts, and they might have gotten serious about marriage had not war intervened. They were coming out of a movie in Chattanooga on Sunday afternoon, December 7, 1941, when they heard of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. (Mom felt guilty about going to the picture show on a Sunday and feared that something bad might come of it, but she didn’t expect World War Two.) Within a few months Dad was halfway around the world in a global conflagration. Over the next three years the couple exchanged hundreds of love letters, 545 of which survive. As my dad’s leave drew near, he regularly raised the prospect of marriage. My mom just as regularly ignored him. He renewed his plea almost as soon as he stepped down from the train, however, and my mom couldn’t resist. Four days later they were married. Less than three weeks after that Dad was headed back overseas.

Seven months later, in the late fall of 1944, Mahan was operating off the coast of the Philippines, patrolling for submarines and assisting with an amphibious landing near Ormoc Bay as part of General Douglas MacArthur’s promised return. On December 7, 1944—three years to the day after the attack on Pearl Harbor—three Japanese kamikaze bombers crashed into Mahan, and in short order the destroyer was in flames, one of the magazines had exploded, and a plume of black smoke was rising hundreds of yards into the air. 

Years later, a sailor on the U.S.S. Walke recalled the aftermath in these words:

We were heading for Mahan at high speed from about 1-2 miles away. Our Captain thought to lay us alongside to help fight fires. She was dead in the water under a huge column of black smoke. We could see flames in her bridge area. As we got closer we could see fire hoses in action. At this time our guns were firing so we did not hear, but we saw what appeared to be an explosion forward of the bridge. We were coming in on her port side when we saw her men beginning to abandon. At the same time a big raid developed and we had to pull away. During a lull in the battle, we returned to the area and began to pick up survivors. Twice we had to pull away to fight off raids, returning to pick up her people. Another destroyer was aiding in this. Some of the survivors were horribly burned and many were otherwise wounded. There was heavy fuel oil in the water and a lot of the men were sick and vomiting. I believe we got them all. . . .

Dad was always willing to share this much, but no more. What he felt when he heard the crash of the Kamikazes, what he thought when the forward magazine on the Mahan exploded, what he saw as he headed toward the side, what went through his mind when he jumped into the oil-coated bay, what, perhaps, he prayed as he bobbed in the water while the battle continued to rage—those are things Dad never once offered to share.

Praise be to God, Dad survived the attack. In a heart-wrenching “snafu,” the Navy Department inadvertently released the news of the sinking of Mahan before all of the crewmembers’ families could be notified, so my mother heard on the radio that Dad’s ship had gone down before she heard from Dad that he was OK. I cannot imagine the extremes of emotion she must have felt, although Mom always insisted that she knew in her heart that Dad would come back to her. And so he did.

My mom passed away on Christmas Eve 2011, and Dad followed her not quite six years later.  By the time of Mon’s death, she and Dad had enjoyed sixty-seven years as husband and wife (74 years after Dad first showed up on her front porch bearing a handkerchief and perfume).  The last picture that I have of them together is when they were both living in an assisted-living facility,

My mom passed away on Christmas Eve 2011, and Dad followed her not quite six years later.  By the time of Mon’s death, she and Dad had enjoyed sixty-seven years as husband and wife (74 years after Dad first showed up on her front porch bearing a handkerchief and perfume).  The last picture that I have of them together is when they were both living in an assisted-living facility, and dad is wearing a sweatshirt with the names of his children and grandchildren, and on his head a blue ball cap with insignia USS Mahan, DD-364.  Nothing could have been more fitting, for those were the two loves of his life.

Often the familiar words mislead us most.  When we come across a word that’s entirely foreign to us, we hesitate to use it until we’re sure what it means.  But when it comes to words that we’ve known since childhood, we get reckless.  Why stop to define terms that we’ve known since third grade?  And so we muddle along, using words that we think we understand but haven’t thought much about.  Sometimes this works, and sometimes it gets us in trouble.  History is a case in point.

It’s not that “history” signifies such a complicated concept.  The problem is that it signifies multiple distinct concepts.  The editors of the Oxford English Dictionary have come up with twelve, believe it or not.  We don’t have to bother with all the nuanced shades of difference that the OED sets out, but we do have to be alert to one critical distinction that is absolutely foundational.

In popular parlance, when we refer to history outside of an academic setting, we almost always mean “the past itself.”  We debate the best sports teams in history, question the checkered history of a political candidate, or celebrate John and Martha’s long history together.  No problem or confusion here; we all know what we mean. But with apologies to popular culture, academic historians insist that history is not the past.  They’re not even close to the same.  Coming to grips with the magnitude of the difference is the first, essential step to thinking historically.

We’re not just splitting hairs.  The difference between the past and our knowledge of the past is so immense that it should stagger and humble us.  The best illustration of the difference that I’ve come across is from one of the lesser known essays of C. S. Lewis.  Lewis was a master at making esoteric truths understandable, and in his essay “Historicism” he crafted a marvelous metaphor for the past.  Imagine that every single moment of “lived time” is like a drop of water, Lewis writes.  If that were true, then it follows that “the past . . . in its reality, was a roaring cataract of billions upon billions of such moments: any one of them too complex to grasp in its entirety, and the aggregate beyond all imagination.”

What a word picture!  By inviting us to imagine ourselves near the base of a deafening waterfall, Lewis helps us to glimpse the nearly limitless scope of the past.  As you read his words, imagine standing by the water’s edge with your arm outstretched, a Dixie cup in hand.  If that wall of water plummeting downward is analogous to “the past” in its near-infinite totality, then the drops that you capture in your paper cup represent history, i.e, all that we can claim to recall and comprehend of those “billions upon billions” of moments.  As Lewis recognized, the difference between history and the past “is not a question of [our] failing to know everything: it is a question (at least as regards quantity) of knowing next door to nothing.”  Try as we may, we can catch but a fraction of that crashing cataract; the rest “falls off the world into total oblivion.”

If reminding ourselves of the disparity between history and the past is the first step to thinking historically, it is also a crucial part of thinking Christianly while thinking historically.  After three decades in the Academy, I’m still wrestling with what it means to think Christianly as a historian, but here are two things I think it has to include: awe and humility.  When it comes to history, thinking Christianly should inspire us with awe when we recall God’s omniscient comprehension of the near-infinite past.  Our Lord “has numbered the hairs of our heads as well as the days of princes and kings.” 

But thinking Christianly should also lead us to humility when we remind ourselves, following Lewis, that in our human finiteness our knowledge of the past is, by comparison, “next door to nothing.”  When we equate history with the past, we exaggerate our capacity to know, minimize the wonder of divine omniscience, and unwittingly attempt to rob God of a measure of his glory.  For the Christian historian, calling to mind the vast difference between history and the past can be a kind of spiritual discipline, a way of promoting humility and awe by reminding ourselves that God is God and we are not. 

(Adapted from A Little Book for New Historians: Why and How to Study History)

Is there a specifically Christian case for the study of history? Should faith in the God of
the Bible and the understandings of orthodox Christianity persuade us of the importance of the
past? Absolutely! In my previous post I shared three reasons why I’m convinced that this is so.
Here are three more.

For starters, our faith informs us that the entire unfolding human story is worthy of
attention. It’s not just the history of the Church or of particular historical events that merit
notice. We believe that God has infused the human story in general with great dignity. Our
understanding of creation tells us that God Himself set the story in motion and that its central
characters bear His image. Our belief in the incarnation further reminds us that the Lord of the
Universe actually entered into the story, identifying with its characters and walking the earth as
one of them.

Beyond this, our conviction of God’s sovereignty teaches us that God is not only Creator
but Sustainer as well. He is involved in the minutest details of the human story. It is an epic that
is unfolding according to His design and decree. In this sense we should see the human past as a
sphere that God has created—and thus a form of natural revelation—every bit as much as the
physical world around us. This makes studying history one expression of obedience to the divine
command to love God with our minds—as well as with our heart, soul, and strength.

Second, in striving to understand the past, we stand on holy ground. The past is immense
and incalculably complex, and most of it is lost to us, beyond our capacity to recover, much less
to comprehend. When we contemplate this truth through eyes of faith, we should drop to our
knees in awe and humility: awe, as we reflect on the sheer magnitude of the never-ending past,
and humility as we acknowledge our intellectual limitations. But above all, we should respond
with worship, as we marvel at the One who alone perfectly comprehends this vast expanse and
declare with the psalmist, “Such knowledge is too wonderful for me” (Psalm 139:6).

In the words of the late Princeton historian Arthur Link, “Biblical faith . . . tells us
something very special about the historical record. It tells us that it is stored in its incredible
totality in the mind and memory of God.” This means that historical truth is God’s truth, and
thus precious to Him. It means that when we claim to know any particle of the past truly, we are
claiming to see it as God does, which should cause us to tremble. Finally, “while readily
acknowledging that only God knows all historical truth,” and that we necessarily understand it
“only partially, imperfectly, corruptly,” we can “affirm, profess, and confess” that when we strive to make sense of the past “we stand in the presence of something far greater” than ourselves”

Humanly speaking, the past is gone forever. We strive to reconstruct the merest fraction,
relying on shadows and echoes to piece together glimpses of a vanished reality now stored in
“the mind and memory of God.” This is holy ground indeed. We need to take off our shoes.

Third and finally, historical understanding plays a vital role in faithful Christian
discipleship. The study of the past can function as a mirror, allowing us to see our own moment
in time more clearly. In the light of scripture, we see how precious such insight is and how risky
historical ignorance can be. The Apostle Paul’s letter to the Romans warns us about letting the
world “squeeze us into its mold” (Romans 12:2). His second letter to the Corinthians commands
us to “bring every thought into captivity to the obedience of Christ” (2 Corinthians 10:5).

But when we’re “stranded in the present,” the fads of the moment can look like timeless
truths. We can be shaped by our contemporary contexts without even realizing it. Nor can we
“bring every thought into captivity” when our present-mindedness renders our most deeply
ingrained ways of thinking invisible to us. In both cases, the first step to obeying the biblical
commandment faithfully is seeing both ourselves and the world around us rightly. The study of
history can further this goal.

History’s ability to provide us with a memory before birth can be indispensable as well.
One of the most repetitive observations of Scripture is the simple truth that our lives are short.
We read that our days on earth are akin to a “breath,” a “passing shadow,” a “puff of smoke”
(Job 7:7, Psalm 144:4, James 4:14). And with brevity of life comes lack of perspective and
narrowness of vision, which is precisely why we need to study the past.

“Remember the days of old,” Moses sang to the assembly of Israel. “Consider the years
of many generations. Ask your father, and he will show you, your elders, and they will tell you”
(Deuteronomy 32:7). “Inquire, please, of the former age, and consider the things discovered by
their fathers,” counsels Bildad the Shuhite. And why is this necessary? Because “we were born
yesterday and know nothing” (Job 8:8-9). History allows us to glean wisdom from our
ancestors, and in this respect it is a logical extension of the biblical precept to honor age. It
broadens our perspective and expands the range of experiences that we can draw on as we face
the future.

“Christianity is a religion of historians,” wrote the French historian Marc Bloch from a
Gestapo prison cell during World War Two. Surely he was right. Christians are, by vocation,
called to be historians as well. God has created us as historical beings, implanted in us a
historical faith, and bound us to the past by engrafting us into a historical church. When we
approach the study of the past with humility and awe, recognizing the past as a sphere that God
has ordained and prompted by biblical dictates and principles, the study of history can become
both an act of obedience and an expression of worship.

(Adapted from A Little Book for New Historians: Why and How to Study History)