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)