Priests of History: Stewarding the Past in an Ahistoric Age with Sarah Irving-Stonebraker

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:23):
Welcome to another edition of the hand unplug podcast of
podcasts that is irrevocably devoted to bringing the most interesting,
informative and inspirational people directly to your earbuds. And today
is another exceptional opportunity to interview an incredible person. She's interesting,

(00:46):
she's informative, she's inspirational. And by the way, as we
get into the podcast, if you enjoy the podcast, subscribe
rate review. It helps a lot. The book that we're
going to be talking about today, let me introduce the
book first and then the guest. It's called Priests of History.
The subtitle is very interesting as well, stewarding the past

(01:10):
in an ahistoric age, and let me mention that for
those who stand shoulder to shoulder with us in the
battle for life and truth. This book available. You can
get it on the web at equipp dot org equip
dot org. You can also write me at Post Office
box eighty five hundred, Charlotte, North Carolina, zip code two

(01:30):
eight two seven one. Well, the author of this book
is an incredible person. I mean, just reading her testimony
in the book made me salivate over the opportunity to
interview her on this podcast. Her name is Sarah Irving Stonebreaker.
She's a professor of history and Western Civilization in Australia

(01:51):
Catholic University in North Sydney. I was just in Australia
a couple of weeks ago, and I know that Sarah
is basting in sunshine while I'm in a place where
I can see snow outside. She is currently co editor
of the Journal of Religious History. She received her PhD

(02:11):
in history from the University of Cambridge. She held a
research fellowship at the University of Oxford. She converted from
Atheism to Christianity while an assistant professor at Florida State University.
Towards the end of the podcast, I want you to
hear her testimony. It's incredible. Her first book, a book

(02:33):
titled Natural Science and the Origins of the British Empire,
won the Royal Society of Literature and the Jurwood Foundation
Award for Nonfiction Writing. Sarah and her husband live in Sydney, Australia.
They have three children. I have thirteen, Sarah, so I've
got you justitie. But we're going to be talking about

(02:56):
her latest book. It's titled Priests of History and subtitled
Stewarding the past in an ahistoric age. And I want
to start actually, Sarah, and welcome to the podcast. But
I want to start by asking you about the import
of the title of your book, Priests of History. It's

(03:18):
an intriguing title, and I love titles. I've written over
twenty books myself, and good titles is will capture the
imagination of people and cause people to read books.

Speaker 2 (03:30):
Yeah, oh, thank you so much. Hang, it's so wonderful
to be here and to talk to you. Yes. So
the title of my book is actually one that reflects
quite a deep kind of personal way of thinking about
history and also of course about my faith. So Priesce
of History encapsulates the fact that when as Christians we

(03:53):
think about the past, I think that we're actually called
to do a kind of priests work in the very
New Testament sense. You know, we're called to be a
royal priesthood and as Luther, you know, paraphrasing the first
Letter of Peter, their priestood of all believers. And what
I think that means is in relation to history, is

(04:13):
that we're actually called to tend and to keep the past,
to steward the past for a God's glory and so
priests of history kind of encapsulates that idea. But I
guess the kind of broader sense there too is that
I think now we're that's particularly important because we're living
in a cultural moment that I call this astoric age,

(04:33):
because I think increasingly in society, and I also think
to some extent, these ideas of a historicism are kind
of rejection of history, thinking that history is irrelevant. They
do sometimes, I think, creep into the church as well,
and so I think it's even more important to have
this kind of idea that actually Christians are called to
steward the past, to be a kind of a priest
of history, tending and keeping the past, or stewarding it

(04:55):
in an astoric age for God's glory.

Speaker 1 (04:58):
Yeah, so how does that impact the Christian Church in
a meaningful way? I mean, there are consequences to being
a historic and those consequences have a profound impact on
the historic Christian faith.

Speaker 2 (05:12):
Yeah, that's right. Well, perhaps to be helpful, actually if
I just kind of briefly outlined what I mean by
this kind of ahistoric age, this kind of cultural moment
that we live in, because basically this is a sense
that I think particularly in the last ten to fifteen years.
This strikes me not only as a Christian but also
as a obviously you know, as an academic historian, that

(05:34):
we're now living in an age which is kind of
I think, uniquely a historical And what I mean by
that is, the first of all, tends to be this
sense because of the kind of radical individualism of our
culture today and this kind of sense that we have
that the good life is about just relentless self invention,
you know, finding and being my true self and expressing
that to the world. First of all, there's this kind

(05:56):
of sense that, well, if that is what the good
life is, the only story I have is my own,
as it were, then history is just irrelevant to that project.
So that's kind of the first thing I think that
broadly culturally speaking, is going on in the broader culture.
The second is that increasingly we are, particularly in the West,
increasingly ignorant of history. I think even as Christians, we

(06:19):
know less and less about our historic formation as God's people.
We know less about Church history, less about even the
history of the ideas that in the West have become
profoundly important to us. So for example, and which you know,
for the most part actually, particularly the ones that we
tend to cherish and treasure. I have Christian roots. So,
for example, like when I talk with my undergraduate students

(06:42):
at university about, say, the idea of that we have
fundamental kind of human rights, they love this idea, but
so few of them actually know where the whole idea
that a human being might be a right bearing individual
even comes from. So we're kind of increasingly ignorant of history.
Kinds of interesting empirical studies actually that back that up

(07:03):
that show, like in the US, for example, that we
know less current generations, up and coming generations know less
and less about their history than previous ones. So as
that kind of ignorance is reaching a new level. And
then's finally are kind of a sense too, especially in
the last ten years, with the advent of social media
kind of polarizing our public discussions, our public conversations, that

(07:24):
we tend to be kind of ahistorical in the sense
that we are no longer able to engage in meaningful
debate about the complexities of history without kind of turning
it into a kind of culture wars basically where we
either are forced to kind of think of history purely
in black and white terms, or we're forced into categories
where we either condemn or celebrate the past, where we

(07:47):
find it very difficult to realize that historical figures and
episodes of the past very rarely fit neatly into our
own category. So we tend to reduce history to ideology basically,
And I think for those if you think about those
three aracteristics irrelevance and ignorance and ideology, then there's a
way of kind of realizing the kind of cultural moment
that we're living in and therefore thinking about the importance

(08:09):
of Okay, as Christians, what do we call to do
in terms of history? What does God tell us in
the Bible about how he acts in history and how
Christians are supposed to think about their history? And what
does that mean for us today living in this ahistorical culture.
How do we live as Christians? And then how do
we think about telling the Gospel to a non Christian

(08:29):
world which I think is so a historical and yet
deeply yearning for rootedness, yearning for a larger story.

Speaker 1 (08:37):
Yeah, beautifully put. And to your point, I was just
thinking about someone who I've quoted off and he is
a prestigious philosopher's name is Alex Rosenberg. And one of
the things Alex Rosenberg says in a long litany of
things which promote atheism his book As of Course Atheists
Guide to Reality. He says in quiry does history have

(09:01):
any meaning or purpose? And then he answers that by
saying no, it's full sound and fury, but signifies nothing.
Does the human past have any lessons for the future?
He says, fewer and fewer if it ever had any

(09:23):
to begin with. And I think that sort of summarizes
where the culture is. And as you've alluded to, I mean,
Christians are impacted by the culture, and this is the
kind of thing, this is sort of the air that
we're breathing today an a historical perspective, and that's why
I think that your book is so transcendently important. If

(09:47):
we forget history, we lose the gossamer strand that connects us,
that allows us to view our present in a meaningful fashion,
recognizing that we are in a continuum, a continuum that
reaches into the past, but even beyond the resurrection and

(10:07):
the second coming of Jesus Christ, because history will continue
in the New heavens and the new Earth with a
recreated universe, resurrected bodies will learn and grow, albeit without error,
as forever we explore the glory and the grandeur of
the one who created history with a purpose. Talk about

(10:28):
how the disenchanted worldview leads us to be what I
like to call wretched flatlanders. Nature has come to be
understood in terms of how it works, rather than what
it means or what its purpose is.

Speaker 2 (10:45):
Yeah, yeah, that's such a profound reflection. Actually, so we
look basically, it's probably really useful to think about this
as a long term kind of historical change. The really
interesting thing is that in the early modern world, when
the term Christendom actually is a historical and correct kind
of word to think about the community of Christians, it was,

(11:08):
and the philosopher Charles Taylor puts this really well, it
was almost impossible not to believe in God in the
year fifteen hundred, in the sense that the entire way
that people approached their understanding of human life and the universe,
the natural world and so forth was through the lens
of God's ordering and purposes for the rest of creation.

(11:29):
But gradually what's happened over the last five hundred years
or so is a process that different historians and philosophs
kind of refer to as a gradual kind of secularization,
where increasingly in this again, you know, I'm kind of
simplifying here a whole lot of very complicated, you know,
historical processes. But with the advent of modernity and what's

(11:50):
called the Enlightenment project, there's a kind of sense in
which human beings think that they can and they attempt
to understand themselves and the universe, the natural world and
so forth, without any reference to God, and so in
the sort of late modern and some you know, for
a last thirty forty years or so, the term kind
of postmodern has been bandied around various kind of terms

(12:13):
for understanding the characteristics of our culture and society after
about the nineteen sixties and seventies. In the late modern
kind of postmodern world, there is a kind of sense
that we're in a kind of post truth age in
which there's no longer any kind of ultimate story. There's
no kind of meta narrative if you like, that gives

(12:33):
us any kind of sense of purpose or any sense
that time ultimately has any kind of ultimate meaning. And
what that does is ultimately it leads people kind of
desperately searching or inventing some kind of way of thinking
about how they exist in time, or it creates a

(12:56):
kind of I mean, and you see this in the
kind of literature and some of the really kind of
more pessimistic literature and philosophy in the late twentieth century.
Think about Albert Camu's work, like there's a kind of
deep sense that human life perhaps is ultimately meaningless because
time is ultimately meaningless, there's no purpose to the universe.
But actually, as Christians, really, of course, the thing that

(13:18):
we know as Christians is that there is an ultimate
purpose to time, that time is given purpose and meaning
by a God who actually shows us who he is
through his mighty works in history. And just as somebody,
I mean you alluded to the fact before that, you know,
I didn't grow up in a Christian home. I was
very much at a secular person who defined themselves define

(13:39):
myself as an atheist in my twenties, and here I
was doing a PhD at Cambridge and what actually kind
of begins to strike me is that Christians actually have
the framework for understanding time and why history is meaningful
in the first place, right, because in the rest, like
in the ancient world, ancient philosophers basically think that the

(14:01):
universe is eternal. But it's actually when Christianity arrives on
the scene, and when we have the Christians interpreting and
revealing that actually the promised Messiah that is given to
the Jews and the Alderson is in fact Jesus Christ.
And when you have Augustine writing the City of God
and which he gives us this kind of very clear

(14:23):
articulation of the idea that no history is like the
history has meaning and purpose, that we have a framework
for human beings understanding the kind of overarching, kind of
sweep of human history, and that's what gives life meaning
and purpose. So it's a little wonder of course that
you know, when you began by quoting Alex Rosenberg a

(14:43):
few minutes ago, that there is this kind of sense
of nehalism, of purposelessness, because without a God who renders
time meaningful, what kind of meaning or purpose to human
life is there?

Speaker 1 (14:54):
You know, it's interesting because you know, I was thinking
as you were speaking that the second world also has
a view of history that's linear in some sense. So
today we talk a lot about the cult of progress,
or the myth of progress, the idea that history is

(15:14):
moving forward and we are evolving from human beings to
human beings two point zero, that we're going to be transhuman.
So we're becoming the gods of our own biology. We're
becoming the gods of our own gender. We're now saying
how things are going to transcend our normal limitations, and

(15:38):
we're going to go into a golden age, what Donald
Trump calls the Golden Age. I'm not criticizing any politician
and saying this, but I'm simply saying there is a
sense of progress in the secular worldview too. It's a
distorted sense. It's a sense without God, but it is
a sense of progress. It's not as though the only

(15:58):
thing that matters is today, because today we're moving on
to becoming evolved human beings.

Speaker 2 (16:04):
Yeah, that's such a fascinating observation actually, because well not least,
because actually the whole idea of a progress in the
first place is actually a kind of use the word distortion,
I would even use the word perversion as well. There's
a kind of secular perversion here of what actually enters

(16:24):
the intellectual tradition of the West as a way of
thinking about the advent of God's kingdom, like it's actually
only with the advent of Christianity and the hope and
the not like the sure hope that we have that
Christ will come again and remake the heavens and the earth,
that we have any sense that history is going to
ultimately end up anywhere. And the really interesting thing that's

(16:47):
happened in the history of the West is that these ideas,
and particularly happens after the advent of the scientific revolution
in the last few hundred years, ideas of progress increasingly
get secularized. And what happens is that their ultimate goal,
or what might say is the tea loss of that progress,
which of course Christians know and historically was the idea
of God's kingdom. Christ will return. But as they get secularized,

(17:08):
so in other words, as they get unraveled from their
Christian framework, what happens is that the ideas of progress remain,
but they remain as kind of as distortions and perversions,
because and here's the thing, there's no longer any real
sense of what that tear loss is, what the endpoint is,
is it some kind of you mentioned earlier like transhumanism

(17:30):
or is it a kind of And I think that's
why too. Our culture at the moment almost oscillates wildly
between the sense that there is a kind of progress
which will end up in transhumanism and colonizing Mars, Utopia
and dystopia always so closely connected, and there's this idea
that it will actually culminate in disaster, that there will
be a kind of dystopian destruction of the planet. And

(17:52):
one of the reasons why secular culture is struggling with
this is because we've kind of inherited Christian ideas of
progress and hope for a better world, which is Christians
we know it's the new heavens and the new Earth,
like this is this is God's plan for history. But
we unravel them from theology and think that the classic
you know, we'll worship the creative things instead of the Creator.

(18:12):
We'll think that we can create our own kind of utopia.
We lose that sense of t loss or endpoint, and
so we just maintain the sense that there is endless,
boundless becoming in progress, and yet we're completely at a
loss about where it actually ends up.

Speaker 1 (18:29):
I found something fascinating and reading your book and that
is when you actually talk about when the ahistoric epic began,
and you would think, well, that happened maybe back with
the Renaissance or the Enlightenment, but you say, no, it
is very modern.

Speaker 2 (18:47):
Yeah, well, so this is interesting. I think that there
have been for some time. You know, there are long
historical threads that give us the kind of origins of
a historicism. I mean, even when C. S. Lewis was
writing in the mid twentieth century, he uses the phrase, oh,
chronological snobbery, right, there are moments in history in which

(19:08):
there is a kind of sense and this. Yeah, I
think this is characteristic of the kind of modern mindset too, right,
that we are superior to the past. This is modernity.
But I think there is something in the last ten
to fifteen years which is kind of uniquely well, that
there's a kind of unique moment really in the last
fifteen years. These things have kind of various threads, I

(19:29):
think of kind of coalesce to give us a new
sense of in which the past is completely irrelevant. Not least.
I think it's exacerbated by the fact that social media
really finds its kind of origins in about twenty twelve
twenty thirteen. And what that does is that it means
that basically aid the kind of conversations that we have

(19:49):
in public are operating on a completely different level now,
the more and more polarized we know how the algorithms work,
so public discourse is transformed and so and also cause
with the constant, you know, the twenty four hour news
cycle and the constant and rapid demand for new content,
means that we're kind of generating information and content without

(20:09):
actually thinking that there is any need to kind of
preserve and to continue that. Of course, the other thing
about social media too is that it exacerbates this radical
kind of emancipatory individualism we have. That is to say,
it really accentuates the way in which we think that
life is really just about this constant process of self invention.

(20:30):
The more that we do this online, the more that
we're constantly kind of creating content and inventing ourselves online,
the less that we ever see ourselves And I think
even you know, this seeps into the church, the less
that even the church Christians collectively see themselves as conserving
and passing down a tradition and being part of a

(20:51):
larger story.

Speaker 1 (20:52):
Yeah, so I was just stunned when I read in
your book two thy ten. You know, it just seems
so recent, and yet you say soon after two thy
ten five characteristics of Ahistoricism intensified and coalesced. And I
think you're very qualified in your writing. You didn't say

(21:13):
it began, but intensified and coalesced. And you argue then
that the digital revolution and the rise of social media
have acted like sparks to ignite the flame of heh
historicism in a number of different ways. And then you
give illustrations of the Astoric age. And one of the
illustrations really caught my attention because, as I was saying earlier,

(21:37):
I was just in Australia, and Australia is beautiful. I mean,
you see these incredible churches. I was downtown in Melbourne, Australia,
and I attended a number of churches there, but they're
basically empty. And then you have these beautiful statues. But
part of what you say in your book is that

(21:58):
you have a march or a telltale sign of ahistoricism
with the toppling of statues.

Speaker 2 (22:06):
Yeah, that's right. I mean this is a kind of
a trend really that has begun. I mean, statues have
been toppled in history. Obviously. You know, when the Soviet
Union collapse, when there's a kind of climactic crisis of
the fall of governments in the late nineteen nineties Soviet
Union collapse, they pull down the statues of Lenin and

(22:26):
Stalin and Marx and so forth. But what's happening now
is that there's a kind of a sense in which
the toppling and vandalism of statues is a kind of
a constant display of how we think about history in
everyday life. I mean, this happened again. We just celebrated
our National Day, Australia Day a month ago in January,

(22:48):
and again there's a kind of constant sense that vandalizing
statues is the political move that people make to symbolize
where they stand in current politics. And that's an interesting
thing when the approach in the past is just simply
to kind of cancel, an attempt to kind of cancel
a historical figure, or to reveal them as nothing but

(23:09):
somebody who supported racism or genocide or whatever it is.
When historically, I mean, the interesting thing is too, like
in Australian history, we've actually known for generations about various
historical like the ways in which Indigenous people were treated
by the British for generations. And yet something happens in
like the last five years in which now statues are

(23:31):
being toppled, and this is not something that had actually
really happened before. So there's a sense that that kind
of mobilization and that kind of sense that there's no
collective story that Australians will share about their past which
will enable them to have any kind of public or
shared representation of the past without it being vandalized or attacked.

(23:52):
There's no real kind of sense that we can do
that anymore.

Speaker 1 (23:55):
And when you're ahistorical, I love that word ahistorical. When
you're a historical you don't have a sense of nuance.
You look at the past as either black or white.
You don't see things in their complexities.

Speaker 2 (24:11):
Yep, that's right. I think that's one of the features
of kind of the way in which we reduce history
to ideology today. I mean one again, like a really
interesting example of this from Australia is that one of
our most important indigenous leaders, our aboriginal leaders from the
early twentieth century. His name is William Cooper, and he's
a Christian, and he's born in the eighteen sixties on

(24:34):
a Christian mission on the border of New South Wales
and Victoria. And what is with major kind of act
of leadership is during the early twentieth century, when Indigenous
people didn't have the same civil political rights as white Australians, Cooper,
informed by not only the Western political tradition but by
his Christian faith, engages in an act which is entirely

(24:56):
consistent with the way that Americans, I think know this
even than Australians, consistent with the political tradition, which is
the right to petition the government for a redress of grievances. Right,
this is in the Magna Carta. And so here's Cooper
putting himself in that tradition. So he creates a petition
and he gets thousands of He goes around and collects

(25:17):
thousands of signatures or markings on the petition to petition
ultimately actually to petition the King takes it to the
federal government in Australia first in order to do this.
And his whole argument actually is that the reason why
Indigenous Australians ought to have the same political rights as
non Indigenous Australians is that they're all not only they
all subjects of the British Empire, but they are all

(25:40):
created equal. And he quotes the Bible and he says
we are of one blood, and he talks about God,
and he talks about being of one blood, and so
again and again. This petition and the rest of his work,
which has founded on his Christian belief that Indigenous Australians
are created in God's image, lives are inherently worthy and

(26:02):
as valuable as any non Indigenous Australian's life framed by
the Christian tradition. And yet the way that Cooper's kind
of presented in for example, the National Museum of Australia,
is that the Christian part of this story is kind
of written out, which is really interesting. So on the
website of the museum and in the museum itself, there's

(26:23):
like no at least on the website, there is no mention,
which footnote in the book, so you can go and
check it out, But there's no reference to his faith.
There's no reference to the fact that the entire reason
he could even make this argument in the first place
is that he relies upon a biblical principle, which is
that we are of one blood, as it were. And
so there's an inability, i think, like you said earlier,

(26:44):
to recognize that history is nuanced and complex. We're living
in a cultural moment now in which, for various reasons,
look for some reason, there's a sense that if you're
on the kind of progressive side of politics, then you
must write out any reference to Christianity is playing a
role in indigenous rights in Australia, so they write out
that part of history and they can't attend to the

(27:05):
fact that no history is complex. Cooper doesn't fit into
our category of what a kind of progressive indigenous activist
might look like today because he is profoundly evangelical and
Christian and wants the Gospel to go out to indigenous communities.
So history is kind of nuanced, it's complex, it doesn't
fit into our neat ideological categories.

Speaker 1 (27:25):
You know, you mentioned museums, and I think that's another
really important point to make on the podcast, because if
you have children and you're taking them to museums so
often you need to be equipped to tell them what
they're encountering, because so often what they encounter is not

(27:45):
historical reality, but a political agenda.

Speaker 2 (27:50):
Yeah. So this is the other interesting thing that I
think was something that really illustrated the way that we're
now living in the kind of ahistoric ages uniquely happening
in the last ten to fifteen years or so, because
it was in I think twenty nineteen. I quote this
in the book, so you have to check the footnotes
and everything. But the international body that regulates museums redefined

(28:15):
the purpose of what a museum is. It's the first
time that this has happened in a very long time,
so for centuries really, since the creation of the first
kind of modern museum, the British Museum through Hans Sloan's collections.
The idea is that a museum is a repository of
the past that it conserves and passes down the past.
But the essence of the redefinition of what a museum

(28:36):
was by this international body in the last five to
seven years completely so Jettison's the idea that it's about
conserving heritage and basically redefines it as having a role
in the sort of the justice and the political They
use various phrases that have social justices in there. We
can check. I've quoted it all in the book, but basically,

(28:57):
it redefines the purpose of the museum as an ideological
and a political purpose to kind of remake the world,
to reshape the world. And that's profoundly significant, right in
terms of what's happening here with how we think about history,
because and how we think about the public role of
the stories that we tell. Because for a very long
time this is about conserving and passing down a tradition.

(29:19):
And yet suddenly in the last ten to fifteen years,
there's this sense that, oh no, instead of conserving and
passing down, we actually think about these things purely in
terms of the purpose of reshaping the world, remaking the world.
There's a reference actually, I think to the ecology of
the planet in the purpose of the museum. Now there
is a political role in the way that there wasn't historically.

Speaker 1 (29:41):
Yeah, and it's just breathtaking when you say this is
forged some five to seven years ago. There's also something
that I think you can speak about from personal experience
as a professor of history. There's a steep decline in
history majors all over the world.

Speaker 2 (30:00):
Yeah, Yeah, that's right. It's some really interesting evidence, I
quote coming out with the American Historical Association in the
last few years, like history majors plummeted, and they're plummeting
faster than other humanities majors. History. I also give some
kind of evidence my own experience in Australia is again
at my prior institution, my pre university history majors basically

(30:21):
kind of halved in the ten years that I was there.
So there's a kind of yeah, there's a sense in
which we're no longer thinking that history is really one
of the basic kind of ways of equipping citizens for
public life. I mean, this is the other really interesting
thing too. I think this, and actually I think this
is true particularly in America as much, perhaps even more

(30:43):
so actually given the sort of fascinating Republican tradition that
we don't have in the same way in Australia. But
both in America and Australia, there is a sense in
which education is for the kind of public equipping of
citizens for public life, and history is always played a
very important role in that. So if you rewind back
a few generations in either of our countries, there is

(31:05):
a kind of sense that people who are educated, who
went off to a liberal arts college or a university.
The assumption is that you will be reading important books.
You'll read the classics, and you'll also be educated in history,
because the idea is that you have to know the
stories that you are part of, as it were, the
sort of the collective narrative about your own people, your nation,

(31:29):
the ideas, the institutions, where they came from. Where did
the common law come from? For example? You know about
these institutions, and that knowledge of history is essential to
being a citizen who participates in public life. But basically
what's happened, particularly probably more so actually in Australia than
in America for various reasons. But now there's a kind
of sense that we've almost kind of unraveled the idea

(31:51):
that a we educate to form the character of citizens,
and b that history should have a kind of role
in that.

Speaker 1 (32:00):
Yeah, you talk about five characteristics of the ahistoric age,
and the first of which is a recall has to
do with a failure to recognize nuance, which we already
talked about. But could you give us sort of an
overview of those five characteristics? Maybe I should go through
them with you. But the past is merely a source
of shame and oppression from which we must free ourselves.

(32:22):
And again, as I mentioned, we in this discussion are
already talked about the failure to recognize nuance. But it
also involves a hyper individualist and consumer mindset, as you point.

Speaker 2 (32:34):
Out in the book, Yeah, that's right. So that first
characteristic that basically the only lens through which particularly young people,
like if you talk to students going through high school
and college or university, basically the kind of lens that
they approach history now is through this mindset of thinking
that history is all about power, about oppresses and oppressed

(32:59):
and effectively these kind of collective stories. It makes you
inherent world First of all, it makes you inherently ashamed
of any part of your own nation's history. Again, it's
not to say there aren't complex parts of your nation's history.
In some things that are you know, deeply deeply problematic
in Australia's history, for example, But seeing the past purely

(33:20):
as a kind of story from which they have to
free themselves from, as a source of kind of domination
and oppression is probably the first thing. And I think
that's a real kind of intensification of this idea that
we see the purpose in life really is to kind
of free ourselves from all external authorities. Like if basically
if young people come out of their high schools and

(33:43):
into college thinking that life is really about going on
my own journey, right, a phrase we here all the
time that educational institutions are all about empowering myself. That
is it like when you probe a little bit, that's
antithetical to any sense that we're part of a larger
story in part of history. That's a kind of idea that, well,
we need to free ourselves from all kinds of external
authorities so that I can be my true self, so

(34:05):
that I can go on my true journey. And so
history is just a kind of a source of some
kind of oppressional domination from which we have to free ourselves.
That's why come back to the statue vandalism and toppling thing.
Why that's such a good illustration of that because instead
of being able to sit with any kind of complexity,
there's a kind of sense that we'll know the statue,

(34:25):
for example, about first Prime Minister Edmund Barton or Lock
the Macquarie, one of about greatest governors in New South Wales
has to be knocked down, because there's no way that
people have of thinking about the fact that the past
is complex, it's not just a kind of source of
oppression and domination. So that's probably the first thing you.

Speaker 1 (34:42):
Quote one of your students and undergraduates say, why should
I study British Empire? Has absolutely nothing to do with
my life? And there's some presuppositions underlying that kind of thought.
But there's also a cultural milieu that's sort of like
I said before, it's like in the air. It sort

(35:03):
of leads you to that kind of thinking, that ahistorical malaise.

Speaker 2 (35:08):
Yeah, yeah, that's it's such a good illustration. It's something
I mean, it is one particular student, but really I've
heard you.

Speaker 1 (35:14):
Know that a thousand times.

Speaker 2 (35:17):
But yeah, because so yeah, if we unpack that a
little bit, right, what other presuppositions. First of all, there
is this kind of sense that, like, I would only
study things that are relevant to my life, because I
think my life is about my relentless like my ability
to kind of create myself invent myself. And so if
I don't think that something is important to my life,

(35:37):
like if I don't think I should read the founders,
or if I don't think I should read about the
history of the British Empire or study that, then I
shouldn't study it because my life is all about me.
And then what happens to the idea of education there
is that it's just a means to an end, and
the end is self empowerment. That's why I too, like,
have you noticed too that interestingly schools and universities increasely

(36:00):
use the language of empowerment to describe their purpose. Historically,
that is not like, you know, the earliest university in
Bologna in the eleventh century, the ten hundreds, The whole
history of the university is not about self empowerment. Right,
So there's a sense that today the student is going
to reject studying history because basically they don't see it

(36:24):
as relevant to their lives, because I think their lives
are all about self invention.

Speaker 1 (36:29):
You bring up a phrase in the book, and it
is digital tribalism. Can you explain what digital tribalism entails?

Speaker 2 (36:39):
Yeah, So I'm talking about this, I think in the
context of trying to show the church, to show other
Christians that actually Christians are called to be part of
God's historical people, a rich historical community, and the kind
of community and fellowship that we have with each other
and that we can learn so much more about. Actually,

(37:01):
if we read about how Christians have practiced fellowship historically,
is so radically different to the kind of false communities
quote unquote or digital tribalism that we see online because increasingly,
you know, in the digital age, you know, there's that
kind of classic paradox from which people are intensely atomized
and isolated and lonely, and yet they find their community online.

(37:24):
And so the kind of phenomenon that sociologists kind of
refer to as digital kind of tribalism creates a kind
of false community. And it's not a real community for
various reasons, because there are no It's a group of
people who are just united merely by the fact that
they share the same beliefs or preferences or interests or whatever.
But there's no real community in the sense of and

(37:46):
of course, the model of community and fellowship is the
Church and so and the way that Christ has loved
us and called us to be part of his body.
So there's no in digital tribes. There are no demands
on each other's life. You don't serve each other, You
don't lay your life down for each other, You don't
live in deep kind of fellowship and community with each

(38:09):
other in terms of sharing meals together, serving each other
at considerable cost, or anything like that. And so that, Yeah,
I think that's really illustrative because there's often a sense
today that the Internet has kind of brought us into
a kind of new age in which there are different
kinds of communities. But I think historically the church needs
to well, we need to be part of the kind

(38:31):
of long historical communities that the Church has always kind
of done. So, well, what.

Speaker 1 (38:36):
Does the ahistoric epic of time look like with respect
to the church you just mentioned the church? I mean,
what does that look like when the culture invades the
church or we become enculturated, we become part of the
culture rather than transformers of the culture.

Speaker 2 (38:54):
Yeah, this is really interesting because I do think that
there's always a tendency, of course to kind of a
culturate ourselves too much, or to acculturate ourselves in such
a way that's actually kind of damaging. And you know,
I think this looks different in different parts of the church,
but I do think that there are certain things today,
certain kind of attitudes in the church towards the past

(39:16):
that are really kind of problematic. And you know, one
of the biggest kind of idols and temptations that we
face in very privileged countries like the USA and Australia
and in the West in the church is the kind
of comfortable kind of consumer lifestyle, highly individualistic lives in
which we you know, we're tempted to reduce faith to

(39:37):
something that looks like the rest of culture in the
sense that is it just like another well like is
it just part of the wellness phenomenon? Is Christianity a
kind of self help doctrine, which, of course we know biblically,
it's not that this is always a kind of temptation.
And so one of the ways that a historicism can
manifest itself in that respect is that it makes us
kind of blind, Like if we don't know the way

(39:58):
that Christians have lived lived historically into their faith, then
we are going to be like increasingly blind to the
ways in which we are culturating ourselves to things like individualism,
the kind of sense that really the faith is just
something being a Christian is something that we might do
on a Sunday morning that really the church is kind

(40:19):
of there to serve us, makes us blind to seeing
like celebrity pastors. Again, not a phenomenon that existed in
previous generations. But I think that's why if we actually
understand something of our history, we can we can kind
of sharpen our understanding of culture, and we can be
very wary of the way. We can be more aware

(40:40):
of the kind of temptations we have for current kind
of cultural idols.

Speaker 1 (40:44):
When you talk about celebrity pastors, you know, my father
was a pastor and his work was anything but that
of a celebrity. I mean, he had to tend the flock,
he had to marry and bury, he had to counselo.
I mean it was hard work. And one of the
things that are real contribution you make in the book

(41:06):
is the disjuncture between the kind of pastor that's become
all the more prominent in our culture and pastors that
really did the hard work of ministry, tending the flock,
caring for the flock, teaching the word of God. I mean,
I think of you know, I'm going to name a name.

(41:27):
Andy Stanley is a great example of a celebrity pastor.
He's got one of the largest church networks in the world.
He's in the United States. He actually you talk about ahistoricism.
He says that the Old Testament has nothing worthwhile to
say to us today. You ought to call it the
obsolete Testament. We should not read the Old Testament because

(41:51):
if you read the Old Testament, you're going to have
a sense of an entitlement to slavery, and you're gonna
have a false sense of God. You're gonna be worshiping
of false God and all of that. I mean, it's
absolutely incredible. These people are more managers of large Christian
cults than they are people that are teaching their constituents

(42:14):
how the Old Testament and the New Testament are inextricably
woven together in a beautiful harmonic tapestry.

Speaker 2 (42:25):
Yeah, that's interesting. I mean the way that you were
again speaking about the actual kind of day to day
pastoring work caring for the flock that your father did,
And I was really instructed when I read Eugene Peterson's work.
I mean, the interesting thing about this is that they
are historic ways in which pastors have tended to the flock.

(42:46):
But if we actually don't know that historically, that's what
ministry look like, that's what pastoring involved. I think we're
much more likely to just kind of jettison the past
because we don't we're ignorant of it, we don't know
about it, and to kind of think that really the
role of the pastor is merely as a kind of
CEO or a manager who just delegates. But historically and
even biblically, of course, that that's not what actually pastoring

(43:09):
look like. And I think there are other examples too
in some churches. So this is more about so, for example,
if you take the worship service, I think another way
that the ahistoric age can kind of creep into the
church is that we tend to kind of assume sometimes
that historical practices just not relevant anymore, or if we

(43:30):
don't know about them, and suddenly what you end up
with is a service that actually is not only out
of step with how we have met together and shared
fellowship as Christians, but is also kind of unbiblical too. So,
for example, there's a kind of sense that any kind
of tradition of coming into church and praying a prayer

(43:52):
of confession of sin, which historically has been which obviously
told to confess our sins. Historically, Christians, when they meet together,
they can invest their sins. But there is a tendency
to kind of make worship service about entertainment, and then
you abandon these kind of practices. The practice of sharing
the peace too often can be kind of abandoned, and

(44:13):
yet we're told, you know, share the peace. And another
one that I think is pretty interesting is the kind
of reverence in which historically we've celebrated the Lord's Supper. Well,
if you have kind of pop music on in the
background and the Lord's Supper is so denuded of its
reverence and significance and the fact that we worship a
transcendent God, then you turn the Lord's again, turn the

(44:34):
Lord's Supper into entertainment. Likewise, I've been in church services
that conclude with instead of ascending, which is historically God's people,
after they meet together, they are sent back out. And
this looks different in different denominational traditions, but there's a
sending back out into the world which encapsulates the fact
that you've been brought together as God's people. You've met

(44:56):
and worshiped God and heard his word preached and sung
praises to him and so forth, you are being sent
back out into the world to serve him. But a
really good illustration of a historicism, I think is when
a church service just ends with the service leader saying, Okay,
have a great week, which is really common. But the
thing is, we often don't realize that I think actually

(45:17):
should really be shocking and jarring to us. But I
think one of the reasons why sometimes we don't see
that as shocking and jarring is because we're so acculturated
to the ahistoric age. We're so ignorant of how Christians
have met together historically that we don't even see the
idols of our culture because unpack what's happening there. When
the service leader says have a great week, well, the
idol is your a week and your time is about you.

(45:41):
You're not being sent back out into the world to
serve God. You're enjoying your week because your week is
about you. But historically that's never how That's not how
Christians have thought about what worship is all about. But
the more that we forget what we have been doing historically,
the more that we just kind of acculturate ourselves to this.

Speaker 1 (46:00):
Yeah, and the church has a rhythm. There are seasons
of the Church, and we order our lives as Christians
around the rhythm of the church. It invades every aspect
of our life. So it's not going to church, it
becomes a way of life.

Speaker 2 (46:19):
Yeah, that's right. And one of the things I talk
about in the book, so after I kind of do
this cultural analysis of the historic Age, I want to
really show Christians that actually there is a path forward here.
I think that if we tend and keep and steward
the past, one of the things Christians can do is
use the past as this kind of vast treasury. That
beautiful phrase, by the way, a phrase that Isaac Watt's

(46:41):
The Wonderful Hymn Writer uses a vast treasury to help us.
I think one of the ways that it does that
is that we can draw upon things like the lectionary
or for example, or liturgy or the church calendar to
kind of order our time. My family did this a
couple of We began doing this a couple of years
ago when we decided to kind of really lean into

(47:04):
the church calendar and what in the Anglican tradition is
called the daily Office. We decide sort of step by
step gradually we're reorienting our time and redeeming our time.
I think around these kind of historic practices that enabled
us to kind of structure our time around the story

(47:24):
that God gives us and the kind of the rhythms
of life that structure the church. And these are kind
of daily rhythms, like we meet for prayer in the morning,
like we pray morning prayer in my family. But again,
historically there's morning prayer in different Protestant denominations and in
all kinds of in the Eastern Church and the Catholic Church.
There are kind of historically, actually Christians have structured their

(47:47):
days around cycles of prayer and devotion. And this can
be really helpful for us, because of course, we're living
in a culture in which our culture is more than
happy to structure our time for us. There are secular
seas our work, or the demands of consumerism, or just
you know, the way that we kind of secularize events
like we turn Christmas into the holiday season. We're actually

(48:09):
living in a culture which is going to structure our
time for us if we let it.

Speaker 1 (48:13):
That is a brilliant point. I mean, it's not just
that we are no longer structuring our time around God's purposes,
in God's plan, but the secular world has an alternative
for us, and so often we embrace that alternative without
even knowing that we're doing it.

Speaker 2 (48:32):
Yeah, that's so true. I think. One of the things
that I hear so when I talk about my book
in the Australian evangelical context, one of the kind of
particularly from like older generations, one of the kind of
pushbacks I get most often is this kind of anxiety
about oh, gosh, you know, tradition or church calendar that

(48:55):
makes it seem like we're not actually evangelical anymore, or
we don't actually believe the Gospel anymore, because there's this
kind of sense that tradition equals no longer an authentic
faith or something. And I think while there are sort
of moments in which yeah, of course tradition can be empty,
but the other thing that's going on there is that
I think there is also a profound blindness to the

(49:18):
idols of our own culture, because so often what happens
is that underneath all that, so underneath the idea that
we could even engage in any kind of tradition of
liturgical prayer, like praying from the Book of Common Prayer
is this kind of anxiety that to do that would
mean we're not authentically expressing ourselves to God. And yet

(49:39):
at the same time, the idea that prayer is just
about my authentic self expression to God, you know, that's
the idol of individualism, of authentic self express like there
is a time and a place for that. But the
idea that that is the primary function of prayer, that
is imbibing a kind of idol of a highly individualistic culture.
But we so often don't realize that. So I think again,

(50:00):
that's what history can do. It can actually sharpen us
to enable us to understand the idols of our own culture.

Speaker 1 (50:05):
I was so excited as reading through your book, you
quote one of my favorite quotes. I have quoted it often,
but Aros Pelican, where he says tradition is the living
faith of the dead, but traditionalism is the dead faith
of the living. And I think that is absolutely a
delicious quote because it puts tradition in the right light

(50:26):
by contrasting it. I always say, contrast is the conduit
to clarity, contrasting tradition with traditionalism, the problem being the ism.

Speaker 2 (50:34):
Yeah, that's right, and it may be surprising in our culture,
and it is actually countercultural in a very kind of
hyperindividualistic age to think that actually a no tradition can
actually be helpful for us, and they're kind of the
stories that we pass down and the ways, like the
ways that Christians actually through the centuries have lived their

(50:57):
faith can be helpful for us. That's kind of cultural,
but actually I think it's it's biblical and it can
be enormously helpful to us. The way that Christians have
lived for centuries has actually been to think of themselves
and to understand that what they're doing is consciously part
of a largest story. I mean, I think one of
the best examples, probably pretty pertinent to the fact that

(51:18):
we're recording this actually just before Lent begins, but is
actually Lent as a kind of a tribute again Lent.
The kind of spiritual disciplines and practices that Christians undergoing
in Lent. There's not a sense, if you are a
Christian that these things are going to save you, but
there is a sense that when you are part of

(51:39):
a historic people who live their lives in a way
in which God's saving history and the story that they're
adopted into right when they're grafted into the faith, made
a sign not of Abraham through faith that that actually
kind of structures their lives. And so each year on
ash Wednesday, my family and I will go and we

(51:59):
will go to a like an ash Wednesday service and
it'll be ashes. This is a very countercultural thing in
evangelical like we are evangelicals, and this is not what
most evangelicals are doing, at least in Australia. So it's
a very it's something difficult to get your heads around,
I think. But no, actually to receive the ashes on
the forehead, to live in such a way in which
you're consciously living as part of God's people, and then

(52:22):
to go through lent preparing your heart, whether it's through
and again it's not legalistic. Perhaps it's fasting for some people.
Perhaps there are lent and disciplines, alms giving. You're actually
living as part of the story of God's historic people
that's been handed down to you. And I think it's
really you know, when Paul says in his first letters
to Corinthians, these things like that, you know the stories

(52:43):
of the Old Testament, these things have been written down
for our instruction. I think there is the sense in
which Christians are called to only remember these stories and
pass them down, but then also kind of live into
sacred history. And we do this by ordering our time.

Speaker 1 (52:58):
Yeah, beautifully said. I think one of the most important
parts of your book is where you observe the outworkings
of the ahistoric attitude that's pervaded the Church. And the
first of that is doctrinal drift from orthodoxy, from the
faith once for all delivered to the saints, from what
was believed everywhere, always and by all. So you have

(53:22):
this doctrinal drift, and one of the key points you
make is the doctoral drift is seen in the same
sex sexuality redefining marriage. I mean, if you think at
the beginning of human civilization, you have church, and you
have government, and you also have marriage. Marriage is foundational

(53:43):
to all of human civilization. It's not just a thing,
it's the thing.

Speaker 2 (53:49):
Yeah, that's right. I think the interesting thing there about
a historicism is that that. Yeah. So doctrinal drift was
one of the kind of characteristics I think of the
age in the Church in the sense that I think
it's very revealing that No, and Tim Keller's kind of
made this point as well, and I'm echoing him here,

(54:10):
but no Christian denomination throughout history in the Eastern or
the Western Church, Catholic, Protestant, Orthodox, has ever redefined marriage
like this. And so when we're in a historical we're
in a cultural moment in which we just kind of
redefine doctrine in such a way that's completely out of
step with two thousand years of Christian theology, then it's

(54:32):
quite revealing, I think of the extent to which we
just kind of think that the past and the way
that we've thought about things in the past is irrelevant.

Speaker 1 (54:40):
Yeah, so that's one of the characteristic. Another characteristic that
you point out is individualism and comfort and emphasis that
shifts the point of reference from a costly discipleship to
a therapeutic individualism.

Speaker 2 (54:56):
Expand on that, Yeah, well this is this is changing.

Speaker 1 (55:02):
There's another way of talking about it.

Speaker 2 (55:03):
Yeah, the beautiful Bonhoffer quote. I mean, look, historians and sociologists,
i mean Christian Smith did a great job of and
even coining the term moral therapeutic deism have noticed for
some time that one of the kind of characteristics of
a Christianity which is so acculturated to a very kind
of post industrial and hyperindividualistic age is the sense that

(55:27):
basically it is well, it a culturates to consumerism in
many ways, in the sense that the faith really becomes
a kind of pathway to my self help, It becomes
a kind of lifestyle. It becomes about therapy and about
sort of self empowerment, and in that sense, it is
no longer a walk with Jesus. Right, And there are

(55:49):
ways in which we see this. Yeah, obviously this looks
you can see this in all kinds of ways, kind
of creeping into the church, that that emphasis on the
kind of therapy that Christian is nothing but a kind
of therapy to help me live my best life. But
it's profoundly unbiblical, right, like those who seek to save
their life will lose it. Like we have to be
willing to die, die to ourselves and be willing to

(56:12):
suffer for Christ. In fact, it is granted, just in
our small group last night in Philippians. But you know,
really mulling over the fact that you know it is
granted to you to suffer, Like how difficult and countercultural
that is for us today, Like living in the West,
missionaries and our persecuted brothers and sisters in the rest
of the world actually understand this much better than us,

(56:35):
but that it is granted to us to suffer.

Speaker 1 (56:38):
Yeah, yeah, beautiful. You know, I want to skip over
to what you say when you talk about a consumerist
and marketing model as one of the indications of drift
within the historic Christian faith, and you say, here's a
quintessential example, and I'm quoting you. Evangelicals in Australia frequently
discussed whether they should celebrate the Lord's Supper and Easter

(57:00):
Sunday because it seems too weird, awkward or uncomfortable to outsiders.
That is a stunning statement in and of itself when
you think about the sacramental liturgical history of the Church,
at the very epicenter of everything, the epicenter of liturgy.

(57:21):
In fact, liturgy is the Lord's Supper. It is partaking
of the real presence of Christ. It is that receiving
of zooetic energy by which you can live not by
might nor by power, but by His spirit. Is not
just about biological energy, it's about spiritual energy that you
receive when you partake of the real presence of Christ.

(57:43):
It's transformative, it's transforming you from one glory to another,
so that you in fact have the wherewithal the power,
the energy. You know, you're energized by all his energy
of Saint paul'sys which so powerfully energizes me the energy
by which to transform the world. And here now we
want to denude the church of the Lord's Supper because

(58:07):
it might seem weird or awkward. And it seems also
and I want to say this, it seems very counterintuitive
in a lot of ways because right now I'm in
a church. We don't have enough space for the people.
The people are flooding in. But it's a sacramental liturgical church.
It happens to be an Orthodox church. People want to
come in because they are intoxicated in a world denuded

(58:30):
of intoxication. They're intoxicated by the mystery of God, by
the sacredness, by beauty, by all of these things. It's
captivating them. So there's a sense in which the churches
that are recognizing that the Lord's Supper is not just
a remembrance but has efficacious meaning in our life attracts

(58:54):
people today.

Speaker 2 (58:56):
Yeah, that's right, and it's interesting, Like I mean an
Australian example there, and I can comment from that kind
of Australian perspective too, that it's interesting that one of
the reasons why the Lord's Supper was often in our
context not celebrated on Easter Sunday was that there was
a moment for a while and it probably served its

(59:16):
purpose at a different historical moment where at least the
kind of thought was that we need to make Christianity
kind of relevant to the culture. And I don't for
a moment think that that means you should not celebrate
the Lord's Supper, but I think that that when you
unpack it, that's the kind of thought behind it. There's
this kind of constant sense that we need to make
the church relevant to the culture, we need to make
the church like the culture. But this is a very

(59:39):
different moment culturally now, and I think, regardless that the
deeper thing going on here too, which is what you
were alluding to when you talked about the number of
people in your church yearning for a sense that God
is actually transcendent and sacred, is that there is a
kind of a secularizing, you know, tendency, particularly well in

(01:00:02):
some parts of the evangelical church that I'm broadly speaking
a part of more than others in which we so
denewed the world of the transcendence of God and of
any sense of the sacred, because there's this kind of
knee jerk reaction that to think that God might be sacred,
or the moment we think about wonder we might you
know that maybe that's Catholic. There's a kind of anxiety

(01:00:24):
that that might mean that we were pre Reformation or something.
But I think it's there's a kind of deep problem
that some branches of evangelicals have with trying to grapple
with well with actually engaging with a transcendent and holy God.
And it's interesting too that theologically, like in Australia, this
kind of sense that nothing happens at the Lord's Supper

(01:00:46):
isn't even in keeping with so that's as Vinglian kind
of theology. It's as memorialism if that. And yet even
see I.

Speaker 1 (01:00:54):
Can tell you're a professor of history because many people
wouldn't know what you do. Said okay, so, which is
absolutely true.

Speaker 2 (01:01:04):
Yeah, okay, so sorry. What I'm saying there for a
moment is what I was noticing happening is that even
in evangelical churches that are in the Anglican tradition in Australia,
like part of the Anglican tradition, there's actually a departure
even from Anglican theology about the Lord's Supper. And that's
a very clear statement you can make because in the
thirty nine articles, which are the written guide canon if

(01:01:28):
you like, for Anglican not in the biblical sense of cannon,
but canon in terms of authority for what Anglicans believe.
For thirty nine articles, there is a very careful insistence
that they don't believe that the Lord's Supper is just remembrance,
that it is completely devoid of any kind of spiritual presence.
I mean, even Calvin, who many evangelical Anglicans love, even

(01:01:49):
Calvin is not saying that nothing spiritually happens in the
Lord's Supper. And yet it seems to me that the practice,
like functional reality of what happens in many Anglican Church,
at least in Australia, is that they just think that
the Lord's Supper is nothing but memorialism, which imports a
kind of and what I mean by memorialism is the

(01:02:11):
idea that well, we're just kind of doing this as
a symbol nothing spiritual happens. So when I referred to
Zvinglei Reformation kind of thinker, that's a kind of broadly
zvingliand approach. But my point is that's not even in
keeping with historically or even what Anglicans believe at the present.
So's it's really interesting that what's even happening here is
that there is such a kind of secularization, like in

(01:02:35):
evangelical churches, that we have so taken out even a
kind of sense that anything spiritual happens in the Lord's Supper.
And that is not even what Anglicans have believed historically.
It's not even what most Evangelicals believed historically. It's not
even what Calvin believed historically. So isn't it fascinating that
we have now basically accultuated ourselves to a kind of

(01:02:56):
almost a materialistic sense that, well, you know, where is
God's since, then where is what actually happens? It's not
even in keeping with our own tradition.

Speaker 1 (01:03:06):
You know, it's interesting when you're talking about Swingley, I
was immediately thinking about a historical event and I sort
of characterize it for you off the top of my head.
But I think it was fifteen twenty nine, there was
a debate between Zwingley and Luther at the Marlbart Castle
in Germany, and the debate was about well, about a

(01:03:26):
lot of things. But during the debate, I don't want
to mischaracterize it. During the debate, and this is my paraphrase,
Zwingley was it was a colooqui. Zwingli was actually accusing
Luther of bread worship because Luther still believed in the
real presence of Christ, not just the spiritual presence of Christ,
or not just the memorial but the real presence of Christ.

(01:03:48):
And so Zwingley said to Luther, he said, how can
Christ really be present in the Eucharist? And Luther responded
to the effect of saying, look, if you can explain
to me how Christ can be one person with two natures,
I'll explain to you how Christ can be present in

(01:04:10):
the Eucharist. In other words, it's a mystery. And I
think this is part of what you're driving at in
the book. There's a mystery that we are now denuding
the Church of you know what the Latin phrase the
mysterium tremendous at fiscinones, the mystery that causes us to
tremble and yet attracts us. And I think today's generation,

(01:04:32):
having gone through this ahistoricism, is looking for mystery, is
looking for the very thing that we're trying to rob
the Church of.

Speaker 2 (01:04:41):
Yeah, yeah, I agree, And I think that's why there
is a kind of a flurry now of interest in
things in I think really dangerous idols, right, but that
tap into or in transit. So yeah, flurry of interest
in like paganism and witchcraft, and I mean, yeah, false
ways of trying to access the divine where it actually.

(01:05:06):
Of course, Christians know they have the revelation of God.
And actually, for me as a historian of what the
book's trying to say is actually, if you look into
Christian history, we have a whole wealth of tradition. This
kind of takes me the chapter on like art and
Beauty and sacredness in the book, because there's this whole
rich tradition in which Christians have praised God's beauty and

(01:05:28):
transcendence through for example, I mean sacred music. I often say,
you know, when I'm speaking at events or you know,
speaking to my students, Gosh, if you haven't like listened
to some Gregorian chants, listen to the whole early music
like sacred music tradition, this is music or even like listen.
I talked about js Bach in the book and the
fact that you know, we have Bak's Bible and he

(01:05:50):
annotates his Bible and he talks about the way that
his music is for the glorious solideo gloria, like for
the glory of God alone. There is a whole tradition
of using art and beauty. I mean the poetry of
George Herbert is another example. I talk about it and
quote in the book. There are ways, I mean God
created human beings with the ability to create, with the

(01:06:11):
ability to appreciate beauty which comes from Him, and therefore,
like the ability to create in such a way that
we can actually praise something of God's transcendence through the
music and the poetry and the art that we create.
And we've been doing that historically, so let's in the
current cultural moment that we're in, let's actually turn back

(01:06:31):
to that and see how that can actually help us
today to revive and strengthen our faith and our ability
to appreciate that God is the author of beauty and
the transcendence for which we long.

Speaker 1 (01:06:42):
Yeah, absolutely, and Another thing that you might want to
emphasize for our listeners is the fact that church is
an embodied experience that you can't really do church via zoom.
It requires human beings to interact in a physical sense.

Speaker 2 (01:07:01):
Yeah, you know, it's really interesting that CS Lewis talked
about the way that what we do with our body matters.
And I think historically one of the things that we've
often kind of thrown away in the last well in
the historic age, perhaps even a little bit before that too,
is a kind of sense that the historic ways in
which we've embodied the faith in worship and other ways

(01:07:22):
and in other times have been something that we no
longer do anymore. But actually, like kneeling in prayer, for example,
is something that can be incredibly helpful. Like to go
and actually kneel the Lord's supper and to put your
hands out and to receive the Lord's supper, to put
yourself in a posture in which you are embodying the
fact that you are an unworthy sooner, like to bow

(01:07:45):
your head in prayer. The things that we do with
our body actually count. But I think again, we're so
living in an age in which we separate the mind
or the spiritual from the body, and we think that
bodies have various funny ways I think of thinking of
out the body and what we should do about it.
That we often kind of reject the sense that actually

(01:08:07):
that church is an embodied experience, but it actually is
and it always has been, and that can be extremely
helpful for us. And there's nothing like kneeling in prayer
for a while to realize how fragile your body is
and how dependent you are on God. I mean again,
like the tradition of fasting for various reasons, read the
church Father, like church Father's writing about fasting. There are

(01:08:27):
Christians and theologians for centuries writing about fasting. But like
the depriving of the body of food and the kind
of sense that this is a way of trying to
embody your own dependence on and like need for the Gospel,
and yet you're desperate, kind of the ways in which
you so dearly crave that food. These things can be

(01:08:48):
enormously helpful.

Speaker 1 (01:08:49):
Yeah, And one thing you talk about in that same
context is night vigils. I mean, for a lot of
people talking about night visuals, they have no clue what
we're talking about, and quite frankly, for most of my
Christian life, I didn't either, and I actually came upon
night vigils by osmosis, or maybe not by osmosis, but

(01:09:11):
I mean, I have a hard time sleeping, so I
used to, you know, just struggle laying in bed. And
now what I do if I can't sleep, I just
get up and I pray. And I don't pray extemporaneously.
I mean, I use a prayer book. Actually one of
the prayers I use as a small comp line, but
I use prayers that have historical value, and I use

(01:09:36):
that time wisely. And for me, that was sort of
an entrance into this idea of night vigil. I wouldn't
say that I'm an expert on it by any stretch
of the imagination, or have I made this a consistent
aspect of my life, but I do think that your
pointing to night vigils has real import in an age
of astoreses.

Speaker 2 (01:09:57):
Yeah, thank you, Kush. It's fascinating that that is being
really helpful to you, and it's just you know, when
you're doing that, it's really interesting too that you use
a form of complain again when you're praying complain at night?
What a beautiful way of living into the story of
being part of God's people, that you're praying prayers and
in the same way and with the same kind of

(01:10:19):
form that generations. Well, first of all, across the world,
my family and I often pray, complain as well, there
are Christians across the world geographically horizontally, but for generations
and for millennia have been praying because actually the whole
tradition of staying up during the night and keeping watch
and praying is developed well, of course with biblical president

(01:10:41):
right like Paul and Silas there they are singing hymns
during the night. Paul's singing when he's in prison. Christ
of course in the Garden of gets semeny like they
are awake and praying during the night. And of course
you know the Psalmist talking about meditating on God during
the night, and then this tradition of praying, particularly the psalms. Actually,

(01:11:02):
and when early Christians and the monastic movement begins to
take off in the early centuries, actually what they're doing
is that they are remaining up during the night and
they are singing the psalms, and of phonely so in
the book one of the things I'm trying to do
is to show Christians that there are spiritual disciplines that
we've practiced in the past in different parts of the

(01:11:23):
church that can be and obviously helpful today. And back
in the seventeenth century in England, there's a little Anglican
community in a village called Little Gidding, and I talk
about some of their spiritual practices, one of which, like
you mentioned, is this night vigil and what they're doing
is they often stay up in pairs. Of course it's
seventeenth century. This is by candlelight, and they're singing the

(01:11:43):
psalms and to phonally. So again that's an old tradition
to call and response, like will either be a half
verse or a verse, and then somebody will sing the
other part of the verse. And that is a way
of praising God and of using their time to praise God.
And it's such a helpful kind of practice. But another one,
and this one often actually is so surprising to Christians

(01:12:06):
to learn because even in the seventeenth century, the phrase
Protestant meditation is used, and there's a whole history that
actually goes back far longer than the seventeenth century of
Christian meditation, which again it's probably a good illustration of
our ahistoricism. But today if we hear the term meditation,
we tend to think, oh, that's something invented by Eastern spirituality,

(01:12:28):
that's not even Christian. But actually meditation is at its origins,
like in our tradition, a Christian practice of meditating on
God's word. And there are all kinds of instructions, instruction
pamphlets and books printed, and I talk about one in
the seventeenth century in which there is it's basically a

(01:12:50):
kind of instruction book about it's called Protestant Meditation, published
in the sixteen hundreds, And again it's another spiritual practice
which so many Christians today who would I don't know
much about the history and the rich history of the
church and how they're part of a historical people, and
who just kind of think, oh, well, my faith means
just a kind of individualistic sense that I'm united with

(01:13:11):
these people by the fact we agree on the same doctrines. Well, yeah,
that's part of it. But you're part of a historical people.
And actually, if we learn something about the ways in
which they practice their faith, that can be so incredibly
helpful for us.

Speaker 1 (01:13:24):
Today, I want you to impact the meaning of a
word that you use in your book presentism. We've sort
of touched on that, but I was thinking when I
was formulating this question for you, I was thinking about
another quote by Euros Pelican where he said, tradition lives
in living conversation with the past.

Speaker 2 (01:13:46):
Yeah, this is I mean, there is a sense too
that throughout one of the wonderful themes actually about the
Christian tradition is that there is an ongoing conversation not
just with the Bible, but actually with Christian authors and
the theologians. And that is actually how the tradition and
how the intellectual riches of Christianity, and actually, more broadly speaking,

(01:14:10):
how the intellectual traditions of Western and the Eastern Church
have developed. Because there's this sense that we're in conversation
with the past. Again. Cs Lew has put it so
well that actually, if we join at eleven PM a
conversation which began at eight, we're missing really the heart
of paraphrasing him here, but missing the heart of really
what's going on. And here's a really interesting illustration of this.

(01:14:31):
Calvin's Institutes of the Christian Religion, probably his most famous
work in systematic theology. Right, Calvin's writing this in the
midst of the Reformation in fifteen twenties, fifteen thirties. And
here's the interesting thing. Many today in Bible College or
just elsewhere in the evangelical church will kind of assume
that Calvin, of course, he's a well known reformer for

(01:14:54):
emphasizing the importance and the authority of the Bible. Absolutely,
But if you actually look at the institute, Calvin is
in constant conversation, of course, not only with the Bible,
but actually with the rest of the Christian and non
Christian tradition, because he's trying to articulate what he believes
and how Christians ought to systematically think about all these
doctrines and principles in terms of this long conversation. So

(01:15:18):
they're actually in there's sixty odd other authors outside of
the Bible that Calvin lists in the institutes, And so
you can read the institutes and you realize that actually
the reformers themselves are part of a long conversation. He's
quoting Lactantius, and he's quoting Aristotle, and he's quoting Plato,
like Christians are always part of a long conversation, and

(01:15:40):
that can be really helpful for us too if we
think about that today, because there's a long conversation about
really all the kind of ideas that we're interested in today.
I mean, I was struck, for example, during COVID. Obviously
there's a lot of debate about this kind of issue
of well, to what are the extent and limits of
secular authority, so the government's authority over our life, and

(01:16:01):
to what extent can you resist and unjust law all
these kind of things. And the really interesting thing is
that actually these ideas have been talked about historically for
hundreds of years. There's a whole tradition here. We're part
of a long conversation, like Luther famously in fifteen twenty
three writes on secular authority in which he's dealing with
these kind of issues, like people have been thinking about

(01:16:23):
all of these issues for so long, And if we
realize we're part of that conversation again, it can be
incredibly helpful because we can draw upon those insights and
those riches.

Speaker 1 (01:16:31):
Now, you know, one of the things I want to
really drive home in this podcast is the fact that
we have to know our history so we can understand
that we're part of that history, that Christ invaded time
and space, that he came into history, that he's a

(01:16:51):
man of history. He's the god Man, but he is
a man of history. He's shaped history, but becoming part
of history in the incarnation, and then as part of that.
How the Bible instructs God's people to pass down their
history and learn from it. I mean, the quintessential example
is Moses. But you have so many great authors throughout

(01:17:14):
the centuries that have hammered home this point. This is
a quote I used to have in my head, but
I'll read it Jacob Neusner. He's one of the most
published authors in history, and I love this quote. He
says civilization hangs suspended from generation to generation by something
I mentioned earlier, by the gossamer strand of memory. If

(01:17:36):
only one cohort of mothers and fathers fails to convey
to its children what it has learned from its parents,
then the great chain of learning and wisdom snaps. If
the guardians of human knowledge stumble only one time in
their fall collapses, the whole edifice of knowledge and understanding.

(01:18:00):
And Moses said much the same thing. He exhorted the
people of the promise to impress the words of the
Almighty upon the hearts of their children and their children's children.
Talk about them when you sit at home, when you
walk along the road, when you lie down, when you
get up, Tie them as symbols on your hands, and
bind them on your foreheads, Write them on the doorframes

(01:18:23):
of your houses, and on your gates. And above all.
He says, do not forget. And you would add to
that what he's implying, do not forget your history.

Speaker 2 (01:18:34):
Yeah, that's right, that's right. I mean, yeah, like Paul said,
you know, these things are written down for our instruction,
and it's I think the major kind of temptation today
that we often don't even realize is so powerful is
to think of faith. I think of being a Christian

(01:18:54):
in contemporary culture as just a kind of set of
doctrinal positions that I happen to agree upon, but I
basically kind of lived my life. I'm united with the
rest of the church kind of geographically, but really there's
no sense that I'm actually part of a historical people.
But actually biblically, we are part of a people that

(01:19:16):
God has saved through his historical acts and through you know,
the life, death, and resurrection of God himself who has
come to inhabit time, and in doing so like render
time meaningful and we're part of Christians are part of
that story. We are part of a people who God

(01:19:37):
saves in time. And that's the most incredible thing when
you think about the fact that for somebody, well for
many people who are like gentiles and not part of
the Jews, like this invitation has gone out to the
whole world. And when you become a Christian, you are
actually grafted into a historical people. You are saved into

(01:19:57):
a people, saved into a family, and so you're actually
saved into that history. And so that history becomes your history, right,
like the great Cloud of Witnesses becomes like they're your
spiritual ancestors. I mean, often when my husband and I
kind of talk to our kids about the stories that
they're part of in the church, we kind of make
the point that people so the kind of like heroes

(01:20:20):
of church history. So I'm you know, thinking recently, for example,
about Gladys Aylewood, you know, missionary in China in the
nineteen thirties. There are all kinds of i mean Christians historically,
who's you know His stories, we read and we pass down.
It's actually really helpful to remember and to live in
such a way that you realize, oh, no, these are like,

(01:20:41):
this is your story. I'm not genetically related to so
many of these Christians in this great cloud of witnesses,
but actually, through the blood of Christ, I am like,
these are my spiritual ancestors, and I'm part of this story.
And so those stories is that we are called to

(01:21:01):
kind of pass downcome they become your history. And I
think that's such a powerful and beautiful way of presenting
the Gospel in an age in which so many people
are rootless and disconnected and lonely, whose personal histories either
they don't know their family history like life and time

(01:21:22):
are perhaps deeply fraught. And that's what actually what Christians
can actually do is to say, not only are you
kind of you are loved and forgiven by the Lord.
When you become a Christian, you are also of course
part of his people, and you were given an identity
and an inheritance which is actually historical. It's an incredible thing.

(01:21:43):
I mean, you know, even just as a historian, thinking
about the fact that the claims of Christianity at heart
rest upon from a historical point of view, like the
actual historical claims of you know, did Jesus live and die?
And was he raised from the dead? What happened with
the empty tomb? That is foundly unique. And I would
really encourage anyone who has doubts about Christianity to kind

(01:22:06):
of read about the historical evidence for the historical man
of Jesus Christ in the empty Tomb, because the claims
of Christianity cannot be kind of watered down or thought
as if they're kind of analogous to any other religion.
They rest upon a historical claim yep.

Speaker 1 (01:22:22):
And certainly the historical claim of the resurrection, which Saint
Paul calls a first importance. And if Christ has not
been risen from the dead, eat, drink and be merry,
because tomorrow you die. So Paul is making the point
that Christ is not only a man of history, but
he demonstrated that he was gone through the immutable fact

(01:22:45):
of resurrection. There's a word that you've been using over
and over again throughout this discussion, and you just use
the word about three or four times in the last
few comments you made, and that is the word read,
and that is music to my ears. I wrote a
whole section on the importance of reading in one of
my books, and you emphasize this so well in your

(01:23:05):
book how significant it is to read. John Wesley once
said that if you don't read as a pastor, you're
just a trifler. C. S. Lewis made the point that
if you read a book only once, you've never really
read that book at all. You need to read books
over and over digest, you know, and there are so

(01:23:26):
many great books to read. I often talk about, you know,
a book people get started with, like Mere Christianity. It's
a book that you can read over and over again
and you get a real sense of history doing so.
So anyway, I'm not trying to take your place and
elaboration on this, because you do such a beautiful job
of elaborating on the importance of reading. And I think

(01:23:47):
that's a lost art in the digital age.

Speaker 2 (01:23:51):
Yeah, I agree, And yeah, increasingly we kind of there
are concerns that we're kind of losing our literacy. AI
has all kinds of terrible I think in bookations for
our ability to kind of think and to write and
our willingness to read. If we can just like, why
would we were. There are many reasons for this, but
kind of one way of thinking, unfortunately at the moment,
is you know, why would I go and do all

(01:24:12):
the research and kind of read all of these books
when I could ask chat gpt a question that there
is something that happens to us when we read with
the renewal of our mind, using our minds as God
intended us to and there is just such a wealth
of books to be read. No matter how old you get,
you're never going to read all the books that need
to be read.

Speaker 1 (01:24:33):
So yeah, yeah, And you tell the story of studying
for your doctorate at Cambridge, how you were an atheist
at the time, how you immersed yourself at that particular
junction in your life with the study of the seventeenth
century chemist Robert Boyle. That had a great impact on
your life, and it's part of your testimony.

Speaker 2 (01:24:55):
Yeah, it did. I basically arrived at Cambridge as someone
who was a complete kind of non believer, and one
of the first things that happened to me was recognized
was sort of having to encounter the fact that the
seventeenth century natural philosophers. So that's the kind of term
that was used at the time these are people like

(01:25:16):
you mentioned, like Robert Boyle, John Locke, in many ways
a natural philosopher and a political theoris like people are
studying for my PhD, like we're deep believers in the
Christian faith. And that begins to kind of unsettle some
of the kind of very sort of caricature like and
arrogant assumptions I'd had about Christianity. And the thing that

(01:25:36):
is probably so profound and beautiful about Boyle, and what
was really kind of striking to me is that I'm
reading Boil because I'm writing a PhD at the time
on what we now call science in the origins British Empire.
So I'm interested in in Boyle's scientific work and the
fact that he's involved in colonization. And yet throughout all
of what we would now call his kind of scientific work,

(01:25:59):
Boyle is quoting the Bible like he's quoting Psalm eight.
He is quoting an idea that comes up again and again.
Is this idea actually of Genesis one twenty six to
twenty eight, This idea of being created in God's image
and then having dominion over the fish of the sea
and the birds of the air and all the living
things that creep upon the earth and what that kind
of dominion or responsibility looks like. And so this is

(01:26:22):
kind of striking to me that you know, here I
am trying to write a PhD about the origins of science,
but I can't actually do it without trying to understand
why on earth these early modern natural philosophers who are
found as a modern science are doing talking about their
Christian faith all the time. So that, I mean, that
doesn't make me a Christian right then and there or anything,

(01:26:44):
but it really begins to unsettle assumptions that I have,
and it persuades me of the fact that, oh, no,
this you can be a serious believer here and a
great intellect, and there's something kind of going on here.
I could talk a little bit more about my faith
story if you like.

Speaker 1 (01:27:00):
You know, I was going to ask you to do
that anyway, and I would love you to do this.
A perfect time for you to share your testimony is
really powerful because you come out of a secular culture,
a secular lifestyle, and you become a Christian and reading
is part of your journey, reading and studying, and there's
a beauty to it. There's an elegance to it. It's

(01:27:22):
transformational to every aspect of our lives. But your testimony,
I love that part of the book. And I also
something i'd like you to comment about as well. I'll
prompt you if you forget. But it's not only your
testimony that is riveting in this book, but you tell
the testimony of so many significant people, people that were

(01:27:45):
involved in the abolitionist movement and so forth. So testimony
is a powerful way of conveying truth. And I found
your testimony intoxicatingly beautiful.

Speaker 2 (01:27:57):
Oh thank you. Okay, Well, I started with that kind
of episode about what happened when I got to Cambridge.
I mean, probably just the precursor to that is that, Yeah,
just I grew up in Australia, which is a very
kind of secular country. I grew up in a really
loving home that encouraged me to grapple with ideas, but
very much like a non Christian home. And so by
the time I was in my late teens and early twenties,

(01:28:19):
I really kind of thought of myself as a non
believer or as an atheist. And so then we have
that kind of the first kind of thing I think
significant that happens is in terms of my faith is
that when I am at the University of Cambridge doing
my PhD, I'm encountering these early modern philosophers who are deeply,

(01:28:43):
deeply Christian, and I'm kind of needing to kind of
make sense of that. And then after I finished my PhD,
I was elected to a junior research fellowship in history
at the University of Oxford. And that's a really significant
kind of time for me because I was at one point,
my friends and I go to hear a series of

(01:29:03):
lectures that are given by well the really well known
atheist philosophers, the ethicist Peter Singer, and he's really one
of the world's kind of leading ethicists. Yes, some of
the listeners will have heard of Singer or perhaps be
familiar with his work. I know you are, Hank. So
he's an atheist and a utilitarian, and so I kind
of go along to these Oxford lectures that Singer Gibs

(01:29:25):
really excited to kind of hear about ethics from an
atheist perspective. But actually I kind of I left that
series of lectures with what I've described as a profound
kind of intellectual vertigo, because basically what happens is that
it's very clear, I mean, Singing is very consistent in
his atheist ethics, and it just makes very very clear,

(01:29:45):
not only in those lectures, but then in the books
that he writes as well, that really there is no
kind of basis for thinking that human life is inherently
valuable or precious or set apart from the animals in
any way. So it's nothing distinctively valuable about human life.
And moreover, in the rest of his kind of writings,
which are then sort of after these lectures, had to

(01:30:07):
go and kind of familiarize myself with because I found
these claims so disconcerting, he really argues that there's no
kind of equality, inherent equality of human life too. So
Singer is well known for kind of arguing that human
beings have a certain set of capacities that set them
apart from the animals. But then the problem is, of course,
if you don't have those capacities, so for example, the

(01:30:29):
capacity to reason and to be self conscious and to
experience pain, to think of yourself as a being over time,
and so forth. But the problem is that if you
don't have those capacities, so if you are severely disabled
and you're born infant with severe disabilities and no potential
therefore to develop those capacities. Then for Singer, your life
is not nearly as as worthy. I mean to put

(01:30:52):
it kind of in really stark terms, at the terms
that Singer uses. He argues for euthanasia of it used
the term after birth abortion, like things that completely took
the carpet from underneath me. As it work gave me
this kind of sense of intellectual vertigo. And the reason
why I say that is that, I guess the interesting
thing is that even though I've grown up at a

(01:31:13):
non Christian home, I basically, through osmosis, imbibed a set
of Christian ethics, a set of Christian moral presuppositions about
human life and human value. And what I realized after
the Singer's lectures gradually and reading Singer's work is that
atheism actually doesn't sustain any of those deep ethical convictions

(01:31:34):
about the value and the equality of human life. And
so that kind of put me in an interesting kind
of intellectual place as well. And then around the same time,
so by this time, I'm in my mid twenties at Oxford,
and there's kind of more so this kind of intellectual things,
and they're kind of personal things going on as well,
in the sense that I've kind of been living well

(01:31:54):
in many ways. I kind of say this in the
book when I open up sort of with a part
of my testimony. It been kind of living a kind
of ahistorical life in a sense in that I basically
thought that life was about my own kind of self invention,
didn't really think that there was any greater story that
I was part of. But then there's a sense in
which even when things are going enormously well for you,

(01:32:15):
and they were like here I was at Oxford, I
achieved this kind of childhood dreams I'd had as a
young person in Australia, dream You're going to Oxford and Cambridge.
I'd won scholarships and I've done really well and all
these all these things seemed to be delivering, and yet
there was this kind of sense that they were never enough,
Like there was this kind of sense of spiritual like emptiness,

(01:32:37):
because I kind of knew that no matter how much
I achieved, there was never there was always a kind
of sense that there was another rum on the ladder,
as it were. And so I guess both personally and intellectually,
I kind of found myself in my mid twenties in
this place of just questioning, well, what, like what is
it that I lived for? You know? And even as
a historian now kind of looking back, which brot a
lot of reflecting to write Priestess of History, and I

(01:32:59):
think I have realized too that, you know, here's his
like the closest thing probably that I had to any
kind of idol that I'd given my life to right
before I knew Jesus, is this kind of sense that
I was a historian, like there's always what it was
called to be. But then the thing is, if there's
no kind of larger story that you're part of, no
ultimate purpose to history, like what is history? And one

(01:33:20):
of the reasons why I use the term priests of
History in the title of my book is that Robert Boyle,
who's now kind of like intellectually speaking, almost like an
old friend spiritually and intellectually. But it strikes me that,
you know, Boyle as a Christian, had this sense of
why his calling in life as a natural philosopher was

(01:33:41):
something that he was called to do to glorify God.
And it's why he uses the phrase a priest of
nature for natural philosophers, and as a historian. Part of
what inspired priests of history is the idea that I
actually think that there's a reason that historians are actually
that we all actually priest sort of all believers are
called to steward the past and to think about responsibility

(01:34:03):
towards God as stewarding the past. So anyway, I ended
up as an assistant professor at Florida State University, and
a friend of mine there gave me C. S. Lewis's
Mere Christianity, and that was probably the first time that
I'd read a book that was actually about Christianity before that.
You know, there was a moment actually in Oxford where

(01:34:24):
I found myself in the library over Christmas and I,
for the first time was willing to kind of pick
up a book of sermons and kind of read a
book of sermons, and they made me kind of realize
that this whole Christianity thing that i'd kind of dismissed
to be honest in my arrogance was far more intellectually

(01:34:44):
robust and far more beautiful than I'd ever thought about.
And actually, interestingly enough, one of the sermons that I read, yeah,
quoted Psalm thirty nine, where it talks about being fashioned together,
knicked together in the wound. So there was this alternative
story really about who we are, you know, created by
God and therefore given meaning in life by Him. I

(01:35:06):
found that really striking. Again, it didn't make me a
Christian here. I am about a year later reading me
Christianity in Tallahassee, and then one morning I just kind
of decided to rock up to church, kind of went
by myself, rocked up to a church in Tallahassee. I
think the other thing that was happening there when I
walked into church for the first time.

Speaker 1 (01:35:24):
Is that this was the first time that you're in
a church.

Speaker 2 (01:35:27):
Not ever in my whole life. Sorry, okay, somebody. It's
really the first time that I had gone into a
church kind of earnestly with an open mind, as it were,
like really seeking God, yeah, searching. And I think the
other thing that happens there is that they're celebrating the
Lord's Supper that morning. Now I'd never been baptized or

(01:35:48):
christened as it were, as a child, and so I
didn't take part in the Lord's Supper, but it was
clear that there was something transcend and something sacred, and
the liturgy like the hymn by Ralph and Williams, who
I was familiar with like musically, and of course the
words of being of Christ's body broken for us and

(01:36:10):
his blood poured out for the forginness of sins, like
there was a sense in which Christians were part of
a people and a story and that actually there was
something which was sacred. Because this the other thing is
an atheist, like I was a kind of atheist. That
was really like the philosophical term we'd kind of used
for this is that I was metaphysically speaking, a materialist.

(01:36:30):
So what that meant was, I didn't think because why
would you, like if the only things that exist a
matter in motion, Like, why would you think that there's
anything outside of stuff right of matter in motion? But
what happens in church, in the allurgy of the Lord's
Supper is that it's clear to me that no, actually
the sort of sacredness and transcendence of God that I'd

(01:36:50):
always kind of been yearning for was in some real
sense on display for me. Like I was given a
glimpse into a God who was transcendent and yet became human,
and that was profoundly beautiful. At the same time, like
I was reading T. S. Eliot's Four Quartets, which you know,
Elliot has his own conversion story, and it's just it's

(01:37:11):
so profoundly moving, this kind of idea that God would
become human and offer us but like forgiveness for our
sins and reconciliation with him. And so I became a Christian,
like in my started attending church, went to the Catechism classes,
and then yeah, was baptized when I was twenty eight,
and I think even you know now kind of reflecting

(01:37:33):
on that, Yeah, there's a kind of sense that that
the like the story God tells us in the Bible
about who who God is and who we are as
human beings, that He is a god who has created
the world, which is good, that we rejected him. Like
as a historian every civil like I see that in history.
That's profoundly true in history, right, Like you look at

(01:37:55):
the history of human societies and civilizations, there is at
once a kind of a yearning for the good society
and attempt to build it, but at the same time
a kind of rejection of God and a kind of
fundamental brokenness of sin in the world. And that seemed
to make so the Bible story about who God is.
That revelation made sense not only of world history and

(01:38:17):
the human condition, but also it made sense of my
own soul and my own yearning for forgiveness and reconciliation
with God.

Speaker 1 (01:38:25):
What an impact you are having, not only as a professor,
but as a mother, as a Christian leader in many ways.
I love what you say in your book towards the
end of the book that Christianity is not only true,
but it's also good and beautiful. And I think that's
profound in so many different ways. I mean, I attend

(01:38:48):
to church. It's not just for bear walls and a sermon,
but you're enveloped in the architecture of the Church, which
is pointing towards the new Jerusalem, coming down to Heaven,
prepared as a bride beautifully adorn for a husband, and
an condostasis that sees Christ on one side as coming
in incarnation, the first Advent, and then Christ in his

(01:39:11):
Second Advent, and then you see the cross in between.
How we're called to participate in the daily advent, and
part of that through the liturgical sacramental life of the church.
But the beauty of the church, the beauty of architecture,
but the beauty of the Word of God, the richness
of people who have invested themselves in the Word of God.

(01:39:34):
And you tell so many powerful stories in this book,
and I was thinking as reading those stories that that
is your secret sauce. You know, I was going to
ask you, you know, how do you is it really
realistic to get people to read again in a digital age,
in an age of computers and smartphones and all of that.
But I think what you're doing is you're sort of

(01:39:55):
intoxicating people with the stories of these people throughout history
that incredible impact and a lot of them had absolutely nothing,
and yet they transformed their world and vicariously ours.

Speaker 2 (01:40:08):
Yeah, yeah, that's right, And there are so many stories,
it's just that we don't Yeah, we often don't know
about them. And yet increasingly, you know, there are books
out there which are starting to retell these stories and
to make history much more accessible for people, and that
can be really really helpful. Actually, Like one of the
practices that we try to do quite a lot at

(01:40:29):
home is like reading aloud at meal times, and so yeah,
actually reading books that aren't just the Bible, because trying
to read them in such a way that we're like
consciously with our kids or with whoever else is having
dinner with us, bringing them like making them know that
this is Yeah, this particular part of history is actually
part of their story too.

Speaker 1 (01:40:51):
Yeah, your book is fantastic, and you're talking about in
your book about reading the Bible at the dinner table
and praying at the dinner table, kind of practices you're
involved in with your own children. I grew up in
a reformed context and my parents. One of the things
I remember most about my experience growing up, my parents
never sat down for a meal without reading the Bible

(01:41:14):
and praying. So even though I turned away from the
faith because I just couldn't handle the whole idea of
hard determinism, So for a while, I turned away from
the faith. But that practice of reading the Bible and
praying at the dinner table is something that really motivated
me later on in my life to memorize the Word

(01:41:35):
of God, to meditate on the word of God, to
mind the Word of God for all its substantial wealth.
So it laid a foundation for me, and I was
so pleased to read in your book how you're inculcating
those practices in your own family. It's not just something
you're teaching. It's not ethereal for you, but this is
really your way of life.

Speaker 2 (01:41:54):
Yeah, and I think it's something that you know increasingly
even when you look at not just like the decline
of reading, but even the decline of our ability to
eat meals as people together, regardless of whether it's your
biological family or a much larger family household God's people.
I think that practice of just like putting technology away

(01:42:15):
and eating meals together, sharing fellowship, there's actually something deadly
true to our own history as Christians doing that. Even
in the early Church. Some of the letters even that,
like so you know plenty, they're not the Roman Governor
remarks upon when he's describing the Christians in the second century,
he's recognizing that he describes the fact they meet together

(01:42:35):
and they share a meal. Like this idea of sharing
meals together, which often incorporated a reading of the Word
or reading aloud, that is something that Christians are been
practicing for centuries.

Speaker 1 (01:42:48):
Yeah, talk to our audience as we close this podcast,
from your heart why you want them to be a
priest of history. I mean, not talk to them collectively,
but as you're talking to one person why do you
want the person that you have in your mind as
you're speaking right now to be a priest of history?

Speaker 2 (01:43:08):
Yeah? Well, gosh, you know if that if you're somebody
who is a follower of the Lord Jesus, then you
are adopted into God's historical people, and you're part of
that people's story in history, and you have that rich
history available to you as a resource to help you

(01:43:31):
as you follow the Lord in your faith. And so
I would say to be a priest of history means
to kind of steward the past in the same way
that you would both kind of conserve the past and
pass down these stories, but also kind of tend and
keep and do that work of kind of uncovering lesser
known stories which we need to do from the past
as well. And that kind of work I think can

(01:43:53):
be so incredibly helpful for us as we seek to
follow the Lord. I think it's helpful spiritually and intellectually,
but I think it also helps us live as a
people today because we are not just individuals in the faith.
We are part of God's people, the Church. And so
when we're united in the Church and we can draw
upon that vast treasury as issat Watts put it so beautifully.

(01:44:15):
I think we can just be so much better equipped
to serve God in the world.

Speaker 1 (01:44:20):
Beautifully, said doctor Sarah Irving Stonebreaker. This is an incredible book,
Priest of history. Actually, my eldest son brought it to me.
He said, Dad, you got to read this book, and
I thoroughly enjoyed reading it. Thank you for writing it.
And I want to say to everybody listening in again,
this book is available for those of you who stand

(01:44:41):
shoulder to shoulder with us in the battle for life
and truth. You can get it on the web at
equipped dot org, equip dot org or write me at
Post Office Box eighty five hundred, Charlotte, North Carolina. As
if God two eight two seven to one, Doctor Sarah,
you are amazing. You're an amazing writer, an amazing person. Amazing.
I'm just so impressed by your testimony and your brilliant

(01:45:05):
admonition to all of us to be priests of history.

Speaker 2 (01:45:08):
Oh, thank you so much for having me Hank its great,
great conversation.

Speaker 1 (01:45:13):
Well it's a sincere pleasure. Thank you so much. And
for everybody listening in, thank you for tuning in to
this edition of A Hank Unplugged podcast. Look forward to
seeing you next time with more of the podcasts. So
long for now,

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