In his recent address to the various branches of the American government, our King, Charles III (1948–), spoke of feeling “the weight of history.” Speaking especially about the semiquincentennial—one might also call it by more obscure terms, such as the bisesquicentennial or the sestercentennial—of the founding of the American republic, he was calling to mind all of the momentous aspects of that event in the mid-1770s as well as historical details of the “special relationship” that has evolved since then between the United States and the United Kingdom. He was also reaching back, though, to such seminal documents as the Magna Carta (1215) and the Declaration of Rights (1689).
Now, if King Charles can rightly speak of “the weight of history” with regard to 800 years, how much more can we as believers in the Lord Jesus Christ speak of “the weight of history”? Technically speaking this is Anno Domini 2026—the year of our Lord 2026. If King Charles can trace his lineage back to the Anglo-Saxon kingdom of Wessex, surely we, as the children of the King of Kings, can trace our spiritual heritage back to those first-century believers who came to faith through the preaching of “the eyewitnesses and ministers of the Word” appointed by none other than Christ himself (Luke 1:2).
And as the rest of the New Testament constantly reminds us, our roots actually go much further back than even those days in the Roman Imperium. They reach back to the Old Babylonian world of Ur, 2000 years before Christ when God appeared to an idolater named Abram (Acts 7:2) and turned him into a man of faith, the father of a multitude that cannot be numbered.
Talk about “the weight of history”! It gives solidity, credibility, and integrity to the Christian faith. And Christians should rejoice in it, for even as the eighteenth-century Baptist educator Caleb Evans (1737–1791) once said in the midst of the American Revolution, “Every Christian ought to be a good historian, and if his knowledge of history be improved by him as it ought to be, the better historian he is, the better Christian he will be.”1
There are, of course, some Christian who speak slightingly of the long history, for example, after the Apostolic era. To do so is not only foolish—this lengthy history has much to shape us as believers as the quote from Caleb Evans rightly stresses—but it is also a sign of worldliness. For, ever since the Enlightenment in the Western world, much of the intellectual impulse of Western culture has been predicated upon a rejection and even despising of tradition.
Christians who spurn tradition—what has been rightly called “the living faith of our ancestors”—are in essence aping much of Western intelligentsia who thought they could create a “brave new world” and ignore history. It is not without significance that the dystopian novel of Aldous Huxley (1894–1963), Brave New World (1932), depicts a society animated by a campaign against remembering the past, one that was guided by that incredibly stupid statement by Henry Ford (1863–1947), “History is bunk.”2
Therefore, with the aim of recommitting itself to exploring the weightiness of the past, this column—hitherto known under the name of my favourite Anglo-Saxon historian, Bede (673–735)—is being rebranded with King Charles’ pregnant phrase: “the weight of history.”
1 Caleb Evans, The Remembrance of Former Days (Bristol: William Pine, 1778), 10.
2 Aldous Huxley, Brave New World, with an introduction by Margaret Atwood (1932; repr., Toronto: Vintage Canada, 2007), 29. The initial context for Ford’s statement was the following: “History is more or less bunk. It’s tradition. We don’t want tradition. We want to live in the present, and the only history that is worth a tinker’s damn is the history that we make today. That’s the trouble with the world. We’re living in books and history and tradition. We want to get away from that and take care of today. We’ve done too much looking back. What we want to do and do it quick is to make just history right now” (Chicago Tribune, May 25, 1916).
According to the record of an interview given a few days before the above newspaper report: “When in our ‘discussion’ of a nation’s need for defensive strength history was appealed to, Mr. Ford replied that he did not believe in history, that history was of the past and had no bearing upon the present and that, there being nothing to be learned from it, history need not be studied nor considered. The American Revolution he refused to have touched upon, saying that the Revolution was ‘tradition,’ that he did not believe in tradition” (Henry A. Wise Wood, “A Wild Mental Journey with Ford,” New York Times, May 16, 1916).
