Why We Need History More Than Ever Before

“I’m just . . . disconnected,” a friend said, pausing before emphasizing the last word. I was chatting after church with some young adults, and one of them, with her characteristic candor and insight, touched on something. This sense of disconnection was the same thing I was hearing from my students at university. In contemporary culture, many people are rootless, atomized, and unsure of where they belong.

When life is all about self-invention, history is deemed irrelevant. And yet the culture of “you do you” is producing an epidemic of loneliness, an “anxious generation” (to use Jonathan Haidt’s term), and rapid polarization as people desperately try to find meaning and purpose in the myriad of idols of this world, from politics to wellness to transhumanism. People are yearning to be part of a larger story.

This is an opportunity for Christians. God invites his people to be part of a much larger historical story. If we understand something about why history matters biblically, and how to steward it well, then history can help us speak the gospel into this rootless age.

Living in a Rootless Age

As a history professor, I often ask my students, “What is our contemporary society’s vision of the good life?” Their answers are almost always some version of this: “Finding and then being your true self.” This culture holds that unleashing one’s true potential is the key to finding happiness.

This obsession with self-fulfillment is connected to a deeper pathology, that is, the view that because there’s no God, there’s no ultimate story about where humanity has come from and where we’re going. The past is deemed irrelevant to what our culture values most, which is the freedom to be ourselves and enjoy the life we desire. This is the first characteristic of what I call our Ahistoric Age.

When life is all about self-invention, history is deemed irrelevant.

A second characteristic is a growing ignorance of history. We have little understanding even of the historical origins of the ideas we most value. Consider, for example, the widespread debate over issues such as human rights. Despite the intensity of these discussions, few people understand where the concept of human rights emerged. Fewer still recognize the extent to which human rights are grounded in the biblical conviction of the imago Dei and the spiritual equality of all humanity.

The third characteristic of our Ahistoric Age is ideology. When our society engages with the past, history is often reduced to an ideological battleground. Many believe the past is something from which we need to emancipate ourselves, and that history is just an ongoing story of victims and oppressors. Less overtly, we look with instinctive superiority toward the past and disdain for its traditions.

In sum, most contemporary culture views the past with attitudes of irrelevance, ignorance, and ideology. And yet, this isn’t the attitude toward history that the Bible takes.

What Does the Bible Say About History?

The Bible teaches us that history matters. It matters because we have a God who acts in history. His plan of salvation—creation, fall, incarnation, resurrection, and one day new creation—is carried out in history.

In the Old Testament, God takes a real historical people, the Hebrews, for himself as his “treasured possession” (Ex. 19:5). They come to know Yahweh through his mighty acts in history. In Christ Jesus, God himself steps into human history. Jesus’s life, death, and resurrection is the center of history and the fulfillment of God’s promise that he will dwell with his people: “Long ago, at many times and in many ways, God spoke to our fathers by the prophets, but in these last days he has spoken to us by his Son, whom he appointed the heir of all things, through whom also he created the world” (Heb. 1:1–2).

Second, the Bible instructs God’s people to pass down their history and to learn from it. When God gives the Ten Commandments in Exodus, he reminds Israel of what he has done in history: “I am the LORD your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery” (Ex. 20:2). And in Deuteronomy, the Israelites are to teach these things to their children (Deut. 6:7). Numerous Psalms retell the story of Israel so we don’t forget God’s mighty works (e.g., Ps. 78).

In the New Testament, Paul reminds the church of their forebears, the generation of Israelites delivered by God from slavery in Egypt and led through the wilderness, and yet who disobeyed, despite their salvation. Paul says that “these things happened to them as an example” and “were written down for our instruction” (1 Cor. 10:11). In 1 Corinthians, Paul describes the passing down of the historical story of Jesus’s death and resurrection (15:3–4).

Third, the study of the past is part of humanity’s responsibility to create and spread civilization as we rule as God’s image-bearers. The creation mandate given in Genesis 1 is to “be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it, and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over every living thing that moves on the earth” (v. 28). Adam and Eve were to tend and keep the garden, and their cultivation was to spread beyond Eden and across the whole earth.

Contemporary culture views the past with attitudes of irrelevance, ignorance, and ideology. And yet, this isn’t the attitude toward history that the Bible takes.

Understanding the history of human societies is part of God’s design for how we tend and keep his creation and fill the earth with civilization that glorifies him. And this understanding isn’t limited to professional historians.

The Bible calls us all to do the priestly work of stewarding the past. On the one hand, this vocation involves tending the past: cultivating the past and uncovering the historical stories of people who’ve been overlooked, bringing historical injustices to light, and recognizing the sins of the past—including our own.

On the other hand, we keep and watch over the past: protecting and passing down historical knowledge and our heritage as Christians, both as the doctrine of orthodox biblical teachings but also through spiritual habits, practices, and traditions. This conservation honors the past and values our inheritance.

How History Can Help Our Christian Witness

Consider three cultural longings that Christians can answer with the gospel and an understanding of history.

1. We long to be part of a larger story.

Spend a moment scrolling through popular media or listening to podcasts, and you’ll encounter endless discussions about identity. Despite, or perhaps because of, the relentless emphasis on self-invention, there’s a growing yearning to belong to a larger story that offers meaning and purpose beyond the individual. This is evident in the rising interest in broader civilizational questions.

Popular non-Christian intellectuals and public figures astute to the zeitgeist also recognize this. Jordan Peterson teaches a self-authoring class that’s supposed to help people understand where they came from and why they think the way they do. The Rest Is History is one of the world’s most popular podcasts, and there’s also burgeoning interest in trying to trace one’s ancestry. The non-Christian culture misses the mark when it comes to the question of the larger story, however, so Christians have a profound opportunity to speak into this question.

History helps us to show that Christianity isn’t merely a set of doctrines but an invitation to belong to God’s people across time. Through Jesus Christ’s life, death, and resurrection, we’re invited into God’s unfolding purposes—a reality that’s not only true but also good and beautiful. Christianity is, in this sense, the ultimate account of reality and the antidote to our culture’s rootlessness.

Because we have a God who acts in history, and who therefore gives history meaning and purpose, we’re able to show our neighbors something of the rich inheritance into which we’ve been grafted. The Christian life is lived self-consciously as part of the larger story of God’s salvation. It was partly my own yearning for a larger story that first opened my eyes to Christianity when I was an atheist.

2. We long to belong to a thicker community.

In an age of loneliness, anxiety, and isolation, the church has a timely opportunity to present the gospel not only as a message of individual salvation but also as an invitation to be grafted into God’s family, a historic covenant community. The apostle Peter’s first letter puts this idea beautifully:

You are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people for his own possession, that you may proclaim the excellencies of him who called you out of darkness into his marvelous light. Once you were not a people but now you are God’s people; once you had not received mercy, but now you have received mercy (1 Pet. 2:9–10).

We have the opportunity to show our neighbors that God’s church isn’t like one of the myriad “tribes” that dominate contemporary culture, united merely by shared preferences and identity markers. Tribalism, often fostered online, attempts to substitute for community. Tribes ask little of people because they’re at heart just a consumer identity, a brand people choose to give themselves meaning and a sense of belonging.

The church has a timely opportunity to present the gospel as an invitation to be grafted into God’s family, a historic covenant community.

However, tribalism doesn’t draw us into a historical community with obligations in our relationships with others. It leaves people lacking genuine community that’s rich with the mercy and grace of which Peter writes. In our culture, in which loneliness makes people crave genuine, thick, relationships and community, the historically rooted fellowship that is the church can be profoundly attractive.

Indeed, the church is a true family. The truth of the gospel, which underpins membership of the church, is lived out through obligations and expectations to love; serve; and show forgiveness, grace, and mercy to each other as brothers and sisters.

We also live out the truth of our salvation in Christ through historical traditions and practices of meeting together, having fellowship, sharing the sacrament of the Lord’s Supper, serving one another, showing hospitality and sharing meals, singing, praying, studying the Bible, and so forth. We must show our neighbors a historically grounded Christian life that stewards and cultivates these deeply rooted doctrines and ways of living in true fellowship.

3. We long for transcendence.

Western culture is marked by a renewed yearning for awe, wonder, and transcendence. This is evident in the rise of various forms of contemporary paganism—from crystals and Wicca to a broader interest in the occult.

The church has a remarkable opportunity to respond by drawing on the rich historical and biblical traditions of beauty and the sacred. In doing so, it can show our neighbors that God is utterly holy, and that the Christian life offers a true encounter with awe and wonder in the presence of his holiness.

I argue in my recent book, Priests of History, that we can encounter and praise God’s holiness and transcendence not only through the Bible and the Lord’s Supper but also through ancient and biblical practices including historic forms of prayer, Christian meditation, night vigils, and the sacred music tradition, from Gregorian chants to J. S. Bach and hymns.

As the looming specters of transhumanism and AI fix our culture’s eyes on the future, we risk losing history completely. Yet we need it now more than ever before. History is a rich storehouse—a “vast treasury,” to quote Isaac Watts—if we’re wise enough to know how to use it. By tending and keeping the past, Christians can equip ourselves to communicate the truth, goodness, and beauty of Jesus Christ to a confused and rootless world.