Book review: “Why Study the Past? The Quest for the Historical Church” by Rowan Williams

The past is a strange, yet familiar place, and history isn’t a cudgel with which to pound opponents into submission.

That’s true of any history. And it’s especially important when looking at the history of Christianity since there is the additional (and arguably the most important) element of faith.

In his 2004 book Why Study the Past? The Quest for the Historical Church, Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury at the time, writes:

For someone trying to write the history of the Church as a Christian believer, the challenge is to trace the ways in which the Church has demonstrated its divine origin — or at least has tried to avoid formulae and practices that obscure the claim to divine origin….

So, I am looking for a way of reading Church history that is theologically sensitive.

That, however, doesn’t mean oversimplifying things or using dogma to decide what happened in the past, he hastens to add, averring that “good theology does not come from bad history.”

 

Spiritual maturity

It’s an approach, he acknowledges, that goes against the modern grain of employing history as a weapon to settle present-day (and usually highly polarized and polarizing) debates rather than as a method of reaching greater spiritual maturity.

To move toward greater spiritual maturity, Christians need to see the strangeness of their own beliefs in the context of the strangeness of past believers. After all, we are the descendants of all those generations of believers; they are our anscestors.

Abraham isn’t “one of us”; yet we and Abraham do make up an “us” in relation to God, a shared reality before God which will take a lifetime to fathom.

The task of studying Church history, in other words, involves an effort to understand the people of the past in their own context and on their own terms and relating these insights to our own lives today, gaining new understandings of ourselves out of, so to speak, the old wineskins of earlier generations.

 

“Questioned by the past”

As Williams says at several points in Why Study the Past?:

[T]raditionalists sometimes miss the point because they don’t expect to be surprised by the past; progressives miss the point because they don’t expect to be interested or questioned by it.

That’s an interesting phrase about being “questioned” by the past.

As Williams details in this brisk 129-page book, anyone looking at the past is questioning who the people were and what they believed and how they came to those beliefs. At the same time, the past itself, in return, questions modern-day people about who they are and what they believe and how they came to that faith.

Studying history, Williams writes, should change the Christian.

 

Good and bad history writing

There is good and there is bad history writing, and here’s how Williams describes the first:

Good historical writing, I suggest, is writing that constructs that sense of who we are by a real engagement with the strangeness of the past, that establishes my or our identity now as bound up with a whole range of things that are not easy for me or us, not obvious or native to the world we think we inhabit, yet which have to be recognized in their solid reality as both different from us and part of us.

As a result, the student has a sense of the past that includes “things we don’t fully understand.”

 

Ambiguity

Put another way, the Christian is better able to deal with the ambiguity that is at the heart of human life.

So bad history is any kind of narrative that refuses this difficulty and enlargement — whether by giving us a version of the past that is just the present in fancy dress or by dismissing the past as a wholly foreign country whose language we shall never learn and which can only be seen as incomprehensible and almost comic in its savagery and ignorance.

Good history, Williams writes, enables us to step away from ourselves in a way, to step outside ourselves, to see ourselves from a new perspective, the perspective of the past.

Good history refuses to let us be complacent or comfortable.

It doesn’t tell us what to do but “will at least start us on the road to action of a different and more self-aware kind, action that is moral in a way it can’t be if we have no points of reference beyond what we have come to take for granted.”

 

“Continuity and difference”

There’s a tension here, Williams writes. We are required to strike “the difficult balance between continuity and difference — the moral tension between respect for what is strange and freedom to interpret, address and argue with what is strange.”

So, we are not only questioned by the past, but we are expected to argue with the past — not argue in the sense of slamming down an opponent, rather argue in the sense of working with another searching soul to try to tease out the important core of an issue or event, or belief.

As Williams describes the Christian’s interaction with history, it involves being honestly open to what really went on in the past (to whatever extent that can be determined, as imperfectly as we are able).

In addition, there is an open honesty that is required regarding our own lives and faith.

The Christian can’t look deeply at the way, say, fourth century believers thought about Jesus without undergoing a shift or expansion or deepening or nuancing of his or her own thinking about Jesus.

 

Resident aliens

An important point that Williams makes early in his book, and an example of how we today question and are questioned by the past, has to do with the nature of the earliest Christian communities.

The early Christians weren’t like the synagogues or other devotional assemblies of their time, and their language about themselves was very different in three ways that, Williams writes, must have caused great puzzlement.

Christians referred to themselves as hagioi, as people who were holy or sacred. They called the groups in which they met ekklesiai, “civic assemblies.” And they also described themselves as paroikoi or paroikoutes, “resident aliens” or “settled migrants.”

They claimed, in other words, that they occupied a distinctive place, the territory that belongs to the divine, that their corporate identity could be compared to a sanctuary; that they were “citizens” of something; and that their actual roots and loyalties were in another context than the cities in which they resided.

 

Counter-cultural

Christians were claiming the role of outsider. They were asserting an allegiance that wasn’t to a king or emperor but to God. They were here (as residents) but belonged somewhere else (as aliens).

This core understanding of themselves is a legacy that those earliest Christians have handed down through the centuries. It is this self-identification that, over all those hundreds of years and down to today, Christians have been able to use as a touchstone.

Are we “resident aliens” in our nation and world?  Are we, to put it another way, counter-cultural?

 

A spiritual discipline

In this context, the study of church history isn’t only an intellectual exercise. It is also, Williams writes, a spiritual discipline.

Spiritual disciplines are invariably methods of challenging the assumption that I — my conscious, willing ego — stand at the center of all patterns of meaning. Silence, fasting, receiving the sacraments, confession and penance, even listening to a sermon, have all been listed as spiritual disciplines because they all direct themselves to this “decentering” exercise, without which, the Christian believes, the impact of the true God upon us will always be muted, perhaps stifled, by our own scripts and dramas.

By studying the past, by opening our hearts to the people of the past and their struggles and their hard-fought wisdom, we moderns become less self-contained, less self-oriented.

By studying the past, we open ourselves to amazement:

The sense of alienness and difficulty of the past should reinforce for the believer the sense of astonishment at the range of human expression and experience that can be counted as Christian, and so fill out the doctrinal conviction that the work of Christ is capable of translation into every human context of culture and imagination.

Even translation into our present-day culture and imagination.

As Williams writes, if we learn to listen to the “strange and recognizable ‘otherness’ of the past,” we may be better able to deal with “what is strange to us now.”

 

Patrick T. Reardon

12.5.25