Forward Thinking and Living in History

As Christians, we believe that God entered human history in a very forceful and dramatic way through the Incarnation. Yet He did so in a way that did not destroy or overturn human history, but rather that was based on human history at the same time that it transcended it.

St. Matthew begins his Gospel with the genealogy of Jesus Christ (Matthew 1:1-17). In doing so, Matthew is making several theological statements, one of which concerns the relationship of Jesus Christ to human history. As the Messiah, Jesus encapsulates (or perhaps, following St. Irenaeus, one might say recapitulates) the entire history of his people. Matthew is concerned not only with showing that Jesus is a descendant of King David, but also that the continuity of the Davidic line rested on some dubious moral and ethical behavior. Tamar, for example, posed as a prostitute to seduce Judah, to whose son she was betrothed; Rahab was a prostitute who betrayed her own people to support the Israelites. Along with kings of deep faith, the Davidic line also included kings who were devoted to Yahweh but failed to take serious measures against pagan worship, along with kings who committed idolatry by embraced pagan worship and pagan sacrifice. Jesus, in other words, lived in history, and the history of his people profoundly shaped him. As the author of Hebrews points out, “Therefore he had to be made like his brethren in every respect, so that he might become a merciful and faithful high priest…For because he himself has suffered and been tempted, he is able to help those who are tempted.” (Hebrews 2:37-38). Because he was rooted in the history of his people, Jesus through his life and ministry linked past, present, and future.

Just as Jesus did, we both individually and as the national and global Church are called to live in history. That means to look at our history honestly, to assess its strengths and weaknesses, its triumphs and its defeats, its virtues and its sinfulness. This calls for a careful and objective examination of our history with a view to transforming it and, where we have sinned, to bringing healing to those injured through our actions.

Contemporary Western culture, on the other hand, emphasizes individualism, the self-definition of the individual, instant self-gratification, and moral relativism. The individual (and not the family, not society, and not social/cultural/religious organizations) is held to be self-defining, while the influence of the family, society, and social/cultural/religious organizations is minimized or denied altogether. These cultural changes have found their way into Western Christianity, with the result that the linkage between past, present, and future has been broken. We often focus so much on ourselves and on the present that we forget about both the past and the future. In other words, we fail to live in history,

Our next series of posts will focus on the future and on the importance of forward thinking – on recognizing that the consequences of our actions transcend the present, on planning for the future, on considering the kind of world we are leaving for our children and their children. Engaging in forward thinking, however, requires that we ground ourselves in the past. We cannot go forward unless we know how we got here, unless we live in and confront our history.

Living in history calls for an objective and often painful examination of our past. And here lies a significant problem: as both Americans and as Catholics, we typically not only do not see ourselves as living in history, but to the extent that we do, the history that we recognize is often largely fictitious. Both histories tend to emphasize the good while ignoring the bad and the evil.

While American history includes a growing recognition of the dignity of the individual and the inalienable rights of individuals, it also includes genocide against native peoples, an economy based on the enslavement of Blacks, enforced segregation in the South, a foreign policy that often installed and supported extremely tyrannical dictators overseas, and the use of nuclear weapons at Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

As Catholics, we should recognize the enormous contribution made by our faith to the shaping of the world around us. The works of charity, the formation of the university system, the emphasis on education for all, the deep faith that motivated a commitment to the dignity of the individual, have all been responsible for transforming societies. But we should also recognize the dark side of Catholicism and Christianity: the Crusades (which even after a millennium still affects Christian-Muslim relations), the intolerance that led Catholics to wage war against Lutherans and Calvinists (who in turn waged war against Catholics), the Inquisition that focused on the rooting out of individuals who were “heretics,” the collaboration with political power that led to the conquest of the Americas and the denial of the humanity of indigenous peoples, and more recently the sex abuse scandals.

Especially because our culture separates us from our histories, living in history imposes some requirements:

• That we learn more about our history and especially the history of our faith (an area of weakness for many Catholics), and that we struggle to separate truth from fiction, propagandistic history from genuine history.
• That we not only recognize our shortcomings and our sinfulness, but that we repent of them, strive to bring healing to those who were injured, and ensure that they will never happen again. A good example is the Vatican’s repudiation in March 2023 of the doctrine of discovery, which was formulated starting with Pope Alexander VI’s papal bull Inter Caetera in 1493 and gave Western political powers ownership of “undiscovered” lands, thus preempting the rights of indigenous inhabitants
• That we recognize, as Vincent of Lerins pointed out, that history is a forward-only process. A return to an idealized past is not possible, and attempts to return to an idealized past have catastrophic consequences (as the attempt to restore the ancien régime in the aftermath of Napoleon’s defeat suggests). This is particularly important for American Catholics today given the rise of Christian nationalism, which presents a completely falsified image of American history in advocating a return to a supposedly Godly nation.

In his commentary on our Lord’s parable of the weeds and the wheat, St. Augustine points out that the separation of the weeds from the wheat must wait until the harvest because each of us is capable of being either wheat or a weed at any given time. Living in history means that we strive to be wheat not only individually, but for our nation, for our church, and for the world.