Quotes about History

many such episodes it became clear that religion allied too closely to the state leads to the abuse of power. Christian experiments with church-state blending, whether in Geneva under Calvin or in Spain and Latin America under the Inquisition, may have worked for a time but inevitably provoked a backlash against the church, such as that seen in secular Europe today.*

Paul Tillich once defined forgiveness as remembering the past in order that it might be forgotten—a principle that applies to nations as well as individuals.

The past must be remembered before it can be overcome.

At times, God's history seems to operate on an entirely different plane than ours...Exodus identifies by name the two Hebrew midwives who helped save Moses' life, but it does not bother to record the name of the Pharaoh ruling Egypt (an omission that has baffled scholars ever since).

see the confusion of politics and religion as one of the greatest barriers to grace. C. S. Lewis once said that almost all crimes of Christian history have come about when religion is confused with politics. Politics, which always runs by the rules of ungrace, allures us to trade away grace for power, a temptation the church has often been unable to resist.

A similar cycle has recurred throughout church history. Christians present an attractive counterculture until they become the dominant culture. Then they divert from their mission, join the power structure, and in the process turn society against them. Rejected, they retreat into a minority subculture, only to start the cycle all over again.

Highlight — Genesis 24:3 Marrying Foreigners From this earliest period of Israelite history, there was an emphasis on not marrying foreigners. The reason had to do with religion, not race—in many cases foreigners were distant relatives, but they worshiped false gods. When foreigners were willing to worship Israel's God, they were welcomed (see the book of Ruth, for example).

I have marveled at, and sometimes openly questioned, the self-restraint God has shown throughout history, allowing the Genghis Khans and the Hitlers and the Stalins to have their way. But nothing - nothing - compares to the self-restraint shown that dark Friday in Jerusalem.

the Jewish philosopher Hannah Arendt said, the only remedy for the inevitability of history is forgiveness; otherwise, we remain trapped in the "predicament of irreversibility.

No society in history has attempted to live without a belief in the sacred, not until the modern West.

ARTAXERXES King of Persia; allowed Ezra to rebuild Jerusalem temple "Friendly Foreigner"—

the early discrimination laws against the Jews—the "Jews Only" shops, park benches, rest rooms, and drinking fountains—were explicitly modeled on segregation laws in the United States.