Quotes about History

What Jesus did was not a mere example of something else, not a mere manifestation of some larger truth; it was itself the climactic event and fact of cosmic history. From then on everything is different…the End came forward into the present in Jesus the Messiah

In fact, like most things in life that really matter—love, beauty, justice—you can't prove things in history the way you can prove Pythagoras's theorem. But there are lots of things you can be certain of nonetheless.

BIOGRAPHY, AS WE said before, involves thinking into the minds of people who did not think the same way we do. And history often involves trying to think into the minds of various individuals and groups who, though living at the same time, thought in very different ways from one another as well as from ourselves. Trying to keep track of the swirling currents of thought and action in Paul's world is that kind of exercise.

First-century Jews looked forward to a public event … in and through which their god would reveal to all the world that he was not just a local, tribal deity, but the creator and sovereign of all … The early Christians … looked back to an event in and through which, they claimed, Israel's god had done exactly that.

The reason history is fascinating is because people in other times and places are so like us. The reason history is difficult is because people in other times and places are so different from us. History is, to that extent, like marriage

If we thought that because we now lived in the 'modern world' we were exempt—that our science and technology had now produced 'progress' that would eliminate all such things—we were obviously wrong. Just like those at the end of the nineteenth century who thought that Western society was now advancing smoothly towards the Kingdom of God. So, throughout Church history, Jesus' followers have usually avoided such lines of thought.

has made, and particularly to and within his people Israel.

But over against this downplaying or mocking we also see, from the earliest documents of the New Testament right on through the first five or six centuries of church history, the resolute affirmation of the cross not as an embarrassing episode best left on the margins, but as the mysterious key to the meaning of life, God, the world, and human destiny.

that God's call of Abraham and his family was designed to put right what was wrong with the world.

The death of Jesus of Nazareth as the king of the Jews, the bearer of Israel's destiny, the fulfillment of God's promises to his people of old, is either the most stupid, senseless waste and misunderstanding the world has ever seen, or it is the fulcrum around which world history turns. Christianity is based on the belief that it was and is the latter.

What is needed is history, genuine history, multi-faceted history, 'thick description' history that takes seriously the full range of human life and culture.

Right through Israel's history there had been a sense that, strange though it might seem, the one true God would use this small and apparently insignificant nation as his means of transforming the entire world. This great transforming event would be, finally, the coming of the Kingdom of God.