Quotes about History

The point is that the resurrection, if it had occurred, would undermine not only the Enlightenment's vision of a split world but also the Enlightenment's self-congratulatory dream of world history reaching its destiny in our own day and our own systems.

History is not just about events, but about motivations. Motivations, no doubt, float like icebergs, with much more out of sight than above the waterline. But there is often a good deal visible above the water, often including a strong implicit narrative. We can study that.

As C. S. Lewis regularly remarked, the chronological snobbery of the modern age (i.e. the assumption that anything that comes after around 1750 is somehow superior to anything that went before) needs confronting at several levels.

History is always a matter of trying to think into the minds of people who think differently from ourselves.

For far too long now Christians have told the story of Jesus as if it hooked up not with the story of Israel, but simply with the story of human sin as in Genesis 3, skipping over the story of Israel

They are being offered a narrative, an historical story whose hope of 'salvation' lies not in a flight from history but in a great convulsive change within history, a transformation in which there will be continuity with the present as well as discontinuity.

We cannot use a supposedly objective historical epistemology as the ultimate ground for the truth of Easter. To do so would be like someone who lit a candle to see whether the sun had risen.

Jesus of Nazareth was a real man, living and dying at a turbulent moment in real space-time history. His message, and the message about him that the early Christians called good news, was not about how to escape that world. It was about how the one true God was changing it, radically and forever.

A major part of our inquiry, then, must be to look at the emerging Christian movement and to ask: what caused it? Even if our eyewitnesses disagree in detail, something must have happened.

This is not psychoanalysis. It is history.

Here again the creeds leave an ominous gap. They don't mention Israel at all.

when we turn to Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John we discover that they at least think it's important to retell the history of Israel and to show that the story of Jesus is the story in which that long history, warts and all, reaches its God-ordained climax.