Quotes about History

I am, of course, aware that for over two hundred years scholars have laboured to keep history and theology, or history and faith, at arm's length from one another. There is a good intention behind this move: each of these disciplines has its own proper shape and logic, and cannot simply be turned into a branch of the other.

A biblical commentary is first and foremost a work of history. But history is a matter of learning not only the tune but also the rhythm and the harmonies.

The gospels] are not merely antiquarian documents telling a strange story about a powerful but now long-gone moment of history. They are the moment of sunrise on a new morning, casting a strange glory over the landscape and inviting all readers to wake up, rub the sleep from their eyes, and come out to enjoy the fully dawned day and give themselves to its tasks.

Science studies the repeatable; history studies the unrepeatable.

The Christian religion, hand in hand with various philosophical outlooks, has motivated, sanctioned, and shaped large portions of the Western scientific heritage. Modern Christians ought to drink deeply at the well of historical precedent. If we do, we will never feel intimidated by positivists and others who deny that religion has any role in genuine scholarship. In the broad scope of history, that claim is itself a temporary aberration-a mere blip on the screen, already beginning to fade.

Nearly all that we call human history … [is] the long terrible story of man trying to find something other than God which will make him happy." C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity

if everything is historically relative, then so is the idea of historicism itself.

Without language, one cannot talk to people and understand them; one cannot share their hopes and aspirations, grasp their history, appreciate their poetry, or savor their songs.

I always loved English because whatever human beings are, we are storytellers. It is our stories that give a light to the future. When I went to college I became a history major because history is such a wonderful story of who we think we are. English is much more a story of who we really are.

The life of the law has not been logic but experience.

A great man represents a great ganglion in the nerves of society, or, to vary the figure, a strategic point in the campaign of history, and part of his greatness consists in his being there.

Could such a many-chambered edifice have stood a century and a half and not have had its passages of romance to bequeath their lingering legends to the after-time?... It was a great happiness to have been born in an old house haunted by such recollections, with harmless ghosts walking its corridors, with fields of waving grass and trees and singing birds...