The Pastor's Heart with Dominic Steele

Recovering our larger story helps know ourselves and our place in God’s world - with Sarah Irving-Stonebreaker

Sarah Irving-Stonebraker Season 6 Episode 41

Historical literacy is a critical tool for Christians, deepening faith and enhancing evangelism and discipleship.

Sarah Irving Stonebreaker says we’ve forgotten how to engage well with the past, we don’t know why the past might be relevant to us today, and we have missed out on being part of a larger story.

We need to uncover overlooked histories, bringing historical injustices to light, move beyond  culture wars, bring historical injustices to light and recognise the sins of the past (including our own).

Sarah is Associate Professor of History in Western Civilization at the Australian Catholic University.

She says the church can offer a rich narrative that can reconnect those feeling adrift.

Sarah Irving Stonebreaker has a new book "Priests of History: Stewarding the Past in an ahistoric Age." https://bit.ly/4eSfpfJ

Church Suite Taster Days in Sydney and Brisbane
Check out the new church management software ChurchSuite.  Gavin and Luke are hosting five taster days in Sydney and Brisbane in November

The Church Co
http://www.thechurchco.com is an excellent website and app platform built specifically for churches. 

Support the show

--
Become a regular financial supporter of The Pastor's Heart via Patreon.

Speaker 1:

It is the pastor's heart and Dominic Steele. And we live in an ahistoric age. That's what Sarah Irving Stonebreaker says. We have lost connection with our history, lost interest in our roots, and yet history matters profoundly and biblically. Being historically literate can help us with evangelism. It can help us move beyond the culture, wars and can help us live as disciples. Sarah Irving Stonebreaker says we need to uncover overlooked histories, bringing historical injustices to light, and recognise the sins of the past, including our own. She's an Associate Professor of History in Western Civilisation at the Australian Catholic University. Sarah, thanks for coming in. I'm going to come to the pastor's heart in a moment, but first, as I was reading your new book, the Priests of History Stewarding the Past in an Ahistoric Age of history stewarding the past in an ahistoric age, what I got was an argument, an academic argument, but also running all the way through, a passionate plea from the heart.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, that's right. I mean, basically I was driven to write this book both actually from the mind, I suppose, but also from the heart. From the mind in the sense that, as you mentioned, I'm an academic historian in a university context and every day, confronted by students who just are feeling this kind of sense of rootlessness and disconnection, so there's a real sense that hold on a minute. There's something about our culture that Christians, with their profound sense that they're part of a historical people, can speak into. But also, really, it's a book that I was prompted to write because of my heart. I won't go into my faith story too deeply, but I actually grew up in a non-Christian home, converted to Christianity in secular academia. I haven't gone through places like Cambridge and Oxford in my twenties and actually it was through engaging with history that God used my story and God used the past to actually make me realise that I was invited to be part of his people.

Speaker 1:

Now the word ahistoric. When I Googled it, your book came up first. It's good, but what do you mean when you say we're in an ahistoric age?

Speaker 2:

Yeah, well, in a nutshell, it's this sense that in our contemporary kind of cultural moment we have basically forgotten how to engage well with the past. In a nutshell, we don't really know why the past might be relevant to us today, in the sense that life in a secular culture is all about kind of like relentless self-invention, and so if life is just always about kind of inventing yourself, writing your own story I'm not part of any larger stories and the histories and the past is kind of irrelevant to that project of self-fulfillment, self-creation. There's also a sense that we are kind of largely ignorant of the past. We don't know much about why history matters and how it can be helpful. And there's also a kind of sense that when we do engage with the past again broadly as a culture, we tend to kind of reduce it and this is so sad to ideology, to culture wars.

Speaker 2:

You know, there's this sense that you know you either condemn or you celebrate the past and then that means that we actually have neglected how to engage well with the past and I think not only is a kind of secular culture we need to hear this, but actually Christians need to be reminded that actually God's called us to be a historical people and has given us in the Bible, I think tools for knowing how he is a God of history and therefore how to kind of tend and keep history really well.

Speaker 1:

Let's just poke around on this, forgetting the past issue, I think, for me. I first was kind of made aware that I was frustrated about this. We were, as a family, driving around Australia and we were coming down the West Australian coast and we were interested as you are when you're being a tourist in the issues of the local area and the backstory of the local area, and everywhere we stopped there was kind of a tourist information type place and they had all sorts of information, whether it was a museum or whatever, or local history, not local history. It was all about ecology and geology and not about the history. And I wanted to know about the shipwrecks and what happened when the white settlers met the indigenous for the first time and I wanted to know the history and the stories and it just wasn't there. But you're saying it's I mean, that's my little story, but you're saying it's much, much wider and a much deeper problem across all of our culture.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, I think it is. I think, look, here's a kind of illustration. So you know, as I mentioned, I'm in university classrooms most days of the week giving seminars and, interestingly enough, when I start to touch upon Australian history, you can almost hear the kind of collective awkwardness or gasp of students, because, no matter what you say, or even when I sort of, in a seminar, invite students to think about, talk about Australian history, there is a kind of nervousness that reflects the fact that we can't even have a conversation today about our own past without thinking that somehow this is going to be awkward because it's going to be about ideology and it's about politics, and that, no matter what people say, there's a sense that oh no, I'm going to be pigeonholed, I'm going to be boxed in, and so we tend to either kind of condemn or celebrate the past or kind of avoid it altogether because it's so kind of awkward. At least that's the kind of snapshot that I'm getting from our, from young people. Why is that?

Speaker 2:

I think for a number of reasons, but the fact that we are now living in this kind of digital age, where so much of our public communication is going on, and the way that we interact with each other increasingly on social media. The reality is it does polarize us, it politicizes us and it kind of it means that public discourse degenerates and it means that basically it kind of turns everything into a kind of moral battleground and we lose the ability to actually engage with history in such a way that can recognize that there are historic, that there are ethical complexities in the past. You find in the same historical person I mean, give some wonderful examples but you can find in the same historical person an immense desire to do good but also some views that we would now find racist, for example, like that is just the reality of history, I mean even when you go back to the 18th century.

Speaker 1:

It's the reality of me and this is the thing.

Speaker 2:

This is the thing, Because I think the other point about this is that we're now also living in an age in which we can't, you know, we're no longer living in a culture that deals with the problems of the human heart like ideas about sin, and so we've lost our ability really to talk about good and like ethics right and wrong, good and evil, and so it becomes a kind of moral culture war where there's all the self-righteousness ironically that people accused the Puritans of having centuries ago, but now it's completely secular.

Speaker 2:

But we've lost this ability to realise that sin lies in the. You know, it's the dividing line that lies at the core of the human heart, that runs down every individual.

Speaker 1:

We've been talking about some of the issues so far in your second chapter in this book, the ahistorical age in society. But I want to jump to our pastor's hearts and the ahistoric age in the church, because I mean, we as pastors we can't well, we may not be able to take on the whole of the society's issues, but we can actually take on some of the issues in our churches, in regards to this how have we become ahistoric thinkers in our churches today?

Speaker 2:

Yeah Well, look, I mean, I don't think it's the case that every pastor or every local congregation has, or anything like that. What I'm trying to do here is to kind of do some kind of you know broad kind of social and cultural analysis and to kind of point out that, look, I think there are kind of tendencies of the way in which, as the you know, this is the nature of the church living in every culture. There is always that danger of kind of acculturation, and I wonder whether there are some tendencies in contemporary evangelicalism where we have kind of embraced ahistoricism in some ways in some churches.

Speaker 1:

So, for example, With all those qualifications, with all those qualifications.

Speaker 2:

Well, because, like everything, like it is actually really nuanced.

Speaker 2:

I mean, here's a kind of example I was speaking to one of my friends who did introducing kind of Jesus course with us and he's 20 years old and after he became a Christian his main question was, okay, like what is the Christian life?

Speaker 2:

And it seemed as if, like what does that kind of look like? And it seemed as if like the only real kind of answer we could give him was not an answer that was deeply rooted in how Christians have always lived historically, like in communities passing down rich spiritual traditions and practices. It was basically like, oh, read your Bible and practices. It was basically like, oh, read your Bible and pray. And it's like, okay, hold on, that is an important part of the Christian life. And yet, actually, if on a local kind of level, pastors and congregations knew how rich the Christian life was historically and the kinds of spiritual and intellectual practices of, say, living and gathering in fellowship together that have actually been handed down through the generations, it actually seems to me that we would have a way of saying to the new Christians who are actually yearning, especially, you know, people in their early 20s, they're so aware of the kind of the rootlessness actually of contemporary culture that they're actually yearning to find in the church, a way of inhabiting part of this much longer richer historical story.

Speaker 1:

I mean, that's actually one of the things that struck me as I was reading your book in preparation for today. You do actually go into all sorts of kind of habits, if you like, that in Christian history Christians have adopted and little traditions, and some of them have been things that I mean you coming to Christ as an adult, but marrying a man who his family had taught him these habits, you know, and then he's brought them into your family, yeah, yeah well, this is the thing, and it actually kind of also helps answer our previous question too, about like, well, you know, on a local level, how is ahistoricism an operation?

Speaker 2:

I think part of it is that many of us actually don't know that these habits have been part of and these that many of us actually don't know that these habits have been part of, and these kind of like rhythms of daily life have long been part of.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, I think yeah, habits and practices or rhythms of daily life have been part of not just like church history broadly, but even protestant history. And I think sometimes, in a kind of, you know, a historical temper, we tend to think, oh, anything that smacks of um, tradition or something which is kind of ahistorical temper. We tend to think, ooh, anything that smacks of tradition or something which is kind of liturgical or a habit for example, praying through the Book of Common Prayer or praying through regular hours of the day we think, ooh, that's Catholic, I'm going to run away from that. But actually historically, of course the Catholic Church has practised this, but actually historically, this is something that Protestants have done. Surprise, surprise. So actually, even in the Reformation, the Book of Common Prayer is actually and this is why it's such an incredible book but it's a book in the Church of England which is meant to go out in the vernacular language that people can understand, and it teaches them these rhythms, age-old rhythms, of how to actually pray through the hours of the day, did you?

Speaker 1:

have that 20-year-old friend of yours that you were describing before. Yeah, yeah, as you talk about him and I think about the 20-something who's steeped in expressive individualism, who I want to come to Christ, or who has just come to Christ, I found myself, as I was reading this book, thinking ah, this book is not just a book for me to think about the issues of history and, if you like to think at that high level, there's actually a practical expression of how the Christian life is to be lived. That's coming out here as well.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, well, one kind of example is the fact that there's a whole spiritual practice and discipline called Protestant meditation, which can be enormously helpful for people like you mentioned, people in this world where we're surrounded by expressive individualism and where there's, at the same time, this kind of yearning for some kind of spirituality. And actually, funnily enough, today we tend to associate the term meditation with, like, eastern religions. But no, actually, even back in the 17th century, there is a whole tradition of protestant meditation, and you know talk about it in the book, but it's one of those practical examples that you just mentioned a moment ago where, actually, if we know about our history and we read, for example, about how protestants engaged in what they even called Protestant meditation, in the 17th century.

Speaker 2:

This actually gives them a very practical way of living through a very kind of rich historical spirituality that also kind of takes them out of themselves too right, because I think the other kind of well, the idol of our secular culture really is the self and is autonomy. Right, this idea that really what I should do is to follow my heart, to be my truest self and the truth is located within me. But what these spiritual practices have done historically and how they can be helpful to us today, is that they take us out of ourselves.

Speaker 1:

In the section on the ahistoric age you kind of take issue on a number of points, consequences or symptoms of us losing, and one of them is on individualism and culture.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, particularly. I mean I think this is true both in society and in the church.

Speaker 1:

And in the church.

Speaker 2:

How is it true in the church, well, and how can history help us?

Speaker 1:

Yeah, okay, I think this is true both in society and in the church.

Speaker 2:

And in the church. How is it true? In the church?

Speaker 1:

Well, and how can history help us?

Speaker 2:

Yeah, okay. So obviously in the secular culture we live in, the individual is our kind of sovereign and everything, about everything to do with anything kind of spiritual or wellbeing in our secular culture is fundamentally focused on the self right. So everything's about self-help and like a lifestyle choice. One of the I think one of the ways in which there's a kind of danger and you know we see this, I think, outside of Australia as well, in the US and other countries in the West but where there's a danger of acculturating ourself to ahistoricism, is where we basically there's a danger of turning the church into individualism, comfort and entertainment, as if it's just a lifestyle choice. Because actually, when you think about it, most kind of groupings in our secular culture, most kind of associations, they're basically like lifestyle preferences.

Speaker 2:

They're things that you kind of I hold the same political views or ideological views or lifestyle choices. Therefore I'm part of this tribe. But here's the thing the church isn't a tribe, right? The church is a historical people, god's treasured possession, who he has brought out of darkness and into his wonderful light, you know, who once were not a people but now are a people. So the church is a historical people and so, actually, if we look, look into history, we actually have a way, I think, of communicating something of what it means to be part of the like the church, part of christian fellowship, a follower of jesus. That is so much richer than just some kind of historical lifestyle choice, which is what secular culture will tell us is is what life's all about. It actually is about being grafted into a historical people who actually share stories, who share disciplines and practices of ways of older people getting alongside younger people and so forth.

Speaker 1:

I'm picking up on you talk about why history matters to Christians in a historic age and you're nibbling towards our engagement as a church, not nibbling running towards our engagement as a church with culture. Why is historical literacy vital for engaging with culture?

Speaker 2:

oh so well, for so many reasons, right, like.

Speaker 2:

Probably the foremost reason is that if you live in a culture which is so profoundly kind of rootless and in which, really, the phrase that our culture uses and that people who are kind of anxious in our anxious age use most of all is like that they're like disconnected and rootless, then actually engaging with history enables the church to speak into that rootlessness, to say that actually there's an invitation here that God is giving you to have a relationship with him that then adopts you into a people who know him and are saved by him and who are adopted in order to go out into the world and serve him.

Speaker 2:

And that's a historical call in an age that thinks that, put it this way the only story that people have is really their own story. But no, the church actually has. Christians have this opportunity to say no, no, there's a much bigger story. You're part of a larger story, an ultimate story about God and a humanity that have rejected and turned their back on, a God who loves humanity so much he runs after them and dies for them and is raised to life again and then invites them into a story which is, and therefore like a community, a fellowship which is vertical and not just horizontal.

Speaker 1:

I had a night, just as you say, that I was reflecting on an Anglican minister friend of mine who was asked by a couple could they?

Speaker 2:

write their own wedding vows.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, interesting and he was able to persuade them and initially they didn't like it what he said at all, but he said no, no, no, no. You're entering into a story that couples have walked down many, many times in the past and I want to say this is the story. You should walk down. And now they wouldn't have known he's not free to work outside the Anglican wedding service and all that kind of thing but he actually persuaded them that it was the right thing to do to enter into that story.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, yeah Well, I mean, here's another example. I sort of mentioned, you know, my own kind of faith story earlier, but actually my own experience is that I was living in my 20s a very kind of this kind of surface level, ahistorical kind of life where I was basically like the only story I have is my own, but one of the important-.

Speaker 1:

And yet you believed in history, and yet I believed in history.

Speaker 2:

Well, there are a couple of really important things that happened here that show that actually engaging with history enabled me to recognize that there was a God of history who made time and history meaningful. Here's the I mean here's the best example. So I did my history PhD at University of Cambridge and I spent all my time reading these 17th century philosophers who ended up basically laying the foundations of modern science, and one of the first things that happened was well, first of all, I realised that the Actually they all had a really deep faith.

Speaker 2:

So people like Robert Boyle, had a deep faith. So actually historical literacy there enabled me to unpack one of the biggest kind of caricatures and stereotypes I had of Christians, which was well, a that Christians were kind of anti-intellectual and, b that Christianity and science were always opposed.

Speaker 1:

It gave you a plausibility Yep, this is a yeah.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, yeah, and I think can still help us in that sense in evangelism. Historical literacy helps unpack myths and caricatures about, and stereotypes actually about, christianity, um, but I suppose the other thing was that when I was reading boyle's work and the more I like read of his scientific work, the more I had to read of his theology and I came across across Boyle quoting Psalm 8 and talking about his own faith and what it made me realize is that I actually had no story that made my own life or my own sense of vocation as a historian meaningful and that made me yearn to be part of like. That was actually one of the very early steps, actually, that God put in place to kind of soften my heart, because I was yearning for a story that was larger than my own.

Speaker 1:

How can historical literacy help us to move beyond the culture wars?

Speaker 2:

Yeah, that's a really good question and I really think it can. I think, first of all, in order to do this, we need to have a really good framework for understanding how we engage well as Christians, with history. First of all, in order to do this, we need to have a really good framework for understanding how we engage well as Christians with history. So that's basically one of the things that the book tries to do, and I try to suggest that actually, biblically, we should use this kind of actually priestly metaphor of to tend and keep, to tend and keep the past actually, because it's part of the way that God has sort of called us into tending and keeping civilization. And so actually, I think the way that we can then apply that to using history today and engaging well and moving beyond the culture wars is that we can actually recognise that in the past there is complexity and there is sin, but also an enormous amount of good as well, and when we enable ourselves to kind of realise that, we develop empathy, we develop intellectual humility. I mean a couple of really good examples of this, but one of the ones that I often use actually and get my university students thinking about this is that one of the most important statesmen in the 17th century, helped involve like, very involved in the foundations of British imperialism, Sir Francis Bacon, lord Chancellor of England, probably the most important like political figure in the land in like Shakespearean England in the early 17th century.

Speaker 2:

And Bacon is an advocate for the English establishing colonies in Ireland, which is something they'd been doing, and also in North America. But does that mean that Bacon is just an ideological apologist for colonisation? Now, the culture wars would kind of tempt us to just think like that and therefore condemn Bacon. But actually when you read his work carefully you realise that he actually writes a number of things, including an essay called On Plantations. Plantation, by the way, is a synonym for colony and in that essay he writes I like a plantation in a pure soil where those are not displanted or people are not displanted to the end to plant in others, for else it is an extirpation rather than a plantation.

Speaker 2:

So here's Bacon. He's not abandoning colonization altogether, but he's actually very, very careful and has some pretty severe misgivings and actually critiques of like displanting the Irish in order to create colonies. And then he writes other pieces of political advice where he talks about make no extirpation of the natives in the name of religion. God is not going to be pleased with those sacrifices. So here's the thing If we actually recognise that kind of like, if we engage well with history and recognise that there's that complexity, and if we kind of tend but also keep like pass down those stories but also cultivate those stories, then I think that actually gives us a way of moving beyond the culture wars because it equips us to have a conversation about the past that is far more nuanced than simply condemn or celebrate like cancel.

Speaker 1:

What do you make of that quote from Barack Obama? The wrong side of history and people being on the wrong side of history.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, I think that's a really yeah. Generally, that's a pretty unhelpful phrase to use, not least because it tends to be used in such a way that indicates the person saying it sort of sees the past in terms of black and white, but also thinks that they kind of know what the wrong side of history is.

Speaker 1:

It's not particularly helpful.

Speaker 2:

I don't think how does?

Speaker 1:

tending and keeping history. Help us live as disciples.

Speaker 2:

Oh, I think in a number of ways. Actually, in the book I actually talk about sort of a number of different categories. I talk about, like, intellectual formation, where, if we know about the richness of the Christian tradition, we're going to be much better equipped to communicate the gospel to our culture because we actually know something about it, because we'll stand with confidence.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, we stand with confidence. But we also know, for example, like historical literacy enables us to say to the friend who's like, hold on a minute. Christians have always been on the wrong side of history. You say, well, hold on. Actually, christians have always been on the wrong side of history. You say, well, hold on. Actually, you know the abolition of the slave trade. You know that was evangelical Christians at the forefront of that. Or do you know that there was the first person ever historically to argue that slavery was a moral evil? Is Gregory of Nyssa actually back in like the very early centuries of the early church, back in the late 5th century AD? And if you know that kind of thing about history, you can actually articulate and live as disciples, because you can actually articulate something of the way in which the Christian teachings have been at the core of our moral foundation in the West.

Speaker 1:

I mean, let me just play with that for a minute. That's where we'd say, ah, christians were on the right side of history. Yep, give me some of those other ones where those apart from slavery, oh yeah, sure.

Speaker 2:

Well, here's a great example even from Australian history In the 1930s. There's well-known Aboriginal like Indigenous activist William Cooper.

Speaker 2:

He's one of the first advocates for Indigenous rights in Australia and he writes a petition actually to the King.

Speaker 2:

And he generates a petition, goes around, collects thousands of signatures and sends it to Parliament and the petition is for civil rights, like representation in parliament for Indigenous Australians. But here's the thing. So William Cooper is an evangelical Christian, he's a member of the Yorta Yorta people and the very words of that petition quote the Bible. He actually uses the phrase that we are of one blood and in that petition the claim for Indigenous civil rights, which actually in full weren't recognised until the famous passing of that referendum in 1967, but actually his argument in that petition was a profoundly Christian one, that the very basis of Indigenous political rights ought to be the spiritual equality before God. And so he talks about God and he talks about the fact that Aboriginal Australians are of one blood quote unquote with white Australians. And the funny thing about that is, to some extent we know this story in Australia to some extent, like the National Museum of Australia has a thing about William Cooper on their website and, surprisingly enough or not, they write out the Christian story.

Speaker 2:

They write out the fact that he's a Christian.

Speaker 1:

So again, don't you find that frustrating?

Speaker 2:

Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 1:

As a historian who wants to go for accuracy.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 1:

Because that's an ideological imposition, isn't it?

Speaker 2:

Yeah, it is. But again, I think this goes back to partly like why I wrote the book, but also in answer to your previous question hey, christians, pastors, lay people, if we actually engage really well with the past, we're actually going to equip ourselves to communicate something of the truth and the goodness and the beauty of the gospel to a very rootless culture.

Speaker 1:

It'd be very attractive for me to dig into a number of these other. I mean, you tell the story of William Cooper, but you've got a number of other kind of cool stories from the past. Yeah, but what do you want to say to us as pastors? What do you hope that we might do in our preaching, in our teaching, in our curriculums? What's your thesis?

Speaker 2:

Yeah, our curriculums. What's your thesis? Yeah, I think in terms of pastors, it's lean into the incredible riches of the Christian tradition and history that are available. So, from reading, like learning about and reading about the kind of the riches of church history and thinking about how that can help Sometimes you know, for example, increasingly they're finding in a lot of evangelical churches in America, but it's probably true in Australia as well that when they're presented with, say, a creed or a catechism, the congregation or even the idea that, hey, there's such a thing as Protestant meditation or practices like fasting or night vigils, all of which were practiced by Protestants in the past. There's a kind of richness there that I think you can kind of lean into and draw upon. Or even stories, right, inspiring stories about Christians in the past in such a way that can actually deeply encourage congregations and actually give them a sense that they're adopted into a people. This is not just a kind of look. We're not just united in Christ because we happen to believe the same principles it's part of it but no, you're adopted like the biblical definition of a church. You're adopted into Christ's body and it's a body vertically through time. So leaning into that history in a number of ways, through spiritual practices and disciplines, through drawing on the stories in the past and encouraging others, I think could be really helpful. Oh, here let me give you an example.

Speaker 2:

I was actually at Synod talking to a local pastor that I know, and he was actually telling me about how his own reading and studies of Nicholas Ridley had been really helpful to him in thinking through a number of like contemporary issues that he is kind of facing as a pastor, thinking about, for example, the relationship between, like what were historically called like matters indifferent, like adiaphora, you know, things that are matters indifferent as opposed to matters that are kind of that the church is more strict about um.

Speaker 2:

And actually Ridley was really helping him to think through the question of how, actually sort of the question of of martyrdom, um, in the kind of broader cultural sense of like how open and how relevant is this actually for our culture today? How open should we be about? And you know, what kind of opportunities do we take to stand for those issues that flow from, you know, christian social and sexual teachings, for example, that flow from the gospel. You know what is the context for doing that, how open to be. Again he's looking back to nicholas ridley and saying you know, there's a kind of there's something.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, yeah, thanks so much for coming in.

Speaker 2:

You're welcome, it's been great.

Speaker 1:

My guest on the Pastor's Heart, sarah Irving Stonebreaker, and she is the Associate Professor of History and Western Civilisation at the Australian Catholic University and the author of this new book, priests of History Stewarding the Past in an Ahistoric Age. My name's Dominic Steele. This has been the Pastor's Heart and we will look forward to your company next Tuesday afternoon.

People on this episode