It wouldn't seem at first glance that history would be controversial. It's the past, it's unchanging and it only exists in memory. ("Memory" here means both our personal as well as our societal, collective and written memories.) You don't trip over it on your way to the bathroom in the night and it doesn't break down when you're on your way to work. It's done, over, finished. How controversial could it be?
But like most things humans bump up against, we manage to transform the fixed, immutable thing in front of us magically into "a matter of opinion" or even the ever present "point of view."
Hopefully, for your sake, you'll be surprised that there are even POV's (points of view's) about what history actually is, what it means about where we're going and how it can help us get through today. The simplest example of what I'm talking about is the oft quoted "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." This quote is usually attributed to George Santayana but since even statements about historical facts can be controversial (George Santayana did actually write this), there are those who point to parallel constructs in ancient literature as the "true" (whatever that means) source of this doctrine. And yes, technicians and philosophers do call this sort of thing "doctrine."
I want to take a pebble off this mountain of controversy and hold it for a moment. There is one school that says the march of information discovery is taking us to an ever clearer perspective of the world around us. Put another way, this says that as history accumulates and we learn from it (thank you George) we become better equipped to make future discoveries and decisions that will be still more right. We owe at least the formalities of this view to a guy named Hegel whose life spanned the 18th and 19th centuries.
This is the predominant current view. In fact, this view so holds sway in current society, that alternatives are not even given serious consideration.
There is however another theory (still quite active in semantics and language analysis) that the further you get away from the original event, the more degraded the information becomes. This theory was the culturally predominant one a few centuries ago. A simple example of this is making copies of a copy. Even on current, high tech equipment the image degrades a bit with each generation of copy. Copies of copies of copies can become nearly unreadable.
I'm going to avoid formal argumentation on which approach might be the better one. Instead, I'm going to suggest that generally speaking, physical discoveries over time tend to produce more and better physical discoveries. (Please note the phrase "over time" in the paragraph above. Sometimes it takes time to discover that the new thing in hand is actually wrong and to subsequently make the necessary correction.) As a counterpoint, statements about feeling and value tend to degrade over time. That's because individual feelings and values derive in part from the cultural context of a time and place. For example, the reason Shakespeare is often considered difficult to understand is because his language and underlying cultural assumptions are no longer in play in current culture. We don't always intuitively "get" him.
Summed up, all our accumulated knowledge is better seen as an invitation to humility than as a mountain conquered from which we can shout down pronouncements. I will add only one specific. All this is particularly true of life and encounters with Christ. Jesus always offers invitation. Although he is at least in part responsible for the idea of carrying stone tablets down from the mountain, I believe these too represented an invitation into life with God.
Hopefully as we move forward into the new year, we'll carry with us the lessons of the past. Hopefully, these lessons can morph into curiosity and not clubs. And hopefully we can more readily embrace a greater portion of the Body of Christ than has previously been the case.
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