Today I have been reading some essays on history. Among them was a set of "Theses on the Philosophy of History" by Walter Benjamin, a German Jew (1892-1940) who offered some 'deep' stuff which I'm not entirely sure I understand, but made me think...  The two I cite below I chose because of their theological threads... 

A

Historicism contents itself with establishing a causal connection between various moments in history.  But no fact that is a cause is for that very reason historical.  It became historical posthumously, as it were, through events that may be separated from it by thousands of years.  A historian who takes this as his point of departure stops telling the sequence of events like the beads of a rosary.  Instead, he grasps the constellation which his own era has formed with a definite earlier one.  Thus he establishes a conception of the present as the 'time of the now' which is shot through with chips of Messianic time.

B

The soothsayers who found from time what it had in store certainly did not experience time as either homgenous or empty.  Anyone who keeps this in mind will perhaps get an idea of how past times were experienced in remembrance - namely in the same way.  We know that the Jews were prohibited from investigating the future.  The Torah and the prayers instruct them in remembrance, however.  This stripped the future of its magic, to which all those succomb who turn to soothsayers for enlightenment.  This does not imply, however, that for the Jews the future turned into homogeneous, empty time.  For every second of time was the strait gate through which Messiah might enter.

(from Tamsin Spargo (ed) Reading the Past, Basingstoke, Palgrave, 2000 p 126)

Benjamin took his life in 1940, so we can never know how he might have revised his ideas in later life.

I am struck by a kind of now-and-not-yet running through these two theses.  The 'chips of Messianic time' running through the whole of history (now) and the future possibility of Messiah entering (not yet).  The commentator suggests a view of history which eschews theological comfort, and maybe there is a deep irony in these two extracts that has gone way over my head.  But I wonder if I can read them more positively as affirming the divine both within and outwith time/history?

Watched the film The History Boys last night.  In amongst all the other stuff a couple of interesting, pertinent quotations - but probably not the sort one can quote in a nice polite theology essay!

As the boys rehearse for their Oxbridge interviews, the female history teacher, Mrs Lintott, poses the question 'what is history?'

Her own response is "history is women following behind with a bucket'

The character Rudge observes "one [expletive deleted] thing after another"

One of the characters comes up with the idea of 'subjunctive history' based on the favourite verbal mood/voice (I never fully get to grips with grammar, not something late 1970's/early 1980's comprehensive education went in for) of the teacher known as Hector.  History as a story of possibilities - might have, could have, would have.... the 'what if' questions... the diffenrence that arose (or arises) from seemingly insignificant or random events.  I have a suspicion that there is a lot of mileage in this idea, if anyone wanted to pursue it.

I quite enjoyed the film - though did the early 1980's really look that old fashioned?!  Thankfully in my compehensive school it was achievement enough to make it to university - 'Loughbrough in a bad year' would have been judged worthwhile.  The film as an exploration of history in its own right - now there's an exercise for the reader!

(Having now read a couple of reviews of the film and the play, it appears the theme Bennett is exploring is that of novelty in education - and its logical consequences if allowed to run unchecked.  But being a good Post Modern person, I'd argue that once you set it free to real 'readers' thay make of it what they will, and, in the words of the recycling advertisement, at least in theory, 'the possiblities are endless')

Christmas is a time when we can demonstrate to our ministers just how much they mean to us.  It is also a time when ministers can discover just how much they need to grow in grace.

I have thought long and hard whether or not it was too ungrateful and unkind to tell the world of these three gifts I received this year.  But in the end I decided the amusement it would bring to others probably outweighted the embarassment it could cause if this post was discovered by the perpetrators of these opportunities for me to grow in grace....

No gold, frankincense or myrrh, I received...

• A Christmas decoration that would have been tacky when it was bought several years ago, but the big giveaway was the faded box demonstrating it had long been hidden away.  At least it was unused!
• A box of biscuits 8 months past their use by date.  Yummy!  Well the garden birds thought so.
• A secondhand tea towel!!!!!  Though to be fair this was in a parcel with two new (kitchen related) items.

I am sure that each gift was well intentioned... I'm just glad these people weren't among the mages of old!

I don't know, I sit down to watch some junk TV and end up with stuff relating to my research work!

In the Christmas Day edition, we had a character who claimed to be an expert in earth customs explaining what Christmas was about, and using lots of mildly amusing cliches along the way - such as Santa being married to Mary.  Well I found it amusing and mildly thought provoking, others may not have done.

Then I read an essay entitled 'Emperor Kennedy Legend: A New Anthropological Debate' by Lesek Kolakowski in Tamsin Spargo (ed) Reading the Past, Basingstoke, Palgrave, 2000.  This short essay is equally humourous, and presents a mythical debate between three scholars some 600 years into the future, into the story of John F Kennedy.  With only limited extant documents, interpolation, extrapolation and surmise are employed, with reuslts that are funny for 21st century English speaking readers but could, conceivably occur in several centuries time.

The essayist offers no commentary and on comment, like a parable, whoever has ears to hear is left to deduce what the story says.

So here's the interesting bit for me - what is the difference between Kolakowski's scholarly contribution and Hyacinth Bucket's husband (I can't recall the name of the actor or his character!) as a phony expert in Dr Who?

And, which is the message in each case, unless you were there, what can you REALLY know about the past?

On Christmas day we had our little quiz about "truth and tradition" in the Christmas story - the answer to most of the questions being 'actually we don't know.'  We don't know what colour Mary wore, how old Joseph was, what the angels looked like, how many Magi there were or how anybody travelled to Bethlehem.  Yet the so-called traditional nativity scene is how most people envisage Christmas; most Christians live with a neat synthesis of Luke/Matthew that skips over inconsistencies to bring us to a tableau in which shepherds stand stage right, along with a donkey and a lamb, and three kings, one with black skin and possibly one with oriental features, stand stage left along with a camel and three elaborate caskets.  I ended my 'quiz' with the idea from the book whose title I've forgotten that somehow God can speak 'new' or 'different' truth through this - that Christ is where rich and poor, educated and uneducated, black, white and 'everything in between' meet on equal terms.  That the whole of creation - humans, animal and maybe even vegtable and mineral - bow, or are laid, at the feet of their creator.  The familiar nativity scene isn't 'true' but it contains 'truth'

If this is so for scripture, could something be similar for history?  And in particular Baptist history?  If history is 'created as much as found' or is a form of 'creative non-fiction', how might it parallel or differ from the nativity play?

The Baptist histories I have read so far are definitely synthetic - the origins of one strand, the heroes of another and the useful bodies of a third are carefully drawn together into a nice whole, with struggles, tensions and inconsistencies neatly ignored to present an inoffensive whole.

So, if there are to be parallels with nativity stories, what, if any, 'new' truth arises from this synthesis?  What is distorted?  What is lost along the way?  In what way does the 'traditional' story work?

I think that some of what it (Baptist history) loses, and is diminished by, is the loss of struggle and tension, it becomes as clean and saccharine as the Christmas card glittery nativity.  The Bible is not a nice, happy story: both Luke and Matthew (especially Matthew) drop hints of the pain that accompanies Jesus - promises of a sword piercing Mary's heart, babies slaughtered by a megalomanic ruler; not a nice story for the kiddies, I fear.

The synthetic nativity story has its place in our Christmas celebrations.  It has its place in learning the stories of Jesus.  And while it is not 'gospel truth,' it can, with some theological creativity, point us to gospel truths.  For all that, we don't expect Christian disciples to stick with Mary in a blue dress and a baby who never cries; we expect them to cultivate a habit of discovering more and more about Jesus the man, the prophet, the Son of God, the saviour (see John 9, the man born blind, for support of this model of disicpleship).  Yet, when it comes to history, the history of our own faith tradition, we seem content with the infant school version.  Granted, it is not the most earth shatteringly important thing for us to devote time to, but I can't help feeling we miss out on useful insights into what it might mean to follow Jesus in an authentically 'Baptist' kind of a way because we don't actually take time to discover what our own story really is.