I was in the eighth grade when I first encountered competing historical narratives. I had just moved to the United States from Canada, and in my US History class we were taught about the War of 1812, or as our history book called it, “The Second Revolutionary War”. I learned that, like the first revolutionary war, in the War of 1812 the scrappy Americans defeated the British to maintain their independence.
This was news to me, as I had grown up learning about the War of 1812 as the war in which the Americans tried to take over Canada, but the brave Canadians defended our homeland (and burned down the White House in the process – a historical event that Canadians sing about). Check out the description of this book to get a feel for how we tell the story North of the border.
History isn’t a simple matter of relaying dates and names and facts. It is a story told by the historian, who does their best to faithfully represent the past by sharing relevant details (and leaving others out). It is why you could have two different perspectives on the War of 1812 that might both be true. It’s why you can have new scholarship and new books on the same historical events, because historians are either discovering new details about the past, or connecting the dots in new ways. This isn’t necessarily bad or “revisionist” or “woke”, it is just how historians work. The conversation is ongoing.
American history is in the news again, as some are pushing back against how much of the American story is told with the stain of slavery in the forefront. In the last few days, the president has posted about the need to talk less about how bad slavery was, and instead focus on the good aspects of American history.
This criticism isn’t new – for instance, you can call to mind the controversy over the New York Times’ 1619 Project. What is interesting to me, though, is that there is (I think) a lot of overlap between people who want to prioritize America’s Judeo/Christian heritage and those who want to hear less about America’s past sins. Beacuse when I look at how the Bible tells history, I see a very different method.
The Bible is not just willing to acknowledge the failures of Israel and the early church, sometimes it seems to take extra effort to highlight them. A few examples:
- Abraham, the patriarch of the entire people of Israel, has a number of moral failings in Genesis: he tries to pass of his wife as his sister (twice) in order to save his own skin. He also shows a lack of faith when choosing to have a child by his slave Hagar (instead of by his wife Sarah), and shows either callousness or weakness when allowing Sarah to send Hagar and Ishmael out into the wilderness to die (prompting God to intervene and promise them his favour as well). Subsequent generations in Genesis don’t fare much better.
- Moses, the lawgiver, murders a man, runs away in hiding, tries his best to reject God’s call for him to lead the people, and acts rashly enough to disqualify himself from getting to enter into the promised land, dying just outside of it at the end of the Exodus.
- David, the king after God’s own heart, shows indifference to the sexual abuse of his daughter (which is what prompts his son to lead a rebellion against him), arguably commits sexual abuse himself by “taking” Bathsheba (you can sort out the nuances in that story yourself), hides behind his sin by sending her husband to the front line and then pulling back the army so he’ll die in battle. At the end of his life, God says that he has too much blood on his hands to be the builder of the temple, and the job is passed instead to his son, Solomon.
- The prophetic books, as well as the New Testament epistles, are largely filled with God’s words of judgment, correction, and condemnation towards his people. They include accusations of idolatry, injustice, bribery, corrupt priests, debauchery, child sacrifice, and so on and so forth. The beautiful statements of God’s goodness and loving kindness that we so often quote frequently sit next to clear statements of human depravity. Which is, of course, part of the point.
- When within the Bible there is a remembrance of something that happened earlier, it is usually to tell of God’s faithfulness in spite of the people’s sinfulness. (See, for instance, Psalm 95)
The Bible’s historiography, its method of telling history, includes and even centers on sin and failure. It does so to both highlight God’s faithfulness, and to warn subsequent generations of falling into the same mistakes. It doesn’t sheepishly try to downplay sin, it puts it on full display. Christianity (and to my knowledge, Judaism, although I don’t want to speak out of my lane) is all about repentance; about our ongoing need to turn away from sin and be faithful to Christ. But you can’t repent what you won’t acknowledge. When you are unwilling to face the fullness of your sin, you can not properly repent of it. The Bible is full of both personal and corporate repentance, and it is strange to me that some of the people that most vocally want to identify as American Christians are so unwilling to tell our nation’s story with the Bible’s methods.
The Transatlantic slave trade was an abomination unto the Lord. Race based chattel slavery was an affront to God. These national sins were greater than much of what the Old Testament prophets condemn among the people of God. Their legacy continued in Jim Crow, which was simply a repackaging of the same evils. It was widespread, and either at best tolerated, at worst defended, by too many White Christians, pastors, and theologians. There were voices crying out, calling for the nation to turn away from that sin. But they were often ignored.
Interestingly, I just watched the documentary Black + Evangelical, put together by Christianity Today and Wheaton College. A highlight of the film is a speech given by Tom Skinner at the Urbana Conference in 1970 (an Evangelical mission conference put on by Intervaristy Christian Fellowship). In it, he calls for the church to deal with issues of racism, and 50 years before the New York Times published the 1619 Project, Skinner was telling the American story by starting with the arrival the first slaves on colonial shores in 1619. There have been voices crying out, calling us to not bury our sin but acknowledge it so that we might repent and be healed of it. Will we listen?
Slavery is America’s original sin, and if we try to tell our story without it, we will fail to be honest about ourselves, and we will tell a deficient story about how we got here. And, in doing so, we’ll fail to learn about how to tell history from the Bible that we claim to love.