Why Study the Past?: The Quest for the Historical Church

In 4 chapters and only 114 pages Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams gives a penetrating and discerning theology of church history. How has the church described what is unique to itself from the first early centuries, through the Middle Ages, the Reformation and modern times? Williams traces deep patterns of how the church has struggled through the pressures of different historical eras to witness to the unique community that is created by the work of God in Christ. A discerning look at the past will discover something strange and different from ourselves but in a way that helps us discover our community with the past in ways that will change how we see ourselves in the present and so face new challenges as we move into the future.

Everyone will increase their knowledge of early Christian Churches. There were significant diferences, culturaly, theological, and socialy to understand. For those not knowledgable of the causes for those diferences it may be slow going. The author should be acquainted with what WSC calls the power of the English simple sentence, Unfortunately because of the complex subject very few are present.

The Archbishop does a fine job presenting the imortance of studying the past. Our history must be understood (actually learned) in order to wisely interpret our present spirituality and worship life. Many of us live a myopic spirituality, liking what we know and mostly only what we know. Rowan Williams pastors a large church (the Anglican communion) that is presented with divisions and is paying the price for the revisionist segment of the communion. The concept of via media is just one of the frames of reference that has come about due to an abismal lack of knowledge of Christian worship history. Hopefully this text will bring light into dark corners, not on specifics of theology but certainly on the importance of knowing our own history.

This is a must read for historians, and should be required reading for students entering Divinity School. Archbishop Williams gifts us with a candid picture of ecclesial scholarship from its inception on. It is not a detailed investigation into specific movements in church history, but reveals to the reader how specific movements tailored history in such a way that the 'winners' articulation of these occurrences prevailed--leaving us with a less than honest narration of that history. Williams presents an argument, much like Alisdair MacIntyre does in "Who's Justice? Which Rationality?," stating that 'we need to understand the other on the other's own grounds.' And in Williams' case, we need to do the grunt work necessary for doing history so to contextualize each period, as best as we can, as the events and language would have been understood to those who actually lived them. (As MacIntyre put it, 'languages can be learned, but they cannot be translated'). This does not mean that tradition and doctrine cannot be timeless. It does, however, mean that they must undergo constant renewal in the community through, as Williams puts it (using the language of Georges Florovsky), the "charismatic memory" as it is located in the liturgical activity of the church.