Why Do We Remember?⤒🔗

There seems to be a lot of interest in the past these days. We have remem­bered and celebrated the anniversaries of a great variety of historical events and personalities in recent years, and the end is not yet. Nor do people seem to get tired of history. The question has been asked, on more than one oc­casion, how one is to explain this lively interest in events that happened de­cades and even centuries ago. Why did people join with such gusto in com­memorations of, for example, the Glo­rious, the American, and the French Revolution, and of the two world wars? Why are t.v. programmes on these and similar events so popular, and why do publishers and editors encourage the production of endless streams of books and articles on these topics?

One answer to this question was suggested, this past summer, by the philosophizings of an American politi­cal theorist. In a controversial essay that has attracted attention throughout the western world and also in Russia and Japan, Dr. Francis Fukuyama, a planner at the U.S. State Department in Washington, proposed that, with the worldwide collapse of communism and the increasing popularity of West­ern-style political and economic liberal­ism, history as we have known it has come to an end. Not only the Cold War, but all major wars are bound to disappear, he says, and what will be left to humanity in the post-historical dispensation is an era of prosperity, progress, and peace.

But whereas earlier utopians (some of the Enlightenment prophets, for ex­ample, and also Karl Marx) promised that such a post-historical age would be one of unending bliss, Fukuyama says it will be a sad and boring time. This is so because henceforth the na­tions will compete only economically and technologically, not militarily or ideologically. Mankind's energy will be invested exclusively in "economic cal­culation, the endless solving of techni­cal problems, environmental concerns and the satisfaction of sophisticated consumer demands." In the absence of ideological and military warfare there won't be opportunity any more for daring, imagination and idealism.

Apparently Western man already misses these older, more idealistic, more heroic times. And that may well explain the nostalgic abandon with which in recent years he has been re­membering the great men and the great events of history. As one of Fukuya­ma's commentators suggested: the deeds of the past now seem to form a type of family album, a record of the events of the race's childhood that we cherish not because we can learn from it, but because it arouses in us a feeling of nostalgia: we know that this type of life, with all its struggles, challenges, ideals and excitement, is gone forever.

An Evolutionist View←⤒🔗

As the title of this article already indicates, it is not my intention to deal with Fukuyama's "philosophy of his­tory" at this time (although I may do so at a later date). I am now merely mentioning it because it seems to me that it summarizes a view of past, pres­ent, and future that is becoming in­creasingly popular, and also because it seems to suggest an explanation of our present hang-up with historical com­memorations that, on the surface at any rate, makes a lot of sense. Nos­talgia is indeed one of the reasons why we turn to the past. And the lengthy absence of war and ideological strife (at least in the West) may have some­thing to do with what seems to have become one of our favorite pastimes: commemorating wars and revolutions and remembering the deeds of the great men (and women) of history.

Nevertheless, reasonable as it may seem, this view of the past has two serious flaws. The first one is that it is evolutionistic. Unlike most earlier utopians, Fukuyama does not predict a future of unprecedented bliss, yet he is in obvious agreement with men like Hegel, Karl Marx, and all the others who in the past two or three centuries have believed in inevitable progress and assured us that history moves on­ward and upward. One result of such an evolutionist view is that the past is not really important any more. Histor­ical events (and also historical ideas, and religious beliefs) belong to a stage in mankind's development that is be­hind us. It has antiquarian interest, it teaches us something about the process of man's and society's evolution, it even has some nostalgic value, but that is all. There is no real message or guid­ance in it for us. We cannot learn les­sons from it that are relevant for our life and world.

History and Providence←⤒🔗

The second flaw in such a view of history (one that is related to the first) is that it is entirely horizontalistic. God, in this view, had nothing to do with history. In fact, in the evolutionist scheme of things He does not even exist. History is exclusively the record of human affairs (and of chance); there is no vertical dimension.

It is because of these implications that those who confess God's provi­dence and Christ's Lordship of history must reject the modern view of history. For the Christian the past is not only the record of man's deeds over time, it is also the record of God's actions, of His dealings with the world and with mankind in acts of redemption and judgment. It is only when we keep this dimension in mind that we can be at peace with the past (and also with the present and the future), and that we can be instructed by what has hap­pened.

In Memory of Gregory the Great←⤒🔗

The foregoing paragraphs serve as an introduction to two other commem­orative articles. They are dedicated to the memory of two well-known church­men of the so-called Dark Ages — that is the three or four centuries immediate­ly following the fall of Rome. The two men are pope Gregory I (the Great), who became bishop of Rome 1400 years ago, in 590, and Willibrord, the English monk who, exactly one cen­tury later, began his missionary work in the northern half of the Netherlands, or Frisia, as it was called at the time. He is often called the "Apostle of the Frisians" and became the first arch­bishop of Utrecht.

I have to begin by saying that these commemorations cause some dif­ficulties for Protestants. Both Gregory and Willibrord lived and worked in a time when the Christian church was in decline: when it was officially adopting the characteristics that are still common to Roman Catholicism and that ultimately led to the reformation of the sixteenth century. Both men, in vary­ing degrees, advanced this develop­ment. Gregory, for example, was the pope who, more than anyone before him, institutionalized unscriptural traits in doctrine, church government, and ritual.

He probably did it with the best of intentions. He came to the papal throne about a century after the fall of Rome, at a time when Roman culture was be­ing destroyed by the barbarians. He considered it his mission to bring the gospel to these barbarians, and he no doubt believed that certain 'adjustments' were necessary to facilitate their conversion to Christianity. In any event, he told his missionaries to adopt any pagan practice that could be har­monized with Christianity; he preached the doctrine of purgatory, the meritori­ousness of good works, the cooperation of God and man in the process of salvation, the adoration of saints and relics, the mass as a sacrifice, the use of images in the churches, and so on. He also strongly advanced the papal claim to universal dominion, even though he continued to call himself, like earlier Roman bishops, the "servant of the servants of God."

The Mission in Anglo-Saxon England←⤒🔗

His desire to extend papal juris­diction may also have been a motive in what was one of Gregory's most sig­nificant achievements: the campaign for the conversion of Anglo-Saxon En­gland. This work already had, or was soon to have, the attention of the Celts from Scotland and Ireland, who, ever since the time of Patrick, worked sep­arately from Rome. As historians have suggested, the work among the Anglo-Saxons could probably have been com­pleted by them without Gregory's aid, but such a development would have kept the British Isles outside the papal fold. It is not impossible, therefore, that he was at least in part inspired by ulterior (imperialistic) motives in this project. If so, God in His sovereign wisdom used them for the advance­ment of the gospel.

Whatever his motives may have been in the Anglo-Saxon project, it is without doubt that Gregory's doctrinal and organizational policies seriously harmed the church. That should not prevent us, however, from remember­ing him and his work. First of all, we can and should learn from his errors: his well-intentioned but fatal policies of adapting church doctrine to what he perceived to be the needs of the time. But we will remember him also for his work in planting the church. Gregory remains the man who saw it as his life's task to bring the gospel to the barbari­ans, in England and elsewhere — the very people who had destroyed the Roman Empire and were still causing great havoc and suffering — and who gave himself to that task with unflag­ging zeal. In him, and in many of his contemporaries and followers, we still notice the vitality and expansionism of the early church. It is the same vitality and missionary enthusiasm that we see in Patrick and the Celtic missionaries from Ireland and Scotland, and, later, in the Anglo-Saxon monks and nuns — people like Willibrord and Boniface and countless others — who followed the Celts in their efforts to plant the church in Europe.                               

Not in the last place, we remem­ber Gregory and men like him because it pleased God to use them, fallible though they were, to bring the gospel to the European peninsula — that priv­ileged continent whose inhabitants were among the first to receive a place in the tents of Shem. These Europeans were our ancestors. Recalling the priv­ileges we received in them, we will also remember our responsibility, as these early-medieval missionaries did.

The English Church←⤒🔗

The missionary work in England that was inspired by the Celtic Chris­tians and by Gregory the Great has been recorded for posterity by a learned, eighth-century Anglo-Saxon monk who has become known to us as the Venerable Bede. His Ecclesiastical History of England contains a lively, almost year-by-year account of the progress of the mission in Anglo-Saxon England. Bede's record is important for its detail and scholarship, and also for its success in conveying, often by means of anecdotes, the challenges and achievements of these decades of missionary endeavor. I will give an example and quote what is one of the best-known stories related by Bede. It occurs in the section on the conversion of an Anglo-Saxon king, Edwin of Northumbria. Edwin had married a Christian princess from Kent and there­fore allowed the monk Paulinus, later bishop of York, to explain the gospel to him and his councillors. Having heard it, the king asked his Council for advice, and one of his wise men answered as follows:

This is how the present life of man on earth, King, appears to me in comparison with that time which is unknown to us. You are sitting feast­ing with your earls and thanes in winter time; the fire is burning on the hearth in the middle of the hall and all inside is warm, while out­side the wintry storms of rain and snow are raging; and a sparrow flies swiftly through the hall. It enters in at one door and quickly flies out through the other. For the few moments it is inside, the storm and wintry tempest cannot touch it, but after the briefest moment of calm, it flits from your sight, out of the win­try storm and into it again. So this life of man appears but for a mo­ment; what follows or indeed what went before, we know not at all. If this new doctrine brings us more certain information, it seems right that we should accept it.

When we read this we cannot but be struck by the difference between these pre-Christian Europeans and their post-Christian descendants. Twelve to fourteen centuries after the conversion of England and the mainland, Europe has willingly reverted to the paganism and doomsday philosophy from which these pagans were so anxious to be delivered — and from which the gospel did deliver them and us.

Like the church of Celtic Ireland, the one of Anglo-Saxon England was strongly monastic, and here too the monasteries dedicated themselves to both foreign mission and scholarship. With Ireland, and under the influence of the Irish Christians, Anglo-Saxon England was for some centuries the great centre of missionary activity and of classical learning in Europe. The conversion and re-civilization of large parts of Europe were the work of Cel­tic and Anglo-Saxon monks. Willi­brord, the missionary of the Nether­lands, was one of them. I hope to say more about him and some of his fellow workers next time.