Easily Forgotten Man

On teaching history

Part I

Sometimes I think the deepest anxiety we carry today is about being outnumbered by those who shape the world’s meaning and control the story. They seem define what it means to be human, speak for the future, and stand at the center of the world’s attention. And we who live by a different story begin to feel like oddities—these people devoted to an ancient book, carrying a vision of the human person that no longer registers as plausible, let alone essential.

I am tempted to wonder if we’re being foolish. Whether we’re unneeded. Unnoticed. Easily forgotten. I may wonder if—even if we were to live with conviction, or remember with care, or love what is truly good—nothing would depend on it. Everyone outside this Body will control the story; they’ll be more present to the world as its representatives of humanity; they’ll define what it is to be human and therefore become stumbling blocks to us Christians when we look around and wonder: do we have an outsized view of ourselves if each individual human being has a history that is infinitely grand?

I am tempted to fear that we will look around us and see this sea of people, this mass of humanity stretching further back in time than we Bible believers suppose, numbering in the billions, and that if we take each individual as seriously as we take ourselves, that there won’t be any room for some special providential history given that the propagation or tradition of the story we define ourselves by is pathetically infinitesimal.

But here is what steadies me: this story does not survive because we carry it well. It survives because God Himself has bound it to His Word which actively shapes our Christian, historical, interpreting, imaginations.

At the center of history is not our strength or memory, but the one Word that does not shift with the ages. Scripture is formative and eternal. It confronts us, revealing what we hide, questioning what we assume and speaking with the authority of the One who made us.

And yet there’s something else going on, making us anxious: remembering no longer seems to require a witness. What was once preserved through memory, reverence, and pain is now flattened—replicated, reframed, and circulated without asking anything of us, so we can begin to feel replaceable even in our deepest thoughts by AI or even by the sheer volume of production from other people.

Well here’s a thought: maybe the forced perspective of our obsolescence and the existential crisis that results from AI super-intelligence is a judgment on us and our idols. To prove finally that intelligence and invention aren’t our glory.

I don’t believe we were made to disappear into the crowd or to question the goodness of our inheritance simply because it is small. I believe we were made to remember, to interpret, to suffer rightly for the sake of what is good, to the glory of God.

History is not just information—it is an interpretive act and therefore incurs a responsibility. At its truest, history is a Christian disciple’s faltering attempt to listen to the past with moral attention, and our highest moral priority is first to the text of Scripture. How we do that is with certain methodological keys: All of history—whether sacred or secular—must be read through the lens of Law and Gospel. Without that distinction, we risk reducing history to moral examples or vague providentialism, as if the point were to extract ethical lessons and then to somehow redeem history with our own work. Christ already has redeemed history; our task is to confess this in the midst of ruins.

This is what I want my students to see: The soul becomes diffuse in a world where everything is archived but nothing is received in faith. They are here to receive the Word and bear witness—to enter our story as interpreters and stewards; not to dominate history, but to be shaped by its testimony.

I want them, and whoever reads this to know that this story is already composed to completeness. That is the comfort of history. Knowledge of history is ultimately for our total assurance, our comfort and even our joyful living in it.

Part II

Why read the Bible? You need to know your story. Why read broader histories? To rethink the thoughts of others who have lived on this earth and to fill in the details of our story. The Bible is always God’s thoughts for our reenactment. Our secular histories are, at their most truly historical, man’s thoughts for our reenactment to God’s glory.

But can you read only the Bible and be a good Christian? Maybe. But first, it would be difficult to understand much of it without literacy, not just the ability to read words, but the ability to understand the language, images, and cultural references within it. And the more history you know (that is, the more of other men’s thoughts you know) the more literate you will be. Moreover, you can hardly love your neighbors, or keep any part of the second table of the law, if you show no interest in what is going on in his life and in his mind.

Finally, the student of history is called to humility: learning, and teaching, that every human system, every empire, every idol of reason collapses—and that, in the ruins, man must listen to the Word for his continually life giving redemption.

To be continued…