Buddhist Catholic Contemplative Evangelical General Christian Hindu Jewish Latter-day Saint Muslim New Visions Progressive Christian

Beliefs

Topics

Columnists

Resource Library

Research Tools

Video

Podcasts

Thought Readers

Faith In Media Tracker

Newsletters

Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In Subscription Support

Follow Patheos

Home
Evangelical
What Happened When I Taught Historical Thinking at Church

What Happened When I Taught Historical Thinking at Church

Last updated on: August 12, 2021 at 1:46 am by Chris Gehrz

What Happened When I Taught Historical Thinking at Church 2021-08-11T08:48:17-04:00 Chris Gehrz

LOGO Patheos Explore the world's faith through different perspectives on religion and spirituality! Patheos has the views of the prevalent religions and spiritualities of the world.

Today I’m happy to welcome to the Bench Jonathan W. Wilson, who holds a PhD in history from Syracuse University and bachelor’s degrees in history and business from LeTourneau University. An adjunct professor at universities in Pennsylvania and New Jersey, Jonathan blogs about teaching history at Blue Book Diaries and tweets at @jnthnwwlsn.

Last month, I had the opportunity to try something new at my little Episcopal church.

I proposed an adult formation workshop in three sessions, to be held, both for convenience and for safety, on Zoom. (In another church tradition, “formation” might be translated as “discipleship.”) I offered to facilitate a conversation about historical thinking. I wanted to talk about history itself, rather than any specific historical topic.

At a time when public debates over history are fierce (and often very embarrassing), I’ve come to believe that one of the urgent tasks facing historians is to help our fellow citizens understand what history’s all about in the first place. We need to help people step back and gain some perspective before, or at least while, they charge into partisan debates.

Jonathan Zoom-ing with the participants in his workshop

But writing promotional materials for this workshop, trying to explain what “historical thinking” means, why it matters to Christians, and why people should care enough about it to attend, was challenging. Grasping for a provocative title, I picked “Seeing Dead People,” which I intended as a whimsical metaphor—although some people, as I should have foreseen, took it literally.

This would be an experiment. When the time came, six people took part.

Week 1: Understanding History

In the first session, which lasted an hour, I adapted a presentation I often give to undergraduate students at the beginning of a college course. The key goal was to introduce the idea that history is a process of investigation and reasoning based on evidence, not a take-it-or-leave-it restatement of received facts.

First, I asked participants to play a sort of parlor game I called “The History of the 2000s.” This was a simplified Zoom-friendly version of a classroom activity I have described elsewhere. Participants made lists of things—events, people, trends, cultural experiences, etc.—they would want to include in a future history of our last two decades. We compared lists and talked about why we chose the things we did. Then we debated how “true” a future history based on our combined list would be.

The point of this exercise was to grasp that creating any historical account involves a similar process of sifting through infinitely complex human experiences, making judgments about causation and significance.

From that point, it was easy to introduce the crucial distinction between primary and secondary sources as bases of historical knowledge. As usual, that involved stressing that primary sources are not necessarily more true than secondary sources; they’re simply more immediate to the past.

To illustrate that idea, I presented participants with two photographs.

First, I showed them Joseph Caxton’s 1839 daguerreotype of Philadelphia’s Central High School, which may be the first photograph ever taken in the United States. As a photograph, I pointed out, this extraordinary source has a “realness” beyond anything we would get from a painting, drawing, or textual description. Yet what could we learn from it as a piece of historical evidence? Participants discussed possible answers to that question. The gist of most answers was “not much.” Then I showed them a skyline photograph I took myself a few years ago in Philadelphia. The image was far sharper and more detailed, but fundamentally, participants observed, its limitations as a primary source were similar.

Jonathan’s photo of the Philadelphia skyline. Click on the link above to see the 1839 daguerrotype with which he contrasted it

I summed up this session with a set of basic principles for historical thinking: History is not the same thing as the past. No single story can be the final word; no human has a God’s-eye view of the past. However, facts plus a valid interpretation can equal imperfect (or incomplete) truth.

Week 2: Understanding Historical Controversies

In the second session, I wanted to present a more explicitly Christian perspective on historical thinking. I also planned (with some anxiety) to tackle the problem of politically contested histories.

Invoking our Episcopal tradition, I presented participants with two of the questions in the baptismal covenant printed in the Book of Common Prayer. These questions, along with others, are put to the entire congregation whenever someone is baptized or confirmed in the Episcopal Church: “Will you seek and serve Christ in all persons, loving your neighbor as yourself?” and “Will you strive for justice and peace among all people, and respect the dignity of every human being?”

(The appointed response to each question is “I will, with God’s help.”)

I asked participants to reflect on what it would look like for a work of history to help us seek Christ in all persons, strive for justice and peace, or respect the dignity of every human being. How could a historian help us uphold those vows?

Eventually, I used this discussion as an excuse to talk about the difference between a “great man” approach to history and the impulse of many contemporary historians to write “history from below,” recognizing the importance of ordinary and marginalized people.

Finally, we turned to assessing historical controversies.

Here I introduced another conceptual tool, the “Five Cs of Historical Thinking” identified by Thomas Andrews and Flannery Burke: change over time, context, causality, contingency, and complexity. Then I showed participants a couple of potentially tendentious (but not explicitly partisan) popular historical claims. I invited participants to assess how well these claims exemplified each of the Five Cs.

Participants thoughtfully discussed both strengths and weaknesses of each claim. In the process, they effectively demonstrated that good historical thinking can be as much about the virtues of the reader as about those of the text—and can’t always be reduced to a right-or-wrong proposition about accuracy.

Week 3: Putting History to Use

In our final session, returning to the difference between primary and secondary sources, I tried to explain how archival research actually works.

To anchor this discussion, I showed a photograph of researchers working in a special-collections reading room. I pointed out the Hollinger boxes in the photograph and explained their function. I noted that the researchers, contrary to popular expectation, weren’t wearing gloves. And I fielded a question from a participant who astutely observed that one of the researchers seemed to be taking a digital photograph of a manuscript.

Then I asked participants what they would look for in a book—say, one they found on a shelf at Barnes and Noble—as specific indications of thoughtfully conducted secondary and primary source research. We discussed features like endnotes, bibliographies and bibliographic essays, translator’s notes, and acknowledgments. I stressed the last feature as a tool for assessing whether an author participated in scholarly discussions, i.e., paid attention to the work of other experts.

(This led helpfully to a participant’s question about what I thought of authors like Doris Kearns Goodwin, Stephen Ambrose, and David McCullough, whose work, she observed, seemed to be based on extensive research but not necessarily much engagement with scholarly debates.)

Finally, we turned to the great challenge of this whole workshop series: history and Christian spirituality.

Returning to antebellum Philadelphia, I showed participants what may be the first American selfie, a daguerreotype made by Robert Cornelius, then about thirty years old, in the yard of his family’s lamp store in the fall of 1839.

Self-portrait of Robert Cornelius (1839) – Library of Congress

I asked how people experienced this amazing image—what impressions it gave them. Some observed that it feels strangely fresh; we know the man in the photograph has been dead for generations, but his eye contact is electrifying. One participant also observed, however, that we see young Cornelius through an eerie scrim of darkness and wear.

I proposed that history’s proper relation to our spiritual practices may be a matter of truly feeling the reality of the people of the past, as when we feel the weight of Robert Cornelius’s reality (albeit “through a glass, darkly”) through his self-portrait.

Anglican spirituality especially stresses the implications of the sacraments and of Christ’s incarnation: God’s presence in tangible and mundane human life. Though long dead, Robert Cornelius, we believe, is made in the image of God, and he also shares with us the same humanity that Christ shared. That fundamental fact is of profound spiritual importance whenever we encounter anyone from the past, whatever else we may think of their character.

To recognize this from a Christian standpoint, I suggested, is a way of participating in the activity history teachers know as historical empathy. So I explained Jason Endacott’s and Sarah Brooks’s model for historical empathy as a three-step process, in which we study context, take a perspective, and connect emotionally (through similarity and difference).

Evaluations

My main source of regret about this series is that it ended up being too short. Each topic, I thought, had a lot of promise, and many of the approaches I tried for broaching these topics was basically successful considering the time constraint. But the series could easily have been a full weeklong seminar retreat—ideally with time allowed for reading, reflection, and prayer.

Upon consideration, my wish for this event is that “Seeing Dead People” might somehow, someday, become an early pilot program for something more ambitious. Exactly how that might work, I’m not sure; I think most of the content is sound enough, but it’s hard to imagine successfully marketing a larger version of this event. Merely being able to run it as a three-hour series on Zoom at my local church this year was probably a fluke.

In any case, any expanded program would be much better if it involved more than one facilitator as well as opportunities for hands-on activities.

I’m left, then, thinking that “Seeing Dead People” is not so much a model for future success as a question aimed at other Christian history educators.

Can we try a variety of experiments like this? Can we find ways to bring historical investigation into the life of the church as something more than an instrument of adversarial apologetics or politics? Conversely, can our churches be dissemination points for humane historical thinking in our larger communities?

I hope I’ll have opportunities to collaborate with other history communicators on such projects in the future.

Previous Post

August 11, 2021

Who Will Be Saved? – The Question That Divides Evangelicals from Mainline Protestants

Next Post

August 13, 2021 Writing The Cold War: What Surprised Me - Continued

Browse Our Archives

Select a Category abolitionism Abortion Abraham Joshua Heschel Abraham Kuyper Abraham Lincoln Academia Activism Adam Renberg Advent Adventist africa African American Religion Agnes Howard Albert Camus American History American Religious History American Revolution American West Anabaptists Ancient History Andrea Turpin Andrei Tarkovsky Anglicanism Annales Ansley Lillian Quiros anti-Catholicism Antisemitism Anxious Bench apologetics Apparitions Arash Azizi Archaeology archives art Artificial Intelligence Asia Asian Americans Augustine Authors Bad Bunny Baptism Baptists Barack Obama Battle of Hastings Benjamin Franklin Bernard-Henri Levy Beth Allison Barr Beth Moore Bethany Mannon Bible Bill Cunningham Billy Graham Black Music Bob Dylan Body Boenhoffer Books Breastfeeding Bruce Springsteen C.S. Lewis Calvinism Cancel Culture Capitalism Carmelites Catholicism Cedric Robinson Cesar Chavez Charismaticism charity Charles Dickens Charles Lindbergh Che Guevara Chicago Children Chinese Christianity Chris Gehrz Christ Christian death Christian Higher Education Christian life Christian Nation Christian Nationalism Christianity Today Christmas Church life Church Practice cinema Civil Religion Civil Rights Movement Civil War civility Classics Climate Change Cold War Colonial Mexico colonialism Comer Communism community complementarianism Conference on Faith and History Congregationalism Conspiracies Conspiracy Conversion Narratives Coronavirus Costa Rica Council of Nicaea Covid-19 Creation Critical Race Theory Crusades Culture culture wars Daniel K. Williams David Barton David Swartz Death Ways death with dignity DEI democracy Democratic Party Devotion Digital Age Diplomacy discipleship diversity Donald Trump Drama Dua Lipa Early Church early modern Early modern Catholicism Easter Eastern Christianity economic exploitation Education elections Elie Wiesel Elizabeth II Elizabeth Taylor emotions Empire Engineering England enslavement Entertainment Episcopal Church Erica Ramirez eschatology Eurocentrism Evangelicalism Evangelicals Exegesis Family Feminism Film Flannery O'Connor folk music Food Foreign Policy founding fathers Franciscans Franciscus Junius fundamentalism Funerals G.K. Chesterton Gender Genocide genre geography George W. Bush George Washington George Whitefield Global Christianity Global church Grief Guadalupe Guest Post guest post gun control gun violence Gustavo Gutierrez Hamid Dabashi Harold John Ockenga Harvest Hate Hawaiian Christianity Healing health care Heather Cox Richardson Hell Heresy Hermeneutics Higher Education Hinduism Hippocratic oath Historical Fiction Historical Methodology Historical Profession Historical Profession Historical Theology Historical Thinking historiography Holidays Holocaust horror movies Human rights Humanitarian Work humanities Hummingbirds Hungary hymns Imago Dei Immigration Injustice Interviews Iran Islam Islamophobia Israel Ivan's Childhood Jacob Randolph James Bratt Janine Giordano Drake Japanese history Japanese Literature Jean Paul Sartre Jesse Miranda Jesus Jesus Christ Jimmy Carter Joan Baez Joan Didion Joanne Freeman João B. Chaves Joao Chaves Joey Cochran John Calvin John Fea John Tillotson John Turner Johnny Cash Jonathan Edwards Jonathan Tran Joseph Smith Josh Howerton Journalism Jr. Judaism Jürgen Moltmann Just War Justice Justin Brierley Karl Barth Katelyn Beaty koi ponds Kris Kristofferson Kristin Kobes Du Mez Latin American Religious History Latino Americans Lectio Divina Leisure Lent Leonard Cohen liberal arts liberalism Liberation Theology Linda Ronstadt Lisa Clark Diller Literature Lou Reed Lynchings Lynneth Miller Renberg Mainline Protestantism Malcolm Foley Marilyn Monroe Maritime history Mark Noll Marriage Martin Luther Martin Luther King Martyrdom Marxism Mary Masih Alinejad mass shootings material culture medieval Christianity Medieval Ethiopia Melissa Borja memory Mennonites Mental Health Mental Illness Methodism Mexican Americans Mexicans Mike Madrid Miles Mullin Min Jin Lee Miscarriage Missionaries Mister Rogers Mitt Romney modernity Monasticism Mormonism Motherhood Mothers of the Church Moving Music Musicals Nadya Williams Nahua Christianity Native Americans Natsume Sōseki New Contributor New England New Year New York Nico Non-Violent Protest Orthodoxy pacifism Paleo Evangelicals Palestinians Parenting Patti Smith Paul Kingsnorth Pedro Calderón de la Barca Pentecostalism Philip Jenkins Phillis Wheatley physician-assisted suicide pilgrimage Pilgrims pluralism Plutocracy Poetry Politics Pope Francis Pope Leo XIV post-modernism prayer preaching Presbyterians prosperity gospel Protest Public history Publishing Puritans purity culture Quakers race Race Massacres Racial Capitalism racial reconciliation racialization Racism Raha Bahloulipour Re-Enchantment reading Reformation Refugees religion and the university religion and war Religious Freedom Religious Nones Religious Pluralism Religious Symbols religious violence Republican Party Revival Rita Coolidge Ritual Roger Williams Roman Catholic church Royalty Russell Moore same-sex marriage Sarah Irving-Stonebraker Scandinavia Science Science and Technology Scopes trial Scriptural Interpretation secularism Selena Quintanilla seminary Seventh-Day Adventists sexual morality Sexuality Sikhs Silence slaveholders theology Slavery Slavoj Zizek social justice Social Media Southern Baptist Convention Southern Religion Spain Spiritual Autobiography Spiritual but not religious Spiritual Discipline Sports Stanley Hauerwas Suffering Summer Camps Sunday Night Odds and Ends Supernatural Supreme Court Syriac Christianity Tal Howard Taylor Swift Teaching Technology Television Thanksgiving The Beatles The Mission theater TheoBros Theology Thomas Dixon Thomas Jefferson Thomas Kidd Thomas Merton Tim Gloege Tim Walz Tom Holland Tourism tradition Tragedy Translation Transnationalism Travel Trump Ukraine Uncategorized Unitarians United Methodist Church US History Vanessa Chan Velvet Underground Verónica A. Gutiérrez Veronica Gutierrez Vikings Violence Virgin Mary Virtue Virtue ethics Visions Voting War WCTU Wendell Berry Westminster Assembly White Evangelicalism Wildfires Winnie the Pooh Witches women Women in Ministry Women's and Gender Studies Work Worship writing Yasunari Kawabata Zena Hitz

Select a Month October 2026 September 2026 August 2026 July 2026 June 2026 May 2026 April 2026 March 2026 February 2026 January 2026 December 2025 November 2025 October 2025 September 2025 August 2025 July 2025 June 2025 May 2025 April 2025 March 2025 February 2025 January 2025 December 2024 November 2024 October 2024 September 2024 August 2024 July 2024 June 2024 May 2024 April 2024 March 2024 February 2024 January 2024 December 2023 November 2023 October 2023 September 2023 August 2023 July 2023 June 2023 May 2023 April 2023 March 2023 February 2023 January 2023 December 2022 November 2022 October 2022 September 2022 August 2022 July 2022 June 2022 May 2022 April 2022 March 2022 February 2022 January 2022 December 2021 November 2021 October 2021 September 2021 August 2021 July 2021 June 2021 May 2021 April 2021 March 2021 February 2021 January 2021 December 2020 November 2020 October 2020 September 2020 August 2020 July 2020 June 2020 May 2020 April 2020 March 2020 February 2020 January 2020 December 2019 November 2019 October 2019 September 2019 August 2019 July 2019 June 2019 May 2019 April 2019 March 2019 February 2019 January 2019 December 2018 November 2018 October 2018 September 2018 August 2018 July 2018 June 2018 May 2018 April 2018 March 2018 February 2018 January 2018 December 2017 November 2017 October 2017 September 2017 August 2017 July 2017 June 2017 May 2017 April 2017 March 2017 February 2017 January 2017 December 2016 November 2016 October 2016 September 2016 August 2016 July 2016 June 2016 May 2016 April 2016 March 2016 February 2016 January 2016 December 2015 November 2015 October 2015 September 2015 August 2015 July 2015 June 2015 May 2015 April 2015 March 2015 February 2015 January 2015 December 2014 November 2014 October 2014 September 2014 August 2014 July 2014 June 2014 May 2014 April 2014 March 2014 February 2014 January 2014 December 2013 November 2013 October 2013 September 2013 August 2013 July 2013 June 2013 May 2013 April 2013 March 2013 February 2013 January 2013 December 2012 November 2012 October 2012 September 2012 August 2012 July 2012 June 2012 May 2012

TAKE THE

Religious Wisdom Quiz

Who was Boaz's kinsman-redeemer?

Select your answer to see how you score.

Naomi Elimelech Unnamed relative Ruth