Читать книгу Living in Love and Faith - Bishops of the Church of England - Страница 24

The birth and resurrection of Jesus were pivotal moments in the history of the universe: God became incarnate at a particular time and place, the culmination of God’s continuing involvement in the world since it began. In the resurrection of Jesus, the new creation, the kingdom of God, was inaugurated, transforming our understanding of history.

In Jesus, we are given a foretaste of God’s purposes for the whole world, and we long for the fulfilment of those purposes in the new creation. For now, however, we live ‘between the times’. We look around us for signs that point us to the power of God’s redeeming love, and that can help us imagine and understand that love more fully. We also look around us to see the ways that love has been misunderstood, ignored, and betrayed, seeking to understand more fully our own propensity to turn away from that love. And the study of history is part of this. As we pursue our questions about human identity, sexuality and relationships, we can learn a great deal from the ways in which those realities were experienced and lived out by people in the past. We can find new perspectives and role models which act as signposts to God’s new creation. We can find abuses of power which point in quite the other direction. We can see how marginalized and excluded voices have contributed to redemptive change in the course of history. We can learn to understand better the dynamics that have shaped our own cultural worlds.

Learning from history is not straightforward, however. How history is told depends on who is telling it and what questions are asked of it. Historical evidence is always incomplete, provisional and open to different interpretations. We have to ask who produced the evidence, why and for whom. New evidence may change our picture of particular events. Equally, we need to be aware of our own subjectivity as we project our fears or value systems onto other ages and cultures. Nevertheless, studying history invites us to see our own questions and struggles within the longer arc of time and to look for traces of God’s transforming love at work.