Lesa Scholl
25 October 2024
Sarah Irving-Stonebraker. Priests of History: Stewarding the Past in an Ahistoric Age. Zondervan, 2024.
Sarah Irving-Stonebraker’s Priests of History is a call for all of us to recognise our disconnection from our own heritage. Part history, part theology, woven together with autobiography, this book is a provocative and personal exploration of what history means to the Christian church.
Opening with literary descriptions of her own story, Irving-Stonebraker takes us on a journey through her own conversion from atheism to Anglicanism as a researcher in Oxford. By engaging with a broad range of human history—from classical times and the Early Church, to Australia’s fraught history of colonialism—she implores her reader to recognise the problems of what she terms our Ahistoric Age.
The early 21st century, starting from c. 2010, has seen a marked transition in society’s understanding of, and willingness to engage with, history. But Irving-Stonebraker argues that it is this diminishing of history in western culture that is causing the polarisation of ideas. Instead, we must be willing to “critically assess our cultures and societies…not least because these are often the most entrenched aspects—so entrenched, in fact, that we are often oblivious to them.” From Irving-Stonebraker’s perspective, Christian growth and discipleship requires us to embrace our own history and question it, but also use it as a context to understand how we got to where we are now.
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Perhaps the aspect of greatest value in this book, apart from it being more accessible than conventional academic studies, is its understanding of how historical narratives help us to grapple with the complexities of our moment in human history. Irving-Stonebraker is absolutely right that our ability to understand history correlates with a sense that we are “losing the ability to discuss and disagree peaceably about the past.” The tacit implication is that this inability equally impacts our ability to discuss and disagree about our present. One of the important arguments made is that our understanding of our present becomes stronger when it is laid on the foundation of understanding our past. This is particularly pertinent in making decisions on ethical matters.
To a degree, this book seems anti-modern. Irving-Stonebraker is clear that she believes the “hyperindividualistic modes of living” of our time encourage us to disconnect from the sacred, from God and from each other. Indeed, her arguments are resonant with many at the rise of modernism at the end of the nineteenth century, particularly with her use of “atomisation.” But while at times she seems to adopt a hyper-orthodox approach, especially in regard to some doctrines of the church, she doesn’t suggest that we need to go back entirely in practices, but more that we need to use our understanding of the past to critique and reflect upon our current views with authenticity.
There are some aspects in which it would have been helpful to include some more recent context. For example, in her timeframe from 2010, with the apparent move away from interest in and valuing of history through university enrolment statistics, it would have been useful to contextualise this in terms of the Global Financial Crisis, the cost of university degrees, and the need to be job ready on graduation.
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Many students might not major in history, but this does not mean they aren’t interested. Also, a more direct allusion also could have been made between the “cancel culture” of our century and the iconoclasm of the Reformation periods in the church.
That being said, these factors fail to diminish the urgent and necessary responsibility placed on readers to relearn how to value and tend to our heritage—to be the priests of our history.
Lesa Scholl is an honorary professor at the University of Exeter and a fellow of the Royal Historical Society.
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