Quotes About History

He could leave the land in ruins and remain beloved. He had made history. He was the end of history.

The Phanerozoic Carbon Cycle

Thus down the ages, millions suffered and died. Bad art and disastrous theology had prepared the way for Hitler and his 'final solution'.

Three hundred years ago, during the Age of Enlightenment, the coffee house became the center of innovation.

Ours is a historical faith, and to uproot the Bible from its historical contexts is self-contradictory.

the passionate defense of the Bible as a "history book" among the more conservative wings of Christianity, despite intentions, isn't really an act of submission to God; it is making God submit to us. In its most extreme forms, making God look like us is what the Bible calls idolatry.

BIBLICAL ARCHAEOLOGISTS are about as certain as you can be about these things that the conquest of Canaan as the Bible describes did not happen: no mass invasion from the outside by an Israelite army, and no extermination of Canaanites as God commanded.

The Bible—from back to front—is the story of God told from the limited point of view of real people living at a certain place and time.

All attempts to put the past into words are interpretations of the past, not "straight history." There is no such thing. Anywhere. Including the Bible.

Christ is the ultimate example of how God enters the messiness of history to save his people.

So much can be learned from other traditions. In the long history of the Christian church, so many different, even conflicting, points of view have been embraced as true and valuable.

There's an irony: the passionate defense of the Bible as a "history book" among the more conservative wings of Christianity, despite intentions, isn't really an act of submission to God; it is making God submit to us. In

There's an irony: the passionate defense of the Bible as a "history book" among the more conservative wings of Christianity, despite intentions, isn't really an act of submission to God; it is making God submit to us.

It is only to admit that what we have cannot be explained as an early (second-millennium-BC) document written essentially by one person (Moses). Rather, the Pentateuch has a diverse compositional history spanning many centuries and was brought to completion after the return from exile.

Transposing the past is an act of wisdom. It is not scripted. It can't be predicted.

Strict legalism is a myth. Laws have a knack for ambiguity, and it only takes a moment of reflection to see that they have to be interpreted, which isn't exactly breaking news. The entire history of Judaism and Christianity bears witness to people of faith doing just that.

Over the years I've grown more and more convinced that "storytelling" is a better way of understanding what the Bible is doing with the past than "history writing.

Myths also played a role in national origins stories.

What could be more normal than for different people, living at different times, in different places, who wrote about the past for different reasons and to different audiences, to produce different versions on the past? Nothing. And that's what we see in the Bible.

Wisdom leads us to dialogues with the past. It doesn't lead us back to the past.

Wherever biblical writers talk about the past, we should expect them to be shaping the past as well.

These first seven books are Israel's stories of their deep past, or "origins stories" as they are sometimes called. They don't exist for entertainment or for idle curiosities about the past (and definitely not as fodder for children's Bible lessons). They explain how things came to be, why things are the way they are, and most important, how Israel got to be Israel—a kingdom with a land of its own.

The period of the monarchy is not only the meat of the Old Testament narrative of Israel. It's also the period when Israel's grand narrative was written.

White privilege is not an overt act of racism but the simple observation that people of white skin are historically and culturally dominant, and therefore seen as the standard or norm.