“Nothing is sadder than someone who has lost his memory, and the church
which has lost its memory is in the same state of senility.”
The words are by Professor Henry Chadwick who died yesterday. Chadwick, with his brother Owen, represent between them some of the finest written scholarship in Church History in the 20th Century. The Early Church, the first of the Penguin History of the Church Series, was the preferred undergraduate text book when I was in College in the early 70's. The Church in Ancient Society, a massive volume in the Oxford History of the Christian Church series, is written with that elegant, deceptively effortless authority you can almost inhale from the pages. His translation of Augustine's Confessions and his short study of Augustine in the Oxford Past Masters Series combine to present Augustine as both attractive and unsettling as a mind massively learned, passionately engaged, and theologically alight.
It could be argued, and I do so argue, that it is the duty of church historians to keep the church's memory alive, alert and interested in its own story. Only as that story is known, reflected upon, learned from, absorbed as both inspiration and correction, only then is the church in a position to think of its life here, now. Impatience with the past arising from a dangerous privileging of the present, creates a know it all culture, that undervalues what it never tried to understand. In that sense I think reading history, reflecting on the insights of previous generations, learning lessons from past experience, is an important expression of humane reflection on human life – it is humanising. The church historian, a category in which I include all those Christians not so obsessed by contemporary experience that they ignore the historical roots and shoots of our faith, is someone who is interested in receiving the faith humbly though not uncritically. Those with a sense of the history of our faith, and who enquire how people down the generations have tried in their time and in their way to understand who God is, the meaning of Jesus, and how to follow after him faithfully and well, wisely refuse to hijack the story in order to tell only their part of it as if the rest didn't matter.
Confining the list of honours only to Britain, and to those who happen to be on my shelves, Henry Chadwick, Owen Chadwick, R W Southern, Gordon Rupp, Frances Young, Jay Brown, David Bebbington, Tom Torrance, Michael Watts, Gillian Evans, Adrian Hastings, Geoffrey Nuttall, and Rowan Williams – are people who help the church keep its memory alive – lest we suffer from historical senility.
One more thought. Several of us heard the same TV interview with a rather pedantic self appointed guardian of the english language. He was infuriated (not annoyed, upset, angry) – infuriated, when BBC announcers and sports commentators misused the word "oblivious", as in 'Fabregas was oblivious of Van Nistelroy's run into the penalty box'. The word oblivious does not mean totally unaware; it means, so our semantic purist argued, 'to forget that which we used to know'. It would be a pity then, if we were oblivious of those things by which the church has lived and grown down through the centuries. It would also be a pity if we were ignorant of the same, and had never taken the trouble to know them in the first place.
Which brings me back to Henry Chadwick, whose scholarship, sympathy and curiosity about the past, enabled him to help us understand and learn from the great cloud of witnesses who surround us, so that we can run our race with patience….and due humility.
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