History

It's just one damn thing after another.

I’ve been flexing on Constantine since 1989

I remember sitting in the courtyard of Fuller Theological Seminary, having lunch with Professor James Wm. “Jim” McClendon. He was semi-retired after a career teaching at the Graduate Theological Union in San Francisco, and had followed his spouse, Nancey Murphy, to Fuller, where he taught the occasional doctoral seminar. I had the good fortune of being invited into one of those seminars.

I was professing to him my love of history, and he said, “You know what they say about history? It’s just one damn thing after another.”

That quip, not original to him, stuck with me.

I’ve loved history as long as I can remember. For most of my time at college, I was a history major, but I felt lost in the crowd of over 100 history majors in my class. (In a sign of the times, the current number of history majors is about 30 per class.) After my term in Rome (see photo above), I returned to campus and petitioned to change my major to Classics, which was approved. Classics, of course, is also the study of history.

Although my books have been about contemporary topics — youth ministry, prayer, and the emerging church movement — any reader of those books will notice they’re rife with history. And more recently, since I was visited by the Muse during a hypnic, diarrhetic state on a Sun Country flight home from Costa Rica, I have been immersed in the early fourth century. Having completed the first draft of a trilogy set in those years, I’ve turned my attention to the early fifth century, and a man who stood on a column for decades near what is now the border between Turkey and Syria.

And let me tell you, life then wasn’t so great. Dinner was lentil beans soaked in salt water — that was dinner every night. Plagues swept through the countryside at regular intervals. Fires were common, as were droughts and floods. Lots of people thought the world was coming to an end.

But we don’t have to look back fifteen centuries to find a time when things were falling apart. The last two weekends, I’ve visited cities rich with history — history of times when the U.S. was on the brink of collapse.