A wag once commented that the difference between Americans and Englishmen is that Englishmen think that one hundred miles is a long way, and Americans think one hundred years is a long time.
And of course in one sense a hundred years is a long time, or, put more accurately, time enough. Much can happen; we can see an empire rise and fall, we might note the invention of the airplane on one end and a lunar landing at the other. George Washington traveled in much the same way that Julius Caesar did, but then, suddenly, a century later locomotives began to transform the landscape.
But in another way, in a biblical sense, one hundred years represents hardly any time at all. We miss this because we have a tendency to measure everything in terms of our own lived experience. But this is to adopt the historical understanding of fruit flies, each generation blindly replacing the last. When we stop telling stories, when we stop reading history, when we lose our sense of place in time, we discover at that point that we have succumbed to a kind of chronological vertigo. After its Warholian fifteen minutes of fame, every event is ancient, all things are in yesterday’s newspaper, and not surprisingly, cultural ennui sets in. Nothing is connected in history anymore, and being wired to the Internet is not the same thing.
When I was a boy, I recall a newspaper photo that ran in 1965 at the centennial of the close of the War Between the States. The photograph was of a reunion of Confederate soldiers — or at least men who had been present in the war. They had been drummer boys, or had lied about their age, but they had been there. And it was not that long ago.
In each of our towns, there are people who are one hundred years old, born in 1899.* They, when they were babies, could easily have been held by men or women who were one hundred years old, born in 1799. A mere two lifetimes take us back to the early years of our nation. Four lifetimes and we are in 1599. Twenty-one lifetimes takes us back to the time of Christ. It was not that long ago.
I once read an interview with a Mr. Tyler who had been begotten when his father was in his eighties. The really odd thing about this was that the same thing had happened with his father, who had been begotten when the grandfather was in his eighties. That remarkable grandfather was our President Tyler. In the interview, this man told of the time when he was on a flight over the Pacific, and was able to say to the one seated beside him, “As my grandfather said to his good friend Patrick Henry . . .” It was not that long ago.
Our lack of an historical sense of place affects our understanding of biblical history. We view the four hundred years between Malachi and Matthew as an unbridgeable gap, but we do not really think about history the same way as those who lived during that time. And then falling in the opposite direction, we turn the pages of the Old Testament, wondering at how the children of Israel could have fallen away from the Lord just one page after God delivered them so remarkably. But we fail to realize that the one page represents a significant fraction of our entire national history.
This in turn distorts our thinking our perception of the scriptural examples of God’s blessings and chastisements that He brought upon Israel. We do not understand the cycle of history because we read the Bible as a series of disconnected stories, each standing in their own right. Thus we do not understand the biblical patterns of the rise and fall of anything. Further, this is related to our failure to connect what we know of “secular” history to the biblical accounts. How many Bible readers connect the book of Esther with the time of the great conflict between Greece and Persia? Or think of Socrates as living roughly in the same world as Malachi? Or compare the warfare of the Iliad with the warfare of the Old Testament? Or think of Dido in the Aeneid as belonging to the same race (and possibly the same family) as Jezebel?
We compartmentalize far too readily. We file information away as though it might only be needed in games of Trivial Pursuit. But as we read, and study, we must labor to draw connections, and in order to do this we must recover a strong understanding of God’s sovereignty and the lordship of Jesus Christ — doctrines which make it possible to draw connections. Our failures in these areas are the result, not of a mere mistake, but of our abandonment of a biblical understanding of God and His Christ.
The time between Malachi and Matthew was, in the worldview of the ancients, bridged. Much smaller periods of time are, in our worldview, a impassable gulf. Patrick Henry and I live much closer together in time than Malachi and John the Baptist did, but the two prophets inhabited the same world, and Henry and I do not. This, incidentally, is not Henry’s fault — he labored to stop it from happening.
But he was overwhelmed, his biblical pattern of thinking about history was ignored, and the result is that we have many historical pieces to pick up. And when they are picked up, they still need to be put back together.