Why Study the Past? Quotes

“If our exploration of the Church’s history can bring alive the full challenge that this poses to religious and secular tribalism, it will be more than worthwhile. If it can contribute to a certain conversational humility in our garrulous and unself-critical culture, to a better awareness of the labour involved in historical self-understanding, it will have opened a few windows in what can be a dangerously stifling environment. It will have shown a little of what Christians have meant by allying their freedom with the alien sovereignty of God.”
― Rowan Williams, Why Study the Past?: The Quest for the Historical Church

“To engage with the Church’s past is to see something of the Church’s future.”
― Rowan Williams, Why Study the Past?: The Quest for the Historical Church

“It is no accident that a culture such as ours, which is alarmed by challenges to its self-evident superiority, is confused about the past, in some of the ways outlined in our first chapter.27 And it is a major irony that a culture determined to affirm diversity is so poorly equipped to understand the difference embodied in its own history, the distance between past ages and ours.”
― Rowan Williams, Why Study the Past?: The Quest for the Historical Church

“T. S. Eliot, faced with the glib modern claim that ‘we know so much more than our ancestors’, riposted, ‘Yes; and they are what we know.”
― Rowan Williams, Why Study the Past?: The Quest for the Historical Church

“we need to bear in mind that the Reformation debate was not one between self-designated Catholics and Protestants; it was a debate about where the Catholic Church was to be found. ‘Is the Pope a Catholic?’ was not a joke in the sixteenth century.”
― Rowan Williams, Why Study the Past?: The Quest for the Historical Church