There have been plenty of warnings about the dangers of ignorance of one's heritage and history. George Santayana's aphorism is notorious ("those who do not learn from the past are condemned to repeat it"). In our recent experience tyrants have arisen deliberately attempting to remake the past exert greater control over a compliant population in the present (think Soviet and Eastern European Bloc communism). We see it before our eyes as Islamic fundamentalists attempt to obliterate the cultural heritage of former civilisations in order to exert more extreme and complete control over their subject peoples.
The Scriptures are replete with injunctions, exhortations, and warnings not only not to forget the past, but also to reckon with it, and live in terms of it. In the past, God's people see revealed His faithfulness to them; they also see the outcome when a generation arises which forgets what has gone before and what He and our forbears have respectively done. It is our duty to observe, learn, and act appropriately.
Unfortunately and dangerously there are many modern Christian confessions which glory in a studied ignorance of the past.
For these Christian existentialists it is all about the "now" and experiencing God in the present. They are like children. We have to reckon with this grave reality: the Christian religion is as old as the world itself. Believers who do not reckon with this and embrace it constantly are left ignorant of God and His will and are prisoners of every changing whim and fancy. Such Christians are governed by the newspaper and the TeeVee, not the Scriptures.
T. David Gordon drives this reality home:
The Christian religion is old, like it or not. It is not a new thing: it is two thousand years old in its current form, and its roots in the religion of Abraham and Moses go back almost another two thousand years. And it will continue to be here until history concludes at the return of Christ.
Christianity is not monogenerational, nor is it monocultural; it transcends generations and particular cultures as a global religion. Similarly, it is communal, not individual. We once confessed belief in "the holy catholic church, the communion of saints", but this would require acknowledging the existence of a many-generational communion of followers of Christ. As our athletes remind us: "There is no 'I' in 'team'." [T. David Gordon, Why Johnny Can't Sing Hymns: How Pop Culture Rewrote the Hymnal (Phillipsburg: P&R Publishing, 2010), p.91f.]
This reality with which we have to deal sets Belief apart from Unbelief. The modern world has gloried in its rootlessness. Christians glory in history and eschatology: in that which was, and is, and shall be. We salute and glorify the God who "was, and is, and is to come", the God Who lives before "all time, and now and forevermore". This grounds us in the warp and woof of His elect people throughout all time. It is with this consciousness of the past, the present, and the future that we live now.
The sensibilities of pop culture and those of Christianity are almost entirely opposed to each other, and when we attempt to force Christianity into the constraints of an individual-affirming, consumerist, monogenerational, immanentistic genre, it simply won't fit. Inevitably, the content is shaped by the form into which it is put, and the message becomes a casual, consumerist "Hey, what do you think about this?" rather than a call to "repentance that leads to life" (Acts 11:18). (Ibid.)
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