ARE CHRISTIANS ON THE RIGHT SIDE OF HISTORY?

Culture
Written By Neal Hardin
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Key Facts

  • According to Google Trends, the phrase “the right side of history” has seen increasing growth as a search term in the United States during the last couple of years. [1] The same is true for the phrase “the wrong side of history.” [2]

  • The view that history is an inevitable march towards progress and enlightenment is sometimes called “Whig history,” a term coined by British historian Herbert Butterfield. [3]

Key Scriptures

  • Psalms 90:1-4 “Lord, you have been our dwelling place in all generations. Before the mountains were brought forth, or ever you had formed the earth and the world, from everlasting to everlasting you are God. You return man to dust and say, "Return, O children of man!" For a thousand years in your sight are but as yesterday when it is past, or as a watch in the night.” 

  • Proverbs 27:1 “Do not boast about tomorrow, for you do not know what a day may bring.”

  • James 4:13-17 “Come now, you who say, "Today or tomorrow we will go into such and such a town and spend a year there and trade and make a profit"—yet you do not know what tomorrow will bring. What is your life? For you are a mist that appears for a little time and then vanishes. Instead you ought to say, "If the Lord wills, we will live and do this or that." As it is, you boast in your arrogance. All such boasting is evil. So whoever knows the right thing to do and fails to do it, for him it is sin.” 

  • Hebrews 13:8 “Jesus Christ is the same yesterday and today and forever.”

  • Ecclesiastes 3:1 “For everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven”

  • Ecclesiastes 1:9-11 “What has been is what will be, and what has been done is what will be done, and there is nothing new under the sun. Is there a thing of which it is said, "See, this is new"? It has been already in the ages before us. There is no remembrance of former things, nor will there be any remembrance of later things yet to be among those who come after.”

  • Isaiah 46:8-11 “Remember this and stand firm, recall it to mind, you transgressors, remember the former things of old; for I am God, and there is no other; I am God, and there is none like me, declaring the end from the beginning and from ancient times things not yet done, saying, 'My counsel shall stand, and I will accomplish all my purpose,' calling a bird of prey from the east, the man of my counsel from a far country. I have spoken, and I will bring it to pass; I have purposed, and I will do it.”

  • 1 Peter 4:7 “The end of all things is at hand; therefore be self-controlled and sober-minded for the sake of your prayers.”

  • Romans 15:4 “For whatever was written in former days was written for our instruction, that through endurance and through the encouragement of the Scriptures we might have hope.” 

  • Ecclesiastes 3:14-15 “I perceived that whatever God does endures forever; nothing can be added to it, nor anything taken from it. God has done it, so that people fear before him. That which is, already has been; that which is to be, already has been; and God seeks what has been driven away.”

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Application

In recent years, we have become familiar with the phrases “the right/wrong side of history.” It was a favorite phrase of President Obama, and, just recently, Senators who acquitted President Trump were said to be on the “wrong side of history.” Likewise, with the recent passage of the Equality Act in the House of Representatives, those from the LGBTQ+ community have said that passing the bill will put our nation on the “right side of history.”

But what does it mean to be on the right or wrong side of history? Does this way of thinking fit with the Christian understanding of history and morality?

Different Views of Time

One excellent article in Business Insider goes through the different views of time that various cultures around the world hold to. Generally speaking, Eastern cultures tend to hold to a cyclical view of time. This emphasizes the repeating cycles that we observe in life, like the rising and setting of the sun every day, the seasons, or the orbits of celestial bodies. In a cyclical view, there is plenty of time. Things will tend to go on as they always have. Western culture, on the other hand, tends to hold to a linear view of time. In a linear view, time is a commodity that is passing by like water in a river. It is something which can be used or wasted. Time progresses towards the future, which is determined by actions taken in the present.

Thus, views about being on the right or wrong side of history heavily rely on a Western or linear view of time. For there to be a right or wrong side to history, there has to be progress towards a certain end. Such claims specifically make a moral judgment about the past in light of present standards, or it judges current events in light of how they think future generations will judge the present.

The Bible’s View of Time

The Bible combines elements of both the cyclical and linear views of time.

The cyclical view of time is built into creation itself: the sun and the day/night cycle; the lunar cycle gives us months; the four seasons created by the earth’s tilt and orbit around the sun create a yearly cycle (Genesis 1:14-18, 8:22, Psalms 104:19). The Lord also declared the Sabbath holy, creating weekly cycles (Genesis 2:3, Exodus 20:8).

The Bible was written from an Eastern perspective and often exemplifies an Eastern or cyclical view of time. For example, Solomon wrote in the book of Ecclesiastes 1:9-11, 

“What has been is what will be, and what has been done is what will be done, and there is nothing new under the sun. Is there a thing of which it is said, ‘See, this is new’? It has been already in the ages before us. There is no remembrance of former things, nor will there be any remembrance of later things yet to be among those who come after.”

This kind of mentality emphasizes the cyclical nature of life. Nothing is new under the sun and, “for everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven” (Ecclesiastes 3:1).

On the other hand, we also see elements of a linear/Western view of time in Scripture. When God made everything in Genesis 1, it is described as an ordered progression of days. When God acts in history, he acts at particular moments with particular people over the course of time. The history of Israel is full of events of God acting within time, whether we are talking about the call of Abraham, the Exodus, the Conquest of the Promised Land, or the Exile. Scholar C. Elmer Chen writes that in Scripture, “Time is conceived primarily as a context for specific events rather than as an abstract dimension...It is inseparably linked to God’s acts and humankind’s response in the story of creation, from its beginning to its consummation.” There is an arc and a progression of time and history over which God is sovereign (Acts 1:7). God both acts within time and yet seems to not be bound by it (2 Peter 3:8).

The best example of a linear view of time is the gospel itself. The incarnation of Christ was foretold beforehand (Genesis 3:15, Isaiah 7:14), and his life, death, and resurrection were all a part of God’s foreordained plan to redeem us from sin (Acts 2:23; Ephesians 1:9-10, 3:8-11; 1 Peter 1:20-21). Likewise, God predestined us and so ordered all these things “before the foundation of the world” (Ephesians 1:4). Since then, Christians have lived in the “last days” and the “last hour” (2 Timothy 3:1, Hebrews 1:2, 2 Peter 3:3, 1 John 2:18). As Christians living today in 2021, we not only can look to the past and what God has done, we can also look to the future, where we can expect an eternal kingdom and inheritance with Christ (Ephesians 1:11-14, Colossians 1:13, 1 Peter 1:3-5). Yet, in the present, we live in an evil age (Galatians 1:4, 1 John 5:19), and it is our knowledge of God’s actions in history and our future hope that give us comfort and purpose in the here and now (Romans 8:18-25).

Time and Morality

When we hear the phrase “the right/wrong side of history,” this comes with a moral judgment. As was mentioned previously, this saying implies a moral judgment of the past in light of the present, or it judges the present in light of how we think future generations will judge us. From a biblical perspective, to make moral judgments in this manner is flawed for a couple of reasons:

  1. It presumes to know how future generations will judge the present. This is why I used the phrase “how we think future generations will judge us.” No one can really know how societal norms will develop or change over time. To presume to know such things with certainty is prideful and arrogant (Proverbs 27:1, James 4:13-17). 

  2. Likewise, it can also presume that the moral judgment of the present to be better than the past. While we can certainly acknowledge that moral progress can and has been made over time, it should not be presumed that “progress” in-and-of-itself is always good. As we will see in the next point, morality cannot truly be based on some generic notion of “progress.”

  3. More fundamentally, these claims rely on subjective morality. Claims about being on the right/wrong side of history base their morality on what society says is good or bad. If society (or future societies) gets to decide what is right and wrong, then there’s no objective basis on which to call something wrong—past, present, or future.

Slavery is a good example of this. For most of human history, slavery has been normative in most human societies. If you had lived back in such a society, would you have said that slavery was wrong or would you have been influenced by what your culture says is right or wrong? Was it wrong for society in the past to practice slavery since it was widely accepted by their culture? If morality is subjectively based on whatever a society at the time says is right or wrong, then we wouldn’t be able to say that slavery was objectively wrong. In the United States, since there’s near-universal agreement that slavery is wrong, we could say that it is wrong for us to practice slavery today, but we wouldn’t be able to judge a past society for what they believed at the time to be morally acceptable. Only if morality is objective and based on something other than majority opinion can we say that what past societies did was wrong because morality is no longer based on an ever-changing consensus. In order for morality to be true for all times and places, it needs to be rooted in a source which transcends time and place, namely God’s Word, his character, and his nature (John 14:6, 17:17; 2 Timothy 3:16-17; Revelation 19:11).

Ultimately, there is only one right side of history, and that is determined by the Lord of history himself, the “King of the ages” (1 Timothy 1:17). Morality is rooted in God, and time is God’s creation. The right side of history will be most readily seen when Christ returns a second time in glory to rule and reign in righteousness (Daniel 7:13-14, Revelation 11:15). But in the present, we are told to “number our days” and to make “the best use of the time” so that we may become wise and live righteously (Psalms 90:12, Ephesians 5:15-16, Colossians 4:5).

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Conclusion

The phrases “the right/wrong side of history,” as they are commonly used, are deeply flawed. Fundamentally, these sayings ignore the fact that morality is objectively based on God, not on whatever society agrees on. Without objective morality, there can be no definitive right/wrong, let alone a right or wrong side of history. Additionally, such judgments presume to know too much about how future generations will judge the present. In our finitude, we can only guess what future generations will think (or even whether there will be future generations—Christ might return by then!). While we certainly need to steward our present circumstances with an eye towards how our decisions will affect the future, morality is not determined by how we think future generations will judge us.

Neal Hardin
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