Making History

Dear Documentary Devourers:

I watched the first installment of Ken Burns’ The American Revolution last night. I was looking forward to it since I’m a big fan of his previous documentaries. It had been a long Sunday, so perhaps my review should be taken with a grain of sleepy salt, but I did not find it riveting. Burns’ technique of tightly focused slow pans of images is his trademark, used brilliantly in his magnum opus, The Civil War, 35 years ago (gosh, I’m old). I discovered—while attempting to make a video documentary on the history of FPCLG from our own archives—that it’s not an easy style to master. (The fact that you’ve never seen it is an indication of how bad I am at reproducing the style.) The slow-moving video treatment of Revolutionary War paintings and portraits lacked the same visual power when focused on Civil War photographs. I found myself thinking more about how oil paintings crack and gloss through the decades than about the smug lack of understanding captured by the artist in the eyes of British General Thomas Gage. I did find some of the educational links on the PBS website helpful and realized this was more than a documentary film. It is a complexly layered masterpiece of multi-media educational presentation which will be used by American History high school teachers for decades to come.

I am poorly qualified to be a critic, and that is not the purpose of my musing today. I find myself wondering every week how I can engage others in the power of history. Nearly every Sunday it is my task to “bring to life” texts that have been moldering for more than a thousand years; Ken Burns is only bridging a few hundred years, and most of his sources spoke English. We don’t have contemporary paintings of Jesus and the disciples, let alone portraits of Moses or Abraham (both often smug in their lack of understanding). At best we have scraps and fragments puzzled together into our texts for the day, curated by generations of ideologically driven preachers, scribes and librarians. Ken Burns takes 12 hours to cover a quarter century; I’ve got 20 minutes to discuss four millennia. Why try?

I find Burns’ work inspiring because he is driven to touch our modern minds. Something in our past has the power to bring meaning to our present, not as prelude but as source. The word radical contains the Latin word radicis, meaning to have roots. Radical ideas catch on not because they are completely new, but because they are sourced in the rooted meaning and purpose of the radicals. One of Burns’ themes is to remind us of the deep heterogeneity of the colonies. Different religions, denominations, races, languages, ethnicities and values coalesced in the shared project of independence. His is an historically rooted rebuttal to those who believe our future strength will be found in homogeneity; it cannot be the case, Burns implies, when our founding victory not only contained but required diversity.

This, I believe, is one of the strengths of our own experience grafted into history’s flow as the people of God. The sixty-six books wedged between Genesis 1 and Revelation 22 are not a continuous univocal monochromatic blend of coherent doctrine; they are instead a bewildering hodge-podge of each generation’s guess at God’s deep purpose and their best potential. As Christians we assert that they have something profound and useful to teach us; that is how they got into our Bible. To suggest there is an unevolved, unwavering thread seamlessly connecting the Old and New Testament characters to their Bible-story partners, let alone an unbroken strand connecting them to our American forefathers and modern ‘patriots’, is to ignore the cracked paint and glossed surfaces that distorts our ability to completely comprehend the past.

And so, another history is written and will someday be replaced by the work of future historians. I deeply believe there is something radical in the stories of our past, which is why Ken Burns drafted another history of the American Revolution. It is why I’ll spend my Sundays trying to figure out what that is.

Preparing my revisions of last Sunday’s work to be delivered this coming Sunday, I remain,

With Love,
Jonathan Krogh
Your Pastor