Ask me in 40 years

I must admit to being rather baffled by an article I’ve just read in Evangelicals Now.  Church historial Michale Haykin describes how he has spent the last 40 years researching and writing about the Particular Baptists of the 1800s.  Her suggests that it has taken him this long to get to properly know his subject and even now, there is much that he admits he doesn’t know.  He says:

Now to the present day. If it has taken me 40 years of immersion in the world of the 18th-century Particular Baptist churches in England to arrive at a degree of comprehension and understanding (and there are days when I feel I know less now than when I began), should not all of the political dilettantes* active on social media take heed about their analyses of the present-day about which they feel so confident.

He then goes on to say:

First off, being in the woods blocks the sight of the shape of the woods. To really understand our present-day, we need to be 40 to 50 years down the road. When, in 1816‒1818, John Ryland, Jr. came to analyse the theological paralysis that had gripped his Particular Baptist community for much of the 18th century, he found it in one source: the hyper-Calvinism of London Baptists like John Brine and John Gill. But from our vantage point and with far more knowledge of his world, it is obvious that there are a multitude of causes for the stagnation of the Baptist cause that, to his dear friend Andrew Fuller, was nigh unto becoming a “dunghill”!

First of all, I agree to a significant extent with Haykin.  We need to be cautious about claiming expertise and all opinions are not equally valid.  I also see the advantages of a bit of distance from events.  This can be true in our personal life as well.  Things that seemed huge to me in my late teens/early 20s take on a very different perspective and importance 30 years down the road. “Give it time” is not bad advice.

However, I want to push back a little.  You see, sometimes it is the people who are in the place at the time that have best perspective.  I honestly know next to nothing about the roots of the Particular Baptists so I cannot comment on what Haykin says about Ryland and the hyper Calvinists. It is possible that Ryland was right though.  Perhaps it was not ignorance of all the other issues affecting the church that led him to his conclusion.  Maybe he saw sharper than historians today what was going on and recognised that even with the other issues, directly or indirectly, hyper Calvinism was having its effect.  However, it is also possible that he got it completely wrong.  This could have been due to ignorance or it could have been because he had his own hobby horse or lens through which he interpreted everything.  If the latter, it is a timely reminded that whether or not we have been studying an area academically for 40 years or we have quickly glanced at some blog articles, our perspective may be influenced by our own pet topics.

Then there’s  the practical issue.  Time might be a great luxury for the academic enjoying his books and research.  However, when it comes to helping Christians navigate the challenge sof life around them, whether that’s what’s going on in The Church or what’s going on in the world around us, we don’t have that luxury.

So, there is the cause of my bafflement.  What exactly is the point of the article?   

*someone with an amateur/perhaps superficial interest in a subject area.