The Disciples of Christ Historical Society mourns the passing of Sara Harwell February 27, 2025. Harwell was a dedicated archivist with a passion for preserving religious history, and she served as Chief Archivist of the Disciples of Christ Historical Society from 2001 to 2015, helping to develop and organize the Society’s collections.
Sara earned her Master of Library Science from Peabody College and an MA in History from Vanderbilt University. Before joining DCHS, she worked at Vanderbilt University and the Tennessee State Library and Archives, specializing in religious collections. After the Society relocated to Bethany, WV, in 2015, she continued as an archivist at Lipscomb University in Nashville.
Sara believed history is more than a record of the past—it has a moral calling for us. Below, we reprint her 2014 article, A Familiar Past: Does History Need a Moral Response?, in which she reflects on the importance of historical memory, moral engagement, and the life of faith.
A Familiar Past: Does History Need a Moral Response?
The Apostle Paul asks us to remember:
For I am mindful of the sincere faith within you, which first dwelt in your grandmother Lois and your mother Eunice, and I am sure that it is in you as well. For this reason I remind you to kindle afresh the gift of God which is in you through the laying on of my hands. For God has not given us a spirit of timidity, but of power and love and discipline.
Therefore do not be ashamed of the testimony of our Lord or of me His prisoner, but join with me in suffering for the gospel according to the power of God, who has saved us and called us with a holy calling, not according to our works, but according to His own purpose and grace which was granted us in Christ Jesus from all eternity, but now has been revealed by the appearing of our Savior Christ Jesus, who abolished death and brought life and immortality to light through the gospel, for which I was appointed a preacher and an apostle and a teacher. (2 Timothy 1:5-11, NASB)
In this scripture Paul points out to Timothy that he has received the gift of grace from God through Christ, and the gift of faith from his mother and grandmother, his ancestors in the faith—that they have passed on their steadfast faith in God and that Timothy is to pass these gifts along to others in many ways, including the ongoing conversation discovering and explaining God’s grace.
History in general teaches us a way to tell stories, to question received wisdom, and develop our reasoning abilities. It helps humanize us and answers questions about what it means to be human. It gives us some idea of our own place in the scheme of things. It can help us make some sense of the world we find ourselves in. Good history causes us to think again about the meaning of things we thought we understood well. History can help bring people together.
The real story to be told in religious history, and the most value to be gained from preserving it, and telling it, is that it will help us understand God’s steadfastness through the ages and believers’ sustained faithfulness. In Church history we see God at work: calling us, supporting us, sustaining us, and challenging us. The story to be told is the response of Christians to that call and challenge.
It has been about 2,000 years since the New Testament was written, but we must not make the mistake of believing that the story of God’s work ends there. Our own all-too-human record is not very consistent, so studying the story of God maintaining his work through earthly conflict, both large and small, invites us to renew our faith over and over again. If we approach congregational history in terms of human moral attainment we are telling the wrong story, and are, in fact, being prideful. Humility and gratitude are the proper responses to our story as Christians.
For history to provide the benefits described above it is helpful to understand some principles about the approaches utilized in historical study. To begin, we usually approach history in one, or more, of four ways: identification, analysis, exhibition, or moral response. These approaches are not mutually exclusive and are often used in combination with each other. Here I want to talk about just one of these approaches: our moral response to history.
The moral response approach should be present in all studies of history because good history should always be a moral undertaking. Our moral response to people and events in the past normally takes the form of remembering, admiring, or condemning those people and events. This approach often involves the study of historically marginalized groups: racial minorities, women, the dispossessed. Our response revolves around issues of right and wrong, fairness and injustice.
In congregational history our most common moral response is remembering, with admiration a close second. In remembering we honor the saints who have gone before us. These admirable people often dominate our congregational histories. Remembering, of course, is a selective process—we forget as much as we remember. We tend to remember, and honor, people and events that have brought unity and consensus. This kind of selectivity can make it more difficult to analyze causes and consequences of historic events. By studying flaws we can see that our spiritual forebears were ordinary people, not models of perfection. If we do not include mistakes and problems in our study then we are left with a glorious but wildly inaccurate perspective of Christian history that does us little good.
The past can feel comfortingly familiar to us—and it can seem disconcertingly strange. We feel kinship with our ancestors in the faith in a way that makes us feel connected, and we see ourselves as inheritors of a tradition that helps provide a foundation and some measure of security against the transience of the modern world. The less-familiar aspects of the past, on the other hand, can teach us perspective and the limits of our brief time on earth.
Christians in the past lived in societies very different from our own. They did not think the way we do, except perhaps in the most basic matters of faith. The cultural differences and beliefs between past and present are significant. We should not make the mistake of thinking that the past is a familiar echo of the present. But it would be equally mistaken to think that there is no continuity with the past.
Continuity is best understood in historical study by looking at trends and themes, patterns and perspectives. From the beginning Christians have had a strong investment in history, seeking to hold together in one story both continuity and discontinuity. The most prominent part of this story is that of the Christ. He represents continuity because his coming was the fulfillment of prophecy, and yet he represents discontinuity because he changed everything and turned the world upside down.
The sense of the difficulty in understanding the past should reinforce for us an awareness of the range of human expression and behavior that can be counted as Christian. And the sense of continuity reinforces our acknowledgment that what we have received others have made possible.
An attitude that is not capable of engaging with the past of the Church is also likely to be closed off from the changes and challenges of the present. Coping with and resolving these challenges is much harder if we have not mastered the discipline of questioning our roots and if we are wedded to assumptions about the obvious rightness of where we presently stand.
To truly understand the lessons of the past we must have humility in the face of the narrowness of our own contemporary experience and openness before the expanse of human history. Our own cultural assumptions often run so deep that we do not see them, and we are made uncomfortable when we encounter historic texts and events that contradict our preconceptions. Calling into question facts and beliefs we assume to be accurate causes cognitive dissonance, confusion, and even anger. The issues that are most likely to stir these feelings most often involve examining the proper roles and spheres in our spiritual communities, both past and present. It is a sign of spiritual growth to be able to encounter these new/old concepts on their own terms and learn from them in an open-minded manner.
Understanding challenges confronted and overcome (or not) in the past gives us encouragement and perspective for the present. Many congregations have had heated debates over the past few decades (actually, since the beginning) on various kinds of innovations.
Our historical understanding requires that we listen carefully and humbly to the voice of God and the voices of past servants. We will discern that there are ways of being faithful other than those to which we have grown accustomed. And whatever traditions are behind our stories as God’s people, we should recognize that they are part of what makes us who we are as believers.