Making history

If you’re a history buff, the podcast world has your number. Whatever your favorite era, location, or event, you’ll find a podcast on it, from solemn to snarky. Some of the titles are deliberately provocative, like History That Doesn’t Suck or You’re Dead to Me, but the podcast I seldom miss is The Rest Is History. Rather than a single narrator ponderously intoning, it’s a lively conversation between two British historians who let their interests dictate how deep to dive into a given subject.

Tom Holland, whose book Dominion showed how Christianity revolutionized Western thought and culture, is always interested in religion’s influence on history. His partner-in-time Dominic Sandbrook plays the hard-nosed skeptic in their genial disagreements. All episodes begin with a letter or memoir or contemporary account relevant to the event, which sets the tone and allows Holland to attempt a French or German accent.

What fascinates most about history is the story of change. Sometimes the changes are slow and ponderous—or, as in the Hemingway quote about going bankrupt, “Gradually, then suddenly.” The Rest Is History series on the French Revolution is an example of a slow build, beginning with the concentration of the nobility at Versailles dictated by Louis XIV. The hothouse atmosphere at court bred scandals and intrigues; the division of classes put increasing tax burdens on commoners; looming national bankruptcy (partly due to French investment in the American Revolution) limited options for Louis XVI.

Then the all-at-once part: a monster storm in the summer of 1788 that destroyed most of the wheat crop and doubled the cost of bread, leading to violent riots and a march on Versailles the next year. Practical urgency dovetailed with idealistic declarations of the Rights of Man, and heads began to roll. Europe—not to mention Western civilization—was altered forever.

But sometimes history turns on a dime. Holland and Sandbrook’s riveting account of events leading up to World War I focused on a moment in Sarajevo in 1914: the June 28 assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the Austro-Hungarian empire, during a state visit to Serbia.

The assassin, Gavrilo Princip, was a rootless and restless young man yearning for a cause. Radicalized by Serbian nationalists, he had signed up for a poorly planned conspiracy against the Austrian oppressors. An attempt on the archduke earlier that day had failed, but Franz Ferdinand insisted on keeping the schedule. With one exception: He insisted on visiting the victims of that earlier attempt, which led to his driver taking a wrong turn down a side street where Princip happened to be walking. Seizing his opportunity, the young man shot the archduke and his wife, killing them both.

Austria had to make some response, and Germany had to honor its alliance, and czarist Russia had to support its Serbian compatriots, and France had to get back at Germany for the Franco-Prussian War. Britain drew a red line at the Belgian border that the Germans crossed, dragging all of Europe into a hot mess. And the rest is history. Holland and Sandbrook believe World War I wasn’t inevitable; it was a wrong turn down a side street that set the tumultuous tone of the entire 20th century. But why?

Adolf Hitler could have been fatally shot on several occasions, either before the war he started or during. Why was he spared to wreak such havoc? And why did a bullet aimed at Donald Trump last July miss by millimeters? Trump (who, to be clear, is no Hitler) thanks God for that, as do we. The point is, we can’t fathom why any one life is spared while another is cut short. In history God writes large and complex, but His writing in an individual life is equally intricate.

Countless human choices feed into the stream of time even as God shapes the stream. What is He doing? Never just one thing, as John Piper has said, but ten thousand things, all at once, in every life.

As a mighty once king declared, “None can stay his hand or say to him, ‘What have you done?’” (Daniel 4:35). A disturbing thought for some, but how many times has God spared you from a fatal highway crash (such as the one Nick Eicher writes about in “Split second,” in this issue) or from a nasty virus? How has He used your own wrong turns?

All of us will be history someday, but “underneath are the everlasting arms.”