In teaching my Medieval History class, we end the year with the transitional period usually marked by historians as the end of the Middle Ages and the beginning of the Modern Age. In our class we call this time the “Watershed Period” in which five major world-changing events took place. If you are lucky(?) you might have one world-changing event occur in your lifetime that marks a watershed from one way of living to another. We probably have experienced one in the dawning of the age of the computer and the internet. In the Watershed Period, however, FIVE such events took place, all within one person’s lifetime – approximately from 1440 to 1520. It must have been an exciting (or frightening) time to be alive!

One thing history teaches us however is that such revolutions in our way of living are nearly always ambiguous – they can produce great advancement in human living but are also accompanied by great evil. Just taking three of the five events:

The Perfection of the Printing Press: This event marked the beginning of the Communications Revolution that has continued to this day. It is no coincidence that this invention was rapidly followed by the Scientific Revolution -- the availability and dispersion of knowledge took a quantum leap during this era. Of course, the relatively easy ability to publish has also produced an avalanche of heresy, evil ideologies, and pornography that has blighted the modern world.

Introduction of Gunpowder into the West: Invented a few centuries earlier by the Chinese, once gunpowder made its way to the West, and during the Watershed Period was put to use in new and various ways, nothing was the same. Suddenly, monumental construction projects that might have taken decades could be shortened to years or months by the massive power of this explosive. No one needs to be told, however, of its destructive effects on the prosecution of war and death.

The Age of Discovery: In search of direct sea routes to the Far East, Europeans triggered the Age of Discovery, starting with the Portuguese in the 1440s and rolling onward to our own time in the Artemis and Orion projects. This age has united our world as never before, to the great advancement of civilization, prosperity and human fellowship. It has also been marked by exploitation and genocide.

How then should a Christian feel about this continuous ambiguity of history? Does he withdraw from the world and agree with the cynic who defines history as “one [expletive deleted] thing after another”? Is history a vain round in which progress is always neutralized by evil?

While certainly a possible approach, I don’t think it does full justice to God’s continuous work in the story of mankind:

The world is a dance in which good, descending from God, is disturbed by evil arising from the creatures, and the resulting conflict is resolved by God’s own assumption of the suffering nature which evil produces.C. S. Lewis

God’s astonishing injection of himself into human history in the Incarnation, Crucifixion and Resurrection ought to give us hope that in the ambiguity of things, goodness will have the final word. The story of Creation is not a meaningless cycle but a glorious dance.