Bringing Out Old Treasures: The Function of Christian History for a Pedagogy of Spiritual Formation

Introduction

As a theologian assigned a broad-ranging teaching load spanning such subjects (among others) as theology, biblical studies, pastoral care, cultural apologetics, and (perhaps my favorite) Christian formation at the undergraduate level, the never-satiated quest to uncover new and novel means of awakening my student’s desire for the subject matter presents itself. What awakens a student’s desire to be formed into Christlikeness? While perhaps evident to others, a secret has slowly manifested itself in my work. When teaching disciplines of the Christian faith—prayer, reflection, silence, solitude, meditation, lectio divina, or sabbath-keeping—the eyes of my students (who generally come from Evangelical environments) awaken with luminescent wonder as they discover the length to which Christians have gone throughout history to put these disciplines to practice. Lecturing about prayer is one thing. But discovering why James has been known through Christian history as “old camel knees” as a result of years of faithful prayer before his half-brother Jesus, or how John Wesley fervently petitioned God on horseback for the conversion of the nations, or the means Hans Urs von Balthasar went to embody holy attention through academic rigor, or the passion with which Madame Guyon practiced solitude is something altogether different. History puts flesh on theology.

This article tackles a nagging problem—namely, that Christian history and formation can, at times, become siloed off from one another. ¹ This siloing can particularly diminish the impact that teaching formation might have in the classroom. By acknowledging this, this article will offer a modest solution by contending that a renewal of interest in the tapestry of Christian history may help mitigate some of the blaring deficiencies in the formation of Christians in our own cultural moment. Indeed, in no small part, this renewal harmonizes with Paul’s prayer for the Ephesian Christians that their comprehension of how “wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ” should happen “together with all of God’s people.” ² (Eph 3.18) The “all” in Paul’s prayer, undoubtedly, must invariably include the living and the dead. Christian history, as such, is not some antiquated domain from which we occasionally grab homiletical anecdotes or illustrations as the moment demands. Knowledge of Christian history is transformational for the follower of Jesus—a narrative that reforms the heart, mind, and imagination of those seeking to be formed into Christ’s image. ³

A call for a renewed relationship between formation and Christian history is anything but new. In the inaugural “call for papers” for the Journal of Spiritual Formation & Soul Care, Evan Howard proposed a methodology for the academic study of Christian formation that consisted of a robust interdisciplinary engagement between voices in the fields of biblical studies, theology, psychology, and—for our purposes—history. On the latter, writes Howard,

In history, we see signs of the hand of God. We also see the human experience in every dimension. Yet we also see something of the divine-human relationship: how people have seen, experienced, and facilitate that relationship throughout time…We see the common patterns of transformation lived out in the different settings of time and place. History provides perspectives and models of Christian spiritual life at a distance. ⁴

In the journal’s subsequent volume, Bruce Demarest explored a variety of historically situated stage theories that serve as paradigmatic approaches toward formation on a developmental level. Greg Peters further calls the growing discipline of spiritual formation to see historical theology as a critical medium for dialogue. ⁵ Indeed, what Howard, Demarest, and Peters each set in motion was a clear agenda: Christian history can and should be taken seriously as a dialogue partner for Christian formation and soul care. And at the same time, these calls have illuminated that these two domains often overlook each other. “Christians,” Demarest contends, “are heirs of a two millennia treasury of wisdom and devotion that we ignore to our impoverishment.” ⁶ We too often neglect the formational function Christian history has, can, and should play in the spiritual formation of Christ-followers.

Christianity, of course, is a history-affirming religion. The God of the universe, Scripture witnesses, has made himself known explicitly by means of historical acts and accounts through real people, moments, and places. ⁷ It is no coincidence that the incarnation of Jesus Christ follows thirty-nine books of Jewish history (Old Testament) and an entire chapter of genealogical history (Matthew 1). History is the manger of the gospel. And it is within this very incarnation that God has stepped into “space and time” ⁸ to take the form and flesh of a lowly peasant carpenter in a backwater region within the Roman Empire known as Palestine. God has entered time. “The doctrines of Trinity and incarnation,” Philip Sheldrake reminds us, “place God firmly at the heart of human history and the stories of individuals.” ⁹ While true, Sheldrake further warns that time and history go largely ignored (“not a prominent theme,” so Sheldrake) in Christian spirituality writing. ¹⁰ The result can be a kind of “history-less” spirituality that enables an ecclesial memory that expands little beyond what transpired last week. Such theological short-sightedness caricatures history as a “distraction” for the reason it “only signifies the past and...what happened rather than something that enables our present to come into being or that invites us to reflect on the future and on what we aspire to.” ¹¹ In forgetting the history that grounds it, Christian spirituality becomes less Christian and more “spiritual” to the detriment of the church’s God-given call to form people into Christ’s image. Christian formation must be historically grounded to remain Christian.

Thus Scripture’s repeated invocation to remember history. As seen, for example, in the Pentateuchal writings of Numbers and Deuteronomy, God constantly commands memory as an operative function of covenant faithfulness (e.g., Num 15.37-41 and Deut 5.15). Not only is memory commanded. Remembering rightly is core to Israel’s worship of Yahweh. ¹² For Israel, such divine injunctions were directed at a covenant community that was constantly torn between a desire to either retreat to the memorable foods of Egypt or entirely forget what God had accomplished in their liberation. These twin temptations—the oscillating problems of theological nostalgia (worshipping the past) and amnesia (forgetting the past)—consistently got in the way of what God sought to do among his people. To borrow the sociologist Robert Bellah, Israel was to be a “community of memory” inhabiting and reconstituting the stories of God’s faithfulness for future generations. ¹³ An intimate knowledge of history, as such, was no mere knowledge of facts, timelines, and places. History was inherently formational—the reconstitution of the lived faith of those gone before for those who are and have yet to enter the Promised Land. ¹⁴

By extension, knowing history is a vital component of Christian formation today. To this end, Kelly Kapic has suggested that historical reflection assists one’s spiritual formation in four concrete ways: by (1) protecting us from the temptation of the new, (2) providing the church with wisdom for how to read Scripture, (3) giving a rationale for experience without being enslaved to it, and (4) encouraging us to appreciate the full family of God. ¹⁵ Building on Kapic’s wisdom, this article will step into the fray and propose a modest rationale behind the need to renew the study of Christian history as it relates (particularly) to the work of teaching. I want to approach this question pedagogically and as a professor. I will contend that such a renewal will help cultivate in those we seek to form—people like my students with whom I began—into the image of Christ by (1) fostering pathways of formation, (2) confronting theological presentism, and (3) nurturing ecclesial generosity.

Fostering Pathways of Formation

To begin, centering Christian history in a classroom has been shown to have vital power for formation by awakening possible formation pathways for my students. At the time of this writing, the undergraduate college where I serve has become enmeshed in an all-encompassing interfaculty dialogue about our institutional response to the release and immediate proliferate usage of ChatGPT (an artificial intelligence platform allowing students to curate nearly perfected content for submission) among our student population. Curious as to its efficacy, I tested the platform and discovered, indeed, the work of grading papers will be more and more difficult as time moves forward. For the first time in my teaching career, I am oddly encouraged to read assignment submissions that include the tell-tale signs of humanity—a few mistakes and errors that reassure me that a machine did not write what I was reading.

Ours is an information age. Little needs to be said about the unprecedented explosion of knowledge that any given human will encounter daily in our dizzyingly informed modern world. The student in today’s classroom has at their fingertips more information than was available to anyone in human history. This is part of an unprecedented shift in the means by which humans are knowing creatures—and the impacts of said knowledge on personhood. The digital devices that student now carry in their pockets bear the power to curate more information in a few seconds than one could achieve by reading everything in every library up through the twentieth century. And ChatGPT has now made it possible for everybody to virtually have a free research assistant.

Yet, evidence from my work as a teacher has revealed that such technological advances often overperform the formation of our character to utilize them. Whatever problems the technologies behind our information age may have remedied, a whole set of new ones have been created. With humanity’s lust for endless information—something akin to what Augustine called in Confessions “the wine of error”—we have been shown to lack the wisdom to know what to do with it. “We are drowning in information,” once wrote biologist E.O. Wilson before even the age of the internet, “while starving for wisdom.” This has led ultimately to the deep need for more information—but rather an even deeper need to know what to do with such wisdom. Wilson continued in his 1993 book Consilience: “The world henceforth will be run by synthesizers, people able to put together the right information at the right time, think critically about it, and make important choices wisely.” ¹⁶ The discomfort a humanist biologist faces with the knowledge-immersed world we live in now is anything short of notable. And it should make us equally uncomfortable. What is now manifesting is a form of information hedonism Quentin Schultze has called “informationism...a non-discerning, vacuous faith in the collection and dissemination of information as a route to social progress and personal happiness.” ¹⁷ In part, this information deluge has actually ended up deceiving us into believing that information acquisition is the same as formation. As Bonhoeffer would often allude, humanity’s root sin is the away from a knowledge of God to knowledge about God.

Deep Christian formation does result from unbounded informationism. Even since the emergence of ChatGPT, a shift in my students can be discerned. No longer can I (as their instructor) merely provide my students with a knowledge base that they themselves could not digitally locate on their own. Information is no longer the sole gift a teacher bears to the classroom. What I can provide, however, is a model for how to live faithfully in a complex, challenging, post-Christian world. As I am having to learn, the value of a teacher in the information age is not their ability to provide information as they once did. Rather, in an increasingly complex world, I can provide a pathway of formation. At one point in my career, it may have been critical for me to be a “sage on the stage.” Today, however, my students are longing for a “guide on the side” with whom they can follow. ¹⁸ They can download the map. But they can’t download a mentor or someone who has walked the terrain themselves.

At the heart of Jesus’s call to discipleship is an invitation to “come...follow me.” (Matt 4.19) Discipleship is the pursuit of a person—not a set of cold facts. This reality drove Paul to invite the church in Corinth to “imitate me” (1 Cor 4.16) and “follow my example...as I follow Christ.” (1 Cor 11.1) These admonitions—broadly categorized under the rubric of the imitatio Christi—reveal that just as the disciples followed the person of Jesus, followers of Jesus continue to need a person to follow in the post-ascension church. ¹⁹ This call to imitate the person Paul is by no stretch isolated to the Corinthian letters. ²⁰ No doubt, Paul would place parameters around this in correcting the Corinthians for balkanizing the early church into factions under the names of Paul, Apollos, and Cephas (1 Cor 1.12). But he also appears to correct others for saying “I follow Christ” as though they remain siloed from the rest of the community and their need for human models and accountability. For Paul, following Christ means following somebody. All Christian formation, in even its earliest iterations, is akin to being the understudy for a great play. As Thomas à Kempis eloquently outlined in his The Imitation of Christ, being a Christian is learning how to imitate. ²¹

To be formed, we need a model to follow. Back to the classroom. Each summer, I teach a course on formation at Friends University entitled “History of Christian Spirituality.” Part of the course entails the students undertaking a semester-long immersion into Richard Foster’s Streams of Living Water. In his text, Foster sketches six distinct streams (what others have called “pathways” ²² ) throughout church history and from various ecumenical contexts that have offered diverse paths for people to follow the way of Jesus. ²³ Within each stream, Foster offers a representative individual from Christian history who has embodied the spirit of this stream. For the students who come from Evangelical spaces, the experience of engaging this diversity of formational pathways can be a watershed (and, at times, decentering) experience. Course evaluations predictably reveal a problem: many Evangelicals in the class confess to feeling virtually ignorant of the diversity of the ways the Holy Spirit has formed Christians throughout history. And that—perhaps most importantly—part of being deeply formed by the work of Jesus is to humble ourselves to learn from these seemingly exotic traditions. Waking up to Christian history has the power to not only reveals our biases and insufficiencies; but also offer historically faithful paths forward to following Christ in our own time. ²⁴ By learning to see these other streams, we begin experiencing what James Sire called “sympathetic vibrations” with forebears who have faithfully gone before us. ²⁵

For a church tasked with equipping followers of Jesus in a culture that is increasingly post- or anti-Christian, we need well-trusted pathways forward. An intimate knowledge of Christian history offers an important assist. No shift or turn in church history has arisen out of thin air. Every page of Christian history is some response to something. It is easy for us to look down with a scowl on those in the past who acted in ways we may deem irrational or backwater. But we should be slow to do so. As Philip Yancey has written:

Church history yields many examples of people who took spiritual discipline to an unhealthy extreme, mortifying their bodies and shunning all pleasures. We rightly recoil from such extremes. Yet as I read their accounts now, I note that these ‘spiritual athletes’ were acting voluntarily, and few looked back on their experiences with much regret. We live in a society that cannot comprehend those who fast or carve out two hours for a quiet time and yet honors professional football players who work out with weights five hours a day and undergo a dozen knee and shoulder surgeries to repair the damage they incur on themselves in the sport. Our aversion to spiritual discipline may reveal more about ourselves than about the ‘saints’ we criticize. ²⁶

History has its priors. “Spiritual traditions do not exist on some ideal plane above and beyond history,” reflects Sheldrake, “The origins and development of spiritual traditions reflect the circumstances of time and place as well as the psychological state of the people involved.” ²⁷ This is often the case in historical theology. For, no doubt, the doctrine of the Trinity arose at a historical moment out of much reflection and theological dialogue. ²⁸ Even John Calvin’s highly ordered and structured theology likely arose out of a personal struggle with anxiety. ²⁹ But this is also the case in the history of formation. St. Francis of Assisi’s turn toward poverty was not a mere whim of the moment who sought to reject opulence and affluence. Francis was responding to a church that he knew was idolizing power, wealth, and control. Out of his moment came an act of faithful rebellion. There is a remarkable power in coming to realize that there is “nothing new under the sun.” (Eccl 1.9) As the American church of the 21st century reconciles itself to the fact that it embodies an increasingly late modern, post-Christian space, it would be easy to believe that the church is facing something it has never faced before. ³⁰ But this only reveals, all the more, our ignorance. The “great cloud of witnesses” (Heb 12.1) has gone before us. We have pathways to follow. Pathways are critical for those increasingly disconnected from their identity and historical location.

Confronting Theological Presentism

Another notable benefit of a renewed awareness of Christian history for formation is its capacity to help dismantle what one might call “theological presentism.” By theological presentism, I am referring to the hypermodern presumption that one’s contemporary knowledge, worldview, and belief system stands in a privileged position over and against those from the past. ³¹ Or—as I describe in class—it is that bias which presumes we must be right because we exist right now. This feature of Enlightenment individualism frames human liberation as, among other things, the unmooring of one’s existence from the constraints of the past so that humanity might move unencumbered into some mythic, utopian future. Far from being abstract, this bias is built into even our search engine algorithms. Western culture unthinkingly assumes the most recent knowledge must be the truest—listed at the top. Recency bias, as it has been called, has also gone by such names as historical supremacy, presentism, and what C.S. Lewis humorously entitled “chronological snobbery.” ³²

In a very real way, this outlook can be sneakily common among Protestants; due, in part, to its own historical critique of tradition. Luther’s break with Rome in the 16th century was justified and necessary. The church needed both to recenter the gospel and to dismantle any ecclesial traditions that inherently ran counter to its message. But this trajectory has had a long and lingering shadow in the mind of too many contemporary Protestants. Sadly, for many, this has forged a communal memory that virtually envisions the gospel as having gone dormant from Augustine to Luther—as though the Spirit and his gospel were absent from the church until lightning struck near a German monastery in 1511. This nearsighted view of history may seem inconsequential. But the number of times I have encountered in the classroom an unwillingness to learn from Bernard of Clairvaux, Francis of Assissi, or Mother Teresa for simply being Roman Catholic is beyond count. At its best, Protestant spirituality is willing to dismantle anything getting in the way of Scripture and its message. At its worst, however, Protestant memory inculcates in its own a pernicious outlook that believes the gospel came to life only when its movement did. ³³

As it is for every disciple, part of the theologian’s task is retrieving history and tradition for today’s church. ³⁴ “Therefore every teacher of the law who has become a disciple in the kingdom of heaven,” Jesus taught his disciples, “is like the owner of a house who brings out of his storeroom new treasures as well as old.” (Matt 13.52) The theologian’s task is to bring out the old treasures for today, to remind the church of the texts and history that brought her here. This is why Alister McGrath has made the case that Christian spirituality must remain connected to historic “classic texts” of the Christian tradition to guard its identity. ³⁵ Elsewhere he has fleshed out how remaining rooted in historical reflection can directly impact the church’s formational practice:

The theologian is called to anchor the Church to its rich past, to identify and apply approaches, insights, and practices from the long tradition of Christian reflection on Scripture to present situations. The theologian is like the householder...[T]he study of theology prevents endless reinvention of the wheel on the part of those who recognize the need to engage a situation or issue but are unaware that the Church has already developed the tools needed to cope with them. ³⁶

If McGrath is correct, then retrieval of Christian history and tradition is itself a confrontation with theological presentism in all its forms. I would suggest it does so in two key ways. First, it releases us from any gnawing sense that our formation into Christ’s image in today’s increasingly complex world requires us to (in McGrath’s words) an “endless reinvention of the wheel.” Two years ago, guided by conviction, I felt led to teach a sixteen-week seminar undergraduate course entitled “Sexuality, Gender, and the Bible.” Part of the pedagogical challenge this course presented was my awareness that any Protestant American approaching this weighty conversation would likely do so armed with a double bias against history and tradition. As Americans, we are taught to believe we must be “right” because we are “right now.” And, as Protestants, we have a bias against tradition. Being a conservative theologian who embraces a historically Christian view of human sexuality, I began (unsurprisingly!) with Scripture to make my case. But it was our engagement with Christian history that was the most critical and formative aspect of the course. My students were able to observe, on the one hand, the near-universal agreement the church has enjoyed across global, denominational, ethnic, and historical lines on the topic of sexuality; and, on the other, to see that the church has been thinking about these topics for two-thousand years. The formative impact could not be overstated. Despite what my TikTok and Twitter-addicted students may have believed, they came to find that there is nothing new about fads or “fashionable absurdities” (so Robert Alter) with which our world is obsessed. ³⁷ And there has been little new about the church’s theological response.

Similarly, a return to Christian history confronts theological presentism by reframing the nature of Christian faithfulness. “History will judge us,” we are often told. “What will our children and history books say about us?” As moved as one may be by these rhetorical ramparts, we must recognize the arrogant assumption that we know how future people will think. And, all the more, that they will undeniably agree with us? But this reveals a hollow hope ungrounded either by theological memory or a theocentric view of history. Christian faithfulness, of course, is not a call to please the world. “The Lord is our judge.” (Isa 33.22) History will not give final judgment over us. Nor will our children. Only God will and can judge us. We would be wise to recognize how such a vision puts the church at odds with the present moment. Like Daniel, we are to be a people who orient our lives to a Temple liturgical schedule at the very moment the Temple has been destroyed. ³⁸ To be prophetic, to have a message, to be a people who have a message, we must be out of sync with our own moment by being faithful to God’s. But we would be equally wise to recognize how living according to the world’s judgment puts us at odds with God. If we marry the spirit of our own age, it has been rightly said, we may find ourselves a widow in the next.

Again, it is critical to return to the function history played for ancient Israel. In the prophetic literature of Jeremiah, for example, the prophet records the words of God, who says that the “bones of the kings” will be brought out for exposure. “They will be exposed to the sun and the moon and all the stars of the heavens, which they have loved and served and which they have followed and consulted and worshiped,” writes Jeremiah, “They will not be gathered up or buried, but will be like dung lying on the ground.” (Jer 8.2) Why does God utter this? Yahweh is reminding Israel that their history would (and should not) not be forgotten. ³⁹ Moreover, history would be their teacher.

Nurturing Ecclesial Generosity

Third, and finally, a renewal of awareness of Christian history will help inculcate and form an ecclesial generosity that will help Christians engage compassionately with one another. Historian George Marsden has explored the nature of history through a surprising lens: the biblical and theological doctrine of human depravity. Marsden contends that history is not only the tale of sinners; history is simultaneously a tale told and retold by sinners. As such, the doctrine of sin should rightly frame our method of encountering and recounting history by creating an outlook of humility and teachableness to learning from the past. To know history as a sinful people is to entail being open to the Spirit’s work in showing us our own follies and sins. None of us engages history detached from our own broken ontology. Marsden writes,

If what we are doing primarily is using the past to reinforce our views on current issues, then our histories will be impoverished by special pleadings, and we might better analyze present issues directly. If, on the other hand, our goal is truly to learn from the past, we would best start by looking for how we share a common humanity with our subjects on both sides of any divide. If we are alert to our own faults, we will be better able to see and learn from the faults of the people with whom we identify. At the same time, we may better appreciate the virtues of those whom we instinctively blame. ⁴⁰

History, as such, is not just to become aware of other people’s sins. It is to be exposed to our own. Marsden goes so far as to call it a “sign of maturity” to engage history with a posture of profound humility:

A sign of maturity is when representatives of a group can write history that takes into account that members of that group are flawed humans like everyone else. In the long run, the most convincing histories will be those that portray their protagonists with faults and virtues. The best histories already do that, but few articulate the principle involved. ⁴¹

Few would disagree: we tend to look generously upon our own traditions while looking harshly upon that of others. This is a reflection of our own sin and pride. As such, Marsden’s point becomes all the more prescient for our cultural moment. As the church contextualizes itself in a culture marred by tribalism and fragmentation—compounded by the never-ending growth and diversification of the church—it has become increasingly pressing in the church’s work of spiritual formation to both embody a resolute solidarity in orthodox Christian belief and a matched humility to walk and learn alongside others who are different than ourselves. This double responsibility, Marsden suggests, is somewhat remedied in the work of knowing the history of all of God’s people.

On one level, being attentive to read all of Christian history—not merely the history of our own denomination or tradition—has the power to create what Justo Gonzalez has called “responsible remembrance.” ⁴² Creating space in the West’s awareness of Christian history for all of God’s people—e.g. non-Europeans, women, children, and those who couldn’t read or write—helps us incorporate a broader understanding of the unfolding work of God. The new creation will include a telos of God’s history with what the apostle John calls “every tribe and tongue.” (Rev 7.9) If true, then our knowledge of history should reflect this eschatological future. “If the people of God come from every tribe and nation,” Mark Noll has written, “[then] so then should a history of the people of God try to take in every tribe and nation.” ⁴³ To see God’s hand among the unknown of history may begin by helping us to see it among the unknown of our own world.

As well, Christian history helps to understand afresh both the simultaneous apostolicity and diversity of the church—and the tension between them. That is to say, it helps us become keenly aware of where Christians have always agreed; and where Christians have room to disagree. ⁴⁴ It is fascinating to consider how the New Testament describes the Spirit simultaneously as the one who creates one church and the church’s diversity. That is to say, the Spirit creates both ecclesial unity and diversity. ⁴⁵ Knowing church history, then, helps us to understand what things Christians have universally agreed upon (i.e. orthodoxy) and those things over what McGrath calls “theological variables”—those things with which there is room to disagree. ⁴⁶ In the classroom, when I read the Apostles, Nicene, or Calcedonian creeds to my students, they come face-to-face with that which Christians throughout history have always believed, everywhere. These documents self-evidently show my students that theology did not come out of nowhere. And they are also keenly aware that those who wrote these creeds stand outside their own denominational affiliation. This experience, I would contend, is a gift of God.

The effect of this can be life-altering. When done well, the experience of seeing the history of the church with a wide-angle lens has the formational power of awakening us to the grandeur and majesty of God through human history. Such an awareness can also teach us how much we have to learn. In my “History of Christian Spirituality” class, I too often see my students respond to seeing the diversity of the church by becoming overly critical of their own. There is a place for criticism. But engaging the church’s history should not lead to self-hatred or ecclesial resentment of our own people. It should awaken deeper hunger to be formed by the church’s gifts inside and outside the place God has put us. I liken this to seeing the church as a potluck. Indeed, nothing could make a potluck worse than when everyone brings the same dish to a potluck. A good potluck is a potluck where everyone brings their best dish. By analogy, each tradition in the church has a gift to bear. But we also have something to receive from others. The church, in the words of Clark Pinnock, is “such a rich feast that there are always ways in which to grow in understanding.” ⁴⁷ It is only in seeing this rich feast that we can appreciate our own dishes and the dish of others.

Conclusion

Martyn Lloyd-Jones, in his The Puritans, commends Christians to the important task of knowing Christian history. “My contention is that the Christian should learn from history,” Lloyd-Jones urges, “that because he is a Christian, it is his duty to do so, and he must rouse himself to do so.” ⁴⁸ We begin, thus, where we began: with a call to return to the history of the church so that the church can be formed in the image of Christ; a task that is particularly important for teachers of God’s people. Indeed, to know our history is to be faithful to the God who will bring it to completion. In his article previously mentioned, Bruce Demarest quotes the great Friedrich von Hugel (1852-1925) as saying about all followers of Jesus: “We all take the same journey and must pass through similar stages and ways. But like all travelers across a continent, we have different experiences of the same reality.” ⁴⁹ Demarest then makes an aside—“there are no dittos” in history. ⁵⁰ This a fitting comment as the work of being formed in the image of Christ is the task of a lifetime. To that end, we start off on the right foot when we humbly recognize that we may, indeed, have our own stories. But we never have—or will—walk alone on the journey.