“What indeed has Athens to do with Jerusalem? What concord is there between the Academy and the Church?” —Tertullian, Prescription Against Heretics, vii.
In sketching a Christian philosophy of history, I see two essential questions. The first is what is the goal of a Christian historian? Paul has admirably answered that question in the first part of his philosophy of history. A Christian historian worships God through the right use of intellect. My purpose is to answer the second question: how does a Christian historian go about integrating his intellectual pursuit with his faith in Christ?
Many Christians have sought to integrate faith and historiography by recourse to a grand narrative. That attempt is understandable, since a grand historical narrative is essential to the gospel. The gospel of Jesus Christ is based on historical facts as historical facts: that man sinned against God, that God became incarnate as Jesus Christ, that the Lord Jesus died on the cross, and that he was raised in the resurrection. These facts form the grandest narrative possible, the history of redemption in Christ.
Even a believing historian, however, cannot understand how the rest of history fits into that grand narrative. By God’s revelation, we know the meaning of history as a whole, but we lack God’s revelation to identify how each part of history connects back to that grand narrative.
Nor can a historian resort to using select biblical passages as a means of periodizing history. For example, it’s common for fundamentalists to divide human history since Christ into seven periods, following the letters to the seven churches in the book of Revelation. From the standpoint of faith, this is poor exegesis; from the standpoint of history, it is an unhelpful periodization that takes into account precious little of what we actually know about historical forces.
History’s ultimate meaning, then, is the story of redemption in Christ. But a Christian historian’s faith and learning cannot be primarily integrated by the grand narrative—by the story the historian tells. That integration can be best achieved not in the story that the historian tells, but in the way that he tells his story. To put that into technical terms, a historian’s faith and learning can be best integrated not with speculative philosophy of history, but with a critical philosophy of history.
To be sure, there is much in a good critical philosophy of history that is not uniquely Christian. But I believe that the logic of faith can lead the historian to certain conclusions about the questions of critical philosophy of history that can make his work, if not uniquely Christian, at least conformable to the Christian faith.
One of the questions of philosophy of history, for example, is the question of causation. The dichotomy between God’s sovereignty and man’s free will exemplifies the problem of causation. Does history done by a Christian describe people as acting and making choices, or does it describe him as buffeted and controlled by other forces? Do people make history, or do forces make history?
Though one can of course argue rightly (but unhelpfully) that the answer lies somewhere in the middle, my answer is that causation is fundamentally about freedom of the will, about people’s consequential choice. Humans, after all, are a fallen race in rebellion against God, as a result of their own choice and not through any responsibility of God. Until all things are made subject to Christ, we must live and make sense of a fallen world, which operates by its own law, and not by the law of God. Behind everything that happens, there is the providential yet secret hand of God, but only man’s choices are accessible to the historian’s study.
The question still remains: how does man create his history? Some historians argue man creates his history through structures and institutions, such as class and gender. These structures force people into particular actions, denying them “agency.” While it’s certainly true that no one is completely free in his choices, people do make choices, and those choices change what happens. People have the power by their choices to do ill or to do good; their consequential choices are the stuff of history.
From this may be deduced two principles for Christian historiography. First, the subject matter of history will be concerned with the choices that people make. Those choices are fundamentally about ideas—the ideas that people hold and the ideas that people use to make choices. I find my interest drawn to religious history and more broadly to intellectual history, in other words, to ideas in their basic form. But one can study ideas in the form of, say, economic relations, or culture, or gender. It’s not the subject matter that matters; it’s the assumptions about causation beneath it that make it Christian.
The second principle that may be inferred is that a Christian historian is able to make moral and ethical judgments about the past. The choices that people make are fundamentally moral, fundamentally ethical. The Christian has, in the teachings of his Lord and in the Bible more generally, a measuring stick by which to judge the choices that people have made. Charity and prudence dictate that a historian’s moral judgments take into account the standards of the time: a historian ought not to judge people in the past by the moral concerns (or preoccupations) of the present. But Christian morality, with a due sympathy for taking the past on its own terms, provides the historian with the tools he needs to write history that makes moral judgments without mere moralizing.
A Christian philosophy of history must try to define the relationship that exists between the scholar and the church—between Athens and Jerusalem, to use Tertullian’s metaphor. Perhaps I can explain it best by citing an unlikely source—Ralph Waldo Emerson’s speech “The American Scholar.” In that speech, Emerson defines the relationship between the scholar and society as “Man Thinking,” as “the delegated intellect.” If the scholar studies merely for study’s sake, then he fulfills no useful role in society. But if he studies as a part of society, doing part of its work, he provides the important values of contemplation, knowledge, and wisdom to society. To borrow Emerson’s phrase, then, the Christian scholar is to be the Church Thinking, not above the church or outside the church, but doing part of the necessary labor to accomplish the church’s great task. Or, to use a better but similar metaphor from the Apostle Paul:
For just as the body is one and has many members, and all the members of the body, though many, are one body, so it is with Christ. . . . Now you are the body of Christ and individually members of it.
I wonder if some of the confusion about causation stems from the assumption that causes must be more or less material. It seems that a Christian would assert both the relevance of human causation, but also the reality of divine (or demonic) causation. Though my observation doesn’t solve the determinism problem, it may permit more options to draw from.
“The second principle that may be inferred is that a Christian historian is able to make moral and ethical judgments about the past.”
I fail to see what moral and ethical judgments have to do with history. As I see it, history is a study of who, what, when, where and an attempt at why. The American Colonies fighting the Revolutionary War against Great Britain fact. The Nazis murdering six million Jews is also a fact. History does not give me the tools to make judgments about these events. That is why I need something else besides for history, like the belief in divine providence and judgment, to keep us grounded.
I would see the role of a Christian historian in terms of what issues are focused on. A Christian history of the classical world is going to spend a lot more time talking about Judea and Josephus than it would talking about Athens and Thucydides. A Christian who does medieval history is going to be more interested in talking Peter Abelard, Thomas Aquinas and debates between the realists and nominalists than in gender or class structures in villages in southern France. Jewish, Muslim and Hindu historians would follow a similar model.
Izgad,
I agree that we “need something else besides for history, like the belief in divine providence and judgment, to keep us grounded.” But this belief brings with it a set of moral principles–because I believe this, then I (and others) must act in thus and so a way.
So certainly, history is an attempt to find out the who, what, when, where, how, and why. But all of that is imbued with morality. Take the example of the Shoah, which you mentioned. There is a story–a fact, if you’d rather–full of morality: the immorality of the Nazis, the culpability of so many others, the suffering and bravery of the Jews, the righteous Gentiles, and so on. Even your simple, one phrase summary of that fact makes a moral judgment: the Nazis murdered the Jews. We could multiply examples to find the implicit moral judgment in many histories. My point is simply that since human actions are moral, any good historian will take that into account in his history, and a Christian historian has a particular set of ethics which gives him a coherent way to approach morality.
A reader sent me an e-mail pointing out—quite correctly—that I had missed a step. In my post, I skipped from the Christian scholar thinking to calling him “the Church Thinking” without adequate justification. The reader framed the question very well: “But how do we know that the Christian scholar’s work is supposed to be part of his identity in the Church, and for the Church, rather than being incidental to the Church and being for humanity?”
For some scholars, the connection can be clear. Theologians, some historians, some biologists, some educators, and the like can have a role of directly advancing the church’s mission, by strengthening the faith and sharpening the knowledge of believers within the church, or by offering an apologetic to unbelievers. Here are two examples: the historian Mark Noll, besides writing histories of American religion, has also written a book titled “The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind”; the scientists at the Institute for Creation Research offer scientific defenses of creationism. I think such scholars in such roles can be described as the “Church thinking.”
But even such scholars do not spend all of their time in work directly related to the church, and such scholars are probably in the minority of all Christians in the academy. For Christian scholars generally, then, I think there is a different connection between the scholar and the church. First, there is the old Christian doctrine of vocation. Whatever a person’s job may be, it is a holy vocation from God, and therefore fits into His purposes for the church, even if we don’t know how. Second, one’s Christianity ought to shape his work in every way. In my graduate history education, I’m about to undergo a program of “professionalization.” If the advice books are to be believed, I’m supposed to order my life and approach everything within my discipline as a professional historian. If one can conform his thinking to a professional identity, is it not reasonable to expect that he first conform his scholarship to his Christian identity? Third, as I understand the Scriptures, the church is intended to be a group of people who completely fulfill God’s purposes for humanity. Even if their work doesn’t have as obvious a connection to the church as, say, a theologian or a religious historian, it must please the Lord Jesus to have criminal lawyers, molecular biologists, plumbers, farmers, and secretaries doing their work as members of His church. To reverse the perspective, it does much to strengthen my faith that the Lord is working through His church to see that there are Christians as Christians filling every occupation.
I hope that’s not just a collection of generalizations. To summarize, I think that Christian scholars can be termed the “Church thinking” because their work either advances the church’s mission directly or because it makes the church beautiful by fulfilling Christ’s desire to have an entire race and nation of redeemed people.
I grant you that it would have been better if I had said killed instead of murdered. That being said murdered does not have to have the negative moral connotations that it is usually given. I fail to see any inherent morality being played out in the Holocaust. One could learn about the Holocaust and come to the conclusion that the Nazis “murdering” millions of Jews was a necessary sacrifice to save civilization from Communism. Hitler, in his great “genius,” used Jews, a group that so many other groups hated, to rally the German people to his cause. And the Allies “murdered” hundreds of thousands of Japanese civilians in order to bring about their surrender. Similarly one can study the history of American slavery and decide: “wasn’t slavery a great thing. I want to have some slaves do my work for me as I sit in the shade and drink mint juleps on my mansion.” Such views would be perfectly consistent with an accurate knowledge of history.
Izgad,
Not to press the point, but each of the counter examples that you’ve given is a moral judgment. If someone were to say (wrongly) that the Holocaust was a sacrifice to defeat Communism, then he would be making a moral judgment that defeating Communism was a greater good than killing the Jews. Concerning the firebombing and nuclear bombing of Japanese cities, one must make the moral judgment whether killing civilians was morally justifiable to end the war. Concerning slavery, your hypothetical argument is not so far from the actual arguments that slaveholders offered to justify slavery—moral arguments that slaveholders needed slaves to reach the heights of culture.
Sorry to intrude (but not too sorry, obviously), but I couldn’t help but note that even so basic an act as selecting a topic reveals our philosophical/cultural/theological/moral biases. We use the term “emplot” to describe the way in which historians choose which history to make salient and which to leave silent. By simply choosing to discuss topics like the Holocaust, fire-bombing, and slavery we have revealed something about our moral order before putting a single word on a page. The topics that we find “big” or “important” tell us much about ourselves and our ideological blinders.
So Izgad, I think that you are right to note that Christian historians are often going to write history that looks different from non-Christians. But the very act of selection requires the Christian historian to make choices based upon moral assumptions. The Christian historian cannot escape making “moral and ethical judgements about the past.”
Paul
I am okay with the sort of bias that comes in topic selection. That still leaves one the ability to deal with the actual information in a professional and honest manner.
Lincoln
In terms of the examples I gave, my point was that the ideologies I outlined, as hateful as I may personally find them, are valid conclusions from the study of history. Just as science can only tell you what can be done and not what should be done, history can only tell us what people did and not what they should have done.