Brodie, Fawn. No Man Knows My History: The Life of Joseph Smith, the Mormon Prophet. 2nd ed. New York: Knopf, 1971. 499 pages. ISBN: 0394469674.

Bushman, Richard L. Joseph Smith: Rough Stone Rolling. New York: Knopf, 2005. 740 pages. ISBN: 1400042704.

As part of a reading list to teach me about how biographies are written, I recently read two noted biographies about Joseph Smith. The two biographies were Fawn Brodie’s No Man Knows My History (1945) and Richard Bushman’s Joseph Smith: Rough Stone Rolling (2005). Joseph Smith was, of course, a nineteenth century visionary, author or translator of the Book of Mormon, and the founder of the Latter Day Saints. Any historian who handles Smith must deal with the supernatural occurrences and claims that pervaded his life. The question I put to myself as I was reading was this: How should a historian treat supernatural? How should a historian write about alleged visions and miracles and prophecies?

Like many historians of religion, Brodie and Bushman have personal connections to their subject. Fawn Brodie was born into the LDS church as the daughter of a bishop and the niece of an apostle and president. While in graduate school at the University of Chicago, she lost her faith. She then wrote her critical biography of Smith, for which the LDS Church excommunicated her. Richard Bushman, on the other hand, is a professional historian who has retained his Mormon faith. Many of Bushman’s works (one of which won the Bancroft prize) deal with early American history, but his biography of Smith has received perhaps the widest discussion.

Because of their different conclusions on Mormonism, Brodie and Bushman wrote very different biographies of Joseph Smith. These differences might be summed up in the way they treat Smith’s visions. Brodie plainly thinks that Smith was a charlatan and a hoax. She is almost mean-spirited in the way that she goes about debunking Smith and the Book of Mormon. I wished at times that she would simply report what Smith did or said, rather than taxing my patience by repeatedly explaining the obvious. The effect is to make Smith a flat character. In Brodie’s telling, he is always the adolescent trickster with scarcely any room to develop into a man who believed his own message.

Bushman, on the other hand, finds believable most, if not all, of what Smith claimed. Consequently, he writes as if Moroni had actually appeared to Smith, as if he had actually translated the golden plates, and if he had actually received revelations. This is not so problematic; as Bushman points out in his preface, a historian can scarcely be expected to add the words alleged or purportedly before every such statement. More problematic is the way Bushman structures his materials. For example, Bushman reports very little about Smith’s treasure seeking until after he discovers the golden plates. The effect, at least to this reader, was that Bushman presented a Joseph Smith whose mind or inner life was much more believable than Brodie’s, at the expense of leaving what actually happened much less certain.

As for style, both Brodie and Bushman have written good biographies, though neither is the summit of the biographer’s art. Brodie’s is much the better story. Where Bushman’s narrative is often interrupted by tedious justifications of Smith, Brodie’s book is well-crafted with an unswerving narrative. Bushman’s biography, though, is far better at explaining Joseph Smith’s teachings. One can read Brodie’s nearly five hundred pages and learn surprisingly little about what Smith thought or taught. The differences in style between Brodie and Bushman is not simply a result of the commonly invoked dichotomy between narration and explanation. Rather, the difference is due at least in part to the way they treat the supernatural. Brodie is able to dismiss Smith’s experiences as hoaxes and his teaching as nonsense, and so she can get on with her story. Bushman is obligated both to treat them as genuine and to provide scholarly explanations, so he sometimes gets bogged down in justifications.

My sympathies lie with both authors. Like Brodie, I have not a shred of faith in what Joseph Smith taught, and so I find her narrative of Smith’s life more compelling than Bushman’s. But like Bushman, I am a believing historian who writes about the history of religion and faith. As such, I would like to think it is possible to write about religious history, even supernatural occurrences, in a way that is different from unbelievers but that is still rigorously scholarly. Despite their admirable work, I think that neither Brodie nor Bushman has quite succeeded in the way they treat the supernatural.

What, then, is the proper way for a historian to handle visions and dreams and prophecies? The extreme of skepticism assumes there is nothing supernatural. The extreme of credulity treats such occurrences uncritically. My method, which is admittedly ad hoc, strikes what I hope is a balance between those extremes. I frankly distinguish between what I believe is supernatural and what I believe is not, leaving room for what is doubtful. After all, not every spiritual claim is true, and life is too short to give every opinion an equal hearing. But at the same time, I try to treat all religious beliefs as genuinely held, in order to give them their due influence in the lives of those who hold them.

Is there a better way?

James Kurth, a retired political scientist from Swarthmore College, is perhaps best known for his variation on Samuel Huntington’s “clash of civilizations” thesis. In the early ’90s Huntington proposed that the end of the Cold War was the beginning of a global contest between people groups and nations that would be predicated upon cultural and religious cleavages. Huntington’s idea became de rigueur with the rise of global Islamic terrorism. But whereas Huntington’s clash was a matter for foreign policy, Kurth believed that the greatest crisis would surface in domestic affairs as a battle between liberal multiculturalism and the Judeo-Christian inflected Western tradition.

Significantly, Kurth rooted both opposing streams of American culture in America’s Protestant heritage. As an evangelical (he’s a deacon at Proclamation Presbyterian Church pastored by Peter Lillback, President of Westminster Theological Seminary), Kurth argues that theologically liberal Protestantism has morphed into a psuedo-religious secular multiculturalism. This is the “Protestant Deformation.”

Kurth begins by positing that the anti-hierarchical and anti-communitarian emphases of the Protestant Reformation bled over into the secular realm. Thus American Protestants were historically supporters of free markets and liberal democracy, secular corollaries to religious individualism and egalitarianism.

But over time, these emphases changed. Kurth lists six stages of Protestant declension: salvation by grace, grace evidenced through good works, salvation by works, the Unitarian Transformation, the American Creed, and universal human rights. Historic Protestantism believed that eternal salvation was ensured by grace alone, God’s unmerited favor towards desperate sinners. But as Protestant communities grew, it became hard to distinguish the nonbelievers from the elect. So, as observed by Max Weber, works became a litmus test for the saved community.

Eventually, the theological concept of grace lost favor in some Protestant circles, creating a de facto belief in salvation by works. This works-based theology transformed into Unitarianism, a deemphasis of the person and work of Jesus Christ. A personal savior had been replaced by a distant Supreme Being. Over time, even that abstract, remote idea of god was relinquished, creating the secular American Creed. This Creed was no longer distinctly Protestant, but “it was clearly the product of a Protestant culture and was a sort of secularized version of Protestantism.” Finally, the American Creed became universalized and reformulated as a belief in human rights.

Kurth’s “Protestant Deformation” is a pretty convincing explanation of the development of American civil religion from an evangelical perspective. It also speaks to historians in a wide variety of fields, like diplomatic, religious, and political history.

Do you find the “Protestant Deformation” convincing? Why or why not?

Bonus: I particularly like this article by Kurth. I sympathize with his politics, including his opposition to the idea of American exceptionalism and his isolationism. I suspect that he is a fellow confessional libertarian in the mold of Gresham Machen.

Lorenzo Dow

In the antebellum United States, more children were named after Lorenzo Dow than any other person. It is likely that more people heard Dow speak in person than any one else. His writings were so widely read and reprinted that Dow made a small fortune. In an age known for religious eccentricity, Dow could give any eccentric a run for his money. But despite his eccentricities, or because of them, Dow was a representative of American religion after the Revolution—a prophet of democracy. [1]

Dow was a child of the Revolution, born in Connecticut in 1777. He was converted in his early teens and began itinerant preaching when he was nineteen. Dow was frequently at odds with the Methodist conferences and bishops that were the authorities within the denomination. At first his age, and soon his idiosyncratic preaching and prophet-like personality made other Methodist ministers reluctant to support Dow. They licensed Dow to preach, but he was never ordained. In the 1790s and especially in the first decade of the nineteenth century, Dow preached at camp meetings throughout the United States, including some of the western territories. He also made three trips to Great Britain, in 1798–1801, in 1805–1807, and in 1818–1820. Dow cultivated his reputation as an American John the Baptist. He wore disheveled clothes, long hair, and a beard. In his preaching, he used the types of antics that are normally associated with later evangelists like Billy Sunday.[2]

If Dow was a preacher of the gospel, he was also a preacher of American democracy. Democracy was the root of Dow’s beliefs about how people obtain salvation. Dow rejected the Calvinism of his upbringing. Salvation, he preached, was not a matter of God’s election but of man’s choice to choose or reject Christ. Nor could salvation be judged by church authorities, but only by the immediate apprehension of the believer. Dow was not unique in these doctrines, for many Christians contemporary with him were moving away from Calvinism towards the revivalism epitomized by Charles Grandison Finney a few decades later. What made Dow important was that he explicitly connected this change in preaching salvation to the ideals of Jeffersonian democracy: “If all men are ‘BORN EQUAL,’ and endowed with unalienable RIGHTS by their CREATOR, in the blessings of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness—then there can be no just reason, as a cause, why he may or should not think, and judge, and act for himself in matters of religion, opinion, and private judgment.” Dow was clear that politics were driving his theology. [3]

The second way in which Dow mixed democracy and religion was by his constant resistance against ecclesiastical authority. Some of this resistance must be attributed to Dow’s naturally contrary personality. But much of it was principled, as can be seen in his tract on “Strictures on Church Government.” In that tract, Dow rejected the notion that episcopal succession was the source of Methodist authority. That argument justified Anglicans, or even the tyrannical Catholics, better than it justified Methodists. Rather, Dow argued, the only legitimate authority for the church was the sovereignty of the people. And Dow was willing to take the principle of democratic egalitarianism much farther than most contemporaries, even to include other races. The main example that Dow used to justify his ideas of church government was the case of Richard Allen, a black laymen who had founded his own Methodist church, of which he eventually became a bishop. Even Dow’s editor, though reluctantly admitting that Dow was too sharp in his opinions on church government, thought that tract and others “evince a mind deeply imbued with the spirit of Democracy.”[4]

The key to Dow’s experience were the visions and dreams that he saw throughout his life. These visions guided Dow’s decisions and informed his theology. For example, Dow had two visions of John Wesley that led to his conversion and his call to preach. Perhaps visions are key to more than just Dow’s experience. Historians have noted that democratized religion in the United States was at once extraordinarily open and extraordinarily authoritarian. People were free to pick the denomination, sect, or clergyman of their choice, and they exercised that freedom frequently. Yet people tended to pick leaders who were authoritarian. Christian democracy was not so much inside any particular church as it was among the churches. Perhaps visions and dreams are part of the explanation for this paradox. [5]

The Protestant teaching that every person could read the Bible for himself can lead to egalitarianism in religion. If people are permitted to understand God’s word for themselves, and to correct their ministers from the Bible, then the Bible has a leveling effect. Reading the Bible can also lead to religious mobility, as laymen look for a church that matches their interpretation, or else found their own. An example contemporary with Dow are the Christians and Disciples of Christ of Alexander Campbell and Barton Stone, who founded new denominations to return to the primitive Christianity of the Bible. Visions and dreams, though, can have a more complex effect. In Dow’s case, visions convinced him to disregard the authority of the Methodist bishops and conferences, and thus to influence Methodism towards increased openness. But visions also gave Dow the authority to preach in a way that was right in Dow’s own eyes. Those visions were necessarily anti-democratic, because they were accessible only to Dow and not to his followers, and because visions are so intensely personal that they are nonnegotiable. It is not much of a leap from Dow’s visions to those of other innovative but authoritarian religious leaders of the same period. For example, both Joseph Smith and Robert Matthews (later Matthias) claimed visions as their basis for establishing very authoritarian sects. [6]

Though Dow was the prophet of American democracy, Dow also typifies the international characteristic of evangelicalism in early America. Dow had visions of John Wesley at both his conversion and his call to preach. He traveled to Ireland and England first for his health and then to preach, where he made connections with British Methodists and also Quakers. Like many revivalists, from George Whitefield to D. L. Moody to Billy Graham, Dow made his reputation on both sides of the Atlantic. Dow was not necessarily well-received in Britain, for the American camp meeting style was far less appealing to British Christians than, say, Moody’s Victorian morality and sentimentality would be a half-century later, but Dow spent nearly as much time preaching in Britain as he did America. Perhaps the most important clue to Dow’s transatlantic identity is the curious term that Dow chose for himself, “Cosmopolite.” This term often stands in for Dow’s name, as in the title of Dow’s published journal, The History of Cosmopolite; Or, Lorenzo’s Journal. Dow titled one particularly bizarre segment of his journal “A Short Account of ‘Eccentric Cosmopolite.’” These sections are clearly autobiographical, but Dow writes about himself in the third person without using his name. The meaning of the term cosmopolite—“citizen of the world”—is plain enough, but precisely what Dow meant by it is more difficult to know. Perhaps Dow meant that though he was a citizen of the United States and an advocate for its democracy, yet he was not bound by the confines of one nation. Neither Methodism nor the United States could hold Dow, though he typified them both. [7]

1. The assertion about children being named after Dow is taken from Nathan O. Hatch, The Democratization of American Christianity (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989), 281, n.27. There is no recent biography of Lorenzo Dow. The best secondary sources on his life are American National Biography, s.v. “Dow, Lorenzo”; Charles Coleman Sellers, Lorenzo Dow, the Bearer of the Word (New York: Minton, Balch & Company, 1928); Hatch, The Democratization of American Christianity. Dow also appears in Gordon S. Wood, Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic, 1789-1815 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 610. This paper is drawn from those sources, and from a collection of Dow’s works, Lorenzo Dow, History of Cosmopolite; or The Four Volumes of Lorenzo’s Journal, Concentrated in One: Containing His Experience and Travels, from Childhood to 1815, Being Upwards of Thirty-Seven Years. Also, His Polemical Writings . . ., 6th ed. (Wheeling, Virginia, 1849).
2. American National Biography, s.v. “Dow, Lorenzo”; Dow, History of Cosmopolite.
3. Quoted in American National Biography, s.v. “Dow, Lorenzo.”
4. Dow, History of Cosmopolite, v, 543-58.
5. Dow, History of Cosmopolite, 10, 27-28.
6. An account of Campbell, Stone, and Smith can be found in Sydney E. Ahlstrom, A Religious History of the American People (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1973). For Matthews, see Paul Johnson and Sean Wilentz, The Kingdom of Matthias (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994).
7. Dow, History of Cosmopolite, 10, 27-28, 78-94, 253-303. The OED reports that the term cosmopolite was revived in the nineteenth century “and often contrasted with patriot, and so either reproachful or complimentary”; Oxford English Dictionary, s.v., “cosmopolite.” Two works which stress the international aspects of evangelicalism in this period are Mark A. Noll, The Rise of Evangelicalism: The Age of Edwards, Whitefield, and the Wesleys, A History of Evangelicalism: People, Movements, and Ideas in the English-speaking World (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2003); John Wolffe, The Expansion of Evangelicalism: The Age of Wilberforce, More, Chalmers, and Finney, A History of Evangelicalism: People, Movements, and Ideas in the English-speaking World (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2007).

While reading William Inboden’s Religion and American Foreign Policy, I came across several sentences that caught my eye. Inboden dedicated a chapter of his book to a discussion of US Senator H. Alexander Smith, a prominent anti-Communist and ardent prayer warrior. Inboden was interested in Smith’s epistemology, the source of his certainty that God had told him how to fight the Cold War. The senator spent much time each day in prayer asking for divine intervention in his own personal struggles as well as for guidance in Congress. Thankfully, Smith journaled about his prayer life. Representative of the quotes that Inboden included was Smith’s prayer asking God to “make me true to thine principles which are true and guided by thee and not those which are merely expedient or vote-getting.” Commendable, but not extraordinary.

But these quotations grabbed my attention: “God is with me and will guide me or I will make a failure in a big [illegible]. Of course God will not fail me but I must be consecrated” (Inboden 196).

A little bit later: ‘“I have had bad days because I am tired and I need God. I have been smoking my pipe which I do enjoy, but I wonder if it has meant that I am not getting that feeling of guidance that I so much need.” A couple of months later he complained of “not being up to my normal spiritual vigor” and noted “it comes to me to make an experiment: Does my smoking keep me from God’s guidance? I will try for this week and see what the effect is” (Inboden 196).

Where had I heard language like this before? Boom, it suddenly hit me…these are Keswickian ideas!

Several months ago I read an article-length version of Andy Naselli’s dissertation on Keswick theology. Andy is a doctoral student at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School and D. A. Carson’s research assistant. (I heartily recommend the article for anyone interested in Protestant theology or modern church history; indeed, I myself was astounded at the influence of Keswickian thought on my own upbringing.)

In summary, Keswick theologians taught that there were three categories of people: unbelievers (those who had not accepted Jesus Christ as their personal Savior), carnal Christians (those who were saved, but who had not defeated their sinful natures), and consecrated Christians (those who had surrendered known sin to God and acknowledged Christ as Lord of their life). It is the distinction between carnal and consecrated Christians that concerns us here.

Keswickians are often associated with the phrase, “Let go, and let God.” Carnal Christians needed to exercise their free will by confessing sin in an act of consecration. This was the letting go. The Spirit of God would then sanctify the believer, counteracting their sin nature. Now these consecrated Christians were empowered for service, confident that they were in the center of God’s will.

Logically following from this concept of consecration was the Keswickian’s constant search for known sin. If sin had not been discovered and confessed, then God could not consecrate that believer. So Keswickians earnestly dredged their souls looking for sins that might be holding them back .

But, like all believers, Keswickians often struggled with doubts and feelings of inadequacy. Keswickians interpreted these struggles as signs of unconfessed sin in their lives. They knew something was wrong, and they knew it wasn’t God’s fault, so they urgently looked for as yet unconfessed sins.

To use Senator Smith’s smoking as an example of Keswickian thought in action, the Senator noticed a lack of “normal spiritual vigor.” This indicated to him that some specific, unconfessed sin must be separating him God’s guidance. Smith believed that he needed to find the sin responsible for his condition, confess it, and then God would consecrate him.

Inboden describes Smith’s thought process this way: “Nothing seems to have bothered Smith more than the feeling that he might be alienated from divine counsel and comfort, and when such feelings overtook him he tried frantically to diagnose the cause, be it smoking or stress or political complications” (Inboden 197).

Speaking more broadly, I believe that Smith frequent mood swings – described by Inboden as “periodic bouts of guilt and self-doubt” (Inboden 197) – fit into a pattern of behavior that Naselli diagnoses as common among Keswickians. When the consecrated believer is on an emotional high following their confession of sin, they are empowered by the Spirit and woe be to all who might question their authority or opinions. But when the cycle reverses, depression is the understandable result of frantically searching for any sin that might be debilitating the Spirit’s work.

Thus it is significant that Inboden, who never mentions Keswick theology, writes, “Alternatively triumphant and timid, Smith saw himself playing the part of a prophet or even an oracle. The content of the message originated with God, not with him, and yet Smith had to maintain a certain standard of personal piety in order to hear and communicate this divine mandate.” (It is easy to see the interplay between Pentecostalism and Keswick theology. Pentecostals and Keswickians alike emphasize the work of the Spirit and speak of the Spirit’s empowerment as an event that is distinct from justification.)

So what, you ask? H. Alexander Smith spoke like a Keswickian. Big deal. Paul, how do you even know that Smith got these ideas from Keswick theology, that the overlap of ideas is not just a coincidence?

Here’s where it gets good. H. Alexander Smith was an adherent of a group called Moral Re-Armament (MRA, also known as “the Oxford Group”). Although it sounds more like a think tank than a religious group, MRA was founded by Frank Buchman, a Lutheran minister. Buchman hoped that the group’s international network of politicians and businessmen would help usher in God’s kingdom on earth. MRA’s members were encouraged to spend time praying and listening to God’s direct commands (Inboden 192).

So what is the connection between MRA and Keswick theology? Frank Buchman was consecrated at the 1908 Keswick Convention. He wrote after hearing Jessie Penn-Lewis speak, “I don’t know how you explain it, I can only tell you I sat there and realized how my sin, my pride, my selfishness and my ill-will, had eclipsed me from God in Christ…. I was the centre of my own life. That big “I” had to be crossed out. I saw my resentments against those men standing out like tombstones in my heart. I asked God to change me and He told me to put things right with them. It produced in me a vibrant feeling, as though a strong current of life had suddenly been poured into me and afterwards a dazed sense of a great spiritual shaking-up.”

Buchman then went to work for the YMCA and was influenced by another prominent Keswickian, Baptist preacher F. B. Meyer. Meyer encouraged Buchman to spend more time each day opening himself up to the Spirit of God. Doing so would allow God to guide Buchman. Buchman followed Meyer’s advice and eventually began to encourage other men to do likewise. It was from these contacts that Buchman eventually formed MRA, which subsequently shaped H. Alexander Smith’s theology.

So why does all this stuff about Smith, Buchman, MRA, and Keswick matter? For political historians it shows the real world consequences of religious belief. Smith’s beliefs shaped his views of American foreign policy during the Cold War. Ideology is not just a cover for national self-interest.

For religious historians it is a reminder that ideas are messy. We should not think of theology as merely a formal system of doctrines. Theology can influence movements and people not normally associated with the theology proper.

For me it is a reminder to keep my eyes pealed no matter what I’m reading. I thought I was just reading a book about the influence of religion on American foreign policy makers during the Cold War. I had no clue that I’d end up learning about Keswick theology and MRA!

PS –Fun tidbit: an offshoot of “the Oxford Group” is Alcoholic’s Anonymous.

PPS – Ironically, D. A. Carson is speaking at next year’s Keswick Convention. Good thing that the organizers don’t know what Carson’s student has been up to! ;-)

One of the recurring themes in American religious history is the adoption of religious ways of thinking in non-religious parts of life. Of course many scholars have studied the direct influence of these religious ideas on American history. But here I’m suggesting that patterns of thinking, ultimately derived from religion, control or affect much of non-religious American thought.

Let me briefly list some of these patterns of thought. The millenarian or utopian pattern of thought looks forward to a golden age of peace and prosperity. This millennium is sometimes explicitly Christian, as it was for George Rapp’s New Harmony, and sometimes it is explicitly secular, as it was for Robert Owen’s New Harmony. The primitivist or fall/redemption pattern of thought, on the other hand, looks back to a golden age before the man’s sin destroyed it. Environmentalists often regard the wilderness as Eden and civilization as fallen. The scriptural or hermeneutical pattern of thought treats political documents as sacred and suggests that they be interpreted by methods  of interpretation roughly analogous to methods of interpreting the Bible. The obvious examples are the ways that Declaration of Independence and the federal Constitution are reverenced. The jeremiad or covenant pattern of thought treats America as a covenanted nation subject to God’s blessings or cursings depending on whether it keeps the covenant or sins against God. Two examples of mostly secular jeremiads are Abraham Lincoln’s “Second Inaugural Address” and Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream Speech.” The service pattern of thought is an ethic of leadership that demands that leaders be servants. Some of these other patterns could probably be classified under a providentialist pattern of thought. Most of these patterns are specifically Protestant and generally Christian, but I suspect that there are also Catholic and perhaps Jewish ways of thinking that have influenced American history.

This line of inquiry could be a means of synthesizing religious history with American history more generally, and of understanding American’s ambivalent relationship with religion.

For the past two days I attended a conference at Gordon College on “The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind—Fifteen Years Later.” The conference aimed to assess the relationship between evangelicalism and intellectual life, the topic of Mark Noll’s book on the subject. The conference program included discussions of the general state of evangelical intellectual life, as well as specific discussions on history, science, and politics. The following are the most important themes that I detected in the conference, some of which will echo Mark Noll’s closing remarks.

First, I was encouraged to see how many evangelicals there were in New England’s colleges and universities, both at evangelical schools such as Gordon College and at other schools such as Harvard. Some acknowledged that the academy is not encouraging to evangelicals, though probably no more hostile to evangelicals than society generally.

Second, several of the presentations provided insights into the actual working of evangelical intellectual life. Jon Roberts explained the difference between how evangelicals and Americans generally define what it means to be an expert. Society generally defines an expert as someone who has mastered a difficult body of knowledge. Evangelicals tend to define an expert as someone who convincingly says things that match what they already believe to be true about a body of knowledge. The evangelical definition of expertise needs to be reformed, but not, I think, completely abandoned. For evangelical scholars to be persuasive to their  fellow evangelicals, it will be necessary for them to take into account what evangelicals regard as expertise. David Hempton, author of a recent book titled Evangelical Disenchantment: Nine Portraits of Faith and Doubt, discussed why evangelicals often don’t listen to the genuine insights from the academy. Margaret Bendroth discussed gender and evangelical scholarship. One of her conclusions was that evangelical scholars have bought into the idea of the academy that scholarship should be an all-consuming vocation. That idea is gendered, because makes scholarship more difficult for women who are assigned the job of raising families, and it is also not-Christian, because Christianity stresses a more balanced approach to life and gives special importance to the raising of families. Evangelical scholars, therefore, need to find a more balanced, more explicitly Christian way of living as intellectuals.

Third, I found a discouraging strain of evangelical anti-intellectualism embedded in the conference itself. One of the issues of discussion was evangelical views of the origins of the world, either through young-earth creationism or some kind of theistic evolution. This was a topic both because it is a crucial question for evangelicals and because it was specifically an issue raised in The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind. Though I am a convinced young-earth creationist, my quarrel here is not with the theistic evolutionary position that many of the conference presenters held, but the way in which they arrived at and maintained that position. Some assumed that a Christian approach to science precluded any belief in young-earth creationism, and they buttressed that assumption with a discouraging number of ad hominem arguments. To be fair, those presenters were discussing why evangelicals believe what they do about science, rather than trying to establish the reasons for their position. There are, in fact, young-earth creationists who are also rigorous scientists. A more profitable line of discussion would have investigated the varying presuppositions of young-earth creationists and theistic evolutionists held by evangelicals whether scholars or not.

Fourth, for a conference intended for self-reflection on the evangelical mind, there was a healthy sense that we don’t need to be overly concerned about the scandal of the evangelical mind. Self-reflection is good, but not to the point of obsession. There was also a sense that we need not obsess about what the academy thinks of evangelical scholars. One presenter observed that minority groups often make the criticisms of dominant groups a part of their own identity. In other words, there is a danger that evangelical scholars will make too much of the criticisms of others in the academy. That danger, however, can be avoided through faith—primarily a faith in the truth of Christianity, but also a faith that truth, and thus evangelical scholarship insofar as it conforms to truth, will eventually prevail.

Fifth, there was a genuine, and I think nearly pervasive, sense of humility that whatever gains evangelicals have made intellectually have been due to God’s grace.

Sixth, I was able to draw some conclusions about the way forward for evangelical scholarship. That way forward is to do work that is rigorous at the highest standards of the academy, but that is also distinctively Christian, even distinctively evangelical. And that way forward is also to be concerned, not just with the quality of evangelical’s academic work, but also with the quality of their life as evangelical scholars. In other words, we must learn not just how to be scholars who happen to be evangelical Christians, but evangelical Christians who are scholars.

Lincoln and I want to elicit our readers’ philosophies of history. To that end, I’ve compiled some questions about historical philosophy that Lincoln and I have attempted to deal with in our previous posts. We want to know how you think about history. A philosophy of history is always in flux and we hope to refine ours through interacting with your personal historical philosophy.

What do you disagree with us about? [To get things started, I take issue with Lincoln’s contention that peoples’ “consequential choices are the stuff of history.” I believe that everything from earthquakes (the tremors themselves, not just the effects on human beings) to the courses of the stars are a part of history.]

What is the purpose of history?

Is there a “grand narrative” of history? If you believe there is, what is it? How does your theology, especially your eschatology, influence your philosophy of history?

Can we know God’s hand in history? Can we comprehend divine intervention in history? Should history be used to reward virtue and punish vice?

Do our choices influence history or is the course of history predetermined? What is the cause of historical events? How does free will (or its absence) impact your philosophy of history?

Ought we to make moral judgments about the past? Can we escape making moral judgments about the past?

“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 believe in a sovereign God who ordains all things and knows all things. He knew humankind, our actions, and our inmost thoughts from before the foundation of the world, in other words, before the beginning of history. The trajectory of history was foreordained. You can see the basic arc laid out in Scripture starting with “in the beginning God created” and ending with the second coming of Christ (well, I guess that depends on your eschatology, but you get my point). The medieval chroniclers incorporated this grand sweep of history into their works. A chronicler might have been writing a chronology of the Anglo-Saxons in the 9^th century, but he would start by linking his work with the time of Christ.

Most Christians hold to some grand narrative of history. The concept of the “grand narrative” is properly called teleology, the idea that there exists an end of history. I believe that all history has a beginning and an ending. A biography begins and ends with birth and death. An institutional history might show the triumphant maturation or the slow decline of a school. As William Cronon has noted, even environmental historians find themselves turning the eruptions of earthquakes and other natural events into narratives. We shape our stories into narratives because narratives are “fundamental to the way we humans organize our experience.” This fact shouldn’t worry Christian historians. As Cronon further explained, “this commitment to teleology and narrative gives environmental history – all history – its moral center.” Narratives tell the reader what is good or bad, right or wrong.

All historians employ narratives. Fine, but how do we determine the shape of our narratives? Ought history to be an ascension narrative or a declension narrative? Do we highlight progress or regress? Lincoln alluded to this tension in his last post. The theological differences between dispensationalism and reformed theology result in very different historical narratives. I am purposefully simplifying (and to some extent distorting) the difference between the two viewpoints. This is not the place for a detailed discussion of the Kingdom of God and what, when, or where it is. The dispensationalist views history as a declension narrative. In each dispensation, or age, humankind is given instructions by God that we inevitably fail to follow. The dispensationalist views society and humankind as regressive. Our world becomes ever worse until the return of Christ. Reformed theologians, on the other hand, often construct a progressive narrative of history. The believing elect work to usher in the Kingdom of God by redeeming souls and transforming culture. Thus the reformed historian gravitates toward ascension narratives.

I find myself unconvinced by either grand narrative. I think we presume too much when we try to streamline the working of God in history to fit into our human-constructed teleologies. I do believe that history is linear, that it began with God’s creation of the world and will end when He destroys it. But as to the shape of the intervening years…well, we all make history, and often our theology, fit our preconceptions. Please indulge me this quick illustration: The reformed ascension narrative took a hit during World War One. Industrialized slaughter on a global scale did not fit particularly well into a progressive framework. Thus the darker dispensationalist outlook on society had its heyday during the post-WWI period. The point of this digression is to illustrate how historical events and cultural change can cause shifts in our theology and narrative of history. Being aware of humankind’s mutability makes me question convenient, tidy, overarching narratives. I can accept by faith that the redemptive narrative of Scripture is true, but I feel no similar urge towards manmade systems like dispensationalism or reformed theology.

My apathy towards grand narratives leads me to a form of teleological agnosticism. I’m satisfied with saying that history begins and ends with the Alpha and Omega. God is ahistorical because He transcends history. He is bound by neither space nor time. He always was and always will be. History, on the other hand, is bound by time, space, and humanity. The confusion comes when one posits, as I do, that all history is God’s history. By faith I accept the overarching themes of history revealed in Scripture (among other themes, humanity’s need for redemption and the offer of salvation), but the context of most of human history is lost to us because we are finite creatures. We can only scratch at the surface of historical truths. We sketch rude outlines of what happened and formulate theories of why things happened without ever really grasping the grander context of that which gives history meaning. Within that broader, inscrutable context lies the purpose and fuller truth of history.

Plato used the allegory of the Cave to illustrate his Theory of Forms, the idea that what humanity sees as real on earth is not true reality. Plato described people sitting in a dark cave watching shadows of objects projected on the wall in front of them. These individuals had no knowledge of the true forms of these objects and so they supposed them to be real. This allegory accurately describes fallen humanity. We think that what we see around us is real, but true reality exists only in eternity. (CS Lewis’s Great Divorce is a modern update to Plato’s “Theory of Forms.”) The apostle Paul was classically-trained and used Platonic imagery in several of his letters: “Now we see but a poor reflection as in a mirror; then we shall see face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known.”

As a historian then, I believe that history is the shadow of reality. We describe as best we can God’s working in human lives and through historical events. We pluck at the strands making a connection here and there, but the full tapestry will not be revealed until the end of history. I make it my goal, as a historian, to describe historical events without worrying about understanding its deepest meaning, its place in the “Ultimate Scheme of Things.” It would be presumptuous of me to assume that I, Paul Matzko, have the ability to fit everything in its place (see also Lincoln’s earlier post). I am compelled to leave history unembellished. It may be linear, but that doesn’t make it a straight line. Rather than constructing grand ascension or declension narratives we must make room for the twists and turns of history. History should not read like a Sunday School story. In the scope of history the good do not always triumph and the bad often prosper (ironically, an anti-Platonic idea). As historians we must describe what happened in this life as accurately as possible and leave the sorting of the just from the unjust to God. This doesn’t mean that we cannot allow our faith to influence our work, but it should constrain us from forcing history to affirm our moral order.

On a different note, I find it ironic that historians argue about the same questions as theologians. In a class at Temple I found myself defending a Marxist historian because I sympathized with his argument about ahistorical concepts. Sure, the Marxist’s Deus ex machina was the “Mode of Production” rather than God, but at least he recognized that all of history is given meaning by something or someone outside of history. A common topic in classes on historiography and historical philosophy is the tension between determinism and contingency. In theology we describe this as the tension between election and free will. Whether or not you prefer to frame the question in theological rather than historical language, your beliefs concerning determinism and contingency dramatically affects your historical interpretations. Do the actions of one individual influence history? Or are our actions simply the result of deep-rooted cultural, geographical, and ideological influences?

On the one extreme, there was a group of mostly French historians called the Annales School which argued that historical structures dictated historical events. In other words, meta-historical forces like geography, religion, and economics so influence individual decision making that contingency is really an illusion. Thus, Annales historians, like Fernand Braudel and Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, thought that individual historical events were less important than these structural forces. Over the past thirty years, the Annales School has declined in popularity. As postmodernism became more influential in the academy, historians have tended to elevate contingency over determinism. In reaction to the way in which modernism stifled minority opinion, many contemporary historians, especially those who would describe themselves as postcolonial, look to rescue subaltern peoples and belittled worldviews. These historians seek to empower subjugated people groups by revealing the ways in which they resisted oppression. Postcolonial historians believe that even seemingly powerless people can make choices that influence history.

Let me give an example of the interpretational tension between these two schools of thought. Slavery was widespread in the antebellum South. The determinist-leaning historian would emphasize the economic basis of slavery, the geography of the South that encouraged plantation slavery, and the pro-slavery mentalité of the dominant culture. Note that the determinst never discusses the feelings of those actually enslaved. The historian who seeks to emphasize contigency might instead highlight the attitudes of slaves towards their masters and the daily acts of slave resistance. The determinist’s interpretation implies that slavery was inevitable and irresistible. His opponent is likely to see slavery as historical circumstance, that slavery as a historical event could have turned out differently.

So which is right? Yes. If you can come up with a better answer, let me know. I suspect that both contingency and determinism hold some validity and that a historian should not be bound to either extreme. In a certain situation, broad, structural forces might compell a certain pattern of behavior. Yet I cannot believe that contingency is a complete illusion, that all choices are totally constrained. Without some form of contigency there is no moral imperative, right or wrong. I use the analogy of a river to make sense of contigency and determinism. Most of the things which we could throw into that river, like a stick or stone, will make a ripple but do nothing to change the course of the river. Yet if we drop in a log or boulder at the narrowest junction we might temporarily dam and divert the course of the water. Even so, we can do nothing to change the fact that the river will inevitably find its way to the sea. So, for the historian, peoples’ choices matter, they can change the course of history, but the ultimate end of history remains fixed. Our work should reflect both contingency and determinism.

In conclusion, I offer this thought. History is a means to an end. This is an unavoidable truth. We construct, or emplot, history to tell a story. Our preconceptions and prejudices, our fears and hopes, and our aspirations and failures are all reflected in our work. We each have a goal in mind when we write. The historian must ask, to what end do we write history? Or, better yet, to Whom do we write history? As a Christian historian I seek to glorify a great God. What does He require of me? That which he requires of all mankind:  ”To act justly and to love mercy and to walk humbly with your God.”

In 1994 Mark Noll, then the McManis Professor of Christian Thought at Wheaton College, published The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind. Chapter One, sentence one: “The scandal of the evangelical mind is that there is not much of an evangelical mind.” Noll spends the rest of the book examining why the evangelical mind was so flaccid. Noll defines fundamentalism as a subset of evangelicalism and the preeminent source of the ailments which Noll believed had sapped evangelicalism of its intellectual vigor. Noll is right.

This accusation is cod liver oil to the fundamentalist. We splutter quick rebuttals, asserting that fundamentalism has long encouraged the life of the mind. We point to the fundamentalist defense of orthodox Christianity. Noll does not neglect those virtues. He readily acknowledges the vital role fundamentalists played in preserving doctrinal orthodoxy, yet he simultaneously identifies a current of anti-intellectualism, one which we often overlook, within fundamentalism.

I think now is a good time to remind ourselves that fundamentalism is a historical movement. We certainly ought to thank God for graciously using fundamentalism to preserve orthodox doctrine from corrosion, but that acknowledgement does not make fundamentalism equivalent to Biblicism. Fundamentalism is a movement of men and women which is rooted in a discrete place and time and has been heavily influenced by a variety of cultural influences.

While most fundamentalists would agree with the above statement, we are still loathe to admit that our ideology may not always arise prima facie from the Scriptures. We place the highest priority on the Scriptures as the inspired Word of God and use that Word as a lamp to guide our path. Yet our emphasis on the Word as the sina qua non of our faith can also discourage us from looking for truth elsewhere. The thought process unfolds like this, “Since God’s Word is perfect, why look elsewhere? All other truth is inferior.” At its most extreme, this train of logic discourages fundamentalists from properly valuing the arts and sciences as repositories of truth and beauty. I am reminded of a visit I made to a church in California pastored by a graduate of Hyles-Anderson College. After the service, while chatting with a number of the high school kids in the youth group, I realized that each of the college bound kids was planning to study for the full-time ministry. When they found out that I was studying history and political science they were visibly discomfited. In their minds something had to be wrong with me. Someone whose heart is right with the Lord would’ve chosen to be a Bible major, right?

This lengthy introduction leads up to the presupposition that ought to belong at the base of every fundamentalist’s historical philosophy: all truth is God’s truth. God, in His infinite wisdom, created a world that reflects His glory. “The heavens declare the glory of God.” Like every other part of God’s creation, we exist to point to Him. We can accomplish this task not only by studying the Scriptures, sharing the gospel, and worshipping in a church, but also by driving a truck, looking through a microscope, composing a concerto, and writing a history book. We make much of God by looking for and finding Him wherever we are and in whatever we do. For the historian, then, history becomes an act of worship, a holy vocation. When we examine historical events and bring to life historical figures we are uttering an “Amen.” This is why we study history.

Thankfully, the fundamentalist school in which I was educated, Bob Jones University, has a tradition of not separating the sacred from the secular. The school’s founder, Bob Jones Sr., often said, “For a Christian, life is not divided into the secular and the sacred. To him all ground is holy ground, every bush is a burning bush, and every place a temple of worship.” I’ll paraphrase that statement for the historian: “all history is God’s history.” Bob Jones College was designed to be a liberal arts institution where all students would be trained to appreciate culture, find beauty in the arts, and diligently study the Scriptures. Shakespeare, opera, and film were an integral part of this expression of fundamentalism. I cannot underemphasize how deep this perception of what constitutes truth pervades my intellectual DNA. On this foundational level there ought to be no tension between the fundamentalist and the historian.

So far I’ve explained why a Christian chooses to study history. On some other occasion I might take a stab at defining a uniquely Christian historiography, the “how” of history. But the purpose of this series is to explain mine and Lincoln’s philosophy of history. A historian’s philosophy of history is the ideological framework that informs their research and interpretation. For the Christian historian our ideological framework is our theology; what we believe about God shapes how we think about history.

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Part Two will be posted July 19th.