1. Introduction to Church History and
Related Disciplines

In recent years, historians have observed a growing rapprochement between institutional church history and the history of doctrine, and this development has occurred at a time when the disciplines of church history are increasingly influenced by new methods of research, particularly those of the social sciences.1 This rapprochement is arguably the wave of the future. The point can be illustrated in a variety of ways: for example, one finds an increasing tendency in modern church historiography to place ideas in a wider intellectual context, sometimes broadening the latter even further, with attention to cultural symbol or “mentality.” Similarly, the new areas of research opened up for us by the study of women and ethnic and religious minorities in church history have oriented us to a wider social context. Both developments are linked to new methods of investigation, and both have contributed directly to the need for reconceptualizing the traditional taxonomy of church history and its subdisciplines.2 Ecumenical issues and the opportunities offered by religious pluralism and concerns for justice and equality have led us to become more sensitive to differences of opinion and approach, even as we discuss the progress of nominally orthodox dogma.

Despite these developments, historians of ideas, including many church historians, have continued to espouse older methodologies, while the social scientists have adopted a variety of new analytical tools to advance research and analysis. Increasingly, the more innovative techniques have revealed the inadequacies and imprecision of the traditional approaches, whether institutional or intellectual, when considered alone. We will argue that the traditional bifurcation of the field into institutional church history and history of theology or history of dogma is no longer adequate because this division itself establishes a topical grid into which the materials of history are pressed.

We will also argue for a necessary distinction between the “history of ideas” and “intellectual history,” the former approach tending to reify ideas and isolate them from their cultural and social context, the latter approach attempting to locate thought in its contemporary contexts. The methods as well as the subject matters of church history will, of course, continue to be contested, because conceptualizations of the past bear so directly upon matters of our self-­understanding, including our individual, social, and ecclesiastical identities. But the older arguments concerning the proper subjects and methods of the church historian, and the relationship of the social sciences to the study of history, seem increasingly irrelevant; the important question for the church historian today is the suitability of the technique to the specific task of research, which in turn is determined by the overall goal of the project and the nature of the evidence at hand. In this new context, the student should be prepared to adopt any method that appears likely to elicit the desired result, and such an eclectic approach will often require an appeal to more than one technique of analysis. The present atmosphere of diversity and freedom of investigation presents us with the need to reevaluate the traditional divisions and methods in the general field of church history and to test their compatibility with contemporary needs and outlook.

In spite of the promise we find in contemporary academic and social settings, recent trends are also laden with no little difficulty; the broad field of church history is increasingly complex and highly fragmented. While the scholarly competence and reputation of church historians generally has never been greater, the danger of overspecialization, as in all related disciplines in the humanities, remains very real. Competing claims with respect to methods of investigation have also resulted in a widespread malaise concerning the possibility of generally agreed upon standards in scholarship. Issues of epistemology, the nature of historical evidence, and the nature and use of language have also been the subjects of vigorous debate. Evidently, the increasing number and complexity of research methods is partially a product of recent innovations in technology and partially a result of the need for delicate and unconventional instruments to discern the voices of those who have left no traditional records behind them. But unless the connections between these developments are brought to conscious awareness and addressed, this complexity, and the growing suspicion of any form of objective understanding, have the potential to fragment historical studies even further. It is with these considerations in mind that we encourage students to imaginatively consider those research topics that have the greatest potential for drawing intellectual and social history together. We have observed that the new information sources and techniques of analysis have already proven to be a strong solvent in breaking down the older distinctions between the study of “sacred” and “secular” history.

Definitions of the several church historical disciplines are also related to the question of the objectivity of knowledge, and given the new methodological climate, this is an unavoidable question to which we will often return. The history of doctrine, for example, when construed as an independent discipline, was sustainable only on the grounds of objectivistic presuppositions. Institutional church history and the history of doctrine now demand a more holistic approach that takes full cognizance of the subtle social, political, and philosophical influences on theology. But recognizing the social location of ideas does not, in our view, necessitate the social determination of knowledge, nor does it lead inevitably to epistemological or methodological relativism. Church historians should aim at objectivity even as they acknowledge that it demands as broad and comprehensive a perspective in the analysis of ideas as it does in the depiction of complex events in the institutional or political life of the church.

The theoretical grounding for our emphases arises from reflection on the historical nature of Christianity and from considerations that are parallel to those of Wolfhart Pannenberg, who rightly observed that “no branch of history is under such pressure from its particular subject-­matter to consider the whole of history as church history.”3 We have also derived some insight from the modern Annales school, and in particular, the influential work of Mark Bloch and Lucien Febvre, who, in their unrelenting quest for a more complete reconstruction of the past, proved the truth of the maxim that “the deeper the research, the more the light of the evidence must converge from sources of many different kinds.”4 Christianity, Bloch observed, is a religion of historians, and the concerns of the historian must be as comprehensive as the history of the human race, because Christianity places the great drama of Fall, Redemption, and Judgment on the wide canvas of world history.5 But if the universal implications of Christianity are important for the church historian, methodological considerations necessarily follow. In a distinguished series of writings, historians of the Annales school have convincingly shown that the wide scope of the historian’s subject matter is inevitably connected with an eclecticism in method.6

The new environment we have briefly surveyed will not yield its full potential apart from a close analysis of the traditional definitions of the discipline of church history and its related fields; to the extent that past definitions of the discipline have unduly contributed to the separation of contiguous and closely related fields, these definitions must be carefully scrutinized and recast. The following survey of the conventional boundaries of the field of church history will reveal that the researcher’s initial orientation determines a great deal about the methods of investigation that he or she eventually adopts. We will also need to give serious attention to the history of church historical studies in order to estimate the considerable limitations of past conceptualizations. At the very outset of research, students of church history in particular need to recognize how confessional differences, when uncritically imported into the study of history, have invariably narrowed our field of vision and distorted the past.

Preliminary Definition of Terms

“Church history” is the broadest of all the traditional disciplines dealing with the church’s past.7 The discipline of church history encompasses the practice of the church as well as the thought of the church; it studies both dogma and the intersection of the church with society and the larger world. In this broader discipline we examine such matters as the church’s liturgy, sacraments, and polity; one might even include the subjects of homiletics, church architecture, and music. Church and state is also a topic of interest to the church historian, ranging from matters of persecution in the early church to toleration and secularization in the modern period. Anything that the church does in the world is arguably a part of church history. But we also look at what the church teaches, and thus historical theology is a subset of the broader discipline. Most narrowly conceived, the church historian might study the teaching of individuals, but inevitably one will also examine the teaching of the church universal, its creeds and councils. Finally, the discipline of church history embraces such topics as the mission and expansion of the church.

Like church history, “historical theology” is a general term indicating a broad area of study. The term itself is somewhat misleading. To some, it indicates the study of the history of Christian doctrine primarily for the sake of theological formulation in the present. To others, it means the analysis of the great dogmas of the church in relative isolation from the events of church history. Some definition and qualification of the term is therefore in order.

In the first place, the documents of historical theology are, with few exceptions, the same as those of church history, particularly in the patristic period. The difference between the disciplines lies in the approach the historian takes to the documents and the kinds of information that are elicited from them. For example, the works of the second-­century Apologists Athenagoras and Justin Martyr can be used to understand the way in which the church conducted its mission to the pagan world. In fact, recent scholarship has tended to view these works as missionary tracts rather than as pleas for tolerance addressed to the emperor. There is no evidence that the emperor ever received these apologies and a good deal of evidence that they had considerable impact on the thought of the early church itself. In addition, they can be used as documentation of the role, the place, and the perception of Christians in Roman society, i.e., as evidence for the construction of Christian social history. All of these areas are the proper subject matter of church history.

By the same token, these treatises can be used to illuminate sacramental and liturgical practice, at least to a certain degree. The best documentation that we have of sacramental practice in the second century is Justin Martyr’s Second Apology. Finally, the works of the Apologists, in particular the Plea for Christians by Athenagoras, offer some of the earliest speculations leading toward the doctrine of the Trinity. Similarly, Justin provides one of the earliest examples of a technical use of the concept of logos. His use of logos language, drawn both from the Gospel of John and from Stoic philosophy, points toward the trinitarian and christological discussions of the third and fourth centuries. “History of doctrine” focuses, in other words, on very narrow, albeit significant, slices of these documents. In fact, the great burden of writing historical theology is to do justice to the sources — to the intention of their authors — while eliciting from them the materials that belong to one, somewhat artificially defined, part of this history. Historical theology or history of doctrine must be done in such a way as to not lose sight of the original location of the ideas and the original purpose behind the documents in which the ideas are found.

The “history of dogma” is the history of those particular doctrinal themes that have received normative definition from the church. There are barely three theological topics that have received this kind of definition. The Councils of Nicea and Constantinople moved toward a full dogmatic definition of Trinity, while the Council of Chalcedon offered the church its orthodox definition of christology. Formulated in a basic form in the patristic period, these dogmas were further elaborated in the subsequent history of Christian doctrine without any intentional alteration of the basic conciliar decisions. The other topic is the doctrine of grace. On this subject, the patristic era failed to offer a final formulation, but it did determine that salvation cannot occur apart from grace. It is orthodox to define salvation in terms of the mutual interrelationships of grace and will. But it is also within the bounds of ecumenical orthodoxy to define salvation as occurring by grace alone prior to any acts of the will. What falls outside of these bounds is the “Pelagian” assumption that salvation can arise by acts of human will apart from grace. There is, to this day, no final definition of the doctrine of grace except in the broad sense of a legitimate spectrum for the language of theological formulation. With these limitations in mind, the classic historians of dogma Adolf von Harnack and Reinhold Seeberg8 were able to construct tightly argued histories of the fundamental dogmatic tenets of Christianity, focused on the Trinity, christology, and grace that presented the development of Christian doctrine from earliest times to the Reformation. The Reformation, understood both as the end of a united Christendom and as a return to Scripture as a norm prior to tradition, concludes the history of dogma, except for the dogmas later enacted by the Roman Catholic Church and discussed by Harnack and Seeberg as limited after-­growths.

While the history of dogma does not look beyond these basic issues, the history of doctrine discusses the entirety of the body of doctrine as it moves through the life of the church in any given period. In a sense, the elements of a larger body of doctrine are capable of being identified in any period in the history of the church. It would be impossible, of course, to build a whole system of theology out of the writings of the Apostolic Fathers (A.D. 95–155). Their writings do, however, provide a body of teaching that is larger than the trinitarian, christological and soteriological issues that typically occupy the mind of the historian of dogma: These broader elements are the proper subject matter of the history of doctrine.

The “history of Christian thought” identifies a still broader field of inquiry, inasmuch as it claims as its field of investigation the entire range of Christian thought, including those topics nominally beyond the bounds of theology. What is sometimes called history of spirituality would fit into this category, including discussion of the character of Christian life and piety, though arguably this is the subject of the church historian. Similarly, philosophical topics and the relation of Christian thought to the rise of modern science belong to this larger discussion.

Although it is the broadest field of the three, history of Christian thought functions as the basic discipline of historical theology, without which neither history of doctrine nor history of dogma can really function. This is because the doctrines themselves (and dogmas as a special case of doctrine) can only be understood in their fundamental religious context and in relation to the way Christians were living, thinking, and acting in society, that is, in relation to a broad Christian history of ideas. It is, for example, impossible to discuss the Trinity and christology coherently without some sense of the religious life or the philosophical inclinations of the age. The doctrinal issues become clear only in the light of the interaction of the church with the surrounding culture and in view of the interrelationship between the doctrinal formulations and the life of the church in its historical and cultural context. The history of Christian thought is the preferred term for the larger context of intellectual history in which history of dogma and history of doctrine must be understood, and, in view of the methodological assumptions present throughout this introductory discussion, it must also be the basic or preferred discipline for the presentation of the teachings of the church.9 As the broadest category, the history of Christian thought presses on the limits of what is “Christian” or “orthodox”: the history of Christian thought would also include thinkers who were only marginally related to the church, and subsequently may have actually been disenfranchised by the church, such as Faustus Socinus.

When historical theology is thus defined in terms of the history of Christian thought, it is sometimes nearly identical with, and always has strong points of contact with, the discipline known as “intellectual history.” Western intellectual history, by way of example, is the discussion of the life of the mind in the development of Western civilization. Learning the history of thought is essential to doing theology and church history, inasmuch as theological literature has occupied a large segment of the great literature of the West. Learning the history of Christian thought, and even the history of dogma, cannot occur apart from this larger sense of the movement of Western intellectual history, not only because of the specific documentary overlap, but also because of the interpenetration of ideas and issues. For example, the impact of Aristotle on the West, beginning in the late twelfth and on into the thirteenth century, is a crucial issue in the history of doctrine, but it is also crucial for Western intellectual history in general, as is the loss of Aristotle (not, of course, to everyone) in the seventeenth century. The failure of Aristotelianism as a world system and cosmology in the seventeenth century has theological repercussions, but it also affects the beginnings of modern science, the changes in political philosophy, and the changes in ethical thinking that have occurred. There is little possibility of separating the two, just as one is unable to engage in the history of doctrine or the history of Christian thought without a grip on general intellectual history. Western intellectual history provides a foundation for studying the history of the church, the history of Christian thought, and systematic theology as well. Even when one moves beyond the early-­modern into the modern world, where there is a separation of the two major traditions (the theological tradition and the Western intellectual tradition), the earlier history shapes the nature of the discussion, if only by raising the issue of the authority of theology in its relation to the other aspects of post-­Enlightenment Western thought.10

The Emergence of Critical Church Historiography

Before the mid-­eighteenth century, the study of church history was uncritical; it was invariably written from a confessional viewpoint and it was anything but detached or neutral.11 In the Roman Catholic Church, the tradition of the church played a far more prominent role as a norm for doctrine and theology than in Protestantism. This perspective had the effect of pressing historians toward an emphasis on continuity; there was a distinct and pervasive tendency to interpret later developments as occurring earlier than they in fact occurred. The theological assumption that links authority with antiquity has thus had a longstanding, deleterious effect on historical investigation. The Catholic understanding of the church meant that for many older Catholic historians (including writers as recent as Schwane and Tixeront,12 the authors of two of the more important early-twentieth-­century histories of dogma), the matter of finding meaning in the past was not even posed as a question. The entire viewpoint was dominated by the concepts of a controlling providence and the uniformity of the tradition, granting the normative character of tradition for the contemporary expression of the church.

When we turn to the Protestant Reformation and its seventeenth-­century aftermath, we find a more critical approach to the past, but this reorientation was laden with its own problems. The principle of sola Scriptura profoundly influenced the Reformers’ understanding of church history as well as theology. For Protestants of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the Middle Ages were a particularly troublesome era, and the temptation, frequently indulged, was to view the period of church history from St. Augustine, or at least from the thirteenth-­century dawn of scholasticism to the sixteenth century, in terms of apostasy. Luther’s Babylonian Captivity of the Church critiqued far more than the Avignon papacy; indeed, he polemicized against the abuses in “this Thomistic . . . Aristotelian church,” pointing directly to the captivity of the church to scholasticism.13 Protestant dogmaticians, beginning with Andreas Hyperius (d. 1564), consistently argued a decline of thought in the era of scholasticism, a view repeated by Protestant writers throughout the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, who distinguished their “scholasticism” from that of the Middle Ages.14 The great Protestant chronicle, the Magdeburg Centuries, scanned the Middle Ages for a few faithful forerunners of reform. The Radical Reformers embraced this approach as well, but pressed it to its extreme conclusion: the Chronicle of Kaspar Braitmichel (1542) placed the fall of the church at A.D. 150. In this view, the entire church, including the first three centuries after the apostles, fared very ill, and the promise of Christ that the gates of hell would not prevail against the church was conveniently ignored.

Church historians throughout the sixteenth and most of the seventeenth centuries, then, viewed the church’s past either in terms of orthodoxy or heresy. In Catholic thought, the crucial idea of development was present; but in the polemical atmosphere of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, it was vitiated by a providential view of superintendence that allowed for little or no error in the past. (The great exception to this generalization is the historian of doctrine Dionysius Petavius, who recognized, for example, that the trinitarianism of the first three centuries was quite different from that of Nicea.) The Anabaptist view denied the possibility of development and had little patience with the study of the past at all, while various anti-­trinitarian heretics of the day looked at the pre-­Nicene era as a source for their views, leaving the orthodox of the day, Protestant and Catholic alike, with little sympathy for careful, historical examination of the earliest church such as had been done by Petavius. The major Lutheran and Reformed churches also tended to view developments that were not in some way related positively to Protestantism in an excessively negative light. These three approaches to historical understanding, represented by Catholic theologians, the Radical Reformers, and the Magisterial Reformers, are of more than merely passing interest; even today it is not uncommon for students of church history to be controlled by one of these viewpoints.

Two basic alterations of perspective were necessary to produce the modern, critical church historiography of the mid-­eighteenth century: First, a greater scientific concern for the analysis of original documents, and second, the freedom to interpret these sources in a way that did not lead to a predetermined, or at least predictable, goal. The latter of the two developments emerged in part from the Pietist distinction between piety and doctrine which, despite its inherent difficulties, did allow for a positive evaluation of a group or movement with which the historian did not agree theologically. Thus, the Pietist historian Gottfried Arnold’s Impartial History of the Church and of Heretics (1688) defended a number of medieval sects on the strength of their religious experience. Since the heart of religion for Arnold was subjective, experimental piety rather than strict orthodoxy, he strove for a fair presentation of the religious motives of various heretics and schismatics. The corollary of this generosity, however, was that Arnold frequently treated the orthodox with undue severity.15 A similar emphasis is found in the works of Joseph Milner, an Anglican historian of the eighteenth century who wrote The History of the Church of Christ in three volumes. For Milner as for Arnold, sects frequently provided significant examples of Christian piety. Milner, however, was not as polemical as Arnold and, indeed, he avoided church controversies almost altogether. His object was even more popular and practical than Arnold’s and he omitted everything from his history that failed to edify. Milner wrote, “Nothing, but what appears to me to belong to Christ’s kingdom shall be admitted; genuine piety is the only thing which I intend to celebrate.”16 Such “celebration” entailed selectivity with a kind of vengeance, and neither Arnold nor Milner really grasped the need for an objective handling of original sources. Clearly, an appeal to piety and a generous, or, in the case of Milner, an indifferent approach to orthodoxy, could be as problematic as the earlier narrow confessionalism. But in both, a new approach to the past freed them from arriving at a predetermined, predictable conclusion.

The beginning of the Enlightenment, concurrent with the rise of Pietism, had a profound impact on historical studies. The Enlightenment brought both a more tolerant atmosphere and a more empirical approach to the source materials.17 The genuine objectivity that was lacking in Arnold was fully developed in the work of Johann Lorenz von Mosheim (1694-1755), for much of his career chancellor of the University of Göttingen. On the grounds of his incredibly erudite, detailed, and balanced four-­volume Institutes of Ecclesiastical History, Mosheim is often called “the father of church history.”18 Mosheim’s work was the preeminent text for more than a century and, in its English translation, was used in most American seminaries throughout much of the nineteenth century.

Although the critical, objective use of documents was not new in Mosheim’s work, his Institutes made this critical objectivity a central methodological concern. “My principal care,” he wrote, “has been to relate events with fidelity and authority. For this purpose I have gone to the very sources of information, the best writers, that is, of all ages, and such as lived in, or near, the times which they treat of.” Mosheim was dismissive of many of his predecessors who had simply rested their work on the chronicles of earlier writers. Such a practice, he continued, “is attended with this evil, that it perpetuates the mistakes, which are apt to abound in very large and voluminous works, by causing them to pass from a single book into numerous others.” Mosheim not only went to the original documents for information, he also was careful to cite his sources in order to aid his readers in evaluating his work. Mosheim’s attempt to attain methodological objectivity, in contrast to virtually all of his predecessors, including Arnold, is most evident in his comments on the treatment of heresies: “The history of these commotions or heresies, should be full and precise.” And, since the leaders of religious parties “have been treated with much injustice,” the term “heretic” should be used only in the general sense of a person who, by their own, or “by another’s fault, has given occasion for wars and disagreements among Christians.”19

Mosheim’s approach to the materials of history also went considerably beyond the mere narrative or chronicle to attempt historical explanation. The historian, he argues, “must not only tell what was done, but also why this or that thing happened, that is, events are to be joined with their causes.” As far as Mosheim was concerned, “naked facts” only served to amuse readers, while the explanation of the “reasons” behind the facts, with due care not to “fabricate causes,” serves readers by “sharpening discriminating powers, and rendering them wise.” Even so, this practical goal of historical studies must be subordinated to the tasks of research, and Mosheim remained acutely aware of the characteristic dangers that face the historian, such as anachronism, undue reverence for authority, and bias.20 The period of the Enlightenment, thus, witnessed a critical, analytical approach to historical study. In their enthusiasm for their own enlightenment, however, many of Mosheim’s contemporaries and successors evinced a certain contempt for the past, or, alternatively, were tempted to view all history as progressing toward the goal of enlightenment.

In very short order, the eighteenth century saw the development of the historical-­critical method in the works of Baumgarten and Semler21 and the beginnings of the historical approach to biblical theology and to Christian doctrine in the writings of Gabler and Münscher, respectively.22 Gabler and Münscher were able to perceive that the materials of the past, whether biblical or churchly, could only be brought into the service of contemporary formulation if they were first understood in their own right and independently, without the interference of modern theological categories and opinions. This perception, refined considerably beyond the views of Gabler and Münscher by biblical and historical scholars of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, is fundamental to modern theological scholarship and provides the primary rationale for the study of history in seminaries and in graduate programs in religion.

The Romantic movement took a different avenue to the study of the past. Generally speaking, it was typified by a deeper appreciation for the past understood on its own terms and by a greater recognition of the way that the historical environment shapes individuals. Johann Gottfried Herder’s Ideas toward a Philosophy of the History of Mankind (1784-91) was especially influential in this respect. Whereas the Enlightenment preferred mechanical analogies, Herder stressed the analogy between history and living things. By viewing history organically, he engendered a love for the past in its entirety, since presumably one cannot destroy part of a living organism without destroying the whole.

The impact of Herder’s ideas on the study of church history can be seen in August Neander (1789-1850). Neander was a student at the University of Halle in 1806, and there he fell under the influence of Schleiermacher; later, at Göttingen, he studied under Gesenius, the Hebrew scholar. In 1813, having published a monograph on Julian the Apostate, he was called to the University of Berlin as professor of church history where he worked until his death in 1850.23 Neander is most well-­known for his multivolume General History of the Christian Religion and Church (1826-52).

Neander’s indebtedness to the Romantic movement is seen explicitly in the dedication of the first volume of his General History to Friedrich von Schelling, wherein he expresses the hope to serve “a spirit which may claim some relationship” to Schelling’s philosophy. Neander’s indebtedness to Schleiermacher is made explicit when he discusses the purpose or the end of church history and the leading aim of his own scholarly work, namely, “To exhibit the history of the church of Christ, as a living witness of the divine power of Christianity; as a school of Christian experience; a voice, sounding through the ages, of instruction, of doctrine, and of reproof, for all who are disposed to listen.”24 In keeping with the Romantic movement, organic metaphors and the theme of development are found throughout his work.

Neander’s hermeneutical sophistication and his relation to Schleiermacher are noteworthy. He works as a historian out of a conviction concerning the inner connection between spiritual life in Christ and scientific inquiry. “Our knowledge here falls into a necessary circle. To understand history, it is supposed that we have some understanding of that which constitutes its working principle; but it is also history which furnishes us [with] the proper test, by which to ascertain whether its principle has been rightly apprehended.”25 His organization of the materials of history is superior to Mosheim’s. He casts all of his evidence on a single topic, for example, persecution, together in one place, and then covers an extended time frame, within reasonable bounds. Then he treats different topics in their relation one to the other; for example, the structure of the ministry or the clerical hierarchy is followed by a discussion of the doctrine of penance in relation to the hierarchy and the institution. One finds in Neander the adoption of vitalistic, organic categories as a way of construing historical development; there is, in addition, a stress upon the importance of primary sources and accurate documentation. As with those who have preceded him, he adopts a separation between piety and doctrine that enables him to judge a movement favorably without agreeing with it theologically. These features, combined, bring the study of church history into the modern world.

The enormous influence of Neander is documented in the work of Friedrich A. G. Tholuck (1799-1877), friend of Neander and professor of theology at the University of Halle. Tholuck delivered a series of lectures at the University of Halle in 1842-43 that were translated and published in Bibliotheca Sacra as “Theological Encyclopedia and Methodology.” Edwards A. Park, the translator, noted that the system adopted by Tholuck “was in some respects, far more scientific and extensive than that adopted in other lands.”26 In this lecture Tholuck lays out the major tasks for one who wishes to be “a worthy historian” of the church. First, building on the earlier insistence of Mosheim and others, the primary sources are essential: “one must consult the original authorities.” The second prerequisite for a historian who would be master of the art is that he or she exhibit individual facts “with individuality of style”; the historian “describes times and persons in detail rather than in general.” This requirement amounts to a plea for the historical analysis of details that moves beyond a simple narrative and attends to explanation. A third prerequisite is that the historian have no “party prejudices,” though “party preferences” are important, since without a point of view, history will be colorless and lifeless. A primary example is found in Neander, who, however, “is sometimes too desirous of exhibiting impartiality, and is therefore more favorable to the heretics whose character he describes, than the truth will warrant.” Finally, in indicating how far he would take “party preferences,” Tholuck ventures into the difficult realm of causation and insists that the church historian accompany the narration of events “with a reference to their causes and consequences,” and that these connections be made “on psychological and religious grounds,” and by “religious grounds” (and in keeping with the thought of Neander), Tholuck was willing to appeal to the “directing providence of God” as a final cause.27 Neander and Tholuck clearly viewed “scientific” historical method as compatible with non-­empirical religious causes and an appeal to providence.

Philip Schaff (1819-93) is sometimes considered the father of American church history, not because he wrote much on the American church, but because he brought together the best advances in the study of church history and set new standards for the discipline in the United States. In 1846 he published an essay entitled What Is Church History?, subtitled A Vindication of the Idea of Historical Development.28 Here he chronicled his dependence on Herder, Neander, and Tholuck (in addition, the views of Hegel are everywhere evident) and set forth his own understanding of church history, called “The Reformed-­Catholic Perspective.” Schaff’s essay is still valuable today, and it will probably never be superseded as a stimulus to the sympathetic reading of church history. Yet while Schaff represented the best in post-­Enlightenment historiography, the influence of Hegel was so pervasive that the work suffers from at least three characteristic weaknesses, all related to Hegel’s schema and the optimism typical of the nineteenth century. Schaff understands history in terms of steady improvement, but he is, in the first place, naively optimistic. While on the one hand he clearly sees how differently the idea of organic development can be used (compare, he suggests, Neander to F. C. Baur), on the other, he believes that Christianity never loses, nor can lose, anything of real value. Second, the historian is able to truly comprehend past events, and to unfold them, just as they originally stood, before the eyes of the readers. Finally, like Neander and Tholuck, Schaff is overly optimistic about the historian’s ability to discern the hand of providence and the guiding spirit of Christianity in history. Since the mid-­nineteenth century, historians have generally become a good deal more sober about the likelihood of discerning the final outcome, the factual accuracy, and the inner causes of historical events. Nevertheless, historical scholarship reached a level of maturity by the mid-­nineteenth century that, in many respects, has not been surpassed to this day. In terms of the utilization of primary sources, energy in accumulating these sources, critical power in comparing them, and detachment in their interpretation, it is the case that the accomplishments of a hundred and fifty years ago, particularly in Germany, are seldom surpassed today. And much that is written today falls far below those standards.

In the discipline of church history in the nineteenth century these emphases on the possibility of detachment and the discovery of the actual truth about the past became increasingly central. One finds a growing optimism about what the historian could actually hope to accomplish and the scientific status of the discipline. In 1851 Henry Boynton Smith could write an article entitled “The Nature and Worth of the Science of Church History.”29 Smith demonstrated a tremendous confidence in the possibility of historical objectivity: the first duty of the historian “is to present the facts themselves in the order of their occurrence.” The next task of the historian is to verify the past; the past is to “live again upon the historic page.” In fact, according to Smith, the historian can so present the past that we may read of the events “better than did the very actors in them.” Besides facts, the historian must discover and set forth the events “in the light of their principles and laws.” These principles are sought out with “a patient, a sympathizing, a reverential, and a truly inductive spirit.” Finally, the historian is to discern the ends that the general laws or principles produce.30 Thus the general laws of history are to be deduced from the facts, and from these one may infer the ends that are to be accomplished by them — such are the major ingredients of “scientific history.” This was a confident, not to say audacious, outlook that characterized many of Smith’s colleagues. Scientific church history seems here to be excessively confident about both the nature of research, that is, getting the “facts” straight, and the outcome of the results, which meant establishing general laws of development. E. H. Carr’s comment about nineteenth-­century historians in general applies equally to church historians: “Historians walked in the Garden of Eden, without a scrap of philosophy to cover them, naked and unashamed before the God of history. Since then we have known Sin and experienced a Fall.”31

The scientific preoccupation with objectivity was characteristic of much of the late nineteenth century as well.32 For example, in 1884, in an article entitled “Church History as a Science,” John De Witt, professor of church history at Lane Theological Seminary, called for movement beyond a series of historical laws and principles to the identification of “the single law which binds together this uncounted multitude of cause and condition.”33 By the turn of the century the emphasis on objectivity and ascertaining the facts had led many church historians toward an explicitly secular understanding of church history. Here, all theological presuppositions were to be eliminated from the study of church history, and though this was a large step away from what Neander, Tholuck, and Schaff had envisioned, it can be construed as the logical extension of the emphasis upon objectivity and detachment.

There were a handful of church historians who continued to accept the possibility of discerning spiritual causes and would talk about God’s activity in history. But those who did so from the 1880s forward spoke with less confidence than their mid-­nineteenth-­century forebears. In Williston Walker’s History of the Christian Church, first published in 1918, one detects “the absence of any sense of his writing from the interior of the Church.”34 From roughly 1900 through the 1930s American church historians ceased to talk about providence or general laws that could be deduced from factual data. There was still, however, an abiding confidence in history as a science and the ability of the historian to get the facts straight. One finds a few exceptions to this generalization, as with the historical writings of Walter Rauschenbusch. But even in the case of Rauschenbusch, the exception was not so much in the area of how he interpreted church history, as in how he applied it. Rauschenbusch wanted to apply the lessons of history, especially the social lessons, to the present. Scholars at the University of Chicago, in particular, emphasized the social aspects of Christianity in the early decades of the twentieth century, and they were especially interested in discovering the natural, environmental causes for developments in the church. Through 1930, even in the books of such an obviously devoted churchman as William Warren Sweet (University of Chicago Divinity School), there was very little theological and interpretive content.35

In surveys of more recent trends, scholars have observed changes in this approach beginning about 1930, and these changes are related in part to new developments in theology and in part to innovations in the wider discipline of history. Henry Bowden, for example, found that following 1930 some of the new emphases in church history were more or less theologically motivated, and he grouped these new departures under four general categories: a new emphasis on cultural influence; a greater stress on the theological significance of the church in history; an appreciation of the church’s role in preserving cultural values; and a fresh emphasis on the importance of ideas in explaining the church’s past.36 Of these four points, the new theological interest in the church and the recognition of the importance of ideas might arguably be accounted for by the influence of the biblical theology movement and neo-­orthodoxy.

One important example of the influence of the wider discipline of history on the field of church history appeared in France at about the same time the impact of neo-­orthodoxy began to be felt. The Annales school actually anticipated many of the concerns expressed more recently by proponents of the “new historicism,” though with less epistemological skepticism than is typically found in treatments of theory since the “linguistic turn.”37 For example, in their quest for a “total” reconstruction of the past, Bloch and Febvre insisted upon the use of interdisciplinary approaches; two or more disciplines might be indispensable to any attempt at explanation, or the evidence itself at some point of transition might require that it be yielded up to yet another discipline. They gave detailed attention to material culture and practices in which people’s religious lives and their economic interests not only coexisted, but were “blended together.” The psychological and self-­interested complexities of human motivation, both in the past and in the lives of historians working today, were carefully weighed and critiqued. Bloch explored the ways that historians borrow “tints” and “hues” from their own daily experience and by “shading” them endeavor to “restore the past.”38 The school’s interest in the corporate “mentalities” or the “psychological states” of cultures or eras was particularly stimulating to students of church history. In the same year that the first issue of the Annales appeared, Febvre published an article that is now considered one of the more famous essays on the origins of the Reformation in France and the problems surrounding its causes. Institutions, politics, and the reaction to ecclesiastical abuses could not fully account for the protean nature of the movement, according to Febvre, but rather one must come to terms with a “profound revolution in religious sentiment” and the broad, significant shifts in people’s religious aspirations. These changes in turn could only be understood by “drawing up an inventory of piety and devotion” in sixteenth-­century France.39 In a recent evaluation of Febvre’s work, John O’Malley judges that the essay first helped move historians’ interests from institutional church history to religion and its popular, multiple expressions.40

In brief, both theological and methodological innovation influenced the discipline of church history in the period following 1930. Historians John T. McNeill (Union), Sidney E. Mead (Chicago), James Hastings Nichols (Chicago, then Princeton), and Cyril Richardson (Union) all defended the importance of addressing meaning in church history.41 Cyril Richardson, for example, wrote that the church historian should not be content to confine the narrative “to that bare record of events which we know as scientific history. . . .” Rather, historians should “tell the story against the background of ultimate meanings.” In other words, the events with which the historian deals “are transfigured by the holy.”42 But at about the same time that we find a new interest expressed in the meaning of history, specifically church history, fresh reservations arose in some quarters about the possibility of an objective view of the past. In 1933 Charles Beard’s presidential address before the American Historical Association was entitled “Written History as an Act of Faith.” He and Carl Lotus Becker provocatively challenged the idea that there were such things as “facts” at all.

In the period since 1950, there is some evidence to suggest that there was yet another reaction to this emphasis on meaning among historians, and a new preoccupation with objectivity seems to have arisen from the growing impact of the social sciences on the discipline of history. Almost immediately, however, claims of objectivity and detachment by those who adopted social-­science techniques led to yet another response by historians who took the quest for meaning and morals to new heights.43 But the historiography of the church from the 1950s to the early twenty-­first century is yet to be written in detail. Provisionally, we can say that this sixty-­year period is typified by several important developments. First, the emergence of the study of women in history, though traceable in its origins to earlier in the twentieth century, was undoubtedly the most important feature of the historiography of these years. The related fields of the study of African Americans and ethnic minorities and their institutions took major steps forward during the same period. Since the 1990s in particular, world Christianity with an emphasis on indigenous expressions of the church has come to be an important new area of study. In secular history, the years 1950 to the present were dominated by the “new” history, that is, by the introduction of quantitative techniques, heretofore applied only in the social sciences; we also find in this period the beginnings of such new techniques as psychohistory. This rich multiplicity of approaches and techniques not only allows the scholar to choose an appropriate technique for a given topic, whether psychology, sociology, or statistical analysis, but some of the best works combine a number of them in a single project. Because of this attention to detail, and because of the introduction of empirical tests of statistical significance, some scholars have expressed a renewed optimism about obtaining a true, objective understanding of the past. Critics, however, have charged that these approaches tend to minimize the influence of ideas in history and drain the past of meaning. In the discipline of church history, the use of the new techniques has been introduced reluctantly, in part, we must suppose, because of the reigning paradigm of church history as preeminently the history of Christian thought.44 Given the tremendous variety of methods and new topics, the historian is now challenged with the perplexing question of whether there remain any viable norms in scholarship; in Henry Bowden’s words, “The troubling element is that historians of all kinds now tacitly accept the fate of being dismissed by those who do not share their perceptions and priorities.”45

Because of the exacting demands of these new techniques and the isolating tendencies of the new fields, the historical monograph that dissects a very small period or topic of history continues to dominate the field. Very few scholars belonging to the present generation of church historians have worked at general history because of the dominance of the historical monograph, and as a result, we have tended to become isolated in our specialties. If the church historian’s slowness to embrace the social sciences is related to a reluctance to subject the church to the profane techniques of science, our inability to write general histories is probably related simply to the enormity of the task, given the present conditions of the discipline.

The ecumenical environment in which we presently work is a favorable one, and it represents a final characteristic of the historiography of the period. The interest in the history of minorities and women’s history complements this intra-­confessional context, since both favor freedom of investigation. The diversity of method noted above is related in part to this welcome diversification in topic, with an ever-­expanding interest in the “underside” of history. The present atmosphere is clearly conducive to a more thorough, less biased, approach to investigation in a wide range of fields. A Protestant author cannot write today about the history of the doctrine of justification without consulting what is being said by Catholic and Orthodox scholars in relation to history, and among themselves. The ecclesiastical and social contexts in which we work demand an empathetic, sensitive study of other traditions, and presumably, this may be accomplished without compromising one’s own confessional distinctives.

Finally, the ecumenical context, combined with the interdisciplinary, technical, and highly specialized nature of research in church history, may offer a partial solution to the problem of overspecialization. It seems clear that in the future, church historians will only be able to address the need for general studies through collaborative efforts. The understanding of fragments of the human past is necessary, but “will never produce the knowledge of the whole; it will not even produce that of the fragments themselves.”46 The goal of the historian will remain the same: the reintegration of the parts that must be disentangled for the sake of analysis. Moreover, historians have always collaborated in an informal sense, since no one historian is able to “seize the whole.” But given present trends, the need for formal collaboration will make itself increasingly felt. Large-­scale cooperative scholarly projects now appear to be the only satisfactory way of producing general church histories.

Methods and Models in the History of Doctrine

If the church historian’s point of view with respect to providence, meaning in history, and confessional loyalty has often significantly shaped the outcome of research, so, too, specific methods of construing the materials of history, as distinct from the specialized techniques of analysis, have had a profound influence on the general contours of the disciplines we study. Students who hope to make a genuine contribution to historical understanding must consider the various ways in which historical materials have been used and, in the process, sometimes removed from their essential context and thereby distorted. It is surely the case that the history of doctrine lends itself to a more systematic development, and builds more upon previous methodological analysis, than the history of the church broadly construed. Even so, the discipline of church history has never produced lengthy methodological prolegomena like those found in the classic histories of doctrine. Church history typically takes a more fully chronological, episodic approach to an extended narrative than the history of doctrine. In church history, topics need to be developed at length, sometimes parallel to other topics, without a perfectly clear or consistent relationship between them.47 By contrast, in the history of doctrine, there has been considerable methodological debate, comparable to the debate over topical, integral, and chronological approaches found in works on biblical theology and the history of the religion of Israel. Since the late-eighteenth-­century beginnings of the discipline several patterns of exposition have emerged, each with its own logic and each with some merit.

There are, accordingly, several approaches to the method and organization of the history of Christian doctrine. (As will also become more evident below, the various methods noted here in detail for the history of doctrine are of fundamental importance for an understanding of systematic theology as well.) At least four basic patterns have been used for the presentation of the history of doctrine: (1) the general/special, (2) the special, or systematic, (3) the great thinker, (4) and the integral, developmental model.

The General/Special Pattern

There is a historical trajectory of meditation on the history of doctrine that began in the late eighteenth century and extended into the nineteenth. The first historian to worry profoundly about the method of historical theology was Wilhelm Münscher. His basic approach was followed by most of the historians of doctrine in the nineteenth century. Two major examples of the method are the histories by Neander and Karl Hagenbach, both of which were translated into English in the nineteenth century and exerted a major influence on British and American studies of the history of doctrine.48 All three followed a method which has come to be known as the general/special method because it divides into two distinct discussions, one offering a general outline of thought, the other a discussion of particular issues. The first step that these writers took was to break the history of doctrine down into periods for the sake of identifying historical types of theology. Then, within each period, they provide a general survey of authors, their ideas, and the forces that impinged on the history of doctrine. As the second part of their exposition, remaining within the same period, they present the “special history of doctrine.” This “special history” typically took the form of a system of theology, beginning with preliminary thoughts on the nature of the theological task in a particular period, moving on to the doctrine of Scripture and the sources of theology, and then to the doctrines of God, creation, providence, and so forth, as far as the last things. Neander and Hagenbach offer this outline for the period of the Apostolic Fathers, the era of the pre-­Nicene theologians, of the post-­Nicene theologians, and then of various periods, down to the present.

The model has the advantage of very neatly lining out the ideas from an individual period and showing in considerable depth the various theological and systematic ramifications of the thought of the church at different times in its history. This model is also a useful preparation for doing systematic theology. If a theologian needs to understand the patristic reflection on a particular issue, he or she can look to Hagenbach or Neander for a clear presentation.

The problem with the method concerns its location of meaning. The location of meaning is, moreover, a basic issue to be addressed in all historical endeavors. Where does the historian’s method locate the meaning of what has happened, of what has been stated and intended in a particular time and place? The general/special method quite pointedly locates meaning in a view of a theological system virtually contemporary with the historian. Hagenbach and Neander knew and debated the theological systems of eighteenth-­ and nineteenth-­century Protestantism, most of which began with prolegomena and moved on to the doctrine of Scripture and the doctrine of God and concluded with the doctrine of the last things. The problem with the method, bluntly stated, is that Ignatius of Antioch, who lived in the early second century, never imagined such a thing as a theological system. The general/special method operates under the profound disadvantage of wedging the thought of particular periods of the history of the church into a model that was unknown in the period and is not reflected in the writings of the time. Neither Ignatius of Antioch nor Clement of Rome, nor even the second-­century Apologists, ever considered such a thing as theological prolegomena. They did not ask rudimentary questions such as, “How do I go about doing theology?” and “What are my presuppositions?” It is not historically accurate to consider the documents of the second century in a way that is unrelated both to the structure and the intention of the documents and to the intellectual and spiritual milieu of their authors. This does not mean that the method completely lacks usefulness, but it does delineate a major methodological problem.

The problem is, moreover, inherent to the method. It is legitimate to take a thinker or a group of thinkers who belong to the same era and culture and to ask what body of doctrine is taught by them. But once this is done, however, the topics must be elicited from the documents and the thinkers, and never imposed on them from without. Such an approach is particularly useful in the discussion even of the ages of the church before the beginnings of systematic theology when, for example, an author like Cyril of Jerusalem can provide an entire body of doctrine in the form of catechesis. Cyril of Jerusalem’s catechetical outline, or Gregory of Nyssa’s, can be used as the basis of an examination of a particular period in theology. In following a model such as this, issues and topics that were not discussed or were not understood as distinct issues and topics in the fourth century would not be imposed on the materials. At the same time, central doctrinal issues such as the Trinity and christology would not be discussed in isolation from the rest of Christian thought.

The Special or Systematic Model

An outgrowth of the “general/special” model is the “special” or systematic model for examining the history of doctrines. Examples of this model are the histories by W. G. T. Shedd, Louis Berkhof, and Bernhard Lohse. Each of these treatises, particularly Shedd’s, discuss individual doctrines in detail. Indeed, Shedd’s history could almost be composed out of Hagenbach’s by drawing together each of the sections of the special history that deal with one doctrine into a continuous history of the doctrine. The result would be a history of apologetics and prolegomena, followed by a history of the doctrine of God, a history of christology, and so forth. The histories appear in a topical order and in the shape of a theological system. Louis Berkhof’s follows the same pattern, and ought, in fact, to be understood more as a prolegomenon to his Systematic Theology than as an independent historical exercise. Both Shedd and Berkhof were, after all, primarily systematic theologians searching out the historical roots of their theologies.

This model has the same failing as the general/special history: it imposes a modern, systematic grid on the subject matter. This failing or problem belongs to all histories of individual doctrines, like R. S. Franks’s History of the Doctrine of the Work of Christ or Cave’s The Doctrine of the Person of Christ. All such books abstract a doctrine from its context and then cease to examine the larger context as a basis for understanding the doctrine. They can address the person of Christ quite independently from the work of Christ, and vice versa, which is something that is really quite impossible given the character of the historical materials. Or, similarly, they can discuss the doctrine of the person of Christ apart from a sacramental context, an illegitimate endeavor whether one is working in the period of the early church or in the sixteenth century. Nonetheless, if this method is utilized with a candid recognition of its limitations, it does serve as a useful approach to particular doctrines and a good prologue to the study of systematic theology.

The Great Thinker Model

The third, and by far the most problematic, of the methods can be identified as the “great thinker” method. An example of this model is A. C. McGiffert’s often brilliant History of Christian Thought.49 McGiffert was a fine historian and it needs to be stated that the problematic character of his method does not give contemporary students of history permission to ignore his work. Justo Gonzalez’s three-­volume history of doctrine also tends toward the examination of individual thinkers. The problem with this method is that it locates meaning in individual persons; but meaning, arguably, does not reside in individuals. Meaning resides in the materials and ideas used by individuals and mediated by them to others after further meaning and significance have been added by their own efforts. Thus, a chapter on the teaching of Bonaventure as representative of thirteenth-­century theology, followed by another chapter on the doctrine of Aquinas as also representative of the thirteenth century, followed by other almost identical chapters on other thinkers, loses sight of the fact that both of these writers live out the results of a long tradition, interacting with one another and with any number of other writers, and using the same ideas but in somewhat different ways. It is far more useful (and methodologically justifiable) to follow the history of ideas and the way those ideas develop and change in a particular time, noting the contributions of the various writers who contributed to the development, than it is to discuss a host of similar thinkers individually or to claim that one writer can represent an entire age.

Besides locating meaning in the wrong place, this method adopts a culturally and chronologically imperialistic view of the past. Historians of philosophy are far more guilty of this than historians of doctrine. They tend to move through the materials of history by thinker as if, for example, the thirteenth century can be reduced to Bonaventure, Albert the Great, Thomas Aquinas, Henry of Ghent, and Duns Scotus. The approach is inappropriate because the thinkers themselves did not share such an assumption. A still more extreme example (in a generally superb survey) is Frederick Copleston’s treatment of seventeenth-­century continental philosophy as moving from Descartes through Geulincx and Malebranche, to Spinoza, and then to Leibniz. Copleston failed to ask the question, “What was really important to the seventeenth century?” This question leads to the investigation of such writers as Francis Suárez and Clemens Timpler, and to the recognition that Descartes was virtually without influence until the second half of the century. Timpler is unknown only because of the intellectual imperialism of modernity. The great thinker model loses track of the interrelationships of ideas and, indeed, of the host of “lesser” minds whose work may have been far more important to their contemporaries than the “great thinkers” identified by later generations. The great thinker method remains extremely useful because it is a way of understanding how ideas cohere in one person’s thought. A history of doctrine or a history of philosophy must offer such cohesion, although, surely, not at the expense of the interrelationships of thinkers and ideas in the context of a larger intellectual development.

It is worth noting that a well-­trained historian of doctrine or of philosophy ought to be able to follow an idea through its development throughout history (the “special” model) and to focus on an individual thinker in an almost systematic way (the “great thinker” model). At the same time, the well-­trained historian will also be able to look for the optimum pattern for the organization of materials and to search out the best location of meaning for the sake of understanding the larger body of materials or sources.

The Integral, Developmental Model

The best model for the history of doctrine is certainly the integral or organic model that attempts a synchronous understanding of the development of the central ideas of Christianity. While it was developed primarily by historians of doctrine, this model holds the most promise for reconceptualizing the task of the church historian on a broader scale. The foremost practitioners of this model were Adolf von Harnack and Reinhold Seeberg, although their histories do evidence occasional acknowledgment of the great thinker or the special model. By and large, however, it is the matrix of ideas in a particular period that controls the exposition of the history of doctrine in Harnack’s and Seeberg’s works. Both writers were concerned primarily with the development of the doctrine of God as Trinity and of Jesus Christ as one person in two natures in the early church, granting that these doctrines were the major foci of debate. Other doctrines (which Seeberg in particular examines) are laid out in subsidiary relation with some discussion of individual thinkers. The major methodological issue for both was to trace out the large issues addressed by groups of thinkers and to indicate how those issues were brought to a conclusion.

In many cases the guiding force in the development of a doctrine is not the inner logic of the doctrine itself, as might be gathered from the special history model, or the force of personality of one individual thinker. A broader dialogue took place with other theological topics and other issues, such as social concerns, politics, and the interaction of parties in the church in confrontation with one another. This approach provides a more complex view of history, but the complexity belongs to the materials themselves and ultimately yields a clearer sense of why ideas developed as they did. In the final analysis, the integral method provides a firmer basis for answering even the more systematic questions at the root of the other methods, particularly when attention is given to the contexts in which the doctrines developed and attention is paid to the forms of theological statement and, indeed, for the maintenance of certain forms and the rejection of others. The underlying danger in the use of this or any of the other methods followed by historians of Christian doctrine is that it might fall into a history of ideas model and ignore historical context.

Students can usefully think in terms of employing several different grids or what might be called mental retrieval systems. A periodizing grid, for example, will recall Christian thought in the thirteenth century as distinct from Christian thought in the sixteenth or eighteenth centuries. A topical grid might retrieve information about the doctrine of God in its historical development. Yet another grid might recall the thought of Thomas Aquinas on a variety of different topics. In addition to that, some sense is needed concerning the intersection of different grids: Thomas Aquinas stands as a thirteenth-­century thinker who examined the doctrine of God together with a series of other theological and philosophical problems in a particular context. Each of the methods noted contributes something to our larger understanding, but the integral, developmental method offers the greatest potential for bridging the subdisciplines of church history and embracing the actual complexity of the past. The location of meaning lies in the interaction of ideas, in a particular period as understood by particular individuals, but always as contributory to the larger development.

The Distinction and Interrelationship of Intellectual, Political, and Social History

One of the near tragedies of twentieth-­century historiography was the fairly open antagonism of some proponents of intellectual, political, and social history to one another’s work. This antagonism was generated in part by the well-­deserved critique of an older, idealistic history of ideas by proponents of social history, and it was solidified by the rather trenchant critique of the methods of the history of ideas offered in a series of essays by the political historian Quentin Skinner.50 The central issue addressed in such critiques is, as adumbrated in our own comments on the methods and models of the history of Christian doctrine, the suitable location of meaning in and in relation to the materials being analyzed.

In response to that critique, many historians have either abandoned or repudiated the idealistic history of ideas approach in favor of a more carefully contextualized intellectual history. Some distinction needs, therefore, to be made between the “history of ideas” and “intellectual history.” The former term refers to a methodologically problematic approach to history that tends to disembody and decontextualize ideas, while the latter term identifies a more contextual and textual exercise. “History of ideas,” in its more extreme manifestations, is little more than Geistesgeschichte, with its identification of “motifs” or “spirits” of the various eras and periods of history. In such an approach the generalization of a “period” in history, itself fraught with difficulties, becomes attached to more or less philosophically construed assumptions and individual texts, persons, events, and the varieties of life are swept up into an idea or, indeed, simply swept aside by it.51 A fundamental rule of competent historiography is broken: when the generalization does not fit the evidences, it is not the evidences that one discards. In its extreme form, social history can fall into the same trap as the older history of ideas: the removal of the discrete and not altogether harmonizable evidences and actors of history in favor of disembodied ideas or laws — and, ironically, at the same time that sociological constructs or economic theories are pressed as explanations, the reduction of the concepts actually expressed in a particular era to epiphenomena.

The approach and method offered in the present volume intends to propose a paradigm for basic research and writing that functions equally well in intellectual, political, and social history — namely, a paradigm that does justice to issues of text, detail, and context, and that moves toward the presentation of conclusions firmly within the bounds of the materials analyzed in one’s research.

1. For the best recent overview and analysis of theory in history, see Elizabeth A. Clark, History, Theory, Text: Historians and the Linguistic Turn (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004), and for a wide-­ranging discussion of the relation between intellectual, religious, and church history, see Alister Chapman, John Coffey, and Brad S. Gregory, eds., Seeing Things Their Way: Intellectual History and the Return of Religion (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2009).

2. For illustrations from the Reformation, early modern, and modern periods, see A. G. Dickens and John M. Tonkin, The Reformation in Historical Thought (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985); Frederick Krantz, ed., History from Below (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1988); and Sherna Gluck and Daphne Patai, Women’s Words: The Feminist Practice of Oral History (New York: Routledge, 1991).

3. Wolfhart Pannenberg, Theology and the Philosophy of Science (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1976), p. 395. See also Pannenberg et al., Revelation as History (New York: Macmillan, 1968), especially chapter 5, pp. 161-81.

4. Febvre and Bloch founded the journal Annales d’histoire économique et social in 1929.

5. Marc Bloch, The Historian’s Craft (New York: Vintage Books, 1953), pp. 67, 4-5.

6. For example, see Emmanuel Leroy Ladurie, The Mind and Method of the Historian (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), pp. 1-9.

7. Cf. Jaroslav Pelikan, Historical Theology: Continuity and Change in Christian Doctrine (New York: Corpus, 1971), pp. xiii-­xviii.

8. N.B. Despite Seeberg’s somewhat broader scope and title (History of Doctrines), his outline and closure parallel Harnack.

9. There exists no careful methodology of church history, such as is available for history of doctrine and history of dogma, where there is a prologue to the larger essay that describes the method. General discussions of the proper subject matter of church history are found in the classic “encyclopedias” of theology like Philip Schaff, Theological Propaedeutic: A General Introduction to the Study of Theology, Exegetical, Historical, Systematic, and Practical (New York: Scribner, 1894); and George R. Crooks and John F. Hurst, Theological Encyclopaedia and Methodology, on the Basis of Hagenbach, rev. ed. (New York: Hunt and Eaton, 1894). In terms of history of dogma and its limits and history of doctrine and its limits, see the first chapters on the subject in Adolf von Harnack’s History of Dogma, Reinhold Seeberg’s History of Doctrine, and Jaroslav Pelikan’s Historical Theology.

10. For convenience, we are using conventional terms and accepted periods of history here, but we are not implying, for example, that there was a single, unitary “Enlightenment,” for which see Nicholas Hudson, “What Is the Enlightenment? Investigating the Origins and Ideological Uses of an Historical Category,” Lumen 25 (2006): 163-74.

11. Philip Schaff helpfully outlined the modern emergence of church historiography in the terms presented here of Catholic, Radical Reformers, Magisterial Reformers, and Pietism, but in much fuller detail. Philip Schaff, History of the Apostolic Church with a General Introduction to Church History (New York, 1854), pp. 55, 63, 69-72.

12. Joseph Schwane, Histoire des Dogmas, trans. (from the German) by A. Degert, 6 vols. (Paris: Beauchesne, 1903-4); and J. Tixeront, History of Dogmas, trans. H.L.B., 3 vols. (St. Louis: Herder & Herder, 1910-1916).

13. Martin Luther, The Babylonian Captivity of the Church, in Jaroslav Pelikan and Helmut T. Lehman, eds., Luther’s Works, 55 vols. (St. Louis and Philadelphia: Concordia Publishing House and Fortress Press, 1955-1986), 36: 29.

14. Richard A. Muller, Post-­­Reformation Reformed Dogmatics, vol. 1: Prolegomena (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 1987).

15. Schaff, History of the Apostolic Church, pp. 69-70.

16. Joseph Milner, The History of the Church of Christ, 3 vols. (Cambridge: 1794-97), p. iv. Additional volumes were published by his brother, Isaac Milner. Milner’s approach resulted in a great many errors. S. R. Maitland wrote an entire book entitled Strictures on Milner’s Church History (London: 1835). Maitland admits that Milner’s work is typified by piety (pp. 8, 79), but while Milner claimed, in his own words, to consult the “original record,” and to eschew the statements of “modern historians,” Maitland shows just how partial and slipshod a job he did (pp. 15, 51). The value of Maitland’s critique of Milner is that it illustrates how far competent criticism of sources and modern assessments of the relative weight of ancient authorities had come by 1835.

17. John Stroup, “Protestant Church Historians in the German Enlightenment,” in Aufklärung und Geschichte: Studien zur deutschen Geschichtswissenschaft im 18. Jahrhundert, ed. Hans Erich Bödeker et al. (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 1986), p. 169.

18. Johann Lorenz von Mosheim, Institutes of Ecclesiastical History, Ancient and Modern, trans. J. Murdock, ed. H. Soames, 4 vols. (London: Longman & Co., 1841). The first edition, in Latin, appeared in 1726-55.

19. Mosheim, Institutes, 1:10, 18.

20. Mosheim, Institutes, 1:18, 20-21.

21. See the discussion in Hans W. Frei, The Eclipse of Biblical Narrative: A Study in Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century Hermeneutics (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1974), pp. 88-91, 111-12, 157-61, etc., and for Baumgarten, David Sorkin, The Religious Enlightenment: Protestants, Jews, and Catholics from London to Vienna (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008), pp. 113-63.

22. On Gabler see Frei, Eclipse, pp. 159, 163, 165-67, 248-51; for a discussion of Münscher, see Adolf von Harnack, History of Dogma, trans. Neil Buchanan, 7 vols. (repr. New York: Dover, 1961), 1:13, 31-32.

23. Leopold von Ranke (1795-1886) was also at the University of Berlin at this time. His work as a modern historian is noteworthy primarily for his emphasis upon the original sources. Von Ranke brought a strong objective attitude to the study of history. As reported by Schaff, it was said of his famous History of the Popes that though written by a German Lutheran, it pleased many Catholics.

24. August Neander, General History of the Christian Religion and Church, trans. Joseph Torrey, 5 vols. (Boston: Crocker and Brewster, 1872), 1:xxxv, xxxvi.

25. Neander, General History, 1:1.

26. Introductory comments by Edwards A. Park on Friedrich A. G. Tholuck, “Theological Encyclopedia and Methodology: From the Unpublished Lecture of Prof. Tholuck,” Bibliotheca Sacra 1 (1844): 178-217, 332-67, 552-78, 726-35, here 178.

27. Tholuck, “Theological Encyclopedia,” pp. 570-72.

28. Philip Schaff, What Is Church History? in Reformed and Catholic: Selected Historical and Theological Writings of Philip Schaff, ed. Charles Yrigoyen Jr. and George M. Bricker (Pittsburgh: Pickwick, 1979), pp. 17-144. For the influence of Philip Schaff and a series of excellent historiographical surveys, see Henry W. Bowden, ed., A Century of Church History: The Legacy of Philip Schaff (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1988).

29. Henry Boynton Smith, “The Nature and Worth of the Science of Church History,” Bibliotheca Sacra 8 (1851): 415-26, here 429. Here he acknowledges his indebtedness to his “venerable and beloved teacher,” Neander.

30. Smith, “Nature and Worth,” pp. 415, 417, 421.

31. Edward H. Carr, What Is History? (New York: Vintage, 1961), p. 21.

32. For the late nineteenth century, see Henry W. Bowden, Church History in the Age of Science: Historiographical Patterns in the United States, 1876-1918 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1971).

33. John De Witt, “Church History as a Science, as a Theological Discipline, and as a Mode of the Gospel,” Bibliotheca Sacra 41 (1884): 95-131, here 105.

34. George H. Williams, “Church History: From Historical Theology to the Theology of History,” in Protestant Thought in the Twentieth Century: Whence and Whither? ed. Arnold S. Nash (New York: Macmillan, 1951), p. 154.

35. Williams, “Church History,” pp. 159-60, 162.

36. Henry Warner Bowden, Church History in an Age of Uncertainty: Historiographical Patterns in the United States, 1906-1990 (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1991), pp. 222-26. See also Williams, “Church History,” pp. 162-63, for a similar evaluation.

37. For a fine overview and the criticism that the Annales school neglected epistemological concerns, see Clark, History, Theory, Text, pp. 63-70.

38. Compare the assumptions of the new historicism in H. Aram Veeser, ed., The New Historicism (New York: Routledge, 1989), pp. ix-­xi, with Bloch, Historian’s Craft, on disregarding disciplinary boundaries (p. 25); on material culture and practices, including expressions of art (pp. 153, 156); on the subtle analysis of “psychic realities” (pp. 110, 116, 133); and on using one’s own experience as an interpretive tool (pp. 44, 161).

39. Lucien Febvre, “The Origins of the French Reformation: A Badly-­put Question?” in A New Kind of History from the Writings of Lucien Febvre, ed. Peter Burke (New York: Harper & Row, 1973), pp. 59-60, and on religious sentiment or mentality, pp. 46-47, also 80-81, 85-88.

40. John W. O’Malley, Trent and All That: Renaming Catholicism in the Early Modern Era (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), pp. 94-97.

41. Williams, “Church History,” pp. 170-73.

42. Quoted in Williams, “Church History,” p. 173. Italics added by Williams.

43. Evidence from conferences and articles in the 1970s and 1980s suggests a reaction to a perceived objectivism; these include Clyde Manschreck’s presidential address before the American Society of Church History, “Nihilism in the Twentieth Century: A View from Here” (Church History 45 [1976]: 85-96); Gordon Wright’s presidential address before the American Historical Association in December, 1975, entitled “History as a Moral Science” (American Historical Review 81 [1976]: 1-11); and Lee Benson’s address at the spring 1981 annual meeting of the Organization of American Historians. Benson, a leading proponent of cliometric history, urged historians to act as moral philosophers and went so far as to say that scholars should organize themselves into “communities of historians” that would “work with nonscholarly activist groups to solve social problems” (as cited in The Chronicle of Higher Education, April 6, 1981).

44. A rigorous defense of this observation would prove difficult: it is based on the relative lack of quantitative research in the leading journals of church history. See the further discussion in chap. 3 below.

45. Bowden, Church History in an Age of Uncertainty, p. 228.

46. Bloch, Historian’s Craft, p. 155.

47. It is worth noting, however, that the dominance of the monograph identified in the preceding discussion of church history is also characteristic of contemporary historical theology — and that some recent projects in the field have moved toward the multi-­author model: e.g., Hubert Cunliffe-­Jones et al., A History of Christian Doctrine (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1978).

48. August Neander, Lectures on the History of Christian Dogmas, trans. J. Ryland, 2 vols. (London: Bohn, 1858); Karl R. Hagenbach, A History of Christian Doctrines, trans. E. H. Plumptre, 3 vols. (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1880-81).

49. A. C. McGiffert, A History of Christian Thought, 2 vols. (New York: Scribners, 1932-33), surveying the history of doctrine from the early church to the Reformation, to be supplemented by McGiffert’s Protestant Thought before Kant (London: Duckworth, 1911; repr. New York: Harper, 1962) and his The Rise of Modern Religious Ideas (New York: Macmillan, 1915), which conclude the history up to the twentieth century.

50. Quentin Skinner, “Meaning and Understanding in the History of Ideas,” History and Theory 8 (1969): 3-53; available in a revised form in Quentin Skinner, Visions of Politics, 3 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 1:57-89.

51. Cf. the comments of Heiko Oberman, “The Reformation: The Quest for the Historical Luther,” in The Reformation: Roots and Ramifications (London: T&T Clark, 2004), pp. 1-2.