2. Perspective and Meaning in History
The relationship of present-day account to past event raises the question of the meaning of “history.” Just as with the case of the basic definitions of the historical disciplines, the answer is more complex than one might imagine. The term “history” itself is ambiguous. Initially, there are at least two histories that we must consider: past event and written contemporary account. But it requires little reflection to realize that even this is an oversimplification, because the past is never simply the past. When we talk about the past, for example, we inevitably project our present perspectives into the past; we encounter the problem of what Carl Becker called the “specious present.” Historians cannot simply block off the past and study it objectively as if it were an object under the microscope, because we ourselves are a product of that past. There is thus a complex, ambiguous boundary between past event, our present circumstance resulting in part as a product of the past, and our interpretation of the event.
Students of history sometimes assume that the recent past is more accessible than the distant past, and this viewpoint is grounded in the common belief that the passage of time makes understanding more difficult. But a case can be made for the opposite viewpoint as well. Arguably, the ancient or early modern world may be studied more objectively because we have a greater distance from those periods of time. On the other hand, the study of past cultures raises the question of the unfamiliarity of the habits and customs of those cultures, and hence a heightened inability to understand them because of a greater distance between the observer and the thing observed.
The tension we find between our too facile understanding of the familiar, on the one hand, and the objectivity associated with our attempts to understand the unfamiliar, on the other, probably means that it is easier to study reasonably distant history rather than very distant history or the very recent past. If the events are too recent, although the documentation may be easy to come by because either written evidence or oral reports are still accessible, nonetheless the level of personal involvement in the events may be so great that it is difficult to step back toward objective interpretation. In fact, the level of one’s own involvement may be so great that stepping back is impossible. In addition, we will find that even the most recent historical events sometimes present us with types of evidence that are extremely difficult to interpret. But if the event is too far distant, not only have we lost an enormous amount of material about the event, but the social, political, and intellectual contexts may be so far from our own approach that we have difficulty understanding and reconstructing what happened. In the middle, arguably, the past becomes more accessible, granting that patterns of thought and patterns of society are not altogether different than we find in the present. Biases, particularly our own involvement in the issues, are reduced. In addition there is a reasonably large amount of material still surviving. Nevertheless, biases can never be completely suspended, and modern historiography has properly concluded that the issue of interpretation begins the moment that we think about the past.
The problem of the past is not only related to the subjective question of the present interpretation; it is also related to the nature of historical evidence. The minute you say that history is “what happened” it begins to dissolve between your fingers, because we no longer have “what happened.” All we have are scattered traces left by “what happened” or people who were involved in “what happened.” In the history of Christian thought there are many ways in which the student must reckon with an idea as an event. In one sense we can say that the idea happened. It was generated in a person’s head. At least in terms of that person’s life or the lives that the person touched, it is the generation of that idea and the liveliness of that idea that had a particular effect. Nonetheless, all that we have is the written record that resulted at some distance from that idea being generated. It is very much the same with other events belonging to “what happened.” All that we have are results and traces. From those results and traces we then construct something that we call history, which is no longer so much “what happened” as the way we construct connections between the surviving traces. The work of the historian is incredibly difficult granted that the connections between the traces are the points at which meaning is inferred — whether it is meaning for us or meaning for whatever happened in the past. And yet, those are precisely the points that do not appear in the documentation.
Historians deal without exception (if we are dealing with human history) with human remnants and human artifacts, much of which falls into the category frequently identified as “brute fact” or simple data. Nonetheless, virtually all such forms of evidence are products of the mind. Perry Miller, the noted American intellectual historian, has said that history is the history of the human mind and no more. The past does not exist, and all we have is a set of surviving traces of the past. All traces of evidence already reflect some level of interpretation — perhaps in the character of the documentation, the style, or the design. If you use a coin from the Roman Empire and you view that coin as a hard datum, you must recognize that the design of that coin says something. What is on the coin reveals something about the mind of the designer. Far from being a “brute fact,” it is already filled with interpretations of the meaning of the empire. The mind of the emperor, or the public image desired by the emperor, or even a particular artist’s conception of the image of imperial Rome, is seen in the way the face on the coin is portrayed. Similarly, the words on the coin are intended to convey a meaning.
Another example of physical evidence that is not quite “brute fact” is the grave marker of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. On the one hand, a grave marker may offer information about the birth and death of an individual that is just as accurate as the later state bureau of vital statistics. And in the case of very old cemeteries, grave markers may well offer information not found in the state offices. The grouping of graves may offer information about families, not merely the size of family, but also evidence of problems of infant mortality and disease. The high infant mortality rate in colonial America is often graphically evidenced by numerous small graves — many of which bear sorrowful carvings of little animals, sometimes even of dead birds. Beyond this kind of information, there is also the highly subjective aspect of grave monuments: an inscription on the grave of a dishonest shopkeeper might read “Dear Husband and Beloved Father.” Or, also on the subjective side, information may be given about likes and dislikes of the deceased — or perhaps of relatives, granting that the deceased have no control over mottos or verses of hymns inscribed on their monuments.
What appears at first glance to be hard, factual evidence from the more recent past can be equally difficult to interpret, as illustrated by the voting records of parliamentary elections in England which are voluminous for the first two-thirds of the nineteenth century. Before the introduction of the secret ballot in 1872, the full names of individual voters in national elections were recorded in poll books, along with their occupations, their choice for Members of Parliament, and occasionally even their places of residence. Poll books would, on the surface, appear to offer us objective and readily accessible access to voter behavior, but upon consideration the appearance of hard data unravels and issues of interpretation multiply. Votes were cast viva voce before bailiffs who heard and recorded the vote, making the voter susceptible to influence, including bribery; hence questions of intent and motive are imbedded in the very process of casting a vote. In elections in which a voter might choose two candidates, what was implied (if anything) about an elector’s intention when the voter chose to vote for only one candidate? The meaning of a single vote cast in elections in which voters possessed two choices but used only one remains the subject of considerable scholarly debate in the study of modern electoral behavior, but the event itself is only the beginning of many interpretive issues. Does a voter’s occupation indicate anything about his social status or wealth — social status and wealth are themselves two issues that must be disentangled — and if one can establish a link between occupation and wealth in some cases, is occupation a secure predictor of wealth in all cases? The study of political behavior can thus be construed as a study of the mind, since the hard quality of quantifiable data found in poll books invariably reflects elements of motive and interpretation. Hence, even in more recent history, seemingly hard evidence is not obliging, it does not interpret itself, and understanding it requires imagination, skill, and insight.1
On the other hand, some historians are more interested in the development of thought than in human behavior, and clearly, different forms of evidence yield up different aspects of written history. A written document in the form of a narrative is, of course, from one perspective just as much a datum as a coin, a grave monument, or a poll book, and it is just as likely to mix more or less objective data with interpretation. The document is, at one level, an evidence of the thought of its author and of the various cultural, religious, social, and political forces that had an impact on his or her mind.
A written document will also be capable of chronological placement in the life of its author given the changing context of his or her thoughts. Thus, the writings of Tertullian that offer little direct evidence of their date can be placed in some order given his interest in and eventual espousal of Montanism, ca. A.D. 207. The treatise On Modesty, for example, argues that sins such as apostasy, murder, fornication, and adultery cannot be pardoned by a bishop and will not be pardoned by the Spirit. Tertullian gives as one of his grounds of authority the presence of “the Paraclete himself in the persons of the new prophets.”2 The treatise can, on the basis of these statements, be dated in Tertullian’s Montanist period, granting both that the statements are typical of the prophetic perspective of Montanism and that they are not characteristic of treatises known to have been written by Tertullian before his conversion to Montanism.
Nonetheless, the critical historian must recognize that documents can and sometimes will intentionally or unintentionally stand in the way of a clear understanding of their author’s mind. For example, Arminius’s negative comments about scholastic theology as antithetical to true and apostolic Christianity and his statements that he never recommended works by the Jesuits but consistently encouraged students to read Calvin’s Institutes and Scripture commentaries mask his significant appreciation and use of the writings of Thomas Aquinas, Francis Suárez, and Louis Molina — all scholastics, and the latter two, Jesuits.3 Given his historical context, Arminius could not have openly advocated Roman Catholic authors without bringing considerable condemnation on himself, but his adamant denial of interest in such works has led generations of historians to ignore their impact on his thought.
The upshot of what we have been saying is that history is not nearly so concrete as we would like to think it is. As Carl Becker observed, the so-called “facts” of history are not objects like bricks that can be readily handled and manipulated. There are numerous problems inherent in the documents that demand critical reading and analysis and, most importantly, the document itself may point only indirectly toward the event or action that inspired it. The document, in other words, is not an event but a trace, a result from which the historian attempts to identify and describe a historical occurrence. A series of documents and other traces is, then, not like a neat row of matched bricks that fit together with precision. Each document or trace may well be unique and replete with distinctive problems.
If the traces of history are not concrete, neither are they complete. We preserve what we view as important. The history of the church is filled with the fragmentary remains of individuals and movements that have been regarded as heretical and almost the complete remains of individuals and movements that have been viewed as orthodox (minus of course the potential remains that the individuals in the movements decided to exclude).
Individuals frequently decide which of their works they want to have survive and which they do not: we have, for example, no musical compositions from the pen of the late Romantic composer Gustav Mahler from a time before 1880, although we know of an early complete opera, two other operas at least partially sketched out, and a piano quintet for which the young Mahler had won the composition prize at the Vienna conservatory in 1878. Mahler destroyed all of these works and identified his Das klagende Lied of 1880 as opus 1.4 Early influences on Mahler’s style are, therefore, impossible to identify. Historians very often attempt to discover precisely what people unaccountably left behind, and distinguish these remnants from what they intentionally retained. Unintentional remains of the human record are obviously considered more valuable for understanding human motivation, but such records are comparatively rare, and this fact, of course, heightens the problem of interpretation. The field of oral history provides a contrasting example. Oral history is by its very nature necessarily intentional with respect to what is recorded, and it is this characteristic that has necessitated the use of unusually rigorous safeguards in the practice of oral history.
A healthy skepticism concerning the factual quality of historical data should be balanced, however, with some confidence concerning what can be learned about the past. E. H. Carr concedes that it would be misleading to call history a “hard core of interpretation surrounded by a pulp of disputable facts” (inverting a statement of Sir George Clark), but Carr’s own emphasis fell too heavily, at times, on the side of interpretation.5 While the evidences the historian examines are always fragmentary and have elements of interpretation imbedded in them, these very qualities can often lead to greater clarity concerning motivation and direction in human events, and the masses of evidence that do remain can be examined and, often, clearly understood from the perspective of the present. In some areas of study it can even be shown that we now know more about certain aspects of the past than the contemporaries who lived in the past. For example, today we know more about how people voted in eighteenth-century and nineteenth-century England and how their religious persuasion influenced their vote than did contemporary observers who lived at the time. Before the advent of the computer it was simply impossible to crunch thousands of bits of data into a coherent picture of what was actually going on in the electorate. No individual or group of individuals was capable of cross-tabulating religion or occupational status with voter preference, but today this task is readily accomplished. The historian can thereby accurately corroborate or discount the vague impressions of contemporary political observers with a far greater degree of certainty than they possessed at the time.
Historical Sources — Their Use and Assessment
An initial criterion used in the assessment of evidence is the quality of the source. Distinctions must be drawn between primary, secondary, and even tertiary sources, between unwritten and written sources, between intentional and unintentional evidences, and, in addition, between manuscripts, printed sources contemporary with the author, and subsequent editions, critical and uncritical.
“Primary” and “secondary sources” are sometimes distinguished from each other as the data or traces are distinguished from an account based on them — or as Barzun and Graff state, the historian uses primary sources to produce a secondary source.6 This definition is correct as far as it goes, but it does not cover all of the cases, nor does it allow that historians do, also, use secondary sources in compiling an account. In addition, it omits reference to sources that fall so far below the level of primary reference that they can be called “tertiary.”
The “primary source” is a document, datum, or artifact that belongs to the era under examination and that offers the most direct access to the person or issues bring studied. This definition does not, of course, exclude modern editions of older works. Thus, a manuscript copy of an original transcript of one of Calvin’s sermons is surely a primary source — but so also is the sixteenth-century printed text of the sermon, the sixteenth-century English translation, a digital version of any of the sixteenth-century forms of the text, and any modern edition or translation. Modern critical editions may often be more accurate than old uncritical editions, or even more accurate than an old transcript of a sermon. Translations must always be checked against the original, if possible, but they do fall into the category of primary sources. An old translation — such as the sixteenth-century translations of Calvin — may very well offer fundamental documentation about the reception of Calvin’s thought in England and, indeed, about the importance of translations in conveying or, perhaps altering slightly, a person’s thoughts. The relative value of original manuscripts, printed texts, critical editions, and translations will also figure significantly in the construction of proper footnotes.7
By the same token, electronic media forms of a text, such as Migne’s Patrologia on the Internet, are also primary sources, although here, as with printed editions, careful scholarship may often demand recourse to early printed texts or modern critical editions. The Patrologia itself is not the best critical text; much of it was taken from the better text of the Benedictine edition of the Fathers and in the transcription process some problems crept in. Yet another transcription, even one done as carefully as the digital version, removes the reader from immediate contact with the original text of the author and, therefore, despite the incredible research advantages of the Internet, will sometimes require examination of a critical edition or at least an earlier printed edition.
This definition of primary sources does, moreover, allow for the existence of “secondary” sources dating from the era under examination: Theodore Beza’s Life of Calvin is a secondary source for Calvin’s life even though it is a sixteenth-century document written by a close colleague of Calvin. A letter by Calvin is a primary source for examining the life of Calvin, but it would have to be regarded as a secondary source when it describes events in Strasburg or Zürich to which Calvin was not an immediate party. Indeed, any description of an event, even one written later by a contemporary, has a certain secondary character when contrasted with remains or evidences of the event itself — such as a transcript or a juridical record.
Secondary sources, therefore, are sources that offer information about an event but stand removed from it either in time or by a process of transmission of information. The secondary source is not a direct result of an event but itself rests on other sources such as documents, oral reports, or historical investigation of artifacts. In other words, a secondary source is secondary to or in some sense removed from the event in question; it is not a direct or primary trace of the event. Thus, secondary sources include not only such older works as Beza’s Life of Calvin or Brandt’s History of the Reformation . . . in the Low Countries, but modern histories, scholarly monographs, articles, and dissertations.
The “secondary” character of such works gives them a substantively different place in the work of research than that occupied by the primary sources. Secondary works are, of their very nature, indirect sources of information. They must be used with care inasmuch as they embody elements of selectivity and interpretation beyond the interpretive tendencies already present in the primary documentation. Secondary works also introduce their own errors and misconceptions into narrative accounts.
In addition, some works are so indirect in their relation to materials and so reliant on secondary works themselves that they ought to be designated as tertiary sources. This category of source includes historical surveys so broad that the author cannot be well-acquainted either with the documents underlying his or her inquiry or even with the development of scholarly literature in a field. Will Durant’s Story of Civilization and Walker’s History of the Christian Church fall into this category. So also do standard encyclopedias with unsigned articles, like the Britannica, Americana, or Collier’s. Tertiary works, while often valuable sources of information at an introductory level, cannot typically be used to good effect in scholarly research.
A very important rule, therefore, in the research and writing of dissertations, monographs, and scholarly articles is that secondary and tertiary sources must not be used to fill gaps in one’s knowledge of the primary sources. Of course, all rules must occasionally be broken; this particular rule is consistently broken in the writing of survey texts, granting that the author of a survey or general history cannot be a specialist in all of the areas covered and must, of necessity, rely on secondary sources in the construction of a narrative. The exception, however, proves the rule. Survey texts and general histories are often notoriously out of date and unreliable on particulars.
The proper use of secondary and sometimes tertiary works in scholarly research leads not to the construction of arguments based on evidences gleaned secondarily, but to the development of an educated context for argument about the meaning and implication of the primary sources. If they have any place at all in scholarly work, carefully chosen tertiary sources provide a generalized background of knowledge — but it is a background that the researcher will frequently find inadequate not only in detail but also in accuracy and will need to modify constantly under the impact of both primary documents and scholarly essays and monographs. The secondary sources, ideally, become the basis of a scholarly dialogue about the documents and ideas of history and, insofar as the history of scholarship on a point is mastered by the researcher, a beginning for further discussion. When the secondary literature is used in this way the researcher becomes part of the ongoing history of scholarship and contributes substantively to the investigation of a subject. Conversely, when the secondary literature is not analyzed or reviewed, the researcher may fail to contribute anything new either to the current scholarly dialogue about a historical topic or, indeed, to the general fund of human knowledge. When the secondary materials are not mastered, a researcher is in danger either of accidental duplication or a naive approach to conclusions, or both.
As a corollary to this rule, it is unwise to cite texts as quoted in secondary sources (and, of course, quite improper to cite such texts as if they had been taken from the original source itself). Secondary sources frequently edit, misquote, and abbreviate sources without giving any indication of the liberties taken with the text.
By way of example, one recent historian of Christian thought, in attempting to prove that various post-Reformation Reformed and Puritan writers held a voluntaristic soteriology, has argued that the Puritan theologian William Ames placed repentance (an act of the will) definitively prior to faith (which necessarily involves the intellect). He cites Ames as follows: “While repentance is indeed an ‘effect’ of faith, ‘Repentance in respect of that carelessness, and anxiety & terror arising from the Law which it hath joyned with it, doth goe before Faith, by order of nature, as a preparing and disposing cause.’ ”8 The sentence in which the citation occurs itself raises questions. If Ames could say that repentance was an “effect” of faith, does Ames think that effects can precede causes, and how does this statement relate to the sentence apparently cited in full by Kendall? When the citation is checked out against Ames’s actual text, however, all becomes clear. In the first place, what appears to be a full sentence is in reality only the first of three independent clauses in a single sentence. In the second place, the sentence, when cited in its entirety, actually proves the opposite point: the “order of nature” to which Ames refers occurs only in the unregenerate and it relates to the so-called second or pedagogical use of the law. Understood, however, as an effective and genuine turning from sin, repentance, Ames makes clear, must follow faith as an effect follows its cause. Contrary to Kendall’s conclusion, this rather neatly mirrors Calvin’s view. Woe to the unsuspecting writer who trusts the secondary source for citations of primary sources!
There are also, of course, numerous forgeries and impostures available to befuddle the historian. This problem is somewhat different from that of the mistaken secondary account; it is instead a problem of fabrication, either at the primary or the secondary level. The “Cardiff Giant” and the “Piltdown Man” are cases of primary fabrication. Both were produced before the modern development of the science of paleontology, but at a time when people were first entranced with prehistoric archaeological discoveries. The Cardiff Giant began as a five-ton block of stone ordered by George Hull of Binghamton, New York, to be carved out of the gypsum deposits near Fort Dodge, Iowa, and sent to Chicago to be fashioned into the shape of a ten-foot tall man. Hull then had the statue transported to Cardiff, New York, and buried in the ground for a year. In 1869, it was unearthed by well-diggers and displayed by Hull as a petrified prehistoric “giant.” After touring for several decades and amazing hosts of spectators, the Cardiff Giant was shown to be a hoax in 1900 by Othniel March of Yale University.
The “Piltdown Man” had a longer and far more successful history. In 1912, Charles Dawson reported his discovery of cranial fragments and a jawbone on Piltdown Common, near Lewes, England. Near these fragments were other humanoid bones and the remains of various animals not extant in England. In addition, the animal remains showed evidence of having been worked on with tools made of bone and flint. At the time, the Piltdown Man was hypothesized to be a ancestor of modern Homo sapiens dating from the Pleistocene age. Although the gravel in which the remains were found was eventually dated from a later era, the Piltdown Man entered textbooks and standard encyclopedias as a genuine human ancestor. Thus, in the 1944 edition of Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary we read that “Piltdown” is “a prehistoric station in Sussex, England, yielding remains of an extinct species of man, Piltdown man (Eoanthropus dawsoni), characterized by a retreating, apelike chin and thick cranial bones, but a humanlike cranium.” It was only in 1954, as scientists found and studied genuine ancient remains and became more adept at identifying bones and at reconstructing and restoring humans and animals from partial skeletal remains, that the hoax was exposed. The cranial fragments were human, but not ancient; the jawbone was from an orangutan. Together with these and the other bones, various primitive tools had been buried in the gravel of Piltdown Common. Although the discoverer of Piltdown Man, Charles Dawson, has been suspected as the perpetrator of the fraud, no final proof has ever been offered.
Such frauds lie at the edge of historiography and responsibility for their exposure falls into the hands of paleontologists. Nonetheless, fraud belongs to the study of history on two counts and establishes the dependence of historiography on collateral fields of study. The existence of an unexposed fraud relativizes the worth of essays on the subject of prehistoric humans from the era in which the remains were accepted as genuine. Subsequent generations of researchers, including historians of the period, must be careful to take into account the state of knowledge at the time of the fraud, and, second, they must be careful to balance their accounts with a critical recognition of the findings of later scientists.
Chatterton’s Rowley Papers and MacPherson’s epic Fingal, attributed to the bard Ossian, are notable examples of imposture — both of which have maintained their place in English literature for their contribution, not to the eras from which they purported to come, but to the beginnings of romanticism in the late eighteenth century. James Macpherson (1736-96) was a schoolmaster whose literary talents were stimulated by old Gaelic poems that he heard in the Scottish highlands. In 1760 he presented to the literary public Fragments of Ancient Poetry Collected in the Highlands. Not only was the work a success, but the interest in ancient lore, bards, and heroes typical of the beginnings of Romanticism was such that money was raised to send Macpherson to the highlands to find more of these wonderful fragments. In 1762, Macpherson published his Fingal and in 1763, Temora, two epic poems attributed to the bard Ossian.
When Samuel Johnson and others demanded that Macpherson produce the manuscripts, he refused and was condemned in literary circles as a forger. Despite these accusations, Macpherson gained renown as a student of ancient poetry and was given a government post with a lifetime salary for his efforts. On his death he was interred in Westminster Abbey. Then, in 1807, after Macpherson’s death, the Gaelic text of the epics was published, still without any trace of manuscripts. The Gaelic text was quickly judged to be a translation of parts of Macpherson’s work back into the ancient language of Scotland. From the perspective of history, we can allow that Macpherson’s critics were partially correct; the epics were indeed forgeries, but, contrary to the claims of his detractors, Macpherson had considerable talent and his works had an enormous impact on the rise of Romantic poetry. William Blake, Thomas Gray, and Robert Burns were admirers of the Ossianic poems, and Goethe read the German translation with admiration. In this case, the forgery did not lose its value on discovery, but took a place in the history of literature slightly different from the one intended by its author.
Of a somewhat different order are the Rowley Papers by Thomas Chatterton (1752-70). The incredibly gifted young Chatterton began, at about the age of eleven, to produce medieval ballads, family histories, and other documents relating to Thomas Rowley, a priest, and to William Canynge, a merchant, both from the era of Henry VI. The explanation given for the documents was that they had been found in an old English church. As in the case of the Ossianic poems, the ancient style brought immediate interest and the papers were a considerable literary success. Here again, Thomas Gray took an interest, but this time of a more critical nature. He recognized that, despite the usually fine style of the papers, there was occasional misuse of a fifteenth-century word and an occasional anachronistic usage. Here again, however, the imposture had its effect and, like Fingal and Temora, contributed to the rise of English Romanticism. The young Chatterton was, undoubtedly, a literary genius of the first order. His early and tragic death is mourned in the forty-fifth stanza of Shelley’s “Adonais.”
Even more significant among the ranks of forgeries are the PseudoIsidorian Decretals and the Donation of Constantine. In the mid-ninth century, pope Nicholas I appealed to the Pseudo-Isidorian Decretals, a collection of the letters and decrees of the church of Rome falsely attributed to bishop Isidore of Seville (d. 636), in which the “chair of Peter” was identified as the seat of power in the church, the bishops of Rome as the convener of councils, the final appeal in all controversies and the “universal bishop.” The Decretals also contained the so-called Donation of Constantine in which Constantine reputedly gave all power in the West to the pope. From the time of Nicholas to the close of the Middle Ages, these documents were viewed as genuine and used as the basis of papal claims to ecclesiastical and civil supremacy. The validity of the documents was questioned in the later Middle Ages by the British scholar Reginald Pecock and finally disproved on linguistic grounds in the Renaissance by Lorenzo Valla. Here again, the identification of the forgery in no way lessens the impact of the documents on history — and the historian becomes responsible both for the understanding of the documents and their impact and for the knowledge of their later exposure as well as their decreasing impact on later generations. The historian also becomes responsible, generally, for the critical examination of evidences for the sake of identifying forgery and imposture.
One less famous but quite insidious imposture is the contribution of one of the anonymous writers for Appleton’s Cyclopaedia of American Biography. Presumably, he became aware that the editorial board of the Cyclopaedia was more anxious to receive short biographies of interesting individuals and to improve their style editorially than to check the veracity of the research that had produced the essays in the first place. In addition, writers were paid for each short biography. This particular writer went so far as to invent interesting lives, such as that of the French scientist, Nicholas Henrion (1733-93), who studied medicinal plants in South America, served as physician during the plague in Callao, Peru in 1783, and surveyed the silver and sulphur mines of Peru before returning to France in 1793. Henrion was rewarded by the governor of Peru for his work against the cholera with “letters of nobility,” but executed on his return to France for suspected royalist sympathies. So detailed is the essay that it notes even that Henrion’s Herbier expliqué des plantes du Pérou was published in 2 volumes, quarto, in 1790.
The problem here is that Henrion, like the explorer Berhard Hühne and some forty other entries in the encyclopedia, is pure fabrication.9 Not only might one wonder how his several books on South America were published in French before his return home — but more careful research would reveal that he battled cholera in Peru nearly a half century before its first reported occurrence there. The unwary student’s life is immeasurably complicated by the presence of a genuine Nicholas Henrion in French biographical and bibliographical sources of the time; the real Henrion was a military engineer during the Revolution who published several treatises on that subject. The genuine Henrion is in danger of being reduced to yet another of the accomplishments in the already distinguished career of his non-existent namesake. In this case, there is little useful historical impact of the imposture and much potential harm. At very least, students must be warned of the careless use of secondary sources and reminded of the rule that secondary and tertiary sources ought not normally to be used in dissertations, monographs, and scholarly articles as sources of information not available from primary sources. When the rule is not observed, Henrion’s exploits become a significant part of the history of Peru and other details from the essay embellish the works of careless scholars.
The close examination of these episodes in the history of hoax and fraud show us once again how the social and cultural assumptions of an era influence our thinking and contribute to various forms of credulity. Hoaxes, however, reveal less about credulity at the individual level than they do about what the majority of people in a given age were prepared to see and what they expected to understand. The Piltdown Man was accepted in an age that was enamored with the advances of science and the perception that evolution possessed an uncanny power to make sense of things otherwise mysterious. In this regard, it is well to remember that the specific cases of hoax and fraud we have examined in this chapter pale in significance when compared to the unveiling in the mid-twentieth century of several of the greatest hoaxes of all time. We now know that the histories of at least half the human population and many ethnic minorities and others without a voice have been neglected or distorted for centuries. It has taken the work of women historians and African American theologians to really convince us that a person’s socio-political setting and their personal history profoundly shape both the content and the methods of their scholarship.10 The rapid maturing of the new fields of women’s history and the history of ethnic and religious minorities has raised in an acute form the question of whether it is possible for historians to attain any reasonable degree of detachment and objectivity in reconstructing the past.
The Problem of Objectivity in Historical Study
In specific cases, historians today may attain to a more objective, accurate understanding of the past than either the individual participants in history or earlier historians, but the question naturally arises, is entire objectivity ever attainable, and, more importantly, how may we approach it methodologically? There are, in the first place, several barriers to total objectivity, or what might be called impartiality. Renier correctly notes that “absence of bias is not the same thing as secure knowledge,” granting that “the historian’s narrative cannot possibly be a faithful and total reproduction of a section of the past.”11 The selective nature both of the traces and of the historian’s reconstruction stands in the way of total reproduction, and selectivity, whatever its source, stands in the way of totally secure findings. History is continually being rewritten through the use of newly discovered or previously neglected sources; it is of the very essence of sound historiography that it be selective. Renier observes: “no story can be told till a selection has been made among available events, and . . . the selection of facts is a judgment passed upon their importance.”12 With selection and individual judgment comes partiality.
Nonetheless, most contemporary scholars have also resisted the inclination of some early-twentieth-century historians and of some modern hermeneuticians to become lost in a mire of subjectivity and relativism and to claim that the materials of the past mean whatever can be made of them. Certainly, the significance of materials changes over time and new levels of significance are added as materials are carried forward in a tradition of interpretation, but the meaning of the document in its original situation not only does not change but also continues to limit the significance of the document in the present. Objectivity arises out of a willingness to let the materials of history speak in their own terms while the historian, at the same time, exercises a combination of critical judgment and careful self-restraint. Her objectivity is not measured by a canon of absolute truth; it arises as a standard of the relationship between data and its interpretation.13
This objectivity, so important to the understanding of both past and present, results neither from an absence of presuppositions, opinions and existential involvement, nor from an ability to set aside such biases. Rather it results from an honest and methodologically lucid recognition and use of the resident bias as a basis for approaching and analyzing the differences between one’s own situation and the situation of a given document or concept. In other words, involvement in the materials of history can lead to a methodologically constructed and controlled objectivity that is quite different from, and arguably superior to, a bland, uninvolved distancing of the self from the materials that must, ultimately, remove the importance from history.
The goal of the student is to attain to balance and objectivity without abdicating one’s personality or losing entirely one’s sense of involvement in and with the events of history. It is, after all, involvement with past events that engenders continued historical interest. Objectivity in historical study does not, and cannot, exist if it is defined as an absence of involvement with or opinion about the materials. Instead, historical objectivity results from a methodological control of the evidence, of the various levels of interpretation both inherent in and related to the evidence, and of one’s own biases and opinions concerning the evidence and the various known interpretations.
The issue of objectivity can be understood, initially, in terms of a balance between what is considered to be a concrete datum and questions of interpretation — ours and someone else’s — together with a personal evaluation of the question of empathy and bias. On the one hand, we move toward the creation of a methodological distance between ourselves and the sources. We encounter sources. We write about the sources and deal with them, usually because of a root issue of empathy or bias. We are attracted to writing about something either because we like it or dislike it, because it moves us positively or negatively. The issue in writing is to try to transcend that basic problem of motivation, and in many ways to use the motivation to understand the materials.
For example, the historian may study Jacob Arminius because he or she wishes to understand more about one’s own tradition. But the student should not ask whether or not Arminius is ultimately doctrinally right or wrong. Rather, the question is, “Why does he say what he says?” One can find out a lot about why he says what he says by comparing his thinking to the Reformed thinking of his day, and then asking the objectivizing questions, “What is the reason that he moves in one particular direction as opposed to another? What is going on in his mind that leads him in this other direction?” These questions raise the further question of what is fact and what is interpretation. Several elements of the written record are data and fact. We have (1) Arminius’s own comments about his own theology, what it is and what it is not, including his comment that he did not read Roman Catholic authors and that he admired John Calvin as much as anybody else. We have (2) the printed catalogue of his library as auctioned off by his widow after his death. In his library we find a wide selection of Roman Catholic books, by authors that he said he did not read and did not recommend to his students. Finally we have (3) his own writings, which are virtually unfootnoted, a fact that while typical of the time, makes it very difficult to analyze the documents. The absence of annotation means that one has to have a hands-on knowledge of a whole series of potential sources in order to check them out against what one is reading. Granting his library and his statements about his work and his theological intentions, and granting the material, so to speak, in the middle — mediating between the books of the library and Arminius’s intentions and offering a basis for our interpretation — his own writings, plus (4) the comments of his adversaries, plus (5) the larger theological and philosophical context, one then attempts (very painstakingly) to match his statements with statements in the literature. The result is an Arminius who is very different from the Arminius defined by his opponents, very different from the Arminius that Arminians have wanted to find, and very different from the public Arminius created during the theological debates by Arminius himself. One finds a modified Protestant Thomist, a scholastic thinker, who did indeed read Catholic materials.
The historian, thus, always has to deal with the questions of interpretation that are lodged in the sources themselves, questions of interpretation that are present in the writings about these materials, and a hard core of data in which there is already interpretation, all of which provide the historian with clues for directions in his or her own thinking. On the one hand, we do not ever want to say that there are facts, or a past, without interpretation. On the other hand, we do want to say that there really are hard data, hard data that have some level of interpretation already in them that has to be critically examined, but data nonetheless.
The approach to objectivity can be enhanced by a candid recognition of the fact that empathy and bias belong to our work, from beginning to end. But the issue of objectivity, empathy, and bias does not rest with a simple discussion of our own empathies and biases, but the empathies and biases that are detectable in the materials themselves, and in the way that our own feelings relate to the empathies and biases in the materials. All of these issues have to be brought to the level of critical consciousness as one is writing.
It is methodologically important that one’s empathy or one’s bias be registered as an initial issue in method at the very beginning of research, so that the method can begin to cancel out its effects. In research on a doctrinal issue, if you find yourself in disagreement with the teaching of the writer who is the object of your research, your disagreement ought to be drawn into conscious relation to the analysis of the document and methodologically controlled. In research and writing, rather than registering disagreement, what one should register is the way in which one’s own understanding of the reasons for a particular intellectual construction are different from the reasons for someone else’s intellectual construction. This understanding can then become a tool for asking the question, “Why does this other person formulate the way he or she does?” What one writes about is not the difference of opinion, but what has been discovered about the logic of the other person’s formulation, by asking the basic question, “Why is that formulated differently from the way that I have been accustomed to seeing the issue formulated?” One’s own writing should not register one’s own theological opinion, pro or con. Rather, whatever that opinion was, it merely serves as part of the method in encountering what the other person is thinking or doing. As a historian, one makes no judgment about the rightness or wrongness of the person’s teaching.
Finally, the success with which a historian attains objectivity is often related to the specific type of task in which he or she is engaged. When the historian works at the level of simple description, a high degree of objectivity is often possible. It is not difficult to describe certain events in history, or to establish beyond a reasonable doubt that a person acted in a specific way. To return to the example of poll books and electoral behavior, let us say that although England had an Established Church, we know beyond a doubt that Presbyterians voted in parliamentary elections in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Objectivity becomes more difficult when we move from the realm of description to that of explanation. Here we are interested in the cause or motivation of a certain behavior; we wish to know why Presbyterians voted and whether or not they were motivated primarily by religion or by economic elements, or what is more likely, by both. Thus establishing the fact of a particular behavior is relatively easy, but determining whether or not the action was intrinsically religious is far more difficult. A third step that the historian often takes removes the goal of objectivity even further from reach, namely, when historians address the question of significance, or larger historical meaning, they engage in a task which will almost inevitably invite debate. If the Presbyterian merchant who voted during the American Revolution was motivated primarily by his socio-economic status, can we conclude more broadly that economic elements were more significant in determining voter preference than ideological or religious elements? In this case, a conclusion one way or the other at this level of generalization will almost certainly be contested, and the possibility of actually proving the case will remain highly unlikely. The historian’s dual tasks of assigning causes and construing significance thus put the greatest strain on the goal of objectivity, and yet these tasks are by far the most interesting aspects of the discipline.
The question concerning what difference it makes for historians to write from a Christian or non-Christian perspective has been a vital issue in the history of historical writing, and it is properly construed as a particular case of the larger problem of objectivity. Wolfhart Pannenberg has rightly observed that “Church history faces in a way no other branch of history does the question of the relevance of the religious concern to the understanding of history because it deals with the history of a religion the essence of which is belief in a God who acts in history.”14 In the past, historians who wrote with Christian convictions wrote very different kinds of things from those who wrote from a non-Christian perspective. We have seen that in the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries, Christians in one tradition had a difficult time understanding Christians in other traditions, to say nothing of those who stood outside these traditions. Since the eighteenth century, great advances have been made along the lines of detaching our Christian commitment from our writing of history, and yet the degree to which one can or ought to interpret texts along the lines of one’s own confessional viewpoint provides grist for an ongoing debate.
In a helpful article on this topic, Harry S. Stout distinguishes between method, empathy, and point of view.15 One could start at the most objective level and ask, “Does Christian commitment or a Christian perspective have anything to do with the methods we use?” In other words, does a Christian perspective have some intrinsic connection with methodological distinctives? Few people today would wish to argue in favor of this proposition. Then we might ask, “Does a Christian perspective have any bearing on our empathy for the subject of study or bias against it? Does a Christian historian, for example, write about the Christian church with more empathy than the non-Christian?” Some historians have argued that a Christian scholar may write with deeper empathy when treating Christian subjects than the non-Christian; a great deal of attention has been paid of late to the so-called “participant-observer” model of writing church history. Empathy or existential involvement may well account for a historian’s initial interest in a particular subject, but such involvement can as easily create barriers to understanding as avenues for interpretation: the unwary participant-observer can all too easily fall prey to a version of the “Whig interpretation of history,” according to which the forward march of events comes to fruition in his or her own group, theory, or program.16
Clearly, a non-Christian may write with more understanding than Christians have ever previously written, depending upon how good a historian he or she is and the current state of research and level of sophistication in the secondary literature. The classic case used by Stout in this regard is Perry Miller and the writing of Puritan history in the early twentieth century. Seventeenth-century Puritans had suffered a great deal of grief at the hands of nineteenth-century historians; as late as the early part of the twentieth century, Puritans were still commonly considered humorless, repressive, and tyrannical. While he could do nothing about the Puritans’ characteristic lack of humor, Miller, writing from an agnostic viewpoint, examined the minds of his chosen subjects with remarkable empathy, and he thereby resuscitated the entire reputation of three or four generations of Puritans in colonial America. Evidently, a person writing from a non-Christian perspective can have a powerful impact on reviving an entire segment of the Christian tradition.
We might put the matter rather differently and think of the religious perspective of the scholar as an undesirable handicap, rather than a potentially desirable asset. In this case we should ask whether it is even possible for Christians to write objectively about Christianity. Can Christians deal with their own history in such a way as to discern accurately and responsibly its meaning, even when that meaning does not oblige their preconceptions? If so, can they build on what they have found? The answer to these questions must certainly be “no” if providential or supernatural causes are assigned to events that will never, by their very nature, submit themselves to the methods of the historian. On the other hand, if the religious element is entirely excluded from church history, the historian’s conclusions might become so many arguments for atheism.17
One could argue that Christian faith might lead to greater empathy for a subject and thereby greater understanding than a non-faith perspective, but this is clearly not a necessary corollary of faith. What may be claimed at a safe minimum is the ideal that the Christian scholar, granting that he or she possesses sufficient analytical gifts and literary abilities, may bring a point of view to a topic that a non-Christian might not bring. If we return to the basic question of the way that the historian goes about selecting materials, a Christian might bring a perspective to the selection and to the organization of those materials that a non-Christian would not bring, simply because a person’s own history and training ultimately do say something about how the materials are selected and ordered. But the entire question of the role of Christian faith in writing history must be examined at different levels. Methodologically, there does not appear to be much of a debate. Similarly, when we consider the matter of empathy in the modern climate of rigorous analysis and detachment, few, if any, differences between a Christian and a non-Christian approach to scholarship should appear. Even when we put the question in terms of one’s point of view, it is not at all obvious that a Christian historian’s faith will have a positive bearing upon the work that is done.
While it is not unlikely that the point of view the Christian historian brings to the study of the past will shape what is finally produced in subtle ways, it is impossible to determine ahead of time whether the result will be salutary or not. We have seen the deleterious effect of nominally “Christian” convictions in our study of the slow emergence of critical historiography, and students who are anxious to locate providence in history should be ever mindful of, and loath to return to, that long and tortured process. The theological element that may find its way into the narrative and analysis of the church historian must be recognized as such and introduced only tentatively, and one would hope, winsomely. Adopting for our purposes the contention of Wolfhart Pannenberg concerning the theologian’s religious convictions, we believe that these convictions properly belong to the heuristic, not the probative, context of historical analysis and argument. Conclusions that are sympathetic to religion, no matter how great the sincerity of the historian, can only be recovered for church history “when they are studied as a disputed theme in history itself.”18
Students who are eager to find traces of providence in history from which they may elicit personal meaning have commonly failed to consider the long and problematic tradition of history written from a confessional or denominational viewpoint (see chapter 1, above), and they have not given sufficient attention to the historical problem of the discipline of history in relation to theology. The scholarly or objective study of the history of the church and Christian doctrine is a relatively new phenomenon in theology. The discipline is barely two hundred and fifty years old in an intellectual community that has been studying theology for more than seventeen centuries. Before the early eighteenth century when Mosheim wrote his Institutes of Ecclesiastical History and Walch produced his introduction to the religious controversies both in and beyond the Lutheran Church,19 the history of Christian teaching and religion was, typically, a function of dogmatic theology. A portion of each locus of the dogmatic system was devoted to a polemical description of the “state of the controversy” in which the views of opponents of all sorts, ranging from the perpetually refuted arch-heretics of the patristic period, to various writers of the Middle Ages, to contemporary adversaries, were ranged in chronological order as part of an etiology of error. The construction of such etiologies is, of course, a time-honored practice, dating back to the classical period and observed by the fathers of the church from the late second century onward. Hippolytus dispensed with the gnostics by arguing the origins of Gnosticism in the errors of Greek philosophy, and Athanasius exposited the virtues of Nicaea in his survey of the materials and debates of subsequent councils during the battle against Arianism.20
The object of all these early attempts at the history of Christian doctrine or of heretical opinion was not history as such, but rather a nonhistorical truth standing outside and above the chronology of a problem. History, in other words, has always been recognized as having some importance for the identification of truth, but only in recent times has history been recognized as having an importance in itself as the embodiment of a kind of truth. This latter recognition was, in its initial form, the contribution of Mosheim, Walch, and the historians and theologians of the eighteenth century who followed in their steps.
The importance of history and the dominance of historical method in the contemporary study of religion and theology bear witness, therefore, to the realization that a right understanding of the documents and of the concepts with which theology works is a historically defined and historically governed understanding. The fact that this is a comparatively recent realization means, however, that very few of the documents and concepts of theology will themselves contain or, in their fundamental intellectual direction oblige, a historical model for understanding their own contents or implications. At one level, then, the importance of history is that it provides a context of meaning that was not immediately or even fully available to the creators of the documents.
The people of the fourth century, for example, certainly knew collectively more about the events of their time than we today can ever reconstruct. Much of the past is lost to us forever. Nonetheless, when we pose the question of the meaning and implication of recorded events, we are in a position, today, through the use of historical method, to know more about the fourth century — or about any past century — than any individual who lived at that time. It is not simply that we know the course of events beyond the life span of individual people. We also are able to understand trajectories of ideas and patterns of debate free from the blinding biases of the moment.
We can draw, by way of illustration of the point, on one of the previously mentioned examples: Athanasius’s chronologically organized analysis of the fourth-century councils has little understanding of either the Arian or the Nicene or the non-Nicene, non-Arian views of the relationship of the Father and the Son as growing out of and dependent upon an earlier history of developing Christian God-language. It never occurred to Athanasius that the Arian and the various non-Nicene views of the Godhead had roots in the undeniably orthodox teachings of such writers as the Apologists of the second century, Hippolytus of Rome, and Irenaeus, and even had some affinities with the pronouncements of Tertullian. Tertullian, after all, saw no difficulty for Christian theism in the statement that “there was a time when . . . the Son was not,” the very sentiment for which Arius was condemned.21 It also most probably never occurred to Athanasius that the gnostic and hermetic use of the term homoousios, still remembered by the church at the time of Nicea, may have exerted a positive influence on ecclesiastical usage — or, indeed, as Ambrose later testified, that the primary reason for selecting the term was not its positive theological worth but the fact that Arius and his followers held it to be anathema.22
History and Self-Understanding
Historical understanding of documents and ideas will, therefore, frequently be rather different than the self-understanding of those who held the ideas and who produced the documents, although it will try to analyze and to grasp that original self-understanding as part of the task of historical interpretation. These two elements of historical understanding are crucial to the work of reconstructing the past, whether for the sake of an accurate representation of the past in and for itself, or for the sake of the present-day use of the materials of the past. On the one hand, accurate reconstruction entails the establishment of a legitimate vantage point for the analysis of an idea or document. This vantage point will allow the historian to take into consideration the cultural context, antecedent to, contemporary with, and subsequent to, the particular object of study.
In the study of the history of doctrine, the methods of intellectual history demand attention to the development and use of particular vocabularies and to the way in which those vocabularies function in a specific, historically discerned and reconstructed context of meaning. The past, in other words, cannot mean what we want it to mean — its ideas cannot be forced, certainly not at an initial stage of interpretation, into our contemporary context of meaning. The very terms of an argument, even if they continue to be used in seemingly identical arguments today, will have changed in meaning, if ever so slightly, with the result that our contemporary understanding of those terms will stand in tension with our right understanding of the way in which they functioned in a different time and place.
On the other hand, present-day use of the materials of the past also requires a clear sense of the difference and distinction between the setting of the document and the contemporary setting, as well as a knowledge of the historical path that connects the document with the present and that, in addition to enabling it to speak with a continued relevance to our situation, accounts for the differences between the perspective of the document and our present-day perspective. In those cases when the contents of a document are totally or nearly totally strange to us, the cultural context of the document in its social, religious, political and linguistic particularity will most certainly provide the best, if not the only, corridor of access to the meaning and implication of the document. Without a grasp of that context, the contents of the document will either remain utterly puzzling to us or they will be assimilated to, and therefore misinterpreted by, our own cultural and intellectual milieu. The point is particularly telling when a specific document or set of ideas, despite the remoteness of its situation from ours, so belongs to the foundations of our own thinking that its right interpretation is necessary to our own self-understanding.
An example of this latter dilemma (again, remaining within the bounds of the historical problems already noted) is the attempt of a fairly well-known contemporary theologian to argue that the Nicene or Athanasian homoousios means “that God himself is the content of his revelation in Jesus Christ” and that the “Gift” is “identical” with the “Giver.”23 In the first place, the term homoousios implies no particular theory of revelation, most certainly not a theory of revelation as “personal” rather than “propositional,” such as appears to underlie these statements. In the second place, although the term certainly does indicate the essential (although not the individual or personal) identity of God the Father with the divine Logos incarnate in Jesus Christ, it in no way implies either the identity of God with Jesus Christ, who was both divine and human, or the identity of Jesus Christ with the entirety of God’s revelation. After all, Athanasius strongly affirmed, in agreement with virtually all of his predecessors in the patristic era, the revelatory work of the Logos asarkos, that is, of the Logos apart from the flesh, in and through the created order. Moreover, inasmuch as revelation is the work and not the being of the Logos, the Logos itself cannot be identical with revelation. In addition, Athanasius’s clear distinction of divine persons, together with his assumption that the Logos, as second in order, serves a mediatorial function, precludes any theory of a total revelation of the transcendent Father — and, therefore, once again, any thought of an identity between God and his self-revelation.24 Whatever the merit of a twentieth-century theory of the identity of God with his self-revelation, it is an example of badly done history to thrust the theory upon Athanasius. It is also exceedingly unlikely that badly done history can be the basis of well-done theology.
The point of this discussion is not that history “teaches lessons” about the good and the bad, the moral and the immoral. Such lessons are the province of ethics, not of history. The importance of history lies instead in the realm of the identification and definition of issues and of the cultivation of objectivity in judgment. The assignment of value — whether ethical, philosophical or theological — to the ideas and events of the past is not, per se, a historical task. Where the ethicist, the philosopher or the theologian judges crime or error or heresy, the historian reports analytically with a view toward meaning in the original context. When a historian does write of crime or error or heresy, those judgments arise not out of the opinion of the historian but out of the clear presentation of the views of the contemporaries of the individual, idea, or event in question. Thus, Arianism is not a heresy and the teaching of Athanasius not orthodoxy because a contemporary historian says so, but because the church of the fourth century, represented in two ecumenical councils, offered that opinion.
When, moreover, historians reappraise decisions of the past, they do so on the basis of evidence drawn from the past, not on the basis of present-day assumptions. Thus, several twentieth-century scholars have argued that Nestorius was, at least in his intentions, essentially orthodox. Their point is not that the councils of Ephesus and Chalcedon were incorrect in their assignment of boundaries to christological orthodoxy in the fifth century — and certainly not that the twentieth century can claim, on historical grounds, that what was once heterodox can now be appropriated as useful teaching. Instead, these scholars have examined a recently rediscovered treatise by Nestorius and have reexamined the evidence from Nestorius’s debate with Cyril of Alexandria and have concluded that Nestorius’s views may have been misconstrued for political reasons. In other words, the theological rectitude of the councils is not an issue, but the accurate representation of the views of the historical Nestorius and of his relationship to the views known as Nestorianism is an issue for the historian.25
The importance of history, therefore, in general and in its specific relationship to the graduate study of the Christian church and its tradition, can be found both in the importance of the remains of times past and in the importance of the cultivation of an objective approach to the materials of religion and theology. If Leopold von Ranke’s maxim concerning the reconstruction of the past “wie es eigentlich gewesen” (as it really was) is understood not as an attainable object but as the description of the fundamental intention of historical method, it ceases to be an unattainable dream and becomes a practical guide. More than that, it becomes the first step in a process of education or, perhaps, a hermeneutical circle, that moves from the materials of history to the historian or theologian in the present-day context and then back again to the materials; that creates a perspective for understanding the materials themselves, the larger tradition to which they belong, and in addition one’s own situation in the present; and that provides an attitude and a set of intellectual tools for the better evaluation of all of the ideas and materials of theology.
If the graduate study of the Christian church and its tradition is to be designed to train teachers and leaders for service in seminaries, universities, and churches, the balance and the objectivity, together with the understanding of materials, past and present, and of one’s self that are to be gained from historical study, are indispensable. History provides, on the one hand, a source of breadth for contemporary theology inasmuch as its vast resources of ideas and perspectives manifest a variety and a range of insight quite beyond the reach of an individual mind or of a community of minds at a particular time. When approached by means of a balanced and objective historical method, these resources, simply by reason of their breadth and of their cultural and intellectual relation to our present, lend a certain balance and objectivity to our own discourse.
On the other hand, history offers a source of limitation inasmuch as its resources frequently manifest the failure of plans, projects, ideas, and systems, or demonstrate the inability of certain teachings to bear an intellectual freight for which they were not designed. It has sometimes been said that the modern church, usually because of its ignorance of the patristic period, has tended to duplicate in its theology most of the errors and problems of the first five centuries of Christian thought. When approached in a balanced and objective manner, history provides insight into the limitation of our powers, if only by preserving the reasons for the failures of the past and, in the case of the theological tradition, showing the boundaries within which the community has chosen to formulate its views.
The importance of objectively recounted history lies, therefore, both in the task itself and in the use of its result. From the task itself not only is there gained a knowledge that has its own value as knowledge, but also the mind of the investigator is trained in an approach to materials that yields balance and solidity of judgment as well as clearer self-understanding. From the result of objective historical investigation comes an indispensable tool for the exercise of critical judgment and for the formulation of ideas in the present. Theological and religious understanding have profited immensely from the revolution in historical thinking that took place during the eighteenth century. Training in theology, especially at the advanced level of a graduate program, whatever the field or sub-discipline, gains its substance and its perspective from history.
1. J. R. Vincent, Pollbooks: How Victorians Voted (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1968), pp. 1-33.
2. Tertullian, On Modesty (De Pudicia), chap. 21, in The Ante-Nicene Fathers, ed. Alexander Roberts et al., 10 vols. (New York: Scribner’s, 1899-1900), 4:99.
3. Cf. James Arminius, The Works of James Arminius, trans. James and William Nichols, 3 vols. (1825-75; repr. Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 1986), 1:299-301; cf. Geeraert Brandt, The History of the Reformation . . . in and about the Low Countries, 4 vols. (1720-23; repr. New York: AMS, 1979), 2:49-50; and see the discussion in Richard A. Muller, God, Creation and Providence in the Thought of Jacob Arminius: Sources and Directions of Scholastic Protestantism in the Era of Early Orthodoxy (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 1991).
4. Kurt Blaukopf, Mahler (London: Futura, 1974), pp. 20, 25, 31.
5. Edward H. Carr, What Is History? (New York: Vintage, 1961), pp. 7, 26.
6. Jacques Barzun and Henry F. Graff, The Modern Researcher, 4th ed. (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1985), p. 124 n. 18.
7. See below, chapter 4.
8. R. T. Kendall, Calvin and English Calvinism to 1649 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979), p. 160, citing William Ames, The Marrow of Sacred Divinity (London, 1643), p. 128.
9. See the discussion in Allan Nevins, The Gateway to History (New York: Heath, 1938), pp. 131-32.
10. James H. Cone, God of the Oppressed (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1975), p. vi.
11. G. J. Renier, History: Its Purpose and Method (New York: Harper & Row, 1950), p. 249.
12. Renier, History, p. 250.
13. Carr, What Is History? pp. 158-59. The best sustained discussion of the distinction between neutrality and objectivity and the viability of maintaining a standard of objectivity is found in Thomas Haskell’s vigorous rebuttal of Peter Novick. See Thomas L. Haskell, Objectivity Is Not Neutrality: Explanatory Schemes in History (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998); and Peter Novick, That Noble Dream: The “Objectivity Question” and the American Historical Profession (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988).
14. Wolfhart Pannenberg, Theology and the Philosophy of Science (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1976), p. 396.
15. Harry S. Stout, “Theological Commitment and American Religious History,” Theological Education 25 (1989): 44-59.
16. Note the now-classic essay by Herbert Butterfield, The Whig Interpretation of History (New York: Norton, 1965).
17. Pannenberg, Theology and the Philosophy of Science, p. 396.
18. Pannenberg, Theology and the Philosophy of Science, pp. 321, 399.
19. Johann Lorenz von Mosheim, Institutes of Ecclesiastical History, Ancient and Modern, trans. James Murdock, ed. H. Soames, 4 vols. (London: Longman & Co., 1841, originally published in 1726-55); Johann Georg Walch, Historische und theologische Einleitung in die Religionsstreitigkeiten der evangelisch-lutherischen Kirche, 5 vols. (Jena, 1730-39); and idem, Historische und theologische Einleitung in die Religionsstreitigkeiten, welche sonderlich ausser der evangelisch-lutherischen Kirche entstanden, 5 vols. (Jena, 1733-36).
20. See Hippolytus of Rome, The Refutation of all Heresies, Book I, prooemium, in The Ante-Nicene Fathers, 5:10; Athanasius, De Synodis, in The Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, series 2, ed. Philip Schaff and Henry Wace, 14 vols. (New York: Christian Literature Company, 1890-1900), 4:448-80.
21. Tertullian, Against Hermogenes, chap. 3, in The Ante-Nicene Fathers, 3:478; cf. Arius, Letter to Alexander, in Athanasius, De Synodis, 16, in The Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, vol. 4. (N.B. Tertullian’s language is clearer in the Latin original: “Fuit autem tempus . . . et filius non erat” in PL, 2.200.)
22. On the history of the term homoousios, see G. L. Prestige, God in Patristic Thought (London: SPCK, 1952), pp. 197-201; and for its usage in the hermetic literature see Hermetica, ed. and trans. Walter Scott, 4 vols. (repr. Boston: Shambhala, 1985), 1:118 (Poimandres, 10).
23. Thomas F. Torrance, The Trinitarian Faith: The Evangelical Theology of the Ancient Catholic Church (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1988), pp. 138, 305.
24. Cf. Prestige, God in Patristic Thought, pp. 214-18, especially p. 218; with Jaroslav Pelikan, The Emergence of the Catholic Faith 100-600, vol. 1 of his The Christian Tradition: A History of the Development of Doctrine (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1971-1989), pp. 202-6.
25. Cf. J. N. D. Kelly, Early Christian Doctrine, rev. ed. (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1988), pp. 310-17.