Christian Historiography

Five Rival Versions

Jay D. Green

• Publisher: Baylor University Press
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781481302647
• Topic: Théologie et religion
• Subtopic: Histoire du Christianisme

Christian faith complicates the task of historical writing. It does so because Christianity is at once deeply historical and profoundly transhistorical. Christian historians taking up the challenge of writing about the past have thus struggled to craft a single, identifiable Christian historiography. Overlapping, and even contradictory, Christian models for thinking and writing about the past abound—from accountings empathetic toward past religious expressions, to history imbued with Christian moral concern, to narratives tracing God's movement through the ages. The nature and shape of Christian historiography have been, and remain, hotly contested.Jay Green illuminates five rival versions of Christian historiography. In this volume, Green discusses each of these approaches, identifying both their virtues and challenges. Christian Historiography serves as a basic introduction to the variety of ways contemporary historians have applied their Christian convictions to historical research and reconstruction. Christian teachers and students developing their own sense of the past will benefit from exploring the variety of Christian historiographical approaches described and evaluated in this volume.

Chapter 1

Historical Study that Takes Religion Seriously

Among Christians who pursue graduate study in history, a disproportionate number seem to gravitate toward religious topics. Their reasons for doing so are almost certainly autobiographical: “Write what you know!” A quest for self-understanding among historians is an undeniable factor in developing and shaping their research interests. There are similarly lopsided percentages of African Americans doing history and race, women studying gender, and gay and lesbian scholars working on LGBT topics. Believing historians are no different: they often enter graduate school with an unsurprising curiosity about religious themes. This is not a trivial observation. Regardless of their convictions about personal faith and history, the mere fact of their own religious identities inclines these scholars to engage their subjects with a measure of built-in empathy. This fact doesn’t mean they will inevitably endorse their subjects’ beliefs, choices, or actions, or always assess their fates with a “rooting interest.” Sometimes they will; other times, not. But, consciously or unconsciously, historians who experience faith as a central feature of their personal lives are more prone to treat past religious beliefs and experiences as also something real, knowing that reality consists of far more than the observable, material world.

The massive corpus of historical scholarship on religious themes produced by believing historians is a testament to one of the important ways that faith matters to historical study. The natural empathy believers have toward their subjects has been instrumental in raising the banner of religion’s importance in human history and played a decisive role in producing a renaissance in modern religious historiography. But the unique challenges of studying religion in the modern academy have also brought these scholars into conflict with some of professional scholarship’s reigning orthodoxies, and inspired them to forge new and innovative ways to be part of the intellectual discourse about the religious past.

The Problem of Religion in Twentieth-Century Historiography

Modern Western history has been a story of declining religious power, and nowhere has this been more evident than within the academy. That American and European universities have undergone an intense process of secularization since the late nineteenth century seems such an unassailable fact that a detailed analysis of this plotline is unnecessary.1 But the implications of this process for the status of religion as a subject of inquiry bears closer inspection. Since at least the early twentieth century, the academic study of religion has been highly contested within the human sciences, history included. Academic treatments of religion for well over a hundred years have been shaped chiefly by secular “scientific” biases that encouraged scholars to treat religious ideas, experiences, and motives as something less than what religious people imagined them to be. Religion seemed too subjective, too medieval, and ultimately too unscientific to analyze in a straightforward fashion. Rather than genuine experiences of the divine or normative descriptions of transcendent truth, the scientific ethos tended to treat religion as an epiphenomenon that reflected deeper, more empirically discernible psychological experiences (e.g., Freud and James) or socioeconomic interests (e.g., Weber and Marx).

Historian Brad Gregory contends that the professional standards governing the academic study of religion have long been imbued with metaphysical commitments that make it impossible for scholars to take the beliefs and practices of their subjects seriously. In the interest of promoting objective analysis, the “scientific” study of religion has adopted a form of dogmatic naturalism whose roots can be traced at least back to David Hume.2 “On this view,” writes Gregory, “religion must be reducible to something social, political, economic, cultural, psychological, or natural, because by definition there is nothing more for it to be.” This “secular confessionalism” has so thoroughly woven itself into the discourse of modern scholarship that it is simply regarded as a “method” rather than the fully operative system of belief that it is.3

Already by the final decades of the nineteenth century, historian Bruce Kuklick observes, “there was a revolution in the way reflective Americans came to understand the world. Instead of serving as an assumption underlying one’s knowledge, Protestant theism itself became a subject for study and analysis.” Unable any longer to envision theological dogma as a legitimate foundation for learning, scholarship began gradually to turn its attention to religious themes only as they “manifested struggles for power, worldly perquisites, and psychic gratification.”4 Religion could no longer be believed, as such, but that didn’t mean it couldn’t be dissected scientifically. Such dissection became an important aspect of academic inquiry.

Kuklick contends that the advent of biblical higher criticism was a major turning point in Western intellectual life. Beginning in the 1870s, students of the Scriptures were invited to measure stories of virgin births, bodily resurrections, and divine interventions against their own experiences informed by decidedly modern notions of scientific cause and effect. “What investigators believed could possibly happen in the contemporary period,” argues Kuklick, “was a measure of what was acceptable as what could have happened in the past—no matter what the Bible or other venerated sources told us.” Those who wrote these sacred texts may have earnestly believed in the supernatural stories they described, but modern authors simply could not. Such impulses, Kuklick concludes, were instrumental “in reordering the worldview of twentieth-century thinkers, more crucial I think than Darwin.” This scientific ethos ushered in a new morality for historians in which they could no longer establish their beliefs upon their hopes or wishes, nor simply give intellectual assent to one or another established authority. The only ground for historical truth available to the historian was scientific verification. Summarizing the central argument of Van A. Harvey’s influential book, The Historian and the Believer, Robert Handy writes that scholars at the beginning of the twentieth century had imbibed an entirely “new morality of historical judgment, one that celebrates methodological skepticism and that proceeds by raising doubts at every juncture.”5

While new attitudes toward sacred texts may have helped usher in this critically minded ethic, it was the newly emerging social sciences that provided historians with methods and paradigms they would need to make it operative. Early twentieth-century psychologists such as William James, Stanley Clark, and James Leuba were hard at work in universities across the country, developing research programs that aimed to understand religious experience through the empirical lenses of personality development, feelings, and “inner experience.” Meanwhile, Franz Boas was beginning to apply the insights of anthropology to religious practices by making use of ethnographic assessments of folklore, ritual, and myth. Soon, the social theories of German thinkers like Max Weber and Emile Durkheim were beginning to make their way into American universities, encouraging scholars to think about religious institutions and beliefs in relationship to the rise of capitalism or as little more than a potent social glue. What participants in this social scientific ethos shared was a general commitment to exploring the structural underpinnings of religious phenomena because such constructions were empirically knowable and measurable. “Accepting a broadly naturalistic world view,” observes historian Edward Purcell, led this early generation of social scientists to conclude “that the only real knowledge available about both man and society was empirical and experimental. Theological dogmas and philosophical absolutes,” Purcell notes, “were at worst totally fraudulent and at best merely symbolic of deep human aspirations. Metaphysical questions, dealing with such nonempirical concepts as essence or soul, were simply meaningless.”6

Of course, this modern social scientific study of religion—along with scholarship more generally—wasn’t interested in dispassionate study or the pursuit of knowledge as an end in itself. These research programs were accompanied by an ascendant confidence in the power of science to serve humanity and to solve long-standing social problems. Indeed, the academic vocation during the first two or three decades of the century was shaped by an imperative of social reform and human improvement, ever confident that an empirically verified account of the social order might lead to the eradication of vexing problems such as poverty, ignorance, and political corruption.

A related set of developments within American Protestantism emerged right alongside the academy’s reconsideration of religion. Theological modernists like Shailer Mathews and advocates of the “Social Gospel” like Walter Rauschenbusch hoped to make Christianity more fully adapted to science, and to harness the power of socially engaged, scientifically informed churches to “Christianize the social order.”7 They also aimed to modulate the supernatural and confessional baggage associated with traditional Christianity, but, unlike many within the academy, they believed it was important to maintain the institutions, the language, and even the values of faith. Many of them firmly believed that such adaptations were an antidote that would preserve rather than extinguish Christianity in the modern age. What they shared with their counterparts in the social sciences was a belief in the power of science to advance humankind. Mathews thought of himself as a Christian “who implicitly trusts the historical method of an approach to Christian truth” and who was capable of using “the methods of modern science to find, state and use the permanent values of inherited orthodoxy in meeting the needs of the modern world.”8

The mood among religious thinkers by the late 1920s was well reflected in H. Richard Niebuhr’s Social Sources of Denominationalism (1929).9 Though he was a theologian with a heart for serving the contemporary church, Niebuhr’s book suggested that Christians were guided much less by their theological commitments than by their respective social-structural, psychological, political, and economic contexts. In fact, Niebuhr argued, theological formulations of all kinds in every age have been shaped by “the demands of the national psychology, the effect of social tradition, the influence of cultural heritage, and the weight of economic interest.”10 While revealing Christianity’s “social sources” did not lead Niebuhr to abandon his personal connection to the faith, the theologian conceded that the social sciences should play an essential role in defining and framing what constitutes religion.

Progressive historians during these same years would have had little understanding or use for the balance Mathews or Niebuhr were attempting to strike between the virtues of modern science and the ongoing value of religious practices.11 Emerging proponents of a “new history,” including James Harvey Robinson and Charles Beard, began applying the insights of social science to their work and called for the abandonment of all historical explanations that weren’t clearly grounded within the social environment. According to Robert Skotheim, Robinson thought of ideas as “ultimately creatures, rather than creators, of the environment. Human thought was a tool which was fashioned by an environmental crucible to help man adjust to his changing environment.”12 Using the techniques of social science (most importantly psychology and economics), Robinson called on fellow historians to push back against the “conservative” idea that human nature is fixed and static, and to demonstrate the good prospect of radically reforming human nature by altering the human environment.13

While the vogue of Robinson’s more progressive ambitions for history as a tool for social reform faded rather quickly, his vision of framing all features of human development within the strict scaffolding of past social environments would become an article of professional orthodoxy. And religion as a subject of inquiry, when it was considered at all, was consistently treated as an epiphenomenon. Most historical study of religion was relegated to ecclesiastical history, and, even here, the methods of a strict socio-historical method guided most interpretations. In his Christian Philosophy of History (1943), distinguished University of Chicago church historian Shirley Jackson Case argued that the Christian past needed to be subjected to unrelenting, rigorous, and complete social analysis because, he argued, there is no reality outside of strict historical cause and effect.14

More aggressive brands of materialism—Marxism most importantly—were adopted by a growing number of historians by midcentury, and studies informed by these theories were (not surprisingly) unsympathetic to religion as a genuine feature of human life. British historians such as Christopher Hill and E. P. Thompson led the way in subjecting various topics in English religious history to withering Marxian analysis. Hill’s many books on seventeenth-century Britain envisioned the Puritan movement as an emerging bourgeoisie, experimenting with new and progressive forms of economic interchange. “His Marxist views,” according to David Bebbington, “induced him to see the intellectual dimension of religion as a product of the fundamental economic processes that determined the course of history.”15 In his masterwork, The Making of an English Working Class (1963), Thompson arrived at many similarly reductionist conclusions about nineteenth-century British Methodism.

By the 1950s and 1960s, even many social theorists who dismissed Marxism also dismissed religion as an illusory category that masked deeper material factors. They confidently held that the incontestable forces of modernization would in all likelihood bring about the eradication of religion in Western life during their own lifetimes. The ascendant “secularization thesis” was often employed not merely as a useful theory that explained the shrinking authority of religious institutions and ideas but an iron law of modern development going forward. Many of them would have assented to Emile Durkheim’s remarkable assertion: “If there is one truth that history teaches us beyond doubt, it is that religion tends to embrace a smaller and smaller portion of social life.”16 To the degree that social theorists remained generally committed to assessing and resolving contemporary social challenges, it made little sense for them to focus much attention on what amounted to an illusory set of social formations that were not long for this world.

Throughout the balance of the century, among most rank-and-file scholars, religion as a serious category of historical analysis largely fell under the precepts of what Wilfred McClay has called “a soft, cautious, inoffensive secularism that omits rather than debunks.”17 With some notable exceptions, religion held little standing as an explanatory category in human history. But in the undercurrent, while most assumed genuine religion was being written out of human life—past and present—at least a few diligent scholars were conspiring to preserve its status as a meaningful force in historical development. This so-called “return of religion” to both social theory and historiography would be one of the more notable and surprising features of academic life during the 1960s and beyond.

The “Return of Religion” in Historiography and Social Theory

There were currents of discourse at midcentury on both sides of the Atlantic that not only questioned the secularizing reduction of religion in scholarshi...