Confessing History

Explorations in Christian Faith and the Historian's Vocation

John Fea, Jay Green, Eric Miller, John Fea, Jay Green, Eric Miller

• Publisher: University of Notre Dame Press
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9780268079895
• Topic: Historia
• Subtopic: Historiografía

At the end of his landmark 1994 book, The Soul of the American University, historian George Marsden asserted that religious faith does indeed have a place in today's academia. Marsden's contention sparked a heated debate on the role of religious faith and intellectual scholarship in academic journals and in the mainstream media. The contributors to Confessing History: Explorations in Christian Faith and the Historian's Vocation expand the discussion about religion's role in education and culture and examine what the relationship between faith and learning means for the academy today.

The contributors to Confessing History ask how the vocation of historian affects those who are also followers of Christ. What implications do Christian faith and practice have for living out one's calling as an historian? And to what extent does one's calling as a Christian disciple speak to the nature, quality, or goals of one's work as scholar, teacher, adviser, writer, community member, or social commentator? Written from several different theological and professional points of view, the essays collected in this volume explore the vocation of the historian and its place in both the personal and professional lives of Christian disciples.

Part One

IDENTITY

Chapter One

FAITH SEEKING HISTORICAL UNDERSTANDING

MARK R. SCHWEHN

IN WHAT WAYS MIGHT CHRISTIAN FAITH ENLIVEN, INFORM, and enrich historical understanding? If one regards the teaching and writing of history as a Christian vocation, what difference does that self-understanding make in the actual practice of one’s craft? Since I think that the sometimes ineffable connections between our spiritual and our intellectual lives cannot be described in a way that should apply in detail to all of us, I have chosen to address this important matter by way of autobiographical reflection about my own faith seeking historical understanding. We all make our pilgrimages across the sometimes contested terrain occupied by both faith and reason, religious conviction and disciplined inquiry, in our own peculiar ways, depending upon our working theologies, our fields of study, our institutional locations, and the full constellation of our sometimes contending loyalties. The best we can hope for is good company on our pilgrimage, not some neat formula or prescription that will guide each and every one of our distinctive journeys to similar destinations. In that spirit, I offer the following self-critical account of my own pilgrimage as a Christian and a historian thus far.

First, some reminders…. Memory is the thread of personal identity, history the thread of public identity. And R. G. Collingwood among others has taught all historians never to equate or confuse the two. Memory is a notoriously self-serving and treacherous instrument, making the past activities of the mind mere spectacle refracted through present longings and interests. History often relies on testimonies borne of memory, but until these testimonies are critically examined and, as Collingwood would put it, reenacted in the historian’s own mind, they are only testimonies and never by themselves history. What then shall we call the testimonies of an historian about how he came to think historically and about how his historical thinking was shaped by his Christian faith? Do my memories become history due to the contingent fact that the mind that is recollecting them happens to be the mind of an historian? Collingwood would think not. He would insist that my memories become history if and only if I have evidence for them, not simply because the mind in which the memories are reenacted happens to be the mind of an historian.

I begin with these somewhat abstract and philosophical reflections, not because I propose to take us all on a metaphysical journey, for this would be a cardinal sin among historians who are frequently suspicious of philosophy. Rather, I want to remind us all at the outset that simply to engage in the practice of testimony or confession or autobiographical reflection, simply to plunge into the mysteries of personal continuity, is already to honor a practice whose deepest roots in the West are Christian. I have in mind here of course St. Augustine’s Confessions and Augustine’s own image of the Christian life as one of pilgrimage, a journey whose final destination lies beyond space and time as we know them. To recover even a part of the shape of that journey is therefore both an act of faith, for that process presupposes pattern and continuity before these are actually discovered by the searching mind, and an act of humility, for we soon learn that we cannot know ourselves by ourselves. Only God can catch the human heart and hold it still. And when we come to see this, as we must see it as soon as we try to understand our own stories, we should bring forth praise more than knowledge. Or rather, our self-knowledge, such as it is, must become itself a form of praise.

THE MAKING OF AN HISTORIAN: AN AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL REFLECTION

With this much as prologue, let me turn now to the endeavor to comprehend the relationship of the Christian faith to the practice of history by way of autobiography. I shall do this in three parts. I will first simply tell the story of how I came to be an historian and of how I chose my subject matter. I will then attempt to reflect upon how my own historical scholarship has been informed and, I hope, enriched by my Christian faith. Finally, I want to enlarge the topic somewhat to the larger question of how Christian faith has sustained the life of my mind, a question that includes but extends well beyond the practice of history.

When I came to Valparaiso University in 1963, I knew I loved to think about things, I knew that I was not called to the ordained ministry as my father and grandfather and great-grandfather had been before me, and I knew that I was not very good at science or math. I was also pretty scared, suffering from the “imposter syndrome,” whose major symptom was believing that I had all my life been pretending to be smart and managing to fool a lot of people, and believing as well that I was soon to be found out. I won’t write about my fears here, since I still suffer from them. I will instead describe how I developed from someone who was pretty much open to studying anything in the area of the humanities and the social sciences to someone who chose to study history.

I wish I could claim that this development was one of deliberate and carefully self-conscious choice. It was instead one of accident, contingency, and chance, or so it seems to me even now from my own limited, earthly perspective. I finished my first year of college with my imposterhood intact, vaguely bewildered as to why no one had yet discovered the depths of my ignorance, not yet realizing that my teachers were not at all interested in making that kind of discovery, since, among other things, they were even more aware of their ignorance than I was of my own. It would take me many years to learn about the true nature of teaching and learning. But at the beginning of my sophomore year in 1964, I still thought that successful work in college involved concealing ignorance, and I had yet to find myself in the grips of an intellectual passion.

Then it happened. I took a required survey course in U.S. history from a professor who offered to meet with any of us for an extra hour each week if we wanted to do more reading. I’m ashamed to admit—but this is a confession, after all—that I joined this group just to be sure I’d earn a good grade in the course. But I soon became hooked on history. This professor used the extra readings to show us how different historians had offered radically different interpretations of the same events or the same historical periods or the same historical personages. I found this a kind of revelation. When I learned much later that the gospels might be different interpretations of the life of Jesus of Nazareth, this would provoke a crisis of faith. But for that earlier time, since we were talking about historiography and not christology, I felt liberated and excited, not threatened.

This professor for some reason or another liked my work. Since he was a bachelor who had no children of his own, he in a way adopted many of his students. I was one of them. Within weeks he had given me several books (I only learned years later that these were, of course, desk copies). Within months I had taken two more courses from him. By the end of the year, he had taken me out for coffee scores of times, and on one of those occasions he told me that I should someday be a Danforth graduate fellow, since I was a pretty good student, since I wanted to teach someday, and since I was serious and articulate about my religious convictions. I had never heard of Danforth fellows, but three years later I found myself in possession of a Danforth fellowship to Stanford University to study American intellectual history.

I have always thought that had this professor been teaching, say, literature or theology, I would now be a literary critic or a theologian. But perhaps not. For there was another development coincident with this one that shaped my emerging sense of vocation just as deeply. Valparaiso University did not have in those days of the 1960s a particularly strong faculty. Students who wanted a first-rate education could get one at Valparaiso, but as many of us said to one another at the time, you had to take professors, not subjects. In other words, many of us plotted our class schedules not by what we would need for this or that major or minor but by which professors we wanted to have for our teachers. We hoped, not unreasonably, that sooner or later we would discover that some assortment or another of courses would add up to a major or that we could petition some office for a so-called “individualized major.” In the 1960s, this strategy worked easily. It would not work so readily today.

In any event, one of the brightest and toughest professors at Valparaiso in those days was a philosopher who had been studying for the ordained ministry when he fell in love first with systematic theology and then with philosophy. After earning a Ph.D. at Harvard, he spent a year at Oxford studying with A. J. Ayer, and he became a resolute logical positivist. I did not know all of this at the time. I did, however, find this professor’s introduction to philosophy course the most exciting course I had ever taken. I easily earned an A in the course and only later learned that this professor had an entirely different set of standards for introductory courses than he did for advanced courses. But I became determined to take this professor for everything he taught. So I took him for early modern philosophy in the department’s historical sequence. I took him for epistemology. And I finally took him for a course that was the most important one I took at Valparaiso: “Religious Language and the Challenge of Logical Positivism.” I should add parenthetically that there were other outstanding philosophy professors in those years, and I soon had a major in that field without realizing it.

And so it came to pass that I spent over two years of my undergraduate life studying with a man who longed to believe with every fiber of his being but who could not bring himself to do so any longer because he believed that the logical positivists had shown conclusively that religious language was meaningless. I read literally scores of very difficult books that tried to show in one way or another how religious language might be shown to satisfy the positivists’ verification criterion of meaning. And to this professor’s credit, he much preferred students who would argue forcefully and carefully with the positivists to those who quickly became parrots of the party line. For the first time, the life of the mind was not an exercise in puzzle solving. It had taken on a real existential edge. Ideas really mattered in a profoundly personal sense. And I found myself on a crusade of sorts. I was determined to refute positivism for myself, because it had begun to erode what I then took to be the foundations of my own faith, and for my teacher, because I sensed that if I could prove A. J. Ayer wrong, I might save my teacher’s soul! This whole endeavor evinced a curious admixture of pride, charity, and salvation through intellectual work. And the endless papers, the scores of all-nighters talking philosophy with the professor and other students, the earnest efforts to find some way to reconcile ideas and values that were finally incommensurable, and the unavailing attempts to reconvert my professor shaped my scholarly life in some obvious ways and some not so obvious ways.

A few years ago, in going through some old papers, I found the essay that I had written as part of my Danforth fellowship application. I was startled to learn that I had somehow during my senior year in college set out the course of study that would preoccupy me at Stanford. Until I found the document, I had always remembered that my dissertation topic had been the result of particular courses I had taken and particular professors I had studied with in graduate school. So much for memory! But there it was in cold print in my Danforth essay: I wanted to study American history, I wrote in 1966, during the period from roughly 1870 through roughly 1920, when many intellectuals had come to grips with the challenges of modern science both to their faith and to their understanding of their work in the humanities and the emerging social sciences. And I had wanted to undertake such a study, I wrote further, in order to sort out my own perplexities about these matters by studying others who had struggled with the same issues at the very beginning of the rise of the modern research university in America.

The book that shaped my thinking in preparing the essay was by H. Stuart Hughes, and it was entitled, Consciousness and Society: The Reorientation of European Thought, 1890–1930. Its second chapter was called “The Revolt against Positivism.” In other words, I had chosen to carry on the argument I had been having for two years with myself and with my philosophy professor by means of history rather than by means of philosophy. And my project would prove to be self-reflexive in more ways than one. Hughes did not have logical positivism in mind when he wrote about positivism, since he was focused primarily on a period prior to the emergence of the Vienna circle in the 1920s. He defined positivism as the insinuation of the models and the methods of the natural sciences into the discourse of the humanities.¹ I was determined to resist scientism and positivism because I was a Christian. And my resistance would take two forms. First, I would study those who themselves found ways to appreciate and to take full account of the powers of scientific explanation even as they refused, sometimes on religious grounds, to be completely captured by natural-scientific methods and metaphors. But second, I would choose to write history in what was then considered an old-fashioned way, intellectual history whose method was multi-contextual and whose explanatory form was narrative. In other words, I would refuse the temptation to make history another one of the hard social sciences, a field for testing social-scientific “covering laws” on people and societies in the past.

This proved to be a somewhat lonely enterprise in those days. For one thing, my fellow graduate students were all enamored of the new social history, and they were enthusiastically studying family history, undertaking social mobility studies using the latest statistical techniques, or probing into kindred disciplines like demography and ethnography. For another thing, there were no American intellectual historians in the Stanford history department at the time. It was a terrific department, and I learned immense amounts from the likes of David Potter, Carl Degler, Don Fehrenbacher, Allan Matusow, Linda Kerber, and a new arrival named David Kennedy. But I had once more to cobble together an academic program that spoke to my deepest questions. I therefore decided to enroll in the Graduate Program in Humanities at Stanford, a course of study that had to be undertaken in addition to a Ph.D. in a regular field. And I took a lot of European intellectual history with people like Paul Robinson. Perhaps because he was so new and so unfamiliar with the ways of graduate education at Stanford, David Kennedy agreed to be my dissertation advisor even though he was a social and political historian, then finishing his book on Margaret Sanger and the battle for birth control in America, a subject remote from my interests.

My department was very kind to me, maybe overly indulgent. But my primary intellectual companions were my fellow graduate students in the humanities program and the individuals whom I chose to study—Henry Adams and William James. Both of these men had been present at the creation of the modern research university at Harvard. Both were deeply seduced by scientism even as they were at the same time repelled by it. Both made major contributions to their fields of study, Adams in history, James in psychology. Both resisted scientism and positivism from partly religious motives, James moving toward pragmatism and the Varieties of Religious Experience, Adams moving away from positivistic history and toward autobiography in The Education of Henry Adams. Neither thinker countered positivism by moving back to a lost world. Adams mourned his whole life long the lost world of classical republicanism that had formed him, but he never thought he could return to it. And James remained ever a Darwinian of sorts even as he retained his own father’s convictions about the reality of religion. I wound up arguing that modern consciousness was born in these two men at least from the unsettling and unsettled conflicts within them between head and heart, between faith and reason, between their gifts and their experiences, between their own generation and the generation of their fathers and mothers, between some of their most deeply cherished convictions and the imperial claims of modern natural science. And both of them had in different ways reversed the project of St. Augustine in his Confessions. In the words of Henry Adams, “Whereas Augustine had worked from multiplicity to unity, I was forced to work from unity to multiplicity.”² This trajectory would be reenacted in many ways and in many idioms by most of the major intellectuals of the twentieth century.

In other words, I came to see these men as different versions of my old philosophy professor at Valparaiso, who had the will to believe, so to speak, but not, in his judgment at least, the rational warrants for it. And when I came to write my dissertation, I used for the first chapter the typology developed by Isaiah Berlin in his magnificent essay on Tolstoy’s view of history called The Hedgehog and the Fox. According to this binary classification, the hedgehog sees only one big thing, seeks uni...