There has never been another time in my life of reading that I have taken in more academic journal articles—or what we call “the secondary literature”—and especially essays concerning the various monotonies of method. In this case we are dealing with historical method. And the assignments given early this past fall flowed from historical method per se, to application of the same to religious history, to finally the implications for the discipline of historical theology. Since my own passions have always been a combination of the history of ideas and the discipline of theology, this was a very worthwhile study.
I can still remember the three books I read back in the summer of 1998 that first stirred my imagination about the history of ideas. Those books were Francis Schaeffer’s How Should We Then Live?, Russell Kirk’s Roots of American Order, and Bertrand Russell’s History of Western Philosophy. Many other similar accounts of historic thought have been read in the two decades since. But what was it in those first surveys that drew my interest? And this will be true even Russell’s atheistic take.
It can be summarized on the first pages of Schaeffer—an idea that has been cheaply disparaged in more recent years—and that is that our presuppositions affect not only the rest of our worldview, but that these ideas make culture, which issue forth on to the stage of moral action. It is what Keynes said, that “the world is ruled by ideas.” It is what Shakespeare said, that “the pen is mightier than the sword.”
As I began this most recent study, still fresh in my mind were the criticisms of “the big idea” thesis, in authors that the New Calvinists had been reading: authors such as James Davison Hunter and Andy Crouch. The viewpoint that ideas can “change the world” is passé. It is naive, arrogant, individualistic, and even Hegelian! That last connection is simple enough to see, but alas the analogy is false. It is of particular note because of the way that even more recent reclamations of the medieval synthesis in Reformed circles have linked nineteenth century “central dogma theory” to worldview thinking. But I digress. The matter at hand is how to assess ideas in the actual historical record.
As one would expect, there was an immediate tension between prevailing secular models of assessing historical fact and Christian expectations for the impress of both God and man in that same narrative. What makes the tension all the more complex is the role played by philosophical thinking (and that among fellow Christian thinkers) in making sure that we are plundering the Egyptians rather than pandering to them. Have we mistaken the spoils of common grace, God’s property all along, with secular insights that need not answer to a larger theological corrective? My question is obviously rhetorical. How unscholarly of me!
And that is the real tension underneath the one on the surface. Are we being careful and zealous enough, as Christian scholars, not only to let history speak but to remain the manly speakers that we ourselves have always been called to be throughout that history? The historical flow of thought, no less than any other object of intellectual reflection, is not a plaything for our momentary fellowships with the world’s pedantic pontifications. The whole is “his story” or else not worthy of the name.
But to set things right, we must indulge the argument in a sense. We must get our heads wrapped around why the historical flow of thought, whether about theology, philosophy, or political theory, “must be” approached as the academic consensus now says that it must. For my part, I hold to a basically traditional Christian position on common grace in the arena of scholarship. We can learn a great deal from the present scholarly conclusions, and not all of it being an exposition of how not to think!
HISTORY AND INTERPRETATION
A Summary of the Scholarship
There are seemingly as many approaches to historical research and writing as there are modern philosophies. In the nineteenth century philosophers often wrote histories. The upshot was that such “histories” were very theoretical, eschatological, and even prescriptive.
Hegel and Marx are obvious examples. History was headed in an inevitable direction. It is easy to miss that the dialectics of Hegel and Marx are both the imposition of a finite mind upon the infinite canvas. One may feature rational Spirit and the other material class conflict. Yet they are both a priori renderings: the axiom being determined by the mind of the theorist.
The historiography of the twentieth century settled into its own. It became increasingly specialized, always pursuing “scientific” status. However, it was no less philosophical in the sense that the methodology had transformed into “engagements with analytical philosophy”1 by the 1960s.
J. T. Shotwell’s “The Interpretation of History” (1913) and Roy Nichols’ “The Dynamic Interpretation of History” (1935) are two examples of historiography following the philosophical trends. Both imbibed the modern narrative of scientific progressivism. In the former, historical “causes” must be limited to “other things of the same kind.”2 In the latter, pessimistic scientific models had given way to a “greatly altered”3 paradigm, where since humans are uniquely adaptive, so shall their historical writing. History was still going somewhere. This I know. For the molecules in motion tell me so.
The school that set the benchmark for the next generation of historiography is known as contextualism, commonly associated with Cambridge School, though its relation is disputed by Bevir.4 The work of Quentin Skinner is often summarized by the value of “seeing things their way,” with respect to historians of thought looking back at their sources. J. A. Pocock stressed the “political language”5 of a tradition as the context, not holding one a priori approach as better than another. We could compare Skinner and Pocock in a tale of two “contextualisms”—one in which language is passive in relation to the author (Skinner), the other in which language is the structure in which the author is constrained (Pocock). Although both were inspired by Laslett’s reconstruction of the context for John Locke, much more were they influenced by language analysis that dominated philosophy in the middle of the century.
Critics notwithstanding, contextualism began to drive the agenda. For example, DeVries “autonomous meaning” seems identical to Wittgenstein’s language games, only applied to historical texts. Meaning is “an irreducible property of items in a highly complex, rule-governed system of activity. Such items as words and ideas are “meaningful only through participation (potential or actual) in a system.”6 Even the detailed focus on historical fallacies, as in Fischer (1970) and Trueman (2010), presuppose that the present historian has not yet come to terms with his proper subject matter: though Fischer’s description of the “metaphysical fallacy”7 seems too extreme, unnecessarily debunking some philosophical knowledge. Even so, the historian committing such fallacies wants either to know or to show things foreign to the text in question.
Now the older preoccupation with strictly “empirical” history and the newer contextual models did have one thing in common. They were both opposed to a history of ideas that “approached texts as timeless philosophical works.”8
This was the “Great Ideas” approach, which is often called “essentialism” because it treats words, ideas, and questions as perennial truths, as having the same referent in the minds of all thinkers regardless of historical context. Here marks the basic showdown between history and truth. A “truth” only approximated by empirical gathering of an ever reduced context is hardly what would have ever been meant by “truth” in that very history.
A more difficult approach to situate on this spectrum are those that focus on certain aesthetic aspects, such as art, rhetoric, and cult symbols. Campbell understands history as “a secession of various symbolic expressions, each appropriate to its intended audience but different from one another in their suppositions about reality”9; Kewes views early modern England as a time when stage productions often drove politics10; while for White, no method of approach to material can avoid gaps and the glut of data, so that selectivity takes the form of an abstraction of mythical proportions.11 The historian must decide between “kinds of stories that might be found there.”12
From a more Christian perspective, Collinson, Morrill, and Trueman can acknowledge the insights of these secular models and yet make the pursuit of historical truth an abiding value of historiography. The scholar may “wait around”13 for truth, but in spite of the many perspectival difficulties, the past remains “tangible and real” and its actors can be known “in much the same way as I can know many people in the present.”14
The lesson of Trueman’s test case of Holocaust deniers is that some historical models are far more plausible than their alternatives. He points out that objectivity is not mere neutrality; and that while histories must be selective, that does not make them simply perspectival.15 For one thing, he argues, “we need to remember that it is not a historian’s motivation that renders his or her analysis invalid; it is improper use and interpretation of evidence which does so.”16 That will be crucial to our total question. If truth is our goal, then we may be said to be “biased toward finding a truth.” So be it. And likewise for motivations that may be called “religious” or even “dogmatic.”
Critical Analysis
I will limit my analysis of this body of literature to two questions. And given the diversity of methods available, it will be the contextualist model that is most in view. First, to what degree is the essence of the historical method dependent on a dubious philosophical foundation? Second, has the contextualist model truly succeeded in inspiring a middle ground between essentialism and nominalism?
First, to the philosophical roots of contextualism in analytical philosophy: specifically with respect to language games and speech-act theory. Skinner is concerned with what historical authors were “doing” with words, or what “moves”17 they were making. But locating the origin of intent here is problematic. Some idea must be a sufficient cause for the speech-act. How else to discern the idea through the act, but that the idea has some empirically discernible independence apart from the act by which to give its discovery meaning?
Pocock claims that the political language of a time “selects and prescribes the context within which it is to be recognized.”18 But the same problem seems to follow here as with Skinner. Either a word has wide usage over a period or it doesn’t. If it does, how do we know its meaning across the board except in relation to other common words to which it has always been related?
Let us finally ask whether contextualism truly holds the middle ground between essentialism and nominalism.
Are we really to believe that political theorists do not operate with some essential idea in their minds when they speak of “republicanism” or “liberty”? No doubt we are guilty of projecting back on them our questions. However, the notion that one a priori approach has no advantage over another, because each language game is self-contained, just is an a priori assumption itself.
This is why Bevir saw the Cambridge school as suspicious of the contextualist a priori methodology: precisely because it has one.19
The Skinner line is that it is anachronistic to find rudimentary “building blocks” of the idea in prior thinkers. However this seems to have its own limitations. As Trueman remarks, “One can scarcely coin a term for a concept that does not exist.”20 It is really a matter of common sense. Many ideas undergo massive change over time and place. Words do so even more. But the relative fixity of the ideas over the words that represent them ought to be a clue as to which is more transcendent of contexts: ideas over words. The words are windows to the ideas. And there is continuity and discontinuity between those ideas as they move across the historical plane of contexts.
RELIGIOUS HISTORY AND INTERPRETATION
Summary of the Scholarship
At the heart of methodological development in history writing is the question of the extent to which religious ideas can be causal. One modernist assumption is that religious ideas must necessarily play less of a role in secular realms the further one progresses into the Enlightenment. From this it follows that religious values must lack empirical verifiability. This even affects the history nearer to our time. For instance, American history textbooks typically do not feature religious figures, post-1870, except as occasional “foils for a more persistent secular history.”21 Where religious speech is taken seriously, by postmodern scholars, the question becomes “how ideology and behavior was maintained through constructed codes.”22
To summarize the prevailing methodology toward religious ideas in the broadest way: Modern assumptions reduce them to the subjective (non-empirical); Postmodern assumptions recast the subjective as wholly ideological. An example of the former is the criticism of Heimart’s Religion and the American Mind (1966). The only allowable Puritanism formative of the early American philosophy was a secular-moralistic strand, not a revival-minded-Calvinism.23 An example of the latter would be explaining away the dogmatic motives of the martyrs of the Reformation era. Gregory’s work on early modern martyrology is really a study in the distinctiveness of religion, and how it calls for “methodological astuteness”24 that resists secular reduction. That requires taking the social relationships in which the ideas emerged at face value.25
The influence of Quentin Skinner is as axiomatic for the newer religious historians as for those in secular academia. However, there has been significant pushback on whether the Cambridge professor has consistently followed through when it comes to religious ideas.26 Such a criticism must reckon with his account of the origin of the lesser magistrate doctrine among the Lutheran and Reformed. Equal share is given to the historical circumstance of Charles V pressing quicker resolution to such a doctrine among Lutherans,27 the various biblical commentaries on Romans 13:1-7 (and Judges in the case of Bucer and Peter Martyr)28, and the nuance of the two models of resistance to tyranny: the constitutional and private-law theories.29
The criticism of Skinner here is important but also ironic. Reformed scholarship has a blindspot precisely at a point where this unbelieving scholar has unearthed a treasury of Protestant political reflection concerning our legitimate duty to prosecute unlawful magistrates, and thus illegitimate governments.
While our scholars are (rightly) busy docking Skinner points on his reduction of early modern Christian texts to the political, they are (tragically) missing the fact that those same writers did express political ideas (from Scripture, no less) that our present collectivist tendencies simply cannot hear.
Even granting all this, Bebbington is right to identify a “problem of privilege,” in which Skinner’s history of ideas tilts toward a “preoccupation with politics.”30 Pressing contextualism further in from the forest to trees, Collinson replaces Trevelyan’s “social history” of all things trivial only by a focus on the lowest level of obscure political documents. Not that we should ignore these, but he seems to suggest that our knowledge is “more elusive”31 the more we fail to hone in such sources. Somebody has to do it, one supposes, but we should not commit the part to whole fallacy and call that, and that alone, history.
Historians debate what religious views have contributed to our present world on the grandest scale. Gregory makes a “genealogical”32 case for the late-medieval-Reformed world (as a unity) shaping our secularized world, seeming to parallel the Weberian thesis of the Reformation as a major source of “disenchantment.”33 Walsham appeals to a more recent groundswell against that view, partly by questioning that same discontinuity between the medieval and modern as does Gregory. Yet she points to “the limits of disenchantment.”34 The Reformation caused both sides to intensify their own claims to the supernatural, and the notion that the medieval view had no distinction between true spirituality and “magic” has been thoroughly contradicted.35
Richard Muller criticizes the Whig tendency to reify ideas and inflate key figures. Such requires us to “demote great thinkers.”36 Willem Van Asselt reminds us of the continuity that had been obscured in older scholarship.37 Periodization oversimplifies into separate phenomena where there is really continuity—as in the “scholastic versus humanist” or “Calvin versus Calvinist” reductionisms addressed by Muller and Asselt—and consequently, according to Gregory, forms “an intellectual prison” for younger scholars where specialization is set against a broader framework of explanation.
One senses a common thread, looking back at religious actors on the historiographical landscape. In a word, there is incredulity. What is modern cannot believe that the religious man could possibly have meant anything real by his conviction, and what is postmodern insists that he must have meant something more sinister.
But such expectations are not the tough-minded scholarship they pretend to be. In the final analysis we must sharply distinguish between “what people believed in the past” and “our opinions about them.”38 We are not immune, simply because we are not poststructuralists, to the habit of confusing the descriptive and prescriptive.
Critical Analysis
What about moving away from denominational approaches to history? If what this means is seeking out the wider context of facts, that is one thing. Gregory responds to calls to “relativize orthodox medieval Christian faith” in order to understand the beliefs of those who were persecuted during that period. He counters this absolute relativism with a “formal relativism of competing absolutisms,”39 allowing each religious view to remain itself: each an absolute claim worth dying for to its adherents.
A trans-denominational historiography must take care that it does not neutralize the dogmatic content of those it studies to the point that the reader no longer reads about their truth claims. The extreme way to level the dogmatic field is the so called “hermeneutics of suspicion,”40 which method implies that those people, or texts, could not possibly have as their referent some timeless truth in its own right. What should the historian substitute as an alternative intent? Likely it will boil down to priestcraft: the use of religious symbols and sentiments to control the masses in one way or another.
History must be after some kind of truth. In a matter quite different from what religious ideas contribute to the secular, we may ask to what extent may Christian writers conceive of a “sacred history.” We find it most clearly where a polemic is being made for a tradition. Grafton examines about the humanist writers,41 and Oates of the Elizabethan histories,42 their method to show that one’s church is the true church by means of continuity with the pure origins. The lesson is not so much that history ought never to be host to the kingdom of heaven, but rather than it ought not make the nation or the present moment the center of that kingdom.43
Finally, it has always been a mark of humility to say that we “stand on the shoulders of giants,” but this implies intellectual development. Contextualism presents a difficulty to this. Woolfe sees any evolution in a set of ideas as “teleological.”44 If an idea developed over time, then the history of this idea must be “going somewhere.” This seems guilty of question begging and the straw man. My criticism is that to maintain an inverse relationship between historical analysis and transcendent values is untruthful. I do not mean that the historian must take a side between competing religious claims, nor even between the religious and the secular. Rather, he must not deny or obscure the exact weight that a particular transcendent value played in the thinking of an individual or a group.
(#historiography #Christianhistory #churchhistory #historicaltheology #contextualism #worldview)
1. J.G.A. Pocock, Political Thought and History: Essays on Theory and Method (Cambridge, 2009), 130.
2. J. T. Shotwell, The Interpretation of History, The American Historical Review, Vol. 18, No. 4 (Jul., 1913), 693.
3. Roy F. Nichols, “The Dynamic Interpretation of History,” The New England Quarterly, Vol. 8, No. 2 (Jun., 1935), 170.
4. Mark Bevir, ‘The Contextual Approach’, in George Klosko, ed., The Oxford Handbook of the History of Political Philosophy (Oxford, 2011),14.
5. Pocock, ‘The History of Political Thought: A Methodological Enquiry’, in Peter Laslett and W.G. Runciman, Philosophy, Politics and Society (Second series; Oxford, 1972), 184.
6. Willem A. DeVries, “Meaning and Interpretation in History,” History and Theory, Vol. 22, No. 3 (Oct., 1983), 257.
7. David Hacket Fischer, Historians’ Fallacies: Towards a Logic of Historical Thought (New York, 1970), 12.
8. Bevir, ‘The Contextual Approach,’14.
9. John Angus Campbell, “A Rhetorical Interpretation of History,” Rhetorical: A Journal of the History of Rhetoric, Vol. 2, No. 3 (Autumn 1984), 227-28.
10. Paulina Kewes, ed., The Uses of History in Early Modern England (San Marino, CA, 2006), 4.
11. Hayden White, “Interpretation in History, New Literary History,” Vol. 4, No. 2, On Interpretation: II (Winter, 1973), 290, 292-93.
12. White, “Interpretation in History, New Literary History,” 294.
13. Patrick Collinson, The History of a History Man, or, the Twentieth Century Viewed from a Safe Distance: The Memoirs of Patrick Collinson (Woodbridge, 2011), 54.
14. John Morrill, ‘The Historian and the “Historical Filter”’, in Andrew Hegarty, ed., The Past and the Present: Problems of Understanding (Oxford, 1993), 94.
15. Carl Trueman, Histories and Fallacies: Problems Faced in Writing History (Wheaton, IL, 2010) 31.
16. Trueman, Histories and Fallacies, 30.
17. Pocock, “State of the Art,” in Pocock, ed. Virtue Commerce, and History: Essays on Political Thought and History, Chiefly in the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge, 1985), 14.
18. Pocock, “State of the Art,” 12.
19. Bevir, ‘The Contextual Approach,’ 14.
20. Trueman, Histories and Fallacies, 157-58.
21. Jon Butler, “The Religion Problem in Modern American History,” The Journal of American History, vol. 90, no. 4 (Mar., 2004): 1359.
22. Goff, “Revivals and Revolution,” 710.
23. Philip Goff, “Revivals and Revolution: Historiographic Turns since Alan Heimert’s Religion and the American Mind,” Church History: Studies in Christianity and Culture, 67 (1998), 700.
24. Brad S. Gregory, Salvation at Stake: Christian Martyrdom in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, MA, 1999), 9.
25. cf. Gregory, Salvation at Stake, 7.
26. Alister Chapman, John Coffey, and Brad S. Gregory, eds., Seeing Things Their Way: Intellectual History and the Return of Religion (Notre Dame, 2009), 2-3; cf. 46.
27. Quentin Skinner, The Foundations of Modern Political Thought: Volume 2: The Age of the Reformation (Cambridge, 1978), 194-206.
28. Skinner, The Foundations of Modern Political Thought: Volume 2, 200, 202, 205, 213, 216.
29. Skinner, The Foundations of Modern Political Thought: Volume 2, 195-200.
30. David Bebbington, “Response: The History of Ideas & the Study of Religion,” in Seeing Things Their Way, 253.
31. Patrick Collinson, ‘De Republica Anglorum: Or, History with the Politics Put Back’, in Collinson, ed., Elizabethan Essays (London, 1994), 23.
32. Gregory, The Unintended Reformation: How a Religious Revolution Secularized Society (Cambridge, MA, 2012), 3-5.
33. Gregory, The Unintended Reformation, 6.
34. Alexandra Walsham, ‘The Reformation and “The Disenchantment of the World” Reassessed’, The Historical Journal 51 (2008), 500.
35. Walsham, ‘The Reformation and “The Disenchantment of the World” Reassessed’, 503-04.
36. Richard Muller, “Reflections on Persistent Whiggism and Its Antidotes,” in Seeing Things Their Way, 147.
37. Willem van Asselt “Scholasticism Revisited,” in Seeing Things Their Way, 154-58.
38. Gregory, Salvation at Stake, 10.
39. Gregory, Salvation at Stake, 12.
40. Gregory, Salvation at Stake, 14.
41. Anthony Grafton, in Katherine Van Liere, Simon Ditchfield, and Howard Louthan, eds., Sacred History: Uses of the Christian Past in the Renaissance World (Oxford, 2012), 3-15.
42. Rosamund Oates, in Van Liere, Ditchfield, and Louthan, Sacred History. 165-85.
43. Oates, in Van Liere, Ditchfield, and Louthan, Sacred History, 178, 181.
44. Daniel Woolf, ‘The Writing of Early Modern European Intellectual History, 1945–1995’, in Michael Bentley, ed., Companion to Historiography (London, 2003), 309.
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