THEOLOGY IN HISTORY AND INTERPRETATION
Summary of the Scholarship
To what extent should historical theology function as a source for the other branches of theological science? Here we are asking not merely the method of inquiry within the historical, but also the mode of interdisciplinary relationship. Walter Rauschenbusch observed that different eras in church history have tended to favor exegetical, dogmatic, historical, or practical theology in a more or less principial fashion.1 Much like the progenitors of the “Calvin versus the Calvinist” thesis, Rauschenbusch exaggerates the antithesis between humanist and scholastic at points.2
Nevertheless it is worth noting that his four main divisions have indeed taken their turns in dominating theology method. What Rauschenbusch does insist upon is “that history holds an essential place in the total of theological sciences.”3 Basic to this viewpoint of the history of theology is an organic and evolutionary form. Doctrines are not merely connected from one era to another,4 but are in the process of development from simple to more complex: “Whatever is now in theology has slowly come to be in it.”5
Writing in the same generation, Mackintos critiques the extravagant claims of the “History of Religions” school. The role that such history plays is essentially comparative religion as a sufficient prolegomena.6
Central to this method are three laws that were set forth by the Heidelberg professor, Ernst Troeltsch: (1) criticism—that all historical conclusions are probabilistic and yield only the moral kind of certainty; (2) relativity—the reduction of seeming isolation or originality of action to the “seamless” current of time; and (3) analogy—or uniformity of natural occurrence.7
The supernatural and exclusive claims of Christianity will not be able to measure up to these standards.8 For Mackintos the more basic question is whether the history of religions method, straying from any dogmatic limitations, can possibly “furnish us with a tenable dogmatic.”9 He answers in the negative.
A century later, James Kittelson examines the recent ecumenical conferences between Lutherans and Episcopalians, revolving around the sticking point of whether the Augsburg standards can cohere with the idea of “historic episcopacy.” And Willemien Otten attempts to transition from the idea of atonement to that of “attunement” as a better footing for the unity of the Jewish and Christian traditions. Both of these projects highlight the role that historical theology is made to play in informing a contemporary matter of reconciliation.
If the historical record does provide some missing links of relevant doctrinal data, we must ask in what way this is the case. Kittelson laments that those engaged in the present debate have been content to rely on “English translations of outdated editions of texts whose originals are in Early New High German and Latin,”10 and neglecting a most basic piece of evidence: documents on the practice of ordination during the era.11 It was an exercise in both traditions reading through their denominational lens.
Otten is also after a kind of retrieval. Following in the footsteps of Michael Fishbane’s Sacred Attunement (2008), she is persuaded that an antiphonal relationship between Creator and creature is the basic kind of reconciliation that is required,12 that the authority of creation, not merely pre-dogmatic sources, needs to be consulted. In the course of this analysis, systematic theology is reduced to an “organizational and pedagogical framework” and its speech to “reified … ‘sacred doctrine.’”13 There are unspoken premises, to be sure, and one detects an almost Barthian covenantal dichotomy between the legal and the relational. The state of affairs between God and man cannot be “contractual” to servants, but rather it “gently nudges” participants to embrace: never “forced obedience.”14 And God remains one of the “partners in the exchange.”15
Critical Analysis
Whether one is examining doctrinal development or comparative religion, beginning with the assumption that dogma is entirely a function of history no longer makes for theology. The more obvious case of this involves the History of Religions model. Mackintos comments that “the idea that history is incapable of anything but relatives is a mere prejudice of the mind.”16 This is an understatement.
In fact it is a theology: it is an account of what God cannot do, in this case, with history. It is also not quite as scientific as advertised.
If Christianity is but one of the religions to study, then one must at least study it on its own terms; but the moment one does that, the object of study is on a collision course with the method. For Christianity claims to be something far greater than one in the procession of religious expressions. To conclude otherwise in one’s scientific analysis is to have failed to treat the subject.
We can appreciate Rauschebusch’s appeal to understand doctrinal development in light of philosophical trends.17 Even the evolutionary analogy is useful at least in the sense that the body of theological data is always becoming more complex and shedding more light. Yet it is more than an analogy for Rauschenbusch. With some amount of chronological snobbery, he flags the Fathers for having “no such conception of the upward slant in religious history.”18
We may recall the uniformitarian maxim of geologist Charles Lyell, that the present is the key to the past. So it is, apparently, in the history of dogma that, “a subsequent period of history is always the most valuable interpreter of an earlier period.”19 However if theology is everywhere the product of historical development, and never its criteria, then theology has been utterly reduced to history. Its truth would be an ever moving goal off into the indefinite future.
The focus of Otten’s attunement theory is a perfect case in point. The backdrop of the doctrinal shift is that “theological scientification”20 is idolatrous, which is more assumed than established. Relations between Jew and Gentile drives interpretation. Classic exegesis of Genesis 22 is reduced to “creative twist” contributing to “fateful supersessionist readings.”21 Her “open hermeneutic”22 assumes that the fundamental problem between God and man is strictly revelational, even if it is cast in relational or emotive terms. It is difficult to ignore how Otten’s project represents precisely that leveling tendency of reducing theology to history.
HISTORICAL THEOLOGY: TOWARD A DEFINITION
Summary of the Scholarship
According to Robert Calhoun, historical theology is a compound of two modes of thought: that of the historian, working toward “unbiased description or reconstruction of modes of life”23; and that of examining theological belief, which he describes as having “their primary locus in religious devotion, in the deepest loyalties of particular men and communities.”24 Historical theology is not dogmatic theology. It does not rule on the truth or falsity of doctrine or religious practice.
While there had been compartmentalization between church history and historical theology, Bradley and Muller note, this is an untenable position now,25 the latter being “a subset of the broader discipline.”26 For Muller, historical theology fits within a unified “encyclopedia”27 of theological sciences, which have been fractured into specialized disciplines; and the historical branch is uniquely qualified to provide a model in reunification.28
The historical theologian approaches his focus, Van Asselt says, “to delve into authors and their writings in terms of the relationship they have with earlier, contemporary, or later developments.”29 The nature of the study demands a certain method and growing appreciation of complexity. For instance, texts are empirical; ideas transcend the text itself. If the discipline were simply a matter of establishing what has been said, then texts would suffice. Because the subject matter of historical theology is “partly beyond history,”30 the scholar must possess “some skill in these methods,” namely of dogmatics, if he is to “understand and interpret their product.”31 Under the weight that our discipline is so historical, we should not forget it is engaging theology.
For this reason I also chose to examine Alister McGrath’s book, The Intellectual Origins of the European Reformation. This work offers a balance between sociological causation and analysis of religious ideas as causal. His evaluation of Reformed theology’s various sources, though controversial, is needed pushback against those who reduce such theological output to “an ideational superstructure erected on a socioeconomic superstructure.”32
While the historic theologian is not ruling on the eternal truth of dogma, he is clearing away obstacles for those who do. Muller, Van Asselt, and Trueman are all really engaged in this business of ground clearing with respect to the Reformed tradition of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Simplistic divisions of periods and schools is bound to make for bad theologizing in general. The more we know of historical theology, the greater we appreciate that the theological enterprise is neither a “fixed block of dogma” delivered at the beginning, nor “a wholly fluid web of opinion relative in all respects to a changing social environment.”33
Critical Analysis
Where do we draw the line between 1. continuity and anachronism, 2. intellectual development and historical context, and 3. description and prescription? A working definition of historical theology cannot be ambiguous about such lines of demarcation. At the very least its methodology will suffer incoherence.
In historical theology it seems that anachronisms can occur from inflating either continuity or discontinuity. Calvin is a typical victim of both tendencies. By privileging continuity, we might search the Institutes for his view on limited atonement, not distinguishing between anticipation of the doctrine and the fuller expression. By seeing only discontinuity, we may be too ready to assume that Calvin, the humanist, treats only the infinity and spirituality of God because he is rejecting scholastic dissections of theology proper.
Both approaches are anachronistic, though the discontinuity trend has received the most ink. There is such a thing as a continuity of “problems or questions.”34 that unites historical texts that may use diverse terminology. As another species of this problem, Trueman alerts us to the fine line between a discernible individual contribution and a communal theological project. He cites the example of Luther operating within Wittenberg’s Augustinian renaissance already underway and his subsequent collaborations with Melanchthon.35
All of this is to say that we must depict historical thinkers as profoundly complex and dependent as they were: late and early Augustine; Purtian and Enlightenment Edwards; Secession Church and Modernist Bavinck—even if such complexities resist popular accessibility, and especially if such reassessments prevent us from exalting a particular thinker or doctrine to a level of distortion.
Historical theology must also discover the line between intellectual development and historical context. Here is where McGrath is especially helpful in my view. Humanists like Erasmus are shown as deliberate actors, attempting to reform church and society by their ideas.36 Whether or not that is naive seems immaterial to reporting the fact that this is how they thought. Both modern materialist and postmodern suspicion frameworks tend to reduce the historicity of ideas to utterly determined or manipulative things. But theological ideas, above all others, ought to be studied as what they really claim to be: eternal thoughts invading time and explaining human action. The historian need not rule on their truth in order to remember that this is the claim, which brings us to the last line that our definition must consider.
Historical theology maintains a sharp line between descriptive and prescriptive analysis. Basic to the modern, non-denominational approach is a “greater scientific concern for the analysis of original documents” and “freedom to interpret these sources in a way that did not lead to a predetermined, or at least predictable, goal.”37 Elsewhere Muller described this same shift as moving from “chronologically arranged polemics” to “an objective discussion of history.”38 And yet Van Asselt speaks of a “desirable, and at times even necessary” analysis and evaluation.39
All of this raises the possibility of observing doctrinal progression, not merely development, as a historical phenomenon. As a case in point, how should our work speak of orthodoxy and heresy? McGrath notes that in the late Middle Ages, the meaning of heresy shifted in its orientation from theological to inquisitional. The declaration of heresy was “an instrument of social control.”40 Fair enough. And yet in one of McGrath’s other books, Heresy (2009), he joins those scholars who reduce heresy to sociology rather than a reflection of eternal and objective truth. At any rate, the historical theologian must find a way to chronicle heresy without ruling on it, or in other words, without getting in the way of the objective rulings that have been made in his proper subject matter.
In summary, historical theology is the descriptive evaluation of how the church has theologized; or it is our best effort at reconstructing the historic flow of theological reflection.
(#historicaltheology #theologyinhistory #dogmatictheology #systematictheology #liberaltheology)
1. Walter Rauschenbusch, “The Influence of Historical Studies on Theology,” The American Journal of Theology, Vol. 11, No. 1 (Jan., 1907), 111.
2. Rauschenbusch, “The Influence of Historical Studies on Theology,” 118.
3. Rauschenbusch, “The Influence of Historical Studies on Theology,” 112.
4. Rauschenbusch, “The Influence of Historical Studies on Theology,” 114, 123.
5. Rauschenbusch, “The Influence of Historical Studies on Theology,” 117.
6. Hugh R. Mackintos, “Does the Historical Study of Religions Yield a Dogmatic Theology?” The American Journal of Theology, Vol. 13, No. 4 (Oct., 1909), 507.
7. Mackintos, “Does the Historical Study of Religions Yield a Dogmatic Theology?” 508.
8. Mackintos, “Does the Historical Study of Religions Yield a Dogmatic Theology?” 508-09
9. Mackintos, “Does the Historical Study of Religions Yield a Dogmatic Theology?” 507.
10. James M. Kittelson, “Historical and Systematic Theology in the Mirror of Church History: The Lessons of “Ordination” in Sixteenth-Century Saxony, Church History, Vol. 71, No. 4 (Dec., 2002), 748.
11. Kittelson, “Historical and Systematic Theology in the Mirror of Church History,” 750.
12. Willemien Otten, “On Sacred Attunement, Its Meaning and Consequences: A Meditation on Christian Theology,” The Journal of Religion, Vol. 93, No. 4 (October 2013), 481.
13. Otten, “On Sacred Attunement,” 483.
14. Otten, “On Sacred Attunement,” 480.
15. Otten, “On Sacred Attunement,” 481.
16. Mackintos, “Does the Historical Study of Religions Yield a Dogmatic Theology?” 516.
17. Rauschenbusch, “The Influence of Historical Studies on Theology,” 116-17.
18. Rauschenbusch, “The Influence of Historical Studies on Theology,” 117.
19. Rauschenbusch, “The Influence of Historical Studies on Theology,” 114.
20. Otten, “On Sacred Attunement,” 491.
21. Otten, “On Sacred Attunement,” 479.
22. Otten, “On Sacred Attunement,” 485.
23. Robert L. Calhoun, “The Role of Historical Theology,” The Journal of Religion, Vol. 21, No. 4 (Oct., 1941), 445.
24. Calhoun, “The Role of Historical Theology,” 446.
25. James E. Bradley and Richard A. Muller, Church History. An Introduction to Research, Reference Works, and Methods (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 1995), 2.
26. Bradley and Muller, Church History, 6.
27. Richard A. Muller, “The Study of Theology,” in Biblical Interpretation to Contemporary Formulation (Grand Rapids: Zondervan Publishing House, 1991), 23.
28. Muller, “The Study of Theology,” 26; cf. 39.
29. William J.Van Asselt, Introduction to Reformed Scholasticism (Grand Rapids: Reformation Heritage Books, 2011), 2-3.
30. Calhoun, “The Role of Historical Theology,” 446.
31. Calhoun, “The Role of Historical Theology,” 447.
32. Alister McGrath, The Intellectual Origins of the European Reformation. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2004), 2.
33. Calhoun, “The Role of Historical Theology,” 447.
34. Carl R. Trueman, “The Reception of Calvin: Historical Considerations,” Church History and Religious Culture, (2011) 91:1–2, 22.
35. Trueman, “The Reception of Calvin: Historical Considerations,” 91:1–2, 24.
36. McGrath, The Intellectual Origins of the European Reformation, 34, 40-44.
37. Bradley and Muller, Church History, 13.
38. Muller, “The Study of Theology,” 36.
39. Van Asselt, Introduction to Reformed Scholasticism, 3.
40. McGrath, The Intellectual Origins of the European Reformation, 32.
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