To begin this series allow me to quote from the 20th century German historian Albert Mirgeler, from whose book Mutations of Western Christianity I have taken the series title:

To raise the historical question of European Christianity is not to deny that the notion of Christianity itself includes also and even primarily a supra-historical element.  This supra-historical character is, of course, a matter of faith and not be grasped by the study of history alone.  As far as it is susceptible of a rational explanation, it comes first of all withjin the scope of theology.  It must, however, be admitted on the other hand that Christian theology cannot establish its conclusions regardless of history, since the Christian faith is only possible at all on the basis of a historical revelation.¹Mutations of Western Christianity, trans. Edward Quinn (Montreal: Palm Publishers, 1961) p. 2.

Mirgeler’s book goes on to describe in great detail how the shape and course of Christianity in the West experienced numerous “mutations” driven by manifold cultural factors and not merely by the logical-expository work of great theologians trying to unfold implications of dogma as responses to the rise and propagation of various errors – a common tactic of what I will call “confessionalized historicism,” or the tendency to subordinate real historical inquiry to pre-determined supra-historical axioms that supposedly supply The Meaning of History.  Mirgeler’s words just cited nicely capture the actual dilemma with which any Christian interested in serious historical thought about his faith must grapple, namely, the fact that Christianity is a historical intrusion of transcendent reality, simultaneously a thing that never changes and yet always is changing.

What in the world could that seeming contradiction mean?  I will suggest in this series that Mirgeler is correct to deploy the word “mutation” as a descriptor for how the fundamental thing itself remains the same while yet experiencing a great deal of significant alteration.  The word “mutation“ seems at first an odd one to use of a religion based upon the space-and-time revelation of a transcendent God who made us to understand Him and has thus communicated in a way that we can, in fact, understand.  For in our age of physical sciences dominated by evolutionary assumptions, “mutation” connotes a random, chance alteration in a structure, which change isn’t aiming at anything in particular and which only persists if it turns out – after the fact – to have had some survival value for the organism in which it has occurred.  The last thing it would seem that a transcendent God who clearly speaks to His creatures, intelligibly revealing His love and His will as He providentially guides the processes of history to a preordained end would allow would be contingent alterations that might just as well skew the organism off onto a side path or even a dead end as actually improve it.

To speak of a “mutation” when speaking of a revealed religion necessarily raises the very sobering question: If God has revealed “once for all” (Jude 3) something called the Faith, such that He can then command His servants to guard it and contend for it and entrust it to faithful men (2 Tim. 2:2) and teach it to the children (cf. Deut. 6:7), surely that thing, the Faith, must possess the quality of being semper eadem – “always the same”?

By using that Latin phrase I am, of course, referring to the notion intrinsic to Roman Catholicism especially, that despite a history stuffed to the gills with quite significant changes, really, you see, it’s always been “the same” and always will be, which is why it’s able to simply declare everyone else deviant by definition.  For, as is plainly and clearly declared in something called “Apostolic Tradition” – to which, conveniently, only the hierarchy of the One True Church has access and the meaning of which only it can rightly declare – Christ Himself set up a visible institution, a continuation through a vicarious theological, juridical, and liturgical apparatus of the Incarnation itself, and that any fair-minded, non-heretical, rational person who just lets history speak for itself will not fail to see how obvious the whole thing is.

Now in terms of historiography, the discipline concerned with the writing of history, this way of thinking has sometimes been called historicism.  Though both unbelievers and believers can be historicists, the central idea uniting both is twofold.  First, granting what anyone who believes in Providence must grant, there is an internal meaning to the historical process.  But more importantly, (2) it is possible for the properly functioning finite human mind to discern and capture that internal meaning of the historical process and use it as an infallible guide to understanding all events that have happened or will happen.  Historicism within a Christian thought process seems on its surface to be simply an affirmation of God’s Providence, such that, as the great Roman Catholic controversialist John Henry Newman wrote, “ten thousand difficulties [for faith] do not make one doubt.”

Yet Newman’s seemingly pious appeal to faith as over against history, I would argue, is answered by the better reasoning of C.S. Lewis, who, in his essay “Historicism” noted that “The mark of the Historicist…is that he tries to get from historical premises conclusions which are more than historical; conclusions metaphysical or theological or (to coin a word) atheo-logical…[The position means] that events fell out as they did because of some ultimate, transcendent necessity in the ground of things.”

It isn’t just Roman Catholics who treat the history of the Christian Faith this way, of course.  As I noted in the earlier post, many Protestants are also guilty of confessionalizing history.  Just as the Catholic is animated to caricature history by his ardent belief in the Infallible Vicariate of St. Peter in Rome, so too is a certain type of Protestant animated to caricature history by his ardent belief in a great “Trail of Blood” maintaining the One True Gospel – synonmous, as it turns out, with his own confessional position – down through the ages.  For this type of Protestant, too, “ten thousand difficulties do not make one doubt.”  And perhaps not interestingly, because it’s really quite predictable, advocates of these two extreme poles of a Mutually Assured Destruction heuristic for history never manage to get beyond the self-aggrandizing notion that they are the truly rational and pious people while their opponents are quite obviously detached from Reality itself.

But what would the discipline of Christian history look like if we did not operate within the contraints of confessionalized historicism?  What if, as I began to sketch out in the last post, we could instead accept all of history, warts and all, and be willing to allow all of it to speak critically to our own commitments?  “Critically” here, of course, means that we might find it necessary, in the light of painstaking, non-ideological historical reconstruction work, to modify some of our own claims because they have turned out to be less well grounded than we had supposed. What then?

It might be that we could come to see the historical record of God’s dealings with His people in quite a different light than that of confessionalized historicism, which often artificially constricts the mind by shutting down the process of inquiry or even preventing certain questions from even occurring to us.

We might begin to see (in some albeit imperfect ways) in the historical record that the Creator of light who is Himself Light has, as it were, blazed His truth profligately out and through a manifold array of differently colored, differently constructed stained glass windows, all of which refract the one Light in their own way as through a spectrascope.

We might find that, just as the astonishing variety of languages and cultures in the world all reveal  parts of what it means to be human, by taking in as many of these historical hues as we are able, we can in small-scale ways achieve a partial comprehension of what otherwise couldn’t even begin to be grasped by any finite creature.  By coming to accept that we cannot know the total meaning of history, thereby insulating us from growth in wisdom, we might actually discover that we can know a significant enough part of the meaning of history to learn wisdom from it.

The Dreaded “r”-Word

Of course, the immediate objection that arises involves the dreaded “r”-word, relativism.  I’m speaking of historical refraction of revelation with the metaphor of a stained glass window, but what’s to stop today’s sophisticated relativist from swapping the metaphor out for the more commonly known one about blind men groping at parts of the one single elephant, each non-culpably misidentifying it as something completely contrary to what the others misidentify it as?  Or what’s to prevent the relativist from invoking the other commonly known metaphor about the mountain with many contradictory roads leading up its slope, and all of them converging mysteriously at the top?

In short, to speak of the Christian Faith mutating as it travels through the realm of space and time that is history either seems to connote the chaotic undirectedness of evolutionism or else the agnostic ennui of simple relativism.  Far better, far safer, far more comforting, is it not, to just baldly historicize one’s particular confessional position by claiming that it and it alone is the clear and distinct “Faith once for all delivered to the saints”?

Unfortunately it is not better, for the real loser in the intellectual and cultural battles that are the only possible fruit of hyper-confessionalized historicism is, well, history itself, the very record of God’s fantastically colorful and inexhaustibly symphonic dealings with His richly variegated people in their real, highly varied space and time situations.

One of the most puzzling things, indeed, you will ever see if you spend any significant time trying to parse out some pivotal theological issue, say, that of “authority” in Christ’s Church, is the ardent True Believer who represents matters of serious dispute like this: all you have to do is pick up a volume of some selected Church Father, pass your eyes over the (translated-into-English) literal, plain words on the page, and you, too, can know just like True Believer Himself knows that only his position is the definition of both rationality and piety.  There is, after all, no gainsaying “the voice of history” which “speaks for itself” if only one can “set aside preconceptions” and “just listen.”

Ironically, there is something true about such language, but that truth isn’t what the True Believer thinks it is.  It is indeed essential when engaging the past to try to avoid anachronism, simply reading back into the past ideas that seem perfectly obvious to oneself.  It has been said that “the past is a foreign country,” and on that analogy it follows that “the past is a different language” – which immediately means that a contemporary student of the past must bother to learn the different language being used before drawing conclusions and representing those as merely “the voice of history.”

There is such a thing as “the voice of history,” but just like a foreign language that voice always has to be translated, and as anyone who has ever learned one or more foreign languages can well attest, translation is not always easy or certain.  But who other than a manifest ideologue would seriously maintain that acknowledging and grappling with translation difficulties just is simply equivalent to relativism?  The assertion nearly refutes itself, not least because translation is translation of an existing artifact, a thing with a definite shape and form and expressiveness that is able to be engaged for the rational, ordered purpose of critically reconstructing the meaning out of one language and into another.  Translation difficulties will always exist, but only in rare cases do they occlude meaning entirely, and even when they cannot be resolved in terms of a simple Yes / No or True / False binary, they still tend to exist within a discernible range that allows for fruitful inquiry without sliding into agnostic despair.

The really interesting thing about history is that although it involves things that are done and so which aren’t changing, it isn’t a self-contained, self-interpreting thing, let alone a thing with a clear and distinct unitary voice that is quite easily grasped and which possesses or projects a metaphysically necessity of which only contumacious heretics can deny the plain meaning.  History is, as Herodotus of Halicarnassus, the father of the very discipline itself, tells us in the prologue of his famous book, an inquiry into the causes of things.  As an inquiry, history is a process of asking questions not just of others but also of oneself, and it is fraught with all manner of linguistic, cultural, and ideological complexities that belie all supposedly “obvious” construals.

Lessons from “the Father of History”

Thus, when setting out from the start of his book to tell the story of why the Persians invaded Greece in 490 and 480 B.C. and what came of their invasions, the ancient Greek thinker Herodotus, who has justly been called “the father of history,” finds it necessary to first talk pretty abstractly about the truth that God never allows human affairs to remain the same for long, but raises up and casts down without ever asking the leave of the human actors themselves or even apparently caring all that much about the claims of long-running political-religious dynasties.  He finds it necessary to first tell us that his 800 pages of painstaking recitations are motivated by the desire to prevent the great deeds of the past from “being erased by time,” so that people living now can profit from a greater understanding of the people, events, and processes that made their own time what it is.

Herodotus can’t just skip to “the bottom line” by telling us right from the start about Miltiades at Marathon and Themistocles at Salamis and Aristides the Just in Athens.  He has to first engage in a very long, sweeping, apparently meandering, ethnographic exploration of how the universal human themes of physis (hard reality) and nomos (changing human cultures) work themselves out on a vast stage of repetitious providential humbling of the proud and exaltation of the nobodies.  He does indeed find a grand meaning in his inquiry (“history”), but, perhaps surprisingly, it isn’t the meaning that the Greeks are superior to all other cultures and that only by “being Greek” can one have The Fullness of the Truth of Human Existence under God.  On the contrary, Herodotus doesn’t spare his fellow Greeks from the most scathing criticisms when the results of his inquiry indicate that is Greeks who are foolish and barbarians who are wise.

One of the most enjoyable aspects of Herodotus’ narrative is, in fact, how he occasionally throws in (at just the right points when he’s hooked his like-minded Greek hearers with some supposedly “obvious” truths about the idiocy of other people) rhetorical-philosophical jabs about how silly the Greeks are, since if they would bother to actually and intelligently investigate other nations’ nomoi (cultures), they might be less quick to simply and gratuitously assume the superior truth and reality of their own.²As a quick aside, the word intelligently comes to us from two Latin words, inter, “between,” and legere, “to read or select” – the compound word thus meaning “to read between things,” not simply to read on the surface and assume an obvious literal or “face value” meaning.

Herodotus’ history, that is, his inquiry, sets the pattern for what history itself of any type ought to be, for how could a finite mind attempting to grasp what Lewis characterized as a “vast, choking cataract” of facts that is “more like [the contents of an old miscellany-filled] drawer than an intelligent epitome of a longer work” ever rightly claim to have grasped the internal meaning of the whole – much less be in a position to simply scoff at the intelligence, and perhaps even the sanity, of whoever dissents from himself?

Then What About Those “Mutations”?

I’ll wind this post down and set up the next one by returning to the title, “Mutations of Western Christianity.”  At the start I wondered aloud what such a word could mean given a sovereign God providentially directing history toward an intelligible end.  I’ll now close by noting that when it comes to examining the historical Christian religion, as opposed to merely apologetically or polemically stating one’s confessionalized-historicist rendering of the Christian religion as if it’s a Cartesian clear-and-distinct thing, one of the most important parts of a really historical heuristic turns out to be a courageous acceptance of our total inability to know the inner meaning of the historical process, even with a supposed “eye of faith.”

Faith, as the opening citation from Mirgeler said, can and does transcend history alone.  But it is equally true, and thus profoundly unsettling for the confessionalized historicist approach, that faith is conditioned by history, and that any construal of faith which propagandizes or even dismisses history is for that reason a defective, and in a way unfaithful, sort of faith.  “Faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen” (Heb. 11:1), but that is not the same thing as saying that when mountains of observations about the way God has and does run the world are causing difficulties for one’s deeply held notions about religion, faith means an irrational “retreat to commitment” that refuses to be altered.  And in this connection, it matters not whether one’s retreat to commitment fixes upon the object of “the Church” or “the Gospel” – both objects can be mere ciphers for unteachable ideology that cuts off the ideologue from seeking wisdom.

God has promised us in His revelation, vouchsafed to us by a knowable historical process involving a wide range of actors operating across many cultures and centuries, that He will always be faithful to His covenant people, and that in the end, King Jesus wins.  He has not deigned to tell us how He will be faithful, when the end will come, or under what precise conditions Jesus will emerge the victor.³Any attempt to specify all of this, especially the more fine-tuned and logic-chopping it gets as it tosses piece after piece of disconfirming historical evidence, is really just presumption, not faith.  And If “ten thousand difficulties” present themselves to a presumptuous man and he continues to cling to his presumption by falsely calling it faith, the same result will obtain for him as obtained for Cyrus, Darius, and Xerxes in the narrative of Herodotus.

With these background considerations in mind, I’ll next start discussing the substance of what Albert Mirgeler termed “mutations of Western Christianity.”

A significant lesson I learned from one of my earliest mentors in theology and apologetics way back in the early 90s was that regardless of what position you hold on some issue, you should always be able to do two things: (1) Define your terms, and (2) Answer the question “So what?”

Way back then, starry-eyed I, then newly introduced to the basic fact that Christianity has deep and wide intellectual aspects, was avidly devouring every theology and apologetics book I could find as fast as I could find them.  In the process, because of the types of books I kept on providentially finding, I was lurching hesitatingly but steadily toward an eventual embrace of the Protestant Reformation as my basic take on the Faith.¹I had always been Evangelical-ish, which for about 100 years at least has been a devolution, American-style, from the Reformation, so moving to the actual Reformation tradition itself was essentially going from a tumbledown shack to a solidly-built, well-kept mansion. Along the steps of that often painful process, I had many occasions to take my early mentor’s advice about Defining Terms and asking So What? once I had done that.

Flash forward through my college years, when my then pretty-newly Reformation-based faith was both substantially augmented and substantially challenged on multiple fronts by unsettling and frequently re-formative encounters with the classical Christian liberal arts intellectual and spiritual tradition.  Over 9 years I moved from an early, hyper-dogmatic popular distortion of Calvinism, complete with a ludicrous Hanna-Barbera cartoon-like understanding of post-Apostolic history as a great “Trail of Blood” to a pretty self-critical hold on “Reformed” that was just as ready and eager to profit from reading the Venerable Bede and Bernard of Clairvaux as Calvin and Luther.²In this expanded frame of mind, it turned out to be quite possible to love the Reformation (warts and all) while also refusing to be embarassed by pre-Reformation history. “Trail of Blood”?  Why should I think so poorly of my amazing brothers and sisters in the past when it was far better to simply recognize that the face can be dirty before it’s washed, but it’s still the face?

Over these years, as I engaged scores of primary sources spanning centuries of theological and societal development, and as I came to bring intensive text-based focus on several crucial juncture points in history,³These were, in sequence: the 5th-11th century Realism-Nominalism debate; the 10th-12th century Investiture Contest, and the 14th-15th century Conciliarist Crisis I never found cause to abandon the basic matrix of the Reformation.  But at the same time I became profoundly interested in making sure my basic matrix was deeply set within the historical record of God’s providential dealings with His people after the time of Christ.  And this meant increasingly and soberly probing the simply huge topic of the multi-form relationships of Christianity to the numerous cultures it came into as it moved through history and geography for two thousand years.

That’s just a quasi-intellectual way of restating the old truism that “Christianity is a historical religion,” which refers to the fact that about two-thirds of the Bible itself is history and the culminating act of redemption, the incarnation of the Word, was a factually dateable historical event with profound and traceable historical effects.  A personal Christian faith that doesn’t exhibit significant awareness of and avid interest in history might yet be a real saving faith, but it is likely also to be a culturally captive and pragmatically anemic faith.

Flash forward again to the present time, December 2023. Though I’ve spent the last 14 years engaged in teaching young people (Christian and non) a variety of disciplines in several types of schools, as all of those disciplines remain connected to my old interest in Christianity and culture, I’ve remained in close touch with the sources of the tradition and have continued to develop my overall understanding.

Though I am a well-grounded and entirely unapologetic Protestant myself, having nothing to fear from either the vitriol of my “Trail of Blood” coreligionists or from that of the Catholic controversialists who are constantly reacting against the former, I have tried to stay clear for years of their rampant, and generally quite fruitless, online apologetics wars.  But I still run up against the destructive fringes of these wars from time to time merely as a result of that wondrously ubiquitous and intrusive phenomenon called “The Feed” that we all have as denizens of the current iteration of the Internet.

Thus it seems evident to me that there is a pressing need for substantive discussions of Christianity and culture interfaces that make every effort to dissociate from the popular M.A.D.-mode of theologizing about appearances only and instead focus attention on more “elementally incarnational” issues of the common historical patrimony of Christians.⁴The reader should understand that any allusion to the Platonic appearance / reality distinction in this remark is quite intentional, and aimed at any target, irrespective of specific confessional allegiance, that confuses historically-conditioned dogmatic structures with purportedly Clear and Distinct Timeless Truths. That said, in no material on this blog do I make any pretense of being “unbiased” or “objective.”  Such language is always self-serving, and usually self-blinding, drivel.  My only goal here is to try to clear a path for intellectual virtue – which, as is the definition of all virtue, is always found between extremes.

This is a tough reality, especially when one is – as I myself and most of my friends across denominations are! – deeply invested in and committed to a particular confessional tradition. The myth of “objectivity” having been set aside, it remains the case that no one believes anything for any reason other than that they think it is true, and having come to believe that a thing is true automatically means it isn’t false.  And of course the true thing previously accepted quite naturally has to function as a litmus test for the truth of other ideas and interpretations of experience.

One can’t coherently say something like “I believe my historical denomination’s theology just is the one correct exegesis of the Bible’s plain words,” and also say, “But it seems as if certain of our very important confessional distinctives result from contingent historical circumstances that modern intellectual disciplines have helped us see relativize our truth claims.”

One can’t coherently say something like “I believe Christ has preserved an institutional ecclesiastical structure without error on faith and morals for 2,000 years” and also say “Alas, that institutional ecclesiastical structure has really grossly messed up several issues of faith and morals at several key historical juncture points.”

And yet the very language in which such statements are couched, explicitly invoking the witness of history, just does subject them to the necessity of critical inquiry.  Just as one can’t honestly be the judge, jury, and executioner in one’s own case against another, one can’t honestly simultaneously appeal to history while defining “history” totally self-referentially as “Whatever happens to agree with the Axioms I stated before I cracked the history books open.”  What is such an act but a question begged precisely by not even acknowledging that there is one to be asked?

The positive statements contained in the two examples I gave, one a commonplace of Reformed micro-sects and the other a commonplace of popular Catholic apologetics, both exhibit an intellectual perfectionism.  That is, both confuse a grand, artifically constructed Ideal Vision of Truth with “what history says,” and so neither, despite appealing to history, is or even can be properly historical.

Not to put too fine a point on it, this is a very serious conundrum for anyone whose beliefs fit the sort of intellectually perfectionistic examples I gave. The simplistic equation of history itself with one’s specific, highly refined faith confessional position, rooted in and engaging with the historical record, is an easy, though serious, intellectual error.  It is the disastrous confusion of the highly questionable, perhaps even nonexistent, category “historical facts” with the results of a highly personal and quite fallible, conditional reconstruction and interpretation of the exceedingly messy pluriformity of “traces of the Past.”

It is in this sense, the sense in which one’s confessional faith position is simplistically equated with history itself, that I mean the title of this post, “Confessionalism ‘Vs’ History.”  This exact adversarial relationship does obtain in many cases today – chiefly cases where some Euclidean Geometry-like axiomatic construction is under attack and its adherent feels a primal and visceral need to indulge in apologetics.  However, I don’t think it’s an essential feature of Christian engagement with the discipline of history.  I think that there is a way to be confessional, to have a real allegiance to a particularly, even a highly refined, faith position which one believes is supported by the aggregate witness of history, without at the same time simply fusing one’s existing view with history itself.

Anyone who has spent any substantial amount of time immersed in the messiness of historical records and artifacts ought to be able to attest that responsibly engaging the past, properly representing it, and non-anachronistically applying it to the present, is a horrendously difficult task.  Any construal of that task that makes it seem really rather easy, just a matter of reading some “plain, face value words” on some pages and “Letting history speak for itself” so that one can find out, mirabile dictu!, that what the pages say is exactly what oneself already believed, hardly deserves to be commented upon.

In short, there’s a way to be confessionally loyal without letting the Confessional Position function as a surrogate brain, doing all one’s thinking for one.  There’s a way to be personally committed to a definite theological position without retreating to the subjective disposition of commitment as if that is an argument that ought to be given any plausibility by anyone else in a public context subject to public rules of engagement, criticism, and revision.

With these background considerations laid, in the next post I will begin the first major task of this now re-launched examination of  “Societas Christiana: Christendom Past, Present, and Future” with some ruminations on the theme Mutations of Western Christianity.