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.