A couple of recent posts by historians that identify with the work of doing Christian history leads to the excerpt below which is a critique of trying to follow scholarly standards while believing you are doing so in the name of Jesus.
The first complained about Christian academics failing to come to the defense of a fellow Christian professor (historian) after the latter had criticized both moderate evangelicals and Christian nationalists for “[craving] genocidal rage against Palestinians” and “[wishing] to turn the Gaza Strip into a ‘parking lot.'” Some with less zeal could imagine why defending that opinion might not be a high priority. Instead, the historian feared for his and his family’s lives when the reaction of Andrew Walker at Southern Seminary “set in motion the ire of a cadre of critics, including Mollie Hemingway, William Wolfe, Tom Ascol, and Meghan Basham.”
This post led to another that praised Christian historians for a critical perspective on U.S. history too often lacking in popular evangelical pundits (think the difference between George Marsden and Francis Schaeffer). Historians add value by recognizing that “history must be critical, even prophetic” as opposed to popular leaders who “have seen long-term political goals as more important than the truth of history.”
Thinking that the current generation (or even previous ones) were innocent of politics is fairly remarkable.
All of this wind-up leads to the pitch which is that evangelical historians can come in for criticism too because they mix advocacy (political, theological, moral) with scholarly inquiry just like pastors do. What follows is part of a chapter that faults evangelical historians for having their cake – scholarship – and eating it too – adding Christian faith. They may have better credentials that Francis Schaeffer or John MacArthur, but at some level within the academy their religiously inflected scholarship looks odd, maybe not as odd as non-academic evangelicals, but still strange. (This essay was published in History and the Christian Historian, edited by Ronald A. Wells, under the title “History in Search of Meaning: The Conference on Faith and History.”)
Do Christian historians have a particular perspective or share a set of assumptions that make their writing and teaching different from that of their non-believing colleagues? Though many factors led to the founding of the Conference on Faith in History in 1967, the conviction that the faith of the Christian historian set his or her scholarship apart from that produced by the rest of the profession was probably the greatest reason for organizing the Conference almost thirty years ago and has sustained its meetings and publications ever since. According to Charles Miller, the group who met to begin the CFH came up with three qualifications for a Christian historian: a “profound faith in the God and father of our Lord Jesus Christ”; an “understanding through revelation of “the nature of man, of time, and of the universe”; and a “mastery of the craft and of the art of historian.”
What happens, then, when one of the Conference’s more accomplished members publishes a book on a significant epoch in the history of American Christianity that according to church leaders not only falls well short of demonstrating a Christian philosophy of history but also appears to deny the hand of God in the development of the evangelical movement? This is precisely what happened when Harry S. Stout, Yale University’s Jonathan Edwards Professor of American Christianity, published his study of George Whitefield, entitled The Divine Dramatist: George Whitefield and the Rise of Modern Evangelicalism. This book, which linked the revivalist’s success in part to his theatrics and business acumen, and revealed the less sanctified aspects of Whitefield’s pilgrimage, caused something of a stir among those English-speaking evangelicals of a Calvinistic persuasion who read the Banner of Truth magazine and its publisher’s many reprints of Puritan and Presbyterian pastors and theologians. Not only had Stout presented the English revivalist warts and all. But worse was the implicit conclusion that human techniques, sometimes overtly manipulative, not the work of the third person of the trinity, had been responsible for the many conversions that followed Whitefield’s itinerant preaching throughout the colonies and British isles.
The cries of “say it ain’t so, Skip, say it ain’t so,” first came in a Banner of Truth review of Stout’s biography. The portrait of Whitefield that emerged, a “bombast and showman” guilty of “shameless egocentricity,” was “barely recognisable” to readers long accustomed to Whitefield as the last Calvinistic revivalist. According to David White, the reviewer, “[i]t is fallacious and absurd to trace the origins of modern campaign evangelicalism, with its expensive publicity, deliberate conditioning by a highly charged musical atmosphere and the manipulation of massed choirs, to the straightforward proclamation of a Whitefield who stood in the best tradition of the Puritans.” Iain H. Murray, the editorial director of the Banner of Truth Trust, biographer of Jonathan Edwards and also a historian of Anglo-American revivalism, kept up the attack, using the publication of the papers from an Institute for the Study of American Evangelicals conference on trans-Atlantic evangelicalism in which Stout had a chapter as the occasion for offering his estimate of the new Whitefield. What is lacking in Stout’s handling of Whitefield, as well as in the “new approach to evangelical history,” according to Murray, is a failure to write history from “the standpoint of supernaturalism.” In fact, the whole tone of this history left Murray wondering what these so-called evangelical historians would do to the book of Acts “if they determined to re-interpret its events without reference to God.”
Stout’s response to these charges, printed in both the Banner of Truth and the Evangelical Studies Bulletin, raised and answered important questions about the nature of believers practicing the craft of history. He wrote that “professional” historians “agree to settle for something less that ultimate explanations,” and that academic “canons of evidence and interpretation” leave “off the field” notions of providence and the work of the Holy Spirit. Still, the damage had been done. A member of a body whose purpose was to reflect upon the significance of Christian teachings about creation, providence and salvation for doing history was guilty of saying that in good history, that is, history practiced by university professors, such questions did not matter.
Not being the Evangelical Theological Society which has purged from its membership scholars who appeared to deny the divine origins of Scripture, the Conference on Faith and History took no formal action against the highly regarded Yale professor. Moreover, some of its members have undoubtedly sided in this debate with Stout, in part because they agree with his assessment of the role of faith in the practice of history and also because, remembering the historic warfare between science and theology, they fear the restrictions of church dogma upon the pursuit of historical truth. But despite the tendency of CFH members as academics to prefer the cultural capital offered by Yale University over that available through the Banner of Truth Trust, Iain Murray’s defense of neo-providentialism and the supernatural in the writing of history are much closer than Stout’s critical history to the purposes and contributions of the Conference on Faith and History. Writers for Fides et Historia as well as historians who have presented at the conference’s meetings have argued overwhelmingly against a secular reading of history and have attempted in a variety of ways to articulate a Christian philosophy not just of history but also of historical research and writing.
Pointing out the resemblance between Murray’s charges and the Conference on Faith and History’s mission does not mean that Stout should be banned from the conference or prohibited from attending all conference gatherings. But his biography of Whitefield and subsequent exchange with Murray cast the aims and purposes of the Conference on Faith and History in a different light, one which reveals the difficult terrain the conference has tried to circumnavigate by promoting scholarship of the highest caliber that springs from Christian convictions. What I plan to do in this paper, then, is point out some of these connections between the Conference on Faith and History and the Banner of Truth Trust. In a nutshell, my argument will be that the writings sponsored by the conference and produced by its members show that the kind of history Iain Murray wants has not been that far removed from the kind of history the conference has tried to provide even if a little light on the Calvinism.
