CHURCH HISTORY

JOHN W. MONTGOMERY, Ph.D.

In checking the October, 1965, number of The Journal of Ecclesiasti-

cal History, I encountered the following articles: "Unions and Con-
fraternity with Cluny", "A View of Archbishop Lanfranc", "Piety and
Charity in Late Medieval London", "Social and Economic Theories and
Pastoral Concerns of a Victorian Archbishop", and "The Reactions of
Church and Dissent towards the Crimean War." It would be possible for
me to point out that as far as I know there has been no article published
recently either by evangelical or non-evangelical dealing with piety and
charity in late medieval Prague, or with the reactions of church and dis-
sent towards the Boer War. Here we still have open subjects for investi-
gation! But it seems to me that if we are concerned with the current
issues in church history we've got to strike a good deal deeper than this.
We've got to strike to the level of philosophical presuppositions that
operate when one confronts the problems of church history. Specifically
I want to discuss four such presuppositional questions.
The first has to do with the nature of history. How do church
historians today look at the nature of history? Do they consider historical
events as having an objective existence apart from themselves? Do they
hold that the events of history have meaning independent of themselves
as interpreters? Secondly, I want to ask the question: How does the
church historian's approach to the meaning of history in general influence
his attitude when he deals with the events of sacred history? What is
the bearing of the church historian's philosophical presuppositions on
the treatment of the saving events upon which church history presumably
centers? Thirdly ( and this of course grows out of the first two questions ) :
Is it possible for a Christtian philosophy of history to be written? And
lastly: What does the church historian have to say to the current con-
fessional issues—particularly those relating to biblical authority—that
are troubling many denominations in America today?
There is an article of considerable interest by Will Herberg in the
Winter, 1964, issue of The Christian Scholar. It is titled, "Five Meanings
of the Word 'Historical'." Herberg points out that people operating in
the area of church history today frequently do not analyze the way in
which they are using the word "history." The word can be used in at least
five different ways, and Herberg regards these as a continuum, extending
from a subjective existential view of history all the way across to an
objective view of history. On the one hand, we have those church
historians who look at the past as basically a reflection of the existential
stance of the church historian himself. On the other, we find church
historians who look at history as having an existence independent of
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 HENRY: FRONTIER ISSUES IN CONTEMPORARY THEOLOGY 75

the historian and who are convinced that historical events give rise to
interpretations not dependent upon their own stance.
Now it is important to note that in contemporary church history the
vast majority of theoreticians opt for some kind of existential orienta-
tion. This is true not only of theologians who are evaluating what church
historians do but of the church historians themselves. Among the theolo-
gians who have concentrated on this problem we have of course Rudolf
Bultmann. Says Bultmann in his Gifford Lectures published under the
title, The Presence of Eternity: "Always in your present lies the meaning
in history, and you cannot see it as a spectator, but only in your respon-
sible decisions." Observe: the meaning of history always lies in your
present. For the church historian, the meaning of history lies in the
existential commitment which he himself makes. This may seem pretty
radical, but if we take a look at Heinrich Ott, Karl Barth's successor at
Basel, and one of the primary figures in the current hermeneutic revival,
we see that it is possible to go even farther in an existential direction.
Indeed, Ott's position virtually reaches solipsism! Says Ott: "The objec-
tive mode of knowledge is entirely inappropriate to historical reality
because there are no such things as objectively verifiable facts. .. .All
true knowledge of history is finally knowledge by encounter and con-
frontation" (Die Frage nach dem histoHschen Jesus und die Ontologie
der Geschichte).
We can see this approach applied to specific historical problems
by such theologians of the "New Hermeneutic" as Gerhard Ebeling.
Ebeling has spent most of his career interpreting Luther; for Ebeling,
Luther supposedly held that we devote ourselves to the service of the
"word-event." Luther is presented as an existentialist who dialectically
unites the Scripture with the stance of the believer. The French Jesuit
theologian Marie expresses amazement that Ebeling has given Luther
such "une étonnante actualité"—such a surprising contemporaneity. This
is quite so. In fact, when one reads about Luther in Ebeling, Luther
sounds just like Ebeling! The church historian Albert C. Outler well
illustrates that the professional church historian today feels at home in
this dialectic atmosphere. Outler became president of the American
Society of Church History a year ago, and delivered his presidential
address on the subject, "Theodosius' Horse: Reflections on the Predica-
ment of the Church Historian." The horse threw Theodosius, whose
death radically altered the course of Byzantine history and led to the
establishment of Chalcedonian christology. In this essay Outler writes:
"The frank acknowledgment of this inbuilt uncertainty in all historical
knowledge might well be the beginning of historiographical wisdom"
(Church History, September, 1965). The stress is placed on uncertainty,
such as the horse throwing Theodosius.
Now the peculiar thing about this situation is that outside of the
realm of church history as influenced especially by contemporary
theology, people are seeing that existential historiography is not as attrac-
tive an option as it superficially appears to be. Strange to say, clarity has
76 BULLETIN OF THE EVANGELICAL THEOLOGICAL SOCIETY

been achieved especially by those who are approaching historical prob-

lems from a secular standpoint. Consider the interesting section at the
end of Sherwin-White's 1960-61 Sarum Lectures on Roman Society and
Roman Law in the New Testament (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1963),
where the writer touches on the question of the historical objectivity of
the biblical accounts of Jesus' life and ministry: "It is astonishing that
while Graeco-Roman historians have been growing in confidence, the
20th century study of the Gospel narratives, starting from no less
promising material, has taken so gloomy a turn in the development of
form-criticism that the more advanced exponents of it apparently main-
tain . . . that the historical Christ is unknowable and the history of his
mission cannot be written." Sherwin-White thereupon compares the
historical data in behalf of the Jesus of New Testament with the historical
data in behalf of Tiberius Caesar, "the best-known contemporary of
Christ." He points out that for Tiberius Caesar we have four basic
documents that give us our information, and that even though these
documents are hopelessly inconsistent at various points, no one doubts
that these documents provide an accurate picture of a historical person
and that they can be relied upon for the events of his life and for their
interpretation. But in the case of Jesus, New Testament historians
seem overwhelmed by uncertainty—and this uncertainty is of course
connected with the fact that they have imported their existential judg-
ments into the historical process they are endeavoring to understand.
Recent work in analytical philosophy—for example, Danto's An
Analytical Philosophy of History (Cambridge University Press, 1965)—
has mercilessly exposed the existential presuppositions that underly
the commitment of many church historians today. Danto points out
that such existential presuppositions are utterly unverifiable. What does
it mean, for example, that history is finally "knowledge by encounter and
confrontation"? Does it mean that the historian bangs his head against
the manuscript? This makes me think of the problem that Robert Benchley
had in his college biology course. Benchley thought that he was
drawing what appeared on the microscope slide. As it turned out he
was drawing a reflection of his own eyelash as this was reflected by
the microscope. One also thinks of Schiaparelli's Martian canals which
may at least in part have been the product of incipient cataracts in
Schiaparelli's eyes reflected against the surface of Mars. The existential
involvement of the historian is frequently this sort of thing. J. W. N.
Watkins in dealing with this question points out that the analytical
work by such philosophers as Ryle "dispels the old presumption...
that to understand Ghengis Khan the historian must be someone very
like Ghengis Khan." This is a nice point.
And from the theological side one does begin to hear a voice or
two raised against the irrationalities built into existential historiography.
Pannenberg of Mainz, in his Offenbarung als Geschichte, argues that
the distinction between Geschichte and Historie as made by the dialectical
theologians must go, for it is impossible to take the New Testament at
 HENRY: FRONTIER ISSUES IN CONTEMPORARY THEOLOGY 77

its face value (or, for that matter, the Old Testament, as Professor Schultz
pointed out earlier) if we attempt to separate the events of saving
history from the de facto events of general history. And one can indeed
discover what these events are; it's a matter of examining the documents,
refusing to inject one's own existential stance into these documents, and
permitting others to check one's investigations so that mutual criticism
will uncover presuppositions inimical to objective historical analysis.
(Incidentally, for Pannenberg one should look at the second edition
of his work [1963], in which he adds an appendix criticizing his critics.
His critics have been very nasty to him. Obviously they have over-
reacted; why? Their own commitment to dialectic presuppositions has
been so strong that Pannenberg makes them nervous.) The significance
of Pannenberg's position becomes evident when we see that for him
(as for the biblical writers) the Resurrection has got to be dealt with
as an objective event; it cannot be put into the realm of "suprahistory"
or "metahistory." It's got to be considered just as the narratives obviously
want it to be considered, as an event on the same historical level as
the death of Christ, as the Sermon on the Mount, etc.
With Carl Michalson's recent death in an air crash, Schubert Ogden
is probably the most prominent living theological exponent of a radical
existential view in the U.S., and even he is trying to stiffen it with
Whitehead's process philosophy. You will find an interesting article by
Ogden in the January, 1963, Journal of Religion, entitled "What Sense
Does it Make to Say, 'God Acts in History'?" Ogden has to engage in
herculean labor to get it to make any sense, for if you hold with him that
God is best understood as the universal process, what is the point of
asserting that God "acts" in a special way in history? Paul Van Buren,
in his notorious but exceedingly valuable book, The Secular Meaning of
the Gospel, nicely takes care of Ogden in a long section dealing with
the analytical absurdity of the kinds of existential-process statements
that Ogden is attempting to make. Neither existentialism nor process
philosophy can make theological sense out of history.
What are the implications of this situation for the possibility of
writing a Christian philosophy of history? It seems to me that a Chris-
tian philosophy of history has got to begin with the assumption that
there are objective events which do indeed carry their interpretation with
them. This is true not only of the events of biblical history but of the
events of history in general. If then we ask, "why do we need the Bible
to help us to interpret history?" the answer is that such a welter of
historical data exists that we don't know how to relate all the facts to
each other. Our lifetime is too short and our perspective is too limited.
By way of Scripture we are able to enter to the christological heart of
the historical process and thereby understand the operation of other
events. We can use the biblical narratives—particularly the narratives
concerning our Lord—as a criterion of significance and also a means of
comprehending human nature and ethical values, so that we can see
meaning in the totality of human life as displayed in history.
78 BULLETIN OF THE EVANGELICAL THEOLOGICAL SOCIETY

Finally, what does church history say to the present confessional

situation? Very briefly, I think that you can look at the church history
discipline in your seminary or your college with a little more apprecia-
tion if you realize that by examining the confessional problem of the
last half century one sees a paradigm of the very difficulties that we
are encountering evangelically today. If the church historian at your
seminary or Christian college were to provide a paper dealing with the
history of liberalism in the Presbyterian Church U.S.A., for example,
that discussion would have a remarkable correspondence to the kind of
difficulties that are being faced by a number of other denominations (not
excluding stalwart evangelical bodies! ) at the present time. The church
historian is able to look at the development of theology in the last fifty
years and see there the logical interrelation and progress of heresy in
the twentieth century. For example, the church historian sees the irony
in Barth's horror when his former student Van Buren sent him a precis of
his Secular Meaning of the Gospel; said Barth in effect, "You have become
a heretic"! Why did Van Buren, who took his doctorate under Barth at
Basel, pass into death-of-God heresy? Robert Funk, who has posed this
problem historically, gives the reason: "Neo-orthodoxy taught that God
is never object but always subject, with the result that third generation
neo-orthodox theologians have been forced to wrestle with the non-
phenomenal character of God" (Theology Today, October, 1964). If God
cannot be looked at objectively, then God can't be looked at—period.
And when the analytical philosophers come along and rightly point out
that there is then no verification whatever for Neo-orthodoxy's theologi-
cal statements, the only possible conclusion is that God has died. His
death, however, occurs not in reality but only in the Neo-orthodox
dialectic process! He dies in the framework of presuppositions that
entered the picture earlier in 20th-century theological development.
The church historian can point out that if you jump on a theological
train you may not be able to get off at the stop you would like to. The
train keeps moving and though you may leap out the window your
students will not necessarily do so. They will carry your ideas to their
logical conclusion whether you like it or not. In the same connection it's
very interesting that Tillich, just before his death, was much offended
by the death-of-God people. He couldn't understand why this sort of
thing was eclipsing his own theological approach. Yet it's not so difficult
to understand. If one makes the kind of existential dialectic commitment
that has been characteristic of twentieth century Protestant theology,
eventually one arrives at a point where God becomes non-phenomenal
and disappears. Let's hope that the church historian can help us to re-
evaluate our own position and make sure that we hold fast to the faith
once delivered to the saints—a faith clearly articulated in an inerrant
Scripture and centering on the historical Lord Christ.

Trinity Evangelical Divinity School

Deerfield, Illinois