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The Historian and the Believer
Van Austin Harvey, SCM Press Ltd, 1967

Split-level Christianity
It has for years been a puzzle to me how Christians are able to assent to apparently fantastic happenings and yet participate in a society which contradicts so many of their deeply-held convictions. They appear to live split-level lives.

This book fastens on an aspect of that contradiction which lies so deep in our consciousness that it is hidden from us, is so woven into the way we think that we fail to understand its immense power in our lives.

Harvey follows in the footsteps of a little-known great, Ernst Troeltsch, whose fundamental conclusion was that development of the historical method constitutes one of the great advances of human thought.

Is mundane, ordinary schoolboy history a great advance?

Yes, says Harvey. We of the 21st century find it difficult to appreciate just how revolutionary it is to try to discover "what really happened" - that is, the "facts" of the past.

Theologians who use historical methods come up with disturbing conclusions, says Harvey, not because they have made new discoveries, but because the historical method cannot in itself be reconciled with the type of thinking which produces traditional Christianity.

One implication of Harvey's conclusion for me is that the only way traditional Christians can maintain some sense of coherence in today's world is to split their thinking into two levels. One level unconsciously holds the historical method deep within itself. The other (on Sundays) freely asserts propositions which are anti-historical.

What is, was always
I for one had never questioned the traditional assertion that certain events upon which Christianity is supposed to hang are "unique". That is, an event like Jesus walking on the water was one of a kind which happened once and once only in human history.

In one sense - a sense which doesn't conflict with the historical method - all events are unique. That is, no two events occur in precisely the same way. Even if they appear to, no two events can share exactly the same cause, and result in the same effect.

I suppose that this uniqueness is dictated by the nature of the time/space continuum. Two identical events might occur at the same time, but if they do they can't happen in the same space. And two otherwise identical events which occur in the same space can't occur at the same time. In other words all historical events are unique even if they appear similar.

But as Harvey and others point out, we can't in history talk of "events" at all except in an artificial sense. This is because history is actually a seamless web of cause and effect flowing through time.

The sense in which theological claims of uniqueness do conflict with history is that if, in the seamless web of events, an event can't happen now in the 21st century - then we can be reasonably sure it could never have happened. This is the historical principle of analogy.

If, to go to the nub of the matter, everything we know of the present indicates the very extreme improbability (what we usually mean by the word "impossible") of a person who has died coming back to life, then it is equally improbable that anyone ever came back to life after dying.

Traditional Christians claim to evaluate and accept certain events on the basis of "faith". The historian evaluates and accepts events on the basis of their probability.

A faith statement resides in that class of statements which do not, by definition, require verification. Verification is incidental to the value of a faith statement. If I say, "My faith tells me that Jesus rose from the dead" then I have just said something which can't be questioned using
historical methods.

A critical aspect of the historical method is scepticism of any assertion about "what really happened", what it was the consequence of, and what it means within the bigger picture. As if that were not enough, Harvey points out the effect on history of an explanation of reality 
which depends upon the concept of the supernatural, as does traditional Christianity.

The supernatural is generally perceived today as a reality utterly different from that which we usually experience, but in some sense parallel to ours. God is of course everywhere at once but, as tradition tells us, he communicates from the supernatural realm into ours
via what we call revelation.

More than that, according to tradition, he acts upon our reality out of the supernatural realm, sometimes observably (like raising Jesus from the dead) and at other times (we suppose) secretly.

The discipline we call history depends upon the concept of a seamless web of events. In theory, were we able to know and analyse every aspect of those events, we could give a full and accurate account of "what really happened" and why.

But if God acts from the supernatural realm into the natural, history itself becomes impossible since we cannot know what is normal cause and effect and what is God's doing. Alternatively, God causes every event - in which case we would have to know God's mind to know why anything happened. Human choice and therefore human sinfulness
disappear if God is in total control.

In this view, no historical analysis of events can be effective unless it can describe each and every supernatural intervention.

So, for example, we can't know for sure if it was God who caused the first atom bomb to be dropped or whether President Truman and his advisors gave the order. Further, since God by definition causes events without himself being caused, the seamless web of historical cause and effect is irrevocably destroyed. 

If God does intervene in the workings of the universe, we must have some way of knowing which are events natural to normal cause and effect (history) and which are God's interventions. There's a sense in which each supposed God-event destroys history, since it is an event without a natural cause. And if God causes all events, then history is the study of just that and doesn't change.

The Bombshell Jesus
Harvey's account and analysis of how Christian theologians have tried to avoid the impact of history is penetrating and his criticism of their contortions I found most convincing.

The first bombshell came in 1834 when Strauss's Life of Jesus was published. He asserted that people of New Testament times perceived reality in a way totally alien to modern man. In reaction, Christian scholars desperately sought to establish the validity of the Bible, hoping to be able to discover "what really happened" and so produce a
life-portrait or biography of Jesus.

They failed. The Bible in general and the New Testament in particular have been conclusively shown to be of diverse origins and of often contradictory content. And so it is hardly surprising that orthodox theologians have so fiercely resisted the analytical historical method.

Harvey deals with the most influential defenders of the orthodox position, each one of whom has many disciples. They include Bultmann, Tillich and Barth.

His account of Karl Barth's last-ditch stand is illuminating. Barth's theology was sensational because be broke both with liberals (who put aside myths and symbols to search for "what really happened") and the orthodox (who retained the scriptures on the grounds that they are "divinely inspired").

At first Barth used a subtle (but basically devious) defense. It was good and right, he said, to apply all the tools of the historian and biblical critic to the texts of the Bible. This would take the seeker up to a certain point, beyond which the "eye of faith" would take over to make sense of what remained.

Only through faith, said Barth, can we really penetrate and fully understand the Bible. He was later to abandon this stance - but not before many imitators had used his fundamental argument to complicate and confuse the theological scene.

Barth's progress in defence of orthodoxy was long and tortuous. But one element persisted throughout. In essence he defined the New Testament as a set of documents which report events of a unique class. It's arrogant to suppose, he says, that only events which can be confirmed by historical methods could have happened in history. The Bible, as God's revelation to mankind, includes unique events.

The criticism of Barth which Harvey offers is nothing short of devastating. In effect, Barth is telling us that there is a class of evidence which is beyond the capacity of the historian to describe, analyse, assess and soundly judge. In other words, history is bunkum
when applied to the Bible, but valid when applied to everything else.

The New Quest
The 20th century saw the advent of a new search for an historical Jesus. Historically, any attempt to reconstruct events "as they really happened" is obsolete according to the New Quest, for the Gospels are not the kind of source which can yield that kind of information.

The New Questers tried to revise the description of what history is. They said that the true goal of historians is not only an attempt to reconstruct an objective account of "what really happened", the motives, needs and goals of actors in history. It is also and primarily to tell how persons relate to their environments, to describe the decisions they make, to get deeply ("existentially") in touch with the undertow of currents below personality.

This approach still requires painstaking analysis of evidence. But it goes further to require of us immersion in the kerygma, the proclamation, of the Good News and through that in the "personhood" of Jesus.

Thus even if we can't create a biography of Jesus we still have those authentic sayings and actions which originally changed the disciples. And if we have these then we have the means to challenge non-believers to respond to Jesus.

So the ultimate aim of the New Quest is to "…test whether the Jesus of the kerygma is the same as the Jesus of the new historian", writes Harvey. 

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