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God in History; Some thoughts on the Recovery of a Useful Christian History

by Dr. Stuart Piggin .

I want to argue in this paper that our usefulness as Christian historians depends on our ability to discern the hand of God in history. We accept in our worship a God who acts, in our prayers a God who sometimes acts, in our creed a God who has acted and will act, and in our Bible a God who always acts. But in our work as historians we concentrate so exclusively on second causes as to ignore the activity of God. This troubles me on four counts. It limits our usefulness as historians to our fellow Christians. Second, it limits our usefulness as Christians to our historian colleagues. Third, it limits our usefulness as guides to those honest doubters who are inclined to believe in God, but are not motivated to search for him since, they have no reason to disbelieve, 'he is an absentee God, shut out from the events of this world'.¹ Fourth, it jeopardises the future of our profession as Christian historians: no group has a future without an awareness of its history or of its distinctive understanding of history.

A second reason for stressing utility arises from a desire, which all present will laud, to learn from history. I refer to the history of organizations similar to the one we are launching tonight. When the American Conference on Faith and History was launched, Professor Under informs us,² many were seized with a passion to write high-flown theologies of history. Now Professor Under is far too wise an old prairie dog to attempt to talk us out of doing that: the children, even if they are historians, must be permitted to discover that for themselves. Still, the vibes are clear: those theologies of history have not proved wondrously useful in helping the historian with his craft. Today, members of the Conference on Faith and History for the most part practise the premise that Christian history is what Christian historians write.

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I hope we will not start with such a mature premise. The new Christian Historians' Association must be permitted to have its charismatic fling before it settles for bureaucratic notions like that. Secularisation has seen to it that Christian historians do not always write Christian history just as sin has seen to it that Christians do not always obey the moral law. Since the Enlightenment the ground-rules of historical writing have been changed: Christian assumptions no longer automatically inform the historical enterprise. Christian historians have tended to respond to this in one of three ways. Some say that in their personal beliefs they are Christians, but in their professional practice they are like all other historians. Their Christianity influences their practice only in making them conscientious and honest. Others, preferring a closer alliance of personal belief and professional practice, concentrate on studying the history of the church and theological thought.³ A third response has been to remove reflection on the meaning of history from the mundane realm inhabited by practising historians and elevate it to the third heaven of the philosopher-theologians, with no ladder, not even a sacred thread to connect them.⁴

No, Christian history is not any of those things. It is not just history written by Christians, nor is it simply the history of the church and theology, nor is it confined to philosophical theology. Christian history is a history of 'peoples, societal structures and institutions, ideas, things, mores and patterns of life, according to the sort of insights and values provided by a Christian view of man, society, norms, history, the world and the whole of created reality'.⁵ For the Evangelical Christian those insights and values will be derived from and must be consistent with Biblical revelation and, I

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suspect, though some here might beg to differ, personal religious experience. Ultimately, the Evangelical historian's insights and values will stem from his faith, not, to use Luther's distinction, from historic faith but from personal faith. He will write out of the experience of salvation; his work will bear the marks of the Gospel.

The primacy of the historian's experience has been emphasised by Butterfield:

I could not go to people and say that if they studied nearly two thousand years of European history this would be bound to make them Christian; I could not say that such a stretch of history would prove to any impartial person that Providence underlies the whole human drama... If we wish to know how God works in history we shall not find it by looking at the charts of all the centuries - we have to begin by seeing how God works in our individual lives and then we expand this on to the scale of the nation, we project it on to the scale of mankind.⁶

The relationship between personal experience and history is wonderfully illustrated in the writings of Jonathan Edwards, the eighteenth-century philosopher-theologian of New England. Edwards first experienced the work of God in his own soul, then in that of his own family, then in his own church, then in his own country, and then in his own world. Of his own experience he wrote his Personal Narrative (possibly written in 1739, although not published until 1765);⁷ on the Northampton revival of 1734/5 he wrote A Faithful Narrative of the Surprising Work of God (1737); on the Great Awakening he wrote The Distinguishing Marks of a Work of the Spirit of God (1741) and Some Thoughts concerning the Revival (1742); and, as for the world, that was too small a theatre for the divine drama, so Edwards was working on his History of the work of Redemption, a study of heaven, earth and hell, when he died in 1756. His experience of the development of spiritual awareness in waves, phases, stages or degrees, which take time, turned his mind from philosophy to history as the primary mode for understanding the divine purpose.

My own predilection for a useful history incorporating the acts of God arises from my studies in Edwards and my involvement in the local church which always seems doomed to mediocrity unless members are habituated to look for the divine action. Our faith is not only about the old, old story. God's works are not all locked up in the Bible. The history of the local

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church which I contend is important is the record of God's activity in the congregation. The task of the local church historian is to provide that recdrd. But, you object, the Bible does not say that the Lord gave us historians to equip church members for the work of ministry and to build up the body of Christ. No, he gave us apostles, prophets, evangelists, pastor/teachers (Ephesians 4.11) - no historians. But, consider - who is it who sees the mind of God in the works of God? It is the prophet, and surely that is the task of the Christian historian. The historian has a prophetic function: to discern in all this human business the activity of God and to bring this home to our conscience thus producing such conviction that (1 Cors. 14.25) 'we shall fall on our face and worship God and declare that God is really among us'.⁸

To record God's activity was the motivation behind the establishment in the 1740s of a number of revival histories which sought to chronicle the mighty acts of God in revival. James Robe, minister of Kilsyth, Scotland, edited the Christian Monthly History and the Kilsyth Narrative to provide a reliable account of the revival: 'Hereby God's wonderful dealings with his Church in this age shall be propagated to many ages to come... ' Robe had heard many complain that no-one had written for 'posterity a full and circumstantial account of the conversion of five hundred by one sermon at the kirk of Shotts in the year 1630'. In view of such complaints it would be the more blameworthy to neglect keeping a record of the present work:

One generation should praise his works to another, and should declare his mighty acts [Psalm 145.4]. This we are commanded to do that after generations 'might set their hope in God, and not forget the works of God' [Psalm 78].7.⁹

The evangelicalism of which most of us are products stems from the eighteenth century revivals under Edwards and Wesley. I want to explore

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tonight the extent to which we might also derive our evangelical philosophy of history from them. What I shall do is to present the outline of their metaphysical pattern of history. We shall want to soften it, since the twentieth century is not the eighteenth, but let us be quite clear about our heritage before we decide what we cannot accept.

II

To the evangelical historians of the eighteenth century the works of God in salvation were the worthiest object of historical study. They signified that God was at work in the world. Indeed, for the eighteenth-century evangelical, God's intervention in the human soul was a more important attestation of the power of God than his intervention in the form of nature miracles. Joseph Milner argues in his History of the Church of Christ that 'effusions of divine grace', of which Pentecost was the first, do not include the 'miraculous or extraordinary operations of the Holy Spirit', an 'abrupt ipse dixit' which sparked off John Henry Newman's exploration of the nature of the miraculous.¹⁰ But Milner's distinction between the work of the Spirit of God in revival and conversion on the one hand and nature miracles on the other is very evangelical and is found full-blown in the earlier work of Jonathan Edwards. For Edwards, God's work of redemption was a higher and greater work than his work of creation, an emphasis of some pastoral significance: it takes more of God's omnipotence to save a soul than to create the universe - man can create nothing; how much less can he save himself. From this we may deduce the following implications for the evangelical's view of what is important in Church history.

1. God's plan of redemption must be constitutive for the historical process. The historian of the local, regional, or national church should have a sense of this context for the object of his study. He will prove more useful to his fellow church members if he can remind them occasionally of where they fit |r into God's grand design - of the grandeur of the cosmic significance of every soul won for Christ. It was the usefulness of this understanding to the church which motivated Edwards' search for it:

It is fit that mankind should be informed something of God's design in the government of the world, because they are made capable of actively falling in with that design, and promoting of it, and acting therein as his friends and subjects.¹¹

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Joseph Milner made the same point in his History of the Church of Christ:

Do we expect that according to numerous prophecies the Kingdom of Christ shall spread through all nations? And are no means to be employed to promote it? Shall we complain of the want of universality in the best religion, and discourage every attempt to effect that universality?

Christian historians from Luke to Latourette have believed that God's purpose in redemption has shaped the history of the world since the time of Christ. Luke was not interested in presenting a picture of the church with photographic accuracy. He was concerned to reveal the divine direction, the thrust: how the church, instituted by Christ, grows as Christ is proclaimed in good times and in bad, expanding from Israel out into the world. In Luke-Acts events never just happen. Luke has a fancy word for what God-directed events do - they are fulfilled. Luke-Acts is not just concerned about things, but 'the things which have been fulfilled among us' (Luke 1.1). 'Today,' said Jesus, after he read from Isaiah in the synagogue at Nazareth, 'this Scripture is fulfilled in your hearing' (Luke 4.21). Luke is so fond of the word that he even uses it in such an awkward place as Acts 2.1: Not 'when the day of Pentecost came', but 'when the day of Pentecost was fulfilled'.¹² Well, what is the divine pattern delineated by these God-directed events and which constitutes the subject matter of the book of Acts and should perhaps be the essential backdrop of every history of the church? The divine pattern is the constant expansion of the Church through evangelism and suffering, the spreading out of the Gospel from Jerusalem in concentric circles, like ripples on a pond disturbed by a stone. Jesus said that it would be such (Acts 1.8): 'You will be my witnesses in Jerusalem and in Judea '- and they were (Acts 2); and you will be my witnesses 'in Samaria '-and they were (Acts 8); and you will be my witnesses 'to the ends of the earth '- and the Gentile mission, of which we are part, began (Acts 10). The final chapters of Acts (21-28), about the imprisonment and trials of Paul, actually occupy more space than does Paul's three famous missionary journeys. Luke's reason for this emphasis appears plain: Paul was appointed, as we have been, to carry the name of the Lord Jesus (9.15), but the Lord goes on to say (9:16) 'I will show Paul how much he must suffer in my name'. The growth of

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the Church, then, comes about through suffering, through martyrdom, as much as through mission.

The Lucan pattern is reflected in K.S. Latourette's 'incoming tide' schema which the great historian of missions uses to organise his grand account of 2000 years of world Christian history.¹³ The gospel is being taken to every tribe and every nation in a process of four great advances and four recessions (five advances and four recessions in the updating of Barrett).¹⁴ The inevitable sufferings are highlighted by the recessions/But the net gain is inexorable, culminating for Latourette in 'the great century', and for Barrett in the 'surge in the third world'. I can just see it: the sixth great advance will be labelled 'tsunami in the antipodes'. The engine which is driving the Church through time has millennial power.

God's plan of redemption, then, is constitutive of the historical process and of the inexorable, if oscillating, growth of the Kingdom of God towards the millennium.

2. A second biblical concept which must shape the evangelical historian's view of the history of the Church is that of the nature of the time occupied by the Church between the first and second comings of its Lord. This is the age of the Church, the time of the Holy Spirit, the dispensation of grace, the period of salvation, the interval of mercy, the day of opportunity. The church historian can usefully bring home to his fellow Christians that this is our 'kairos1, our appointed time to do something great for God. So great, in fact, that Jesus said that greater works would be done by his followers than those done by himself (John 14.12). Again this is evidence that in the divine economy the work of conversion is a greater work than the healing miracles done by Christ. This work is, as Augustine said, 'admirabilis conversione mundi1 - the wonderful conversion of the world: 'evangelizantibus disciplis gentes etiam crediderunt' -the nations believed those disciples who were evangelising them; 'haec sunt dubitatione majora' - these are without doubt the weightier matters. So, this time of our opportunity is also 'the last hour'

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(I John 2.18), and therefore the time for urgent action on the weightier matters.

3. The urgent action of Christians in the last 2000 years, action which is in principle capable of identification by technical historians of all faiths and none, is, the Christian historian believes, a response to the divine action. The engine of history, Edwards believed, is revival. "The leaven of history', the Wesleyans averred, is scriptural holiness. To the evangelical both revival and holiness are manifestations of the Holy Spirit. This urgent age of opportunity in which the Church will enjoy net growth through missions and martyrdom is the age of the Holy Spirit. Joachim Jeremias in his New Testament Theology , vol.1, The Proclamation of Jesus, described by I.H. Marshall as the most important book on Jesus written in the twentieth century, tells us that it was the conviction of the religious leaders of Jesus' day and for 300 years before Jesus that the Holy Spirit had been quenched. Because of the sin of Israel the Holy Spirit was quenched following the death of the last prophets, Haggai, Zechariah, and Malachi. Time without the Spirit is time under judgement: God's words are mere memories or echoes. It is against that background that we may understand the great excitement stirred up by John the Baptist when he said 'I have baptised you with water but he will baptise you with the Holy Spirit'. Jesus has brought the Spirit back. Luke-Acts is full of the Holy Spirit. In the first four chapters of Luke the Holy Spirit is mentioned 14 times; in Acts 62 times. And the power and gifts of the Holy Spirit will be with the Church until Jesus returns. There is no suggestion that the Holy Spirit will be quenched again for the Church as a whole, although this can happen among individuals and individual churches, and that the Church must run on memories or the lower octane fuel of human genius. This is the time of salvation, not judgment. Surely, the Christian historian of the Church will want to record the acts of the Holy Spirit just as Luke did. Revivals and holiness will be full of interest to the Christian historian. It is precisely because of the presence of the Holy Spirit that irruptions of the divine life can attend the preaching of the divine word at any time and that anything can happen in Church history.

Christian historians are as influenced by these irruptions as any other Christians, and I find it incidentally interesting that almost exactly 29 years ago, at a time of 'modest experience of religious revival1, Bruce Mansfield and Edwin Judge had the conversation which led to the formation of the Journal of Religious History,¹⁵ and that we evangelical historians are now launching an evangelical historians' association at a time which has

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been frequently compared with the late 1950s in its perceived nearness to revival. It is unlikely that anyone in the media will write of 1988 in Australia that it is 'the year of the evangelical' as pollster George Gallup Jr. depicted 1976 in the USA, but we are closer to a crest than a trough. We need to think, of course, of the differences between the 1950s and the 1980s as well as the similarities. Evangelicals are stronger and more confident today than they were in the 1950s. They are certainly further from the atmosphere of odium theologicum, to the charge of which the founders of JRH were sensitive. Our projected society is not only religious but Christian, and not only Christian but evangelical. We want to promote the study of evangelicalism and organise meetings and perhaps conferences of like-minded students of history, but let us not be content to lower the standard of academic excellence for which the founders of JRH are still justly esteemed, even if most of us would want to acknowledge that we are unlikely to attain to their standards in the first place.

Anyway, because of the church historian's interest in revivals and holiness, I want to challenge Butterfield on three points. First, he says that history 'fails to seize hold of the spiritual side of religion, because here is something that tends to elude the historian's peculiar kind of net'.¹⁶ Since Butterfield wrote that, historians have been working hard to devise a different type of net - I recall attending an enjoyable seminar at Sydney University taken by Professor O'Farrell some years back on the historical study of spirituality and piety. Then Butterfield hints that landing all that spiritual fish is not an appropriate thing for an historian to do. He writes:

People forget that the grand fact of European History is the constant preaching of the gospel, the conversion of souls to a more authentic appropriation of religion, and the ministering to their spiritual necessities -a thing which the historian can hardly go on repeating, though it is the same year after year and generation after generation.¹⁷

Surely there is a sense in which the 'authentic appropriation of religion' changes with each new generation and each new socio-cultural context, a matter well deserving the historian's attention. True, we may feel some sympathy with the need to avoid endless repeats in an attempt to save history from degenerating into chronicle. Even the Wesleyan chronicler of a remarkable religious revival on the South Coast of New South Wales in 1902

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described as 'gloriously monotonous' the work of the Holy Spirit in one mining community after another.¹⁸ Mount Kembla: 'an intense emotion with an evident assent to the preacher's burning words were imprinted on every face and feature1: 131 professed conversions; Mount Keira: 'the reality of change experienced by these converts was evidenced in altered tone of life and conversation in the mine and the township': 214 converts; Balgownie: 'parents came out seeking the offered Christ, followed by their children1:183 converts; Bulli, where the missioners proved adept at 'candid and condemnatory remarks on masculine vices': 292 conversions; Helensburgh: a 'hell upon earth, a town without churches': 234 converts. Well, it might be monotonous, but surely the historian should not be ashamed to report 'glorious monotony', especially when church members could be exposed to a lot more of it.

But to continue Butterfield's observations on the ceaseless round of preaching, conversions, and ministration of the means of grace:

Here is the impressive story [which he does not want historians to tell], the point where the work of the Church has eternal validity; here is the task in which it has never failed, the task in which it must not be thought to have failed even when men are turning their backs on religion.¹⁹

I would have thought the Church has failed in that area very frequently and that the Church historian's usefulness to the Church would be close to maximised if he could document the failure. Joseph and Isaac Milner in their History of the Church of Christ spent 5 volumes exploring that inglorious monotony and celebrating some of the great occasions when the preaching did nor fail.

Thus far I have given something of my credo rather than an intellectually refined position, on the historian's understanding of the place of God in the history of the Church. I suppose I am following the old distinction between sacred, inner, salvation history, on which I have made a few observations with the help of Luke and the eighteenth-century evangelical historians, and profane, technical, mundane history on which I've said nothing. Something of the mystery of the thrust of salvation history has been revealed in Scripture - a revelation which fashions the calling of the Christian historian, charging him with the prophetic responsibility of charting and contextualising, in different cultures at different times, the growth and vicissitudes of God's work of redemption. In

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the intimacy of his own life or of his own circle of Christian fellowship the historian may feel that he has seen and experienced God's providence. And he may have no doubts of its authenticity, but he may prefer not to speak of it with his historian colleagues in the secular university, but to share it with his fellow-Christians whose empathy will enable them to recognise it as valid and whose needs will enable them to accept it as useful. Let us not despise metahistory or heilsgeschichte because our secular colleagues do not find it of value in the practice of history. Our fellow Christians will receive it and value it in the practice of their Christian lives. This is the central point I want to make tonight: we can prove far more useful to the Church than we have been by mapping out for it a consciously directed future from a consciously preserved past (Troeltsch). Robert Horn, editor of Evangelical Times, wrote of Martyn Lloyd-Jones:

And he never let us forget history - history in general or our evangelical history in particular. He gave us a sense of the flow of history, so that we could see where we had come from. He gave us back our roots, and with them a strong security. He made us aware of our heritage. He set our day in the context of God's ongoing purposes. He made history live and speak. Few others even attempted that, but history was in his bones as much as the Bible and both kept coming out, the one subservient to the other and constantly illustrating it. This was a crucial contribution.²⁰

From the professional historian's point of view this is the observation of an amateur about an amateur, but that only makes it the more valuable as evidence of the perceived need of the intelligent Christian public and the apparent scarcity with which that need is met. I hope that this organisation will help those of us who have considerable input into the life of the local church to do more about supplying that want.

III

But the activity of God in profane history is more problematical for the evangelical historian. There are at least three reasons why it is so. First, God has not spoken on most of it. To paraphrase C.S. Lewis, it is beyond dispute that History is a story written by the finger of God, but we don't have the text.²¹ Therefore, I cannot speak as a Christian historian or prophet on the subject of the inner meaning of the historical process. I can only speak on that as an historicist, and I am about as keen to be known as that as I am to be known as a fundamentalist.

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Secondly, because we are sinners we misjudge God's relation to humankind, and therefore find that world history provides only ambiguous inferences about God's intentions As Jesus said, The kingdom of God does not come with careful observation' (Luke 17.20) The more you see of the details, the less likely you are to discern a pattern in them And the problem with history is not that we don't know everything, it is that we hardly know anything. So we are very likely to see patterns in history and very unlikely to get it right.

Thirdly, God has apparently granted profane history a certain autonomy and the Christian historian will want to reflect on the nature, purpose and limits of that autonomy. This issue raises for him three totally distinct types of questions: philosophical questions, questions of the value of a Christian perspective on profane history, and questions on religion's contribution to culture

Philosophical questions which we shall want to discuss in this forum will include: Is it proper to speak of God's intervention in this mundane world? Can we, as historians, speak of miracles and providence? Should we speak of and witness to those things which we cannot verify hut nevertheless believe? We might want to contend on the basis of God's action in Christ that we Christians have an all-important key to unlocking something of the mystery of all God's actions in history, namely that the motive of God's action is always love, and that the purpose behind the pattern of God's action is the establishment of the Kingdom of God.²² There is, therefore, a divine pattern behind the events of mundane history - it is not open to the Christian to reject belief in providence. On the other hand, neither is it possible for the Christian to claim that the veil can be drawn from the way things go in the world to reveal God's agency,²³ mysteriously man's sin and God's intent conspire at that point. It is customary to deal with this dilemma in either of two ways, both of which are worse than the dilemma itself. One is to claim that the ordinatio omnium rerum in finem the over-all pattern of divine providential agency, can be discerned by the believer and that all natural and historical events in the world can be seen to occur according to the divine master-plan to fulfil God's purposes in the world.'²⁴ This view always turns Christian belief into an abstraction which

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loses contact with our experience of the real world. A good example is Dispensationalism with its 'divine plan of the Ages' and its conquest of numerous regiments in the American evangelical army through the Schofield Bible, described by Sandeen as 'perhaps the most influential single publication in millenarian and Fundamentalist historiography'.²⁵

The other response to the difficulty of identifying God's agency in mundane history is to take a thoroughly sceptical view of divine providence, insist that 'the way we experience this world is the ultimate truth about the world', and thus relegate belief in God to the status of a mere 'consolation for the weaker minds who have not the strength to accept with stoical acquiescence what they experience as true'.²⁶ Whereas the former response turns the Christian faith into an abstraction, this view turns all life into an abstraction. Reality is more than appearances: 'Something greater is here', as Jesus was wont to say (Matthew 11.11, 12.6, 41,42). We cannot this side of eternity resolve or dissolve this dilemma: our critics will have to say 'you cannot verify your view of providence', and we will have to reply 'you cannot falsify it'. Should we go on speaking of those things which we cannot verify but nevertheless believe? I say 'yes', because the history profession should not spurn what humanity needs. It is as useful for many in our society to believe that life is under the superintending providence of God as it is for many in our churches to believe that their Christian lives are being shaped by the hand of God. For the nation with the soul of a church, Lincoln had it right in his Second Inaugural Address (4 March 1865). There the prophetic trumpet sounds not an uncertain note but a hypothetical note: 'If we shall suppose........ If God will.......... so still it must be said "the judgements of the Lord are true and righteous altogether'". I do not know how useful Lincoln's theology is to the history profession in its debate on the place of providence in history, but there is no doubt about its usefulness to the American people. In sum the hypothetical prophetic note is not an inappropriate one for the Christian historian to sound on mundane history.

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If one group of philosophical questions clusters around the issue of God's intervention in history²⁷, another revolves around the issue of bias. Probably most historians today agree that it is impossible to eliminate bias: those who claim that they have achieved this species of extermination -such as Ranke and G.R. Elton - exhibit, in the judgment erf their colleagues, a conservative bias. Bebbington has argued that this inevitable bias is an asset when it is used to ask questions of the traces of the past, thus organising those traces into evidence of a coherent whole. As an example he quotes C.H. Spurgeon:

I have often said that before I knew the gospel I had gathered up a heterogeneous mass of all kinds of knowledge from here there and everywhere - a bit of chemistry, a bit of botany, a bit of astronomy, and a bit of this that and the other. I put them all together, in one great confused chaos, but when I learned the gospel, I got a shelf in my head to put everything upon just where it should be. It seemed to me as if, when I had discovered Christ and Him crucified, I had found the centre of the system, so that I could see every other science revolving in due order.²⁸

I must say that I find this and other reassurances of the value of bias limited in their capacity to console me. I do not appreciate the blinkers put on my Marxist colleagues by their system, and I would not expect them to be any more enthusiastic about my blindness. It is not so much the conscious bias that troubles me - I imagine that my students can see and make allowances for that. It is the unconscious bias and the consequent insensitivity to the valuable insights of otters which distresses me. Nevertheless, I am excited about the insights which Christian faith gives one, and I am not a doubter: that is, I see no evidence that the 'right consciousness' of the Marxist, or the 'reason' of the heir of the enlightenment, has any more general applicability to the historical process than the 'faith' of the Christian.

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This leads me, secondly, in this section on mundane history to catalogue those areas where I believe Christian beliefs can enrich the understanding of all history: the doctrine of sin and its consequences for the historian's understanding of man and of cataclysm; the implications of the doctrine of man as capable of and destined for glory; the implications for an understanding of process and development of the fact that God has structured developmental possibilities into created reality, and the relation of this to the Marxist understanding of history as transformation generated in the interplay of social practice and social structure; the supremacy of the personal understood as the person in time and space rather than in his capacity for mystical self-absorption (our word and much of our concept of personality are borrowed from speculation on the Trinity, and it is no accident that Augustine, author of the first extended philosophy of history, The City of God was also the author of the first real biography, the Confessions);²⁹ the right of every individual to be understood and valued in the context of his own society and culture since every generation is equidistant from eternity; that creative tension, beloved of Butterfield, of insisting on personal responsibility on the one hand whilst leaving ultimate, if not provisional, judgement to God on the other; the relationship between continuity and change expressed so well in the tension between priest and prophet, law and gospel, Word and Spirit.

There are, thirdly, areas where we will want to dwell on the impact on this mundane history of the Church, of Christians, and of religious beliefs. What is the role of religion in the making of culture? What mileage is there in Dooyeweerd's 'religious ground motives', underlying and inwardly shaping a civilisation - how helpful is the view that the motives forming our society are secularist and humanist? We must also reckon, of course, with the impact of the Bible on our culture. A now little understood aspect of this impact is the application of the Bible to human history in a typological way. The New Testament uses the Old in a typological way. The method was taken up by the early Church, systematised by Origen, allowed to luxuriate by the medieval schoolmen under the 'four senses of Scripture', endlessly exploited by Jonathan Edwards, and even found its way into the sermons of John Dunmore Lang. Typology has so influenced the imagination of Christians that it has, at times, significantly shaped our history.

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IV

Among the aims which our new society might seek to promote are:

1. To promote the recording and analysis of our evangelical heritage in Australia.³⁰ I take it that the bicentennial history of Australian Evangelicalism project on which Brian Dickey, John Harris, Bob Under, and I are engaged is concerned chiefly with that aim. But I hope that our society will also foster the work of the many non-professional historians of Australian evangelical history. It is only with their help that anything like a representative coverage and in-depth analysis of our evangelical history can be achieved

2. To give an evangelical Christian view of Australian history. The historiography of our nation needs to be constituted out of philosophies other than the positivist-liberal and the Marxist. I take it that Mark Hutchinson is partly concerned with this aim in his doctoral study of four nineteenth-century historians of Australia.

3. To defend the intellectual viability and utility for the practice of writing history of evangelical Christian philosophies of history, or at least of some elements in those philosophies.

4. To promote fellowship and interchange between the society's members to improve our morale, to sharpen our vocation as Christian historians, and to make us more deliberate about the type of contribution we might make to the profession and to the Church.

5. To monitor the image of Christianity which is projected by the media, politicians, and other moulders of public opinion in our country. Professor Linder is very sensitive to this and, since his arrival in this country, he has drawn to my attention a host of instances of the media's ill-informed and unsubtly-biassed reporting on the Church and Christians. I am used to it, and hardly notice it, but it is probably the things we don't notice which most influence our conceptualisation. Largely because of the original exclusion of the teaching of divinity from our universities, even educated Australians are fairly ignorant of religion. This ignorance is reflected in our media, and, according to Mansfield, in our profession. Speaking of the formation of the Journal of Religious History, Mansfield wrote:

[26] Lucas: An Evangelical History Review, no.1, November 1987

On the matter of religious history, we were convinced that the neglect of religious ideas and institutions - not to mention cultural and intellectual history generally - arose not from any considered judgement but from ignorance.³¹

6. To dialogue more with our theologians to attempt to bring to bear on the making of theology in this country the distinctive value of an historical perspective. The recent debate on the ordination of women in the Anglican Church has highlighted that, at least at the popular level, there is little effort being made to understand the socio-cultural context in which the original deposit of the Scriptures was made or the development or unpacking in changing contexts which that deposit might undergo.

7. To serve our profession rather than to penetrate it with any aggressive view to a takeover. Just as the Church should seek to serve the Word rather than control events, so we ought not to entertain for a moment the thought of controlling our personal history by controlling our profession. We cannot rightly pray of our colleagues as the 10,000 men are praying of our politicians, 'improve them or remove them'. History is a human construct, but it is not controlled by any human or even group of humans - not even the rich and powerful. It is controlled by God who will not be controlled by us -not even by us Christians - and his purposes are larger than our understanding. We might not be able to understand our colleagues, but God can, and he can even understand why they are practising history. After all we should be the least surprised if our mission calls for a modicum of martyrdom, and we can hardly expect others to see that the first will be last if we are racing to be first.

Stuart Piggin,

Senior Lecturer in History,

University of Wollongong.

 

Notes:

1. H. Butterfield, Writings on Christianity and History, New York, 1979, p.3.

2. Robert D. Linder is a foundation member of the Conference on Faith and History . He was editor for ten years, and book review editor for eight years, of the society's journal, Fides et Historia. At the time of writing Professor Linder, of Kansas State University, was on a Fulbright Scholarship at the University of Wollongong, working with the author on a bicentennial history of Australian evangelicalism.

3. Among useful reflections on the nature of the Church historian's task, see H.W. Bowden, 'Science and the Idea of Church History, an American Debate', Church History, 36, 1967, pp.308-26; Sidney E. Mead, 'The task of the Church Historian', Chronicle, 12, July 1949, pp.128-143; J.H. Nichols, 'The Art of Church History', Church History, 20, March 1951, pp.3-9; J.H. Nichols, 'Church History and Secular History', Church History, 13, June 1944, pp.87-99; J.H. Nichols, 'History in the Theological Curriculum', Journal of Religion, 26, July 1946, pp. 183-89; W. Pauck, 'The Idea of the Church in Christian History', Church History, 21, September 1952, pp. 191-214; LJ. Trinterud, 'The Task of the American Church Historian', Church History, 25 March 1956, pp.3-15.

4. C.T. Mclntire, The ongoing Task of Christian historiography, Toronto, 1974, p.12.

5. Ibid., p. 6.

6. Writings, p.11f.

7. P. Miller, Jonathan Edwards, Connecticut, 1973, p.39.

8. So understood, the historian's task is a support to the evangelistic enterprise of the Church and will assist in a more accurate perception of that enterprise: 'Evangelism involves witnessing to what God has done, is doing, an& will do. It therefore does not announce anything that we are bringing about but draws people's attention to what God has brought about and is still bringing about. Evangelism is not a call to put something into effect. It gives testimony to the fact that Christ has already conquered the powers of darkness (Col. 1.13) and has broken down the middle wall of partition (Eph. 2.14-17).' David L Bosch, 'Evangelism: Theological Currents and Crosscurrents Today', International Bulletin of Missionary Research, 11.3, 1987, p.101.

9. Narrative of the Revival at Kilsyth, 1840 edition, p.23.

10. Apologia pro vita sua, London, 1902, p.22.

11. History of the Work of Redemption.

12. This section on fulfilment is based mainly on Robert Maddox, The Purpose of Luke-Acts, Gottingen, 1982. For a considered study of the implications of 'fulfilment' for the Christian philosophy of history as it applies both to biblical and to secular history, see John McIntyre, The Christian Doctrine of History, 1958.

13. The History of the Expansion of Christianity (7 volumes), London, 1937-45.

14. David B. Barrett (ed.), World Christian Encyclopaedia O.U.P., Nairobi, 1982, pp.23-32. For an alternative 6-phase schema based on Christianity's cultural penetration, see Andrew Walls, 'The History of the Expansion of Christianity Reconsidered', in Monica Hill (ed.), How to Plant Churches, MARC Europe, 1985, pp.34-43. Walls' schema is an elaboration of Karl Rahner's simpler 3-fold schema of the history of Christianity in its Jewish, Western, and World phases.

15. B. Mansfield, 'JRH - A Memoir at Twenty Years', Journal of Religious History, 11.1, 1980, p.3.

16. Writings, p. 207.

17. Ibid.

18. S. Piggin, Faith of Steel, Wollongong, 1984, p. 138.

19.  Writings, p.207f.

20. C. Catherwood, Martyn Lloyd-Jones: Chosen by God, Crowborough, 1986, p.21.

21. Christian Reflections, Fount Paperbacks, Glasgow, p. 136.

22. C. Schwobel, 'Divine Agency and Providence', Modern Theology, 1987 p.236.

23. Ibid.. p.241f.

24. Ibid. p.242

25. quoted in D.W. Frank, Less than conquerors, Grand Rapids, 1986, p. 73.

26. Schwobel, p.242

27. It is not necessary .of course, to understand providence in terms of intervention I would prefer to understand it as an always-present superintending power In Karl Heim's thought . the key concept is that of dimension Space is a system of three dimensions. To say that there is a transcendent God is to say that there is another (fourth) dimension. So the Christian claim implies that there is another dimension from which every historical event can be perceived Every human event is open to a transcendent good possibility

28. D.W Bebbington, 'The vocation of the Christian historian', Paper prepared for the Historians' Study Group, and published by UCCF Associates, Leicester, nd., p.3.

29. By speaking of the personal I do not only mean the power of personality as an historical force. To speak of the supremacy of the personal stresses the individual's potential to develop to mature humanity, that is, one from whose personality unselfish love flows freely. A Christian philosophy of history will be directed at protecting the conditions which facilitate the emergence of that mature humanity.

30. And perhaps other parts of the world?

31. 'JRH - A Memoir at Twenty Years', Journal of Religious History, 11.1, 1980, p.3.

© Southern Cross College, and the EHAA, 2004