Confessing History: Explorations in Christian Faith and the Historian’s Vocation (review)

This book is composed of a preface, an introduction, fourteen essays, and an afterword by Wilfred M. McClay, which introduces, almost for the only time in this book, the thought of Christopher Dawson (not particularly well treated). The authors are affiliated with a broad spectrum of mostly Christian academic institutions, with a special presence of Reformed Christians. The topics addressed and tone taken range from the homiletic to the nicely delimited, but all speak to the vocation of the Christian historian. Space allows for individual mention of only a few of the articles, but there is much that is useful in the essays of Mark R. Schwehn, Una M. Cadegan, Thomas Albert Howard, William Katerberg, Michael Kugler, Bradley J. Gundlach, John Fea, Jay Green, Robert Tracy McKenzie, and Douglas A. Sweeny. Most of the authors undertook their PhD work in the 1990s, and this book evidences a sea change in the profession in the matter of religion, which, according to a recent American Historical Association survey, has become the most-named field of study by historians asked to identify their specialties. The editors of the present book are associated with the Conference on Faith and History and the journal Fides et Historia.

The introduction declares: “this book . . . joins a long tradition of writings in which Christian scholars have . . . sought to probe and articulate the ways in which life on earth might be playing out beneath the eye and at the hand of the God of Christian faith” (p. 2). This central project of the book seems to be unclearly treated at times; essays like that of Gundlach need to pay further attention to their exposition of “providentialist history” (p. 163), but James B. LaGrand, in siding with St. Augustine, seems to have it exactly right. The wise comments of George Marsden, disavowing any claim to chart the particular ways of God, are invoked, though not all agree. The essay of Christopher Shannon, which should be read by every Christian historian, seems not to draw necessary distinctions in its discussion of historical causation.

If the Christian historian has no “method” by which to pin providence down, what can be Christian about his or her work? The essay by Beth Barton Schweiger gets closest to the heart of the matter—the Christian, historian or not, replaces the categories of the world by the truths revealed in the Incarnation, above all the revelation that charity rather than power is at the heart of what is real. That said, it would have been preferable if she and Lendol Calder had worked out their ontological insight—God is love and what is love in the world is most real—into specifying what history under this heading looks like. Contributors to the volume such as Howard make good use of Catholic thinkers such as Josef Pieper, but as a group they seem unaware of the resources in especially resourcement and communio Catholic thought for the questions they address.

William Katerberg’s idea that the historian should engage in “useful scholarship” (p. 107)—that is, scholarship useful to a tradition—is very provocative. Shannon provides the most radical position in the book, holding that it is not just that secular historical scholarship is incomplete because it leaves Christianity out, but that it is deeply wounded, and for a Christian historian to accept it is tantamount to participation in “the legitimation of the modern secular world” (p. 12). McClay, on the other hand, although holding for a chastened view of progress (he thinks the idea is necessary as the only possible ordering principle, and although speaking of the unpredictability of history, does not mention Hans Urs von Balthasar’s alternative idea that history is dramatic in form), still affirms that human agency and the ability “to master the material terms of our existence” (p. 318) have expanded in our...