Confessing History: Explorations in Christian Faith and the Historian's Vocation

8. After Monographs: A Critique of Christian Scholarship as Professional Practice

168 Chapter Eight After Monographs A Critique of Christian Scholarship as Professional Practice Christopher Shannon It has now been more than ten years since George Marsden first proposed the “outrageous idea” that personal Christian faith not only could, but perhaps should, make a difference in the research and writing of history.1 After the countless conference panels and roundtables that greeted Marsden’s provocative thesis, is there anything left to be said about the idea of Christian scholarship? My sense of the mood among contemporary historians interested in the issue is that the answer is both no and yes. First, the everlasting nay. At the level of theory, George Marsden’s work seems to have settled the question for most of those concerned. The Marsden settlement goes something like this: Christian scholarship consists in Christian scholars infusing the relatively neutral, technical, procedural norms of the various academic professions with their distinctly Christian background faith commitments . These spiritual commitments inspire distinctly Christian questions and nurture a sensibility capable of producing distinctly Christian interpretive insights that may enrich the historical understanding of Christian and non-Christian alike—provided the Christian scholar achieves these insights with all due respect to secular professional standards of evidence and argument. Next, the everlasting yea. Marsden’s theoretical justification of Christian scholarship raises the question of After Monographs   169 how Christian faith commitments affect the study of specific historical problems. The panel topics at any given conference on religious history are but the tip of the iceberg facing our scholarly Titanic. More work always needs to be done, and an army of Christian historians stands ready to be up and doing. It is at this level of practice where the current consensus on Christian scholarship shows its true colors, colors indistinguishable from its secular counterpart. The “big table” at which Marsden wishes to secure for Christians a seat is less a forum for discussion than a factory for production. The price of admission is a deep commitment to the moral necessity of feeding the monograph machine. This commitment places Christian historians in one of two equally undesirable positions: either they follow the secular profession in its relentless strip mining of the past, so that the sacred people, places, and events of Christian history become fodder for historical revision; or they temper their criticism with sympathy, and write history that affirms, or at least remains silent on, the truth value of Christianity. Intellectually, the first position renders them rearguard Christians, the second, rearguard scholars. I have elsewhere offered my critique of the Christian character of Marsden’s idea of Christian scholarship.2 In this essay, I would like to shift the focus of the debate from the adjective “Christian” to the noun “scholarship.” The problem with so much of the debate is less that it has failed to offer a distinctly Christian historical practice, but that it assumes current secular historical practice to be, despite an undue secular bias, just fine, thank you very much. Through all the debates of the last decade, few if any commentators have questioned the basic moral and intellectual necessity of the standard academic history monograph. A kind of writing little more than a hundred years old, the monograph has somehow acquired the status of a self-evident truth, an unquestionable base from which all rational historical questioning must proceed. The monograph is the practical manifestation of a theoretical consensus on empiricism that unites historians across the range of background faith commitments. Any serious challenge to the current consensus on Christian history must show how, in terms of the monograph, more work decidedly does not need to be done. Christian history can do its greatest service to Christians and non-Christians alike by abandoning 170   Christopher Shannon the futile effort to build a better monograph and shifting the focus of scholarly inquiry from writing back to reading. The pieties expressed in the annual American Historical Association presidential address aside, a survey of recent trends in historical publishing and scholarship reveals the history monograph to be as much a relic of the nineteenth century as the railroad. Scholars, Christian or non-Christian, would be foolish to bank their intellectual future on it. Completely apart from the debate over Christian scholarship, a few brave secular thinkers have dared to say that the emperor has no clothes. Lindsay Waters, executive editor for the humanities at Harvard University Press, has for several years now been...