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

13. Don’t Forget the Church: Reflections on the Forgotten Dimension of Our Dual Calling

280 Chapter Thirteen Don’t Forget the Church Reflections on the Forgotten Dimension of Our Dual Calling Robert Tracy McKenzie “What does it mean to serve God faithfully in the specific circumstances in which He has placed me?”1 Every Christian should ask this question regularly, and to their credit, in recent years a number of Christian professional historians have done so publicly. The result has been a small but burgeoning literature on the relationship of religious faith to the study of the past.2 As a Christian historian myself— one still trying to understand his calling after nearly two decades in the profession—I am grateful for this public discussion and have learned much from it. Yet in my opinion the participants have typically framed the conversation too narrowly. My goal in this essay is to broaden the discussion by calling other Christian historians’ attention to an often overlooked aspect of our calling. Implicitly, at least, we have typically asked, “What does it mean to be faithful to our callings as Christian historians as we labor within the academy?” The qualifier, unfortunately, allows us to ignore the tension between our responsibilities to the academic community, on the one hand, and to our communities of faith, on the other. I have come to believe that, as a Christian historian, I am called not only to labor within the academy as a Christian, but also to labor within the church as an historian. Because historians have paid Don’t Forget the Church   281 considerable attention to the former, the reflections that follow concentrate on the latter: why I believe that Christian historians are called to serve the church, why I think we so often overlook this dimension of our calling, and, above all, what taking it more seriously might require of us, practically and specifically. A Dual Calling I take as my starting point two verses from Christian scripture, one an exhortation, the other a warning. The exhortation is found in Paul’s letter to the Christians at Rome. After explaining that the church, like the human body, has many members with different functions, the apostle concludes, “Having then gifts differing according to the grace that is given to us, let us use them” (Romans 12:6a). The warning comes from the words of Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount: “No one can serve two masters; for either he will hate the one and love the other, or else he will be loyal to the one and despise the other” (Matthew 6:24). How do these verses speak to the matter of vocation? Embedded in Paul’s exhortation to the Romans is the principle that God gives us gifts with service in mind, especially (though not exclusively) service to His church. Surely then, part of the vocation of the Christian scholar is to serve not only the academy but the church as well—as a scholar. I would not argue that every Christian historian is called to share equally in this task, much less to fulfill it in the same way—our circumstances and opportunities will vary greatly—but I think that the basic principle stands: part of the calling of the Christian historian is to be an historian for Christians, not only to have a voice in the academy but also to speak in, to, and on behalf of the church. If we take this aspect of our calling seriously, however, we will likely run head on against the values of an academic culture that is skeptical of overtly Christian reflection about the past, is dismissive of questions that tend to interest our faith communities, and is reflexively suspicious of scholarship geared toward a popular audience . Here Christ’s warning in the Sermon on the Mount speaks to us. To pursue our dual calling faithfully, we must be prepared to do so in submission to one master. 282   Robert Tracy McKenzie Based on their written works, it would appear that Christian historians in the United States have not spent much time thinking about their responsibilities to the church. The most pointed allusion that I have come across is now three decades old. In the introduction to an essay on approaches to the study of early American history, Mark Noll presented Christian historians with the following challenge: to speak in the profession as well as to the profession, to speak to the church as well as in the...