The Rise of Historical Consciousness among the Christian Churches ed. by Kenneth L. Parker and Erick H. Moser (review)

This collection of eight essays, along with an excellent introduction by Kenneth Parker, stemmed from papers presented at the American Academy of Religion's Working Group on the Rise of Historical Consciousness.

This reviewer began reading this book—truth be told—with some wariness, as entire Amazonian rainforests have disappeared to provide pages for studies of historical consciousness and its impact on Western religion generally and Christian theology in particular. The fear was that these essays would simply rehash earlier studies purporting to explain why historical consciousness (a slippery term in the best of circumstances) was a good thing, a bad thing, or an indifferent thing for Christianity in the North Atlantic world. In the event, these fears proved groundless, as this is a quite important collection of essays that is now required reading for any scholar of religion and culture who studies the problem of historical consciousness and its impact on Christian practice and belief.

As Kenneth Parker notes so well in the introduction to these essays, the historicizing of religious experience is often treated as "the emancipation of humanity from the tyranny of religious authority and the advent of a new era, governed by rigorous rational investigation, culminating in knowledge based on historical 'facts'" (p. 1). He also notes that it has been commonly assumed that the rise of historicism and the consciousness associated with it was largely the product of the Enlightenment era, as the logical end result of the emergence of rationalist "secularity and the elevation of human rationality above dogmatic belief systems" (p. 1).

The essays in this collection offer a very different narrative of historical consciousness and its emergence in western Europe by offering two key insights: first, they offer convincing proof that the emergence of historical consciousness as a factor in interpreting the Christian tradition was not an external threat pioneered by Enlightenment thinkers like Voltaire. Rather, the emergence of historical consciousness was an early-modern paradigm shift pioneered by Christian scholars very much committed to strengthening Christian belief systems. Second, these essays explore how the rise of historical consciousness contributed to an internal ecclesial debate among Christian theologians who championed the autonomy of scholarly critique and church leaders who sought to maintain the authority of traditional dogmatic claims in the face of challenges pressed not by rationalist philosophes but by seminary professors within church institutions sponsored by their own ecclesial communities. Thus the word among in this collection's title functions as the operative word, giving a sense of the collection's direction and overall argument.

These two insights alter the traditional narrative of historical consciousness by showing how this battle over historical consciousness was a Christian phenomenon internal to religious communities—an internal debate within churches focused on how to accommodate critical scholarship that was produced to foster—not to attack—religious belief. The critical period for the rise of this consciousness was not the eighteenth century (usually posited as the culprit) but rather the sixteenth century, with Erasmus (and not the Enlightenment materialists) playing the central role. Erasmus's contempt for what we now call the "Middle Ages" led him to posit a rupture and discontinuity between his own age and the centuries when scholastic theology dominated the intellectual landscape. Indeed, Erasmus's historicization of St. Jerome's Vulgate Bible—illustrating the problems of Jerome's translation and the corruptions in the text considered "normative" for centuries in Western Europe—played a decisive role in the rise of historical consciousness among Western Christians.

These essays offer a new and compelling narrative in understanding where historical consciousness stands as a challenge to Christian belief and practice, casting the battle as a family feud more than an attack from hostile outsiders. Parker's very fine introduction to the collection; his essay...