We Are Who We Think We Were: Christian History and Christian Ethics

1. Landscapes of Historiography in Christian Social Ethics

1 Landscapes of Historiography in Christian Social Ethics From William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet to Søren Kierkegaard’s Diary of the Seducer to Julius Epstein’s 1942 screenplay Casablanca, Western audiences have long been in love with the literary motif of love.1 We cannot seem to get enough of the romance, strife, and embodied desire that these works elucidate. They fill our souls with a deeply rooted sense of interconnectedness while attesting to the passion and embodied-ness that accompany human experience. And regardless of their outcome—whether tragedy, repulsion, or romance, as in the case with the above listed titles—these works of love invoke the audience to enter into the intimate spaces existing between lover and beloved. In a similar way, this book peers into the intimate spaces that exist between historiography and Christian social ethics. The discipline currently known as Christian social ethics emerged on the academic scene in the United States at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century. Its key players were not ethicists but philosophers, theologians, and practitioners who expressed deep concerns over the deplorable effects of industrialization in their communities and around the world. These first “ethicists” and those who would follow drew heavily from the historical resources of the Christian tradition in order to recapture, reclaim, and renew the true essence of Christianity. In so doing, they cultivated an intimate relationship between ethical discourse and historical analysis wherein the current conditions of injustice could be corrected by better aligning with the true spirit, or religion, of Christianity. 1. William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet, (Oxford: Clarendon, 1972); Søren Kierkegaard, “Diary of a Seducer,” in Either/Or A, ed. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong, vol. 3 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987); Julius Epstein et al., Casablanca, ed. Hal B. Wallis and Jack L. Warner, film (USA: Warner Brothers, 1942). 1 While certainly lacking the romantic contexts of such great narratives such as Romeo and Juliet, the present work does explore many of the conditions of human experience, both past and present. It also calls the reader to participate in its logic and passion by advocating a new historical methodology for Christian ethics that is equally as adept at self-criticism as it is at textually based historical analysis. The intimate space between ethics and history is much like the intimate space between two lovers: personal convictions are felt so deeply that the boundaries separating rationality and emotional pathos are fused into a singular horizon. Entering these intimate spaces must be done with great caution and intentionality so as not to isolate artificially the rational from the pathos or to script them with external grand narratives and false continuities. Ultimately, an encounter in these intimate spaces will illuminate the methodological conventions and historical constructions resulting from the lovers’ embrace. Based on the general observation that the way we access the past largely influences the types of ethics we espouse, this work identifies and critiques the most dominant or normatively employed historiographic trajectories operative within Christian social ethics. Only afterward does it provide theoretical guidance for a more conscientious or critically reflective ethical historiography. Great attention should be devoted to the issues involved with historical (re)construction to the extent that the intimacy between history and ethics remains normative. More specifically, this book argues that, since we tend to look to the past to supply meaning for our identity and action in the present, we ethicists must relax our grip on outdated and limited historiographic techniques in order to unveil the determinative ideological commitments fueling our interpretations of history. Once this work is underway, we must interrogate the ethical consequences of our historiographies to see how well they are shaped by and incorporate the voices of the poor and marginalized who have been traditionally silenced, neglected, and rejected from normative ethical-historical discourses. Important to this thesis is the realization that histories are neither created ex nihilo by present scholars nor exist in any pristine state but are the product of multiple linguistic and contextual variants. While many “marginal” ethicists have not taken for granted their approaches to history, many more “dominant” ethicists assume the naturalness of theirs.2 Largely but not exclusively comprised of white, middle-class, heterosexual males, these “dominant” ethicists approach history as if history was self-evident and there for the taking. Dominant ethicists, myself included, must courageously enter those deep and intimate spaces between history and ethics and expose them...