History

By James Hennesey, SJ
The word “history” has several meanings. It refers to past actuality, to events which have in
fact occurred. It is also used of the processes of discovering, interpreting and recording past
5actuality and of the finished product of those processes. History presupposes change. Without
change there can be no history. The stuff of the historian's discipline is change. History is out
of place in a fixed universe operating according to immutable laws. From this comes a basic
uneasiness between history and at least some interpretations of theology, the one dealing with
becoming, the other with being. History's relationship to theology is further affected by the
10fact that it is conventionally restricted to the study of human beings and events and more par-
ticularly to events of significant social interaction among human beings, to their impact on
society and its impact on them. History's object is the ongoing story of the continuing human
community, including the church community, and its mutable affairs.
The historian strives for objectivity, to recreate in words and with the help of visual aids,
15statistics, graphs, charts and the like, the human past as it actually was. Scholastic
philosophers developed the notion of "historical certitude," and laid down conditions for its
attainment, but it is "objectivity "that has rather been the historian's admittedly elusive goal.
Nineteenth-century German historian Leopold von Ranke set the historian's task as that of
recording the past as it actually happened, but subjective factors inevitably affect each stage in
20the historical process from the initial choice of topic down to the final presentation. While
careful attention to received scientific method can produce a measure of scholarly agreement,
conclusions reached by individual historians are influenced by their differing preoccupations
and prejudices, their competence, personal degree of involvement with the subject-matter, and
other factors. The line separating subjective interpretation from objective research is thin and
25porous. This reality often discomfited theologians, particularly in eras like that of the mid-
nineteenth century when preoccupation with certitude seemed to outdistance concern for truth.
There are other reasons why the study of the history of the church finds an uneasy home
among the theological disciplines. Several take the form of replies to the question, "What is
the 'church' in church history?" The whole Christian church down the centuries and across the
30world? A specific tradition—Catholic, Orthodox, one of the Reformation groupings—within
that totality? One specific denomination? What meaning is intended by terms such as
"Roman" or "Catholic?" What importance is given to factors arising from Christianity's geo-
graphical spread (or concentration) and its presence within various cultures? A second line of
questions follows. Some historians focus on church leaders, and much church history, both of
35Roman Catholicism and of other Christian bodies, has been written in those terms. But the late
twentieth-century vogue for statistically fortified social history has combined with the image
of the church as "people of God" popularized by the Second Vatican Council to generate a
new "people's history" approach which, in addition to the inevitable statistical tables, pays
closer attention to popular piety and belief, to devotional life and to artistic, architectural and
40musical manifestations of the religion of Christians.
A further conflict is between acceptance that the church is mystery—and thus beyond
historical consideration—and the fact that it is also a human institution, manifested in
radically contingent fashion and subject to the actions and passions of the men and women
who make it up. Should the church historian use the same historico-critical methods as does
45the secular historian? The question, answered affirmatively by many contemporary church
historians of all denominations, has been answered negatively by others, for whom the
church's past must be seen as that of a pilgrim people with a Christian world-view, conscious
of a particular origin, mission and destiny, achieving its goal through the action of God in

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 history.
There are echoes here of the "substantialist" or "classicist" approach prevalent throughout
most of the Christian era. It allows for only accidental external changes in the church's
passage through history. In the case of Roman Catholicism, this concept produced an image of
5the church which emphasized order and unchangeableness. In terms of teaching, Vincent of
Lerins canonized this mindset when he set the norm of what has been believed everywhere,
always and by everyone. A new charter came for the church historian with Vatican II's move-
ment away from an exclusively conceptual approach to theology to an emphasis on the
biblical-historical. The contemporary Catholic historian focuses on the being and faith of the
10church, a tradition .understood as dynamic, which comes from the apostles [and] develops in
the church with the help of the Holy Spirit.
Many early church histories were mere chronicles, a style which lasted into the middle
ages and still recurs. Other writers, more properly theologians of history than historians,
interpreted the human story as a sacred one of progressive stages toward the fulfillment of
15all things in Christ at the parousia. Augustine of Hippo and imitators in subsequent ages
elaborated schemes demonstrating the working out of the divine plan in time, studying
humanity specifically as God's creation with the Incarnation at the center of its earthly
pilgrimage. History for them was made intelligible precisely because guided by a
transcendent Providence, with God as origin and goal. History itself was the tale not only
20of human deeds, but preeminently of the actions of God whose will directed every event.
The orientation of a given historian's theological anthropology weighed heavily in historical
interpretation. Those unduly influenced by Augustinian pessimism sometimes slipped over
into the approach called "primitivism" or "decline-history," picturing the world in conflict
between light and darkness, with the latter prevailing. The assumption made was of a decline
25from an earlier golden age. In more extreme forms which saw the historical process as one of
continuous decay, decline-history was characteristic of medieval Cathar heretics. The more
general Christian approach was marked by cautious optimism, seeing in human history the
slow but sure advance of Christ's kingdom.
Since the Renaissance, emphasis on the individuality and particularity of human persons and
30events, and on free will and its consequences in the understanding of historical reality, have
all contributed to the theologians' uneasiness with historical study. Historians for their part
found increasing significance in their awareness of the constant change taking place in church
government, structure, thought and religious expression, as well as in the fact that a western
Christianity torso many centuries a European religion, had become indigenous to all the in-
35habited continents. This set ill with those for whom church history was valued for its
entertainment potential or as a source of "exempla" or "proof texts" to dress up already
arrived-at conclusions.
More positive challenges came from several quarters. The canonists were old adversaries
whose twelfth-century triumph in western Christianity was a profoundly anti-historical event.
40Revival in the late nineteenth century of an essentialist-leaning scholasticism struck no less a
blow at history's place in the theological spectrum. Despite theories of the organic growth of
the church proposed by theologians at Tübingen, and of development of doctrine advanced by
John Henry Newman, mainline Roman Catholic theology rejected the dynamism offered by
history, which was seen as leading to "historicism," the relativization of all reality. The issue
45was a major component of the turn-of-the-century "modernist" crisis and of later attacks on
the "new theology" of post-World War II France, which had as a major element emphasis on
return to Christian sources.
The Second Vatican Council's Constitution on Divine Revelation (c. II, n. 8) provided a

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 charter which drew the church historian as never before into the heart of the Catholic
theological enterprise. "Tradition," it became clear, was no arcane treasure trove of
prepositional statements of revelation waiting enunciation, but an understanding arising from
and discerned in the life, thought and worship of God's people down the ages and around the
5world. The council also declared that "this tradition which comes from the apostles develops
in the church with the help of the Holy Spirit." Teaching, life, worship as they change and
develop over time and place, these are the proper object of church historical study. Revelation,
in the thought of Vatican II, is not seen, as a scholastic concatenation of a series of
prepositional truths. A sense of history has been recovered. God makes himself known by
10both deeds and words. It is in contemplation of the life and the worship, as well as the
thought, of the Christian community down the centuries and in its global extent, that God is
known. The historian does not claim to discern the tradition, only to aid in its discernment.
Historians are aware that there is a distinction between "the tradition" and the plural traditions,
which may be distorting as well as legitimate. In helping to discern the difference the historian
15makes his/her chief contribution to the overall theological enterprise.
Bibliography: R.G. Collingwood, The Idea of History, New York: Oxford University Press,
1956. Jaroslav Pelikan, Historical Theology: Continuity and Change in Christian Doctrine,
New York/Philadelphia/ London: Corpus/Westminister/Hutchinson, 1971.
Source: Komonchak/Collins/Lane, The New Dictionary of Theology.

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