The Nude Madonna

Books & Culture ran my reflections on a recent trip to New York and New Haven today, which might also be called The Liturgical Consummation of Hipsterdom, or (to reach the Reformed demographic) How Michael Horton Saved Me from Despair.  As it happens, it's entitled Occupy the Optocracy! to coincide with May Day protests, but John Wilson's alternate title above is perhaps most apt.

Nuancing the Post-Secular

Three things that the religious turn mentioned below, so far as I can tell, does not mean:

1.  Academia's religious turn does not mean that the prejudice against religion in higher education has gone away.  In fact, the new situation might intensify this prejudice among those who are particularly uncomfortable with, unprepared for, or even angered by recent developments.  The new interest in religion is in no way universal.  New books emphasizing the secular could be added to the ones I listed, even if they are not as numerous.  As I suggested, the interest in religion is one facet, albeit a rather significant one, in a much more complex condition, which it is beyond the powers of a blog to reveal.

2.  Academia's religious turn does not mean that religious academic communities - Christian colleges, for example - are automatically ahead of the curve.  At its best, Christian academia functions as a haven from anti-religious prejudice where serious scholarship can occur (hence guild standards still apply).  At its worst, Christian academia offers a haven from broader academia's more serious standards as well; and there is no reason to think that wider academic interest in religion will somehow remedy that situation.  But should such standards be held to (without forsaking the "emic" edge), the new scenario could put certain religious academic communities ahead of the curve, provided they invest the necessary resources into research in addition to teaching, thereby both exploiting and enhancing the current situation.

3.  Academia's religious turn does not mean that a scholarly emphasis on religion is entirely new.  How can scholarship that claims to seriously study human culture consistently ignore, dismiss, explain away or suppress a phenomenon as massive as religion?  Yet in many sectors it did.  Consequently, the religious "turn" is in some ways a return to normative scholarship, an inevitable fraying of a calculated prejudice which it took a great deal of energy to uphold - energy than many are simply tired of expending.

That is all, dear readers. 

Post-Secular Academia: A Present Reality

If you don't think academia has gone religious you either 1) haven't been there in a while, 2) are pretending to ignore such an obvious development or 3) are part of a religious subculture invested in the notion of "secular academia" as a foil that galvanizes institutional identity, justifies a lack of engagement, and rallies donors who don't know better.

But what about the rise of programs in secularism?  Doesn't this disprove academia's supposed "religious turn"?  Quite the opposite.  Previously, the entire university flew under the banner of secularism.  Now, the secular perspective has been historicized and relegated to one field among others (exactly what once happened to religion).  Needless to say, secularism continues to have a legitimate place in the modern university, but it now has to be chosen.  The title of one recent publication says it all: The American University in the Postsecular Age.  Indeed, new superstructures of post-secular discourse are being swiftly erected, as evidenced by the invigorating discussions on sites such as the Immanent Frame.

To offer more evidence for this phenomenon, I best limit myself to the field of my terminal credentials: art history.  The secular narrative of art history goes...  or better, went like this:  Art and religion were once inseparable, but as the modern world progressed, art and religion grew further apart.  This simplistic narrative has not disappeared, but it has been profoundly destabilized by countless recent publications.  I try to get the word out about this every year or so, but because the evidence is almost as overwhelming as the determination to ignore it, here we go again.

Consider a brief tour through some recent publications.  Strangely, even ostensibly Christian medieval art required a corrective, leading to The Mind’s Eye: Art and Theological Argument in the Middle Ages (2005), a research path continued, to choose just one example, by Translating Truth (2011).  Meyer Schapiro's secularizing read of Romanesque sculpture has been undone in the discipline's journal of record, to the frustration of many.  The theological turn in Byzantine art is most evidenced in the translation of Pavel Florensky, whose thought is developed (not just regurgitated) in Clemena Antonova's Space, Time, Presence in the Icon (2010).

The undoing of Jacob Burckhardt’s secular Renaissance has been going on for decades, resulting in Christianity and the Renaissance (1990) and a host of more recent specialized studies giving special attention to religion such as The Controversy of Renaissance Art (2011) or The Vision and the Visionary in Raphael (2011), among others. The Baroque and beyond has enjoyed an overhaul with The Sacred Image in the Age of Art (2011), Rembrandt’s Faith (2009), or Sacred Spain: Art and Belief in the Spanish World (2010).

Contrary to popular perceptions, religious art flourished in the age of Enlightenment, a fact thoroughly documented by Art and Religion in Eighteenth Century Europe (2009).  The suppressed religious art of Romanticism has been recovered as well, leading to Representing Belief: Religion, Art, and Society in Nineteenth Century France (1992), Painting the Sacred in the Age of Romanticism (2009), or Painting the Bible: Representation and Belief in Mid-Victorian Britain (2006).  My colleague Rick Gibson explains that the same thing has been going on in the literature of this era, as evidence by The Romantic Reformation (1997).  In the realm of American art, Sally Promey encapsulated her field when she wrote the seminal article, “The ‘Return’ of Religion in Scholarship of American Art” (2003), a direction pursued further, for example, by George Inness and the Science of Landscape (2007).

Even the most doggedly secular of these sub-disciplines – the dominant field of contemporary art – has confessed its secular predicament and called, however halfheartedly, for change, as evidenced by Re-Enchantment (2008).  The big bad October crowd, sometimes accused of ignoring religion, appear to be loosening their secular grip as well.  In the second volume of of Art Since 1900 (2011), Benjamin Buchloh refers to Bill Viola’s “reinvesting representation with mythological imagery, even religious experience…" and Hal Foster speaks of “cultic reenchantment." It would be easy to overplay such prose, but just as easy to ignore it.  The article that led to Antonova's book subtitled Seeing the World with the Eyes of God, interestingly enough, first appeared in October.  In short, the pomo reaction to dry formalism and hard-headed historicism has fizzled, and the ensuing vacuum is being at least partially filled with God.

Again, none of this is to suggest that the secular take on art has evaporated, that this interest in religion is fully informed (let alone traditional), or that the authors of the above publications are necessarily religious themselves.  Indeed, many of the authors make no claim of belief whatsoever, even while they emphasize the faith of others in their scholarship.  But if we were to include those who do profess faith, the list of religiously-minded perspectives on art grows, I remind you, downright unmanageable. 

For those without the time to catch up on this growing reading list, a cross-section of the above developments are captured by Timothy Gorringe's Earthly Visions: Theology and the Challenges of Art (2011), reviewed by your scribe not long ago in First Things (I'm happy to send a copy to anyone interested).  In an impressive display of academic Aikido, Gorringe does not ignore or refuse the secular, but offers a "positive appreciation of secularity...  [which is] part and parcel of Christian revelation."  If Gorringe is right, then saying (as a secular art historian of yore once did) that “religious tutelage had to be broken” for the still life or landscape genre to emerge, is like saying that Christ, because he employed chaff, fields and coins in his parables, was necessarily an atheist. Gorringe conceptualizes a domain - more terrifying to some than the apocalypse itself - where "the secular as an autonomous 'godless' sphere simply disappears."

Graduate methodology courses in humanities used to triumphantly culminate with gender, sexuality, and race. But the religious turn renders this crescendo penultimate, especially considering that feminism and multiculturalism have found a new - and arguably more lasting - warrant under religious sponsorship. As I suggested, all of this is especially inconvenient for the remaining secularists and, strangely enough, for religious folk committed to the old arrangement as well.  Academia going religious means that we religious people might no longer be able to justify ignoring it.  And yet, the "emic" (as opposed to "etic") approach from actual believers - and the debates that such approaches generate - can help ensure that this recent turn of academic fashion remains interesting enough to last. 

ADDENDUM: Please don't neglect to nuance the post-secular.

The Pro-Raphaelite Brotherhood

The way to correct an "art" (as oppose to icon) centered account of the history of images is not to denigrate the Renaissance, but to show how the icon pervaded it.  To give one of many examples of this scholarly strategy, here's Christian Kleinbub on Raphael:

Raphael's Transfiguration... does lead the viewer on a spiritual journey. The painting explicitly addresses the three varieties of vision that arise repeatedly in discussions of the contemplation of God.  The lower zone of the composition shows the struggle of external (corporeal) and internal (imaginary) vision in the confrontation of the apostles and the possessed boy's party, while the Tabor scene above shows the historical and imaginary vision of Christ himself, who satisfied the internal vision of the apostles below and also points beyond it....   Light falls on Christ's face from beyond the frame: it is the divine light of intellectual vision, the luce etterna of the Godhead...

Raphael's Transfiguration... in its sense of stillness, symmetrical setting, and iconic aspect, may well refer to traditional iconic images. The Renaissance viewer might even have assumed that the prominence of Christ's face carried a meaning like those more traditional works, referring like a symbol to the vision of the invisible God...

This devotional aspiration of Raphael's Transfiguration is remarkable in an age in which altarpieces were shedding some of the outward trappings of their more contemplative functions. Iconic altarpieces - where devotion of the kind described by [Nicholas of] Cusa might be centered and anticipated by static hierarchical forms - were being replaced by altarpieces that mainly depicted istoria comprising energetic narrative scenes.  Raphael, in fact, was one of the leaders of this movement, creating one of the first fully historiated altarpieces of the Renaissance in his Entombment...

But between Raphael's Transfiguration and almost all other Renaissance religious images lies an important difference, for Raphael's altarpiece does not simply invite but also describes the process by which the  mind is turned to internal vision of God.  Directly engaging the problem of how the icon can be used spiritually, it deploys its actors so that they do not merely play out their narrational roles but also enact  or figure  the very activity of contemplation in gestural terms...  The Transfiguration harmonized both narrative and iconic aspects of contemporary altarpieces, offering the marriage of the istoria, and all that the istoria stood for, to the spiritual function of the altarpiece through an unprecedented thematization of the stages of contemplative seeing.

That from Kleinbub's book Vision and the Visionary. The upshot is that the very thing the Pre-Raphaelites were looking for could be found...  in Raphael.

Architecture as Theology

I take the scholarship of Margaret Barker with a hefty grain of salt. But the freshness in passages like this is undeniable:

The Mosaic tabernacle, and all the temples later built in Jerusalem, represented the creation, divided by a veil into the visible and invisible worlds.  The holy of holies, with the golden chariot throne, was the invisible world of God and the angels.  It was the state of uncreated light.  The veil, woven from four colours to represent the four elements, thus represented matter screening the glory of God from the material world.  The holy of holies was beyond matter, and therefore beyond time, a hidden place, often called eternity.  The great hall of the temple represented the material world, and was the garden of Eden, paradise, with Adam, the human being, as the high priest.  Rituals in the holy of holies were rituals in eternity, and those who entered the holy of holies passed between heaven and earth.  The priests were angels; the high priest was the Lord.

I often point out to my students that the Bible begins (Babel) and ends (New Jerusalem) with architectural criticism.  Barker reminds us that the Bible is centered on architecture as well.  The Bible's extended architectural descriptions are not sidelines.  They are part of the revelation on Sinai, and are properly theological.  To study architecture is therefore to study theology - something that many (most?) architectural historians and theologians are conditioned to overlook.

Freud was Right

R.R. Reno in the current First Things: 

It seems not to have occurred to Freud that his wish to live without illusions may have been so powerful as to have clouded his reason and infected his arguments about wish fulfillment. After all, his strong desire to live without illusions will, according to his own theory, have the effect of conjuring illusions—illusions of illusions, if you will—that provide him with something to debunk and unmask.

The tendency of the New Atheists to conjure caricatures of Christianity that they can destroy with their arguments suggests that the same dynamic of wish fulfillment holds for them as well. And not just for them. Our postmodern [perhaps better: supermodern] professoriate manages to find racism, patriarchy, and oppression everywhere. They do so with such sure ease that I find myself wondering if they are in the end, as Freud warns, using the rhetoric of critical thinking to support their illusions—illusions in this case arising from an intense wish to be critically and morally superior.

One Testimony About Race

Earlier this month I witnessed a level of racial unity that was downright staggering.  It happened along Roosevelt Road, far away from Wheaton, IL, whose college is now embroiled in a relatively hopeful conversation about race.  It was at Holy Family Catholic Church in Chicago.  I was there for art historical research, and upon arrival, I braced myself for the sad spectacle of a onetime thriving religious community now inhabited by a handful of elderly worshippers whispering the rosary.  What I witnessed, instead, was ethnic harmony nearly amounting to theistic proof.  The traditional Catholic Mass (from which, of course, I abstained) was infused with sublime African-American "rhythm and praise" singing from a mixed-race choir that, because of disciplined, expert leadership, nearly moved me to tears. The passing of the peace, in a packed congregation of various ethnicities (in relatively even numbers), lasted for fifteen minutes.  The sermon, delivered by a white priest, included a moving biography of the African American Chicago sculptor Marion Perkins, whose abstractly black Christ presides over the Art Institute's American galleries.  This experience was a reminder that supposedly "white" liturgical worship and "black" spontaneous worship is a characterization which is itself arguably racist.  These styles can and should blend into one another, support one another, as they do at Holy Family.

This was not a first-time experience.  We've been encouraged at Wheaton to testify about race as part of our campus conversation, and so, one professor's story:  Being raised in a primarily white context ensconced me in what is called an "unmarked category" - being the norm without quite realizing it.  And yet, because of, and I think only because of, a teenage evangelical conversion I was repeatedly catapulted from my suburban context into inner city Philadelphia, thereupon directing a summer camp for primarily African American youth for several years.  This continued at Wheaton, where I took an "African American Experience" class which, believe it or not, was not just a "token" part of the curriculum but actually helped, as did countless trips to Chicago and my (far more normative than is assumed) involvement in Pentecostalism.

There can be no racial reconciliation without genuine affection, and these experiences - not unusual for white evangelicals - slowly generated that affection, which in turn influenced employment. After college, I worked for a North Philly Middle School, and then for a church that effectively partnered with a black congregation in Chester, PA, a partnership which worked past the honeymoon stage toward serious interdependence.  I even met Al Sharpton.  I have heard Anglican liturgical worship described at Wheaton as upper class snobbery.  But on one occasion, deep in the heart of Chester, I witnessed a black man spontaneously pour his heart out to God in a way that seamlessly blended with the evening vespers of Thomas Cranmer's Book of Common Prayer.  I say all this not to unfurl a diversity CV, but simply to show how involvement with the church does not magically cure, but frequently counteracts the racism that inevitably accompanies an overwhelmingly white suburban upbringing. 

But then something horrible happened - I went to graduate school.  Over nearly a decade I heard race talked about often, maybe too often.  Racism was often presented as so hopelessly pervasive that my church-based experiences described above were effectively nullified.   I was squeezed into a guilt-laced, canned "conversation about race" which did grow tiresome and predictable.  It often smacked of what one friend calls "opportunistic indignation," an indignation which ram-rods certain agendas that might not otherwise pass.  I was supposed to believe that a fabulously wealthy community accessed only through a high series of hurdles somehow knew more about race than the black communities in Trenton only ten miles away, with which - through the church - I was still involved.  In the last week at Wheaton College, many students of different races have expressed their fatigue about the race conversation even before they arrived on campus.  I believe this to be fatigue about this particular kind of conversation, when multiculturalism, as the novelist P.D. James suggested, becomes proxy faith.  The tragic irony is that this kind of discussion can actually breed a seething racism all the stronger for being only secretly expressed.

Throughout graduate school, the only place I experienced consistent interracial harmony was, predictably, at the conservative evangelical Christian Missionary Alliance church, whose diversity naturally followed from their preaching of the gospel alongside strategically varied worship.  Despite scorn from more "enlightened" Episcopal churches that incessantly talked about race, it was the only the conservative Anglican church an hour away that boasted anything like a truly integrated congregation.  As Newbigin understood, real multiculturalism has everything to do with the gospel.  "Seek ye first the kingdom of God, and all these things [diversity among them], will be added unto you."

I am cheered that at a place like Wheaton College there is middle ground between church and academy on this issue, because there simply may not be any other way ahead.  It's not that "academic" conversations about race are necessarily unhelpful.  But for real progress, an internalized grammar of repentance and forgiveness is the prerequisite, and this Wheaton has in spades.  Yes, we (and I) have a long way to go, even very long.  But by so going we are not finally "catching up" with the more advanced state of the broader academic community.  I doubt that broader academic community has stairwell confessions or spontaneous circles of singing students gathering before the chapels with which it has dispensed!

The fact that not all race conversations are created equal calls to mind a story once related by Richard John Neuhaus:

William Willimon, former chaplain at Duke and now a United Methodist bishop, invited Jerry Falwell to speak. He did it on a dare, not expecting Falwell to accept. But Falwell showed up...  On the appointed evening, the student crowd was baited for bear. One of the first questions was, "How many African Americans do you have at your Liberty University?" "Young lady," said Falwell, "you could not have asked a question that hurts me more deeply." He went on about how hard he had worked over the years to recruit minority students and how he regularly discussed the matter with Coretta Scott King. "She told me not to be so consumed with the problem. But I can't help myself."

He finally allowed that only 12 percent of the students at Liberty are African Americans. Then he asked, "Do you know, by the way, how many African Americans are enrolled at Duke?" No response. Falwell said, "I'll tell you. Six percent. Six percent! Your endowment is 50 times bigger than ours. You have had years to work on this issue (though admittedly you spent half your life as a racially segregated school). In fact, I struggled with whether the Lord wanted me to come here tonight to a school that, though you have been given great gifts, has such a poor record of minority enrollment. I pray that you will let the Lord help you do better in this area."

At least on the issue of race, Wheaton College may have a lot to learn from Liberty University.

Chapel tweets (unfortunately encouraged by our chapel's gangly, living room stadium architecture), may have started all of this - but they can also help fix it.  Here's one from a theology professor:  "The Father is not the Son is not the Spirit. God loves difference. " This is not to over-theologize a controversy, but to show the basis upon which our conversation will, and already has, progressed.  This kind of talk does not fatigue but energizes, simply because it's part of the always energizing gospel.  Wheaton College can justly celebrate the difference in the way we talk about difference - so very different from institutions whose faith has, under the banner of "diversity," been systematically de-activated.  While at Holy Family before this all began, I found myself lamenting how much I miss by not worshiping in an ethnically even environment.  But I'm encouraged by the ethnically accurate, Jewish Jesus that I see each Sunday at All Souls Church painted by Wheaton Professor Joel Sheesley, and I'll admit to being excited that the Spirit of reconciliation is working its way down Roosevelt Road.

Mortal Coils Revisited

Chavez's phosphorescent choreography, however exciting, is also unsettling. Thinking about her work over the last week induced a slight case of vertigo.  Counter-balance was called for, reminding us of the humdrum holiness of the body as we experience it now.  Yes, the resurrected Christ walked through walls, but the Lutheran Ubiquitists - who argued that Christ's resurrected body was universally dispersed - may have gone too far.  He also ate fish, and iconophile theologians rightfully insisted on his body's circumscription after the tomb as well.  The Wheaton Art Department conveniently provided just this kind of complement with a lecture by Judith Raphael last week, whose paintings are still on display in Adams Hall.

Raphael is also inspired by Hubble Space telescope imagery, but she contrasts the amorphous starbursts with our ordinary frames - the anthropic principle in paint.  Raphael's work recalls neglected Eastern thinkers such as Gregory of Palamas who tirelessly emphasized embodiment both in theory and in the practice of prayer - the original Christian yogis.  "The hesychast," wrote John Climacus in contrast to Shirley MacLaine, "is one who seeks to circumscribe the incorporeal body."

Not to say that Chavez would deny this, or that Judith Raphael is necessarily bound by traditional Renaissance painting.  She described her "medieval eye" which - happily - can't submit to the laws of perspective.  (As Pavel Florensky points out in his brilliant work on the matter, the best Renaissance artists didn't either.)  Between Chavez's destabilizing of stereotyped bodies, and the everyday innocence of Raphael's skydiving adolescents, one has the makings of a nearly Signorellian theology of our resurrected bodies to come.

There's one more lecture in this series to go.

University of Chicago on Tuesday

Ocular Rehab

In the mid-twelfth century, Abbot Suger gave us Gothic architecture.  He had these words inscribed on the door of the first Gothic structure, St. Denis:  "Bright is the noble work; but, being nobly bright, the work should brighten the minds, so that they may travel, through the true lights, to the True Light where Christ is the true door....  In seeing this light [the mind] is resurrected from its former submersion."

Those words, combining Christian light mysticism with thoughts of the resurrection, also fit a thrilling talk given at Wheaton College yesterday by Lia Chavez, who might be a contemporary Abbess Suger of sorts.  Her rebelliously non-digital photography (no photoshop!) plays with light as an expression of True Light, but also with dance, the body, and the resurrected body.

Our diseased visual culture catechizes well.  Horror movies display scattered body parts juxtaposed with whole bodies meant to seduce.  Chavez's work might be understood as an attempt to rehabilitate our troubled eyes.  Body parts are sufficiently disjointed to prevent objectification; and yet they are anything but gruesome, suggesting beauty and the possibilities of renewed forms yet to come: A tutorial in seeing the body anew with a wonder that is innocent.

Chavez's work is informed by the Apostle Paul's thoughts on the resurrection to come.  When speculating about that body, Origen - because of his Late Antique cosmology - surmised that we might be spheres.  Chavez - after brushing up on contemporary astrophysics - imagines those bodies to be closer to something like dance.  Such speculations are only dangerous if they cease to be speculative.  We will be more, not less human - but the details have yet to be announced. "It doth not yet appear what we shall be" (1 John 3:2).

Skipping a Generation

What better way to infuse some fresh voices into the unmappable Christianity & art conversation than by temporarily bypassing (my) Generation X?  I'm rather thrilled about a new series at CIVA by my students last semester, the first one by Callie McKenzie on the irrepressible metaphysics of Charles Baudelaire. There shall be a more.

We are the 90%

Friday afternoon is Habermas Happy Hour here at millinerd.  Warm up with Hart on Pinker, then read what the famous philosopher said in an interview quoted at The Chronicle:

For the normative self-understanding of modernity, Christianity has functioned as more than just a precursor or a catalyst.  Universalistic egalitarianism, from which sprang the ideals of freedom and a collective life in solidarity, the autonomous conduct of life and emancipation, the individual morality of conscience, human rights, and democracy, is the direct legacy of the Judaic ethic of justice and the Christian ethic of love. 

But what about the Greeks?  According to Diogenes Allen, the Greek notion of justice, even in its most exalted form as found in Plato, "failed to notice the distress of the helpless in a society in which 90 percent of the people were slaves." 

Art History: The Practical Major

Those who suggest an art history major is necessarily impractical need to update their census data and learn something more about the economy. Virginia Postrel explains, in How art history majors power the U.S. economy, an article that also appeared in today's Washington Post.  Some highlights:

The higher-education system does have real problems, including rising tuition prices that may not pay off in higher earnings. But those problems won’t be solved by assuming that if American students would just stop studying stupid subjects like philosophy and art history and buckle down and major in petroleum engineering (the highest-paid major), the economy would flourish and everyone would have lucrative careers.  That message not only ignores what students actually study. It also disregards the diversity and dynamism of the economy, in good times as well as bad.

The critics miss the enormous diversity of both sides of the labor market. They tend to be grim materialists, who equate economic value with functional practicality. In reality, however, a tremendous amount of economic value arises from pleasure and meaning — the stuff of art, literature, psychology and anthropology. These qualities, built into goods and services, increasingly provide the work for all those computer programmers. And there are many categories of jobs, from public relations to interaction design to retailing, where insights and skills from these supposedly frivolous fields can be quite valuable.

Postrel does not mince words. The stereotypical wisdom about college majors "misses the complexity and diversity of occupations in a modern economy, forgets the dispersed knowledge of aptitudes, preferences and job requirements that makes labor markets work, and ignores the profound uncertainty about what skills will be valuable not just next year but decades in the future."  In other words, supposedly hard-headed wisdom about what you're "supposed" to major in just isn't hard-headed enough.

Some thoughts on Marilynne Robinson and what we Americans might call native Radical Orthodoxy over yonder.

The Gift of the Guild

Having just finished graduate school, I'm beginning to see more clearly how much I needed it.  Early on I designed a makeshift one-man historiographical seminar, comprised of Herbert Butterfield, Kenneth Scott Latourette's remarkable presidential address, some Christopher Dawson, and any other books I could put together that espoused a "Christian" view of history, whatever that might mean.  George Marsden's and Mark Noll's work played in as well, and a bit later, this little volume came in quite handy.  I'm deeply indebted, however, to Wilfred McClay for providing the capstone to this homemade seminar in his contribution to the series of essays on offer in Confessing History.

Christopher Dawson's view of history is intoxicating, especially considering how much it informed T.S. Eliot. "Every living culture," wrote Dawson, "must possess some spiritual dynamic, which provides the energy necessary for... sustained social effort." Europe's spiritual dynamic is Christianity.  It was challenged by science, but "only through the cooperation of both these forces can Europe can realize its latent potentialities."  McClay's, however, is the best critique of Dawson I have read:

It is one thing to argue that the Christian faith is socially beneficial and even intellectual and morally plausible, but quite another to argue that it is true.  But unless men and women are convinced of the truth of the Christian faith, how can it have the culture-forming role that Dawson describes - how can it even be a 'religion' in Dawson's sense, that organizing force that constitutes a social world?  For to argue for the resurrection of religion because it is the dynamic core of the culture of the West, and the proper partner for (and opposite to) science is, at bottom, to make an argument from utility, from the standpoint of consequences rather than truth.

Even if one were to defend Dawson's rhetoric as an apologetic strategy, McClay's critique still seems to stick.

I have a copy of the very book that McClay says is so rare, Herbert Butterfield's Christianity and History, and it has been dear to me.  For Butterfield, providence, like vengeance, is God's alone, and is not necessarily the domain of the historian.  His little book concludes, "Hold to Christ, and for the rest be totally uncommitted."  McClay, however, criticizes Butterfield as well, whose historiographical detachment makes little sense of the kind of history on offer in the Bible, rife with declinist narratives and precise attributions of providential activity.  For McClay, "Butterfield did something rather similar to what the analytic philosophers of his day were doing: asserting that because nothing can be said with clarity and precision about God's activity in history, nothing should be said at all."  The middle ground between Dawson and Butterfield, between Christian cultural progressivism and the providential cloud of unknowing, is something to which I will return.

In Confessing History, George Marsden emerges as a sort of neo-Butterfieldian.  Christopher Shannon summarizes what is termed "the Marsden settlement":

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.

Though I find this rather plausible, Shannon - to put it perhaps a bit too strongly - smells a rat.  "It is my contention that in embracing naturalistic causality and the procedural norms of the historical profession, Christian historians merely trade one providentialism for another.  Where Christian historians of old once looked for the hand of the Holy Spirit, the new-model Christian history follows the naturalist quest for historical agency."  Shannon compellingly insists that we must think behind the nineteenth century:  "Christian historians should engage the profession not by adopting partisan positions on the causes of the Reformation but by exposing the real stakes of [the] debate:  The legitimation the modern secular world." 

Most essays in this volume aren't as extreme as Shannon's (which I'll confess I found appealing).  Others seek to restore a personal dimension to scholarship, as in a wonderfully moving essays by Una Cadegan (which could have availed itself of more art historical scholarship!).  But for me, the hinge paragraph, serving as a fulcrum for the sometimes conflicting essays, came from William Katerburg:

The crisis in contemporary historiography... is threefold: unresolved theoretical debates; mainstream historians who as a matter of practice ignore these debates; and a neglect of the useful, life-serving purpose of history (even though the scientific ideal that fosters this neglect has long been fragmenting).  One way through these dilemmas is to shift the focus of historical and theoretical debates form methodology and the possibility of producing stable knowledge to the purpose and meaning of historical study.  In short, a shift from epistemology to vocation.  If history is in the midst of a crisis, it is a crisis of vocation, not a crisis of epistemology.

Katerberg's very nuanced approach calls for a return to civic and ecclesial responsibility.  Confessing History's solution - if it can be said to have one - is pedagogy or perish.  Hence a focus later in the book on the classroom, on imparting virtues, caring for students, and serving the church as well as the academy.  This vocational turn emerges most clearly in Douglas Sweeney's essay:

During the mid-twentieth century, Christian scholars had to work hard to earn the respect of secular colleagues.  We devoted a great deal of energy to impressing them with our work.  We sought to acquire places of honor at the academic banquet.  But now that we have done this, a different agenda may be in order...  I am certainly not calling for a return to shoddy scholarship...  We must maintain, and even improve, our levels of academic excellence if we hope to make a difference as historians in our guild.  But rather than operate as other-directed, status conscious scholars, I hope we will finish the task of moving beyond our need for recognition and engage a bit more freely in public service that is fueled by Christian faith.

It is here that Alister Chapman's Books & Culture review is helpful.  Amidst all the important talk of meaning over monographs and pupils over the profession, "There is the question of how new this new inclination is.  Some of the engagement with postmodern thought is indeed new, but Christin historians have been committed to loving students and addressing society for a long time," Marsden and Noll among them.  In fact, Katerberg, in an interesting move, places Noll right next to Howard Zinn as a perspectivalist model for this new kind of history.  With Scandal of the Evangelical Mind (and its sequel), Noll spoke in and to his community from where he was situated, but he also - obviously - speaks in and to the profession of history with his other work as well.

Overall, it is dissatisfaction with the state of the profession (one which is by no means limited to Christian historians) that seems to animate many of Confessing History's essays. One historian complains about program envy and another (quoted anonymously) gripes about Christians who seem to have sold out to academic success.  Beth Barton Schweiger's illuminating essay affords a peek behind the academic curtain:

Graduate students learn that the hierarchy of the profession is predicated on knowledge, and not all of it is knowledge about the past.  The most powerful knowledge for students is knowledge of professional networks that will afford them fellowships, book contracts, or even the highly prized tenure-track job.  Intellectual merit is simply not enough.  In the end, scholarship is not the purely intellectual pursuit many students expected...  Historians like to cast the profession as one in which the value of ideas transcends that of cash and where wisdom is valued above power, but one of the most important lessons of graduate school is that professional history is a bureaucracy like any other.   There are careers to be made.

This, of course, is all true.  But is there any profession where it isn't?

All this is to return to McClay.  The middle-ground between Dawson's somewhat utilitarian progressivism and Butterfield's withdrawal from providential assignation is Reinhold Niehbur's view of history. 

Of the three writers under consideration [Dawson, Butterfield and Niebuhr], I suspect that Niebuhr may well be the one with the most to offer us in thinking about how a religious perspective can shed light on the present condition and future prospects of the idea of progress.  His "reflexive" outlook takes account of the virtues of both Dawson's and Butterfield's works, by acknowledging that the idea of progress is deeply rooted in the Christian Weltanschaaung and in Christian culture, but also by insisting that the misuses of the idea, including the overconfident identification of man's purposes with God's, are paradigmatic examples of sin at work - and moreover by insisting that the dynamic of progress in history, while genuine, is also by its very nature full of moral peril for us, because of the kind of being we are.

Reinhold Niebuhr (1892-1971)

Chapman's very fine review suggests that McClay's essay doesn't neatly fit into this volume.  But by applying McClay's Niebuhrian insight in that paragraph to the guild of history (or, in my case, art history), McClay's essay fits the volume well.  Niebuhr, to be sure, is not good for everything.  But we do well to bring to our guilds, which are not untouched by providence, the kind of realism that Niehbur brought to history.  To the extent that they have succeeded in countering historical misconceptions they have, however unwittingly, served God.  There has been a lot of poor history in the name of faith, and the existence of the profession of history can help Christians avoid, and correct, those mistakes.  Our academic guilds have progressed, they have been (not hopelessly) corrupted, and they are - especially now - open to correction.   It is consequently not duplicitous to, in Mark Schwein's words, "honor Chronos in our work and the Logos in our alleluias." The Lord of Chronos, after all, is Christ.

Confessing History makes clear that there are many ways to be a Christian historian, but the guild suspicion, though not present in every essay, seemed somewhat overblown.  The post-secular turn in academia makes conditioning in materialist epistemology much less of a concern than it may once have been.  The secular providentialism that Shannon rightly decries is certainly still there, but it is easily dismantled using the very guild standards that such views transgress.  Perhaps I say this because I've been professionalized, but that's a good thing, one which I'm well aware hasn't happened to me sufficiently enough.  Guild standards beat my mind into something better than it was; and because it is a mind that certainly requires more beating, there is nothing like a healthy fear of colleagues - perhaps especially secular colleagues - to help that process along.

Confessing History contains a moving sermon entitled, "For Teachers to Live Professors Must Die." It employs an elaborate mountaineering parable to propose that rather than ascending their professions in search of status, professors should kenotically descend to the cognitive level of their students (the pedagogic bibliography for this descent is especially helpful).  And while the is is no doubt necessary, the sermon neglects to emphasize the rest of the story.  The aim of such a descent is to teach students how to climb.  Christian historians, because they're required to love their students, should naturally be better teachers.  Encouraging them to be better scholars, ones who thereby sharpen their students, continues to strike me as a more urgent concern.  And there is Scriptural support for that as well.

We should attempt to summit our disciplines because it's too easy not to try, and the views from the top need be seen with Christian eyes as well.  If the peak seems boring or irrelevant, that's because it hasn't been reached yet, so we should keep climbing   If we exert ourselves primarily to change our disciplines, for their sake over our own, we will only better serve our students and churches.  If we focus primarily on our students and churches, our guilds - which are ready for change - won't.