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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 09 September 2014
This essay argues that “essentializing” history and theology is less useful as an approach to the problems of “faith” and “history” than a more piecemeal and pragmatic approach. It begins by invoking the intellectual virtues learned in communities of character. It analyzes role-specific responsibilities of historians and argues for evaluating historical claims in terms of historians' execution of their professional responsibilities, rather than in terms of the presuppositions they bring to their work. It examines a recent controversy involving the Catholic Theological Society of America and argues that serious confusions in that dispute about the practices of history and theology can be overcome using the approach advocated here. It concludes by arguing that overcoming specific conflicts between historical and religious claims requires exercising one of the virtues of the mind, phronēsis, and by showing how the constructivist epistemology ingredient in this approach is appropriate for a Catholic theologian.
1 The present essay is based on the 1998 Presidential Address to the College Theology Society, delivered May 30, 1998, during the annual convention at Samt Louis University. The title I gave that address was stolen from tunesmith Marty Haugen, but reordered for my purposes “We Celebrate, We Remember, We Believe”. Although I have revised the text for publication here and omitted some testimony not really suitable for an academic ȷournal, I have not attempted to hide its roots in an oral, after-dinner presentation Maureen Tilley, Sandra Yocum Mize, and Dennis Doyle have read and commented on written versions of the text, I thank them for saving me from some blunders. I also thank those who made comments on the oral presentation for rescuing me from my mistakes. Those errors that remain are solely the fault of the author.
2 This phrase acknowledges the very important work of Catholic philosopher Zagzebski, Linda Trinkaus, Virtues of the Mind: An Inquiry into the Nature of Virtue and the Ethical Foundations of Knowledge (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996).CrossRefGoogle Scholar Her work shows how the strengths of the various strands of classical and contemporary epistemology can complement each other in a theory that focuses on the responsible epistemic subject and her intellectual virtues. Zagzebski's work makes phronēsis, practical wisdom, central to epistemology (see esp. 211-31 in her book) as I make it central for wisely making and holding religious commitments (see The Wisdom of Religious Commitment [Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 1995]Google Scholar).
3 This phrase acknowledges the work of Stanley Hauerwas, but emphasizes that we do not and cannot live or thrive in one community, but are constituted as subjects in many communities of discourse, a point important for understanding how the historian's craft is related to the work of theologians as discussed below. Among his many works, for this point see esp. Hauerwas, Stanley, A Community of Character: Toward a Constructive Christian Social Ethic (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1981).Google Scholar
4 This clause pays tribute to McClendon's definition of theology. Among his early works see McClendon, James Wm. Jr. and Smith, James M., Understanding Religious Convictions (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1975);Google Scholar rev. ed., Convictions: Defusing Religious Relativism (Valley Forge, PA: Trinity Press International, 1994), 184.Google Scholar
5 As one example, on the first page of the first draft of the first chapter he saw of my doctoral dissertation some quarter century ago—a page jumbled with nervous prose—he wrote down the margin in his distinctive left-handed scrawl words that made me laugh and showed me how to think and write better: “Backward run sentences ‘til reels the mind.”
6 See Zagzebski, , Virtues of the Mind, 185.Google Scholar Because she is exploring the shape of a virtue-based epistemology, Zagzebski does not attempt to offer a comprehensive list of intellectual virtues, but offers various candidates for inclusion in such a list. This is one small set, adapted from John Dewey.
7 Dulles, Avery S.J., “Historical Method and the Reality of Christ,” The Craft of Theology: From Symbol to System, new exp. ed. (New York: Crossroad, 1996), 212–22.Google Scholar
8 I do not offer this as a “definition” of history, but as a rough and ready description of what historians actually do when they work as historians. Some practices, e.g., doing oral histories, would need to be explored more fully to make this description further nuanced. Some historians would also not accept the purpose as stated, preferring not to say that they “construct” history but instead “tell it like it was.” But on the account I offer below Rankean objectivity can find a place even if history is more literature than science, a point made by Clark, Elizabeth A. in a plenary address to the 1998 CTS convention, “Rewriting Early Christian History” in Macy, Gary, ed., Theology and the New Histories, annual volume of the College Theology Society (Maryknoll: Orbis, 1999), forthcoming.Google Scholar
9 Boswell, John, Same-Sex Unions in Premodern Europe (New York: Villard Books, 1994).Google Scholar I am unable to locate the source for this criticism, but recollect it from casual reading of book reviews.
10 Borg, Marcus J., Meeting Jesus Again for the First Time. The Historical Jesus and the Heart of Contemporary Faith (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1994).Google Scholar I see no reason to believe this deception was intentional, but, having read the text with a number of students, I find them consistently to be deceived in the ways. I describe below as a result of reading the opening chapters of the book.
11 Ibid., 20.
12 Tyrrell, George, Christianity at the Crossroads (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1963), 49.Google Scholar
13 Lest it be thought that I reject historical approaches to Jesus altogether, let me affirm that I find the work of E. P. Sanders to be much nuanced, reliable, and far more convincing than any of the works of the Jesus Seminar members. See his (relatively) popular summary, The Historical Figure of Jesus (London: Penguin, 1993)Google Scholar and the historically nuanced scholarship that lies behind it, especially Jesus and Judaism (London: SCM Press, 1985).Google ScholarJohnson, Luke Timothy, The Real Jesus: The Misguided Quest for the Historical Jesus and the Truth of the Traditional Gospels (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1996)Google Scholar interestingly says nothing about Sanders' work.
14 Harvey, Van A., The Historian and the Believer: The Morality of Historical Knowledge and Christian Belief (New York: Macmillan, 1966).Google Scholar
15 Ibid., 104. Harvey presumes a deontological ethical approach. Along with Zagzebski, I would subsume this “rule governed” approach into a “virtue ethic” applying both to moral and intellectual virtues. As “virtue ethics” was not a live option in mainstream American philosophy or Protestant theology until about a decade after Harvey wrote, this should not be taken as implying any criticism of Harvey.
16 Ibid., 118. This claim is severely limited. It applies to some believers in some cases. Harvey is quite correct in noting that the believer has a rather different “ethic of judgment” from that of the historian, but that does not make the believer “intellectually irresponsible” unless the believer fails to exercise the virtue of wisdom in her or his faith. I have argued that believers can fail to be prudent in their judgments, as in the case Harvey notes, but that this is not characteristic of all religious believers or religious judgments (see Tilley, The Wisdom of Religious Commitment, chap. 4).
17 See Harvey, , The Historian and the Believer, 196–97.Google Scholar Avery Dulles takes a similar position in “The Historical Method and the Reality of Christ”: “The postcritical approach … does not rule out the legitimacy of efforts to reconstruct the person and teaching of Jesus by ‘presuppositionless’ methods acceptable to nonbelievers. The resulting pictures of the ‘historical’ Jesus are always intriguing and sometimes useful in illuminating aspects of the life and personality of the Redeemer. But in no case does the method provide a religiously adequate portrait, one that can take the place of Jesus Christ as proclaimed by the Church and received in faith” (224). The problem with Dulles's account is that it seems to insulate faith from historical work that might cast shadows on theological claims.
18 See Niebuhr, H. Richard, The Meaning of Revelation (1941; reprint, New York: Macmillan, 1960), esp. 32–66.Google Scholar
19 This is a large claim which requires significant argument and analysis to warrant it fully. Space does not allow redeeming this claim fully here. To do so I would use the work of Luke Timothy Johnson and the many discussions and reviews of the Newest Quest and argue that their criticisms are most warranted if they are seen not as “wholesale” criticisms of method and presuppositions, but as “retail” criticisms about specific claims the Newest Questers make not on the basis of historical investigations, but on the basis of their own ideologically informed social locations.
20 Clark, Elizabeth A., The Origenist Controversy: The Cultural Construction of an Early Christian Debate (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992), 6–7.Google ScholarI find similar revisions of theoretical presuppositions by the data in the evolution of Robert Orsi's work; compare “‘Mildred, is it fun to be a cripple?’ The Culture of Suffering in Mid-Twentieth-Century American Catholicism,” South Atlantic Quarterly 93/3 (Summer 1994): 547–90Google Scholar, with Thank You, St. Jude: Women's Devotion to the Patron Saint of Hopeless Causes (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1996).Google Scholar
21 In discussion of her paper, “New Footsteps in Well-Trodden Ways: Religion and Gender in Irish America,” presented to the American Catholic Life and Thought Section of the annual meeting of the College Theology Society, May 31, 1998, Kathleen A. Sprows of the University of Notre Dame noted that she could not make progress in her own work on gender roles until she stopped trying to answer the ideological questions often put to her. People would ask her (and she evidently began her work with such questions) questions like, “Weren't the roles constructed for Catholic women in that context repressive (or ‘suffocating’ or ‘liberating’ or “supportive’)”? But these are questions that can only come after one reconstructs the actual shape of those roles, the effects they had on womens' and mens' lives, and after one develops a notion of what essentially contested terms like “liberating” or “repressive” mean. If one tries to get historical investigations to provide answers to such ideological questions, one cannot proceed properly in the craft of the historian. These questions can only come logically later, after the excavation, analysis and reconstruction is well under way, if not complete. Sprows's answer to these questions is, if I understood it correctly, that those roles were “liberating” and “repressive” in different ways, at different times, for different people—and sometimes both simultaneously.
22 Justo Gonzalez, “The Changing Geography of Church History” in Macy, ed., Theology and the New Histories.
23 Dulles, Avery, Donovan, Mary Ann, and Steinfels, Peter, “Disputed Questions: How Catholic Is the CTSA? Three Views,” Commonweal, 125/6 (03 27, 1998).Google Scholar Letters on these essays, both attacking and defending the CTSA and its members, have appeared in the April 24, 1998 and May 22, 1998 issues of that magazine. Further letters have been submitted; whether they will be published remained to be seen at the time of this writing.
24 Ibid., 13.
25 Macy, Gary, “The Eucharist and Popular Religiosity,” CTSA Proceedings 52 (1997): 52.Google Scholar
26 Dulles, et al., “Disputed Questions,” 14.Google Scholar
27 Ibid., 16. Msgr. M. Francis Mannion finds her defense uncompelling, “because, though it appears to refute Dulles, she ends up for the purposes of defense placing herself in a position considerable to the “right” of the operative convictions of American sacramental theology—a position I do not believe she generally inhabits” (Correspondence, Commonweal 125/8 [04 24, 1998]: 30Google Scholar). Mannion, like Dulles, conflates Donovan's theological views with her historical and textual analysis. Where she stands on the issue of sacramental theology is irrelevant to the debate at this point; her theological views factor out of this argument. She is not, indeed, “taking a stance” at all.
28 I recommend consulting his work and the modern and medieval sources he cites in “The Eucharist and Popular Religiosity.” Macy does note that there was a renegotiation of ritual power in the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries and that there is reason to think that there may be a ritual renegotiation occurring today (56-58), a state of affairs about which he confesses optimism and enthusiasm in his peroration. That admission, however, neither substantiates nor undermines his historical arguments; rather, it expresses in a plenary address to a theological society his valuing the present ferment in debate and practice as being as interesting and exciting as that of the thirteenth century, and his optimism for the church in this era. Neither of these are historical judgments.
29 Mahony, Cardinal Roger, Correspondence, Commonweal 125/10 (05 22, 1998): 4.Google Scholar
30 Peter Steinfels (Dulles et al., “Disputed Questions”) makes the point that there is real reason for concern by moderate and conservative theologians. In language Macy uses, there is a renegotiation of ritual power in the church today. In language Steinfels uses, this renegotiation is resulting in a “diffusion” of the power of the minister into the congregation. But this “diffusion” is not new, as Macy shows, nor are the theologies that reflect these practices completely new. Rather, the monochromatic and concentrated practice and theology of the Eucharist which we have considered as the tradition is being revealed as merely one color in the Catholic theological rainbow in past and present. This seems to be a clearly warranted historical claim. The worry about the diffusion of the tradition and the possible loss of Catholic identity through loss of distinctiveness in our culture is as legitimate as the worry about excessive centralization and the loss of Catholics' ability to identify with the tradition because of petrification of traditional practices and beliefs. Yet this worry is a religious one, important whether or not the historical claim is accurate. And neither Dulles's hint that the schism of a remnant group from the CTSA might be preferable nor Steinfels's suggestion that more “balanced” theological presentations are needed will resolve those real worries about Catholic identity. For what the plenary addresses at the CTSA meeting of 1997 did was to present an authentic, but neglected, strand of the tradition which “emphasizes the entire eucharistic liturgy as celebrated by the whole gathered people of God. To present and explain this growing consensus, in scholarly papers at a theological convention, is the proper work of the Catholic theologian” (Donovan, , “Disputed Questions,” 16Google Scholar).
31 Dulles, , “Historical Method and the Reality of Christ,” 222–24Google Scholar, clearly subordinates “history” to “faith,” allowing “faith” a trump over “history” in the way neo-Orthodoxy privileges “belief” over “history” according to Harvey's analysis in The Historian and the Believer. While I think Dulles's theory needs significant modification to do justice both to the practice of faith and to the practice of history, I nonetheless wholeheartedly agree with Dulles when he points out that the Quests for the Historical Jesus cannot provide a “religiously adequate portrait” or an acquaintance with the real Jesus, and that “faith and intelligence, dogma and history, can and must be integrated” (224).
32 Harvey, Van A., “The Ethics of Belief Reconsidered” in McCarthy, Gerald D., ed., The Ethics of Belief Debate, AAR Studies in Religion 41 (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1986), esp. 194–203.Google Scholar McCarthy's book collects many of the Victorian essays and some contemporary reflections; Harvey's article was first published in The Journal of Religion in 1979.
33 For a brief, but helpful, discussion of Jesus' self-knowledge, see Johnson, Elizabeth A., Consider Jesus: Waves of Renewal in Christology (New York: Crossroad, 1990), 35–47.Google Scholar
34 For a brief discussion of this title and the consensus about its historical significance (which has not, so far as I know, changed in any significant way since I wrote), see Tilley, Terrence W., Story Theology (Wilmington, DE: Michael Glazier, 1985;Google Scholar reprint, Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1990), chap. 7, “The Stories of Jesus: III,” esp. 121-27.
35 Dei Verbum §11; as in Abbott, Walter M. S.J., ed., The Documents of Vatican II (New York: Guild Press, America Press, Association Press, 1966), 119.Google Scholar The position developed here is intended to be fully consistent with the teaching of Dei Verbum.
36 The skeptical historian will, of course, reply that this is no “historical” proof about what Jesus knew. But the skeptical historian has no warrant for the claim that Jesus did not know or could not have known he was in a Christologically significant sense “son of God.” Proving the absence of a singular belief is practically historically impossible. The skeptic will claim that the belief is attributable to the early Christian community. The traditional believer will agree—but, at least in this case, will see no reason not to think that, however the belief emerged in the early discourse, the process was inspired by God. The difference between them has nothing to do with historical warrants and arguments but with ideological issues about the ultimate inspiration for some historical events.
37 I am certainly not claiming that only well-warranted claims have been made at gatherings of the CTSA or any other society. I have heard claims made at meetings of theological societies that are far more outrageous than any Marcus Borg makes. But such claims are usually recognized for what they are and die from malnourishment as competent theologians refuse to feed them with their attention.
38 For a description of phronēsis as “intellect in action,” see Tilley, , The Wisdom of Religious Commitment, 93–160;Google Scholar also see Zagzebski, , Virtues of the Mind, 211–31Google Scholar, for historic discussions of phronēsis.
39 Sellars made this comment at a symposium devoted to a discussion of Rorty, Richard, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1979)Google Scholar, at the annual meeting of the Eastern Division of the American Philosophical Association in Boston in 1980. I am not aware of Sellars's commentary being published.
40 For my view of the standards we can use, see Tilley, , Story Theology, 182–213.Google Scholar