Can There Be a Christian Culture?--Part 2

As I examined in the last post, the question of whether twentieth-century Europe could still be considered a Christian culture occurred amidst the violence of World War I and II. The second world war itself left many with serious questions as to why it had happened and what this revealed about the course of humanity in general. Writing in 1949, E. Harris Harbison observed a hunger for meaning among the young veterans returning to American universities after the war: "[They] made it clear to advisers and teachers that they were looking for answers. . . . Somewhere in history, many of them thought, the answer to how it all came about was to be found." The same year in Britain, historian Herbert Butterfield's six BBC radio lectures on Christianity and history made him a public celebrity, becoming some of the most listened to broadcasts in BBC history. Clearly the public on both sides of the Atlantic was hungry for some sense of what history as a discipline could reveal about Christianity, the West, and civilization. Did the twentieth century invalidate Occidental values and beliefs, and could history give a needed perspective on the past and the future?

After all, one could ask, do the events of history mean anything? Are they, as Elbert Hubbard once remarked, just "one damn thing after another"? Can there be a philosophy, science, or theology of history that speaks in any way to the historical particulars? "Can the thinker who utilizes the empirically achieved data of historical study stand, as it were, outside the historical process and see pattern or meaning in the whole historical process itself?" (Connolly 41) If not, can the historical thinker still offer some intimation of the whole from a more limited vantage point? Likewise, what does the theology of the Christian Church have to say to how history has unfolded? Can the gospel, for example, explain the twentieth century?

Typically, a Christian understanding of history had been understood to be linear as opposed to the wide cycles of history in Greek, Chinese, or Hindu thought, and twentieth-century Christian thinkers mostly rejected the cyclical view of Oswald Spengler’s infamous The Decline of the West, which traced eight “high cultures” through the cycle of birth-development-fulfillment-decay-death, as well as the view of Arnold Toynbee that civilizations arise, grow strong, fall, and die in reaction to cultural problems. Did civilizations, cultures, or societies have life cycles, or was it permissible to divide history into periods, such as ancient, medieval, and modern?

Particularly in response to the fascist claims of historical destiny, Christian thinkers of the period were quite divided on these questions. Jacques Maritain, William Albright, and Eric Voegelin, for example, all held that some order or process was observable in history, though each was cautious as to how much could be predicted or exhaustively understood. For Maritain, historical laws cannot explain history entirely or predict it, but they can help interpret it: axiomatic laws can point to general characteristics of history, while typological laws can suggest various periods in history: a growth is observable, so some periods are better than others. He held that history possessed "two faces."

1. Axiomatic laws included the law of two-fold contrasting progress; the ambivalence of history; the law of the historical fructifications of good and evil ; the law of the world-significance of history-making events; the law of prise de conscience ; and the law of the hierarchy of means.
2. Typological laws included the law of the passage from the "magical" to the "rational" regime or state; the law of the progress of moral conscience; the law of the passage from "sacral" to "secular" or "lay" civilizations; the law of the political and social coming-of-age of the people.

Maritain in general, then, held that one could predict that good and evil would bear results in certain ways, that certain means tend to overshadow others, and that in general history was moving to more secular and rationalistic expressions of culture. (Of course, this is a variation of the secularization thesis that has in the last two decades been called seriously into question.)

Albright, too, held the search for laws was not fruitless, but the larger the scope of observation, the less certain, “until we reach a plane where the number of variables makes prediction impossible.” Albright's simple point was that smaller local changes are more predictable than wide-spread national, continental, and global shifts. These later ones were better observed in hindsight.

Voegelin, not an entirely unrepentant Hegelian, nonetheless broke with Hegel in holding that one cannot predict the outcome of history even if one can understand some of its laws. Humans are too sinful to hold to anything like the ideal, divine plan: “The truth of order has to be gained and regained in the perpetual struggle against the fall from it.” For each of these, some observation of order and direction did not suggest total predictability. The fascist doctrines of an unopposable direction to the spirit of history were to be treated agnostically at best.

Others were even more cautious. Butterfield and Kenneth Scott Latourette stationed themselves in a middle ground. Only general principles and observations are possible from a Christian perspective, though these can still offer much. Though Butterfield himself condemned easy judgments on human actions, he did feel that in the broadest sense one could obviously conclude that human beings were sinful, that the personal nature of historical lives included sinful effects, and that general, historical judgments on evil actions, such as the militarism of Nazi Germany, were conclusive from history itself.

For Butterfield, broadly speaking there are three ways of looking at history:

1. biographically, which offers the meaningful life of individuals;
2. technically, in the study of the law-like social forces of larger history;
   
3. holistically, attempting to view the providence of God in broad strokes.
   

It is significant that while Isaiah Berlin praised Butterfield's position as a "prima facie very humane and convincing thesis," that he finally dismissed it as one in which "individual responsibility is made to melt away" because we declare ourselves never fit to judge, be that by virtue of ignorance or sinful ineffectiveness .

Latourette, the great historian of world missions, in different fashion, sought to provide for the Christian claims for history the sense that these truths, though they cannot be "proved" by history itself, nonetheless have "strong probability for the truth of Christian understanding.”

Still others felt even this went too far, such as Henri-Irénée Marrou and Mircea Eliade who rejected any philosophy of history, though each conceded a theology of history was still possible. Eliade sniffed that attempts at "scientific" laws of history were but the “decomposition product of Christianity,” seeking the sense of history’s meaning while denying “a transhistorical, soteriological intent.” Marrou, in turn, warned against “the sin of immoderation” so tempting to philosophies of history; history is always a subjective reconstruction of the past by the historian, and “[e]very problem in history, no matter how small, gradually and eventually demands a knowledge of universal history in its entirety,” which is impossible for any but God. Marrou, however, did not see this as a counsel of despair, rather humility.

Finally, not all would agree with even this claim. Gerhard Ebeling observed, "Wherever historicity is not taken seriously, there is also a failure to take really seriously either the text of the Scriptures or the man to whom this text must be interpreted." Likewise, voices like Yves Congar and J. P. Mackey insisted that without tradition no Christian dogma existed. Any large meaning in history was rightly obtainable only through God's revelation.

This wide-spread continuum suggests perhaps why no single Christian answer was available at the time to those in search of spiritual and theological insights into the twentieth-century ideological wars. We can still ask today, what did they hope to find in the study of history that might explain their political and social dilemmas? Likewise, what might we hope to find, if anything, in the midst of our own?