‘Historians’ Category

Blogging and doing history: it is obvious that I think the two are complementary to some degree and that those doing history should blog. But there is an ephemeral nature about blogging that is counter-productive to historical writing. We write to be read—and read by future generations and not simply our passing contemporaries. I just looked at some blog entries I posted three years ago this time of year—Jan 2006—and some of the references on the web I referred to no longer exist. As I said, blogging is too ephemeral a medium to make it the basis of lasting, influential history writing.

I have entered a new phase of my life: full-time professor at The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. I am deeply humbled and in some ways terrified! But I see it also as an opportunity to be what God has called me to be: an historian.

I wrestled with that calling long and hard. By that I do not mean that I ever fled from being an historian. In some ways it fits me as naturally as my skin! But for a long time, in a church culture that sees calling as primarily meaning becoming a missionary or pastor, I could not believe that this was my calling. I suppose it was not until I was fortyish that I began to accept it as my calling.

Since then I have been learning what it is that God has called me to do—and learning what he has not called me to do. The latter has been especially very difficult, since there is this underground rivulet (or is it a stream?) in my heart that keeps hankering to be more than an historian. But that is my calling—after Christian, husband, dad, and friend.

And then I look at what it means to be an historian—and that daunts me as well! Maybe tomorrow, or the day after, I will begin to be an historian, I think. But I am nowhere near where I should be—and I am in my early fifties!

A fitting new year’s resolution: this year a budding historian!

Dr. Mohler has a brief examination of the life and work of Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., one of the most influential historians of the past century, who died yesterday, February 28, 2007, in New York.

See Dr. Mohler’s post here: Al Mohler.

It was Schlesinger who once argued that “history is to the nation rather as memory is the individual.” A right-on comment if there ever was one! Mohler rightly comments, “we may argue with Schlesinger’s interpretations of that memory,” but “we do well to take his contribution seriously.”

How does one become an historian? Well, the path is not an easy one. But then the learning of no skill or art is easy. It does not come through merely much reading. Nor does it come through merely much writing. There have been all kinds of journal-writers—currently prolific bloggers—but neither much writing nor much reading in themselves doth an historian make. There must be reading and there must be writing, but being prolific in either or both does not guarantee good history.

There must be discernment. There must be reflection. But before anything else there must be an attitude that takes time to be careful and precise, an attitude that is revealed in the small things of the craft. In fact, how one tackles those small things reveals the ability to handle the larger. If, with regard to the small things, the seemingly unimportant things, there is simply the desire to get them out of the way as soon as possible to make way for the truly “significant things,” the faculty of a good historian is lacking. Such an attitude is not perfectionism—an impossibility in this life for fallible humanity—though it is the desire to make everything written the best and most precise it can be.

Without precision, the faculty of taking care to be exact and right, the interest in details, there can be no good history-writing. If such a faculty is naturally present, it must be honed. If it be not present, it must be learned.

I have been working through the life of James Petigru Boyce (1827-1888) by his close friend John A. Broadus (1827-1895), just reprinted by Solid Ground Christian Books as A Gentleman and a Scholar: Memoir of James P. Boyce (2004). It is a tremendous study, exhaustive and rich with Broadus’ comments on the life and times of Boyce. I suspect the time is ripe for a new biography of Boyce, especially with the sesquicentennial of the founding of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary upcoming in 2009.

Here is one priceless comment by Broadus on the teaching of Church History. He is in the midst of discussing the great sacrifice made by Boyce in 1872, for theological reasons, of giving up his favourite subject, Systematic Theology, to his colleague William Williams to teach. William Williams taught as Professor of Ecclesiastical History and Church Government. In his ecclesiological convictions, though, Williams believed that immersion in a Paedobaptist congregation or immersion by the Campbellites was a valid baptism. Understandably, there were objections to this view, and Boyce, knowing that his own views on the issue were more mainstream offered to switch teaching responsibilities. It was a great sacrifice, not least, because Broadus says, church history is “a subject so vast, and demanding boundless reading” (A Gentleman and a Scholar, 227).

How true this is! Whenever someone tells me that they would like to study church history among the traditional curricula of theology, I urge him to consider this truth about church history: it is “a subject so vast, and demanding boundless reading.” You must be a reader and be prepared to attempt to survey the vast picture. Quite a challenge!

And even more so now than when Boyce took it up. Why so? Not only do we have another 150 years of church history, but also because the breadth of methodological tools have increased. In that day, the focus was very much “a history of ideas and institutions” approach. But today an historian must be familiar with tools of sociological and cultural analysis. Who is sufficient for such things?

Lord Acton (1834-1902)—Sir John Emerich Edward Dalberg Acton—was one of the great historians of the nineteenth century. He was the holder of the Regius Chair of Modern History at the University of Oxford. Amazingly, he was appointed to the Chair in 1895 without a single book to his name, but he had written some of the most remarkable scholarly articles of the day.

Among his principles was an insistence on the primacy of primary sources, which usually means archival sources, for sound historical scholarship. As he said:

“To renounce the pains and penalties of exhaustive research is to remain a victim to ill informed and designing writers, and to authorities that have worked for ages to build up the vast tradition of conventional mendacity. …By going from book to manuscript and from library to archive, we exchange doubt for certainty…”

Would that many wannabe historians and other historical pontificators would learn this vital principle! Even theologians would do well to heed this advice. All of those vacuous generalizations about church history and our culture with nary a shred of evidence! The ultimate result is vapidity. How easy it is to pontificate—but we want proof of assertions.