The Value of Historical Theology
The Value of a Proper Historiographical Method
The final value of the study of HT that I would like to mention occurs through the cultivation of a proper historical method. I’m not here concerned with specific facts or arguments or data that one learns from historical personages, but rather the habits of mind and method that are requisite for the historical enterprise.
Leopold Von Ranke’s famous maxim that the historian’s task is to “tell it like it was” may be ridiculed by those who doubt the possibility or even the desirability of objective history, but I believe Von Ranke was fundamentally correct. In the case of intellectual history, this involves understanding a thinker on his or her own terms, in his or her own context. It is coming to grips with a document’s meaning and penetrating what underlies the arguments being advanced. It is not about rehabilitating or castigating those long dead, but about grasping objectively what is being said and why.
While objectivity is the historian’s goal, this does not mean that the historian is void of personal commitments, or that he or she must remain neutral as to the truth or falsity of the positions under consideration. The point is simply that history qua history is not about passing such judgments but is merely about getting the story straight, however the chips may fall. It is only after the position has been understood on its own terms and without bias that the historian may turn to evaluation and employ the fruits of his or her discovery in polemical or other theological application. But at that point we’ve moved beyond the historical task simpliciter and into something else—something wonderfully valuable and necessary, perhaps, but something different nonetheless.
The objective habits of mind that characterize skilled historiography are consubstantial, as it were, with those of the thoughtful pastor, youth worker, missionary, or skilled apologist. Whether the issue is dished up by an ancient or modern protagonist, the apologist must know truly what he or she is up against. We do well to attend carefully to the admonition of that great medievalist Etienne Gilson, who said that it is much easier to refute an opponent than it is to understand him. To this I would add that to thoroughly refute an error, one must understand it as well as the one who holds it. To get into the head of someone who thinks quite differently from us requires the cultivation of an objective frame of mind. This mode of thinking is as necessary for the pastor or the apologist as it is for the historian, the former typically dealing with a contemporary opponent, the later examining advocates long dead.
It will not do to misrepresent an opponent, living or dead, however much we may wish to justify it by some greater good. None of us appreciates being misunderstood or deliberately misrepresented, and we must take care to treat others with the same respect. We can do nothing less as lovers of the truth.
Let me end this article where it began. If I’ve made the case for the great value for your life and ministry in these venerable old works, why not dust off some of them that may have been sitting on your shelf since your seminary days? How about reading Augustine’s Confessions or Athanasius’ On the Incarnation of the Word or Calvin’s Institutes or a host of other great works like these? Can’t find your copy, you say? Then point your web browser to one of the many sites, such as www.ccel.org, that is choc–full of these fabulous treasures. Perhaps you are so busy in your ministry as a pastor, youth leader, apologist, teacher, or church planter that you wonder where you will find the time. I know life and ministry are hectic and you may think that I’m asking the impossible. But I’m not suggesting that you drop everything else you are doing to become a professional church historian! You don’t have to lock yourself in a room and plow non–stop through the entire 37–volume set of the church fathers! What I am urging is that we all heed C. S. Lewis’s advice to make sure we don’t ignore the classics, and rotate some of these into our diet of reading as we are able to do so. If you make it a habit you’ll be surprised at how, little by little, you’ll be running with the “big dogs” before you know it.
Notes
Adapted from “The Value of Historical Theology for Apologetics,” in Reasons for Faith, Norman L. Geisler and Chad V. Meister, eds. (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2007); used by permission.
1 C. S. Lewis made this point nicely in his well-known essay “On the Reading of Old Books,” in God in the Dock: Essays On Theology and Ethics (Eerdmans, 1970).
2 Irenaeus of Lyon, Against Heresies, 2.19.8.
3 Athanasius, On the Incarnation of the Word, 54.3.
Alan Gomes (MDiv, ThM, Talbot; PhD, Fuller) is Professor of Historical Theology at Talbot. Alan has authored numerous scholarly articles in journals, encyclopedias and dictionaries, and was general editor of the Zondervan Guide to Cults and Religious Movements series of booklets. The Gomes family lives in La Mirada, but Alan can sometimes be found at Catalina Island, reading dead theologians aboard his sailboat.