Buddhist Catholic Contemplative Evangelical General Christian Hindu Jewish Latter-day Saint Muslim New Visions Progressive Christian

Beliefs

Topics

Columnists

Resource Library

Research Tools

Video

Podcasts

Thought Readers

Faith In Media Tracker

Newsletters

Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In Subscription Support

Follow Patheos

Home
Evangelical
Further Thoughts from CFH 2018: Historians and the Church

Further Thoughts from CFH 2018: Historians and the Church

Last updated on: October 10, 2018 at 2:18 am by Chris Gehrz

Further Thoughts from CFH 2018: Historians and the Church 2018-10-09T20:29:38-04:00 Chris Gehrz

LOGO Patheos Explore the world's faith through different perspectives on religion and spirituality! Patheos has the views of the prevalent religions and spiritualities of the world.

Almost as long as I’ve been coming to meetings of the Conference on Faith and History, I’ve been especially drawn to discussions of the relationship between historians and the church. I wrote my faculty promotion essay as a response to Wheaton College historian Tracy McKenzie’s 2012 presidential address, on Christian historians’ “vocation to the church.” Then at last week’s 2018 meeting of CFH, a personal highlight was getting to moderate a roundtable discussion of the “distribution problem” that Raully Donahue described in an Anxious Bench post last fall — namely, that Christian scholars like us members of CFH struggle to reach Christians beyond academe.

So I was struck by three more guest mini-posts that I received from fellow CFHers: one encouraging and two more challenging. Like Brenda Schoolfield, CFH 2018 left me “renewed in my conviction that history… has the ability to build community and to reconcile” as we pursue truth faithfully. At the same time, Mark Correll is right that such truth-seeking requires us to tell “the complicated history of our churches and the evils that are done in Jesus’s name.” So while I resonated strongly with Beth Allison Barr’s sense of CFHers being “my people,” I take seriously Matt Stewart’s caution that scholars not let fellowship with members of a professional society — Mark’s “small band of memory-bearers” — obscure our connections with the larger membership of the Body of Christ.

(I certainly don’t think Beth — a pastor’s spouse, recent preacher, and active church member as well as a historian — meant it that way. But speaking for myself, I do find it easy, in Matt’s words, “to sit back and watch as the lives and histories of our fellow church members are deconstructed” — and so to feel increasingly distant from and perhaps superior to those fellow Christians.)

Thanks to today’s three guest-bloggers, as well as to the four who shared reflections yesterday, for giving me insight into sessions I wasn’t able to attend — and for letting our readers join these important conversations.

Brenda Thompson Schoolfield: My first Conference on Faith and History left me renewed in my conviction that history as a discipline has the ability to build community and to reconcile in our work as faithful truth tellers. Telling the truth builds community across time and in the present by giving context to developments that affect our lives today and by showing how people are connected to each other by and through their pasts. Telling the truth reconciles through constructing faithful narratives—ones that don’t mask the ugly or confusing and ones that includes those who have previously been ignored. Telling the truth reconciles through mediating the sources (the voices) of the past.

The work of doing history is worth the effort, but it is at times onerous, burdensome, and distressing. In his Saturday afternoon plenary address, Robert Orsi gave us a powerful example of how our work affects us. What should we do with the disgust we feel as we uncover/recover stories of broken, damaged human actions and their consequences? We cannot be silent; we must tell those stories truthfully. It’s a work that requires love and care even through our disgust. Then in a session on “Theology and Spirituality in the Doing of History,” Mark Sandle implored us to care for the dead. We should not use the dead for our own selfish ends, but we should engage in hesed shel emet (the truest act of kindness because it cannot be reciprocated) so that the fragments of the dead (their stories, their remains) will bear witness. We have the power to undermine the inhumanity of forgetting the dead.

I didn’t expect such a profoundly moving experience from a history conference. The CFH is far more than an academic conference. I found the sessions and the conversations engaging on a spiritual level, challenging and encouraging me as a historian and as a Christian.

Brenda is chair of the Division of History, Government, and Social Science at Bob Jones University.

Mark Correll: In the Saturday morning roundtable on Tal Howard’s The Pope and the Professor, Jeffrey Zalar questioned Protestantism’s oversimplification of the understanding of Pius IX’s Syllabus of Errors (1864) and its place in elevating to heroic stature the rationalist Catholic theologian Ignaz von Döllinger. Zalar reminded the listeners that the Syllabus of Errors was never meant to deny the forces of modernity; rather, they were meant pastorally as a way to keep parishioners from sins and confusion. The church bears as its responsibility the responsibility of protecting its most vulnerable members. This idea was turned on its head during Robert Orsi’s plenary session on “The Study of Religion on the Other Side of Disgust.” As the church’s own intention to preserve the faith of its laity by avoiding scandal which might lead to disbelief facilitated the church’s own worst corruptions and active participation in brutal sins.

As I sat in my Sunday morning church service listening to a triumphant telling of the story of God’s actions in the creation of modern Methodism in the United States, the CFH haunted me. Where is the space for telling the complicated history of our churches and the evils that are done in Jesus’s name? Certainly Christian colleges create a little bit of space, but our thoughts (perhaps due to our distribution problem) aren’t reaching even the well-educated portions of our church. Is there a space in our world to deal with the complexities of belief, faith, generative spiritual activities, and active sins?

In What is Christianity? (1900), Adolf Harnack accuses Catholics of creating a two-tiered system, a modern mystery religion, where only a small cohort of super-Christians is allowed to live the full Christian life. Harnack praises the democratic virtues of Protestant freedom for all to live Christian freedom. In our own self-policing of the story of our institutional sins, have we created a small band of memory-bearers who mourn for the loss so that the others of the church need not be so burdened?

Mark is chair of the Department of History, Political Economy, Geography, and Social Studies at Spring Arbor University.

Matthew D. Stewart: My flight from Grand Rapids to Denver was delayed on the Saturday that the Conference on Faith and History concluded, so I had the strange experience of waking up in Denver and then walking into the middle of the sermon at my small church in Nampa, Idaho a few hours later. I might as well have been teleported, as I was wearing the same clothes I had worn in the Calvin College Chapel a mere fifteen hours earlier, where Robert Orsi told me, if I heard correctly, that the sexual abuse crisis of the Roman Catholic Church, only the latest of Christianity’s failures, has finally obliterated the radical hope of verses I cling to, such as Romans 12:21 or Revelation 21:5. I dissent.

Working my way back towards a conscious union of body, soul, and mind, it felt strangely providential when my ears told me that my pastor had started speaking about how we define our “we.” He then included the phrase, “this is your people.” Before Communion, he reminded us that we eat at the Lord’s Table with other Christians across space and time. I looked around the church and saw our newest member, who had been baptized only a month ago. I then received the holy meal from the hand of a farmer, a hand that bore the marks of a near-fatal early morning car accident. These are my people.

CC BY-SA 2.0 GlasgowAmateur

I describe this experience because the idea of the CFH as “my people” was sitting uneasily in my mind after CFH president Beth Allison Barr’s address, in which she said that the CFH was her people. Though it was not the main point of her address or one that she developed at length, the idea is one that might carry more weight for the CFH than I think it should. Especially given the fact that a significant portion of CFH members study what amounts to the failures of American Christianity from the past to the present, of which there are many, I think the CFH should actually guard against becoming a people. If it does become a people, I worry that it will then be a place where it is too easy to sit back and watch as the lives and histories of our fellow church members are deconstructed, sometimes out of a necessary desire to serve in a prophetic role and tell the truth about the past, but perhaps at other times with motives that should be resisted. I have felt and fought them myself.

My people might not be able to name a single plank of the Bebbington quadrilateral. They might, like my dad, be put to sleep by scholarly articles because they have been working on their feet all day. These are the people, however, who visit me when I’m in the hospital, as they did when my lung collapsed several years ago. They are the ones that smile radiantly at my kids, and whose grandkids chase them shrieking across the grass after church. They feed my family in their homes and know my name without needing to practice that ultimate conference skill of holding eye contact while searching for a name tag (which by some strange force of nature is always backwards) simultaneously. Professional organizations are valuable. Like nations, however, they have a shelf life. I hope the CFH survives another fifty years. But I’ll stake my membership in the body that was told on good authority that it will withstand the gates of Hell.

Matt is a PhD candidate in the history department at Syracuse University.

Chris Gehrz

Church life

Guest Post

Historical Profession

Adolf von Harnack

Church

Conference on Faith and History

Previous Post

October 9, 2018

Highlights from the 2018 Conference on Faith and History

Next Post

October 11, 2018 Conference on Faith and History

Browse Our Archives

Select a Category abolitionism Abortion Abraham Joshua Heschel Abraham Kuyper Abraham Lincoln Academia Activism Adam Renberg Advent Adventist africa African American Religion Agnes Howard Albert Camus American History American Religious History American Revolution American West Anabaptists Ancient History Andrea Turpin Andrei Tarkovsky Anglicanism Annales Ansley Lillian Quiros anti-Catholicism Antisemitism Anxious Bench apologetics Apparitions Arash Azizi Archaeology archives art Artificial Intelligence Asia Asian Americans Augustine Authors Bad Bunny Baptism Baptists Barack Obama Battle of Hastings Benjamin Franklin Bernard-Henri Levy Beth Allison Barr Beth Moore Bethany Mannon Bible Bill Cunningham Billy Graham Black Music Bob Dylan Body Boenhoffer Books Breastfeeding Bruce Springsteen C.S. Lewis Calvinism Cancel Culture Capitalism Carmelites Catholicism Cedric Robinson Cesar Chavez Charismaticism charity Charles Dickens Charles Lindbergh Che Guevara Chicago Children Chinese Christianity Chris Gehrz Christ Christian death Christian Higher Education Christian life Christian Nation Christian Nationalism Christianity Today Christmas Church life Church Practice cinema Civil Religion Civil Rights Movement Civil War civility Classics Climate Change Cold War Colonial Mexico colonialism Comer Communism community complementarianism Conference on Faith and History Congregationalism Conspiracies Conspiracy Conversion Narratives Coronavirus Costa Rica Council of Nicaea Covid-19 Creation Critical Race Theory Crusades Culture culture wars Daniel K. Williams David Barton David Swartz Death Ways death with dignity DEI democracy Democratic Party Devotion Digital Age Diplomacy discipleship diversity Donald Trump Drama Dua Lipa Early Church early modern Early modern Catholicism Easter Eastern Christianity economic exploitation Education elections Elie Wiesel Elizabeth II Elizabeth Taylor emotions Empire Engineering England enslavement Entertainment Episcopal Church Erica Ramirez eschatology Eurocentrism Evangelicalism Evangelicals Exegesis Family Feminism Film Flannery O'Connor folk music Food Foreign Policy founding fathers Franciscans Franciscus Junius fundamentalism Funerals G.K. Chesterton Gender Genocide genre geography George W. Bush George Washington George Whitefield Global Christianity Global church Grief Guadalupe guest post Guest Post gun control gun violence Gustavo Gutierrez Hamid Dabashi Harold John Ockenga Harvest Hate Hawaiian Christianity Healing health care Heather Cox Richardson Hell Heresy Hermeneutics Higher Education Hinduism Hippocratic oath Historical Fiction Historical Methodology Historical Profession Historical Profession Historical Theology Historical Thinking historiography Holidays Holocaust horror movies Human rights Humanitarian Work humanities Hummingbirds Hungary hymns Imago Dei Immigration Injustice Interviews Iran Islam Islamophobia Israel Ivan's Childhood Jacob Randolph James Bratt Janine Giordano Drake Japanese history Japanese Literature Jean Paul Sartre Jesse Miranda Jesus Jesus Christ Jimmy Carter Joan Baez Joan Didion Joanne Freeman João B. Chaves Joao Chaves Joey Cochran John Calvin John Fea John Tillotson John Turner Johnny Cash Jonathan Edwards Jonathan Tran Joseph Smith Josh Howerton Journalism Jr. Judaism Jürgen Moltmann Just War Justice Justin Brierley Karl Barth Katelyn Beaty koi ponds Kris Kristofferson Kristin Kobes Du Mez Latin American Religious History Latino Americans Lectio Divina Leisure Lent Leonard Cohen liberal arts liberalism Liberation Theology Linda Ronstadt Lisa Clark Diller Literature Lou Reed Lynchings Lynneth Miller Renberg Mainline Protestantism Malcolm Foley Marilyn Monroe Maritime history Mark Noll Marriage Martin Luther Martin Luther King Martyrdom Marxism Mary Masih Alinejad mass shootings material culture medieval Christianity Medieval Ethiopia Melissa Borja memory Mennonites Mental Health Mental Illness Methodism Mexican Americans Mexicans Mike Madrid Miles Mullin Min Jin Lee Miscarriage Missionaries Mister Rogers Mitt Romney modernity Monasticism Mormonism Motherhood Mothers of the Church Moving Music Musicals Nadya Williams Nahua Christianity Native Americans Natsume Sōseki New Contributor New England New Year New York Nico Non-Violent Protest Orthodoxy pacifism Paleo Evangelicals Palestinians Parenting Patti Smith Paul Kingsnorth Pedro Calderón de la Barca Pentecostalism Philip Jenkins Phillis Wheatley physician-assisted suicide pilgrimage Pilgrims Piracy pluralism Plutocracy Poetry Politics Pope Francis Pope Leo XIV post-modernism prayer preaching Presbyterians prosperity gospel Protest Public Executions Public history Publishing Puritans purity culture Quakers race Race Massacres Racial Capitalism racial reconciliation racialization Racism Raha Bahloulipour Re-Enchantment reading Reformation Refugees religion and the university religion and war Religious Freedom Religious Nones Religious Pluralism Religious Symbols religious violence Republican Party Revival Rita Coolidge Ritual Roger Williams Roman Catholic church Royalty Russell Moore same-sex marriage Sarah Irving-Stonebraker Scandinavia Science Science and Technology Scopes trial Scriptural Interpretation secularism Selena Quintanilla seminary Seventh-Day Adventists sexual morality Sexuality Sikhs Silence slaveholders theology Slavery Slavoj Zizek social justice Social Media Southern Baptist Convention Southern Religion Spain Spiritual Autobiography Spiritual but not religious Spiritual Discipline Sports Stanley Hauerwas Suffering Summer Camps Sunday Night Odds and Ends Supernatural Supreme Court Syriac Christianity Tal Howard Taylor Swift Teaching Technology Television Thanksgiving The Beatles The Mission theater TheoBros Theology Thomas Dixon Thomas Jefferson Thomas Kidd Thomas Merton Tim Gloege Tim Walz Tom Holland Tourism tradition Tragedy Translation Transnationalism Travel Trump Ukraine Uncategorized Unitarians United Methodist Church US History Vanessa Chan Velvet Underground Verónica A. Gutiérrez Veronica Gutierrez Vikings Violence Virgin Mary Virtue Virtue ethics Visions Voting War WCTU Wendell Berry Westminster Assembly White Evangelicalism Wildfires Winnie the Pooh Witches women Women in Ministry Women's and Gender Studies Work Worship writing Yasunari Kawabata Zena Hitz

Select a Month October 2026 September 2026 August 2026 July 2026 June 2026 May 2026 April 2026 March 2026 February 2026 January 2026 December 2025 November 2025 October 2025 September 2025 August 2025 July 2025 June 2025 May 2025 April 2025 March 2025 February 2025 January 2025 December 2024 November 2024 October 2024 September 2024 August 2024 July 2024 June 2024 May 2024 April 2024 March 2024 February 2024 January 2024 December 2023 November 2023 October 2023 September 2023 August 2023 July 2023 June 2023 May 2023 April 2023 March 2023 February 2023 January 2023 December 2022 November 2022 October 2022 September 2022 August 2022 July 2022 June 2022 May 2022 April 2022 March 2022 February 2022 January 2022 December 2021 November 2021 October 2021 September 2021 August 2021 July 2021 June 2021 May 2021 April 2021 March 2021 February 2021 January 2021 December 2020 November 2020 October 2020 September 2020 August 2020 July 2020 June 2020 May 2020 April 2020 March 2020 February 2020 January 2020 December 2019 November 2019 October 2019 September 2019 August 2019 July 2019 June 2019 May 2019 April 2019 March 2019 February 2019 January 2019 December 2018 November 2018 October 2018 September 2018 August 2018 July 2018 June 2018 May 2018 April 2018 March 2018 February 2018 January 2018 December 2017 November 2017 October 2017 September 2017 August 2017 July 2017 June 2017 May 2017 April 2017 March 2017 February 2017 January 2017 December 2016 November 2016 October 2016 September 2016 August 2016 July 2016 June 2016 May 2016 April 2016 March 2016 February 2016 January 2016 December 2015 November 2015 October 2015 September 2015 August 2015 July 2015 June 2015 May 2015 April 2015 March 2015 February 2015 January 2015 December 2014 November 2014 October 2014 September 2014 August 2014 July 2014 June 2014 May 2014 April 2014 March 2014 February 2014 January 2014 December 2013 November 2013 October 2013 September 2013 August 2013 July 2013 June 2013 May 2013 April 2013 March 2013 February 2013 January 2013 December 2012 November 2012 October 2012 September 2012 August 2012 July 2012 June 2012 May 2012

TAKE THE

Religious Wisdom Quiz

Which Psalm expresses confession: "Against you, you only, have I sinned"?

Select your answer to see how you score.

Psalm 51 Psalm 100 Psalm 24 Psalm 73