Church History as Vocation and Moral Discipline.

HILLERBRAND, HANS J.

I should like to acknowledge at the outset that I harbor no grandiose illusions about the import of what I will say this afternoon.(1) As any veteran of annual meetings readily knows, presidential addresses are a time-honored ritual in the life of learned societies, a ritual comparable to the prayers spoken in the United States Congress, well meant, but stirring only mild interest. Alas, they all tend to be written as on water.

A future dissertation on such addresses of our Society will undoubtedly point out that over the years they have fallen into three broad categories--addresses that reflect, addresses that teach, and addresses that preach. The first sort engenders a kind of discrete charm as it affords the listeners an interesting hour, between the afternoon sessions and drinks and dinner, neither intellectually demanding nor needlessly provocative. It is the commencement address for colleagues. The second sort clearly is the favored one. It is the learned essay, culled from the speaker's field of specialization, generally an impressive vignette of mature and learned research. It has the advantage of insulating the presidential speaker from criticism, since, after all, the speaker is the expert, and thus the address proceeds to its predictable conclusion, undisturbed by ironic witticism or cries of outrage on the part of the audience.

The third category of presidential pronouncements is the precarious one. It begins with reflection and ends with a sermon. It latches on to an ethereal topic and opens, or reopens, a debate that has nagged at the speaker's psyche. It seeks to offer broad, even metaphysical, musings on our craft. But, much like taking on the task of climbing Mount Everest, this is impressive only when successful. This category has several sub-categories of which the moralizing kind has recently fallen out of favor. For more senior presidential orators, the temptation to fall into rhetoric invoking a golden age long ago is seemingly irresistible.

This is where I come in. Some of you will wonder, especially once I have come to the end, why I did not stick with the Reformation. The very title of my talk is, as they say, quite a mouthful. I suspect that it may have triggered some discomfort for some of you, both for its use of the term "church history" (rather than the currently fashionable "history of Christianity" or "religious history") and of the phrase "moral discipline."(2) The former suggests hopeless ecclesiastical blinders, while the latter intimates my naive intention to move rashly into the swamps of moral judgments, these days hardly the way to win academic friends and influence publishing people. You might think, indeed fear, that I shall propose that we return to a metahistorical enterprise or, as Henry Charles Lea put it many years ago, that we write church history "as a Sunday School tale for children of larger growth."(3)

I thus proceed with my self-assigned task not only with crafted candor, but also with an admitted handicap. I offer my reflections out of a deep concern over a state of affairs that, in my judgment, is likely to lead to dire consequences for the profession you, and I, deeply cherish.

Let me begin with the story of how I came to the vocation of a historian of Christianity.

"I know by experience that from my early youth I aspired to the character of an historian."(4) I wish I could claim these words as my own. But they are from Edward Gibbon's memoirs. Of course, one may be entitled to some skepticism if a boy growing up in rural Hampshire in those days knew what it meant to be a historian. Thus we may easily relegate the remark to a romantic exhibitionism of Gibbon's part, who in retrospective reflection saw his vocation as a harmonious development from youth to adulthood. Such self-confidence inspires envy and admiration.

I confess that I do not recall what my vocational aspirations or fantasies were in my early youth. In fact, contrary to the uncannily perfect recall of memoir writers, I remember very little from my childhood. I grew up in Nazi Germany, but my foremost experiences were the awareness at age seven that there was no Santa Claus and at age ten my first (and hopeless) infatuation.

When I first became aware that adult life lay ahead of me, I decided on a career in the German diplomatic service and consequently began the study of law. My legal studies, comparable neither in length nor in depth to those of John Calvin, were challenging enough, but I soon decided that jurisprudence was not for me. In Gymnasium I had drunk the heady wine of Nietzsche, Kafka, and Sartre, and not long into my legal studies, I concluded that I must be better suited for broader, if more elusive intellectual pursuits. But it was not so much that I was drawn to the lure of unfolding the mysteries of European intellectuality, including those of Christianity. Rather, my father, who had more homespun notions of my future, got me in touch with a well positioned member of the legal profession who eloquently conveyed to me that diplomatic service was not going to be what I had fantasized it to be. A diplomatic career, he enlightened me, would take me to such places as Shanghai, Timbuktu, or Lima, where I would issue import licenses for agricultural products or legitimize the offspring of German merchant sailors, while the weighty ambassadorships to London, Washington, or Moscow, not to mention the ratified air of summit meetings and international conferences, would elude me. Thus, after an abortive semester as a law student, I began to study theology. I did so at the University of Erlangen. Since Erlangen was then, more so than now, a citadel of Lutheran orthodoxy, it was Lutheran theology that I imbibed.

What personal piety and conviction lay behind this decision to do theology is irrelevant here. Suffice it to say, however, that as a teenager I had as my religious role model two pastors who had been chaplains in the German army, both involved with the Confessing Church and the anti-Nazi resistance, one of them escaping from a Soviet prisoner-of-war camp in Poland all the way back to Germany. Both represented a Christianity both robust and intellectual, one my pastor, the other my Religionslehrer in the Gymnasium. I thus survived the heady skepticism of adolescence with an intriguing mixture of defiant polemic and persuasive response. My religion teacher in high school, whom I remember for his intriguing characterization of modern belief--"a pound of beef makes for a good steak"--was endlessly patient with my sophomoric demurrers. In short, I never felt alienated from organized Christianity. The intellectual and existential appeal of Christianity seemed to me more persuasive than that of its critics.

In telling my story I skipped the fact that between high school and university I spent a year as an exchange student in the United States--at a Mennonite college, Goshen College in Indiana. I had no say in winding up at Goshen College. Serendipity or providence took me, a German Lutheran, to the center of American Mennonitism. Initially I was not at all altogether happy with a prospect of attending an institution located in the middle of nowhere--Mike Royko once wrote that every place in Indiana is "somewhere in Indiana"(5)--and, moreover, representative of what in Germany was condescendingly called `sectarian' Christianity, but the prospect of spending one year in America, at a time when German tourists had not as yet discovered Florida, was irresistible.

At Goshen College I was confronted with an striking ethos--which I had known from confirmation class as Pietist ethos. Movies, my favorite pastime alongside reading, were at Goshen declared to be immoral, not to mention wine that in my parental home had always been both freely offered and consumed. I faced the alternative of taking a stand against this understanding of the Christian faith, which seemed to me rather bizarre, or of making an effort to understand it. After my initial bafflement had passed, I began to empathize--Wilhelm Dilthey called it "das Verstehen"--with this Mennonite environment, even though I never failed to be aware that I was an outsider, welcome and accepted, to be sure, but always an outsider nonetheless.

I thus commenced my study of theology at Erlangen after my return to Germany with the awareness that there was a Christian world beyond Lutheranism, though my courses did little, if anything to help me understand this diversity. Clad in genteel civility of form and with impressive accumulation of learning, my professors left little doubt that between Patmos and Wittenberg there had been no authentic Christianity and none afterwards either (unless connected with Martin Luther).

In the end, I opted to get my degree not in theology but in religion. My advisor was Hans Joachim Schoeps, who enthralled me by his brilliance, his wit, and above all by his persistent probing of provocative questions. If theology had exposed me to exact and principled scholarship, Schoeps exposed me to provocative ideas. Under his tutelage the history of Christianity was no longer a string of great men, but the beliefs and notions of the common people, the men and women in the pews, expressed not so much in weighty theological tomes, but in sermons, pamphlets, and editorials. The Apostle Paul was no longer the forerunner of Martin Luther, but a Pharisaic Jew, deeply steeped in his religion and time. The story of early Christianity was not the clear and consistent unfolding of orthodoxy, but an incessant controversy between competing interpretations of Jesus.

Importantly, Schoeps's courses alerted me to something else as well: that in the history of Christianity there also were the forgotten voices, the losers, the heretics, the schismatics, the dissenters, the outsiders. And theirs were voices worth hearing. In a way, Schoeps himself personified this, for he himself was a Jew living in post-World War II Germany, and I, for my part, realized that I had heard these ignored voices among the Mennonites at Goshen College. Indeed, in an ironic way, I had myself experienced being an outsider at Goshen--and later on had the same experience of being an outsider in the United States--who (to cite a trite illustration) could not connect with anyone from graduate schools days when I first began to attend the meetings of the ASCH. Yet, I understood that the disparaging terms "Sekte" and "Sektierer" with which I had grown up in Germany did not at all correspond to what I had encountered in Goshen--namely a deep, ethically focused piety. Hans Joachim Schoeps provided me with the conceptual rationale to understand what I read in the Tauferakten and in Gottfried Arnold's Unpartheyische Kirchen- und Ketzergeschichte and what I had experienced in Goshen.

When the time came to decide on a dissertation topic, I entertained the exuberant if naive notion to draw on the best of two worlds and write about Martin Luther and the Anabaptists. But Wilhelm Maurer, the church historian at Erlangen, was of the mind that dissertation writers were too immature to write about Luther--this evidently being a prerogative reserved for incumbents of endowed professorial chairs--and so I turned to Schoeps. Since he did not believe much in comparative topics, he encouraged me to write about the Anabaptists. The dissertation became my first book and the point of departure for a brief, yet intense, dabbling in Anabaptist research. I never felt theologically close to these sixteenth-century Anabaptists, but I always stood in awe before their commitment, determination, and martyrdom.

The rest is a fairly traditional story of an academic career--that intriguing convergence of competence and circumstances. This career took place, however, not in Germany, but a chance appointment at Goshen College, then appointments at Duke, CUNY, SMU, and again at Duke, meant that I found both my profession and my home in North America. If there is anything unusual in my story, it was that somewhere along the lines I fell from grace by becoming a university administrator. Even more important was the fact that throughout my career I have always had joint appointments--in history departments and religion departments and in a divinity school.

In short, my vocation as a historian of Christianity was forged in a series of personal paradoxes--a commitment to Christianity, yet always a discernable distance, part of the mainstream, yet always close to dissent. I suspect, all the same, that the story of my vocation is not too different from your stories. I also suspect that most of us entered our profession with only a vague notion what the history of Christianity, as expressed in the story of numerous churches, was really all about.

When I began my career, the world of church history was a harmonious world. It was a world that was centered in Wittenberg or Geneva (according to the values of the observer). It was a Protestant world, and the guild of those who studied it was mainly one of Protestant churchmen. Had I then known more about the history of church history, I would have realized that this history was far more complex than met my eye.(6)

For the fact of the matter is that the study of church history is a rather complex story. Long ago and far away, it was loftily assumed that the history of the world and the history of Christianity were one and the same. Both were salvation history that began in the Garden of Eden and would end at the Second Coming, encompassing the time from Adam to Armageddon, from Ramses and Hammurabi to Charlemagne and Richard the Lionhearted. It was universal history, even as the Bible was the universal book of books, not only for religion, but also for history and geography, not to mention science. This understanding of church history, which made no distinction between historia sacra and historia universalis, dominated the stage until the eighteenth-century Enlightenment. And the process of emancipation that then ensued proved rather difficult. Voltaire's attempt, in his famous Essai sur les moeurs et l'esprit des nations et sur les principaux faits de l'historie depuis Charlemagne jusqu'a Louis XIII, to separate secular from sacred history was dismissed by Montesquieu with the famous remark that Voltaire had written his history the way monks had earlier written history to glorify their monasteries.(7)

This eighteenth-century loss of universal claims for the history of Christianity was countered, in the course of the nineteenth century, by a new claim--that the study of church history was a scientific enterprise, an objective science, that could take its rightful methodological place alongside the other sciences, such as chemistry, mathematics, or physics. This notion found winsome expression in Henry Boynton Smith's 1851 inaugural address at Union Theological Seminary, entitled Nature and Worth of the Science of Church History. Of course, with their insistence on the worth of the science of church history, the church historians of the time were merely following the lead of their secular colleagues. Both shared the ideal of incessant work in archives, of an indefatigable excerpting of primary sources, of the filling of shoeboxes with innumerable 3x5 cards with pertinent quotes, all of this serving as the steady supply line for monographs and the pages of scholarly journals. The assumption was that church history was (or could be made) "scientific." There were a few skeptics, who noted not only that there was a difference between history and church history, but also that even the claims of historical objectivity lacked final persuasiveness.(8)

Toward the end of the nineteenth century the Social Gospel movement exerted its influence, particularly in North America, on the study of the Christian past. Now the social aspects of Christian history were emphasized. That was a somewhat short phase, however, though those of our older colleagues, who did their graduate work at Chicago or Harvard during the 1930s, tended to parlay their version of the Christian past as social history way into the 1960s. My Duke colleague Ray Petry was one of them, and I remember vividly how I once asked him how he dealt with Thomas Aquinas in the first semester of the required two-semester survey. His response was "oh, very little. I emphasize the beginnings of church music in the thirteenth century."

During most of the twentieth century, however, the major force impacting our field was Neo-orthodoxy. Theology was now writ large, and for the better part of the century those who practiced our craft smiled benignly on their predecessors, their empathy with colleagues in secular history, their emphasis on social history. Two generations ago our colleagues cared little about claims of scholarly objectivity and were outspoken in their insistence that church history is an integral component of the Christian theological enterprise and so is more than a strictly empirical or phenomenological discipline because it is informed by faith commitments, an appreciation of revelation, and a philosophy of history. Especially our European colleagues endorsed Karl Barth's idea of church history as an auxiliary discipline, a Hilfswissenschaft, for dogmatic theology. In any event, the methodological and heuristic dilemma that the nineteenth-century practitioners had exposed was impatiently brushed aside.(9)

This perspective dominated our work for decades and only in the 1970s did different voices emerge. We heard about new subject matters and new methodologies. Those who purveyed them also tended to smile benignly on their predecessors as they informed them that they had done it all wrong.

The new subject matter, that is, the discovery of previously neglected voices of the Christian past, has significantly changed the way we are doing history and the history of Christianity. In particular, the perspective of the new social history has made major, and dramatic, inroads.(10) Both in Europe and in North America the emphasis on the social dimension of the past was undoubtedly triggered by the social turbulence experienced in the 1960s and early 1970s, for which the words Civil Rights and Vietnam became apt code words. Martin Luther's notion of the deus absconditus or John Calvin's understanding of predestination began to pale as important issues for the historian over against such topics as Luther's attitude toward the Jews or Calvin's toward civil disobedience. The relative rapidity with which such topics as women, popular religion, sexuality, dissent, etc. were embraced was surely expressive of the traumatic turbulence of the time.

As regards the history of Christianity the argument was made that the historians of Christianity previously focused on "official" religion--the theological elites, popes, and councils. The new social historians. of Christianity, in turn, focused on the beliefs and practices of the men and women in the pews at particular times and places. Both the social context of Christianity and the social dimension of the Christian belief system were emphasized.(11) Some scholars were interested in Christianity as a demographic variable, while others, such as the late Bob Scribner, having been influenced by social and cultural anthropology, saw Christianity "as something to be defined and described within the historical framework in which it appeared."(12) Finally, and most recently, the mandate of doing a "global history" of Christianity has come to the fore--which may well be seen as paralleling the general move to do away with eurocentrism in history and focus on the "Two-Thirds World."(13)

The new methodologies, for which the word "theory" has become the code word, have not been so well accepted by our guild, perhaps because of their seemingly more radical departure from the traditional way of doing things. The advocates have offered new apostolic lines of succession, one that did not begin with Schleiermacher, continuing with Ritschl, Harnack, and Barth, but one that began with Feuerbach and Marx and continued with Habermas and Benjamin, Derrida and Foucault. This has excited quite a few among us, especially our younger colleagues. According to this poststructuralist gospel, truth is evasive, there are only self-serving realities buttressed by regimes of power, though--as Foucault's work has exemplified--regimes of power get overturned and spread through society. There is no room for historical linearity or continuity, for the force of human agency, for settled meanings, and for the authority of tradition. What we find, rather, is a sense of the self and of social institutions as fluid constructions, a sense of relativism and of the contingency of the entire historical world, coupled with skepticism about universal constructs and the capacity of language to say what "is really" the case. Thus, as Lyotard has argued, the "grand narratives" of Christianity, Enlightenment, and Marx have collapsed.(14) In so arguing, however, theory does not seem to have said much about religion, much less about Christianity, as fields of inquiry, though recently some theorists, such as Derrida or Lyotard, have focused on religion and Christianity. Intriguingly, English departments seem to have become the home for philosophical and religious inquiry. Much of this appears to be far more discontinuous than is actually the case. Anybody who has attempted to reconcile traditional Protestant and Catholic perspectives on the Protestant Reformation will have found "truth" quite evasive. Still, the impact of theory on our field has been, if I see it correctly, minimal to date.

Of course, all this is well known to this audience, and my overview simply meant to remind you that, during the last 250 years, the history of our discipline has been an intriguing story of changing emphases and perspectives, which might well be seen as underscoring the postmodern insistence on the relativity of all viewpoints, while at the same time lessening the notion of the revelatory character of each new trend. The fundamental fact, however, is that we today ask questions different from those our predecessors asked a generation ago. Then, it would have been most unlikely to find a paper entitled "Blessed are the Meat-Eaters: Christian Antivegetarianism and the Missionary Encounter with Chinese Buddhism" on the program of a national scholarly society. We today emphasize what was then deemed unimportant, and what we now deem unimportant was then highlighted. The new understanding of the role of women illustrates the former, while the place of theology in the broader fabric of the history of Christianity suggests the latter. Thus, to note just two examples from my own field of specialization, we have unearthed a staggering wealth of new sources pertaining to the sixteenth-century Anabaptists, even as the records of the Genevan Consistory in the sixteenth century have become more accessible, throwing important light on the way the Anabaptists and the Genevan church functioned.(15) On the whole, however, it is not that new unearthed "facts" have altered the traditional understanding; rather, new perspectives have been imposed on old facts that were known, but ignored. And, inasmuch as generational cohorts always overlap and intertwine, our field today has disciples of various approaches.

No matter. Our field is full of vitality. New journals have been launched, striking monographs appear with breathtaking rapidity, and the annual meetings of the ASCH show an ever greater breadth of sessions and participants. Our field has been transformed and enriched in a number of striking ways, not the least of which is the reality that traditional confessional biases have disappeared. We, the members of this guild, labor with diligence, vigor, and insight in this vineyard. This is particularly true of our younger colleagues, whose devotion to the field and whose learning are impressive indeed. This applies to graduate students and undergraduates as well. Most of us have fewer of the latter, but some sparkle as if it were the first day of creation. There is much to be excited about.

But, these strikingly positive aspects notwithstanding, there is also a different, bleaker story. We are a field with much vitality but without a vital mandate. I confess to some deep concerns that cloud the picture.

First of all, I remind you that for a long time, it was taken for granted that there was a "higher" purpose to the study of the history of Christianity. The craft was practiced in theological faculties by believers, to be sure, with some disagreement in the ranks. Schleiermacher argued that the study of the past of the Christian church was the task of the theologian, while Wilhelm Dilthey insisted that "theologians cannot study the history of theology."(16) In any case, the Christian past was studied by insiders--a fact, the significance of which escaped only the practitioners themselves.

For centuries, church history was thus taught as part of the theological curriculum. It had no function independent of its overarching theological purpose to support historically the claims of the Christian faith, even though, beginning with the Enlightenment, church historians increasingly performed the critical role of subjecting dogmatic assertions to historical scrutiny. Johann Salomo Semler or Adolf von Harnack are two apt illustrations.

This role of church history did not materially change, when over a century ago undergraduate departments of Bible appeared at colleges and universities in North America, paralleling the rise of graduate theological seminaries.(17) These departments were undergraduate Protestant seminaries in disguise, as the roster of these departments invariably included faculty in Old and New Testaments, theology, ethics, and church history, in other words, the exact complement of the classical disciplines in seminaries. Of course, these departments might have been better described as departments of Christianity, for the Christian religion was their sole subject and the purpose was that of indoctrinating the young, that is, the delineation of the splendor of the Christian faith. As in seminaries, there was a purpose to be served and lessons to be learned. Except that the story was not to enlighten future men of the cloth, as was being done in seminaries, but the future elites of society.(18)

A little more than a generation ago, this normative Christian model, in which church history held an important place, began to be subtly repudiated. Departments of Bible or of theology became departments of religion. The argument underlying this change was, on the one hand, the reiteration of nineteenth-century notions of scholarly objectivity (anyone, especially a Christian, teaching Christianity obviously was not objective!) and, on the other, the declaration to deal equitably with the religious traditions of all of humankind. A distaste for the traditional Christian hegemony in the academic study of religion undoubtedly was also a factor.

The disavowal of the traditional model is well illustrated by departments of religion established in the 1960s and 1970s.(19) These departments were created ex nihilo, so to speak, and they reflected what an ideal department of religion should look like. So, an ideal conceptualization, rather than an amalgam of tradition, legacy, and faculty politics determined the configuration of fields to be taught. In these newer departments, which typically were given to a phenomenological approach, and increasingly in established departments as well, Christianity became only one of several religious traditions to be studied on equal footing. And church history became history of Christianity which, in turn, became a secondary aspect of the study of the Christian religion.(20)

Thus, to say it somewhat stridently, the curricular importance of the history of Christianity became analogous to that of the study of the history of Chinese philosophy or of medieval Buddhism, both sub-areas of larger religious traditions. This was a far cry from the sweeping identity of church history with universal history that had been characteristic until the eighteenth century and a far cry also from the notion of church history as handmaiden for Christian theology, either as a specifically theological discipline or as branch of the broader theological enterprise.

The new assumption was that Christianity, as one of the major religions of humankind, deserved academic attention as one area of the humanities. The study of Christianity, including its history, was said to do positive things--such as expose students to cognitive reasoning, to the great ideas of humankind, with or without a literary canon. This kind of language is invariably found in preambles to general education requirements or department of religious studies descriptions in college catalogues, though I may be forgiven my doubts whether faculties really believe this to be the case or whether general education stipulations and strategic plans for departmental priorities are foremostly the outgrowth of faculty lethargy and politics.

The referent in all of this is to Christianity in general, which means that the various Christian subspecializations, such as the history of Christianity, must vie for a place in the academic sun, and this in view of the reality that Hinduism, Buddhism, and Judaism still tend to be represented in departments of religious studies by a single faculty member--who then is said to "do Buddhism," "Judaism," or "Hinduism" in its entirety.

Of course, there are those in our midst whose institutional alignment is with seminaries. It seems almost needless to say that in these institutions--as also in those institutions where the term "church related" has retained its meaning--the context is one of a faith tradition. But even in those institutions there is an increasing temptation, not to say tendency, to ignore the historical dimension of Christianity. Thus, the importance of the Christian past is not without challenges in those institutional settings. The disposition to engage in the practice of Christianity without knowing its past and to construct it on the basis of the insights of the past twenty years is disturbingly pervasive.(21) As a Duke Divinity School student once put it, "The trouble with Christianity is the New Testament."

A second characteristic of our current situation is what I would call the cultural estrangement of the field of church history as it relates to settings other than seminaries and church-related institutions. As I have noted, the study of the Christian past, even as the study of the past in general, traditionally had a broader purpose--the use of the past to enlighten the present. This didactic function of the past explains why history commanded such a pivotal place in the collegiate curriculum in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Society accepted the past as integral to the present. Expressed in this country by Fourth of July parades, memorials of Jefferson or Lincoln, or civil war monuments, the study of the past was held in high esteem not because it enhanced the cognitive or analytic reasoning ability of the young, but because the past contained the values deemed crucial for society. It is easy to see how, in an America molded by the Protestant ethos, history and church history went hand in hand as important didactic tools of society. Biblical notions and imagery--"the city built on a hill" or the "New Jerusalem"--informed much of America's self-understanding. Of course, it was a Protestant version of the past, but no matter. Crucially important was the convergence of the values of society and the task of the historian. In a subtle way, history supported the self-understanding of American society, even as church history provided the ingredients for the Christian self-understanding of this society.

That was true of nineteenth-century Oxford and Cambridge as well, and John Henry Newman's idea of the university assumed that conversance with the "Greats" was the proper preparation for leadership in society.(22) Thus, young "boys" were sent up to Oxford and Cambridge to study history, philosophy, classics, and literature, since these disciplines were deemed to be the proper preparation for the future elites of English society.

This has changed. Today American society has other notions about how future elites should be educated than to be exposed to history, not to mention church history. The dramatic shift in undergraduate majors in colleges and universities away from the humanities to "preprofessional" and outrightly "professional" majors, such as information technology, public policy studies, or business, is a telling case in point.

Many of us still dream of colleges or universities as institutions where the true, the good, and the beautiful hold a permanent lease, where the humanities are pivotal and where society appreciates the function of the humanities to debunk societal myths and mythologies expressing its appreciation of such deconstruction by generous financial support. The battles in Washington over the NEH budget (as compared with the National Science Foundation budget that is always higher than are asked for) are important reality factors. As is the disparity in salaries between humanities and professional school faculty. One need only to observe how the largesse of donors influences direction and emphasis of faculty preoccupation and institutional mission to be disabused of the fantasy that fields of study are timeless verities. American society has shown itself surprisingly generous in supporting higher education, but--when you look closely--mainly of those initiatives that are perceived to mesh with the ideal of what constitutes the educated individual needed by society.

To be sure, humanities departments today continue to play important roles on our campuses. By and large, they have survived the vicissitudes of budget cuts and the reordering of institutional priorities, even though religion departments seem to be high on the list of administrators' lists of potential cuts. But the true magnets of student interest, not to mention institutional budgetary commitments, are elsewhere. Much like the Gideon Bibles in hotel rooms, revered, yet rarely used, so humanities departments are revered, but as far as society is concerned, ever farther from the center of things. The vitality of our scholarship stands thus in blatant contrast to the disregard and benign neglect on the part of society. As we all know, this society has been dominated for almost two centuries by liberal capitalism that venerates the "market" with religious intensity and attributes to it all the attributes that Thomas Aquinas reserved for the deity. And thus makes even higher education subject to it.

A third characteristic of our current enterprise is a tendency toward marginalization. This is a complicated matter, where one can be easily misunderstood. If you survey some of the most impressive work done in recent years, it becomes obvious that a goodly portion has dealt with aspects of Christian marginality, such as popular Fundamentalism, ethnic Catholics, or Native American Christianity. Carlo Ginzburg wrote a splendid exemplar of such micro-history, The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a Sixteenth Century Miller.(23) No doubt, we have been immensely enriched by some of these studies, especially when they were accompanied, as was the case in Ginzburg's book, by methodological reflections on how such micro-history is to be placed into a larger context. Still, notwithstanding the protestation that what seems to be marginality is, in fact, addressing major issues, I would suggest that precisely because some of these studies have been so good, our appreciation of addressing larger issues of the Christian past has diminished. The telltale question would seem to be rather simple: has our understanding of sixteenth century popular religion been really enhanced by Ginzburg's book?

This then is the way I see things in our field--reasons to be gratified, but also reasons for concern. Clearly, some developments in our field during the last two hundred years are--and should be--irreversible. Most of us will not want to reassert the identification of human history with church history. Most of us will not want to reassert the function of the history of Christianity as "handmaiden" of theology. Many of us will also have grave problems with a historicism that, in its own way, was just as arrogant a century ago as are some advocates of social history or theory at the present. The botanical dictum that a thousand flowers should bloom is, as far as I am concerned, a valid pronouncement for our situation today. Our guild would be impoverished if, as regards subject matter or methodology, we would all sing out of the same hymnal. Our present pluralism is fine. What impoverishes us, I believe, is that we have not kept our eyes on the larger picture.

Which takes me back to the beginning, where I shared with you how I came to the vocation of a historian of Christianity, for in applying the term "vocation" to my own story, I meant to speak for a recovery of a sense of vocation for all of us. Perhaps in so doing, the intellectual and societal significance of our work might be enhanced. The question that remains is simple: what then will add a vital purpose to the vitality of our common enterprise? I wish I had the answer, but (lest I lapse into silence) let me offer three suggestions.

The first is that we do not hesitate to address broad questions. That will mean that we insist vigorously that the avenue through which to understand Christianity is its history. The possibility of the traditional "grand narrative" of Christianity may well be gone; the possibility of a "grand narrative" for the history of Christianity remains. This means a role for the historian of Christianity as a judge, a "moral" judge, if you please, that is, as a scholar with a purpose for those inside as well as outside the Christian tradition. Surely, we can tell Christian believers, better than anyone else, that Christian beliefs are not suprahistorical, beyond the contingencies of time and place; that we can demonstrate better than anyone else, be it for the third century or the sixteenth, the actual historical unfolding of faith claims they, the theologians and the churches, are making. And surely we can tell those outside the Christian tradition--again, better than anyone else--of the profound changes introduced into the Western tradition by those who, for good or for ill, claimed allegiance to what they. understood as the Gospel of Jesus of Nazareth.

This will also suggest that we do not hesitate to argue vigorously that the avenue through which to understand Western culture is its Christian history. We have been all too timid, I believe, about this. In our determination to get away from the hegemonic notion of the history of Christianity as universal history, in our disavowal of church history as handmaiden of theology, and in our commitment to curricular pluralism; we tend to overlook the effects of Christianity on the political, social, economic, and intellectual dimensions of society. As long as we only see it the other way around, that is, as long as we are overwhelmed by how politics, economics, class, gender have impacted Christianity, we have yielded our place--and have made ourselves superfluous. Our colleagues in economics, political science, or sociology can do this kind of analysis much better. Some of us might even suggest that historians of Christianity would be better off as members of such departments, since we have neither a distinctive subject matter nor a distinctive methodology. Of course, much of what is done in religion departments could well be done elsewhere in a college and a university. But the issue is not, so it seems to me, the structural alignment of the study of the history of Christianity, but the dictum of its intrinsic, indeed pivotal importance in Western culture. Surely, after we have acknowledged the reality of other factors, non-Christian, non-theological in Western (and since the eighteenth century also global) history, the fundamental importance of Christian history remains. Michael Walzer may well have overstated the case for the Puritan origins of liberal democracy and Max Weber may have been wrong on the Calvinist origins of modern capitalism. Still, they argued for the pivotal importance of our field.(24)

Secondly, we must affirm that the avenue through which we understand Christian history is how Christians in the past understood themselves. Nowadays, we have been reluctant to do this. It is one thing to subject historical claims and counterclaims to rigid scrutiny; it is quite another when the story we tell turns into a kind of intellectual freak show. We have taken the postmodern insistence that there is radical discontinuity between representation and reality so seriously that we have tended to revel in the argument that Christians in the past rather naively took representation for reality. I believe this to be an impoverishment of the story. Brad Gregory's recent book on sixteenth-century martyrs eloquently points this out.(25)

My final suggestion is that we, the tellers of the story of Christianity, approach our task with a sense of moral earnestness. After all, this story is a somber one--a story of striking learning and intriguing ignorance, of individuals standing up to a powerful state and of individuals succumbing to a powerful state, of reform and renewal, of repression and restoration, of love of enemy and fanaticism, of cynicism and justice--and this in a world in which the battalions of good and evil have always been ready to announce their readiness to march into battle, even though the battalions of evil often are indistinguishable from those of good. In telling the story with passion, indeed, when appropriate proffering moral judgments, we will have regained a usable past, with our patron saint and godfather none other than Friedrich Nietzsche, who also had much to say about "antiquarian" history that ends up being hollow, irrelevant, as well as unnecessary.

This is what I call "church history as moral discipline." It is, therefore, not much a moralizing about the bewildering richness of Christian history; it is a telling of the story with a sense of moral earnestness and urgency. If we do that, we will be well on our way to regaining an appropriately important place for our field.

There are many who have warned against making history the handmaiden of moral philosophy. A generation ago, Herbert Butterfield, who then seemed to have the last word on just about everything, warned against making "pseudomoral judgments, masquerading as moral ones, mixed and muddy affairs, part prejudice, part political animosity, with a dash of ethical flavoring tossed into the concoction."(26)

I agree. But, I contend that, unless we bore ourselves and our students to death, against which Soren Kierkegaard so eloquently warned us, we cannot afford telling this story without our own personal engagement. Only then will we have that sense of awe before those women and men who recorded, sometimes humbly, sometimes arrogantly, that they had encountered the sacred.

(1.) Given the nature of this essay, I document only sparingly. I must thank several colleagues who kindly have offered comments, both positive and negative: Elizabeth Clark, Peter Kaufman, David Lotz, John O'Malley, and Grant Wacker. My reasoning may not have become more persuasive; it assuredly has become more cogent as a result of their comments.

(2.) I am using the terms "church history" and "history of Christianity" in this essay quite interchangeably and as virtually synonymous. I mean to indicate, thereby, that I do not share the (current) reluctance of the use of the term "church history" and find rationales for the use of both. I am well aware (as should go without saying) that the term "church," as in "church history" is historically as well as theologically problematic, especially for a Protestant. However, I do prefer, as a matter of fact, the term "church history" for what seems to me, at least, a persuasive historical reason: I read the history of Christianity to have been eminently a pursuit of the "church." That is what the theologians argued about and, even more importantly, what the men and women in the pews were convinced they were part of. To use the term, therefore, seems to me to acknowledge historical reality. My major misgiving with the term "church history" is that it intimates a simple equation between "church" and "Christianity" that in our pluralistic culture would seem problematic.

(3.) As quoted in Conrad Wright, "History as a Moral Science," American Historical Review 81 (1976): 3.

(4.) Edward Gibbon, Memoirs of my Life and Writings (Hartnolls, Bodmin: Ryburn 1994).

(5.) My Duke colleague Grant Wacker reminded me of Royko's quip.

(6.) Of course, the topic has triggered an almost endless array of studies. See, for example, the old but still valuable work by Walter Nigg, very much in the anti-establishment tradition that goes back to Gottfried Arnold: Die Kirchengeschichtsschreibung: Grundzuge ihrer historischen Entwicklung (Munchen: C. H. Beck, 1934). More recent and important works are V. Conzemius, "Kirchengeschichte als `nichttheologische' Disziplin: Thesen zu einer wissenschaftstheoretischen Standortsbestimmung," Theologische Quartalsschrifi 155 (1975): 187ff. and Hans Reinhard Seelinger, Kirchengeschichte--Geschichtstheologie--Geschichtswissenschaft (Dusseldorf: Patmos, 1981).

(7.) Seelinger, op. cit., 24.

(8.) Ephraim Emerton, first Winn Professor of Ecclesiastical History at Harvard, seems to have missed this point in his 1882 inaugural address, for he sought to make the case that "the method of historical science is the method of history.' Perhaps this should be seen as yet another proof for the futility of presidential or inaugural addresses!

(9.) An excellent treatment, from that perspective, is Christian Uhlig, Funktion und Situation der Kirchengeschichte als theologischer Disziplin (Frankfurt/Main: Peter Lang, 1985).

(10.) For example, as regards the Reformation of the sixteenth century, we have impressive studies on festivals or ritual, but we have no interpretative conceptualization of the phenomenon we used to call "the Age of the Reformation" other than the notion implicit in much recent work that several centuries were characterized by change and reform.

(11). The important influence of social history, and concomitantly, social anthropology, has led to what I would call an intriguing secularization of the study of the history of Christianity. As David Lotz has observed, "the great bulk of the writing in church history and most of the best such writings has been done by scholars in university departments of religion, history, and literature" ("A Changing Historiography: From Church History to Religious History," in Altered Landscapes: Christianity in America, 1935-1985, ed. David Lotz [Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1989], 312). This echoes an earlier comment by James Nichols that the historians of culture and thought have contributed more to the literature of church history than had the occupants of chairs assigned to the discipline. One can easily think of names of distinguished colleagues and suggest that the field has become dominated by the agenda of scholars from outside the discipline.

(12). R. W. Scribner, "Religion, Society and Culture: Reorienting the Reformation," History Workshop Journal 14 (1982): 2-22.

(13.) See, for example, Carolyn Walker Bynum, "The Last Generation of Europeanists," Perspectives (February 1996) and Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000).

(14.) Jean-Francois Lyotard, The Postmodern Tradition (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984).

(15.) On Anabaptist research, there are a number of thoughtful assessments. See, for example, James M. Stayer, "Review Essay: Anabaptist History and Theology," Mennonite Quarterly Review 71 (1997): 473-82, as well as Stayer's earlier contribution "The Radical Reformation," in Handbook of European History, 1400-1600, eds., Thomas A. Brady Jr, Heiko A. Oberman, James D. Tracy (Leiden, 1995), 2: 249-82. For the Genevan records see Robert M. Kingdon, ed., Registres du Consistoire de Geneve au temps de Calvin, Vol. 1 (1542-44) (Geneva: Droz, 1996).

(16.) Wilhelm Dilthey, Briefwechsel zwischen Wilhelm Dilthey und dem Grafen Paul York von Wartenburg, 1877-1897 (Leipzig, 1923), 130.

(17.) Conrad Cherry, Hurrying Toward Zion: Universities, Divinity Schools, and American Protestantism (Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 1995).

(18.) This North American development was (and remains) unique, since elsewhere the teaching of the history of Christianity continued to be done in seminaries and theological faculties.

(19.) I am thinking here of such departments as that at Arizona State University at Tempe and the department at the University of Missouri, Columbia, Missouri.

(20.) Two perceptive studies are David Lotz, as cited above, and N. Keith Clifford, "Church History, Religious History or the History of Religion?" in Religious Studies: Issues and Prospects, eds. K. Klostermaier, L. W. Hurtado et al. (Atlanta: Scholars, 1991), 171ff.

(21.) I see this tendency, to cite just one example, in Elisabeth Schussler Fiorenza, Bread Not Stone: The Challenge of Feminist Biblical Interpretation (Boston: Beacon, 1984), xx.

(22.) Insightful in its analysis is Jaroslav J. Pelikan, The Idea of the University: A Reexamination (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1992).

(23.) Carlo Ginzburg, The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a Sixteenth Century Miller (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 1980).

(24.) My reference is, of course, to Max Weber's famous Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (numerous editions, the most recent of which is Los Angeles: Roxbury, 1998) and to Michael Walzer's Revolution of the Saints (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1965).

(25.) Brad S. Gregory, Salvation at Stake: Christian Martyrdom in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). This is one of the major monographs in recent Reformation scholarship.

(26.) Herbert Butterfield, History and Human Relations (London: Collins, 1951), 114, as quoted in Wright, op. cit., 11.