Reasonable Faith (3rd edition) by William Lane Craig

Author:William Lane Craig
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: ebook, book
Publisher: Crossway
Published: 2008-06-09T07:00:00+00:00

Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries

During the nineteenth and twentieth centuries the parallel development of historiography and historical apologetics was disrupted.

HISTORICISM, RELATIVISM, AND POSTMODERNISM

The nineteenth century saw the greatest advances in the science of history that had theretofore occurred. The climax of this development came in the school of historicism, shaped by the prodigious influence of the German historian Leopold von Ranke. Von Ranke, through his doctoral students and in turn through their students, was responsible for shaping a whole generation of great historians. The earmark of nineteenth-century historicism was objectivity. The task of the historian was to uncover the objective facts, and let those facts speak for themselves. The subjective element—the historian’s own personality, biases, outlook, milieu, and so forth—did not enter the historical equation. Von Ranke’s goal in doing history, to use his famous phrase, was to describe the past “wie es eigentlich gewesen ist” (as it actually was). He apparently saw no reason, given the enormous industry that he brought to his research and that he instilled in his students, why this goal could not be achieved.

During the twentieth century there came a sharp reaction to von Ranke’s naïve objectivism. The school of historical relativism emphasized the inextricable subjective element in the writing of history. In the United States, relativism was associated particularly with the historians Charles Beard and Carl Becker. Against von Ranke, they denied that historical facts are “out there,” waiting to be discovered. Facts do not bear their own meaning piggy-back; it is the historian who must ascribe meaning to the facts. And the historian, who is himself a product of his time and place in history, cannot assume the point of a neutral observer in writing history. The personal element is always in the equation. Von Ranke’s goal of describing the past as it really was is illusory; rather, the historian must himself reconstruct the past on the basis of the present. Ironically, the viewpoint of historical relativism is often referred to today as historicism, so that this term now means exactly the opposite of what it meant in the nineteenth century.

During the 1970s the postmodernist critique of objective canons of rationality and truth revitalized the old debate between historical objectivists and relativists. Rooted in Continental philosophy and hermeneutics and in the anti-realism of Wittgenstein, there has emerged a powerful postmodernist current of relativism which flows through virtually every academic field, including history. Calling the conflict between objectivism and relativism the “central cultural opposition of our time,” Richard Bernstein remarks, “Relativism, a stream in the philosophy of the past two hundred years that began as a trickle, has swelled in recent times into a roaring torrent.”7 As a result, he observes, “There is an uneasiness that has spread throughout intellectual and cultural life. It affects almost every discipline and every aspect of culture.”8 In 1986, writing in the journal History and Theory, F. R. Ankersmit called for the abandonment of what he termed the old “epistemological,” or objectivist, philosophy of history.9 The objectivist approach aimed

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