The Reality of God and Historical Method by Adams Samuel V.;

Author:Adams, Samuel V.; [Adams, Samuel V.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780830899500
Publisher: InterVarsity Press
Published: 2015-11-17T00:00:00+00:00

The Concrete and Contingent (the Real); The Necessary and Universal (the Ideal)

Wright’s definition, that history is the “meaningful narrative of events and intentions,”19 points to the causal relationship between events and human intentions so that those events can be related by the historian in a meaningful narrative. Meaning and intention point to the subjectivity of the actors within history, their worldviews and whatever those things are to which they point in order to make ultimate sense out of their lives. This can also be the meaning that the historian gives to the narrative that is told. At this point we might observe, with Hans Urs von Balthasar, that history involves the relationship between “the factual, singular, sensible, concrete and contingent; and the necessary and universal (and, because universal, abstract), which has the validity of law rising above the individual case and determining it.”20 That is to say, history lives within the tension of the contingent and the universal, an ever-moving fluctuation between one and the other as the quest for meaning influences the historian’s understanding of events and, in an opposite movement, the events themselves, or the impressions events have left on human memory and historical evidence, serve as checks upon the universal interpretation of meaning. There is a circularity to this, as von Balthasar claims: “The whole of history [is] the world of ideas which gives [history] its norms and meanings.”21 Without wandering too far afield into the dynamics of various accounts of the hermeneutical circle, it is important at least to recognize this feedback loop at work in the historian’s enterprise. The commitment required by such a loop is that human interpretation is, to some degree, checked by a reality external to it, whether a past reality whose effects remain in the present through historical evidence (memory, artifacts, texts and the like), or a present objective reality. This latter reality can be the ideological commitments of the knower or at least the conscious/subconscious worldview brought to bear upon the reality in question.

A theology of history, according to this view of history, will interpret the historical sources in light of theological claims, doctrines and dogmas; the “universal” claims of theological knowledge provide the interpretive framework for understanding the unique particular events of the past. It is also possible for a theology of history to be articulated according to the theological beliefs and commitments of historical figures (so, in Wright, this is what we find when he articulates the theology of the apostle Paul), but these still remain past artifacts, concrete particulars in the form of beliefs, which remain removed (to the extent that they can be) from the normative claims of the universal hermeneutical commitments of the historian: those commitments that order the historian’s work of storytelling. Here, again, Lessing’s ditch reappears. How can the particular history (including beliefs and events) of Jesus and the apostles be the source (as history) for the theological norms that, in turn, make sense of that history?

Again, the split between idealism and realism appears.

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