The Significance of Historical Theology in the Education of Ministers

Now, an inaugural address offers at least two options as to topic. One is the study of a theological problem and its historical ramifications. The other option is the prior question, why historical theology at all? Why should courses in historical theology be injected into an already overcrowded curriculum? Perhaps I should say the curriculum became overcrowded after historical theology was in. The question is coarsenal as well as academic. Every question should be able to give a better reason for its daily occupation than the fact that it happens to be a very pleasant way to make a living. I have therefore chosen for our theme the question what is the significance of historical theology in the training of a minister. The emphasis is on the word minister, the minister of a local congregation.

For our primary concern, as an institution of the church, is not the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake, not even the training of teachers, how significant teaching may be, and how significant training here may be for teaching. The question, rather, is what does historical theology have to contribute to the making of good ministers of Jesus Christ in the reformed tradition? Now, if my good colleague and friend had made it unmistakably clear that you cannot be an exegete unless you are first a historical theologian, I could forego this responsibility. I think this was what he was saying, but he edged it with other words, so there may be some misunderstanding. And another good friend, a colleague, Professor Mays in the biblical department, has really put me under pressure by suggesting, as I came here to speak, that since theology was only half as important as biblical studies, I should speak only half as long.

I feel obligated to speak at least twice as long. Well, let us begin with a brief definition of historical theology. As Italian indicates, it is a two-fold discipline, history and theology. historical discipline is subject to the methods of historical inquiry. Its basic aim is to understand rather than to explore it. Its proper concern is to be descriptive and empathic rather than partisan and dogmatic. As one branch of the history of ideas, it is involved with the general intellectual and cultural history which found the larger context for the development of theology, but the very fact that historical theology is theology as well as history makes the historical task more difficult, for it is only as one has in some measure competence in theology that he can understand the history and development of theology.

Yet theological competence is usually accompanied with theological commitments, which make it easy to understand certain theological developments and difficult to understand other theological developments. Most of the 18th and 19th studies in the history of theology were entitled histories of dogma. This has proved to be an inadequate description, in part because dogma, which usually has the meaning of official and authoritative teaching, was too limited, in part because of the ambiguity of the significance and meaning of dogma. means one thing for Protestants, something else for a Roman Catholic. Theology is a much more adequate word for it points to the reflection of the Christian community upon the meaning of Christian faith and Christian life.

Professor Calhoun, one of the ablest of the historians of dogma of this century or any century has said that the material of the history of theology can be fitted into three concentric circles. The largest circle is the total response of the Christian community to the mighty acts of God which create the community, and within this largest circle there is the interpretive reflection of the Christian community upon these originated events, and then there is the still smaller cycle of the official doctrines of the church. And now let us come a step further and ask what does historical theology contribute to the education of ministers? And in the first place let us First note that historical theology is significant for the education of ministers because it is an aid to the recovery of a Christian memory, a sense of belonging to a great community.

One of the tragedies of our time is the uprootedness of human existence, a man of bereft of the roots of the past and become victims of the tyranny of the present. In the words of Riesman’s well-known study, modern man is other-directed because he has no inner direction, no tradition to give strength to his life. And the Christian has rootage in the past because he belongs to the great tradition of the people of God. And significantly enough, many of the early historians of the Church began the history of the Church with Adam. It cannot be said that all who call themselves Christians today have a real Christian memory, have a real sense of belonging to the great tradition, and have roots which go back through the centuries. This is especially true of American Protestants.

They are, in a bad sense of the word, 20th century Christians. And as Professor Albert Outler has well expressed it, it was in some sort of historical community that each of us heard the gospel preached and at a time when we could not judge whether it was preached well or ill. Then as we discovered the past of our own communion and the past of other and disparate communion, we began to have some fuller measure of the common meaning of the Gospel we have heard and believed, and the Gospel as believed and practiced by others. In this respect, the discovery of our total Christian past is a means to a fuller initiation into the whole Christian family. Man is a creature capable of inheriting acquired characteristics. through his genes, through his traditions, children are met into the family life by hearing the reminiscences of the family.

It is a sense of this particular family tradition that makes its members truly care since the blood relation in itself is not sufficient to produce a feeling of truly belonging. theology is a recollection of the tradition of our life, of the family unto which we belong. It is, to use the words of Professor Richard Niebuhr, the story of our life that has been popular with radical Protestants since the days of the Reformation, to imagine that they could get along without the Christian tradition. Without the Christian centuries, some regarded the whole of Christian history as a great mistake, unaware that they themselves were the products of this history. Salvation was to be found by the incredible historical gymnastics of leaping over fifteen centuries of Christian history to the New Testament. part is represented in our time by the Church of Christ and by some but not all Baptists.

Now the notion that one can leap across 15 or 19 centuries and interpret the Bible independently of the Christian tradition has always been an illusion, however tantalizing. Some who have attempted this leap have been more dependent upon the Christian tradition than they have realized or have admitted. As Albert Outler has suggested, I give a basic New Testament passage to an orthodox, a Lutheran, a Calvinist, an Anglican, a Congregationalist, a representative of the pietistic and biblical tradition in American Christianity, and the discrepancies and their interpretations will correlate much too closely with various historically conditioned traditions in which they stand to justify the claim that they did nothing more than reproduce the original meaning.

It is amazingly difficult, even if it were desirable, for a member of the Christian community to escape the influence of the tradition in which he was born, nurtured, and trained. who think that they can leap across 19 centuries to the Bible and actually interpret the Bible in terms of and from the viewpoint of the particular spirit of the age in which they live. A spirit of the age which is bereft of the wisdom and the perspective of what Christians through the centuries have discovered the Bible to me. others who attempt to leap across the centuries, interpret the Bible in the light of the secular traditions of the society and culture in which they live and work. Actually, the church very early in its history found that historical theology here in the broad sense of exegetical, doctrinal theology, pastoral theology.

The historical theology of the church is enshrined in the rule of faith was indispensable to sound interpretation of Scripture. Irenaeus, Tertullian, Athanasius all discovered that the heretics could quote Scripture quite glibly and quite effectively. Therefore, they insisted that the Bible must be understood in the light of the Church’s rule of faith. And the Church ever since has insisted that the theology of the church, as summarized in some rule of faith, must be the guide to biblical interpretation with the exception of the Church of Christ and some Baptists, and one strongly suspects that in the case of these churches, a rule of faith is implicitly honored. But this does not mean that Irenaeus, Tertullian, or Athanasius of the confessional churches of our time give of church tradition and authority over scripture.

It does mean that the scriptures must be studied in the context of the Christian community and with serious regard to what Christians have found the scriptures to say in every age. The rules of faith are subject to reform in the light of the Christian community’s apprehension of the word of God. But this reformation of the rule of faith is the prerogative of the Christian community and not of the Christian individual. As is very clear this morning, a union seminary does not leave it to the prerogative of the individual professor to reform the Reformed tradition or the Presbyterian system of government. This is the prerogative of the community to which we belong and in which we work. John Calvin was fascinated by the radical reformers, but he never succumbed to their anti-historical outlook.

He can never bring himself to the point of saying that any home segment of the history of the church had been nothing but a great mistake, but he was certain that the church had fallen, especially about the time of Gregory the Great. Yet he does not even try to leap over the 1,000 years which intervened between the Reformation and Augustine, though it was with Augustine that he first tarries for long. But he claims fellowship with such theologians as Aquinas and Bernard of Clairvaux, his mastery of the fathers and his appreciation of the ancient church as a well-established fact. He deliberately worked as a theologian and as a liturgist within the context of the historic Christian community. And he wrote his institutes, the Christian religion, the great Protestant attempt to think consistently about the Christian message and life as a guide to the study of the Bible.

A Christian memory is a recollection of the story of one’s life as it reaches back through the ages and through the centuries. It is a thrilling fact to recall this morning And between each one of us and the events of the New Testament, indeed between us and Abraham, there is an unbroken succession of believing men and women who have heard the voice of God and in faith and love obey. Historical theology is church history, not the history of Christianity and not the history of theological texts. Professor Trimmer wrote in his presidential address before the American Church History Society several years ago rightly declared, the most crucial of these assumptions for the church historian is the assumption that the church is a community of people redeemed by God in history through Jesus Christ.

Apart from this assumption, there would be no church history, but rather the history of the Christian religion. Historical theology is nothing more and nothing less than the recollection of the reflection of Christian people through the centuries upon the mighty acts of God in their creation and redemption. H.E.W. Turner in his excellent book, Patterns of Christian truth is well written, all the major doctrines of orthodoxy will live devotionally as part of the corporate experience of the church before their theological development became a matter of urgent necessity. Historical theology does not deal with beliefs in abstract but with belief as it has been lived and confessed and proclaimed by the Christian community. The life of the Christian community, which historical theology seeks to recover, is a life of the ecumenical church.

It is also the particular tradition, and in our case, the Reformed tradition until and not in conflict. We can serve our own particular tradition best when we see and understand within the context of the Ecumenical Catholic Church. We can serve the Ecumenical Church best when we bring to it the treasures of our own particular heritage. Historical theology is nothing more than the effort to take seriously the life of the church, the covenant community through the centuries. We cannot take the covenant community seriously in the present if we break community with the covenant community through the centuries. Recovery of a Christian memory is nothing more than an awareness of the history of the church as a story of our own lives. Now let us note secondly that historical theology is significant for the education of ministers because history judges dogma and thus lays back its true meaning and its true significance.

We never know fully the meaning of any exegesis of Scripture or any theological reflection until we have seen it submitted to the test of time. There is a statement from the Old Testament which suggests that the man who puts on his arm ought not to boast as the man who takes it off. And I suppose that this means that any inaugural address is rather tenuous of fact. But surely this is true of the theological enterprise. Any new theology, a theological reflection untried by history, which treats cavalierly. The only theologies which have been proved in the crucible of history amazingly presumptuous. Professor James Orr, of the old United Free Church of Scotland and a remarkably fine book, The Progress of Dogma, as put it this way, the history of Dogma criticizes Dogma, corrects mistakes, eliminates temporary elements, supplements defects, incorporates the gains of the past at the same time that it opens up wide horizons for the future.

Of course, as Professor Orr well understood, history is no infallible judge of Dogma. In Protestantism, there is no infallible judge. But the historic wisdom of the Christian community, as it is reflected upon the Bible, is the best judge that we have. History judges dogma intellectually. For in history, an individual theologian’s reflection upon the meaning of Christian redemption, or a council’s decree is subjected to the evaluation and judgment of many Christians in many different places and in many different situations. History also judges dogmas socially and morally. James Orr speaks of the correlation of doctrine with vital Christian experience and with his practical effects. John Calvin wrote his institutes not only as a guide to the study of scripture, but as an aid to piety.

Calvin further declared that one of the principles of sound theology was the power to edify. Indeed, edification was one of the principles which Calvin used in the shaping of his liturgy. In 1788, our Presbyterian forefathers in this country attached to the former Presbyterian government certain preliminary principles. One of these principles declared truth is in order to goodness. And the great touchstone of truth, its tendency to promote holiness. We never know the full meaning of a Christian doctrine or an interpretation of scripture until we see it embodied in the life of the Christian man and in the life of the Christian community. As John Mackay has put it, the Christian revelation shall continue to have its crowning significance, not in great systems of thought or in masterpieces of all, but in the renewed lives of plain people, not in scholars and connoisseurs, not in poets and artists, persons who were enthralled and transfigured by the grandeur of the revelation, but in the community of believers, saints in the New Testament sense of the word, men and women who heard and obeyed the gospel of God and what we created by Christ Jesus.

In them, did the revelation of God reach the end, which was also the beginning. History judges theology and exposes something of its meaning, something of a meaning which can be found nowhere else by laying bare its embodiment in the life of the Christian man and in the life of the Christian community. For example, we come to a greater understanding of the real meaning of Arianism and the Nicene faith when we see the embodiment of Arianism and Nicene faith in the culture and in the imperial politics of the fourth century, as Professor George Williams of Harvard University in a very brilliant study has demonstrated. There is still a third way in which history judges dogma, and that is by what H. E. Turner is called the instinctive judgment of the Christian community.

Orthodox is established not simply by theologians but also by ordinary Christians who are in no sense professional theologians. As Turner puts it, behind the instinctive rejection of heresy there lay a kind of Christian common sense, exercised at all its levels within the Christian Church, which is merely another name for the guidance of the Holy Spirit leading the Church into all truth and dividing to every man separately as he wills. Again, this is no infallible judgment, but in the long run, I think, history indicates The common sense judgment of the Christian community is more reliable than the judgment of theological faculties and church councils. The theological faculties and church councils contribute to the common sense judgment of the Christian community.

In any case, it was through the common sense judgment of the Christian community, rather than through the action of church councils. And most Christian doctrines have been really established, including that most crucial of all Christian doctrines, the Nicene faith. Historical theology is significant in the education of the minister in the third place because it contributes to theological competence. It develops theological competence by bringing to us the accumulated insights and methods and conclusions of the Christian community as it is reflected upon the Christian faith. We do not have to start from scratch in the interpretation of the Bible and the reflection to which we have upon the message of the Bible. There are few, if any, theological problems or difficulties for faith which Christian people face today, which Christian people have not faced in a central substance before.

There are few, if any, heresies which threaten Christian faith from within, which do not bear a remarkable resemblance to Gnosticism and Arianism and Manichaeism and Pelagianism and the various heresies of the centuries. Many of the issues which the church faces today and which many evade, are precisely the issues which the church found at Nicaea, at Worms, and many other occasions during its history that it could not evade. The Christian emotional will increasingly speak to college-educated Americans has greatly helped in his task. If, through his knowledge of the Christian past, He can detect the incipient Gnosticism, Arianism, and Pelagianism of the present. And if he knows the questions and the issues which are involved in Christian faith and which are frequently obscured in contemporary theology by verbiage about a climate of opinion, historical theology contributes to theological competence are providing perspective for contemporary theological work and study.

History teaches two things as clearly as the blindness of particular cultures to truths which are very obvious in other cultures. Arrows can be so endemic in a particular culture that truths which were very obvious in other cultures cannot be recognized. Evil can be so pervasive of a society that good men are unaware of its existence. Herbert Butterfield, in his book The Origin of Modern Science, has pointed out how a climate of opinion, a frame of reference, prevented some of the greatest minds in all the history of the human rights from seeing certain things which are now obvious to any school child. The supreme paradox, Butterfield writes, of the scientific revolution is the fact that things which we find it easy to instill into boys at school, because we see that they start off on the right foot, things which would strike us as the ordinary way of looking at the universe, the obvious way of regarding the behavior of fallen bodies, for example, defeated the greatest intellects for centuries, defeated Leonardo da Vinci, and at the marginal point, even Galileo, when their minds were wrestling on the very frontiers of human thought with these problems.

It required their combined efforts to pull up certain simple things which we should now regard as obvious to any unprejudiced mind and easy for a little child to understand. The history of study in the Christian community indicates the same problem exists for the Christian too. The intellectual and social climate in which he works makes it easy for him to see certain truths and difficult to see others. We wonder today how the liberal theologians and biblical scholars and historians of the 19th and early 20th centuries could have been so indifferent to certain theological and biblical truths. We wonder and are somewhat ashamed of some of the ablest theologians and ministers, Some of the most brilliant minds which southern Presbyterianism has ever produced used Christian theology and the Bible to justify slavery as a divine institution.

In our amazement at the blindness of some of our predecessors, we ought not to forget that if anything is clear from history, it is certain that some of our successors will think of us as incredibly obtuse in certain theological and ethical concerns and blind to certain truths which should be obvious to any Christian. Now, no one can fully extricate himself from the sociology of his situation. But if we are aware of the way the prevailing climate of opinion, secular opinion, theological opinion, penetrates our thinking, there is less likelihood that we shall fall victims to all that snare. The history of theological reflection in the Christian community in every age is a protection against the blind spots in the over-emphasis of any particular age.

Historical theology contributes to theological competence in a third way by providing training in what we may well call theological conversation. The ability to talk intelligently about one’s faith to a fellow Christian or to one who stands outside the Christian community. Someone has well said that whatever may be the religion of the average American, it is not that about which he can talk intelligently. And we can say the same about some of us who are ministers. We can talk more intelligently about the operation of the church, about the politics of the church, and about the faith of the church. We can, to be sure, make assertions without limit about the faith. But assertions are not conversation. Even if we call in a word from another sphere, abuse and impart our assertions proclamation.

For conversation is the interchange of thought. The testing of opinion, the working out of implications, the capacity for theological conversation is simply the art of talking intelligently and meaningfully about the significance of the Christian faith in life. Historical theology ought to enable us to enter into conversation with the great Christian minds the past and thus prepare us to engage our own age in conversation concerning the meaning of the redemption of God in history through Jesus Christ our Lord. Historical theology contributes to the training of ministers by telling the story of the Christian community’s engagement with culture, in particular the intellectual life of culture. This engagement is a two-fold affair. As Kenneth Scott Latourette and his monumental work, the expansion of Christianity, is documented over and over again.

The Christian community influences the environment, and the environment also influences the Christian community. And we neglect either aspect of this engagement at serious risk, not only to our Christian and faith, but to the soundness about theology. Culture always leaves us imprint upon theology, theological work. Whereas Paul Tillich has written, the form of theology is always cultural, if for no other reason, the theology has to use language, which is a product of culture. The history of theology indicates the cultural distinctiveness of almost all theological work. The accents and the idioms betray the cultural context. And this is the reason today that European theology, written in the European culture, which experienced an idealism, a romanticism, a historicism, more radical than anything in the intellectual history of America.

And in the context of a political and economic history vastly different from that of America, cannot be simply repeated in America without either misunderstanding or irrelevance. It is a notorious fact that amateur Barthians are frequently mistaken for fundamentalist, and sometimes not without reason. Historical theology makes one aware of the cultural conditioning and the cultural idiom of all theology and of the necessity of translating every theology into the cultural idiom of one’s own society. One factor in culture, which is influence theology, is human sin. And the history of theology indicates how sin corrupts theology. Oh, we’re not going to that. Christian theology has not simply been influenced by culture, it has influenced and shaped culture.

It has engaged culture for the sake of converting culture. This is especially true of our Calvinistic tradition. One can never understand Calvin and the Calvinist apart from the vision of the holy commonwealth, the Christian community. In the past, the great intellectual revolutions have not defeated Christian faith, but had become the occasion for great new statements of faith in terms of the new intellectual climate. This was a work of Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, and of Calvin. And today, we need to learn from the past how the Christian community has dealt with the cultural and intellectual revolutions of the past, for we live in a day of cultural and intellectual revolution. We are experiencing drastic changes in life and we do not know what the future holds.

We do not even know 10 years from now there will be a Virginia or even the United States of America. The future is uncertain. We live in one of those great political eras when old patterns of life are breaking up and we do not know what the new patterns will be. are at least three great cultural and intellectual crises which will be increasingly the cutting edge of theology during the ministry of those who now come to our seminaries. The first is the scientific revolution, which has affected more drastic changes in man’s manner of thinking than almost anything in the whole history of the human race. It has radically affected man’s way of looking at the universe and understanding human existence. And he raises a whole host of theoretical as well as practical questions that the Christian community must answer.

And the Christian community must make its proclamation in the midst of an increasingly scientific culture. The second cultural situation is trying to challenge as the Christian community is the increased contact It’s a Christian community has with formal religion, such as Mohammedism and Buddhism, and with new religions, such as communism. Increasingly, the Christian community shall have to say a word about their significance in the providence of God and the responsibility of the Christian community over against them. The third cultural situation which challenges the Christian community is the revolution, which is taking place in the breakup of old established patterns of life. in the South and throughout the world, and in the shaping of new patterns, patterns which are not yet born, and which we cannot fully anticipate.

Christian people have a right to expect from ministers and professors guidance and help in the theological understanding of the radical changes which are taking place, and guidance and help and obedience to Jesus Christ in the midst of those changes. The really critical test of theological teaching will not be found in the classroom, but in the embodiment of that teaching in the life of the church in our time. Harnack, one of the greatest of the historians of dogma, according to Troeltsch, One is declared that one must overcome history by history. That is, one must accept his destiny, love it, transform it into something better. We study history, he added, in order to intervene in the course of history. It’s now our historical knowledge as an instrument of action in the present.

Harnack, no doubt, overemphasized the fact that, as he put it, man is not in the world to contemplate the world, but to act in the world. And yet he said something which is profoundly true. Historical theology, and for that matter all theological learning, will in the end be a very vain thing unless it comes to embodiment in Christian life and in Christian community. As John Mackay has put it, the finality of Christian doctrine can never be purely speculative. The Reformed thinkers are not interested in prying open the secrets of the universe in order to indulge a speculated bit. They theologize in order that divine truth may be more perfectly known. So that, in turn, the divine will may be more perfectly obeyed. Historical theology are reminding us of the ways in which Christians have dealt with the crises of the past, throws light upon the role of the Christian, amid the intellectual and cultural crises and revolutions of our time.

Now, I’ve tried to give four reasons. My historical theology is significant for the education of a minister. It is an aid to the recovery of a Christian memory, which is indispensable to a siren understanding of the Christian faith and the sense of belonging to the Christian community. It is a record of the judgment of Christian doctrine by history, which lays bare the meaning of doctrine. It develops theological competence by providing the methods, the insights, the conclusions of 19 centuries of theological reflection, by providing the perspective of the centuries for contemporary theology, by training in theological conversation. It reminds us of Christianity’s engagement with culture, with revolutions, with the decay and the rise of civilizations during the past 19 centuries, and gives us some insight into our role as Christians amid the revolutions of the 20th century.

In some, historical theology is the record how the Christian community has understood the Christian faith and how it has proclaimed and witnessed to that faith through the centuries. As such, it is a guide and a source of strength as we think through the meaning and the implications of Christian faith and life today and proclaim it to the time in which we live. As such, it ought to give strength and sustenance to those who desire to be good ministers of Jesus Christ in the Reformed tradition.