In chapters 7 and 8 of Patterns in History, David W. Bebbington describes two different schools of thought in the philosophy of historiography, which he calls the positivist and the idealist schools. He then describes how some Marxist historiography has endeavored to bridge the gulf between these schools, and explains why he feels such efforts are inadequate. Finally, he suggests that a Christian view of history provides a more adequate bridge between the two views while avoiding the criticisms that are generally leveled against them. Of course, he acknowledges that the Christian view has vulnerabilities of its own, but he feels that those are easily dispatched. In my opinion, Bebbington has exaggerated the rational force of the Christian view and erected it on infirm foundations.
The positivist school in the philosophy of historiography is closely related, Bebbington suggests, to the “progress” school from which it is descended. According to Bebbington, positivists (who usually tend toward determinism) are concerned to make generalizations about causes and “historical laws” at work in the past. Positivist historians accept a correspondence theory of truth, and apply empirical methods from sciences like sociology in order to gain insight into the historical process. Idealists, on the other hand, are descended from the historicist school. Idealists hope to identify human intentions in history and to focus on the particular rather than the general. They emphasize human free will as the primary historical force and suggest that only empathy and intuition can help the historian truly understand figures from the past. Theirs is a coherence theory of truth, in which a statement is true if it coheres with other statements that we can make. These factors lead them to stress that history is a discipline autonomous from the sciences with a unique and largely non-empirical methodology (142-153).
These two schools, obviously, are largely incompatible. Bebbington observes that Karl Marx and Georgy Plekhanov managed to synthesize the two views to some degree, but says that “the synthesis was unstable” (154). As evidence of this conclusion he cites that fact that other Marxist historians have tended to lean to one side or another rather than following their founder’s lead. Frankly, this phenomenon probably has more to do with the fact that Marx’s views were not fully published or known until recently, that Plekhanov fell out of favor with the Soviet regime, and that Marxist history has thrived primarily in Germany (a bastion of historicism) than it does with any inherent instability in the synthesis. Two other attempts to reconcile the schools are mentioned. The first, that of Hegel, is dismissed because it “is affected by the idiosyncracies of his system, and so does not do justice to positivism” (158). The second, Max Weber’s famous hypothesis about the Protestant work ethic having driven the Industrial Revolution, is said to depend upon whether he has rightly characterized the Protestant spirit and so is a “piecemeal recipe” that “seems inadequate” (159).
Having blithely ruled his strawmen out of court (in Weber’s case on a technicality), Bebbington turns to the task of filling the vacuum by enshrining the “Christian view”. Two important arguments here bolster his case. The first is that, since the positivist and idealist perspectives both descend (via progress and historicism, respectively) from the Christian view of history, they share a “common ground” that can guide us in their reconciliation (160). The claim that a premodern worldview that was rejected by the discipline as inadequate can illuminate the perspectives that replaced it is extraordinary, to say the least, but Bebbington manages to make it with a straight face. His second argument is more convincing. He asserts, with Raymond Aron, that the divergence between the two schools stems from their differing views of human nature. The apparent contradiction may be resolved by appeal to a Christian dualist anthropology, in which man is part of the sinful natural world but is “free to take spontaneous, God-like initiatives” (161). Bebbington then holds up Johann Chladenius, a Christian historian during the Renaissance, as a figure who (apparently unlike the inept Weber and Hegel) used intuition but also looked for historical laws and who allowed history to be created in the meeting of perspective and evidence (162-4). Finally, at the end of chapter 7, Bebbington admits that it is not only Christians who are able to arrive at this common-sense methodological fusion. That this admission undermines any claim to have privileged the Christian view on a rational basis, despite the obvious thrust of the rest of the chapter, apparently escapes him (167). It is worth adding here that such a merger would actually be better-served were it not burdened with a dualist anthropology, which (due to the clear dependence of mental functions on neurophysiology) even many Christian philosophers have exchanged for a physicalist anthropology.
Bebbington does better in chapter 8, wherein he asserts that a Christian view of history is unbothered by the lack of moral foundations that plagues historicism and by the lack of discernable moral progress that undermines positivism. The latter, however, is probably more problematic than he’d like to admit, since the introduction of the Holy Spirit after Christ’s resurrection might be expected to result in moral improvement. Nor do his appeals to the Holocaust, which occurred in an age of overpopulation and modern warfare, really establish that moral improvement has not occurred. Bebbington also underestimates the gravity of the problem of suffering, which is unique to the Christian view: his attempts at explanation are facile and inadequate. After dismissing the possibility that suffering doesn’t really exist, for example, he suggests that God might eventually remove suffering retrospectively. These seem to be essentially the same thing, and to minimize the horrors that many suffer in the present (174,6).
Ultimately, Bebbington has erected the Christian view of history on some very shaky foundations. By far the most fortunate statement he makes in these two chapters is that “Personal experience of the intervention of God inclines [the historian] to discern it in the world as well” (173). Indeed, I suggest that personal experience is the only really valid basis for a Christian view of history. And if experience is the historian’s basis, than he/she should be extremely careful about taking the Bible as the “continuing norm for any Christian perspective on history,” as Bebbington commands (183). Neither the validity nor the coherence of the biblical canon (let alone a particular interpretation of it) are necessarily implied in an experience of divine intervention, and indeed both have sometimes been subjected to devastating criticism. This suggests that when Bebbington facilely dismisses modernist Christian views of history-- as he does near the end of the book-- he does so much too prematurely.
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