The Historian as Moral Judge: Internal or External History?

David Bebbington’s distinction between positivist and idealist approaches to history largely corresponds to what Grant Wacker calls the “external” and “internal” approaches to history. Harry Stout also makes an external/internal distinction, though for him the terms take on different connotations. These three theorists are asking different methodological questions, which is part of the reason they construct their categories differently. When the three theorists’ models are allowed to inform each other, their categories shed considerable light on the subject of how Christian historians should handle historical actors’ moral deficiencies.

For David Bebbington, positivist historiography is concerned with generalizations about causation and with identifying historical “laws”. Positivists tend to adopt a very empirical approach to the study of history. Idealists, on the other hand, hope to identify human intentions in history and focus more on the particular than the general. They prefer “intuition” to scientific methodology as the primary tool for understanding history. Bebbington’s concern is to show how Christianity’s dualistic anthropology can unite these two schools (Bebbington, 142-53,61).

Grant Wacker’s distinction between “external” and “internal” approaches to history is similar to Bebbington’s in some important respects. The external approach, corresponding roughly to Bebbington’s positivist school, is “observer-oriented.” It sets aside historical actors’ self-perceptions and seeks “to implicate them in larger frameworks of meaning.” By contrast, the internal approach (corresponding to Bebbington’s idealism) is “actor-oriented” and seeks to “collapse the investigator into the heart and soul of the one who is being investigated” and to resurrect the dead and let them speak for themselves” (Wacker, 165). Wacker’s concern is to determine whether it is legitimate for Christian historians to explicitly make moral judgments about the past. He assesses the pros and cons of each approach. His conclusion is that internal history can avoid the touchiness of religious questions, but that it fails to ask “so what?” It also has a tendency to descend into tribalism by obscuring the real causes of events (Wacker, 169-70). External history has the downside of forcing Christian scholars to play by the rules of the secular academy, but ultimately is a more honest and courageous approach (Wacker, 177). While Wacker thinks there is a time and place for internal history (Wacker, 160) and suggests (rather like Bebbington) that it is worthwhile to try to combine aspects of the two approaches (Wacker, 178), he finally seems to prefer the external approach.

Harry Stout uses the same language as Wacker in order to denote similar ideas, but—perhaps because Stout is asking a different question—the terms take on different connotations than in Wacker’s analysis. Stout analyzes the work of Perry Miller and Edmund Morgan on Puritanism with his own efforts to understand Puritan history. In particular, Stout is interested in the question of how being a Christian—over and against being an atheist like Miller and Morgan—has caused him to see Puritan history differently. The key difference he detects is that, “no matter how sympathetic the history might be in its identification with the believing community, it is still seen from the outside looking in. The atheistic observer…turns down family membership in the community of faith he or she describes.” By contrast, the Christian can do “internal” or “participatory” history because he/she is “bound in a common kinship of shared spirituality” (Stout, 49). Miller and Morgan share with the Puritans an identity as Americans, but not an identity as Christians; this leads them to minimize theology and to misjudge the continuing vitality of Puritan faith up to the time of the American Revolution (Stout, 56). Of course, Stout’s insider/outsider distinction is somewhat artificial; it would probably be more accurate to locate historians on a continuum based on the amount of common ground they share with their subjects. It seems probable that the Puritans understood both the Christian and the American community differently than do modern historians, so in no case is a historian really part of the Puritan “family”. Stout’s perspective is also open to criticism in that what the atheist (or, for that matter, the Christian) historian lacks in terms of common ground, he or she could arguably make up in historical imagination. Stout is on firmer ground when he says in closing, “it is important to establish the commonalities of a shared faith, but it is also important to expose the ways in which our spiritual ancestors fell short. In this sense, history writing in the theological community must be ‘interested’…we must be personally connected in our criticisms as much as our praise” (Stout, 58). Stout thus sees moral criticism of the past as an “internal” act, one in which we engage because we identify with our ancestors in their ethical dilemmas.

So is Stout correct that moral critique of historical actors is an “internal” activity? Or is Grant Wacker correct in making it “external”? I suggest that, just as Bebbington unified his two schools into a single Christian approach (and just as Wacker hinted near the end of his essay), internal and external approaches must be combined in order for moral critique to be valuable. Identification with historical actors—internal history—enables the historian to make connections between dilemmas faced by historical actors and dilemmas faced in the present. It helps the historian to understand the motives that drove historical actors to make particular choices and to identify similar motives at work in the present. At the same time, there is a sense in which critique can only be done from an external position. Even self-critique requires a certain degree of detachment; when friends are making poor choices, we often recommend that they “take a step back” and evaluate the situation. The historian’s loyalties to his subjects, to his faith community, and to himself ought not to prevent him from being able to “step back” and issue moral critique when necessary.

Bebbington, D. W. Patterns in History: A Christian View. Downers Grove, IL: Intervarsity Press, 1979.

Stout, Harry S. “Theological Commitment and American Religious History.” Theological Education (Sp 1989), 44-59.

Wacker, Grant. “Understanding the Past, Using the Past: Reflections on Two Approaches to History,” in Religious Advocacy and American History, 159-178. Edited by Bruce Kuklick and D. G. Hart. Grand Rapids: Eerdmas, 1997.