Interpreting Christian History Revisited

In my recent review of Euan Cameron's Interpreting Christian History I expressed my conviction that his "essentialist" view of the relationship between faith and history is the only option for committed Christians. As we discussed this book in my Historiography class tonight, some interesting questions came up that I'd like to take a crack at. First, a very quick rehash of Cameron's conclusions. The "essentialist" view he proposes holds that in every time and place that Christianity has existed-- including the New Testament era-- it has been trapped within the limitations of history. It can only be expressed within our cultural categories and our intellectual frameworks, and will always be tempered by our politics and biases and wranglings and hang-ups. And yet, there is some kind of unique, true, enduring "essence" of Christianity that is refracted in all our various Christian communities. In short, Christianity is always historically and culturally conditioned, it's always "distorted" to some degree, and yet there is always some valid essence at the core of it that we limited beings can't really grasp or pin down. Cameron rejects any attempt to pare Christianity down to get at the "pure essence", because that's impossible and even destructive. The best we can do is remain in dialogue with each other and with history and hope that that will give us enough perspective to be able to mitigate some of the distortions in our own refraction of the Christian essence.

So the question that came up in class tonight was, where does this leave us? Does all this mean that theology is pointless? What do we pass on to our children, if we can't get at the essence of Christianity? Cameron thinks he has finally avoided relativism, but has he really? Most of my classmates seemed to agree that the historical problem exists, and the Cameron's way of addressing it is compelling. But they were all a little disturbed by how close he seems to come to relativism. And indeed, Cameron ends on a somewhat pessimistic note and fails to really address these questions. His second-to-last paragraph also seems to nod toward a Jesus-as-moral-teacher framework, which led one classmate to conclude he was cutting out the supernatural. In what follows, I don't claim that the answers I'm offering to these questions are necessarily the ones Cameron would offer. But I think they're definitely compatible with his framework, and he might very well agree. So here goes.

Is theology pointless? No, I don't think it is. I think that every generation really has to erect its own image or expression of Christian teaching, faith, and practice, because that's how it works. We can only glimpse the "essence" through our historical lens. So we can't shy away from the task of erecting a Christian expression that makes sense to us. Cameron cites Sallie McFague, who has apparently argued that the theologian is a "poet" whose task is to remythologize the Christian faith for a modern world. I think that's an apt analogy. Here Cameron would caution us is in several directions: first, he would say we should not be creedal or exclusive. While some expressions of the Christian faith may be distortions, we should gauge that at an individual rather than an institutional level. And second, we should not assume that our expression is necessarily better than others, even though we can hope that historical perspective has helped us mitigate distortion. All of this also answers the second question: the only thing we can pass on to our children is Christianity as we see it, from our limited perspective. But we can also pass on to our children humility, awareness of, and respect for the many other perspectives that have existed in the past and that do exist today.

The third question: has Cameron avoided relativism? I think he has brushed up against it, but does finally manage to avoid it. Granted, he denies that a truly balanced Christian perspective is possible. But he also suggests that distortion can be mitigated, which implies that different cultural refractions of the Christian "essence" will be faithful and/or unfaithful to different degrees. So there's still room for us to strive to be more faithful, even though we must always fall short (of the glory of God, as it were).

What about the supernatural? I am reminded here of John Hick, who is a religious pluralist. Hick believes that the divine essence is refracted in all religions, Christian or otherwise. There is no escaping human lenses in viewing the divine, but Hick believes the divine is real nonetheless. Cameron is working with a more narrowly Christian pluralist framework, but I think one could still express it in the same terms. Cameron's use of the word "essence"-- which he obviously doesn't identify with a set of theological propositions or ideas-- is certainly suggestive of something divine or mystical that is at the core of Christianity. Perhaps this is a useful place to recall Luke Timothy Johnson's book The Real Jesus, in which he basically argues that the historical Jesus doesn't matter much, because Christian faith is built around a shared experience of the real, living Jesus. True, it is difficult or impossible to discern which historical events constitute revelation and which do not. If there are revelation events in history, they are not (despite Barth's insistence) sufficiently "other" that we can reliably identify them as such. But perhaps, hidden underneath our cultural expressions and historically-conditioned forms, there is a living Jesus animating our faith. Perhaps he is the "essence" of Christianity toward which we are all groping, however ineptly. This is not a propositional, creedal, intellectual view of Christianity. It does not emphasize the importance of orthodox doctrine. Rather, it is a Romantic, mystical view of Christianity. Maybe that's the best we can do.