In a little less than a year, our nation will celebrate its bisesquicentennial. There are some who have chosen to prepare for this happy commemoration by reading about the magnificent history of our country. Whether its recalling tales about the Pilgrims who arrived on the shores of Massachusetts Bay or American soldiers storming the beaches of Normandy, the nature of history has a way of captivating our imaginations, reminding us of who we are, and propelling us into the future.
The study of America’s history, however, can be extremely complicated. Our history, like the history of all people everywhere, isn’t perfect. For every act of great heroism there are others which cause us to hang our heads in shame. How does the student of history deal with such complexity? And more to the point of The Public Theology Project, is there a distinctly Christian way to handle the historical record?
One resource that Christians can lean on is the work of Hebert Butterfield (1900—1979). Butterfield, who spent his academic and professional career at Cambridge, was both an accomplished scholar and a Christian of heartfelt faith and piety.
Though Butterfield recognized certain distinctions between his personal faith in Jesus and his vocation as an academic historian, he could not entirely separate the two from one another. The former came to bear on the latter in important ways, particularly with respect to his theological and philosophical views on human nature, redemption, and the divine providence. The way he attempted to organize them in his writings reveals a distinctly Christian philosophy of history that remains instructive for us today.
Butterfield is most famous, perhaps, for his criticisms of the “Whiggish” interpretation of history, or the “tendency to see things running in a straight line of progress from somewhere in the past and culminating in whatever the historian favored most about the present.”1 In telling his story of moral, social, or cultural progress, Butterfield accused the Whiggish historian of turning history into “a fight of white men, pure and righteous, against the diabolically wicked.”2 For Butterfield, this was not only bad history, but bad theology. In reality, history was far more complicated because humans were far more complicated. “Events tie themselves into knots,” Butterfield said, “because of…general cupidity; situations becoming more frantic and deadlocks more hopeless because of man’s universal presumption and self-righteousness.”3
In affirming universal human sinfulness, we see Butterfield plainly articulating an Augustinian doctrine of original sin. Coupled with our depravity, however, is our inherent dignity as an image-bearer of God. “It is men who make history,” Butterfield said.4 Therefore, the historian ought to treat the objects of his study as possessing all the inherent qualities of agency and responsibility. No doubt there is a level of history operating above the heads of individuals, Butterfield admitted, but it is not right to treat the subjects of history as passive victims of abstract concepts. For Butterfield, this was tantamount to pulling the cart before the horse. After all, ideas are not self-acting agents but are carried along in the minds of men and actualized through their countless interactions in a world where all of us are simultaneously constrained and free.
But what do these twin ideas of human depravity and dignity mean practically for the study of history? Let’s take the common refrain, “He was a product of his time,” as an example.
On the one hand, the saying communicates something true about human limitations. As embodied creatures, we are conditioned at some level by the time and space we occupy. We can’t reasonably hold a figure from the 16th century to 21st century standards on civil rights—most, if not all of the prerequisite conditions for our modern society were simply not operative. Nor can we simply assume that those who advanced the causes of justice did so for purely altruistic reasons, or that those who defied them did so because they were uniquely wicked.
Does that mean we are incapable of leveling moral judgment on historical actors? Of course not. However, it should leave us with a profound sense of humility about our own limitations and sinfulness which just might temper the expectations we hold for our forefathers. As Butterfield so famously quips, an honest study of history will leave us “being a little sorry for everybody.”5
However, it is precisely this sense of moral ambiguity that presents us with the opportunity to develop a uniquely Christian philosophy of history. For Butterfield, feeling a little sorry for everybody is just another way of describing Christian charity. History actually shapes and forms us into the kind of virtuous people who deal honestly with our nature and the tragic consequences of our actions. Why? Because we serve the God of History, Butterfield says.
As a Christian, Butterfield objected to the notion of an “absentee God.” He believed God to be the living and active God who sovereignly chose of His own goodwill to enter into history. “The way that God reveals himself in history is in fact the great theme of the Bible itself,” said Butterfield.6 The ancient Israelites’ inspired reflections on God’s mighty acts in history eventually produced a linear view of history based on the promise of redemption—a view that was distinct from the essentially cyclical view held by their neighbors. And though it sounds like Butterfield is inadvertently baptizing the Whiggish notion of historical Progress, he reminds us that the history of the redemptive promise to God’s people was always punctuated by periods of judgment wrought by their own sin and covenant disobedience.
For Butterfield, the good news of the Gospel is that judgment never gets the last word. It is never the end of the human story. And we see that fully and most brilliantly in the incarnation, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. Because the inheritance of the Biblical history is essentially one of grace, the Christian historian never operates without mercy, charity, and forgiveness toward all. Because of the faith he has received through the Gospel, he is also able to detect God’s Providence superimposed on the story of human tragedy (cf. Gen. 50:20), even secular history, and read as one not without hope because he knows how the story ends even if he is blind to how we’ll get there.
In that way, Herbert Butterfield’s Christian philosophy of history is more humane precisely because it is unwaveringly theocentric.
C. T. McIntire, Herbert Butterfield: Writings on Christianity and History (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1979), xxx.
Herbert Butterfield, Christianity and History (New York, NY: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1950), 40.
Butterfield, Christianity and History, 40.
Herbert Butterfield, “The Role of the Individual in History,” in Herbert Butterfield: Writings on Christianity and History, ed. C. T. McIntire (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1979), 18.
Herbert Butterfield, “God in History,” in Herbert Butterfield: Writings on Christianity and History, ed. C. T. McIntire (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1979), 11.
Butterfield, “God in History,” 13.
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