The Way of the Church
Part 1:
1. Controlling
the Past – I (A Consideration of Methods)
by
Hugh Nibley, Ph.D.
Improvement Era 58 (Jan. 1955), 20-22, 44-45
1. THE QUESTION
GRANTED that Jesus
founded a church, was that church expected by its founder and members to remain
upon the earth for a limited time only, to be removed and restored at a later
date, or was the "apostolic church" the ultimate and final foundation
of God on earth, destined "to remain firm and steadfast until the end of
the world"? That is one of the most important questions that confront
students of church history today.
Every day it becomes
more apparent that on its solution depends the whole nature and history of the
Christian church. The solution is not far to seek: By the simple, almost
mechanical, process of extracting from the literature of the ancient church
those passages dealing specifically with the church's future, or what the
saints thought would be its future, placing these passages in chronological
order, and reading them over, anyone who has the requisite time and patience
may discover the answer. That is what the present study intends to do.
"THE WAY OF
THE CHURCH"
It has not been done
heretofore because when churchmen have found themselves confronted by the above
question, with its alarming implication that all the churches of Christendom
might conceivably be astray, they have dismissed the awful thought with a
shudder. What! cries Tertullian, can all those martyrs have shed their blood
for nothing?—carefully evading the declaration of the martyrs themselves,
that the only reward they ever think of is a crown in heaven, where they have
been repaid a thousandfold for their brief sufferings here below. Conventional
church history is resolved never to raise the question of whether the church of
Christ actually survived, as the best way to avoid a disastrous answer. Thus at
the present time leading church historians would forestall any embarrassing
questions touching the main issue by devising ingenious titles for their studies:
"The Infant Church" (L'Eglise Naissante—Batiffol), "A World Being Born" (Un Monde qui
Nait—Daniel-Rops), The
Unquenchable Light (Latourette), etc., titles as "loaded" as
Neander's Planting and Training of the Christian Church.
They are
"loaded" because they suggest and permit research only along one
carefully channeled course. The mere title "Infant Church" as used by
these authors fixes unalterably the whole course of church history in advance:
If the early church was by very definition an infant church or a world being
born, we can tell no other story than one of growth and advancement regardless
of what happened—calamitous failures are merely setbacks; success in any
direction is growth; the story can have only one outcome; within a thematic
framework we can ask all the questions we want to, but the main question of
whether the church really was an infant church and not something totally
different, must never be raised. And what other tale can one tell of an
"Unquenchable Light," again an expression of those authors, save that
it never goes out? That wonderful title has forestalled any embarrassing
questions as to whether the light was to overcome the darkness or the other way
around—for merely to ask such a question is to remind oneself of John's terribly
emphatic answer, that the "Unquenchable Light" was by no means to
remain among men.
"The task of
church history," writes the author of the latest large church history to
appear, "is to give a clear, comprehensive, scientifically established
over-all picture of the evolution of the visible institution of salvation
founded by Christ."
This is very much as
if he were to say, "Our business is to describe the triumph of the
church," as if that triumph were inevitable. Like the classic question,
"Have you stopped beating your mother-in-law?" it cleverly avoids a
very important question by asking a less important one resting on the
assumption that the other has been answered. The assignment of describing the
evolution of the institution established by Christ assumes (1) that there was
such an institution, (2) that it remained on the earth, and (3) that it
underwent an observable process of evolution. All this is taken for granted,
yet until very recently the bulk of scholars have regarded the first
proposition as unproven, and they have only just begun to think about the
second. The third point is, thanks to the systematic avoidance of the second,
never questioned.
2. THE NATURE OF
THE EVIDENCE
The study of church
history has in the past been of interest to but a few, and their interest has
been a strenuously partisan one. Who writes church histories? Churchmen. Who
reads them? Divinity students. It would be hard to find another branch of
science or the humanities in which so few scholars ever engage in the study of the
thing for its own sake. Even the rare researcher of disinterested motives must
end up taking sides, for the nature of the thing requires it.
"Only one who is
personally convinced of the truth of the gospel," writes Heinrich
Bornkamm, "can fully grasp its historical manifestations and what is
lasting or changing in them. There is no such thing as pure objectivity in the
history of thought, which in fact would be rendered sterile by such." In
1699 Gottfried Arnold published his Impartial History of the Church and
Heresy, to show that the true church
through age has been that of the persecuted mystics and heretics—whether
his theory is right or not, it cannot by any effort of the imagination be
called impartial.
Recently Professor
Pfeiffer has vigorously deplored any side-taking at all in the study of
religion; he thinks one can maintain perfect scientific detachment by
"keeping facts and faith, history and revelation, historical research and
theological speculation separate and distinct." But is not this appeal for
a double book-keeping that shall "distinguish sharply between true facts
and true doctrines" simply a device for placing one's own particular
beliefs beyond the reach of objective investigation? Is it fair of the doctors
to denounce with moral indignation those who have not yet given up those
partisan strivings in which they themselves engaged for generations, and only
gave up with reluctance when years of determined seeking led to unforeseen and
embarrassing conclusions? It is altogether too convenient when one's own
methods of soapmaking have failed, to declare to the world that soap simply
cannot be made and heap contempt on those who are still trying and abuse on
those who have succeeded.
When the professor
finds that his facts do not square with his doctrines, then, but not until
then, he announces to the world as a general moral principle that no one should ever try to compare facts with doctrines. That lets him out. But the escape is
altogether so convenient; the cause of cool and scientific detachment is
defended with such surprising heat and censure; and the announcement of these
so liberal and so obvious principles has come so suddenly and so late (for
until now church scholars have all admitted to a degree of partisan interest)
that one is forced to the conclusion that all this pleading to keep religion
out of religious studies is possibly just an extreme form of partisan pleading,
an attempt to save face by the belated declaration that the rules do not hold
any more—that religious and historical facts have absolutely nothing to
do with each other. Since the rules no longer favor us, we will abolish them!
The modern scientific
credo is thus no exception to the rule that an ulterior motive has marked the
writing of church history from the very beginning. "It is dangerous to
enquire after truth among later writers," wrote the great Baronius,
"who are often found to write that which false rumors, vain imaginings,
private affection and sometimes Flattery suggested to their Minds, to the great
prejudice of Historical Truth." But what about the earlier writers?
"The age was one of rhetoric," writes Harnack of the period from the
fourth century on "which did not draw back at artifice and unveracity of
every kind. ... Forgery was the order of the day. ... Already in the fourth
century a spirit of lying prevailed mightily in the official documents. ... and
in the fifth and sixth centuries it ruled the Church." At that time
"no one any longer put any faith in any written record or official document
or report."
After giving various
examples of the use of falisfication by the most illustrious fathers as a
partisan weapon, and describing the controversial literature as "a morass
of lies and rascality," Harnack concludes that "one cannot escape the
fear that present-day historians are still altogether too trusting in their
attitude towards this whole literature. ... We stand almost everywhere more or
less helpless in the face of a systematically fabricated tradition."
Recently Walther
Volker has shown that the great church history of Eusebius was actually a
"tendentious" writing designed to prove a particular point. The
events culminating in the riotous councils of the fourth century led thinking
men of the time to doubt whether the church was still on earth or not: It was
to silence his own doubts on this head that Eusebius undertook the researches
that resulted in the ecclesiastical history. "By the simple process of
excerpting ... only what agreed with his fundamental thesis," Eusebius,
according to Volker, "altered the appearance of the old church history.
All the tensions were removed, all the conflicts smoothed over. ..." This
work, which rightfully won for its author the title of "Father of Church
History," laid down the line which church historians have followed ever
since, namely the implicit and unquestioning defense at all times of the basic
proposition that the Christian church of today is actually the "apostolic
church" of the beginning, no matter how strangely and wonderfully altered.
To this proposition all conventional church history is dedicated; it is the
axiom which may never be questioned and which predetermines the direction of
all research, the bed of Procrustes into which all the evidence must be made to
fit, cost what it may.
Before we address
ourselves to our proper task, which is (1) to set forth in order the early
reference to the future of the church, and (2) to show what modern scholars
have to say on the subject, it is necessary to get some idea of the nature of
the documents with which we have to deal, and of the extent to which church
historians have controlled those documents, actually inventing the past which
they claim, and often sincerely, to be only discovering. The reader should be
warned that the thesis of the present study runs counter to the massive
consensus of church history for over a thousand years.
Long ago Socrates
showed what a hollow thing consensus is. More recently, in 1932, Olaf Linton
published his now famous study of what he calls "the Consensus" of
church history in the nineteenth century. Therein he shows how the scholars
when they think they are being most sound, most objective, and most scientific
in their construction of church history, are actually doing little more than
faithfully reflecting their own background and conditioning. As they are
liberal, democratic, congregational, individualist, so must the "primitive
church" be; if they like ritual, so did it; if they eschewed it, so did
the early Christians. But what the general public dreams not of, and even the
experts underestimate is that the invention of history has been a major
industry for many centuries, one of the primary concerns of scholars having
been in every age to control the past. This is a serious, but not criminal charge, for as we shall presently
see, it is virtually impossible for anyone to handle ancient records without in
some way having to control them; and so, as the records have been handed on
from one generation to the next, there has been exercised over them a
cumulative, all-pervasive, and thorough control.
3. HAND-PICKED
EVIDENCE
To begin with, anyone
who writes church history has the inescapable and dangerous obligation of
deciding somehow just what evidence shall be made available to his readers and
what shall not; obviously, he cannot include it all. Now anyone who takes it
upon himself to withhold evidence is actually determining what the reader's
idea of church history is going to be—he is controlling the past. And
when the evidence held back is a thousand times more extensive than what is
brought before the jury, it is plain that the historian is free to build up any
kind of case he desires.
Is there no
alternative to this commission of all but absolute power to a few notoriously
partial authorities? There is none. The only completely fair presentation of
church history would be a full
display of all known evidence laid out before the public in chronological
order—all the written stuff: histories, letters, sermons, tomes of
philosophy, all the artifacts, ruins, and inscriptions, all the traditions,
rituals, liturgies, and legends would have to be there, without any attempt on
the part of the custodian to interpret or control. But such a corpus would be
all but useless, an impenetrable jungle of stuff beyond the capacity of any
reader. To be made available even to specialists it would have to be
classified, broken up into departments that could be handled by one man and, as
far as the general public is concerned, each of these would have to be further
reduced by sampling or condensing. If one were to include in a source book but
one-tenth of one percent of the writings in the old Patrologiae alone—and they are far from exhaustive, even
in their area—the reader would be confronted by five hundred solid pages
of quotation. But how representative is a selection of one page in a thousand?
One need only examine Kirch's Enchiridion for the answer. Aside from all policy and prejudice, sheer necessity
has brought it about that what has been handed on from generation to generation
as standard church history is a growing accumulation of carefully hand-picked
evidence.
But the business of
control does not end with the selecting of evidence. Once our texts have been chosen for presentation, we
discover that they are all without exception in an imperfect and fragmentary
state, marred by scribal slips, emendations, interpolations, and deletion.
Generations of careless, or (what is far more dangerous) careful and deliberate
scribes have been busy day and night at the game of controlling the past by
altering the texts they were supposed to be copying, and as often as not the
alterations have been intentional. And what is the cure for this? More
correction! The conscientious, modern editor proceeds to control his text by reconstructing it to say what he believes the original should have
said. Such reconstructions are not always infallible. In fact, in the opinion
of most scholars, the reconstructions perpetrated by most other scholars are
pretty bad.
Once the church
historian has picked out the most highly favored passages to call to the
witness stand and, as a textual critic, carefully tidied them up and brushed
their hair to make a favorable impression for his client (the client being the
church of his choice—for most church historians are professional churchmen)
a most effective control still remains; for before the evidence can be heard by
the general public, it must be translated. Translation is a far more effective and aggressive way of controlling
the past than most people suppose.
The business of selecting,
restoring, and translating pertinent texts is one that calls for the constant
exercise of judgment and the constant making of choices. To enable the scholar
to choose between two or more equally authentic but conflicting passages.
between equally plausible but conflicting readings of the passage chosen, and
between equally grammatical but conflicting translations of the text thus
selected and restored, he invariably adopts some rule or policy in the light of
which one interpretation will always enjoy a clear priority, thus obviating the
necessity of giving serious consideration to the others. Let us consider the
well-established principles upon which the experts operate.