“I sat in my car and cried for ten minutes before driving home.” That’s what a student in my class said while recounting their time at the Baptist church down the road from her house. They’d attended a worship service as part of an assignment for my class. Students were meant to observe a Christian worship setting in a tradition unfamiliar to them. Most of my students are from mainline traditions, so many of them ended up attending Catholic masses, but this student decided to check out the Southern Baptist megachurch in town. What brought them to tears was not a stirring conversion or spiritual encounter. No, what ignited their sense of grief was the sermon’s emphasis on penal substitutionary atonement and the danger of hell for those who don’t believe what this church believes. This student recalled looking around the sanctuary as the pastor preached, desperately searching the faces of the congregants for signs that something was not right. Why weren’t they scared? Why weren’t they disgusted? Is this all normal?
I was struck by my student’s recollection of the worship service for a few reasons. First, because the church she attended sounded not far off the mark of my own religious upbringing. I sympathized with how jarring that experience was for her, even though that brand of preaching and those uses of scripture had been normalized for me from a young age. But I was also struck because not thirty minutes prior, the class had informally been talking about their hopes for the newly elected pope, Leo XIV. Again, most of my students are mainline Protestants, but they, like many of us, were enthralled by the intrigue of the papal enclave, the storied tradition, the mystery of it all, and the hope of an authoritative religious figure to speak to the social issues of our time with love and spiritual vigor.
But I must admit, I found it interesting. The Catholic doctrine of hell doesn’t stray too far from the eternal conscious torment being preached from Southern Baptist pulpits. The exclusivity of salvation for the repentant is there, too. But my students seemed less concerned about these differences. Because of the perceived progressive papacy of Francis, and a vague notion of Catholic social ethics, plus the respectability, mystery, and pomp of the Roman Catholic Church, my students held space for the Catholic faithful in a way they simply could not for their Southern Baptist siblings.
Teaching history at a seminary can be a tricky enterprise. The immediate relevance of the subject is not always evident to students, while the real urgency of our present cultural moment, as well as the political, institutional, and ideological sympathies of those gathered in the classroom, constantly entice us to tell easy stories about the past. Seminaries, not unlike universities, can be ideologically “thick” settings. There are at least three challenges I’ve found to doing history well in such rooms. I’ve got three points because I am, after all, a Baptist. And in good Baptist fashion, I’ll use alliteration. These three challenges are closely linked in our social moment—the challenges of presentism, polarization, and performativity. These informal orthodoxies endanger the effectiveness of the historical enterprise.
In conservative spaces, this looks like reading Schleiermacher or Brueggemann or Barth only to refute, never to understand. In these rooms, history becomes a subsidiary of apologetics, a “you must know the enemy to defeat them” posture. In more liberal settings like one I inhabit, presentism prevails, which assesses historical actors by their usefulness. As Jonathan Tran says, liberal Christians often operate under the assumption that the moral arc of the universe is long and it bends toward me. Unspoken and, sometimes, spoken assumptions like “Augustine is problematic because of his views on sex,” or “we can’t take Aquinas seriously because his theology led to the doctrine of discovery” stifle historical—and, if we’re being honest, theological knowledge. Both conservative and liberal-tinged classrooms must push against the temptation to merely pilfer history for a usable past. In every case, the answer, at least in my classrooms, is to contextualize historical actors and events and to problematize received narratives by practicing historical empathy and close analysis. It is not to praise what is actually morally blameworthy, or merely to play devil’s advocate or post up as the contrarian in the room. But good history will necessarily complicate our theological melodramas where the good guys all wear white hats, because history seeks to tell human stories.
Presentism
In the case of presentism, I’m not dealing with the debates on presentism in the historical guild, as interesting and fruitful as those debates are. I’m thinking rather of pop-history, a sort of slipshod historical reasoning that finds its way into our academic discourse because of the gravity of our cultural moment. Take as an example the spotlight on Christian Nationalism in the US. Now, I live and teach in the state of Oklahoma, where we have real, card-carrying Christian Nationalists holding public office and seeking to legislate narrow, oppressive statutes, so I am not downplaying the very real danger of that ideology and its actors. But many times, in an effort to oppose, well-intentioned faith leaders have coopted the history of Christianity to condemn right-wing Christian attempts to turn the gears of government power in their favor. The problem with this is that monocausal explanations and straight lines between now and then too often mystify rather than clarify. For instance, a Methodist pastor and scholar recently blogged the Nicene Creed was a MAGA-esque attempt to bolster imperial power through religious means. “Under the guise of imperial protection,” he wrote, “Constantine effectively turned the empire approved Christian church into an instrument for maintaining imperial order, with differing theological views being suppressed by exile or execution. What was once the persecuted church became an imperial instrument of persecution to eradicate divisions that Constantine viewed as problematic for imperial peace.”
This kind of oversimplification cuts curiosity off at the knees. To counter, when the Nicene Creed was formalized at the Council of Constantinople in 381, Emperor Theodosius sent out a decree that defined orthodoxy in Nicene terms with a list of approved Nicene bishops, but he also ratified the legality of Arian Christianity within the empire among various Gothic tribes who lived in Roman towns and among Roman citizens, served in the imperial army, and were a regular part of civic life in the fourth century. Concessions allowing Gothic Christians to adhere to the Creed of Rimini, a non-Nicene formulation established in 359, were repeated in imperial edicts from 386 all the way up to at least 437 CE. As Ralph Mathisen observes, the story of orthodoxy and Arianism in the Western empire is, at many points, one of coexistence and fraternization, whatever the polemical jabs of orthodox bishops might say to the contrary. Playing connect-the-dots from Athanasius to Pete Hegseth sidesteps the contingency of fourth-century Roman politics and the complexity of the religious situation that’s utterly strange to us but, like our own stories, was often one of negotiation and malleability.
Polarization
Closely linked to the issue of presentism is polarization. Political polarization continues to shape students’ attitudes about the past. Much ink has been spilt narrating how polarization has ignited prejudicial views on the American right—debates about the legacy of Confederate statues, the status of Christopher Columbus as an American symbol, attempts to foist right-wing evangelical views of the Bible into public classrooms, and claims that liberals want to “erase history.” We are right to be vigilant about such bald misappropriations. But polarization has its liberal casualties as well. And in the seminary context, political polarization has fed downstream into polarization in theological education running largely along mainline and evangelical lines. The dichotomy between evangelicals and mainliners is more muddy than most are willing to admit; nevertheless, the traditional narrative has been bolstered in the wake of the infamous 81% of Trump. Here, in both conservative seminaries and their more progressive counterparts, prejudicial attitudes are sanctified by confessional myths, grounding narratives the reinforce the idea that institutions’ ideological commitments are divinely ordained. In these spaces, history can often become the search for a usable past.
I recently read Lisa Weaver-Swartz’s fascinating book, Stained Glass Ceilings. In it, she does a sociological comparative analysis of two Kentucky seminaries, Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville and Asbury Theological Seminary in Wilmore, on issues of theology, gender, and the lived experiences of women in these schools. She notes the formative power of institutional stories in both schools. For Southern, linking subjugation of women to biblical fidelity feeds narratives of the seminary as a bastion of true Christianity and its leaders as those who stood against the tide of theological liberalism. For Asbury, spiritual individualism and a proud legacy of supporting women’s ordination in the practical aim of world mission bolsters a sort of genderblind approach to equality, where the Holy Spirit calls people regardless of—but not because of—their gender. In each case, both schools carry a self-conscious identity as being an institution acting in opposition to one another. The complementarian/egalitarian ideological divide shapes each school. In reality, both exhibit different forms of patriarchy. In particular, Asbury’s commitment to gender blind equality leaves the institution ill-equipped to do the critical work of disarming patriarchal structures, even while rhetorically elevating women to places of church power.
The sense of embattlement that pervades our institutional narratives in the evangelical/mainline or fundamentalist/reasonable binary can skew our perspectives, masking the similarities in piety, consumer habits, gendered labor, political and economic commitments, class and racial attitudes, regardless of how differently these groups may answer questions about the age of the earth or the dating of John’s gospel.
Performativity
Swartz’s book outlined the performative nature of Asbury’s gendered commitments. Support for women in ministry consisted largely of exegetical finesse, allowance of women’s voices in theological discourse, and criticism of hardline patriarchy. But women remained underrepresented and undersupported in the seminary, theological debates tended to skew masculine, and many women at Asbury still carried the burden of the “second shift,” the domestic labor of the family when the schoolwork or ministry tasks were completed.
Symbolic performances of community values are important for creating an ethos of cohesion. Exegetical commitments, T-shirts, Facebook campaigns, campus protests, bumper stickers—such performances signal an aspirational identity—“this is who we are and strive to be,” and as such, they have limited but real utility. But performativity can also create an overinflated sense of moral righteousness, especially when it is paired with the Christian imperative to care for the marginalized. This will inevitably create real barriers to historical empathy and trade on easy narratives. Musa al-Gharbi’s provocative book, We Have Never Been Woke, outlines the disjunction between the rhetoric of the symbolic professions (journalists, professors, clergy) and their actions. He writes that “our sincere commitments to social justice often blind us to the role we play in contributing to social problems…indeed, the very fact that we are self-critical is held up as proof of our essential goodness, fairness, and rationality.” In short, we enlightened progressives critique the systems we benefit from while continuing to reap the benefits of social status, status that we claim we will use to make the world a more equitable place.
Wherefore History?
So what’s the answer? I confess, I sympathize with my students who are trying to grow and navigate the turbulent waters of theological education. I don’t have many answers. But what I do have is a dogged if imperfect commitment to resist these three impulses in the classroom and in myself. This is not a call to blind centrism. Nor is it a piece in praise of “both-sides-ism.” It is merely a plea to resist the forces of dehumanization that threaten the prospect of constructive communal life. It’s a call to love our neighbor in the as ourselves or, if you like, to love our enemies and so be children of our Father in heaven. That may seem trite to some, but to Christians it is the naive—one might say childlike—hope that transformation is possible. And transformation is not merely an exercise of the mind but a reordering of ourselves toward the other. This turning toward the other, this transformation is not painless. It does not cost nothing. Jesus loved the rich man, and because he loved him told him to sell his possessions, give to the poor, and follow him. That’s a painful proposal. Exploitation and oppression characterize our social arrangements. The history of Christianity is rife with the same. We must take the burden of that knowledge seriously. At the same time, I hear Kathryn Lofton’s claim that “the most hopeful labor of history…is not a corrective relationship to human prejudice. A corrective relationship is one in which one party, the historian, points out the factual and logical error to another (the student, the reader, the believer).” She goes on to call such an approach “paternalistic,” and writes that “this reach to diminish—to use history as an analgesic to racism or sexism—is a complicated intercession, suggesting that historians hold the moral high ground simply by the act of historicizing.” In other words, we ought not use history to say, “now that you know better, do better.” So what can be done? Here’s Lofton again: “What do historians know that other scholars do not? They know just how richly complicated, contradictory, and varied are the ways human beings understand what they do and think. This capacity to complicate our contemporary senses, even our social scientific senses, is where history as a practice thrives.”
We problematize the received narratives as a way of acknowledging that it is the nature of human beings in community to be problematic. Such problematization can be, in Christian educational settings, an act of love. This problematization constantly counsels that as Christians doing history, discerning specks and logs is just as important as calling balls and strikes. How could Bernard of Clairvaux write the most moving allegorical reflections on Song of Songs and use his influence to promote the Templar crusades? How could Bartolome de Las Casas defend indigenous rights and stay silent on African slavery? When my students ask, “how can these people claim to be Christians and do X?,” it is an invitation to interrogate the contradictions and variety in our own lives, to ask how we can claim Christ and live with the cognitive dissonance—shopping at Amazon, buying fast fashion clothing, fighting subsidized housing in our neighborhoods, borrowing and lending with interest, prioritizing tax cuts over assistance programs. They did and we do.
The point of such an exercise is not self-flagellation or moral despondency. While I agree with Lofton that the ethical import of history can’t simply amount to finger-wagging, I believe resisting easy answers and historicizing as a Christian act can help to nourish our moral imaginations, if only we allow ourselves to be surprised by the humanity of people who went before us. As the eminent historian and theologian Andrew Walls once put it, as we observe the drama of human history, we each occupy a single seat in the theatre. Our views vary due to obstructions, angles, and level of interest, but none of us gets the full picture. We can, of course, move seats. We can compare our experiences by conversing with others. But this limitation is a necessary reality of viewing the play. History allows us to compare and converse with others. We only need the concession that others are seeing and hearing things we are not—we could not—and the recognition that our seat in the theatre is not the only or even the best seat from which to observe. It is simply the seat we occupy.
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