There has been an interesting discussion in the blogosphere lately about historical study and how it relates to belonging to a religious confession. April DeConick got the ball rolling and subsequently clarified her meaning. A very interesting contribution to the discussion came from April’s husband Wade, who (rather entertainingly) acknowledged that this fact might lead him to be biased, and yet his post was itself about the nature of historical study and the fact that, if it is true that we all have biases, there may be biases that distort in a manner that others may not. Others have pointed out that there seem to be examples of good historians who also belonged to faith communities and thus had a vested interest in the subject they were investigating.
The example given in the latter post, of Joseph Fitzmyer, perhaps helps us notice an important distinction. The issue does not seem to be whether one belongs to a faith community, but whether one is capable of acknowledging honestly when the evidence does not support one’s tradition and its historic beliefs. I think there are many of us who engage in historical study, and perhaps at one point we did so “in spite of” the fact that it often created awkward questions for things we believed. Now some of us have reached the point where we seek to allow interaction between our historical study and our faith, but in a largely unidirectional fashion. Our faith may lead us to find certain questions and topics interesting, but we seek to avoid allowing our presuppositions or our desires to dictate our outcomes, and more than that, we seek to allow the results of our historical investigation to inform and transform our religious beliefs.
Sometimes, I suspect this takes us further than the evidence requires us to go. In a desire to avoid self-deception, I’m sure I end up being slightly predisposed towards conclusions that challenge or disagree with views I already hold. So it certainly isn’t the case that I’ve escaped bias. But presumably there is at least some extent to which my conflicting allegiances counterbalance one another. And so perhaps fairness and honesty are possible even if “objectivity” is not.
Historically (if you’ll excuse the pun) there certainly is evidence that religious believers have been willing to rewrite history in light of their beliefs. When we consider the tenacity of false rumors favorable to one’s beliefs in modern times (e.g. Darwin’s alleged deathbed conversion, debunked long ago but still heard regularly) we cannot but assume (particularly given evidence from the developing tradition in the Gospels) that the same sort of thing happened in the past as well.
Ultimately, however, it seems to me that a historical-critically informed faith, or simply doing historical-critical scholarship, does itself involve a sort of committment that is at the level of belief or value judgment rather than something that can be historically or scientifically demonstrated. We are committed to allowing the evidence to shape our beliefs rather than vice-versa. We hold the value that believing what the evidence leads us to, rather than what our already-held presuppositions and beliefs lead us to, is “better”. I’m not sure that one can “prove” this in any sort of “objective” fashion.
Finally, while sometimes history is rewritten in light of beliefs we hold, more often it is simply interpreted in a certain way. James Harding has a post illustrating this with reference to the Jewish experience of exile.
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