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Theology was once queen of the sciences. From her royal perch she imperiously appropriated what she wanted or needed from philosophy. Already in the early nineteenth century, Soren Kierkegaard presents a different image of theology's relation to philosophy: "Theology sits all rouged and powdered in the window … and offers its charms to philosophy. It is supposed to be difficult to understand Hegel but to understand Abraham is a small matter."1
Kierkegaard sees theology as a prostitute because of her lack of confidence in her own inherent value. Abraham is to be left for Sunday school classes; to gain respect in the academy one must hitch one's wagon to the latest trendy philosopher.
The new edition of Van A. Harvey's The Historian and the Believer offers yet another chapter in this unedifying saga of theology riding piggyback on philosophy. Harvey's book is a reissue of a work published in 1966. In the original edition, Harvey drew on a strange brew of philosophical ideas: the philosophy of history offered by idealist philosopher F. H. Bradley, and some reflections on biblical scholarship and history from German theologian Ernst Troeltsch, as well as a mix of empiricist views of knowledge and neo-Kantian claims about the relation of God to the natural world. All of this was offered to argue that orthodox Christian belief is undermined by rigorous historical scholarship. What Harvey called the "morality of knowledge" demands that the theologian fearlessly face the results of unhampered historical learning.
As Harvey described historical scholarship, it requires a commitment to the autonomy of the historian, which is in turn understood as demanding an attitude of suspicion toward all historical sources, particularly testimony. Quoting R. G. Collingwood with approval, Harvey affirmed that "insofar as an historian accepts the testimony of an authority and treats it as historical truth, he obviously forfeits the name of historian." The true historian gives tentative assent to historical claims only in proportion to the strength of the evidence or warrant for those claims. Most important, for a theologian, the genuine historian simply cannot take seriously miracles or divine causality, since such things are not compatible with a scientific world-view. Genuine history is based on a tough-minded commitment to the facts, and we know in advance there are no supernatural facts.
The new edition of Harvey's book is of interest mainly for the new introduction contributed by the author. Here Harvey confesses what an astute reader of the original edition could have guessed: that the book was written by a man brought up in a fundamentalist home who "was really working out the theological conflicts that were emotionally rooted in [his] upbringing." Even more important, however, is Harvey's encounter with the contemporary intellectual situation sub se quent to the publication of the first edition. The wheel of history has turned, and the quasi-positivist philosophy of history invoked by Harvey in 1966 is now in disrepute. Harvey rightly sees that many postmodern thinkers would describe the conflict between faith and historical scholarship that Harvey delineates not as a contest between a group blinded by faith and dogma and another group committed to the "will to truth" (as Harvey himself had done) but as a conflict between two different kinds of believers. Secular historical scholars are themselves a group of ideological believers, and there is no such thing as history free from ideological assumptions. Harvey seems oblivious to the fact that his own autobiographical confession seems to support this criticism.
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