Why History? A Defense of God’s Revelatory Medium

Christianity teaches that God is the Lord of all, even history. He started history by an act of creation, he governs it by his providence, he entered it in the person of Christ, and he will terminate it at the final judgment. Chronologically, one can develop the scheme of divine redemption by a series of revelatory historical events: Creation, Exodus, Exile, Crucifixion, and Resurrection. Unlike the Greeks, who sought to explore the nature of God by abstract reasoning, the Hebrews and Christians pointed to God’s actions in time, in history, actions that revealed his eternal nature.

Yet many thinkers still find quaint and downright scandalous the belief that God would reveal himself in history, that he would cloak himself in the limited and the particular. Why, they ask, would God have disclosed himself in past events? Why should the Almighty compel me to rummage through happenings of thousands of years ago to find him? Why must the sovereign Lord of the Universe play hide-and-seek with me, his putative creature, who supposedly radiates his image? If this Infinite Personality really exists, he must be the most important entity in the Cosmos. Why can’t he make himself contemporary? Why would he hide, especially from his offspring? Would an earthly father do this?

So the objection runs. But what specifically is the problem with the belief that God reveals himself in history?

The critic points out that history isn’t immediate; it is removed—removed from the person God is trying to reach, especially if the revelatory event happened thousands of years ago. Being removed, history is therefore contingent, uncertain. You can never be absolutely sure that anything happened exactly as the story has come down to you. You are at the mercy of the eyewitnesses; you get the event secondhand. And if the story is two thousand years old, as is the resurrection account, you’ve really got a problem. In sum, it seems unjust for God to shower signs and wonders on the first generation of Christians and leave the sixtieth generation with only a collection of books documenting those original miracles. History loses its certainty the further away you get from the original event. Why did God use a fallible earthen vessel for his revelation?

Now, anyone who argues this way is really restating his version of an ancient complaint, the complaint that—for the outsider—the truth of Christian theism cannot be established by either a mathematical demonstration or a direct personal experience. Granted; but who proved that God might not use another method of revelation if certain conditions warranted it? If sin has distorted man’s thinking (a fundamental Christian tenet), then history might not be such a quaint method of revelation as some think. It might be admirably tailored to fit man’s present predicament; it might be a very appropriate way for God to disclose himself to man—as man now exists.

This idea has hovered at the edge of my mind for several years, and when I recently read a passage from Pascal it lunged dramatically into the center of my thinking. Pascal reasoned that if God had wished to overcome the stubbornness of the most hardened of unbelievers he could have done it by revealing himself so openly that the truth of His existence would be inescapable. But, Pascal continued:

It is not in this manner that he chose to appear in the gentleness of his coming; because since so many men had become unworthy of his clemency, he wished them to suffer the privation of the good that they did not want. It would not have been right therefore for him to appear in a way that was plainly divine and absolutely bound to convince all mankind; but it was not right either that he should come in a manner so hidden that he could not be recognized by those who sought him sincerely. He chose to make himself perfectly knowable to them; and thus, wishing to appear openly to those who seek him with all their heart, and hidden from those who flee him with all their heart, he tempered the knowledge of himself, with the result that he has given signs of himself which are visable to those who seek him, and not to those who do not seek him [Pensées, #309].

My thesis is that history may be an ideal way for God to “temper” the knowledge of himself so that he is partly revealed and partly concealed. The person seeking God will rejoice at what is revealed, however partial, but the person fleeing God will use the partial to justify his unbelief.

How does history reveal God? Well, to give the classic case, if a man could perform miracles, rise from the dead, teach a high ethical code and embody that code in his own person for a period of time, and then ascend into heaven, I think most people would conclude that he was divine or had divine power. That’s why Christians can say with conviction: Jesus Christ reveals God.

But there’s the rub—Christ revealed God to the eyewitnesses of his own time. They were the only ones who directly observed all these things. As soon as you get to the second generation, you get to the partial; you must accept the testimony of eyewitnesses. That’s why history partly conceals God, particularly to those past the first generation. If Christ would only return to each new generation and arrange his affairs so that every human being could observe these marvelous events for himself, then God’s revelation in him would be much easier to confirm.

But then, that’s where sin comes in again. Maybe it would be wrong, yes, even indecent, for God to expose the evidence for the faith so frankly. Maybe it would be like casting pearls before swine. Maybe God tucked the evidence back into history so the diligent seeker would find it and the unbeliever would fail to find it because of his prejudice.

We can see this point better if we consider the paradoxical nature of history. People “back there” make history, true, but the practicing historian makes just about as much history as the original participants in the drama. History is objective in the sense that the events happened outside the minds of us all and are thus amenable to the investigation of all. Yet at the same time history is, in a sense, subjective, because events are not immediately accessible to all—except the eyewitnesses. What happened “back there” must be reconstructed by the practicing historian “right now.” You cannot go and personally observe the resurrection of Jesus, but this doesn’t make the event totally inaccessible to your investigation. Events in the first century are removed, but not totally removed. In a sense, you “see” the event through the eyes of competent witnesses. Perhaps we should say history is “remotely objective.”

History and faith, therefore, are closely akin because both demand the attitude of trust before you can use them at all. The layman must trust the work of the historian; the historian must trust his witnesses and his documents; even the witnesses must have first trusted their own senses. This trust, like any kind of faith, isn’t credulity or gullibility; it has sufficient reasons, but it is still not rational certitude. History is like man, in Pope’s words,

With too much knowledge for the skeptic side,

With too much weakness for the stoic’s pride,

He hangs between.…

By being a kind of centaur, partly objective and partly subjective, history avoids two extremes to which people often go in reflecting on the certainty of divine revelation: rationalism and mysticism.

History avoids rationalism, because you must have some faith when you assent to a historical proposition. Unless someone develops a time machine, there will always be some uncertainty about an event in history. Nowhere in history (or in most of life, for that matter) do you escape the necessity of believing and trusting in others—a condition that fairly enrages some consistent rationalists. If you insist on believing only what you can directly experience, then history will be the first sacred cow to perish from your skepticism. You would have to live in the eternal present, because even your own memory would not be immediate enough!

History avoids mysticism, on the other hand, because it insists that the revelatory event is not totally subjective. An event actually occurred back there, and thus it is not locked up in anyone’s mind. Having occurred objectively, it is from then on available to all inquiring minds. Furthermore, your apprehension of an event can be verbalized and described; it is not ineffable, for you can tell others of the event and invite them to examine it.

Both rationalism and mysticism seem to promise certainty, either by inescapable deductive operations or by perfect personal contact. Both dislike the distance, the partial contact, affirmed by the moderate position of faith and history. Yet this is precisely the strength of the moderate position: it has enough reason to keep subjectivism from degenerating into sheer superstition, yet enough mysticism to keep rationalism from evaporating into the air of intellectualism. History and faith go hand in hand, because together they combine the best elements of rationalism and mysticism. They create a subtle balance between knowledge and hope, a beneficent tension between reason and will, analysis and choice, head and heart, logic and axiologic.

Just as faith is a state of conviction midway between certainty and credulity, so history is a mode of revelation midway between total disclosure of God and total ignorance of God. Those who seek God with a pure heart and an open mind will find him in history, for his revelation there is adequate. But for those who have already made up their minds that they will not believe, history is unconvincing; they gleefully point to its uncertainty, its contingency, its lack of demonstration. Very well, God lets them remain in their unbelief, for if history were totally demonstrative, their intellectual acceptance of Christian theism would have no impact on their wills. As Pascal concludes: “There is light enough for those who desire only to see, and darkness enough for those of a contrary disposition.”

Jesus had a disciple who distrusted history: Thomas “the Twin.” When Thomas heard the other disciples testify, “We have seen the Lord,” he said, “Unless I see the mark of the nails on his hands, unless I put my finger into the place where the nails were, and my hand into his side, I will not believe it.” A week later the risen Lord appeared to Thomas and granted his request: “Reach your finger here: see my hands; reach your hand here and put it into my side; be unbelieving no longer, but believe.” Thomas responded: “My Lord and my God!” The final words of Jesus in this episode sum up this essay very well: “Because you have seen me you have found faith. Happy are they who never saw me and yet have found faith.”

Arlie J. Hoover is chairman of the Department of History and Political Science at Pepperdine College, Los Angeles. He has the Ph.D. from the University of Texas and did post-doctoral research at the University of Heidelberg.

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