Historical Objections
By
A.R. Vidler

The purpose of these lectures is neither to substantiate nor to refute objections to Christian belief, but to offer you some assistance in thinking out for yourself what is involved in Christian belief. That means reckoning as openly and honestly as possible with what can be said against it as well as with what can be said for it. What I design to do therefore in this lecture is to set before you some considerations that I think you ought to take into account when assessing the relation between Christian belief and history. But 'history' and 'historical' are large and elusive terms: almost anything could come within their embrace. I shall concentrate on that range of questions which has to do with the supposed dependence of Christian belief on what has actually happened not in history in general, but in a particular bit of history.

Christianity is a historical faith not only in the banal sense that it has by now had a long history, but in that it seems to require belief in the occurrence of certain quite specific events in the past. This claim was recently made in an unequivocal manner by Professor Mascall in his inaugural lecture at King's College, London, when he said:

It has often been emphasized that Christianity is historical in a sense in which no other religion is, for it stands or falls by certain events which are alleged to have taken place during a particular period of forty-eight hours in Palestine nearly two thousand years ago.

And he quoted the late Dom Gregory Dix as having said that Christianity 'is the only fully historical religion. It is the only religion which actually depends entirely upon history. ...'

I am not - at any rate at this stage - expressing agreement or disagreement with those statements. I cite them only in order to indicate the central topic of this lecture. I am sure that another lecturer with other interests and a greater competence might discourse in a big way about 'the philosophy of history' or about objections to the idea that there is a Christian philosophy of history. That larger, though perhaps less crucial, subject is not within my scope.

First, I would call your attention to a fundamental objection to any tie-up between Christian belief and alleged historical events or the existence of a historical person. Here are a few examples:

Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson (both his bedmaker and his biographer - E.M. Forster - felt he was the best man who ever lived) said this:

My difficulty about Christianity is and always has been that Christians make the centre of their faith the historical existence of a man at a certain age. I dare say he did exist, though that has been doubted. But if he did, what was he really like? I cannot think religion can depend on such uncertainties.

A similar objection was expressed by the Mahatma Gandhi in an address which he gave - oddly enough - on Christmas Day 1931:

I may say that I have never been interested in an historical Jesus. I should not care if it was proved by someone that the man called Jesus never lived, and that what was narrated in the Gospels was a figment of the writer's imagination. For the Sermon on the Mount would still be true for me.

Again, Sir Walter Raleigh, who was Professor of English at Oxford, wrote to his sister in 1899:

I send you a book which I believe to be by Bernard Holland - piejaw in its nature, about Churches and religion and the like. ... Much as I like Bernard, I get further and further from that point of view. All these questions are very interesting (and well treated by him) so long as you remain inside Christianity, but I can't stay there. It seems absurd to subordinate philosophy to certain historical events in Palestine - more and more absurd to me, I think. The ideas of Christianity are always interesting, but they are all to be found elsewhere, and are not, it would seem, the chief part of its attraction.

My last example is a more trivial one - from Bernard Shaw - but it also has its point:

What Christ said would have been just as true if he had lived in a country house with an income of £5,000 a year.

None of these men was a professing Christian, but they might all (except perhaps Shaw) be described as sympathetic or regretful dissenters. You will observe however that they all considered that Christian belief ought to be about the teaching, not the person, of Jesus. They considered that Jesus happened to enunciate certain spiritual and moral truths, ideals or principles the validity of which was independent of his own person or circumstances, just as it is not necessary to know anything about the biography of Bach in order to be pierced to the soul by his music. It is the music, not the man, that matters. It is the teaching of the Sermon on the Mount, not who uttered it, that matters. Well, you have to ask yourself with regard to Christian belief whether or not that is so: whether or not Christians have been misguided in identifying their beliefs with affirmations about particular historical events.

It is the same point as was made in a more abstract way by Lessing in the eighteenth century when he said that:

If no historical truth can be demonstrated, then nothing can be demonstrated by historical truths. That is to say, accidental truths of history can never become the proof of necessary truths of reason.

Lessing was a professing Christian, and there have been Christians since who have so interpreted Christian belief as to make its justification independent of the question whether or to what extent the events recorded in the New Testament actually occurred. This, if I understand him aright, is the position of Professor Braithwaite in his lecture, An Empiricist's View of the Nature of Religious Belief. 'A religious belief, he says, 'is an intention to behave in a certain way ... together with the entertainment of certain stories associated with the intention in the mind of the believer.' 'A man is not, I think, a professing Christian unless he both proposes to live according to Christian moral principles and associates his intention with thinking of Christian stories; but he need not believe that the empirical propositions presented by the stories correspond to empirical fact.' A similar view was expressed at the beginning of this century by one of the Roman Catholic modernists - not all of them, as is often alleged, not for example by Loisy or Tyrrell, but - by Edouard Le Roy who like Braithwaite was a lay professor. Le Roy, who became a member of the Academic Francaise and died only in 1954, taught that Christian dogma is primarily a rule of practical conduct.

The professional theologians have not taken kindly to these views which, it is urged, could never 'constitute an effective basis of missionary propaganda'. It is suggested that they can appeal only to sophisticated and sceptically inclined academics. I am not so sure about that. I fancy that there are a great many ordinary Christian believers who, if they were articulate, would confess that it is the practical implications of Christian belief which are of decisive importance for them, and not the historical origins - or the speculative implications. So I do not think that we should let the professional theologians too swiftly dissuade us from considering these views seriously. And I notice that the present Dean of St Paul's has gone so far as to say: 'I see no reason to suppose that a complete abandonment of the historical basis for Christianity would necessarily involve the end of the religion', though I should add that he was speaking only of an extreme hypothesis, and not of one that he is himself in the least disposed to entertain.

For, after all, there can be no doubt that Christian teachers and preachers as a whole, and the vast majority of Christian worshippers, take it for granted that their faith is inescapably bound up with what actually happened in Palestine in the first century of our era and that, as has been said, 'the Gospel, divorced from its basis in history, must needs lose its essential power'. I therefore turn to consider more precise objections to Christian belief thus understood, the difficulties that are entailed in it, and ways in which attempts have been made to meet them.

On the one hand, it can be claimed that Christian belief derives its peculiar strength and interest from its affirmation that the eternal God, who is the ground of all being, once upon a time and once for all not only disclosed himself but in 'the flesh', that is, in the concrete stuff of our human existence, initiated for mankind a universal movement of healing and restoration - a new creation. This affirmation, it is claimed, sharply distinguishes Christian belief from any assertion of general ideas or timeless principles, from mere guidance for conduct, and from suggestive mythologies: and this it was that enabled Christianity in the early centuries to triumph over the faiths that were competing with it.

On the other hand, it must be recognized that this claim to be rooted in, and to derive from, actual historical events exposes Christian belief to objections or to doubts which have become more acute in the last century or two since scientific methods of historical investigation have established themselves. This was acknowledged by Dr H.M. Relton in an essay on 'The Reconstruction of Dogma':

The appeal of Christianity is still, and must always be, an appeal to history. This cannot be helped. There must always, therefore, be an element of doubt and query. Did these things really happen? There must always be room for critical investigation, and a right employment of the historical method must always be welcomed.

(By the way, why does he say 'a right employment of the historical method'? Does he mean one that sees to it that the answers come out right?) I prefer the way the point has been made more recently by Mr Christopher Driver:

Because Christianity is a historical religion, because Christians are ever charged with seeking the truth about the created world and the begotten Christ, the Church is singularly vulnerable to the advancement of knowledge.

In what respects then is Christian belief historically vulnerable?

First, Christians are expected to hold their beliefs with such assurance that they are prepared not only to live by them but, if necessary, to die for them. But, if we look closely into the question, we have to acknowledge that no beliefs about matters of history can be proved to be certainly true: strictly speaking, they can never have more than a very high degree of probability. Do Christians then live and die for what they must allow to be not certainly, but only probably, the case?

Some Christians have a way of meeting this objection which is not open to me. They grant that what I have said is correct about historical statements in general, but they say that Christian beliefs involving matters of history are presented to us in a form which lifts them altogether above the uncertainties of historical evidence.

They come to us with a guarantee of certainty either in an infallible book or from an infallible pope or both. If that claim could be sustained in either form, we should not need to bother any more about arguments from history and that is why Cardinal Manning said that 'the appeal to antiquity is both a treason and a heresy: it is treason because it rejects the divine voice of the Church at this hour, and a heresy because it denies that voice to be divine.' In that case, it would be unnecessary for me to proceed with this lecture. However, even if such claims could be sustained (and I do not think they can be), I should disregard them here, for in these lectures we are appealing not to any supernatural or miraculous authority but to reason. I therefore proceed.

Anyhow, the objection that historical statements can never be certainly demonstrated is not so formidable as it may seem. Christians do not assert, or they never ought to assert, that the truth of their beliefs can be demonstrated with certainty. If that were so, they would no longer be beliefs but knowledge. Christians would no longer be walking by faith but by sight. This is of course an intricate subject which depends to some extent on the definition of words. All I need point out here is the distinction, which is often overlooked, between the logical certainty of propositions and the psychological certitude of persons: between saying 'it is certain' and 'I am certain'. Every day of our lives we all show that we are practically or psychologically certain about things which we could not demonstrate to be certainly true - at least, not if we were cross-examined by any competent philosopher.

The objection, so broadly stated, does not therefore hold, but it leads to an objection with a much sharper point. It must be granted that it is quite reasonable for persons to be certain about matters which cannot be certainly demonstrated, including historical statements such as that William the Conqueror came over in 1066. But that is so, either because there is universal agreement about the beliefs in question except among lunatics, or because we have adequate grounds for supposing that if we ourselves examined the evidences we should find them convincing. But do these conditions hold in the case of the historical statements involved in Christian belief?

Obviously they are not matters of universal agreement: in fact, the early Christians were regarded as mad because they believed them, and it has often been so since. What then about examining the evidences for ourselves? It would not be reasonable to expect every Christian, or non-Christian for that matter, to be competent to examine the evidences concerning the origins of Christianity and to reach dependable conclusions about them on the ground of his own inquiries. This is an undertaking that calls for exceptional philological, literary, critical, and historical expertise. It would be unreasonable, I say, to require people to become trained historians or critical experts before they could become Christians or before they could renounce Christian belief.

In this, as in many other matters, we most of us have to depend more or less upon the experts. But here is the difficulty. It is well enough known that the experts - those who have made themselves competent to form an opinion of their own about Christian origins - differ very widely in their conclusions. There have even been learned and intelligent men who have denied that Jesus ever existed: the so-called 'Christ-myth' theory. However, by the generality of even radically sceptical critics, that is regarded as a fantasy of criticism. You must always bear in mind the words of Ronald Balfour in his essay on 'History' in Cambridge University Studies:

Facts can be found which will support almost any historical thesis, and the more learned the historian the more of such facts he will be able to cite.

But apart from the extravagance of the Christ-myth theory, why is it that experts in this field differ so widely from one another? For one thing, while it may seem to undergraduates who are reading for the theological tripos that the documentary records of Christian origins are pretty substantial and extensive, yet in comparison with the import of their subject matter they are all too fragmentary. I remember an eminent New Testament scholar saying to me that the period before A.D. 170 is rather like the prehistory of Christianity, and that we have sufficient documentation for a history proper only after that date. I think there is something in that analogy. It does not of course mean that we can reach no conclusions about the earlier period, but the comparative fragmentariness of the surviving records accounts in part for the variety of ways in which they can be interpreted.

There is indeed a remarkable coherence in the New Testament as a whole: it is not for nothing that the books it contains are bound up together. At the same time, they are in many respects heterogeneous; there are striking inconsistencies between them; there was evidently a process of development or evolution going on during the period when they were being composed; there is considerable uncertainty about when exactly most of them should be dated. All these circumstances go far to explain the different conclusions which experts reach, or their hesitation in arriving at any firm conclusions.

But there are other factors that must be taken into account. It is the case that some historians are by temperament more sceptically inclined or more cautious than others, not only in this but in other fields of study. While there are some who, when they have made up their minds, will write with great confidence and aplomb, others persist in qualifying even their most considered or cherished conclusions with such expressions as 'probably', 'possibly', 'perhaps', 'it may seem', or 'it would appear'. The late Professor R.H. Lightfoot of Oxford was an agreeable example of this habit of mind. One needs to make allowance for this personal equation when estimating the significance of disagreement between experts.

However, a much more important question is that of bias. Presumably, we should all like to feel that our favourite historians were unbiased. But the question is: can they really be so? Allow them the maximum of honesty: but can they really approach a subject without any presuppositions in their minds? The best and most balanced treatment of this question that I know of is in the essay which I referred to just now by Ronald Balfour in Cambridge University Studies. Broadly speaking, it must be said that, while it is impossible for a historian to be completely without bias or completely presupposition-less, there is a vitally important difference between those historians who appear to be making out a case for conclusions which they hold in advance, and those who are genuinely wanting the evidences to speak for themselves, who seek to discount their own bias, and who are manifestly willing, if need be, to reach conclusions that are uncongenial to them.

This brings me to a graver objection and I am always surprised that more is not made of it. For have you observed that, in Cambridge for example, those scholars who are deemed competent to give teaching about Christian origins are almost without exception (indeed, so far as I know, without any exception) committed members of Christian Churches, whether as ministers or lay men (which is only a matter of degree), although this is not a formal condition of their appointment? This is not the case everywhere, especially in some continental universities, which may explain why there is much more variety in the teaching that is given there. But in England it has been said that the teaching of theology, and this includes the elucidation of Christian origins, is mostly carried on within the sound of church bells. In our Divinity School in St John's Street the bells of Great Mary's can be clearly heard, and even the solitary bell of King's College Chapel, as I know very well since I sometimes depart from a meeting in the Divinity School when I hear that bell start ringing!

Renan in the preface to his Vie de Jesus likened orthodox theologians to caged birds and liberal theologians to birds whose wings have been clipped. He meant that, when theologians study the historical evidences for the life of Jesus or for anything else that bears on their creed, they are tied down in advance by the dogmas to which they are committed. Liberal theologians may appear to fly a little way in the direction to which the evidences point them, but they are not really free to do so. Now I must say that I am not myself sensible of being either caged or clipped or inhibited from saying what I really think by my ministry or membership in a church, and anyhow Renan was ill-qualified to say this kind of thing since he laid it down as an axiom of his own thinking that miracles cannot happen, which is a thoroughly unphilosophical presupposition. But although I myself feel free to think and say whatever I believe to be true, and while I have the highest opinion of the honesty and integrity of my colleagues in the Divinity Faculty here, I should be happier if those who are appointed to give teaching about Christian origins in this university were less apparently tarred with a bias. I have very much sympathy with an article on this subject by Professor Ninian Smart in the December 1962 issue of the Universities Quarterly.

But there is more involved in this question of presuppositions than we have so far considered. What range of evidence may rightly be taken into account and influence our decision when making up our minds whether or not the hard core of the Christian story is to be accepted, for I apprehend that Christians need have no difficulty in granting that there may be legendary embellishments of the story even in the canonical gospels? There are some - both believers and unbelievers - who suppose that you can more or less isolate the story of Jesus, and even particular incidents in it, and treat it somewhat like a detective story - what Mark Pattison once called the 'Old Bailey' type of theology. An example of this is that book by Frank Morison, Who Moved the Stone?, in which he starts as an unbeliever and arrives at an orthodox conclusion.

I do not myself find such books convincing or at any rate decisive, whatever conclusion they come to, because they presuppose that you can make up your mind about the story of Jesus without viewing it in its total context, in particular without taking into account the Old Testament of which it purports to be the fulfilment, and without taking into account the subsequent history of the Christian movement. As regards the latter, Dr Relton has written:

Investigation of the historicity of Christianity cannot be confined [he means 'ought not to be confined'] to an inquiry concerning events of [Christ's] earthly life without any reference to the phenomenon of the Christian Church which arose as a result of that life, and claims still to live in the power of His endless life.

This point was put with a sharper accent by another English divine (Alfred Fawkes):

The question of origin, so fiercely discussed by theologians, is in truth the least decisive of questions; the point is not what a formula, a function, an institution was, but what it has become. This, not the other, fixes at once its worth and its character.

It seems reasonable, and indeed inevitable, that a man's judgement about the origins of Christianity - where the evidences in the narrower sense are manifestly susceptible of more than one interpretation - should be influenced by his assessment of the total Christian phenomenon in history. I do not say that this will make it any easier - at any rate, for a detached observer - to make up his mind. For the Christian movement in history has a brighter and a darker side.

As regards the brighter side I will cite the testimony not of a Christian, who might be starry-eyed in the matter, but of that famous agnostic T.H. Huxley:

Whoso calls to mind what I may venture to term the bright side of Christianity-that ideal of manhood, with its strength and patience, its justice and its pity for human frailty, its helpfulness to the extremity of self-sacrifice, its ethical purity and nobility, which apostles have pictured, in which armies of martyrs have placed their unshakable faith, and whence obscure men and women, like Catherine of Siena and John Knox, have derived courage to rebuke Popes and Kings - is not likely to underrate the importance of the Christian faith as a factor in human history.

But against that we have to set the darker aspects of Christian history: the quarrelsomeness of the Christians, their censoriousness, their legalism, their arrogance, the blatant immorality of doctrines which they have accepted with equanimity, and the Christian Church's all too frequent resemblance to the Jewish Church which crucified Christ.

Possibly a distinction may be drawn here, as is done by Dr Emil Brunner, between the Christian Ekklesia by which he means the communities of believers who have lived in the Spirit of Jesus and who have taken him at his word, and the Church as a great hierarchical, juridical, quasi-political organization, which has been animated by a very different spirit. It is only of the former that even a detached observer might be moved to say that at the bottom of this phenomenon there may have been or there must have been some stupendous event which was not of this world. But on the other hand he might equally well be moved to say that this is the evasion of a clever theologian who is trying to have the best of both worlds!

I have been speaking of a 'detached observer', and I am sure that it is good for all of us - whether we are believers or unbelievers - to try to look at Christianity sometimes from that point of view. But of course in reality we are, none of us, detached observers. We are inevitably involved or engaged in one way or another, and influenced by the experiences we have had and the decisions we have made heretofore.

So that, finally, I would say that the way in which a Christian believer responds, in the last resort, to the historical objections to Christian belief which we have been considering is likely to be settled by one or both of two things, which are not unrelated. On the one hand, by the enduring impression or impact that is made upon him by the person of Jesus as he is portrayed in the Gospels. It is by no means easy to get at this because - apart from the fact that there are extraneous elements even in the Gospel records - the Christians themselves have so mucked up the impression of Jesus - by all that Sunday School silliness about 'Jesus meek and gentle', or by turning him into a cleric or an idealist, or by concealing him behind an elaborate facade of dogma, or by those distressing pictures in stained glass windows which were beloved by the Victorians and have yet to be smashed. All the same the authentic personality of Jesus does still make its impact. As an example of its doing so today, I would recommend a recently published paperback by Roger Tennant, entitled Son of a Woman. Here you have a man with a genuinely post-Darwinian, post-Marxist, post-Freudian mind, who has also knocked about the world a lot, and who has found the person of Jesus inescapable.

And, on the other hand, whether a man decides to become or to remain a Christian believer may also be settled by what I would call his participation in the Christian mystery as a present reality: by what he finds, or by what finds him, in the shared experience of the community of believers - it may be in the eucharistic sacrament or in the Friends' meeting house: by whether or not he is convinced that there is something there which, despite all his puzzlements, holds him and speaks to the deepest levels of his being. This, I take it, is what Paul Tillich had in mind when he said:

The affirmation that Jesus is the Christ is an act of faith and consequently of daring courage. It is not an arbitrary leap into darkness but a decision in which elements of immediate participation and therefore certitude are mixed with elements of strangeness and therefore incertitude and doubt.

I want to end with a word first to the non-Christians, and then to the Christians, and then to both. To the non-Christians I would say, make sure that you are considering the objections to your own beliefs or unbeliefs as searchingly as the Christians are in these lectures being pressed to consider the objections to their beliefs. And here I might interject that I often find myself more in sympathy or en rapport with non-Christians who have a sense of the strangeness and incertitude of our world and of the duty of a large measure of agnosticism than I do with Christians who are cocksure about their beliefs.

And to the Christians I would say: don't expect or require that all Christians should see eye to eye about these matters. Don't try to lay down a hard and fast line between what are the essentials and the non-essentials of belief, for that is one of the questions that will be with us till the end of time. And don't expect or require all Christians to be equally confident or sanguine or light-hearted. Robert Leighton, a seventeenth-century divine, of whom Coleridge said that he was the most inspired writer outside the canonical scriptures, said:

Some travel on in a covert, cloudy day, and and get home by it, having so much light as to know their way, and yet do not at all clearly see the bright and full sunshine of assurance; others have it breaking forth at times, and anon under a cloud; and some have it more constantly. But as all meet in the end, so all agree in this in the beginning, that is, in the reality of the thing.

And lastly, this from a very different kind of man, James Anthony Froude, and this can be addressed to all of you:

It seems as if in a healthy order of things, to the willingness to believe there should be chained as its inseparable companion a jealousy of deception. ... Some men are humble and diffident, some are sceptical and inquiring; yet both are filling a place in the great intellectual economy; both contribute to make up the sum and proportion of qualities which are required to hold the balance even; and neither party is entitled to say to the other, 'Stand by; I am holier than thou.'