Christian histories of Christianity

In Cultures of the Religious Right, we're reading Mark Noll's Turning Points: Decisive Moments in the History of Christianity. This is a textbook for colleges and adult learning contexts used widely in Christian (meaning especially Evangelical) institutions; I first stumbled on it in the bookstore of the Moody Bible Institute in Chicago. Noll is a distinguished historian, long at Wheaton but now at Notre Dame, who is also an important gadfly Evangelical intellectual. Part of the interest of this book is the way he shows Evangelicals that the history of Christianity is worth knowing about (they tend to have what Martin Marty calls a "hop, skip and jump" view, starting with the New Testament and early Church, skipping to the Reformers, and then jumping to the present). Along the way, he presents an excellent overview of a very complicated history, and if he owns a "Protestant Evangelical" bias, he's scholarly enough to tell us and give us enough material (generally) to see alternatives to his interpretations.

This became clear today as we discussed Noll's chapter on the Council of Nicaea and the conversion of Constantine, which started and ended with discussion of political questions in 4th century Rome, discussing theology only in the middle. Nothing in his presentation excludes the view that Constantine's conversion may not have been sincere, that he was using the Christian church to pacify his empire, even as the bishops were using him to establish themselves while the theological stuff was epiphenomenal; indeed, he offers us the materials for such a view. When students in some consternation wondered "But isn't he supposed to be doing a Christian history of Christianity?" I responded, inspired: the most cynical and apparently anti-Christian account could be true and the religious view also true. Human beings are sinners, but God brings good out of evil. And indeed Noll gave notice in his introduction that this was one of the things the history of Christianity taught - that God looks out for his church and preserves it, despite the failings of human beings.

There is no more a single Christian way of doing the history of Christianity (or anything else) than there is a single secular way. It was interesting to discover in Noll the materials for what you might call a "total depravity" history of Christianity. The agents of history are sinners, impure of motive and probably deluded about their own virtue. Some are aware of this and penitent, but none is without sin, and so human history will inevitably be a history of vice and hypocrisy and overreaching, if also of penitence and whatever helps the repentant sin no more. How fortunate that sinful human beings aren't the only agents of human history!