Ontology and Christian Historians

In recent years, Christian historians in the United States have produced a thriving literature on the integration of religious faith and history. This literature represents a remarkable testimony to a grand effort among Christian historians to explore the complex interdependence between religious belief and professional and responsible historical investigation. Although influential and provocative in the best sense of the words, these recent works suffer collectively from significant limitations: their authors have chosen to look in epistemology for a touchstone that distinguishes good history from bad. Here lies the difference between these authors and those like Jones and Gregory: the latter have chosen to look not in epistemology but in ontology. They look not in the word but in the world. The epistemological question is what out of the range of things that make up the world can we know? The ontological question is what exactly is there to know? What makes up the world? The problem the sacramental ontology authors address is not what it would look like, practically and specifically, for a Christian historian to bring a “faith-informed” perspective into a secular institution such as the historical profession. The problem is rather what it would look like, practically and specifically, for a Christian historian to deal with a reality of the past that is “supernatural-infused” and bring it into a historical profession that does not identify with a Weberian understanding of the secular. Put simply, the sacramental ontology thinkers wonder what it is to see the past as sacramental then bring this perspective into the historical Weltanschauung in which secular modernity and religious tradition contaminate each other. Because of their ontological shift, both Jones and Gregory have been accused of stating that the past was itself infused with the sacred; therefore, to study the past with secular eyes is fundamentally an act of distortion. This interpretation was not entirely fair: neither author suggested a view of the past in which the sacral was indeed at work in the world while it is not at work in the present. Their work—and my work, for what it is worth—does not go beyond the question of perception alone, that is, beyond the point that people in the past thought and interpreted experience differently from today.