Bruce Gordon: ‘We have to be humble in our approach to the past’

Bruce Gordon is Titus Street Professor of Ecclesiastical History at YDS, the author of a definitive Calvin biography, and the recent winner of a Yale University grant to create a MOOC version of his class on the history of Christianity. We sat down with him to discuss these and other matters.

Recent Pew data show a striking decline in the number of Americans identifying as Christian. Please put this in historical perspective. Surely it cannot be said that Christianity is dying when 70 percent of the US public still identifies as Christian. What is happening?

We need to remind ourselves in humility that ours is a Western story of decline, and that we have much to learn from the rest of the world. As Lamin Sanneh’s work tells us, churches in Asia, Africa, and South America are flourishing. Those of us who study history are encouraged to look upon such data with a critical eye and not accept simple answers. We have to look beyond the numbers. The past tells us that Christianity has always been a dynamic force, growing in some places and shrinking in others. How do we explain change? Percentages alone tell us remarkably little, as if there were a direct correlation between numbers and the lives of churches. There are many questions to be asked about the situation we encounter today. We need, for example, to learn from those who do not identify as Christian. HowBruce Gordon at filming session for his new MOOC. Photo creditL Michael Marsland, Yale University do they understand that designation and what does it mean to them? We all see that the mainline churches are shrinking in numbers. That’s not the debate.  And we know that other forms of Christianity are flourishing.  Easy assumptions about decline, however, do not tell us very much until we learn more about where people are moving to, what choices are they making, and what kinds of Christianity we do have. One example of our changing culture is how fewer people today would identify themselves as Christian when they have no active involvement in a church community. One could argue that we have fewer nominal Christians today, and that transition alone radically alters the percentages. Models of church attendance and church services are changing rapidly. We need to think about what other kinds of communities people may be involved in, including  virtual worship. History teaches us to ask the right questions.

How does this development fit into the larger story of Christianity in the western world going back over the centuries?

People have had very different ways of measuring decline and success, ways to measure whether Christianity was growing or declining. In the Western world we’re obsessed with statistics. There are many aspects of our religious cultures that are not easy to measure, however. Who’s to say a small community is not vibrant? Do we have to have large numbers for Christianity to flourish? The missionary movements of the Reformation period and later believed baptizing masses of people were signs of success. They were bitterly disappointed to find that many ‘converts’ had little attachment to their new religion. In many ways we are no different. Our prejudices and values are reflected in the ways in which we assess whether the faith is flourishing.

There’s no doubt that churches are in a desperate state in Europe and in parts of America.  The picture is highly uneven. Many churches are virtually empty during worship while others are vibrant.  Growth needs to be carefully considered, for we know that most mainline churches grow by transfer of membership rather than through converts. Back to my first answer, we need to foster conversations that engage with the beliefs and needs of the people, not how many there are of them. Traditional forms of worship are disappearing (although by no means gone). And we need to understand why that is happening. Why have young people decided to leave churches and either go to no form of religious services or find other forms of religious community. My point, as made above, is that engagement with the beliefs and convictions of young and old tells us infinitely more than numbers. In studying the Reformation I encourage my students to engage, as far as possible, the beliefs of those men and women we study; that’s how we begin to learn about the decisions they made.

You recently won an award from Yale University to create a MOOC version of your history of Christianity course. What motivates you to pursue this project? What can course-takers look forward to?

What excited me to do this online course on Western Christianity from early Christianity to the Scientific Revolution is the way in which I have been changing our history survey over the past two or three years to address better the interests and needs of M.Div. students—especially their desire for a more global perspective. And so I have done that in the course.  When the opportunity came to apply for the award I realized that the way in which I was framing the story of Western Christianity—in terms of a global perspective—could have wide appeal to people who were not only in Europe and North America but, indeed, in Asia, Africa, and South America as well.

You have written one of the definitive biographies of John Calvin. Casual followers of American religion are used to encountering references to “Calvinism” and the like and have come to associate Calvin with theological rigidity. What are one or two important realities about Calvin that we ought to know?

I wouldn’t say Calvin is kinder or gentler than you’d imagine him. I would say he was a person of his time. It was an age of fiery polemics in which he was a brilliant thinker and writer. A theology drawn from Augustine and Aquinas is, to our eyes, very stern. He never believed that the doctrine of double predestination was his but that it came, rather, out of the tradition. Predestination can only be understood within the full expanse of Calvin’s thought on God and humanity.

There are aspects of Calvin that are unknown to people today. For example, he believed the created world revealed the divine—not in pantheistic ways but in the sense that all of creation brought forth the glory of God and that, therefore, the natural world is good. Calvin was deeply moved by the beauty of creation, which he referred to as the theater of God’s glory. He encouraged people to take in the wonder of nature, look at the stars and mountains, and meditate on them.

Most people think of Calvin as a divisive figure. But he devoted himself to the cause of church unity in this world. He was bitterly disappointed with the failure to heal the breach within the Church. Unity of the visible Church was a passion for him; he was forever counseling people not to do anything to break the bonds of communion. So he was not a man who ruled over the church with an iron fist. He never possessed such authority.

For the recently released Oxford Illustrated History of the Reformation, you contributed a chapter on late medieval Christianity. What was going on during this period that in retrospect can be said to have set the stage for the rather momentous development we know as the Reformation?

The late medieval world was not merely the opening act for the Reformation. It was many things at the same time. There was rampant corruption in the highest circles of the church—the story with which we are most familiar. What is less known is that in churches and communities across Europe, religion thrived. This was a culture in which people donated vast sums of goods and money, a culture that revolved around the intercession of the saints for the living and the dead. And this took place through a wide variety of practices, from pilgrimages to religious art and images and the mass itself. I find the idea of decline very problematic. Everywhere you looked, you saw religious art, churches, and popular piety flourishing. This was the case, above all, in England but also in Scandinavia, France, and Italy. It was not a perfect world: There was severe criticism of the clergy and worldliness of much of the church. Late medieval religion flourished in a volatile culture of devotion and dissent.

One of the things that makes the Reformation so fascinating is that it emerges from a highly vibrant religious world, not one in decline. However, Martin Luther and others, aided by the power of the printing press, were able to pick up on the discontent of people to create a hope for reform and change. Luther, above all else, became a symbol of liberation; he was able to translate that hope into theological ideas that proved powerfully persuasive. Luther persuaded the people that what they had been depending on was not just wrong but was the work of the antichrist. It’s really the power of a personality and that vision that changed the situation.

How do you teach history in a divinity school, where some people might think it’s marginal or even unnecessary?

Teaching history at a divinity school is challenging for a number of reasons. Some students see it as marginal subject that doesn’t relate directly to their interest in ministry. They can understand why one would study theology and the bible and pastoral care. But history? Less so. What I try to do in the course that all of the M.Div. students take, “Transitional Moments in Western Christianity 200-1650,” is to give them a sense of the ways in which the past continues to inform the present. I choose themes that reflect ongoing interest within church life in contemporary culture so people can look to the past to see how problems and issues that faced these communities continue to be present in our world, though in very different forms.

I encourage the students to consider how history consists of the narratives told by men and women who necessarily make decisions about what to remember and what to forget. We have to be critical and ask the tough questions. This is by no means to suggest that there is not objective truth, but that all history writing is contingent because it comes from human hands. How do we know about the Donatists but through Augustine’s hostile assessment?  How do we read the story of the martyr Perpetua, or listen to the visionary accounts of Teresa of Avila? We learn how to hear lost voices, read texts, and examine images mindful that the past both speaks and is silent. It yields much wisdom for our day and, in others ways, remains unreachably distant. To ask questions and to listen for answers requires from us great humility.

We don’t do this by learning vast amounts of material such as names and dates, but by understanding ways in which vibrant Christian communities in the past can only be understood if we step outside of ourselves and our modern assumptions to gain the wisdom of the past. And, above all, to understand they were complex communities in which belief, unbelief, as well as achievement and destruction, existed in ways that are foreign yet still strike us as familiar. The past yields a great deal of wisdom for the present. But we have to be humble in our approach to the past, acknowledging there is much we do not know. We must not practice the condescension of the present whereby we assume ourselves to have improved upon that world.

One of the questions those of us who teach history often encounter is whether there is a distinctively Christian interpretation of the past. I was asked recently by a prospective student whether I taught God’s providence as an explanation for events in history.  To put it another way, what is the relationship of the study of history and faith. My response is that I teach students the skills to read texts, employ scholarly methods, deal with competing interpretations, and (less often) to work in original languages. I also help them to think about the relationships between historical and theological questions and how to frame their analysis. All of this work, I would argue, is not at all hostile to faith but, rather, serves to enhance their beliefs through rigorous thought, discussion, and writing.

September 2, 2015
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