I have read the recent posts by Chris Heard (1 | 2) on the question of faith and its relationship to historical reconstruction as well as the posts to which they respond and that respond to them. As I read these posts, and reflect on my recent exchange with Keith Whitelam, I am reminded that there is certainly one area in which Dr. Whitelam and I are in complete agreement: the historical reconstruction of ancient Levantine culture, society, politics, and religion needs to come out from under the aegis of dogma and faith.
The arguments to which Chris responds are wholly irrelevant for the professional historian; and, I think Chris makes some good points to this effect. Historians are not out to prove the biblical text, give comfort or a foundation for their faith, or contemplate any of the mysteries of the divine. Historians are engaged in recovering the stories of the past. Historiography is a narrative of past events, cultures, societies, voices, and ideas; it is fellowship with the dead. As a professional historian, my highest duty is to fathfully and critically recover the voices of the dead that are silenced by time and decay. I do this because the past has a power and usefulness for humanity in its own right and silence or the act of silencing is very dangerous. As Elie Wiesel wrote, "to remain silent and indifferent is the greatest sin of all."
Certainly, I would argue there is a spiritual component to historiography. I believe that stories, testimony, and witness are a conduit to understanding human experience and therefore a conduit to understanding our collective interactions with and reflections on spirituality, religion, and faith. I am, therefore, not only an historian of events but also ideas and interpretation.
I also regard my career as an historian as a calling consistent with my Faith. Again, as Elie Wiesel once wrote:
Remembering is a noble and necessary act. The call of memory, the call to memory, reaches us from the very dawn of history. No commandment figures so frequently, so insistently, in the Bible. It is incumbent upon us to remember the good we have received, and the evil we have suffered.
I believe this holds true for history in general and not only our own personal experiences or those particularly horrific historical circumstances that Elie Wiesel had to remember. So, for me, history is an act of remembering and, in partaking in that act, I believe that I fulfill a biblical commandment to which I am enjoined as a Christian.
But, these spiritual components aside, I could not do my task as a historian if I allowed dogma to predetermine the results of my investigation whether for skepticism or gullibility. I do not research in and write history in order to strengthen religious convictions or prove the historical claims of the Bible. If I forced my research into the service of religious convictions, how could I honestly claim then to have listened to the evidence? My duty as an historian is owed to people not dogma. As such, there is in my mind no greater danger to history than the refusal to listen to all the sources and to write critically and faithfully the stories of the past.
The Historian's Duty to Remember
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