It does no service to Christians now or in the future to beatify our forebears in the faith. An overly sanitized story is ultimately not a true story. Scripture itself is quite realistic in its portrayal of some of the great figures in redemptive history. One is repeatedly shocked by Moses’ brutal honesty not only in his portrayal of his own faults but of the sins of the great heroes of redemption. Abraham was a serial liar. This is a family column and so I should commend you to the reading of Genesis or the 1 and 2 Kings or the Book of Acts for biblical examples of stark honesty about the sins and frailties of the patriarchs, prophets, and apostles.

Telling the truth about the past is more difficult than it might seem but we can appreciate the difficulties by reflecting for just a moment on the controversy in Ferguson, Missouri. It’s a contemporary event of which there are at least two starkly different accounts of what took place. Either 1) a suspect in a criminal investigation struck and a police officer, struggled for the officer’s weapon (during which it discharged), ran, and then finally charged the causing the officer to discharge his weapon and resulting in the death of the suspect; or 2)An unarmed, college-bound, 18-year old African-American was accosted by a police officer, submitted peacefully with his hands in the air but was nevertheless shot and killed without cause.

These are very different accounts of an event that transpired less than a month ago. Only three people know what happened and one of them is dead. The uncertainty and the differing accounts have roiled and riveted an entire nation. We may not know for months what actually happened and it’s possible that we may never know with certainty what happened and this is, what we used to call in grammar school, “current events.”

Now, add 1800 years to the equation. Imagine there is only one record, which tells only one side of an event, which was written with the intent of idealizing his subject and implicitly to advance a particular view of Christian piety and behavior. The difficulty of determining what happened in the past and why is increased considerably.

At least in the Ferguson case there are two living witnesses and it is at least possible that, through the various investigations that a facsimile of the truth may emerge but it’s possible that the event has been so polarizing, that feelings are running so high, that so many interests are, in their own view, better served by chaos on controversy that the truth may not come out.

These challenges illustrate two temptations faced by the historian: cynicism and hagiography. Cynicism says that either there is no truth we can never know what the truth was. If that is the case we should give up all enquiry since everything is nothing but politics and the quest for power. Cynicism is not a moral option for Christians since despair is a sin.

 We do not know truth as God knows it (we call that the Creator/creature distinction) but we do know truth. We may not know all the truth and we are always learning—which is why histories are revised. Sometimes people joke by asking “has history changed?” The answer is, “As a matter of fact, yes.” We do learn more about the past. We find new sources. We get new perspectives. We ask a new question that helps to put an event in a new light.

Hagiography is the more common temptation faced by Christian historians. Literally it means “a life of a saint” (which is the definition given in the quite disappointing entry in the Oxford English Dictionary. The entry has  not be updated since 1898). In modern use it refers to an uncritical or credulous and idealized account of the past. This is one of the definitions given by the Oxford American Dictionary. It is in this sense that historians typically use the word.

I am not certain when the first hagiography appeared but as part of our Ancient Church course I walk students through the Martyrdom of Polycarp. It’s a great and gripping narrative. An aged holy man is hunted down by secular authorities. He shames them by his piety. If you have not read it I will not spoil it for you but let it be enough to say that there are elements of the narrative that Christians have a right to doubt without being accused of cynicism. The narrator—I don’t know the text history well enough to know if there was only one but I’ll assume for the sake of this discussion that there was only one hand—repeats for our edification stories that are almost certainly false. Polycarp appears as a superhuman figure and ironically the effect of the inclusion of those elements is to blur the line between Polycarp’s Christian witness and the very paganism he stoutly repudiated all of his life.

In distinction from these two approaches a Christian account of the past should be realistically sympathetic. We should tell the truth about the past as best we can and that includes letting the reader know that our subject was human and thus fallen. I am an Augustinian/Calvinist in the Reformed tradition. I confess a robust doctrine of human depravity  and therefore I am not surprised when our Christian family members in the past are found to have sinned.

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