From Historicism, The Idea of Progress to Postmodern Revisionist History
Almost two centuries before Postmodern leftists gained control over the great chair of the
humanities, especially history, the seeds were being laid for historicism. Theories of historicism
have agreed in emphasizing the uniqueness of historical events. A distinct contrast is Karl
Popper's definition of historicism in his book, The Poverty of Historicism. (Boston, 1959), p. 3.
"It will be enough if I say here that I mean by 'historicism' an approach to the social sciences
which assumes that historical prediction is their aim and which assumes that this aim is
attainable by discovering the 'rhythms' or "patterns' of the laws or trends' that underlie the
evolution of history." (see the sharp criticism of Popper by Hans Meyerhoff in The Philosophy of
History in Our Times (NY, 1956), p. 29. For an excellent attempt to define "Historicism" and its
many conflicting meanings, see Dwight E. Lee and Robert N. Beck, "The Meaning of
Historicism", American Historical Review, LIX (1953-1954): 568-577.
Historicism itself developed in late 18th century Germany. The Enlightenment that flourished in
France and Britain came late to Germany. Its impact became visible after mid 19th century (see
my paper and syllabus, "The Enlightenment"). The philosophies of the German Enlightenment,
the Aufklarer, were not swept away in the waves of enthusiasms for 'enlightened' ways. The
achievements of the French philosopher did not soon impact German thought. The key to the
distinctive German Enlightenment is its high regard for tradition. French tradition was treated
with contempt in Germany. German Aufklarer were dismayed by the scorn for revealed religion
evident in the writing of Voltaire and his contemporaries. They found that French and Scottish
philosophical history paid too little attention to the details of the past (see especially G. P.
Gooch, History and Historians in the Nineteenth Century (London, 1952), p. 9; and Isaiah Berlin,
Vico and Herder: Two Studies in The History of Ideas (London, 1976); perhaps the greatest
precursor of historicism was an early 18th century Florentine professor of rhetoric, Giambattista
Vico); P. H. Reill, The German Enlightenment and The Rise of Historicism (Berkeley, CA,
1975).
The religious contribution came briefly from pietism. Pietism laid much stress on personal
religion that verged on mysticism. Pietism contrasted reason with spiritual illumination. Wisdom
(Sophia) and Reason had access only to logical distinction. Sophia is the power of God. A twin
influence produced historicism-pietism and antiquarianism (tradition). The Germans, Gatterer
once remarked, were people exactly suited to the products of learned footnotes (Herbert
Butterfield. Man and His Past: A Study of History of Historical Scholarship (Cambridge. 1955),
p. 38). German concern for historiography becomes visible in the number of historical
periodicals which rose from 3 in 1700 to 131 in 1790 (Butterfield, p. 39). Two further
contributors to the rise of historicism were Idealism and Romanticism. Germany's great
protagonist of philosophical idealism was Immanuel Kant. Both Idealism and Romanticism were
reaction against the Enlightenment. Kant rejected the view that knowledge is passively
assimilated by the human mind. This was to turn against the sensationalism of David Hume
(Butterfield, p. US). The mind is active in the acquisition of knowledge. Ideas (categories) are
essential for understanding the world. Therefore, it is Idealism. This is a radical break with
Enlightenment Empiricism! Idealism became the strongest concept in German philosophy after
the publication of Kant's mature views in 1780. Hegel's philosophy can best be understood as a
response to that of Kant. Kant's constructivism opens Pandora's Box of relativistic radical
contextualization and ultimately postmodern Revisionism in science, history, etc. Idealism was
the characteristic intellectual expression at the turn of the 19th century while Romanticism was
the characteristic cultural expression of the epoch. Romanticism was a reaction against 18th
century norms. Nature had been conceived as an intricate structure of cause and effect passively
awaiting dissection by human reason. Now nature was seen as an organic whole that actively
influences human beings. For Wordsworth nature was the "muse, the guide, the guardian of my
heart and soul of all my moral being." (Wordsworth from Tintern Abbev. Lyrical Ballads. 1798,
lines 1 l0ff, ed. R L. Brett and A.R. Jones (London, 1963), p. 116.)
Nature fulfilled the role of God. Its stress on the role of ideas was widely diffused and became
axiomatic in historicist thought. History is concerned with ideas. It is not about pure ideas, but
about a really whole development that is subject to ideas (Idealism). This view of nature was
propounded by Wilhelm von Humboldt, the architect of the Prussian education system, in a
lecture "On The Historian's Talk" delivered before the Prussian Academy of Sciences in 1821.
The trend of ideas he explained constitutes historical truth. The history of ideas
(Geitesgeschichte) became deeply entranced in German historical tradition. Philosophical
idealism had a marked impact on the theory and practice of history. The divine was thought to be
everything, or to be more precise, in everything. Romantics like Wordsworth and Coleridge in
England discerned the divine in the natural world of crags and seascapes, flowers and storms.
Their poetry was meant to distill the mystical spiritual experience of those who lived in
awareness of the "Wisdom and Spirit of the Universe" (M. H. Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism:
Tradition and Revolutions in Romantic Literature (London 1971), p. 68). Romanticism was
charged with a sense of the divine abroad in the world.
Historicism was a factor within the romantic tide that swept Germany. Goethe, the greatest of
German romantics, is quite reasonably treated in the best known German study of the subject as
the climax of the rise of historicism (Friedrich Meinecke, Historicism: Use of A New Historical
Outlook (1932), translated by I.E. Anderson (London, 1973), pp. 373-495). Goethe shared
romantic values—the feeling that the world is impregnated with the divine. Therefore man shares
nature with God and history. Ranke illustrates this well in an essay that he wrote "On the
Character of Historical Science". "It is not necessary for us to prove at length that the eternal
dwells in the individual. This is the religious foundation on which our efforts rest. We believe
that there is nothing without God and nothing lives except through God." (Ranke, Theory and
Practice, p. 38). All forms of historicism affirm that God works in all "histories" not merely the
special history of Israel and Christianity. The pluralism of religious customs give evidence of the
manifold wisdom of God. The Germans, French and English all produced learned treatise based
in the developments of the aufklarer. These tomes fused hard and fast rational categories and
rhetoric to good effect. As historians began to write—on aufklarer principles, they integrated the
research method of philosophy with generalizing method of philosophy—as Vico had done in
Italy and Gibbon did in England (see especially The New Science of Giambattista Fico. ed. Max
H. Fisch and Thomas G. Bergin (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1948); A.D. Monigliano,
"Gibbon's contribution to Historical Method" Studies in Historiography (London, 1966).
The Gottingen quest for detail emphasized the need to ensure the accuracy of what was written
as history. The Gottingen School sought to represent the widespread desire for accuracy that
began in the later Middle Ages. Critical standards were employed primarily in philology and
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genealogy, to the editing of texts. The 18th century German Enlightenment did not produce any
monument of historical scholarship equivalent to Gibbon's Decline and Fall of The Roman
Empire or Niebuhr's History of Rome. The history of ideas, Geistesgeschichte, became deeply
entrenched in German historical tradition. Philosophical ideals had a marked impact on the
theory and practice of history.
All the Aiifklarer were responsible for developing another feature of romantic thought, a stress
on organic development. Like Vico, they were eager to reject a mechanistic worldview. Wolfian
atomistic reductionism was on the wane. According to the Aufklarer every event is related to
another. Nature was interconnected to every event in history. Herder's rambling work Reflections
on The Philosophy of The History of Mankind (1784-1791) fully expressed the spirit of German
Romanticism. Herder's pluralism thesis is his chief contribution. This thesis finds ubiquitous
voices in postmodern revisionism. All cultures have their own values that cannot justly be
compared with the values of other cultures (see especially Berlin, Vico and Herder, p. 153). This
cultural relativism thesis is the diametric opposite of the "inevitably of progress" thesis. Progress
can only occur within a given nation and cannot be measured on any single or external scale.
Each notion contains the "ideal of its own perfection, wholly independent of all comparison with
those of others." (p. 206). This is precisely the postmodern revisionist thesis!!
The seeds of historicism during the Napoleonic Wars were scattered and historians turned from
repairing the materials of history to historiography proper. Perhaps the singly most influential
work of the period was the History of Rome (1811) by Reinhold Niebuhr, who blended the
fragmentary sources for early Roman history—law codes, inscriptions, poetry, ballad, literature,
i.e. Livy’s influence, into a coherent story of a perennial struggle for power between patricians
and plebeians. Niebuhr's work was a tour de force, replacing the classical accounts of brief
phases of republican history. Niebuhr utilized the standard historicist thesis that poetry and myth
express the inner spirit of a nation. He also assumed (following Vico) that all nations go through
similar cycles of development. This development finds postmodern fruition in revisionist history.
Through Niebuhr the idea of historicism spread beyond Germany. In England a group of scholars
with an Oxford background, the so-called "Liberal Anglicans," read Niebuhr avidly. Of this
group the best known is Thomas Arnold, Headmaster of Rugby and subsequently Regius
Professor of Modern History at Oxford. Niebuhr molded all his thought (Thomas Arnold,
Introductory Lectures on Modern History (London, 1845). His inaugural lecture at Oxford is a
manifesto of historicist views. Modern history, he argued, is the study of national personality,
which is a product of race, language, institutions and religion and persists down the ages (T.
Arnold, ibid., p. 25). (See especially Duncan Forbes, The Liberal Anglican Idea of History
(Cambridge, 1952) and P.W. Day, Thomas Arnold and The Philosophy of Vico (Aukland, New
Zealand, 1964), p. 55). The chief influence of historicism in Britain was not a historian but a
novelist, Sir Walter Scott. It was Scott who fired the imagination of Macaulay. The Romantic in
British historiography was to be found in its literary expression rather than its intellectual
assumption (on Macaulay see Sir Earnest Barker, Age and Youth, pp. 25Iff). Niebuhr influenced
Leopold von Ranke. Ranke is surely the example of value-free objectivity. His dictum that the
historian must concern himself only with "what actually happened" has become the most
common of commonplaces on historical thought. This is actually a distortion of Ranke's view as
his phrase "wie es eigentlick gewesen" contains an adverb "eigentlick", which certainly means
"actually" in 20th century German usage. In Ranke's own 19th century usage it usually meant
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"essentially," -"what essentially happened." (Ranke, Theory and Practice, p. xix; editor G. Iggers,
Bobbs-Merrill: Indianapolis, 1973) Instead of objectivity, Ranke was expressing the classical
historicist belief that institutions enable the historian to divine the essence of the past (note that
we are on the way to Marx's "the entire so-called history of the world is nothing but economic
and philosophical manuscripts of 1844." The phrase "the materialist conception of history" was
first used by Engels in 1859 (Z.A. Jordon, The Evolution of Dialectical Materialism: A
Philosophical and Sociological Analysis (London, 1967) p 37n). Ranke's influence was
dwindling and a new influence was entering the historical arena, an appreciation of positivist
history exemplified by Buckle, yet reaffirmed the central historicist claim that the methods of
nature science cannot be applied to history (see especially Igger's German Conception of
History: The National Tradition of Historical Thought from Herder to The Present (Middletown,
CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1968, revised edition 1983. It contains comprehensive study of
historicist mainstream).
At the turn of the 20th century, Marx Weber was preoccupied with positivism yet making a
distinctive methodological separation between the sciences of man and the physical sciences.
The German tradition of historicism was being diluted under Hitler's tyranny in the 1930's. (See
esp. Monigliano's "Historicism and Contemporary Thought," Studies in Historiography, p. 227.)
In the 1900's many German historians were still defending a method that justified their country's
past role in the international arena. Fritz Fisher claimed that Germany must bear the
responsibility of the outbreak of World War I (J.A. Moses, The Policies of Illusion: The Fisher
Controversy in German Historiography (London. 1975). Wilhelm Dilthey, a Berlin professor
who died in 1911, exerted a strong posthumous influence. His lasting contribution was to
elaborate the historicist notion of intention. History is to be separated from the physical sciences
by different methods. The laws of physics cannot grasp the particular features of any instance of
human behavior, charged as it is with intention. Human intention can only be intuited.
Dilthey introduced hermeneutics as a bridge between physics and psychology. Dilthey utilized
Schleiermacher's principles for interpreting the Bible and recognized that they could be applied
to any documents (R.E. Palmer, Hermeneutics and Interpretation Theory in Schleiermacher,
Dilthey, Heidegger and Gadamer (Evanston, IL; Northwestern University, 1969), pp. 94ff.).
Persons, like historical events, can be studied and understood only by seeing them in relation to
one another. At this point we can perceive Dilthey's doctrine of the Hermeneutical circle1: a part
must be understood through its setting in the whole; the whole must be understood through
recognizing the significance of its parts. Interpretation is therefore a process of allowing part and
whole to interact in the mind (H.P. Rickman, ed., W. Dilthey: Selected Writings (Cambridge,
1976), pp. 9ff.). The historicist thesis' influence expands far beyond history. Historicism, fused
with Hegelianism, Vico contributed to the greatest intellectual achievement of Italy-the historical
philosophy of Benedetto Croce (A.D. Monigliano, "Reconsidering B. Croce 1866-1952”) Essays
in Ancient and Modern Historiography B. Croce. History: Its Theory and Practice (editor
Douglas Ainslie (NY: Russell and Russell, 1960). In Germany the historicists stress on the
corporate personality of the nation formed the foundation of Hitler's "volkisch", Philosophy of
life (Michael Oakeshott, The Social and Political Doctrines of Contemporary Europe
(Cambridge, 1939), p. 201).
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Dilthey's idea of intuitive understanding also did much to shape philosophical trends. Dilthey's
method was taken up by Martin Heidegger, whose Being and Time (1927) was intended as a
preliminary hermeneutic study but became the early classic existentialism. In a chaotic world,
according to Heidegger, man must recognize the certainty of death and so steel himself to follow
a life of decisive activity. Such ideas were to become popular in the wake of World War II,
especially through the writings of Jean Paul Sarte (M.D. Biddiss, The Masses: Ideas and Society
in Europe Since 1870 (Hassocks, Sussex, 1977), pp. 249-322f). Human life in the historicisticexistential can be regarded as the redactio adabsurdum of historicism! Human life in existential
historicism is not shaped by history, but is reduced to meaninglessness by being part of the flux
of events. The only rational thing left for man to do is to accept his place in a world that is absurd
and futile. The terminal results of historicism is events of the Counter Culture (Generation X) of
the 1960's. Historicism is the result of two centuries of a sustained attempt to grapple with the
question of the significance of the historical process. Niebuhr's influence still pervades
postmodern revisionism—The Death of History.
It also effects revisionism in precipitating the Death of Science, our on-going anti-science
debate. (See the article "Science versus Anti-science?" in The Scientific American (January,
1997), pp. 96-101) Yet, the main historicist idea is that human groups are molded by history. To
a great extent this is undeniable. But historicism holds that the flux of history eliminates any
constancy in man. There is no such thing as human nature, (cf. Gender Bias, Political
Correctness, etc. Structure in family, culture, civilization. See my paper "Structuralism in Our
Postmodern Revisionism") To deny man-qua-man is to reject the view of men held down for
centuries in Western thought and accepted by the philosophers of the Enlightenment. Man has
been and remains—in all cultures, languages—the same. Even Hume saw that human beings had
similar characteristics whether they lived in ancient Greece or Rome or in modern France or
England (G.G. Iggers, New Directions in European Historiography (Middletown, CT, 1975), p.
15, 77ff.).
Historicism over reacted against the Enlightenment and its idea of how we obtain knowledge of
the past is also questionable. The historian can intuit the mental world of people long dead.
Formulating ideas by inference from the evidence of a creative artist. There lies its fundamental
weakness. How is an artist to know whether he has created a faithful likeness of the people of the
past? Postmodern art denies that is even a possibility. There is no objective criterion for
determining how accurately the historian reflects the past.
The fundamental problem of historicism is. that is foundationless. The determinate of men’s
beliefs, it holds, is in history and history is a constant flux of events with no ordering center. The
historical process is only a patchwork of different attitudes in perpetual dialectical tensions with
no mediating possibilities, except power, and why power? No one in the historicist mode from
Troeltsch forward have proved able to discover an alternative to God's guarantees for judgment
of value. (See his book, Historicism and Its Problem (paperback reprint) and Robert Morgan,
"Troeltsch and The Dialectical Theology" Ernst Troeltsch and The Future of Theology, ed. J.P.
Clayton (Cambridge, 1976), p. 46) Historicism collapsed into historical relativism. There is no
ground for preferring one custom to another, one moral code to another, or (even most crucially)
to an alternative worldview. Worldviews are in conflict in Postmodern Revisionism, but what
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does it or can it mean? The whole historicist perspective stands revealed as an arbitrary
preference with no objective criterion for selecting alternatives.
Another voice for human allegiance in our postmodern cultural wars is Marxist history and
Positivistic Historiography. Marxism is a worldview. History is at its heart. The code name for
Marxist perspective is historical materialism, a phrase coined by Engels in 1892 as an equivalent
for what he had also called "the materialist conception of history" (see Z.A. Jordon, The
Evolution of Dialectical Materialism: A Philosophical and Sociological Analysis (London,
1967), p. 37n). This was to reject what Marx dismissed as the idealistic view of history and I
believe that ideas are responsible for shaping human destiny. (Marx/Engel, The German
Ideology (1845-46), edited by Roy Pascal (London, 1938), p. 28). How men produce their means
of subsistence, according to Marxism, is the key to historical change. The heart of the debate
centers on blended and codified ideas from Marx, Engels, and Lenin. One pivotal work is his
Grundrisse: Foundations of The Critique of Political Erosion (Harmmdsworth, 1973).
The context of Marx's views is mid 19th century German historicism fused with the inherent idea
of progress. The earlier fusion was the system of George W. F. Hegel, whose all encompassing
philosophy was the marvel of Germany in the decade after his death in 1831. Marx's view of
history is not understandable without also engaging the whole Hegelian worldview. Hegel's
philosophy can best be understood as a response to that of Kant (see Karl Marx, Letters to His
Father: Karl Marx: Early Texts, edited by David McLellan (Oxford, 1972), p. 8, l00ff.).
In his theory of knowledge, Kant's belief that the mind actively constructs the world of
experience led him to conclude that the world of experience differs from the world as it really is,
beyond experience. He contrasted the knowable world of phenomena (things as they appear)
with the unknowable world noumena (things as they are in themselves). This distinction Hegel
emphatically denied. The world that is known as the world phenomena in Kant's sense, Hegel
grounded this claim on the belief that the mind is responsible for creating the external world.
There can be, according to Hegel, no reality beyond experience. Hegel summed up his view in
the dictum, "the real is the rational and the rational is the real." (quoted in G.R.G. Mure's, The
Philosophy of Hegel (London 1965), p. 23).
He meant that the real world is knowable to the mind; and that the mind is all there is ultimately
in the real world. Hegel's stress on the human mind was because he believed that the particular
human mind is a manifestation of the eternal mind (Geist) which is the equivalent of God in his
thought. Hegel is therefore classified as an absolute idealist. The ideas of the mind are wholly
responsible for the eternal world, the medieval family was superceded by the rise of "civil
society, which in its commercial individualism, tended to break up the family. The conflict was
superceded by the state, which supplied ideal conditions for ethical life by uniting the solidarity
of the family with the State. The triadic pattern bears the hallmark of the idea of progress.
Marxist freedom is to be understood in the romantic way as self-realization. Yet the idea of
progress contributed to the underlying structure of Hegel's understanding of history. The young
Hegelians were committed to criticism of Christianity. The young Hegelians used Hegel's
categories to assert the truth of atheism (i.e. Marx's 1841 Atheistic Archives). The ultimate
outcome of the cultural tension focused more on politics than Christianity. The poor in Prussian
lands were not members of groups recognized by the State. These people were threatened by
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Hegel as a threat to the stability of the State. Hegel's self-fulfilling freedom for all was not a
reality." (Heinz Lubrasz, "Marx's Initial Problematic, The Problem of Poverty" Political Studies
24 (1976): pp. 27-34).
Marx aimed for democracy--"freedom for all"- yet he generated Communism, where no state
survives to neglect or oppress the mass of the people. Marx will soon decry his intellectual
independence from Hegel. The heart of Marx's view of history is that man is the maker of his
own history. This idea probably derives from his encounter with Ludwig Feuerbach, whose
Essence of Christianity (1841) had attempted to show that theology is a mystical form of
anthropology. Marx was attracted by Feuerbach's anthropocentricism. Feuerbach never
progressed beyond a Lockean view that man is a passive recipient of sense experience. In Marx's
third thesis on Feuerbach he declares: "The materialist doctrine of men are products of
circumstances and upbringing and that heretofore, changed man are products of other
circumstances and changed upbringing, forgets that it is men who change circumstances and that
the educator must himself be educated." (Theses on Feuerbach, Marx and Engel, Collected
Works 5 (London, 1976) p. 7) The first premise of all human existence and therefore, of all
history, is the need to produce food, etc. "The first historical act is this—the production of the
means to satisfy these needs, the production of material life itself." (Marx/Engel, "The German
Ideology" in Collected Works 5, pp. 41f; W.H. Shaws, Marx's Theory of History (London.
1978).
Surely Marx is a fatalistic determinist as both Berlin and Popper claim. Yet Marx declares that
the processes of history are determined by no agency other than man. Surely laws in Marx can
only mean tendencies. Marx did not deviate from his initial premise that man, not fate or law, is
the maker of history. Does historical materialism entail the way people gain their living and mold
their ideas? Marxism can hardly explain the timeless appeal of Shakespeare to people with
different modes of production. Nor can it explain why artistic achievements took place when
they did. Marx's priority given to production as an all embracing explanatory factor is a crucial
mistake. The Marxist view of history invites man to an uncertain hope.
What is The Meaning of History? Positivism (Idealism/Materialism) derives from the idea of
progress and historicism. As Christians we must expose inadequacies of the schools of thought
about the historical process that have dominated Western thought over the last two centuries.
Both the idea of inevitability of progress and historicism (historical relativism) are fatally flawed.
Only Judaeo-Christianity can provide confidence in the future. Its keynote of hope is grounded in
the twin beliefs that our creator-redeemer God is moving history forward in a straight line and
that it will in due time reach His goal. In the cross and resurrection God "disarmed the
principalities and powers and made a public example of them, triumphing over them in this
(Colossians 2:15). The outcome of history is, therefore, already assured. His promised purpose
will be realized. Christian eschatology affirms divine control of the historical process and
guarantees the future. Christianity gives historicists their due without being infected with a lethal
virus of historical relativism. God's sovereignty over the historical processes is integral to a
Christian worldview. A Christian worldview is concerned with both the general tendency of the
historical process and also its ultimate goal (Matthew 10.29f). God pays attention to the minute
details of human life and that God intervened in history by becoming man and dying for us as
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salvation from sin and death—is the essence of the Christian faith. The divine mysteries of
incarnation and return of Christ are not contradictions of our Lord's divine interventions. The
working of God in certain historical events are not empirically available for positivistic analysis,
but the creation, incarnation and resurrection are examinable by scientific analysis (K.S.
Latourette, "The Christian Understanding of History" The American Historical Review 54
(1949), p. 270).
Is the world—nature/history—under God's control? The ultimate answer lies in The Cross of
Jesus. Sin, suffering and death were no match for he one who hung on The Cross and who could
not be located within a locked and guarded tomb (II Corinthians 5.7; Revelation 7.17).
Christianity and history must draw attention to the operation of a general providence. (Note the
entire promise line through both the Old and New Testaments. Looking forward we cannot often
tell that God is in control, while looking backward we must see that only a sovereign God is in
control of human historical events and epochs.)
Human history is a compound of necessity and freedom. History entails simultaneous scrutiny
along positive and idealistic lines. God controls history; yet He is not fully known within it.
Providence affirms a quality of mystery on the historical process. Creation must not be
interpreted as a myth or symbol rather than an event. Creation is the starting point of history.
Eschatology is revelation of what comes at the end of time, not merely a sign post to the eternal
as set forth in Reinhold Niebuhr's, Faith and History: A Comparison of Christian and Modern
Views of History (London, 1949), pp. 62ff.). His neo-orthodox theology precludes a solid
foundation for a Christian view of history. The essence of our postmodern historiographical
debate is the possibility of a "search for the Jesus of history." (See my paper, "Search for the
Wrong Jesus") A Christian view of history must constantly be on guard regarding the risk of
being over influenced by postmodern alternatives. Historicism and the idea of progress are not
the only pitfalls. Christians must be on guard against being attracted to a worldview blending a
Christian concept of history with either a Darwinism process philosophy or cyclical view. The
study of comparative religion can lead Christians down a dead end street (see my paper, "From
Syncretism to Relativism: Challenge In Our Multicultural Epoch, an analysis of Pike, Hick,
Kung, Newbigin and responses to non-Christian religions).
This danger is ever present in the works of Arnold Toynbee, and Liberation Theology in the style
of Gustavo Gutierrez, who attempts to fuse a Christian view of history with a Marxist view, and
especially a Western Marxist view influenced by the Frankfort School. The Christian view of
history is in no need of syncretistic supplementation. Yet, the stimulus is given by Ernst Block, a
member of The Frankfort School, to Jurgen Moltmann's valuable stress on the importance of
hope in a Christian view of history (J. Moltmann, Theology of Hope (London, 1967), p. 16).
The scriptures still provide the only defensible norm for any Christian perspective on history.
The Christian historian must operate within a Biblical frame of meaning that does justice to the
complexities of our postmodern, multicultural global village (see crucial works of Herrahd
Parker, editors, Ideas in History (Duke University Press, 1995 and D.W. Babbington, Patterns of
History. Inter-Varsity Press, 1979).
Dr. James Strauss
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