Teaching the History of Christian Thought

Abstract

tory of Christian thought than for one in the history of, for instance, philosophical or political thought. It is, if anything, likely to be a more serious problem in interpretation than the latter, for membership in a Christian church, or participation in a vaguely Christian culture, does not guarantee imaginative understanding of the process by which Christian thought has reached the present day. The problems of government and of many other aspects of culture are, to our own day at least, more readily accessible than the problems of religious thought. The history of Christian thought is nothing less than the story of the meanings which Christians in successive centuries have declared when they tried to see the world of ordinary claims and human occupations in the perspective given by the demands upon them of the divine. It is the study of what they held to be supremely important, of the particular and very vivid difficulties which old problems presented to them, of their convictions that as Christians they had resources by which they could live in the world without surrendering to its standards. Only when the abstractions of the creeds, or the perfectly finished forms which one finds in liturgy or cathedral, are related in this way to the hopes which are part of the stuff of human life, do their meanings become clear. Otherwise their very perfection endows them with an absoluteness which they did not have for the men who worked at them, and for later generations they become remote. It is by seeing how Christian understandings about God and man worked out in ethics, and institutions, and theology that we can understand and teach the history of Christian thought. This is an enterprise that calls for the use of the creative imagination in reconstructing the life of other times, for unless the problems of a given age are clearly seen the significance of its affirmations and the insights of its great men will seem to our generation like period pieces which no longer fit our needs-ideas and practices which are quaint, rather than vital. Such a course is identical neither with the courses in the history of Christian doctrine which are to be found in the curricula