Chair of History Department at LU Takes On Social Justice

Social Justice, Bias, and the Historian’s Task

So, as a Christian historian, should social justice, in its modern form, influence the way that we look at the past?

Well, I think a lot of things influence the way we look at the past. I mean, there's no way to completely free ourselves of the biases and the intentions and the agendas that we have. We're human beings and that's the way it is.

We have certain biases that we'll probably never get rid of. On the other hand, I think the most important thing in writing history and researching history is to recognize that and to recognize it as a potential danger when you are trying to find out what happened in the past and why.

I have no problem with a person wanting to participate in social justice activities, even if I don't agree with their perspective on it. What I do have a problem with, especially as a Christian historian and something I see happening with Christian historians, is conflating social justice principles with the gospel itself.

To me, that's exceedingly dangerous. The gospel is too precious to mix even good things into it, right? Secondly, as a historian, I have a problem with conflating any kind of agenda-driven motivation into the study of history.

That is, making it a part of what I'm doing as the front and center of what I'm trying to accomplish. The reason for that is, and that's for people on the right and the left, if you have an agenda, and you're trying to push that agenda, it will inevitably cause you to take your eye off the ball, because you start looking for evidence that supports your thesis before you've done enough research to see if it's a legitimate thesis.

That's one of the major dangers of conflating historical investigation with something like social justice.

Exegesis, Eisegesis, and the Right Way to Do Theology

It sounds like, from my theological training, and I'm sure you understand the difference between exegesis and eisegesis, it almost sounds like what you're saying is the tendency is when you want something like social justice to motivate the discipline that you're engaged in, like history, it becomes eisegetical, so you start quote mining the past for a preconceived idea.

Am I tracking with you?

It's the same. I think it's almost exactly the same principle. Okay. So an exegete takes the passage and tries to take out what is actually meant there, not presupposing a certain theological position and then imposing it on that and trying to find your theological position on it.

Any good systematic theology should start with exegesis. In other words, it has to be exegeted out of the passage for it to then be systematized as doctrine. If you get that mixed up, if you start with systematic theology and not with exegesis of the Bible, I think you're doing the same thing that a historian is doing if he goes to history with, I got to find something that's really going to bolster up my view on what should be done today about whatever's going on in society.

Cherry-Picking History and the Problem of Presentism

Then you start cherry picking history, looking at things that support what you believe in. And again, there's nothing wrong with a person believing in certain things. There's certain things in society that do need to be fixed.

But when you start using your discipline, like history, to inform what I call the oughts, what ought to be, instead of what happened, why did it happen, and those basic questions that you have to ask of a historical document or when you're reading a secondary source, instead of what should have happened, or how can I manipulate history to have this result for today.

Historians used to call that presentism. You're focusing on the present and then using the lens of the present to interpret the past and it always gets it mixed up.