As advocates of the Presuppositional approach to apologetics remind us ad infinitum, no one is neutral epistemologically. That is true enough. We must not, however, draw the fallacious inference that no one is objective. That does not follow. In Histories and Fallacies (Crossway, 2010), Carl Trueman gives us a delightful survey of historiographical fallacies. Every chapter is a treat. He reminds us that while we cannot be neutral in method, we can be objective when writing history.
Trueman illustrates his thesis with a controversial question: If there is no objectivity in history, in what sense have Holocaust deniers misread the facts? To be sure, even within mainstream scholarship there are differences in method. Some scholars argue that the Nazis did not intend at the outset to exterminate the Jews. Other scholars say they did. Neither group, however, disputes the facts.
Trueman spends the rest of the chapter rebutting points made by Holocaust deniers. Normally, one should not spend too much time on this, but unfortunately for us Reformed, some explanation is in order. First, as Trueman notes, R. J. Rushdoony (1916–2001) falls into this category to some degree. To be fair, Rushdoony did not deny that terrible things were done to the Jews during World War II. He simply says no more than two million were killed. Trueman concludes in a note with some derogatory, although true, comments about Rushdoony’s skill as a historian. Second, although Trueman wrote this some years before the rise of the “dissident Right,” for those tempted to see the Jews conspiring behind everything, his comments then apply now.
The next chapter examines anachronisms (reading the present back into the past) in historiography. To some extent, this is probably unavoidable. We see this particularly in the history of ideas. This sub-discipline is very helpful, but a few cautions are in order. Ideas themselves, perhaps existing outside of time, are used by agents who are in time.
Trueman has a delightful chapter on historical methods as explanatory schemes, something we see most notably in Marxism. An explanatory scheme is not wrong or unfair to the evidence. Some are quite brilliant. It runs into difficulties, however, when it becomes a hammer and everything is a nail. An explanatory scheme allows the historian to tell a unified story. On the other hand, as we see most clearly in Marxism, such a scheme only asks questions that reflect the ideology. Even worse, particularly with Marx’s doctrine of “false consciousness,” it cannot be falsified under any conditions, making it useless for interpreting data.
Since we are talking about Marxism, a few words are in order. For a Marxist, reality is material and history moves by class struggle. In terms of historical facts, this is nonsense. Nonetheless, Marxists have done a decent job in showing connections between social morality and class struggle.
Trueman’s next chapter is on fallacies. We will survey a few of the more notorious of these. The first is reification, where an abstraction is given concrete existence. The most embarrassing and widespread example in Reformed studies is the claim that “x used Aristotle,” the implication being that Aristotle is bad. Typically, this implication is assumed rather than demonstrated. In fact, however, Aristotle’s influence was simply too varied to be pinned to one teacher. Moreover, as Richard Muller has demonstrated, that a Christian author employed Aristotle does not necessarily mean that the use of Aristotle’s language or his categories, which were widely used by Christian theologians for a thousand years, controlled the content of a given teacher. If one thinks that the use of Aristotle is inherently corrupting, then what are we to do with the Christian use of words like substance and being? Good luck with the word Trinity, which, of course, is not a biblical term but which was used in order to describe what Christians found in Scripture.
©Jacob Aitken. All Rights Reserved.
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Jacob Aitken
Jacob Aitken teaches junior high English in Monroe, LA. He is an elder-elect in the Evangelical Presbyterian Church. He studied at Reformed Theological Seminary in Jackson, MS and earned his M.A. at Louisiana College.
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