Jesus Remembered: Christianity in the Making, vol. 1

FAITH AND THE HISTORICAL JESUS §4.1
world, and that such superimposed hermeneutical frameworks took the prevailing
social order for granted and without criticism. 8
(3) Behind these lay the Enlightenment assumption that human reason is
sufficient measure of true and false fact. This was not initially intended as an irreligious
or anti-religious sentiment, so long as reason was still understood as
God-given. But the increasing secularism of modernity more and more reflected
the triumph of autonomous human reason as axiomatic.
(4) Behind this in turn was the assumption, drawn from Isaac Newton's
discovery of the universal laws of motion and gravity, that the cosmos is a single
harmonious structure of forces and masses (itself an ancient conviction), and that
the world is like an intricate machine following immutable laws, a closed system
of cause and effect. 9 The inference was that all events are inherently predictable,
the effects of causes already observable, and that therefore there is no room for
divine intervention. Thus, to postulate divine intervention in any instance would
undermine the whole principle of scientific inquiry and of history as a science.
It is easy now to see the weaknesses of these hermeneutical assumptions
behind rationalising attempts to build a more effective bridge between the historical
figure of Jesus and present faith. But it is important to realise that such
assumptions pervaded more or less all scientific scholarship in the nineteenth
century and remain influential at a hidden, presuppositional level of much popular
scholarship today. At the same time, the need for historical inquiry and the
beginnings of the development of historical method should not be linked exclusively
to the Enlightenment or modernity. It is also important for the present
study to recall again (from chapter 3) that the West's historical awareness and
its recognition of the historical distance and difference of the past from the
present did not begin with the Enlightenment. On the contrary, they go back at
least two or three centuries to the Renaissance and to the West's re-awakening
to its classical roots. 10 However much extra 'baggage' may be attached to 'the
scientific method' of historical study, its basic rationale holds firm that 'The
past is a foreign country: they do things differently there', 11 as does its basic
8. Appleby, Hunt, and Jacob, Telling the Truth 232; G. G. Iggers, Historiography in the
Twentieth Century: From Scientific Objectivity to the Postmodern Challenge (Hanover: Wesleyan
University, 1997) 23-30.
9. See again Barbour, Issues in Science and Religion 34-37, 56-60. In the early phase of
the Enlightenment, a popular image of God was the retired architect, or divine clockmaker, who
started the world and thereafter left it to run by the mechanism (natural laws) he had devised
(40-43).
10. 'Wherever the culture of the Renaissance took root, there also modern history was
evolved' (Troeltsch, 'Historiography' 717b).
11. The much-quoted first line of L. P. Hartley's Prologue to The Go-Between (London:
Hamish Hamilton, 1953).
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