Previous American Society of Church History (ASCH) presidents have used their presidential addresses for a variety of purposes, from contributing to the cutting edge of their own specialties to scanning the previous highlights of personalities or developments in their field.

In this age of growing technological dependence, both in our private lives and in the classroom, I considered showing in my presidential address how far we had come in using electronic media since my first venture into computer-assisted-presentations (CAP) with classes over thirty years ago (1979) and quietly illustrate the improvements in the process since my first uses of PowerPoint and Blackboard in class fifteen years ago (1995). Instead, I decided to bypass the now-usual PowerPoint presentations, which are terribly expensive in settings like that used for the 2011 ASCH winter meeting, for a new venture into what we might call an IAP—“imagination-assisted presentation.” IAPs are much more consumer-oriented and personalized to the needs and interests of the individual listener. The method works easily and is much less costly in settings like that one. You simply imagine there is a screen up front of you, and you put most of the images on the screen (in your imagination) as we go along. And if your mind is technologically adept, you can do it all in HD, or even 3-D. I will give you suggestions occasionally, to assist you into this new age of virtual IAPs.

The first screen contains on the left a picture of Leopold von Ranke at the University of Berlin writing his History of the Popes; in the center we see Thomas Edison in his Menlo Park laboratory perfecting his new incandescent light bulb; and on the right is a picture of one of your elementary school teachers looking straight at you.

My topic entails reflecting upon our vocation, especially upon what we are doing when we gather and present historical information to our various audiences. My main point is betrayed by the title: “Inventing Church History” (and “church” is a somewhat superfluous adjective in the consideration). No, I am not talking about the origins of the modern academic field or the beginnings of so-called “objective” (or modern) history with Leopold von Ranke (there on the left) and the nineteenth-century German historians who tried to tell the story “as it actually happened,” with a special concern for dealing critically and accurately with the primary sources within the sitz im leben. That is an interesting and important story, but not what we are going to deal with in this article—that only lies there in the background like a disturbing dream (fade his picture into the background).

We will reflect together on three of the steps that we all employ as we try to fulfill our task as church historians: research, conjecture, and analysis. That sounds terribly boring, as I discovered when trying to describe my speech to my teenage grandson. His main suggestion was to rename the three sections “look it up,” “make it up,” and “spice it up.” In any case, we will attempt to give a rationale for the importance of these efforts: the first (research), which allows the result to be credible; the second (constructive conjecture), which allows the result to be appropriate; and the third (analysis), which allows the result to be useful.

The result of the process of doing history therefore reflects the aura of certainty, contains a sense of propriety, and has the value of utility —or, in other words, the result is credible, appropriate, and useful. And for each historian, for each of you, the details of both the process of the effort and the result of putting together the story, this historical process, this inventing of history, is different—from age to age, from culture to culture, from person to person. We will, however, take a step backward, away from the details of this very individualized process, and try to see the common elements of what we are all trying to do when we invent the historical story.

Using the word “invent” with regard to the historical endeavor is a somewhat dangerous venture in itself, since the word has more than one meaning, as you are certainly aware.Footnote ¹ On the one hand, it can mean “discover” or “originate”—the sort of thing that we think of inventors as doing. Thomas Edison, inventor par excellence (there in the middle), came up with many such inventions, coming up with things that people had never put together before, like light bulbs and phonographs (not to mention concrete furniture). The progress of civilization depends upon such inventive discoveries during every age. On the other hand, “invent” can also have what, at times, is a more pejorative sense of “fabricate” or “make up”—like the made-up or invented stories your elementary school teacher could see through when you were trying to get out of trouble. (You can make that picture of your teacher one that is scowling at you as a kid.) But the sense that we are using here is not of that sort either, but rather a more constructive and positive sense, like making up a bed or fabricating a model airplane—putting it together in an orderly and logical way.Footnote ² The point is, our task as church historians entails both discovery and fabrication in developing the story that we tell. And by the time our interpretation (subjective as it is) has been added to the whole picture, the finished product seems to be an invention, our invention, in the fullest sense of the word. Now before you reject this concept, let me explain myself more carefully.

I. Research, Discovery, Certainty

First, I want you to imagine four images on the virtual screen, related to discovery—two parchments and two stones. On the top left is the Vinland Map in the Yale Library; on the top right is a picture of some of the Dead Sea Scrolls in a cave near the Dead Sea; on the bottom left is a picture of Plymouth Rock on the Atlantic seaboard of Massachusetts; and on the bottom right a picture of the Rosetta Stone in the British Museum, with its inscriptions in Egyptian hieroglyphic, demotic, and Greek.

Our first task as historians is to discover the facts, find out the details of the tale, learn the stories. This undertaking entails research, which many people enjoy immensely and others simply tolerate as part of the job. This part of the historical endeavor can be tedious and at times elusive—finding the who, what, when, and where of the story (the quis, quid, quando, et ubi, if you are enamored of Latin terminology).

When I was in elementary school (during the first half of the previous century), one of the factual details that we were taught was that Columbus discovered America on October 12, 1492. The study of history in elementary and secondary schools is often limited to such boring details as names, dates, and places—things that can be easily graded on a fill-in-the-blank exam. Then in the 1950s someone “discovered” the Vinland Map, a purported fifteenth-century copy of a thirteenth-century original. This discovery, made public in the mid-1960s, presented “new” information, tentative as it might have been, that challenged the traditional assumption that Columbus was the first European to “discover” the “New World” and that he did so in the late fifteenth century. I lived in a predominantly Scandinavian town at the time, so the idea that the Swedes beat the Italians to America was greeted with enthusiasm (notwithstanding scholarly considerations).

The subsequent academic controversy over the Vinland Map's authenticity entailed a number of scientific studies, international conferences, and monographic analyses, all watched with silent interest by the map's owner, Yale University. Although the Vinland Map has, indeed, been discredited by several historians and scientists as a twentieth-century forgery, the idea of the pre-Columbian settlement of North America is confirmed by the sixteenth-century Skálholt Map (the authenticity of which is affirmed by nearly all) and has been supported by the archeological studies of the 1960s in northern Newfoundland. These more recent studies have advanced our knowledge of early American history beyond the sketchy borders of some of our earlier rudimentary concepts. And they embody many sides of the terms “invent” as “discovery.”

Then there are the Dead Sea Scrolls (up there on the right)—discovered by accident (and not by a scholar); sold and resold like contraband; praised and debunked by various groups; and finally confirmed by knowledgeable folks as authentic. The discovery has provided more ancient Hebrew Bible manuscripts than were previously known, and the scrolls have provided a wealth of information on the world leading up to the time of Christian origins. The scholars working with the scrolls are now making many solid new contributions to our understanding of the biblical world, and providing the basis for a long line of important interpretive points.

What makes this whole process of discovery really fun for the historian, of course, is the excitement of finding information that is new. Sometimes, such information is simply new to ourselves. But the process becomes even more exciting when the resultant information is also new to everyone else—information that no one has uncovered before. Can you imagine the excitement when the French soldiers came upon the Rosetta Stone in their 1799 expedition to Egypt? It took a couple of years to sort out who would keep the stone, the French military or the English scholars (our picture on the screen is a later picture of the stone on British soil). Within months, the scholars began to unlock the meaning of those hieroglyphic pictographs that had baffled scholars for decades. The recovery of that written language was literally monumental. As historians, we covet the experience of adding such new information to the fund of modern human knowledge.

The past is full of ancient codes, unknown documents, lost places, and shadowy people waiting to be discovered, uncovered, and recovered. And the process of doing so is indeed exciting so long as the discoverer thinks that the information is indeed authentic and is actually new to our own time.

But what happens when you find out that someone else has already discovered the information that you thought was new? What if it is old hat to some people? There are historians who never publish, never tell their story, never claim a point of view because they are either afraid that someone else has already said their piece or that someone is about to debunk the basis of their story or their point of view. And how many graduate students live in daily fear that the thesis of their dissertation, which they have been developing for months (if not years), has already been (or is about to be) claimed by someone at another university?

Or how does one feel when it turns out that their “new” information is not only old hat, but is also not really true after all. Either it has been told so many times that people have assumed that it is true (the twice-told tales of yesteryear), or the previous reiterations of it are so convincing that everyone has thought it to be true. There is sometimes a fine line between legend and history, and some people will tell you that myths might contain more truth than some “histories” (the sort of thing that Jon Meacham might call “historically questionable but philosophically true”).Footnote ³ Our guide at a tour of the New Old South Church during the winter meeting in Boston told the group a version of the Paul Revere story that he claimed was more like the “history that actually happened” (which I would say in passing, in most cases is not fully recoverable).

How many people have climbed on or chipped away parts of Plymouth Rock—or have simply seen, as there on the lower right of the imaginary screen, its picture in a walled-in but open-air mausoleum along the shoreline? There is no written reference to it for more than a century after the Pilgrims landed in 1620. But then the stories began, which started a long and twisted history. Part of it was moved to a different location in 1774, and again in 1869, but some of the remaining parts were cemented back together in 1880 (with the date 1620 incised on its surface) and the united remnant was placed in its present setting in 1920. Many people assume that Plymouth Rock is literally the spot where the Pilgrims first set foot in America. Even if they have not been in that part of the country, many people still recognize Plymouth Rock as an American icon.

But is that story actually so? Even while towns and civic organizations were arguing over ownership of “the Rock” and the location of the landing (and moving parts of it to strengthen their view), cynics were repeating questions that had long cast doubt on the legitimacy and even the logic of the tradition surrounding the use of Plymouth Rock for the landing of the first settlers in Massachusetts. Fame and iconic value are not necessarily grounded in historicity, however. In fact, as Grant Wacker has pointed out to me more than once, provability (or factuality) often is inversely proportional to significance (or importance). Or to put it the other way around, just because you cannot prove that something is an actual fact does not make it necessarily unimportant, insignificant, or uninteresting. Plymouth Rock will probably be an American icon long after the present site has been swept out to sea by a hurricane.

So the search for factual certainty is the first step in the process. A story with a believable basis in factual evidence is not an easy task nor a simple matter, but a necessary part of the endeavor if the final story is to be credible.

II. Conjecture, Construction, Propriety

As we move into the second part of the process, you will change the images on the virtual screen. At the top of the screen are two images of Martin Luther: on the left, as a baby crying in his cradle, while on the right he is a young university professor tacking up his 95 Theses on a church door. The bottom of the screen shows Winston Churchill sitting at his writing desk with a wry smile on his face.

One of the problems that we face as historians is the constant presence of uncertainty in the details and the processes. We come up with several ways to cope with this problem. Some things seem so logical that they certainly must be true. Luther's 95 Theses are dated on Hallowe'en 1517. The next day was the great exhibition of saints' relics at the church in Wittenberg. Since in his theses, Luther challenged the basis of the merit system upon which the relic-viewing rested, he certainly must have nailed a copy of those theses to the doors of the church the night before. Right? Could have, should have, must have. It is the unspoken but natural progression of many historical arguments. Check your own writing sometime and see how many times you use words like “might,” or “if,” or “perhaps,” or “probably.”

Some scholars have been explicitly cautious about writing history in the subjunctive. Hans Hillerbrand, for one, has had some fun (or at least his readers have had fun) with a typical subjunctive possibility over the years. In the preface to a 1964 book, he says, “If church history can be written in the subjunctive, then one might say that there would have been a religious upheaval in the sixteenth century even if Martin Luther had died in the cradle.”Footnote ⁴ This playfully positive “yes” was followed by a more cautious “maybe not” by the same Hans Hillerbrand in his publication of another book in 1968,Footnote ⁵ and then a resounding “no” by his 1973 work.Footnote ⁶ But one can do that quite easily when painting successive pictures of history in the subjunctive. Many of you are also familiar with Albert Outler's subjunctive meanderings in his ASCH presidential address in 1964, in which he presented his audience with the possibilities of what might have happened if Theodosius had not been thrown from his horse in the fifth century—an event that, in fact, resulted in his wife's contrary theological views prevailing in the succeeding ecumenical council.Footnote ⁷

I have a fascinating book in my study at home that represents the most blatant use of this form of historical mental exercise. A group of historians in 1931 put together a book (in its American edition) simply entitled If; or, History Rewritten. Well-known scholars such as G. K. Chesterton, Andre Maurois, Hilaire Belloc, and Winston Churchill each wrote a chapter that focused on a familiar historical episode (such as John Wilkes Booth's assassination of Abraham Lincoln in Ford's Theater, and the defeat of Napoleon at Waterloo) and engaged in the interesting exercise of writing history in the subjunctive, in all its details and consequences, as if the opposite had in fact happened (that is, that Lincoln had not be assassinated, that Napoleon had escaped to America, and so on). Churchill, however, turns the exercise on its head. Writing about Gettysburg in 1863, he does not use the actual episode as the point of reversal. Rather, he assumes the opposite for his assignment and writes a chapter entitled, “If Lee had not Won at Gettysburg.” But, you say, Lee did not win at Gettysburg—what is going on here? Well, the chapter is indeed interesting. First, of course, he has to describe what he assumes did happen when Lee won, which is interesting in itself—Lee then advanced to capture Washington, D.C., the slaves were freed, the alliances with Europe were firmed up, and so forth. Then, when he goes on to describe what would have happened if Lee had not won, he does not, in fact, describe the history that we know, but has several new twists that take yet another turn into the realm of the historian's fancy in some rather fascinating ways.

But I leave that for you to read and enjoy further on your own. We must move on to the question of what happens when the historian is not actually making it up (in the subjunctive), but when the actual story might be so evident. Now, you might think that is a problem reserved to the classicists, medievalists, or perhaps early American historians. After all, some of us think that everything since 1800 is simply current events, easily known, and not really history as such. But the Jesus Seminar is not the only group that is wondering about who said what and when.

So now we change the images on the screen so that on the top left we have Benjamin Disraeli addressing the House of Commons; at the top right is Andrew Jackson waving his fist in the air; at the bottom left is Dwight D. Eisenhower speaking at a lectern; and on the bottom right, Texas oilman Joe Perkins (if you don't know who Joe is, just picture J. R. Ewing).

One of my colleagues in British History at Centre College of Kentucky, interested in knowing all the factual details of any situation, was particularly fascinated by the question of how Disraeli pronounced the Latin tags when he addressed the British Parliament in the nineteenth century. There is a longstanding assumption that the Members of Parliament used the Oxbridge tradition of Latin pronunciation following the decisions and publications of the Cambridge Philological Society in the 1880s (right after Disraeli's death). But no one can be quite sure of how individuals followed or did not follow that tradition, either before or after that date. There were no videos or audio recordings of those speeches, so we are left to conjecture on the pronunciation. So when Disraeli gave his maiden speech in 1837 or his final speech in 1880, how did he pronounce the Latin? Probably quis, quid, quando, but how about veni, vidi, vici?

More to the point, as to what people actually said, it is not just the Jesus Seminar that raises such a question. More recent quotations are just as questionable. Jon Meacham, recent Newsweek editor and biographer of Andrew Jackson, is very clear on that matter when he refers to Old Hickory's comment following the Supreme Court decision in 1832. Jackson had many a dispute with Chief Justice John Marshall and did not like many decisions of the Court. In particular, regarding a Georgia case involving the Cherokee and some unlicensed missionaries, who were arrested and prosecuted but successfully appealed their case to the U.S. Supreme Court, Jackson purportedly said (according to Horace Greeley, over thirty years later) to a friend, “Well, John Marshall has made his decision; now let him enforce it.” The problem is, of course, there is no actual record of the comment, aside from Greeley's later, undocumented, and questionable relation of a conversation. Meacham, in his biography, admits that the evidence for such a statement is rather thin, but states boldly (and I might say honestly, if not typically) that the statement is “like the more colorful images from holy scripture: historically questionable but philosophically true.”Footnote ⁸ In other words, if Jackson did not actually say it, he certainly should have.

Those events took place over a century and a half ago. Certainly we are better off these days. Ask Patrick Henry, who taught religion at Swarthmore for nearly two decades. In one of his articles, he wanted to cite the familiar quotation from President-elect Eisenhower, speaking to the Freedoms Foundation at the New York Waldorf Astoria in December 1952: “Our form of government has no sense unless it is grounded in a deeply felt religious faith, and I don't care what it is.” Many readers of this journal have read that; some may have quoted it. Patrick Henry, while writing his article in the 1980s, wanted to quote it accurately and support it with a good footnote, so he began looking for a reliable source. After checking references in Sydney Ahlstrom's survey, the Christian Century report, the New York Times article about the event, the Times reproduction of the text of the speech, the Freedoms Foundation archives copy of the typescript, the Eisenhower Library, and several other sources, Professor Henry came to the conclusion that historians may never know exactly what Eisenhower actually said that day, since most of the primary sources include some variant readings from each other. Henry's article on his experience in this case concludes with a listing of the variant readings that looks like the footnotes in a critical Greek New Testament.Footnote ⁹

All of this is to say that, while we may not be “making up the story” in the fictitious sense of the term, we certainly do a significant amount of selection, conjecture, emphasis, and organization that results in a picture that makes sense to us and makes a point to others.

During World War II, Sidney Hook wrote about the task of the historian in his book, The Hero in History. At one point, he strongly criticized Churchill's fantasy about Gettysburg in the book, If—not because Hook necessarily disagreed with the value of testing historical interpretations by the use of the subjunctive, but because he felt that Churchill's storyline belied any real understanding of “scientific history”—that Churchill constructed conclusions based on assumptions that did not consider “the relative constancy of certain determinate relationships in any historical situation.” According to Hook, without some regard for these lines of demarcation, “it would be hard to draw a line between fantasy and scientific reconstruction,” which he saw as the fatal flaw in Churchill's well-told but fantastic tale.Footnote ¹⁰

To put the problem in other terms, not quite so deterministic or scientific, in any historical interpretation, as in successful fiction, the reader must be able to experience “the willing suspension of disbelief.”Footnote ¹¹ The story must make sense to the knowledgeable person and be more or less believable to anyone with a modicum of logic. That is not to say that the constructive process is necessarily easy. Putting together the hard facts as known, and the soft “facts” as gathered, examined, critiqued, and chosen, entails an organizing principle or “thesis.” What is the point (which also entails a point of view) of it all?

The problem of choice and organization is highlighted by a passing comment made by Kevin Watson toward the beginning of a section of his paper on Perkins School of Theology at the 2010 American Academy of Religion meeting. In trying to characterize Joe Perkins, the oilman patron behind much of Perkins's growth in the 1950s and 1960s, Watson said, “I could have made Joe Perkins look like a monster, based on some of the things that he said in letters.”Footnote ¹² That situation confronts most historians at one time or another. What information we choose to use and how we decide to organize it has a tremendous impact on the choice of a thesis and the credibility of the point we are trying to make. There is no way we can present all the evidence, much less simply say that the picture is very complicated. Our job is to bring a particular point into focus. We must decide what part of the scenery is worth viewing, choose the details that are the most relevant, then determine what focal length, shutter speed, lighting, and background are most appropriate.

III. Analysis, Interpretation, Utility

That brings us to the last part of our brief survey of the process by which we further the field of church history through our endeavors. The value of history is not to be found so much in the answers to quis, quid, ubi, et quando as in the grappling with cur and quomodo, why and how. We need not spend a great deal of time on this aspect of the task, except to say that some of the most pervasive constructions and interpretations over the years have also been among the most discussed and debated. Here, we will look into only one small but ever-present corner of the analytical side of the process—the attempts to periodize history into eras: the Early Church, the Middle Ages, the Reformation, the Baby Boomers, or Generation X.

The success of this tempting tendency to characterize certain periods with an appropriate nomenclature that catches the spirit of the times depends upon not only some sort of inner consistency of definition in the scheme but also how well such interpretive handles convincingly match the perceptions of other people. Therefore on the virtual screen, you can now place a timeline across the top, covering the last five thousand years. Some of you will start by figuring out where to divide the line between b.c. and a.d. (or b.c.e. and c.e.), already coping with differences of terminology regarding Christian understandings of time, to say nothing of how the line would be measured by other calendars.

Now you can begin figuring out where you would put such things as the beginning and end of the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, and the Reformation. We have already raised more questions than we can answer, in terms of what eras we want to mention, the terminology that we want to use, the definitions that determine how we make these decisions (to say nothing of the questions of time and place in which similar things occurred). The known factual details might not be different among the various interpretations of how they fit together, so that the questions concerning such efforts seem to deal with whether these terms are credible given the details, are appropriate given the circumstances, and are helpful given the needs of the people who you might be trying to convince.

Two quick illustrations help make the point. On the screen, let us view Jonathan Edwards on the left, reaching over a wooden pulpit to dangle an imaginary spider in front of a nervous congregation. On the right of the screen we see, reading at his desk, the inimitable Voltaire, a leading philosophe and one of the leaders of the Age of Reason.

Edwards has long been considered one of the major figures in the Great Awakening in America, that movement of spiritual vitality that spread along the eastern seaboard in the middle part of the eighteenth century. If you cannot imagine Edwards, then consider Peter Cartwright, the “Kentucky boy,” and one of the revivalists who carried a similar gospel vitality westward with the frontier at the turn of the nineteenth century, during a movement and time known generally as the Second Great Awakening. But then, just as we are getting used to such familiar designations of eras such as the Great Awakening and its Second counterpart, along come people like Jon Butler and Frank Lambert, challenging not only the terminology but the reality that it purports to describe. Butler's “The Great Awakening as Interpretative Fiction”Footnote ¹³ and Lambert's Inventing the “Great Awakening” Footnote ¹⁴ are just two of the increasingly more prevalent attempts to revise the categorization of the past into well-known periods with memorable, if not catchy, names.

And what about Voltaire and the Age of Reason? Well, Carl Becker provides the same kind of challenge to the rationality of the philosophes in his Heavenly City of the Eighteenth-Century Philosophers,Footnote ¹⁵ pointing out that they exhibited a set of non-rational assumptions that in many ways was not unlike the faith assumptions of St. Augustine—an argument that might have set Voltaire on his ear, as it has the participants in many subsequent conferences on the topic.

These are just a few of the larger questions of interpretation, dealing with large issues and broad sweeping interpretations. While one careful historian, such as Nathan Hatch, sees the middle of the nineteenth century as the Golden Age of Methodism in America, another careful historian, David Hempton, sees American Methodism as starting to decline just before that, in 1840. We could begin to fill the screen with countless numbers of historians who have presented numerous interpretations, challenging the views of the past, critiquing the views of colleagues in the present, and in some cases, turning their own field on its head with views that press the lines of credibility farther toward the fringes.