Presentism: It's fine except when it isn't

[_MCB]

Seth;
Which all ties into Masonic fabrications of ancient history, when, in fact, Masonry evolved from a humble trade union.

[_Drifting]

Presentism will be okay in the future...

[_MCB]

Presentism will be okay in the future...

That will be fine if they openly repudiate past-ism, and ex anyone for practicing it.

[_Aristotle Smith]

Unbelievers are often charged with judging historical events and characters through the lens of modern sensibilities. This is called "presentism"....Presentism, according to Wikipedia, is simply "a mode of literary or historical analysis in which present-day ideas and perspectives are anachronistically introduced into depictions or interpretations of the past."

I have a few observations.

First, these definitions of presentism are very broad. If this definition is going to be used, then it seems to me that any attempt to understand the past will necessarily be presentistic. Sometimes it will be overt, such as attempts to use modern social science categories to understand the past. Since the categories are modern, retrojecting them in the past will be presentistic. Or take various "theory" driven approaches to history. Trying to understand the past in terms of Marxist theory, gay theory, feminist theory, poststructuralist theory, postmodern theory, etc. will be presentistic. Historical figures would never have thought or been motivated by these ideas, at least not prior to the twentieth century. Because of this I don't see this as a problem for believers, but rather a problem of doing history in general.

Second, I think this is just a fact of life. We are born into an intellectual matrix and have to understand the past in terms of that intellectual matrix. But, since it is undeniable that each generation has its own unique intellectual matrix, each new generation will engage in presentism as it tries to understand the past. If I want to understand the ancient Mediterranean, it's unavoidable that my thoughts will be tainted by present day ideas because there is no way I can live as if I live in an ancient honor-shame culture, which is the culture that ruled the ancient Mediterranean.

Third, I don't think this is necessarily a bad thing. For history to remain relevant, it has to be in terms that we can understand. If not, it's just one damn thing happening after another and that's just boring and useless. History needs to remain relevant for both believers and unbelievers. And, when you have a faith like Judaism or Christianity which has an explicit historical component, there is going to be some amount of presentism involved.

Finally, I do condemn presentism when it is based on lies and is done for evil purposes. For example, the stupid Mopologetic that Joseph Smith marrying teenage girls was no biggie because they did that all the time in the 19th century is bad presentism because it's a lie. As liz has shown many times, the average age for brides in the 19th century was past the age of majority, much higher than Helen Mar Kimball at 14 years of age.

1) replace the New Testament's sacrificial theology of atonement with their own pet theory
2) explain that the biblical commandment to "fear God" just means respect
3) read the creation story to mean metaphorical days
4) read the flood story as a limited flood
5) read Old Testament prophecies as if they refer to Jesus

Re: #1; Christianity has accumulated quite a number of atonement theories over time. I'm also curious as to why you seem so confident that you can identify the precise theory of atonement in the New Testament. Is this a bit of presentism in assuming that modern historical critical methods can precisely define this theory? No less an authority than Jaroslav Pelikan says, with reference to the early church, that "While the relation of Jesus Christ to God and the relation of the human and the divine within his person became the subject for doctrinal controversy and dogmatic definition, the saving work of Christ remained dogmatically undefined." (emphasis mine). In other words, the early church never thought it important to work out a precise theory of atonement. So while moderns will emphatically say that the correct theory of atonement is X, history tends to undercut those dogmatic assertions.

Re: #2; I think here the move is to keep faith relevant. We live in a different intellectual matrix than did the ancients. Any insistence that we cannot update interpretation because of changing worldviews seems unfair. It's unfair because it seems to say that either faith must be irrelevant (since it can only deal with its original historical context) or it must be eliminated. So while the ancient and modern views are different, I think the modern view is in keeping with the meaning of the text, given the new context.

Re: #3; I think this is bad hermeneutics. I agree that insisting the days were metaphorical is presentism. But, I also think the solution to the problem is something akin to what John Walton (who teaches at your alma mater) proposes. Try and read the story as historically as possible and realize that once you do this, realize that this cannot possibly be a story about the scientific process of creation. Not only were the ancients not interested in this, they couldn't possibly formulate the story in scientific terms. But there still is much to be learned from the story because science doesn't exhaust all learning and explanation. Once you stop trying to read Genesis 1 as literal science you simultaneously reduce the presentism, read the story better, and it also becomes more applicable to a modern world.

Re: #4; Same as #3.

Re: #5; In many ways I agree with this. Jesus needs to be seen as the fulfillment of the story of salvation in the Old Testament as a whole, not as a fulfillment of individual prophecies. I'm all for eliminating "proof texts for Jesus." However, I think that for a Christian, the Old Testament must be read with Jesus in mind, and seeing Jesus as the culmination of the story of the Old Testament. I don't think this is too different than what rabbinical Jews do, they read written Torah through the lens of the oral Torah.

And this is just barely scratching the surface. Really, I've never met any believer who didn't routinely use presentism as a hermeneutical strategy. Which means the use of the term as a polemical bludgeon against unbelievers is motivated not by actual historical conscientiousness, but by rhetorical expediency.

There are words for that.

Like I said above, I don't think it is unique to believers, and I don't think it is unique for believers to use presentism badly. This doesn't excuse bad history and bad hermeneutics, I think both sides need to stop.

[_EAllusion]

Presentism isn't about judging historical figures by modern moral standards. It's Ok to forgive someone for not rising above their cultural milieu, but in order to forgive someone, one must first judge their actions in needing of forgiveness. Failing to judge people of the past with the same moral standards is a form of moral relativism. It's always awesome when people who imagine themselves to be shadowboxing with "relativists" start engaging in it to defend their idols.

Presentism is just when you anachronistically project modern ideas into the past. It happens because people have that default tendency. It's easy to forget that germ theory of disease is a relatively recent advance in human knowledge and people's behavior wasn't in any way motivated by it until that relatively recent development. If you find yourself imagining people in the past taking baths to clean off germs, you might be guilty of presentism.

Cal -

I'm pretty sure the "days" in Genesis refer to periods of time and not literal days. It's the literalism with the English translation that is the presentism in theology. The text is communicating day-age creationism, which was the standard Christian view for most of its history.

[_Nightlion]

Excellent points. Mormonism is a highly presentist faith - which began with Joseph Smith imputing (then) present Methodist ideas about the nature of God and salvation onto a group of bronze-age Hebrew nomads travelling to the New World.

Yep.

This here is a great one to feed you all some crow. The gospel of the Book of Mormon IS the same as the Old Testament gospel referred to as to "know the Lord" "get a new heart from God" (King Saul) and no longer a child of Belial as with Hannah, the mother of Samuel,(The same as to forsake the natural man and become a new creature, a saint, a child of God, by the baptism of fire and of the Holy Ghost.) The act of circumcision was to remind the Hebrew of their obligation to circumcise the foreskin of their hearts, that the Lord may put his love in them. That is pure Christianity. It is all over the face of the Old Testament. To say nothing about the pure Christian gospel taught to Adam in the Book of Moses. This the sons of Eli refused to do, so they were very much cognizant of it. Must I fill up a page of quoted scripture?

You learned folk just can't see it because, as Jesus said, you must be born again to SEE the
kingdom. Hasty ways make for pasty faces when truth stares you in the face. Eventually somewhere a scroll will unravel and reveal plainly that the Ancient Hebrews (those few who could make the grade) were born again Christians. Not as the EVs are born again, heaven forbid, but as in the Book of Mormon. Their Zenos and Zenock and Neum know all about it. Probably all Hebrew prophets that were taken out of The Prophets by haters of God. Truth shall again spring forth from the ground. I pray for it. If the Lord was particular that the Nephites have the words of Malachi then Zion shall have the words of Zenos, Zenock and Neum.

(Oh, crap, don't tell CN or he'll crank out a bogus ZZ&N next week)

[Guest]

First, these definitions of presentism are very broad. If this definition is going to be used, then it seems to me that any attempt to understand the past will necessarily be presentistic.

Naturally we always bring something of the present to our study of the past. The present is the only standpoint we have from which to view the past, and it's also the only frame of reference we have for making the study of the past meaningful. However, simply bringing present methodologies and questions to the study of the past is not considered presentism. Nor is simply translating past ideas into terms present-day people can understand. Presentism is more along the lines of imposing expectations or assigning meanings and intentions to historical persons which would not have made any sense in the time and place in which those persons lived.

For example, it would be presentist to attack Moses for being scientifically illiterate because of the way he portrays creation. Science simply didn't exist as a category of knowledge back then, and Moses's account, apparently influenced by the Babylonian Enuma Elish, was pretty much the cutting edge of elite thinking in his day. On the other hand, I don't think it would be presentist to say that Moses probably meant his creation account to be read as a literal portrayal of historical events, and we now know it was not "true" in that sense. We make this judgment not for the purpose of deriding Moses's education, but for the purpose of informing our own epistemology. We can conclude from it, for example, that the Book of Genesis does not possess the epistemic authority that some modern religious groups impute to it.

In short, presentism is a sort of disregard for historical context, a sort of failure to imagine things from a historical person's point of view. It doesn't just bring the present to the past as a frame of reference. It inserts the present into the past in an unrealistic, unsympathetic, and unconscientious manner.

Re: #1; Christianity has accumulated quite a number of atonement theories over time. I'm also curious as to why you seem so confident that you can identify the precise theory of atonement in the New Testament. Is this a bit of presentism in assuming that modern historical critical methods can precisely define this theory?

No. Arrogance, maybe, but not presentism.

Re: #2; I think here the move is to keep faith relevant. We live in a different intellectual matrix than did the ancients. Any insistence that we cannot update interpretation because of changing worldviews seems unfair. It's unfair because it seems to say that either faith must be irrelevant (since it can only deal with its original historical context) or it must be eliminated. So while the ancient and modern views are different, I think the modern view is in keeping with the meaning of the text, given the new context.

I'm fine with that sort of move if it's done self-consciously as a kind of post-structuralist hermeneutical move. But I think most of the people who interpret "fear" as "respect" think that they're describing the meaning intended by the original author. I agree that we live in a different intellectual matrix than the ancient authors did. That's why it's a mistake to project our intellectual matrix back onto them as if that's the way they really thought.

Peace,

-Chris

[_CaliforniaKid]

Presentism isn't about judging historical figures by modern moral standards. It's Ok to forgive someone for not rising above their cultural milieu, but in order to forgive someone, one must first judge their actions in needing of forgiveness. Failing to judge people of the past with the same moral standards is a form is moral relativism. It's always awesome when people who imagine themselves to be shadowboxing with "relativists" start engaging in it to defend their idols.

Presentism is just when you anachronistically project modern ideas into the past. It happens because people have that default tendency. It's easy to forget that germ theory of disease is a relatively recent advance in human knowledge and people's behavior wasn't in any way motivated by it until that relatively recent development. If you find yourself imagining people in the past taking baths to clean off germs, you might be guilty of presentism.

This is well said.

I'm pretty sure the "days" in Genesis refer to periods of time and not literal days. It's the literalism with the English translation that is the presentism in theology. The text is communicating day-age creationism, which was the standard Christian view for most of its history.

The text refers to "evening" and "morning", which suggests the days described are meant literally. Also, most of the scholars I've read say that "day" would be the natural meaning of the Hebrew term, even though "age" is within the range of its lexical meanings. I don't think the metaphorical usage of days to refer to longer periods of time was in the mind of Genesis's author at the time he penned this narrative, despite the long and venerable hermeneutical tradition of freely swapping days for years and years for ages. I suppose I could be wrong.

[_huckelberry]

I have a few observations.

#1; Christianity has accumulated quite a number of atonement theories over time. I'm also curious as to why you seem so confident that you can identify the precise theory of atonement in the New Testament. Is this a bit of presentism in assuming that modern historical critical methods can precisely define this theory? No less an authority than Jaroslav Pelikan says, with reference to the early church, that "While the relation of Jesus Christ to God and the relation of the human and the divine within his person became the subject for doctrinal controversy and dogmatic definition, the saving work of Christ remained dogmatically undefined." (emphasis mine). In other words, the early church never thought it important to work out a precise theory of atonement. So while moderns will emphatically say that the correct theory of atonement is X, history tends to undercut those dogmatic assertions.

Re: #3; I think this is bad hermeneutics. I agree that insisting the days were metaphorical is presentism. But, I also think the solution to the problem is something akin to what John Walton (who teaches at your alma mater) proposes. Try and read the story as historically as possible and realize that once you do this, realize that this cannot possibly be a story about the scientific process of creation. Not only were the ancients not interested in this, they couldn't possibly formulate the story in scientific terms. But there still is much to be learned from the story because science doesn't exhaust all learning and explanation. Once you stop trying to read Genesis 1 as literal science you simultaneously reduce the presentism, read the story better, and it also becomes more applicable to a modern world.

This tread started out less than exiting, yep,yep,yep yep.
I am close to responding to Aristote smiths comments with a , yep. Well I picked and quoted a couple of parts I thought were particularly well aimed and well said.My observation is they are worth consideration.

I am trying to give a fair rethink of my apologetic thoughts. Do they contain use of presentism as bad as the cover for Helen? I feel some guilt about excusing some Old Testament brutality in war by referring to our presentism. I suspect some guilt for brutality in war might be best left in the Old Testament story. That might even be an area where the origenal text do not compelely understand their own actions requireing us moderns to further the thoughts toward a better completion. That might require being aware of meanings of a story a couple of millenia old and being willing to think beyond that meaning now.

(concerning the sacrificial theology of the New Testament, it might be intersting to hear what that theory is. It is hard to avoid the suspicion that what is heard now is not so much presentism as it is instead medieval. There is a renewable seperate thread looking at that question).

[_moksha]

I want to praise Present-Day Saints.