On Writing a History of the Catholic Church | James Hitchcock | Catholic World Report
The Introduction to History of the Catholic Church: From the Apostolic Age to the Third Millennium
The Catholic Church is the longest-enduring institution in
the world, and her historical character is integral to her identity. The
earliest Christians claimed to be witnesses to the life, death, and
Resurrection of Jesus, thereby making Christianity a historical religion,
emanating from a Judaism that was itself a historical religion.
Christianity staked its claim to truth on certain events, notably that at a
precise moment in history the Son of God came to 
earth. The Gospels have a ring
of historical authenticity partly because of the numerous concrete details they
contain, the care with which they record the times and places of Jesus’ life.
While there is no purely historical argument that could convince skeptics that
Jesus rose from the dead and appeared to His disciples, His Resurrection can
scarcely be excluded from any historical account. Marc Bloch, the great
medievalist who was a secular-minded Jew (he perished in a German prison camp),
observed that the real question concerning the history of Christianity is why
so many people fervently believed that Jesus rose from the dead, a belief of
such power and duration as to be hardly explicable in purely human terms. [1]
But an awareness of the historical character of the Church carries with it the
danger that she will be seen as only a product of history, without a
transcendent divine character. While Christians can never be indifferent to the
reliability of historical claims, since to discredit the historical basis of
the Gospel would be to discredit the entire faith, they must be aware of their
limits.
The modern “historical-critical method” has provided valuable help in
understanding Scripture—explicating the precise meaning of words, recovering
the social and cultural milieu in which Jesus lived, situating particular
passages in the context of the entire Bible. But it understands the Bible
primarily in terms of the times in which it was written and can affirm no
transcendent meaning.
Also, modern scholarship itself is bound by its own times, and the
historical-critical method has a history of its own that can also be
relativized. Some scholars cultivate a spirit of skepticism about almost
everything in Scripture, including its antiquity and the accuracy of its
accounts. A major fallacy of this skepticism is the assumption that, while
religious believers are fatally biased, skeptics are objective and
disinterested. Some practitioners of the historical-critical method take a far
more suspicious view of Christian origins than most historians take toward
other aspects of ancient history. (Far more is known about Jesus than about
many of the Roman emperors.)
Then there are the attempts of some historians to make Jesus a modern man—the
claim that He “liberated” women in the feminist sense or that He was the leader
of a political movement. Such claims necessarily assume that from the very
beginning the leaders of the Church systematically falsified the record,
concealing the fact that women were among the Twelve, for example.
The distinction between “the Jesus of history” and “the Christ of faith” was
formulated by certain modern theologians as part of the effort to
“demythologize” Jesus as the Son of God and Redeemer of the universe,
dismissing that belief as a theological construct only loosely connected, if at
all, to the actual, historical Jesus.
A fundamental flaw of the historical-critical method is that, while at various
times it has called virtually all traditional beliefs into question, it offers
no sure replacement, merely many competing theories.
If the babel of scholarly voices is taken at face value, it forces the
conclusion that there is no reliable knowledge of Jesus. But Christians can
scarcely think that God gave the Bible to man as a revelation of Himself but
did so in such a way as to render it endlessly problematical, or that for many
centuries its true meaning was obscured and only came to light in modern times.
Thus, while making use of scholarship, Christians must ultimately read
Scripture with the eyes of faith. Its central message—salvation through Jesus
Christ—is incomprehensible to those who treat it as a merely human document.
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