In Defense of Facts and Memorization

Randall Stephens

I recently had a student in a large survey class who did not appear to be prepared for an exam. That's not unusual. But this student answered the essay question on the test in a very unusual way. She/he wrote a poem describing how much she/he hated "history." (I was glad to be spared from his/her wrath, at least in the poem.)

This got me thinking about why students say they despise history. It certainly could be related to how history is presented to them: dry-as-dust fashion, or one-damn-thing-after-another mode. Perhaps such students think of lectures, textbooks, and history classes in general as producing storms of useless facts, unconnected to reality. Some non-majors complain that they did not come to college to learn about the past or irrelevant dead people.

Some students might not have an aptitude for history, plain and simple. That's fine.

But how much of the undergraduate complaint against history has to do with an unwillingness to learn content? Surely one needs to know real details about the past in order to understand it.

It strikes me that historians can be a little too defensive about teaching too many of the facts, the details of history. To be sure history is not a collection of pointless facts, as I tell my students. Among other things history helps us undertsand who we are by examining who we were. I like how Peter Stearns puts it in "Why Study History" on the AHA site: "The past causes the present, and so the future. Any time we try to know why something happened—whether a shift in political party dominance in the American Congress, a major change in the teenage suicide rate, or a war in the Balkans or the Middle East—we have to look for factors that took shape earlier."

A student will need to know what actually happened in the past before he or she can go on to write history, tell a story, formulate arguments, and do the interesting work of interpretation.

That's not unique to history. Content and some basic memorization are a the heart of most disciplines. Biologists have to learn anatomy and classifications. Others in the hard sciences must memorize formulas and need to have a grasp of mathematics. Language requires plenty of memorization. And on and on.

History professors, though, blush a bit when they ask students to memorize a list of names, ideas, dates, and the like. A student of Antebellum America should know the difference between John Calhoun and John Brown. A student in a course on the Early Republic should be able to distinguish a Federalist from an Anti-Federalist. A student in a colonial history course will need to know that the French and Indian War came before the American Revolutionary War.

OK, I may be overstating the case, or grossly oversimplifying things . . . But, I'd like to say nothing more than this . . . facts matter, memorization has its place, and history does require exposure to and understanding of real content.

Oh . . . and George Washington never drove a Dodge Challenger.

What Does It Mean to Believe?

When someone joins a Disciples Church, we usually ask them to make the Good Confession.  And the question goes something like this:  "Do you believe that Jesus is the Christ, the son of the Living God?  And is he your Lord and Savior?"  The first question is asking for an affirmation of a fact.  Disciples are deeply rooted in the Enlightenment mentality.  Alexander Campbell liked to talk about the gospel "facts," and so to believe meant affirming those facts as being true.  This is also why he had problems with creeds -- they required, in his mind, assent to the "facts" as outlined in those creeds.  While he might affirm most of the elements, there were elements that might not be "facts."  I should add that he was also a fan of Francis Bacon's understanding of science, and thus didn't like speculations.  If stated clearly in Scripture, then it could be affirmed.  That is the old paradigm -- belief is affirmation of the facts about God.

But is that what "belief" is?  At the GMP's Pastor's Conference this week in San Diego, Diana pushed the definition.  In the new paradigm, which is more internally driven and more experiential, might we not return to an earlier understanding of belief, back to when the word now translated as belief/believe -- the Greek pist and the Latin Credo had the sense of faith/trust.  Thus, when we say the creed, we say:  "I trust"  or "I give my heart to God the Father, the Almighty, the Creator of the Heavens and the Earth . . . "   Does this not have a very different meaning for the one who makes the statement of belief.  It's more internal than external. 

And the Diana an interesting point -- the English word "belief" derives from the German "belieben" -- "to belove."  If this is true, then when we ask folks when joining the church if they believe that Jesus is the Christ?   We should rephrase it:  Do you belove Jesus, the Christ, the Son of the Living God?  And is he therefore Lord and Savior?    

In this new paradigm belief is not about assenting to facts, but rather is about the disposition of the heart.  If so, what are the implications for the church? 

Theology and Liberty; or, How do you think theologically but not dogmatically?

Icon of Gregory of Nyssa
4th cent. theologian

I am a Disciple of Christ.  In making that claim, the confession is two fold.  First of all, I am a follower of Jesus Christ, as are all Christians.  I confess him to be the Christ and Son of God (Matthew 16:16) and name him  Lord and savior.  I am also a Disciple of Christ by denominational affiliation.  The Disciples emerged on the 19th century frontier as a reform movement concerned about the unity of the body of Christ.  The founders were disturbed by the fragmentation that was experienced on the frontier.  Being influenced by a number of factors, including the emergent democratic feelings after the founding of the American nation along with the Enlightenment ideas of John Locke and others, they embraced the idea of a simple biblical Christianity, a faith founded on a commitment to New Testament Christianity.  This led to a rejection of creeds and official faith statements.  Unfortunately, over time, many in this tradition confused this commitment to non-creedal Christianity rooted in a commitment to recovering the New Testament understandings of faith with being non-theological.  That is, many in the Disciples concluded that since we're non-creedal it doesn't matter what you believe.  You're free to do what you want, without any touchstone at all -- in other words, something akin to what you'll find in many Unitarian Universalist churches.   But that is not how the earliest members of this tradition understood their task.

Although not as well known today as he was in earlier years, British Disciple theologian William Robinson, was one of the most thoughtful of Disciple theologians.  He was influenced by Karl Barth, but sought to go beyond Barth to the biblical text itself.  He understood that we are non-creedal, but he pushed Disciples to think theologically.  In a book written in the 1940s entitled What Churches of Christ Stand For, Robinson gave a definition of what this work might look like (Churches of Christ here is the British equivalent of the Disciples and not to be confused with the more conservative American portion of the Stone-Campbell Movement).

Whilst Churches of Christ have, like Catholic Christianity in general, always placed great emphasis on the Church as a Divine Society, on Church unity, and on the sacraments of Baptism and the Lord's Supper as real channels of grace; yet they have differed significantly from Catholic Christianity in rejecting creeds and confessions and have regarded them as divisive in their influence.  In this their attitude has been nearer to that of Quakers.  It must not, however, be understood that they have been unconcerned about belief itself, regarding it as a matter of indifference what was believed.  No! they have contended earnestly for the "faith once for all delivered to the saints," but they have ever been opposed to the summing up of that faith in a creed or confession, regarding the New Testament itself as a sufficient basis of union for all Christians.  Moreover they have always been suspicious of metaphysical explanations of the facts of Christianity, and have refused to make them binding upon men's consciences.  Thus they have never regarded theories  of inspiration, of the entrance of sin into the world, of predestination, or the Atonement, of the Incarnation, and of the Trinity, as of the Faith.  . . . They declared that they themselves were neither Arminian nor Calvinistic, neither Unitarian nor Trinitarian but simply Christian; and they saw clearly enough that such confessions were divisive in their effects.  Their attention seems not to have been directed at all to such a simple statement of facts as the Apostle' Creed.  There is no doubt that they would have accepted every clause of it, but only because they could have found these clauses within the New Testament itself, and because the expressed the facts  of the Faith and not abstract theological dogmas.   (William Robinson, What Churches of Christ Stand For, (Balsall, Heath, UK:  Berean Press, 1946, pp. 63-64)

Although the use of the word "facts" might be off putting for some, the point here is that there is freedom to wrestle with the biblical text and from that make theological affirmations.  Disciples have, for the most part, shied away from what he refers to at "metaphysical explanations," speculative statements that are more rooted in Greek philosophy than biblical understandings.  Thus, he might affirm the "facts" of the Trinity without choosing to embrace any particular theory of the the Trinity.  

What we learned over the years, as Disciples committed to unity among Christians, is that it is difficult to abandon abstract summations.  It's difficult to throw off traditions long passed on.  If you throw off some, you have a tendency to adopt others, perhaps new ones.  So, how do we think about our faith (which is what theology involves) without becoming "dogmatic"?