Herbert Butterfield by Kenneth McIntyre [Feature Review]

Page 3 – Herbert Butterfield by Kenneth McIntyre

Yet, the positive role of practical, political purposes is also owed to human nature.  Persons have worth because they are created in the image of God.  The individual has value so liberty is rightly tied to conscience.  With a wary eye on human depravity, personal dignity sustains the tension of human limitation in political affairs.  Revolutionary uprisings tend toward human perfectibility, resisted by those who refuse to believe overthrow of one government automatically means the next will be better.  Evidence for the destructive legacy of France’s revolution, for instance, was overwhelming to Butterfield.  The state’s expansion of powers creates novel means of usurping personal liberties.  Intrusive ideologies inundate inhabitants with interferences imposing importance on institutions instead of the individual.  Butterfield’s conclusion based on the data was the ultimate end of revolutions is not utopia but slavery.

Butterfield maintained the Christian doctrine of God’s providence in history while keeping intact the methodology of a historian.  In keeping with The City of God Butterfield continued Augustine’s view that human and divine views of history were separate.  Rightly assessing the linear Hebraic view of history Butterfield delineated the Christian intellectual from classical Greek thinkers where history is repetitious.  Political direction in any society arises out of a commitment to its worldview.  To honor the past is to study history for itself.  It is not wise to say that past lives teach us in the present how to live.  Butterfield rather asked “What does each generation do with the law and order they have been given?”  Beliefs in so-called ‘progress’ were the deposits left of evolutionary teaching; humans move from primitive, savage states through stages of betterment.  Political forces corrupt the past by assigning it weight history was never intended to carry.  In our day, it may be one group’s wish for ‘JFK’s Camelot’, whereas others anticipate ‘the next Reagan.’  History is not meant to ask “How will we pick up our hero’s mantle?” but “What will we do with similar opportunities which were available to our hero?”

So where does Butterfield place his hope for a dignified but depraved human race? Butterfield’s optimism for human endeavors resides in ordered liberty premised on Divine Providence.  In the end, Butterfield rejects all doctrinaire attempts to make viewpoints acceptable by cherry-picking historic persons, places, and events to substantiate certain cultural claims.  Butterfield merely reflects biblical history which does exactly the opposite, showing our true, sordid natures.  History rejects a cut-and-dried simplistic approach accepting rather a cloak of complex intricacy.  The historian should write the story of what she studies without regard for popular pressures for packaging.  Present historians ought to consider the past for examples but limit the authority of any particular ‘lesson.’  Each generation acts or does not act on biblical-providential principles.  Butterfield’s hermeneutical controls on historical research allow for reflection rather than interpretation.  The sophistication of Herbert Butterfield’s teaching about God and man in history is well served by the scholarly organization of Kenneth B. McIntyre.

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Mark Eckel isDean of Undergraduate Studies, Crossroads Bible College, Indianapolis, IN.  Mark blogs at www.warpandwoof.org