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Book Review: Philosophical and Theological Papers 1965–1980

also certain presuppositions rooted in our present knowledge; how it is that historians, when dealing with the testimony of past witnesses, can in fact judge whether what those witnesses testify to is possible or impossible, probable or improbable. To simply argue that historians are in no position to judge their testimony constitutes what Collingwood called “scissors and paste” history. So too, although T.’s distinction between the identity principles of Christianity and their expression is suggestive, it needs to be worked out more extensively precisely in connection with the traditional historical claims of Christianity. He needs to tell us whether these Christian principles entail specific historical beliefs and what they are. Sometimes, for example, he seems to say that they do not entail specific beliefs because identity principles cannot in the nature of the case be undermined by historical inquiry. But sometimes he tells us that in certain cases “historical investigations can . . . undermine religious conviction” (153). Which is it? Consider, for example, the Christian principle of Jesus Christ’s resurrection. T., relying on a distinction between “act” and “event,” argues that “the testimony at the root of the Christian tradition does not claim that an event has occurred but that God has acted. . . . To construe the resurrection as an ‘event’ as theologians all too often do, is to obscure, ignore, or find irrelevant the agent who performed the (alleged) act.” (52). Does this mean that T. as theologian is committed to saying that nothing historically observable occurred with the Resurrection? Does he, like Willi Marxsen, interpret the core confession (or principle) to be that “Jesus lives” and the empty tomb and appearance stories to be time-bound “expressions” of that confession? Until we get a much clearer analysis of these issues, at least this important aspect of the faith-history problem remains undissolved.