G. W.

TROMPF

Does God Requite in History?

Comments on a
Theme in World Chnstianity*

Deserve it! I daresay he does. Many that live deserve death. And some
that die deserve life. Can you give it to them? Then do not be too
eager to deal out death in judgement. For even the wise cannot see all
ends.
J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring

Ancient Christian historians inherited hermeneutical principles from both

the Hebrew and Graeco-Roman historiographical traditions. Both these
traditions reckoned with 'general patterns' of the past in which good and
bad actions were revealed 'to evoke their appropriate deserts'; and most
early Christian historians were as concerned as the Deuteronomist(s) or
Herodotus to uncover the distribution of divine rewards and punishments
in events, and to illustrate how evildoing was punished and 'the just ones'
were blessed (Trompf 1979: 2,155-74, 231-41). Apart from a few subtler
minds, Augustine most eminent among them, such Christian interpreters
of history upheld a long-received confidence that appropriate requitals
would manifest themselves recurrently within human affairs, and thus
betoken Providence below even while heaven above was accepted as the
final tribunal-point for all deeds. History reflected a retributive logic. If
human transactions entailed negative acts of revenge, wars of retribution,
expressions of punition and disapprobation, along with positivities of
forebearance, peace, mercy and concession, the past as a great multiplicity
and whole tapestry of occurrences was presumed to confirm the strong,
governing hand of God, who aided the obedient (though perhaps also
chastizing them for their purfication) and scourged the wicked (while
nonetheless granting them time to reconsider with a remarkable patientia)
(Trompf 1998).
66 STUDIES IN WORLD CHRISTIANITY

Now it is very well known that Christian historiography and historic-

ally-oriented literature went on burgeoning well beyond Antiquity, and, in
the course of many centuries, up until the beginning of the nineteenth
century, it presented as the largest amalgam of written literature the world
had ever seen. No annus Domini had gone by without some significant
event being noted, and the processes of interaction with recorders of
events in other traditions - from late Antique pagans, through Muslims,
early medieval Jews, conquered Meso-Americans, occasional Hindu
chronicles, on to the high historiographical accomplishments of Chinese
literati - made the enterprise all the vaster and more impressive. What we
all too easily forget in our own time, however, is that the 'historicization of
retributive logic' - the defence of God's providence reflected in the course
of an author's chosen period, and the documentation of divine rewards and
reprobations in events - has formed the basic 'assumptive world' of
Christian historiography even up until modern times.
Its popularity was enhanced by the fact that reasoning in terms of
notions about retribution is itself apparently endemic to humanity; a kind
of 'cultural universal'. Virtually every known people on earth explains
significant events in its ken in terms of praise and blame, or rewards and
punishments, or of extolled heroic deeds on the one hand and the malice
of sorcerers, enemies and traitors on the other (Trompf 1997). All
identifiably major happenings and trends could receive their coherence
through applying Christianized interpretative principles to the recorded
past precisely because world cultures were used to this way of thinking,
with the Chinese already having ascribed the collapse of dynasties to a loss
of the mandate under heaven {Shu Ching: Shang 4; Chou 4), for example,
the Sinhalese noting the successes of their kings when they followed the
Dharma (Mahavmsa 29-30), the meso-Americans already accepting the
legitimacy of taking revenge on an oppressive regime (Keen 1971: esp. 7 1 -
104), and so on. For the whole Pacific region, I have recently shown of the
last 150 years or so, islanders have been adapting Biblical talk of blessing
and punishment to their explanations of daily changes in terms of
'payback', typically ascribing sicknesses or death, for instance, to the
breaking of tabus or the effects of sorcery, but referring nation-wide or
regional achievements and tragedies to the hands of God (Trompf 1994a:
128-53, 259-81, 410-56; Swain and Trompf, 1995: 209-11, cf. also
Horton 1993 on Africa).
Yet at our point in time, as we approach the year 2,000, this orientation
towards the past is tacitly eschewed by virtually all trained historians -
certainly those influenced by Western critical methods writing for inter-
 Does God Requite in History? 67

national audiences - and concern to read the signs of divine retribution in

human affairs seems left to (an albeit now rising tide of) conservative
theologians. What has happened? Is the evisceration of retributive and
providentialist discourse from historical narrative a neat index to a more
complete modernity or 'the post-Christian world'? Does this discourse
reflect the persistence of a kind of sophisticated superstitiousness that had
to be put to death by the so-called 'Enlightenment project'?
Manifestly, contemporary philosophers have also rather exiled retribu-
tive logic from their agenda, even if theodicies and defences of Providence
nonetheless abound. The last great philosophical apology of a traditional
Christian way of looking at events lay with the eccentric yet brilliant
Joseph de Maistre (1753-1821), whose enterprise is said to have died with
him because by his time he was the only one who truly believed in the
evident decrees of God through history when others only paid lipservice to
them (thus Sainte-Beuve 1850: 196)! For Maistre, an exiled Savoyard and
vehement Catholic opponent of the French Revolution, divine Providence
in human affairs remained an ever-present reality, and those who take
matters belonging to God into their own hands - by making up their own
rules for society - will bring an inevitable retribution on themselves and
the generations coming after them. This is in one sense a long-inured
Christian position, going back to strictures against the arrogant reliance on
human effort in the writings of Augustine and his Gallic protagonist
Prosper of Aquitaine (Markus 1986: 31-44). But at Maistre's hands,
despite all the reactionary elements in his work, it becomes a 'remarkable
and terrifying' prophetism against violent revolutionism, guillotine poli-
tics, and (more in the long run) secular totalitarianisms (Berlin 1992:194,
cf. De Maistre [1821] 1993; Berlin 1967: 48-77). 1
If back in 1821 Maistre could still accept a connection between the 1755
Lisbon earthquake and human iniquities, exposing Voltaire's arguments of
derision against such possible link as facile and meretricious, the second
half of the nineteenth century saw the hermeneutics of retribution 'out-
lawed by natural science'. By 1894 the American savant Henry Adams
(1838-1918) officially summed up the changing situation for his fellow
historians with the flat dictum that 'science, by definition, must exclude
the idea of a personal and active providence' (1963 edn.: 420). Just over
twenty years earlier, when Herbert Spencer (1820-1903) asked the crucial
question 'Is There a Social Science?' (1871: 25-47), the first action he took
was to pour scorn inter alia on the anonymous French author of La main de
l'homme et le doigt de Dieu (1871), who held that God meted out
appropriate rewards and punishments in French power struggles, and
68 STUDIES IN WORLD CHRISTIANITY

on John Duff Schomberg (1842), for holding that God used William the
Conqueror's victory over the English 'to expurgate the evils of the land',
and later 'severly punished the whole nation' through the Wars of the
Roses. In the Spencerian view such judgements reflected theological
predilection, even prejudice, and not the objectivity made possible by
scientific methods. We can readily see that the naturalism and the search
for law-like generalization in the new approach to history, on the other
hand, virtually made the physical and biological sciences paradigmatic for
social and human study (cf. Trompf 1977: 114-21).
In the important work of Karl Marx (1818-1883), of course, retribution
is prima facie given firmly into human hands, yet on reflection for him it is
the processes of history, scientifically considered, that do the 'paying back'
(cf. [1852] 1951, vol. 1:225, cf. Shaw, 1978), and for Engels, who was only
too willing to accommodate his friend's materialism to current scientific
trends, one had to add reference to the requitals of nature ([1884] 1954:
219-20). Any indications that the Communist League they joined was
originally inspired by Wilhelm Weitling's apocalyptic projections ([1843]
1969) - that Jesus would return to join the workers in overthrowing the
capitalist bosses - barely survived the massive secularizing of their
consciousnesses (Engels [1885] 1951, vol. 2: 338-57). (And dispensing
with the hope of a final divine victory, let alone the notion of a supernal
monitoring of human life, has since been central to the modern secular-
ization of consciousness in general) (Chadwick 1990: 189-228).
As pressures mounted to set historiography on a stricter footing, its
practitioners were expected to avoid 'imposing' moral and theological
meanings on events. They were expected, especially in the Anglophone
world, to become 'generally empirical' in method, or, for those who
preferred it, 'social scientific'. Past outlooks were not forgotten, but they
became part of the history of ideas. In the 1850s, admittedly, the German
scholar Chevalier Bunsen (1791-1860) was first to document system-
atically just how ancient and long-enduring was the idea of 'a moral order
in history', and he remained inspired by it (cf. [1857] 1868, esp. vol. 2:
342-428); yet by 1946, R.G. Collingwood, in his renowned study The Idea
of History, could only warn against injecting theological assessments into a
discipline in which 'individual human judgement' need not 'fall short of
accuracy and rationality and demonstrativeness' (1965 edn.: 136, yet cf.
1956: 205-334). In the twentieth century, mind you, so many momentous
eruptions and paradoxes occurred that made both old-style retributive
hermeneutics and new-style 'empirical objectivity' look rather fragile.
World War 1, without precedent in its magnitude and devastation, seemed
 Does God Requite in History? 69

'a catastrophe of which no one would ever say, the Will of God' (so,
Hazzard 1981: 52, cf. 35). Was one ever going to talk easily again about
historical objectivism, let alone God, after the Nazi holocaust of Jews and
Poles? But in the schools and the University, scholars were to keep up a
basically non-judgemental equanimity, while allowing what became 'po-
litically correct' criticisms in our day of racism, ethnic cleansing, sexism,
imperialism, totalitarianism, and the worst aspects of capitalism. At least
that is the Western and internationally influential norm (various depar-
tures conceded).
Any 'critical' or 'scientific' history written today, to be sure, is not likely
to be endowed with a moral meaning: any roundedness to the study of the
past, whether chronologically or analytically organized, can be provided
through having signalled the emergence of some ongoing trend, or by
more or less stopping at some 'closure' (the collapse of some regime, for
instance, or the death of a great leader), and is no longer expected to entail
didacticism. Of course unavoidably covert moral assessments will still be
made, under the verisimilitude of a strict objectivity; yet the dominant
empiricism confirms here that 'civilization is indeed repression' - a
cultured act of restraint, a methological refinement, the achievement of
fair-minded epoche - that suppresses the natural urge to pass ethical
judgements or pursue moral significances. In literary theory, by compar-
ison, although palpable moralism may be denigrated, we find that ER.
Leavis (1936), Tolkein (1964: 52-63) and others have rightly tried to
identify the 'moral strength' of great writing, and most audiences of most
literary works and films, do not want to be left up in the air at the end, so
psychologically powerful is the pressure for plots to finish with a 'fitting
outcome'. Theologians are the only members of an academic discipline left
to fulminate with a 'prophetic judgement' concerning the world's ills, but
doing this is hardly a respectable front to be issuing from theological
colleges, even many conservative ones. And how very obvious it is, in
contemporary theological representations of the Christian view of history,
that documenting recompenses in everyday and world affairs is off the
agenda (Marsden and Roberts 1975, cf. Berkouwer 1952). Among the
more secularized intelligentsia, in any case, who are nowadays affected by
social critiques of the punitive mentalité in a re-read Nietzsche ([esp. of
1887] 1895) and academically popular Foucault (esp. 1979), lending any
theological justification to the retributive modes of thinking might appear
'politically incorrect.' The young Hegel was perhaps determinative here for
radical Western intellectual life over the last two centuries, in (at least
temporarily) rejecting Christianity's 'doctrine of reward and punishment'
70 STUDIES IN WORLD CHRISTIANITY

as unsatisfactory for a 'full life in the world' and looking instead to Greek
aestheticism and political virtue (Gascoigne 1985: 3, cf. Manser 1962:
306).
Perhaps the power of scientific constraint fulfils certain conditions of
forgiveness that were generated in earliest Christianity (Mk. 2: 5; Matt. 7:
1-5; 18: 21-22; Lk. 23: 34, cf. Jn. 15:14-14; Jas. 2:1-7; 2 Cor. 5:188, 21;
Ephes. 4: 32; Acts 7: 60) and were not maintained by later generations of
polemicists (cf. esp. Athanasius, Epist. 54: 1 for this very issue). It is
paradoxical that methodological acts of personal 'distancing' or authorial
phenomenology, are actually under-girded by charity. Then again, while I
reckon much of my labours in the history of historiographical ideas have
been out of a fair-mindedness, this entails dedication to understand an
older way of looking at the world, which, its retributive component once
accounted for, hardly renders any ancient writer's text useless as source
material for modern historians. To assess the applied logic of traditional
retribution as part of an ancient historian's bias and calculate its effects on
textual structures, in fact, is often not so very different from having to
gauge the effects of a modern historian's decisive, sometimes prejudicial-
looking, adherence to a particular school of social science! That is not to
rehabilitate the older views, though, only to suggest that they might have
foreshadowed later historicisms, with old retributionists adopting 'a God's
eye-view' of history and science-oriented moderns searching for law-like
generalizations about the past that transcend the vagaries of human
purpose.
I suspect the theological application of retributive principles is only
going to regain something of its earlier and broader credence with a
deepening sense that we are now, and have been in contemporary history,
judged by God for our gross materialisms, our environmental irrespon-
sibilities, our technological hybris, our aggressions and arrogant self-
reliance, our shelving of asceticism, our participation in genuine evil -
since humanity is currently confronted with awesome predicaments. And
the education of societies towards such a lively awareness we expect to be
at the hands of prophets rather than historians. Historiography no longer
calls us to contemplate what seems harder and harder to accept in a
sensation-dominated, rapidly changing world order: our 'fallen condition';
and history, pace the rivetting attempts of Reinhold Niebuhr and scholars
around him, is no longer written up as the arena of sin (Theler 1946; Heard
1951: 45; Niebuhr I960). 2 Herbert Butterfield, Cambridge Professor of
History, may have dared to claim that God had judged Hitler (1950: 48-
55), yet the tyrant's best biographers declined to put it that way, and in any
 Does God Requite in History? 71

case, historians have had to acknowledge that Stalin and Mao died in their
beds, while Pol Pot is still at large (at the time of writing).
The causation of past events has always been a vexing problem in the
philosophy of history, and it is immediately compounded once an author
stresses any kind of external factor independent of human purposiveness.
If questions arise as to who or what were responsible for outcomes, no one
is ever in a god-like position to be sure about the complete concatenations
of causes and effects. Then of course one has to know what writers are
investing in their manner of describing agents and these agents' actions
within particular scenarios. It is all very confusing and humbling, and a
small host of debating-points cut in a variety of ways. Ecologista have
firmly respositioned humans within nature, for example, but there is still
enough external, uncontrolled circumstantial effect of the environment -
in earthquakes or hurricanes, for instance - for the timing and chaotic-
looking consequences to remain a mysterion, so allowing explanatory
flexibility (and this remains true even if a surprising number of environ-
mental, including meterological disasters are now increasingly blamed on
humans) (Myers 1995). Contemporary 'Friedmanite' politics often pro-
ceeds on the assumption that individuals are and should be responsible for
their own socio-economic conditions, and this is curiously reminiscent of
a nineteenth-century conservative Christian view that poverty is 'the result
of sinful individual lives' (Cashdollar 1978: 282). Early protagonists for a
social Gospel, however, let alone a strengthening consensus of sociolo-
gists, have retorted that inequities and material distress, even advantage
and prosperity, typically reflect structures and factors that easily make us
victims on the sacrificai pyramid of systems (Cashdollar 1978: 280-84, cf.
Berger [1975]). If, despite all such problems, any amelioration of the
human condition is said to have occurred, yet cannot certainly be ascribed
to 'the physical and social nature of men' alone, the idea of Progress, asJ.B.
Bury anxiously observed ([1920] 1932: 21-22), would lapse back into the
idea of Providence. This is perhaps why his Catholic contemporary Lord
Acton (1906: 11) very early this century was quite happy to assert that
'progress in the direction of organized and assured freedom' in the modern
world is a 'tribute to the theory of Providence', and not just to human
efforts, a view not entirely without credibility in the 1990s (Fasnacht 1952;
Fukuyama 1992).
But where does God fit into all this causatively? Can we legitimately
allow that God may exert directive compensatory pressure on events, or do
the findings of social science require of us that the divine only operates
through 'secondary causes', as the American theologian James McCosh
72 STUDIES IN WORLD CHRISTIANITY

(1850) willingly conceded last century? Very recently Pope John Paul II
(1994: 132) has contended that it is just too simplistic to talk about the
Providence of God causing the collapse of the USSR, because 'Communism
brought its own internal downfall'.3 On the other hand, that would mean a
downfall against a multitude of human wills, and - we may be prepared to
go on to say - because of a shocking 'absence of good', so allowing
Providentialism a way back. Besides, the Pope keeps up an intense interest
in the Fatima prophecies which took 'World War II as a punishment for the
sins of humankind' and which forecasted both the demise of Communism
and the Christianization of Russia (Yel 1994: 44-45). Is it not inevitable
that he must believe an Almightly has his 'hands on the great Wheel', the
very same One who 'guided' the bullet of his would-be assassin on 13 May
1981 from fulfilling a mortal's desperate intentions (Tindal-Robertson
1992: 7)? Or is it just a matter of using a different mode of talk for and in
different contexts? - a cautious mode for historians, a faith-affirming one
for the faithful.
Language in connection with historical causation and retributive logic is
obviously a key issue for examination. Take prophecy, since we have just
confronted it. Initially it is not just going to be a matter of sorting out the
apparent conflict between free will and determinism, but how the
prophecy is stated. When not a few clergymen fulminated in Australian
pulpits in the 1840s, for example, that the new nation would be requited
for what it had been doing to the Aborigines (Reynolds 1992: 89-92), the
linguistic function of prophetism was - actually in a rather 'classic fashion'
- that of deterence and warning, not specificity of a punishment or
forecast. We must be careful about what we hear. When Edward Gibbon,
to return to characteristic historiographical discourse, wrote that history
was 'the Register of all the crimes, follies and misfortunes of mankind', his
view might seem to be in keeping with those looking for the signprints of
divine requitals in the past, but in fact he was willfully secularizing that
older outlook (see Passmorel968: 8). Some of the characters in his story
whom believers might account among the righteous, he has recast as ever
so 'fallen'; and in our time we are being warned to account for his
Enlightenment anticlericalism. Astuteness over language is vital. If some-
one were to write a book today on the Afflictions of the Righteous, let us say
(cf. Macleod 1913), we would obviously do well to ask first whether it was
about the self-righteous!4 In the 1990s we are still being challenged to
address the linguistic and conceptual nature of religious and theological
judgements about human affairs, but thankfully there are critical tools
available to allow us to discriminate between fanciful, myth-making,
 Does God Requite in History? 73

imaginative, empathetic, logical, reductionist, insignificant and significant

explanations (cf. Oser and Gmunder 1991).
Whatever the caveats drawn by scholars, though, popular expressions of
retributive logic will not go away. They are part of what I once described as
the 'perennial religion', the one that keeps on bubbling up irrepressibly
This is the classic religio that above all celebrates the fecundity of the earth
and victory over enemies, explaining good fortune and adversity in
altering terms of relations with the divine and 'naming the consequences'
of worthy deeds and delicts (Trompf 1988: 208-11). For, it is natural for
humans to pass judgement, and to estimate whether any outcome is a just
desert. Where in the West there has been a tendency to repress the
traditional Judaeo-Christian discourse of retribution, it curiously returns
in the trendy 'New Age' appeal to karma, or in the apparently secular
estimates that one is rewarded for foresight and pays a penalty for
stupidity. Even under a government which attempts to enforce an
atheistical consciousness, when sickness and death come to visit, the
existential pressures for religious explanations in terms of rewards and
punishments return, as the Russian Solzhenitsyn's novel Cancer Ward
(1968) brilliantly shows. Scientific hermeneutics and its secularizing
effects, indeed, engendering inter alia the newspaper culture in which
day-to-day events are reported without hints at cosmic meanings, are
repressing what will inevitably well up again in political and religious
movements that take 'necessary and well-defined judgement' as pivotal,
with projections against an outside enemy being socially legitimated
through a compelling righteous indignation (Germany against the in-
justice of Versailles, Iran against godless and materialist America, once
ravaged Serbia against its old neighbouring disputants, the traditionally
inferiorized Hutu against the proud Tutsi, the righteous against the
wicked, and so on).
The recurrent strength of such popular attitudes, mind you, might
provide the best reasons for some to go on dissuading people from
imbibing them. Christian convert and Evangelical intellectual CS. Lewis,
for example, has decided that retributive discourse may only be acceptable
when conveyed from the Bible, the warnings of God being rightly re-
enunciated through our reading of the sacred Text. But as soon as we
ourselves take up this kind of language, he maintains, whether taking
seriously 'a village woman' who claims 'her wicked father-in-law's paralytic
stroke was 'a judgement on him', or evoking in Hegelian terms 'the
judgement of history', we do 'precisely what ... popular Paganism' did,
and we also succumb to an unwarrantable historicism (1977: 45-47). 5
74 STUDIES IN WORLD CHRISTIANITY

This is a Biblicist view rendering Patristic historiographical methods

immediately suspect; yet perhaps we should stress Lewis had us in mind
rather than the ancients. After all, one contemporary and more particu-
larly Western problem is that historical interpretation has now become a
matter of 'individual judgement' (to reappropiate Collingswood's phrase
above), and it is the private self qua historiographer whom Lewis and all
schools of the fair-minded are hoping will heed consensus restraint (cf.
Oakeley 1934: 34-43). He apparently wants us to take our cue from
putatively unbiased empirical commentators on events who eschew blame
and praise. Virtually all the Christian writers I have examined over the
years who make a good deal of retributive principles, though, have made
social judgements, that is to say, they represent and write for group and
doctrinal stances. When contemporary writers openly stand for such
collective causes, we tend to allow them more leeway for axiology. And
we can still readily understand how and why those groups in terrible social
situations can use the traditionalist explanatory verbiage to help sufferers
come to terms with their plight at whatever point in time. Take the
Ugandan churches, for instance, many members of which were encour-
aged to think of Idi Amin's anti-Christian activity as a persecution which
God thought fit to bring on them as refining chastisement, with Amin's
eventual flight a fitting divine punishment (E. Charles 1981). Almost a
millennium earlier, the average Rhineland Christian's response to the
ending of the first Inquisition in 1233 was comparable and as under-
standable: something akin to the great pagan persecutors of early Christian
times had just passed, and when its perpetrator Conrad of Marburg was
found killed on the open road, it was a divine judgement and his foretaste
of hell (Gest. Trever. Contin., 4 [p. 402], cf. Cohn 1976: 28). Imagining
ourselves in those very same crises, we quickly realize the power and
virtual necessity of applied retributive logic, especially for 'social security'.
Even the language of the straitened early Puritan settlers of North America
may come to life here, as they saw themselves often 'delivered ... from yc
hand of ye oppressour', or who held with confidence that, despite all the
disputations of community life, at the end 'Heaven will make amends for
all' (Hanscom 1917: 6, 270). 6 Outside such predicaments, perhaps in the
comfort of a scholar's study, we trouble - like a modern Malebranche -
over whether anybody's effort at construing the past is going to put private
before general interests, and bias before fact (O'Reilly 1986:, or we muse -
like a latter-day Spinoza - that systems of rewards and penalties in popular
religions are useful for keeping the ignorant virtuous but childish for
paragons of Reason (Hampshire 1962: 202).
 Does God Requite in History? 75

Perhaps, with the triumph of the scientific spirit, the real problem about
retributive reasoning is that we can never be certain we are dealing with all
the relevant facts and are applying all the proper rules. The two remark-
able judgements on events we have just cited above - on Uganda and the
first Inquisition - are perfectly intelligible, particularly within the em-
pathized world of the persecuted, but they are quite obviously Gestalt-like
rather than 'classically scientific'. We might say that the grounds for
identifying instances of requital have improved in their 'scientific standing'
over the centuries - if, for example, we briefly ranged from the mediaeval
topos of explaining notable sickness and death (illustrated most quaintly in
Gerard of Wales [Itiner. Kambr., esp. l;l-2]), through the Quaker George
Fox's 'Book of Rewards' (behind [1694] 1925: 74, 81) and the botanist
Linnaeus' taxonomic Nemesis Divina (see 1878 edn.) on to informal books
of documentation sporadically put together in our own time.7 In the
'secular West' one is likely to think twice about taking a plague to be a
'visitation of God' (Bourke 1993), or an invasion as a divine 'scourge' and a
sacking 'heaven's will' (Coupland 1991; Longhurst 1950) ;8 and we sense
how easily those in the grip of conflict can fall into a jingoistic retributive
mode, an English theologian one-sidedly lamenting 'the insolence and
blindness' of Russia, Germany and Austria after the Great War at one end
of our century (R. Charles 1923: 271-72), for example, and a Palestinian
radical delighted that Israeli Prime Minister Rabin was 'dead, paid in his
own coin' (Sydney Morning Herald 7 Nov. 1995: 9). We might also well feel
confident to conclude that our modern linguistic tools for identifying evil
have become quite sophisticated, so that, leaving behind the Jesuitical
categories so distrusted by Pascal, or casuistry about the relative sinfulness
of a hundred-and-one different acts ([1659] 1962 edn.), we now talk
astutely about structural injustice, the political manufacture of under-
development, and so forth. But still, the problem of the status of 'the
judgemental' remains, caught as it is between its associations with
theological assessment, even legal pronouncement, and the realization
that there has to be left some place for it in science, if we are not going to
hoodwink ourselves into believing that the clever methods of human
Reason can actually be morally neutral or quite apolitical. Beneath all
discourse, or deep-structural analysis, a layer or component of ethical
commitment will be evident. Beneath all attempts at history, EH. Bradley
would add, are inevitable 'prejudications' of the mind (1935:11, 20). 9 The
unnerving quality of a compelling, perhaps prophetic judgement about a
human situation, we discover, is that it can expose in their nakedness
problems too often left secretly lurking or unaddressed. What we thought
76 STUDIES IN WORLD CHRISTIANITY

was nobly scientific could be placed in a new light, threateningly enough,

as a reactionary establishment awaiting its demise, or the posturing of
intellectual hybris beckoning a fall. We may actually sense deep down that
such an evaluation is right, and has its place scientifically, but we cannot
freely explore its implications if we are going to hold on to our jobs.
Besides, the trouble with those strong assessments that evoke some higher
judgement is that they can easily generate serious dissent or conflict, or
compound struggles already in process, with socially disruptive conse-
quences well beyond that of a healthy debate. Perhaps we will acknowl-
edge providential outcomes in some obviously relevant disruptions in the
past - in the Reformation, for example, or the American Revolution (cf.
Mansfield 1992: 38-39, 84, 157, 239-47, 314; Tuveson 1968: 91-136) -
but we fear the return of any retributively-oriented challenges that will
throw our already fragile worlds into chaos. We realize there is suffering in
the world, experiencing it ourselves, but are more impatient about it being
there at all than knowing how to connect it with [a] God; we know of
death but it is now all too humanized and ever harder to place it in God's
'prodigious storm' against the undeserving chaff of humanity.10
Modernity, it could seem, has threatened to do away with God
governing the world and elevated instead our own powers of rational
control, holding before us at present the prospect of utopie solutions and
perhaps world government. Post-modernity, on the other hand, as a mêlée
of attitudinal and intellectual reactions, has deconstructed all our preten-
sions at power, though as a result also all those pretensions preceding the
Enlightenment Project, in which agents used God for their own privileges
and legitimacies, so that we do not yet perceive how spiritual insights can
be reconstructed from the onslaught. If modernity shared with classical
and Christian traditionalism a strength of signification, a world in which
the past had definite patterns and proportions, we are at the moment quite
disoriented about whether significances are just human constructions, or
indeed reflections of a transcendent reality, or sheer maya. How then can
we go on taking retributive logic seriously per se (i.e., as a challenge for us,
not just a false consciousness we happen to notice in others), especially
when it may carry connotations of guilt, punition, masculinity and
totalism that we imagine are démodé! Is the matter foreclosed, or are
we going to suffer from the niggling feeling that, without cautious
reflection on this very issue of retributive logic, post-modern deconstruc-
tion and criticism will only be left as 'self-validating', and historians will
come to possess no more than functional grounds for worrying about the
consequences, let us say, of betraying veracity?11
 Does God Requite in History? 77

I suggest that it would be too easy and immature a move to give up.
More work beckons. Reflecting on ancient Christianity, I have argued (e.g.,
1998) that just when historians' perceptions about divine requitals within
history were looking very embarrasingly simplistic, and susceptible to
triumphalism and the vindictive spirit, Augustine arrived at a deeper set of
insights without entirely discarding the old conceits. By dint of his
continuing influence, he has called humanity to contemplate what it will
ignore at its own peril: the issue of relationships between earthly and post-
mortem outcomes, and the need for a spiritual transcendence of our desire
for personal rewards. In the eighteenth century, after the unity of
Christendom had been shattered and enough disorderliness was being
revealed about world history to dismantle its intelligibility, the brilliant if
neglected Giambattista Vico (1668-1744) reached the remarkable con-
clusion that La Provvidenza was manifest through great time-spans 'in spite
of our mistakes', and its outworkings better grasped in an age of reflective
reasoning ([1744] 1959: 101, 103, cf. Trompf 1994b). In our own awful
Era of Violence, moreover, we have recently been enjoined to have the
courage 'to believe in a profound significance of the most tragic history'
(Ricoeur 1965: 96, cf. Niebuhr 1937: 153-70; De Unamuno, 1954).12
Bearing in mind that the matter of retribution hardly exhausts the broad
field of providence, or theodicy, let alone the 'Christian doctrine of history'
in general (Mclntyre 1957), or all that can be said about 'moral judge-
ments' and 'theological perspectives' in history' (Butterfield 1951: 101-30;
Harvey, 1966: 246-91), we are challenged to revisit it, working enough
with it to reenliven its by now stifled potential.
One possible way forward, to conclude, is to contemplate what I have
discussed elsewhere (1996:171-86). as 'the judgement of love'. Of course it
is inevitable that love must be returned to as an issue in a book on
retributive logic, for unconditional love will naturally occur to the mind as
the logical antithesis to conditional thinking surrounding negative and
positive 'pay-back'. I do not wish to fall back on a glib solution at this
point, however, even though I believe a newly formulated hermeneutics of
love is needed. Here I am simply noting the unspoken function of love in
the history and ongoing activity of criticism. Love as radical caring, and
unconquerable goodwill, not misconstrued as mere sentimentality, or
weak-kneed concessiveness, or for that matter divorced from the power
of eros, but love as the very bow-string of justice, keeps on returning as the
curiously unexpressed standard through which all the events we and
others perceive, all the evaluations we and others make, all the actions we
and others take, all intellectual and institutional achievements, receive
78 STUDIES IN WORLD CHRISTIANITY

their most subversive critique, as if nothing is humanly so fine and

effective that it could ever elude her judgement. Such judgement probes
every hidden motivation, undermines every false excuse, queries all
privileging, engages each manifestation of human power, and beckons
to refine us as those base metals we very often did not recognize ourselves
to be (cf. Sturm 1988; Wink, 1992: esp. 274-77). With this reorientation
one could identify problems in virtually every historical application of
retributive logic that we could uncover in the whole story of historio-
graphy - critiquing the triumphalism or imperialism; the baptism of pagan
mentalities or the imprisonment of pagan vitality; the gloating, the bias
and polemicism, rationalization and sacred dishonesty; the unsubtle
moralism, or else unconvincing ethical verdicts; the superficial and
sometimes hackneyed conceits; the unyielding and unforgiving tempera-
ments; let alone the pretentiousness of consigning people to heaven or
hell, or just the unwise failure to suspend judgement - and yet still be
utilizing these same axiological principles, endemic as they are to human
thought in a maturer way. For retributive logic cannot be wished away, it is
just that users need to discover its true end, which in Christian - or more
precisely Christological terms - involves the archetypal constant journey-
ing away from the divine avengement in the Exodus to the crucifixion of
God, or, if we can here encapsulate the whole of humanity's documentable
historical processes, the struggle to leave war and hatred behind and give
in to the just judgements of love. In following this path, forgiveness is
imperative, but not without a critical sense; and remembering through
recording events rather than a forgetfulness of them is essential for
learning the lessons of time.
Perhaps then we will discover that history did have a Divine (rather than
merely human) Subject after all, and that it expresses the Incarnation, as
Orthodox mystics would say, as the Body of Christ. At this point, however,
I am not rushing to reinstate the cultural universal of retributive logic as a
religious category from which no mind wanting truly to comprehend
happenings in the world can withstand. I am here just reckoning with its
powerful, rebounding force. If retributive logic can be purged of its
connections with 'perennial', often triumphalist religio, and liberated
Christologically, then it becomes a decisive heuristic tool for discerning
good and evil in the morally ambiguous 'contemporary order'. The
Judgement of Love/Eros, though, is too transcendent to fall ready-made
into the hands of Christians, let us say, or 'the religious', or the most adept
social critics and post-modernist desconstructors. We all have to do inner
work in order not to be blind to the extent and far reaches of its clarifying
 Does God Requite in History? 79

force. Besides, why limit this force to the human domain? We are talking
about God. It is thus present in the whole cosmos, and is the love that
moves galactic processes.

G. W. Trompf is Professor in the History of Ideas, The School of Studies in

Religion, the University of Sydney, Australia.

NOTES
*An article dedicated to Rev. Prof. John Mclntyre of the University of Edinburgh, in
appreciation of his mentorship at the University of Sydney. An unrevised version of this
paper was delivered at New College, University of Edinburgh, on 17 May, 1996, when I
held a Fellowship there. 1 am grateful for Prof. James Mackey's comments on the draft.
1. Most of the above is taken from my forthcoming review of Joseph de Maistre, The
Petersburg Dialogues (1993 edn.) in Australian Journal of Politics and History for 1997.
2. Though for a contemporary American writer of comparable moral conviction, see
Lasch (1991), cf. also Ballard (1974: 275-76, 286) on Bonhoeffer.
3. The Russian Orthodox would not agree, cf. M. Scammell, Solzhenitsyn: a hero of our
time, London, 1984.
4. Or better, see New England Tract Society. (1820), cf. Marshall (1911).
5. Cf. Popper (1957) (on forcing facts to fit theories); Eddison (1970) (related but more
conservative Evangelical approach).
6. Quoting William Bradford [1620] and the dying Cotton Mather's wife [1701]
respectively.
7. The author awaits access to British diary material from the Second World War period,
which notes what happened to people on account of their attitudes, with a mix of secular
and religious-looking explanations. Giraldus' work has a long-term background for the
topos in Isidora of Seville (Sent); George Fox's 'Book of Rewards' has been lost, but the
temper of it can be reconstructed from his Journal, cf. also Ellwood (1885 edn.: 231-35). As
for Linnaeus, the complex supporting notes of his Nemesis Divina are now 'all too
inaccessible'; thus Hammarskjöld (1957: 12).
8. Coupland considers early mediaeval responses to Viking invasions, cf. Bede earlier on
concerning the Picts as punishers for God (Hist, eccles. gent. Angl., 1,15); J.E. Longhurst
writes on the humanist and pro-imperial view of Alfonso de Valdés that Rome's sacking by
Charles Vs troops in 1527 was God-ordained because of the city's wickedness.
9. (Using William Paley's term), Bradley (1935, vol. 1: pp. 11,20, cf. 14-15, and see also
Burke (1992). The prejudices can also be unconscious, Gadamer (1984: 239), Jameson
(1981: 35).
10. For background, Gutierrez (1987), cf. van der Ven and Vossen, (1995) (on suffering);
and I allude to Jeremy Taylor's renowned piece On Death', in WE. Williams (1951: 25-26
(quotation, on death)
80 STUDIES IN WORLD CHRISTIANITY

11. Here I foreshadow a work on the necessary defence of veracity in history-writing by

A. McLaughlin.
12. The allusion to our Era derives from the title of vol. 12, the 1960 edition, of The New
Cambridge Modern History.

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