History in a Post-Christian World

Abstract

The ancient Europeans were writing history long before the arrival of Christianity – Herodotus, Thucydides, Polybius, Cicero, Caesar, Sallust and Tacitus being just a few of the major pagan historians working in the Greek and Roman worlds – but the conversion of the Roman Empire to Christianity after Constantine profoundly changed the way that Europeans thought about the connection between the past and the future. The merging of Graeco-Roman and Judaeo-Christian historical traditions in the later Classical Age, under the influence of Christian writers such as Eusebius, Origen and St Augustine, established a universal providential framework to understand the unfolding history of humanity. This Christian historical tradition held sway throughout the medieval and early modern periods until the secularism of the early twentieth century began to challenge the old determinist notions of historical movement. Many new and secular, and some of them decidedly anti-Christian, ways of interpreting the past have been tried in the last hundred years, but the universalist worldview of the Christian historical tradition still remains attractive to many scholars who reject post-modernist and post-historical models of the modern world. What will happen to the way we interpret the history of humanity as the twenty-first century unfolds? Will attacks on Christianity bring an end to a Christian way of thinking about the past? What will the new history of the post-Christian future look like?