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David Hume would no doubt enjoy with us today the irony of this essay. He is rarely credited with inspiring Christian reflection on any topic. He is, after all, Hume the skeptic-suspicious of any truth claims associated with revelation and espoused with conviction. In particular, it is ironic to evoke Hume in a discussion about Christianity and the doing of history. For some of Hume's strongest statements on the topic of historical method come from his treatise on miracles where he attempts to combine logical arguments of definition and arguments about rules of evidence-historical methodology, as it were-to separate definitively the narrative accounts of miracle-and especially the resurrection-from the truth status even of probability. The possibility of a miracle is so inconceivable-by definition, apparently-that any witness to a supernatural event must therefore be less believable than the weight of probability on the other side.
Hume's Natural History of Religion outlines an account of the origins and development of religion in human experience that would strike any Christian believer as reductionistic in content, and imperialistic in tone. Furthermore, when religion appears as a factor in his six-volume History of England, it is usually to illustrate the deleterious effects of superstition and fanaticism on human progress. (One thinks also of his one-liner in the Treatise-"Generally speaking, the errors in religions are dangerous; those in philosophy only ridiculous."1) So, it is not, at first glance at all obvious how David Hume could be helpful to us in reflecting on what it might mean to do history in the light of Christian faith.
Before I embark on a discussion of how, at second glance, Hume might, in fact, be helpful to us in the task before us, I want to assure you that in no way do I want to baptize David Hume. He remained, as best as I understand, something like an agnostic on religious questions. (Or, since that word was not invented until the nineteenth century, we might better say a Pyrrhonian skeptic. He claimed simply not to know.) Despite efforts by well meaning fellow Edinburghians to obtain a deathbed conversion, Hume remained unbendable and unnervingly calm (at least to his Christian friends) in the face of his imminent departure from this world. And, though there are...