Coming to Terms, As a Christian Historian, with F. H. Bradley's The Presuppositions of Critical History

F. H. Bradley’s 1874 essay, “The Presuppositions of Critical History”, was one of the earliest full statements in English on the naturalistic understanding of “history” that seemed to be required by the higher criticism of Scripture, Darwinian evolution, and the Western study of “primitive religions”. It is a forceful essay that has much to say about the effects of a culture’s most general assumptions on historians’ treatment of claims about God and the workings of providence. This paper summarizes Bradley’s argument and examines the sources and questions that lay behind its writing, but most of the paper treats implications of Bradley’s position for current writing on topics in the history of Christianity. In particular, it scrutinizes Bradley’s implied claims about moral problems involved in historical writing of the modern, academic type that still treats Christian belief and practice as responsible human behavior.