Geras and Gray

This blog owes its inception to the good offices of internet legend and all-round good egg Norm Geras. Here he is easily disposing of serial gloommonger John Gray. One aspect of Gray's argument that Norm doesn't deal with however, and which shouldn't go unchallenged, is that "belief in progress is a relic of the Christian view of history as universal narrative" - that is, that a "Christian view of history" is essentially progress-minded.

This seems to me quite wrong, suggesting, as it does, that the Christian worldview understands history as some kind of linear narrative of incremental improvement. Nothing, of course, could be further from the truth. As John Burrow points out in his recent, magisterial A History of Histories:

"The impact of the Bible on Christian conceptions of history ... was radical and pervasive ... The fact that biblical history presented the dealings of God with his Chosen People in something like a recurring pattern of transgression, punishment and deliverance meant that the same pattern could be expected to be repeated so long as history lasted: history presented as a recurring series of types and situations within the historical macrocosm of primal sin and final judgement." (p 182)

Thus its the "notion of repetition", in Burrow's words, which furnishes the framework for the Christian conception of history - not a "universal narrative" of progress, as Gray contends. He has got it exactly wrong. This kind of ignorance, however, is surely what one would expect from a "philosopher" and "historian" esteemed the world over.