Just as two people who speak different languages cannot communicate meaningfully without sharing a common language, so two people who interpret the world differently cannot communicate meaningfully, even when they share the same language. They will use the same words and idioms, and employ the same semantic structures, sometimes even speaking with the same accent, but they will inevitably talk past each other. The Christian sees the world around him differently from the way he saw it before his conversion. He can never see things the same way again. The Christian and the unbeliever may stand on the same planet, but they live worlds apart. The Holy Spirit has enlightened the eyes of the believer, regenerated him, illuminated his understanding regarding spiritual things, and the believer has welcomed the truth once hid from his eyes. The unbeliever remains in darkness. Inevitably the words a believer uses will carry for him a meaning different from the meaning the same words carry for the unbeliever. If this concept sounds strange, don't stop reading here. It sounded strange to me when I first heard it, too.
I would like to spend the next few paragraphs explaining the meaning of this difference rather than proving it. If it were my goal to prove it, I would show what the Scriptures teach about the noetic effects of sin, the total depravity of the natural man, and the role of the Holy Spirit in regeneration and illumination. Scores of Bible texts teach these truths. Instead, I want to give an explanation--not a proof--of my position by considering how we use words like "safety" and "probability."
When a Christian uses the word "safe" in a Christian sense, he does not use it the same way as the unbeliever. I do not mean that they use the word in two different senses, with two definitions. Everyone is used to using words with more than one meaning. Although two parties may misunderstand each other for a while, eventually they will recognize their misunderstanding stems from a common vocabulary with divergent meanings. The word safety takes on different meanings in the working world today. It can refer to practices which, over time, have proven to lead to few accidents and injuries. It can also mean adhering to a code of practice intended to promote safety, whether or not it actually does. Many OSHA and DOT regulations--safety regulations--fall into this category. If I fail to copy down the serial number of one piece of paperwork on another piece of paperwork at my job, I will be cited for a safety violation. As someone at my work says, "There's safety, and then there's SAFETY." For the believer and the unbeliever, the failure in communication does not arise from a common vocabulary with multiple meanings, but from the fact that the two people live in different worlds of understanding. It is as if a man were talking on the phone from somewher on earth to an alien in another galaxy. One of them might learn the other's language, but he could never understand the other's world.
Let us say that a boy walks across the ice of a lake only recently frozen in early winter. He reaches the other side without having fallen through the dangerously thin ice. The unbeliever can say that he reached the other side safely, or that it was unsafe to do what he did. In this example, "safe" and "unsafe" reflect different definitions of safety. The act was both safe and unsafe (although the boy's mother will remind him repeatedly how unsafe his excursion was). Now let us change the circumsatnces of the boy's adventure. Let us say that he is a true believer, regenerated by the Holy Spirit, a member of the household of God. Let us also say that this time the ice split open under his feet and he plunged suddenly into an icy grave. Who would say that the boy was kept safe? Only the Christian could say that he was kept safe by the loving hand of God, who called him home.
The believer sees a world that a perfect, holy, wise, loving, and just God controls, a God to whom words like "likelihood" and "probability" have no meaning. With Him, all is certain, known, and absolute. The unbeliever can say that an act was safe only after the fact, when he can see in retrospect that no injury was done; or when he sees that an act usually does not result in harm. To God, there is no retrospection; He knows all events equally well before they occur as after. To God it is also nonsense that an act is safe because of its likely outcome. He knows the outcome with certainty. Probability has no meaning for the Lord.
I am afraid I have left too many loose ends untied in this essay, but I have run out of time. Perhaps I can continue my train of thought in a future blogpost.
Safety is of the Lord.
Next blog: Review of The Grand Design of God by C. A. Patrides
Sunday, January 22, 2012
Book Review
God and Man in Time, by Earle E. Cairns
My quest for a Christian philosophy of history has led me to a book written by the author of the well-known church history textbook, Christianity Through the Centuries. Cairns wrote this little book after his retirement from the classroom in 1977 after 34 years of teaching.
He divides the book into three parts, history as science, history as philosophy, and history as art. In the first part he discusses the historian's materials and methods. The second part, devoted to the philosophy of history is by far the most important of the three. He begins with a survey of historians from ancient Egypt to modern America and their philosophies, or at least their purposes for writing. After this survey, he proceeds with four chapters which compare the various philosophies of history. Part three, the briefest, deals with the art of history writing.
Cairns rightly recognizes the difficulty of categorizing philosophies of history. Dissatisfied with the traditional division into linear and cyclical philosophies, as well as with other divisions (naturalistic/humanistic/idealistic, degeneration/progress/providence; prideful man/frustrated men/redeemed man; and physical/metaphysical/theological), he suggests the categories of optimistic philosophies, pessimistic philosophies, and pessimistic-optimistic philosophies, the last group including evangelical Christians. This division seems to work well, but is confused by the way Cairns first divides historians into those who adhere to a philosophy of history, and those who adhere to a school of history. Schools of history tend to be positivistic, expecting to achieve a measure of certainty about past events. Philosophies of history by acknowledging the subjective nature of the sources and of the historian, relinquish the hope of certainty about the past. As it turns out, he categorizes the proponents of schools of history by their philosophies of history. I found his terminology confusing.
I found only one fault with Cairns' own position. He is too optimistic about the ability of the Christian historian's ability to graft into his work the findings of secular historians. He clearly recognizes the importance of the historian's worldview to his interpretation of his data, but somehow fails to point out the real cause for the difference between the secular historian and the Christian. The mind of the unbeliever is blinded. He cannot know the truth. He cannot see the world a God sees it. His problem is not just that he uses a faulty interpretive grid, but that he does not even possess the spiritual sense to understand the data correctly (I use "spiritual sense" here in the same sense as Jonathan Edwards, Religious Affections, part 1, chap. 4). Every event since creation has some relationship to the Creator. Anyone who does not know the creator, anyone who is spiritually at war with Him, cannot, will not understand those events correctly. Nevertheless, Cairns's position on the ability of the unbelieving historian to handle his material rightly is the usual evangelical position.
One of the chief values of this little book for me is its annotated bibliography at the end of each chapter. I will find myself coming again and again for new reading material.
My quest for a Christian philosophy of history has led me to a book written by the author of the well-known church history textbook, Christianity Through the Centuries. Cairns wrote this little book after his retirement from the classroom in 1977 after 34 years of teaching.
He divides the book into three parts, history as science, history as philosophy, and history as art. In the first part he discusses the historian's materials and methods. The second part, devoted to the philosophy of history is by far the most important of the three. He begins with a survey of historians from ancient Egypt to modern America and their philosophies, or at least their purposes for writing. After this survey, he proceeds with four chapters which compare the various philosophies of history. Part three, the briefest, deals with the art of history writing.
Cairns rightly recognizes the difficulty of categorizing philosophies of history. Dissatisfied with the traditional division into linear and cyclical philosophies, as well as with other divisions (naturalistic/humanistic/idealistic, degeneration/progress/providence; prideful man/frustrated men/redeemed man; and physical/metaphysical/theological), he suggests the categories of optimistic philosophies, pessimistic philosophies, and pessimistic-optimistic philosophies, the last group including evangelical Christians. This division seems to work well, but is confused by the way Cairns first divides historians into those who adhere to a philosophy of history, and those who adhere to a school of history. Schools of history tend to be positivistic, expecting to achieve a measure of certainty about past events. Philosophies of history by acknowledging the subjective nature of the sources and of the historian, relinquish the hope of certainty about the past. As it turns out, he categorizes the proponents of schools of history by their philosophies of history. I found his terminology confusing.
I found only one fault with Cairns' own position. He is too optimistic about the ability of the Christian historian's ability to graft into his work the findings of secular historians. He clearly recognizes the importance of the historian's worldview to his interpretation of his data, but somehow fails to point out the real cause for the difference between the secular historian and the Christian. The mind of the unbeliever is blinded. He cannot know the truth. He cannot see the world a God sees it. His problem is not just that he uses a faulty interpretive grid, but that he does not even possess the spiritual sense to understand the data correctly (I use "spiritual sense" here in the same sense as Jonathan Edwards, Religious Affections, part 1, chap. 4). Every event since creation has some relationship to the Creator. Anyone who does not know the creator, anyone who is spiritually at war with Him, cannot, will not understand those events correctly. Nevertheless, Cairns's position on the ability of the unbelieving historian to handle his material rightly is the usual evangelical position.
One of the chief values of this little book for me is its annotated bibliography at the end of each chapter. I will find myself coming again and again for new reading material.
Saturday, December 10, 2011
Imagine a world where God is . . .
From my childhood I have been trained to understand the world in two different ways. My parents taught me about the God who created the world, saved Noah, chose Abraham, used Moses, raised up David, and sent a Savior. That far away world of the Bible was somehow relevant to the world in which I lived. I learned about my own sinfulness and my need for salvation. This worldview was instilled into me as much as any twentieth century parents could manage by every means they had. We went to church regularly, prayed together and learned the Scriptures. Many of the most fervent believers I know never had the advantages of a good Christian upbringing that I had. Nevertheless, while I was learning all this about God and His world, I was also learning how to view all that goes on around me without reference to Him. In the next few paragraphs, I would like to explain how western society is teaching us all to ignore God, pretend He is not there, and live our lives independently of Him.
In ancient and medieval society such a life beyond the eye of deity was unthinkable. Contracts were honored because people feared the gods in whose name they had pledged themselves. Temples were built and adorned in the hopes that due reverence to the proper deities would ensure their gracious protection in the aversion of calamities like, plague, drought, storm, war, and many other ills. People greeted one another in the name of the gods. When Christianity replaced paganism in and beyond the Roman world, reverence for one God replaced reverence for many gods. Until the Enlightenment, virtually all literature and official documents, as well as informal writing repeatedly acknowledge one or more gods. Until recently in world history everything that happened was attributed to the will, pleasure or anger of the gods, the fates, Fortune, Providence, Divine justice, or similar influences from heaven.
When an apple fell from a tree, God was known to be the Unmoved Mover whose will it was that the tree should no longer support its fruit. Every wind that blew was from God.
Something has changed. It is not important whether we assign a date to that change, such as the publication of Newton's Principia or Descartes' Discourse on Method, or of any other work by Bacon, Machiavelli, or Voltaire. It is not even needful to pin down that change to a particular decade or century. What is important is that a change has taken place; a new philosophy has hijacked the western way of thinking, and kicked God out of the plane. And locked the door.
Nevertheless, we see the marks of spirituality all around us. After all, we no longer live in the modern world, but the postmodern one, in which we allow for all creeds and beliefs equally. We have recognized that failures of the preceding scientific age which produced two World Wars and a Holocaust, and no longer follow in step with the "assured results of objective scientific investigation." According to the current popular philosophy, no one has a monopoly on truth, even the scientist. We still wave the banner of religious freedom (toleration is the current word). Religious books of all kinds are available everywhere from Walmart to truck stops. But whereas the spirituality of ancient times permeated to the very core of society, so that people could hardly think without reference to their deities, whoever they may have been, nowadays, spirituality is only one of many components of an otherwise totally godless world. Let me explain what I mean, and test it against your experience. When we go to ballgames (which sport is irrelevant), we sing praise to our governmental system together, cheer our local heroes together with an alacrity that exists in our lives, and bury deep in our memories that touchdown run, shoestring catch, or last second goal for the rest of our lives, but we never pray, praise, or sing a hymn. No one mentions God in advertising (at least in a reverent way). When was the last time you saw thanks to God for a bountiful harvest written on anything in a grocery store? Remember when secular city newspapers ran a Religion section every week? Everyone in every occupation other than clergy is expected to perform his work as if there were no God. Even ordinary conversations are seldom spiced with phrases like, "God be with you," or "Lord willing." We are permitted to attribute to God only those things that society acknowledges to belong to Him, that is, private religion and the public worship that takes place within the walls of a church. God must be kept within these limits.
After having said all this, it may surprise you to hear that the way society has kicked God out the door is not the what I am driving at in this short essay. Rather, I want to call attention to the way that the Satan is using this godless world around us to teach us how to imagine a world in which there is no God. It is not the godlessness of the world that I see as the main danger (this world has been godless as long as it has been under the rule of the prince of the power of the air), but the way that it educates the mind to attribute all happenings to some other cause than God's sovereign pleasure. Whether he likes it or not, even the most godly American Christian in the twenty-first century has learned to think this way.
How did we learn this? My parents made every effort to teach me the one system, as have my teachers in church. I went to a Christian school from fourth grade on, then to a Christian college. No one has spent so many hours teaching me the other system, but I came to know it, and I know it well. I ask myself, from where did this strange ability come? Perhaps I learned it from many sources, but I know of two, and I will mention only one here. Perhaps you can identify more.
We do not learn all that we know by listening to truth in the form of propositions. We learn far more from the experiences of daily life. Just as most manual skills come from watching imitating and practicing, so also our way of seeing the world comes in part from how we see others interpret it, by our imitation of those exemplars, and by our repeatedly interpreting our experiences in the same way. Unfortunately, we do not learn only from experience of others in the real world, but by those who exist only in the imagination. I do not mean the imaginary friends in the mind of a child who spends his time daydreaming about happy things, but the well-known characters shared by our whole society, that is the people of literature, the stage, and the screen. They have taught me how to imagine anything, from the deepest ocean recess to the surface of the moon. I have been in king's palace and enjoyed their hospitality and trembled under their ire. I have sailed with Drake around the horn, died with Scott in Antarctica, blazed jungle trails with Livingstone, travelled the land righting wrongs with Ivanhoe and Don Quixote, escaped Nazi prison camps, and discovered the source of the Nile (both of them). From television I have learned to be a paramedic, a police officer, a detective, a cowboy, a sheriff, and a soldier. I may not remember all the verses to Amazing Grace, but "just sit right back and you'll hear a tale, tale of a fateful trip that started from this tropic port aboard this tiny ship," and five more verses. What I share with the society in which I live is not a common set of propositional truths, but a common set of experiences vicariously shared through our common entertainment. We no longer quote the Bible in ordinary conversation, as did the Puritans, for example, but we draw from our shared pool of emotions and experiences from TV, movies, and occasionally, books. A line from The Wizard of Oz or Casablanca or a popular sitcom is always in season.
I am convinced that Satan and his demons use our imaginations to tempt us (see Jonathan Edwards, Religious Affections). What more effective means could he have to reach our imaginations than by that gate which we open wide to let in all the stories of fiction, farce, romance or reenactment. As we suspend our unbelief so as to allow ourselves into a story which we know fully well cannot happen, we open the way into our imaginations. I do not mean that we would ever condone sex violence an bad language in our entertainment. I do mean that we are in danger of a subtler form of Satan's attack. The stories we read and watch have a single element in common: they all portray a universe in which the Main Character is missing, and is not missed. We learn to see the world without God.
Now imagine a world in which God is. Whether an apple falls from a tree or the rain falls at my window, all is by divine decree. Imagine the same dramas and comedies with that Main Character present and felt by every other character in every scene, though unseen.
Now imagine a history book written the same way. God is always present and felt, though not always seen. The Main Character is the protagonist of every plot in every real life drama, the righter of wrongs, the ordainer of kings, the dispenser of justice, and even the director of every war. We do not know his purposes, even after they are accomplished, and God's mind in history is rarely understood, outside of salvation history. But He is there. I want to read this kind of history.
Next blog:
Safety and probability
In ancient and medieval society such a life beyond the eye of deity was unthinkable. Contracts were honored because people feared the gods in whose name they had pledged themselves. Temples were built and adorned in the hopes that due reverence to the proper deities would ensure their gracious protection in the aversion of calamities like, plague, drought, storm, war, and many other ills. People greeted one another in the name of the gods. When Christianity replaced paganism in and beyond the Roman world, reverence for one God replaced reverence for many gods. Until the Enlightenment, virtually all literature and official documents, as well as informal writing repeatedly acknowledge one or more gods. Until recently in world history everything that happened was attributed to the will, pleasure or anger of the gods, the fates, Fortune, Providence, Divine justice, or similar influences from heaven.
When an apple fell from a tree, God was known to be the Unmoved Mover whose will it was that the tree should no longer support its fruit. Every wind that blew was from God.
Something has changed. It is not important whether we assign a date to that change, such as the publication of Newton's Principia or Descartes' Discourse on Method, or of any other work by Bacon, Machiavelli, or Voltaire. It is not even needful to pin down that change to a particular decade or century. What is important is that a change has taken place; a new philosophy has hijacked the western way of thinking, and kicked God out of the plane. And locked the door.
Nevertheless, we see the marks of spirituality all around us. After all, we no longer live in the modern world, but the postmodern one, in which we allow for all creeds and beliefs equally. We have recognized that failures of the preceding scientific age which produced two World Wars and a Holocaust, and no longer follow in step with the "assured results of objective scientific investigation." According to the current popular philosophy, no one has a monopoly on truth, even the scientist. We still wave the banner of religious freedom (toleration is the current word). Religious books of all kinds are available everywhere from Walmart to truck stops. But whereas the spirituality of ancient times permeated to the very core of society, so that people could hardly think without reference to their deities, whoever they may have been, nowadays, spirituality is only one of many components of an otherwise totally godless world. Let me explain what I mean, and test it against your experience. When we go to ballgames (which sport is irrelevant), we sing praise to our governmental system together, cheer our local heroes together with an alacrity that exists in our lives, and bury deep in our memories that touchdown run, shoestring catch, or last second goal for the rest of our lives, but we never pray, praise, or sing a hymn. No one mentions God in advertising (at least in a reverent way). When was the last time you saw thanks to God for a bountiful harvest written on anything in a grocery store? Remember when secular city newspapers ran a Religion section every week? Everyone in every occupation other than clergy is expected to perform his work as if there were no God. Even ordinary conversations are seldom spiced with phrases like, "God be with you," or "Lord willing." We are permitted to attribute to God only those things that society acknowledges to belong to Him, that is, private religion and the public worship that takes place within the walls of a church. God must be kept within these limits.
After having said all this, it may surprise you to hear that the way society has kicked God out the door is not the what I am driving at in this short essay. Rather, I want to call attention to the way that the Satan is using this godless world around us to teach us how to imagine a world in which there is no God. It is not the godlessness of the world that I see as the main danger (this world has been godless as long as it has been under the rule of the prince of the power of the air), but the way that it educates the mind to attribute all happenings to some other cause than God's sovereign pleasure. Whether he likes it or not, even the most godly American Christian in the twenty-first century has learned to think this way.
How did we learn this? My parents made every effort to teach me the one system, as have my teachers in church. I went to a Christian school from fourth grade on, then to a Christian college. No one has spent so many hours teaching me the other system, but I came to know it, and I know it well. I ask myself, from where did this strange ability come? Perhaps I learned it from many sources, but I know of two, and I will mention only one here. Perhaps you can identify more.
We do not learn all that we know by listening to truth in the form of propositions. We learn far more from the experiences of daily life. Just as most manual skills come from watching imitating and practicing, so also our way of seeing the world comes in part from how we see others interpret it, by our imitation of those exemplars, and by our repeatedly interpreting our experiences in the same way. Unfortunately, we do not learn only from experience of others in the real world, but by those who exist only in the imagination. I do not mean the imaginary friends in the mind of a child who spends his time daydreaming about happy things, but the well-known characters shared by our whole society, that is the people of literature, the stage, and the screen. They have taught me how to imagine anything, from the deepest ocean recess to the surface of the moon. I have been in king's palace and enjoyed their hospitality and trembled under their ire. I have sailed with Drake around the horn, died with Scott in Antarctica, blazed jungle trails with Livingstone, travelled the land righting wrongs with Ivanhoe and Don Quixote, escaped Nazi prison camps, and discovered the source of the Nile (both of them). From television I have learned to be a paramedic, a police officer, a detective, a cowboy, a sheriff, and a soldier. I may not remember all the verses to Amazing Grace, but "just sit right back and you'll hear a tale, tale of a fateful trip that started from this tropic port aboard this tiny ship," and five more verses. What I share with the society in which I live is not a common set of propositional truths, but a common set of experiences vicariously shared through our common entertainment. We no longer quote the Bible in ordinary conversation, as did the Puritans, for example, but we draw from our shared pool of emotions and experiences from TV, movies, and occasionally, books. A line from The Wizard of Oz or Casablanca or a popular sitcom is always in season.
I am convinced that Satan and his demons use our imaginations to tempt us (see Jonathan Edwards, Religious Affections). What more effective means could he have to reach our imaginations than by that gate which we open wide to let in all the stories of fiction, farce, romance or reenactment. As we suspend our unbelief so as to allow ourselves into a story which we know fully well cannot happen, we open the way into our imaginations. I do not mean that we would ever condone sex violence an bad language in our entertainment. I do mean that we are in danger of a subtler form of Satan's attack. The stories we read and watch have a single element in common: they all portray a universe in which the Main Character is missing, and is not missed. We learn to see the world without God.
Now imagine a world in which God is. Whether an apple falls from a tree or the rain falls at my window, all is by divine decree. Imagine the same dramas and comedies with that Main Character present and felt by every other character in every scene, though unseen.
Now imagine a history book written the same way. God is always present and felt, though not always seen. The Main Character is the protagonist of every plot in every real life drama, the righter of wrongs, the ordainer of kings, the dispenser of justice, and even the director of every war. We do not know his purposes, even after they are accomplished, and God's mind in history is rarely understood, outside of salvation history. But He is there. I want to read this kind of history.
Next blog:
Safety and probability
Sunday, November 6, 2011
The Advice of Cervantes' Friend
I just read Saturday's post and noticed that I exceeded the limits of decorum in the number of names I dropped. It appears that heeded the advice of Cervantes' friend in the preface to Don Quixote:
"To which he made answer, "Your first difficulty about the sonnets, epigrams, or complimentary verses which you want for the beginning, and which ought to be by persons of importance and rank, can be removed if you yourself take a little trouble to make them; you can afterwards baptise them, and put any name you like to them, fathering them on Prester John of the Indies or the Emperor of Trebizond, who, to my knowledge, were said to have been famous poets: and even if they were not, and any pedants or bachelors should attack you and question the fact, never care two maravedis for that, for even if they prove a lie against you they cannot cut off the hand you wrote it with.
"As to references in the margin to the books and authors from whom you take the aphorisms and sayings you put into your story, it is only contriving to fit in nicely any sentences or scraps of Latin you may happen to have by heart, or at any rate that will not give you much trouble to look up; so as, when you speak of freedom and captivity, to insert
Non bene pro toto libertas venditur auro;
and then refer in the margin to Horace, or whoever said it; or, if you allude to the power of death, to come in with—
Pallida mors Aequo pulsat pede pauperum tabernas,
Regumque turres.
"If it be friendship and the love God bids us bear to our enemy, go at once to the Holy Scriptures, which you can do with a very small amount of research, and quote no less than the words of God himself: Ego autem dico vobis: diligite inimicos vestros. If you speak of evil thoughts, turn to the Gospel: De corde exeunt cogitationes malae. If of the fickleness of friends, there is Cato, who will give you his distich:
Donec eris felix multos numerabis amicos,
Tempora si fuerint nubila, solus eris.
"With these and such like bits of Latin they will take you for a grammarian at all events, and that now-a-days is no small honour and profit.
"With regard to adding annotations at the end of the book, you may safely do it in this way. If you mention any giant in your book contrive that it shall be the giant Goliath, and with this alone, which will cost you almost nothing, you have a grand note, for you can put—The giant Golias or Goliath was a Philistine whom the shepherd David slew by a mighty stone-cast in the Terebinth valley, as is related in the Book of Kings—in the chapter where you find it written.
"Next, to prove yourself a man of erudition in polite literature and cosmography, manage that the river Tagus shall be named in your story, and there you are at once with another famous annotation, setting forth—The river Tagus was so called after a King of Spain: it has its source in such and such a place and falls into the ocean, kissing the walls of the famous city of Lisbon, and it is a common belief that it has golden sands, etc. If you should have anything to do with robbers, I will give you the story of Cacus, for I have it by heart; if with loose women, there is the Bishop of Mondonedo, who will give you the loan of Lamia, Laida, and Flora, any reference to whom will bring you great credit; if with hard-hearted ones, Ovid will furnish you with Medea; if with witches or enchantresses, Homer has Calypso, and Virgil Circe; if with valiant captains, Julius Caesar himself will lend you himself in his own 'Commentaries,' and Plutarch will give you a thousand Alexanders. If you should deal with love, with two ounces you may know of Tuscan you can go to Leon the Hebrew, who will supply you to your heart's content; or if you should not care to go to foreign countries you have at home Fonseca's 'Of the Love of God,' in which is condensed all that you or the most imaginative mind can want on the subject. In short, all you have to do is to manage to quote these names, or refer to these stories I have mentioned, and leave it to me to insert the annotations and quotations, and I swear by all that's good to fill your margins and use up four sheets at the end of the book." Public domain. trans. John Ormsby
Notes
Notes
Scripture passages pertinent to philosophy and theology of history, historiography, etc.:
Prov. 21:1, 30, 31
Isaiah 10:5-19
Gen. 50:19-21
Hab. 1:1-2:3
Ps. 50:7-15
Acts 1:6,7
Numerous texts relating to the restoration of God's perfect rule on earth, once destroyed by Adam's sin.
Texts dealing with God's sovereignty in general.
Isa. 46:10, etc.
I plan to add to this list and categorize the entries as I have time.
Scripture passages pertinent to philosophy and theology of history, historiography, etc.:
Prov. 21:1, 30, 31
Isaiah 10:5-19
Gen. 50:19-21
Hab. 1:1-2:3
Ps. 50:7-15
Acts 1:6,7
Numerous texts relating to the restoration of God's perfect rule on earth, once destroyed by Adam's sin.
Texts dealing with God's sovereignty in general.
Isa. 46:10, etc.
I plan to add to this list and categorize the entries as I have time.
Saturday, November 5, 2011
Christian history writing
Essay
When I began driving a truck to support my family eight years ago I found that I no longer had time to read theological and Biblical materials like I used to do. Instead the world of my reading became confined to those books which had been recorded as audiobooks, of which precious few had anything to do with theology. I decided that rather than wasting my time reading fiction all the time, I ought to read whatever I could find that bore even remotely on Biblical studies. It was not too hard to find books of history recorded on audiobooks, even from the period that interested me most, the first century Roman world of the New Testament, as well as the centuries just before and after it. I read Josephus' Wars and Herodotus early on, and they became my favorites. My fascination with ancient history grew quickly as I read Livy, Books I-V, Tacitus' Annals, Caesar's Commentaries, Sallust, Eusebius, and Socrates Scholasticus, though not in that order. I read nearly every audiobook in the history section of our local library, covering periods ranging from fourteenth century France to biographies of Mao and Stalin. I read about two World Wars, the American Civil War, the Punic Wars, the Revolutionary War, the Napoleonic Wars, Alexander's conquests, the Holocaust and the Rwandan genocide. I read about the discovery of Antarctica, the sources of the Nile, and the New World. I read sea adventures of Magellan, Drake, Nelson, Frobisher, Cook and a dozen others. Some books were written by the participants of the events they describe, others by contemporary chroniclers, and still others by modern historians. All this reading has done nothing to quench my thirst for an understanding of history.
I have been seeking more and more to understand the connections that tie the events together and unite them to a wider framework which will give them meaning. These connections between historical events and their meaning are interesting, but seldom discussed in histories. Historians almost never inform their readers of the basis of their jumps from the particulars of history to an absolute interpretation of the events, or else they avoid giving interpretations. As long as the reader and the writer share the same philosophy, there is really no need to put it on paper. Most readers today share a common secular worldview which includes elements such as a mechanistic universe, pure chance without the interference of spiritual forces, and aimlessness. Since both reader and writer do not believer that any particular world event moves history forward toward a predetermined goal, ther is no need for the author to say anything about it in his book. I, however, am not one of those readers. Even when writers make absolute statements about history, I can seldom agree with them because they cannot fit into my Christian interpretive framework. For example, when Tolstoy said, "A king is history's slave," he left out the most important party in the relationship, the Author of history, the Lord Himself.
God's hand moves history along according to his good pleasure toward a goal which He has predetermined before the world began. Few historians, especially modern ones, have acknowledged this in their interpretation of events. Sometimes I run across a writer who gives lipservice to Providence, while recording events as if there were no Hand guiding them. Other times I read old Christian authors who attribute all events to God without admitting the possibility of intermediate causes, or who subtily identify God's causes with his own, or fail to recognize the role of man's sinfulness in the outworking of His plan. Many of the Christian writers of whom I speak do not appear to be genuine believers. Some Christian writers simply mimic the methods of their secular exemplars, and then polish their work with a Christian varnish. Still other Christian writers have sound theology and aim at true Christian edification, but are just plain lousy historians. Some Christian biographies are really just hagiographies in Protestant disguise; they sift out all the historical data that do not glorify their subjects.
This failure to understand how God moves in this world both by means of and in spite of man's rebellion against Him has led historians into several common errors. 1) God is on the winning side. God was pro-American and anti-British in the Revolutionary War, but pro-British and anti-French in the Napoleonic Wars. God was on Alexander's side. However, Isaiah 10 says that God was not on Assyria's side, even He gave them victory over the ten northern tribes. 2) Religious factors are always less important in societal conflicts than political, cultural, and economic ones. The Reformation was only a power struggle betweeen the church and the growing power of the secular establishments of Europe. The settlement of New England was prompted by economic and political forces, not religious ones. 3) Great men make history. The opposite mistake is just as pernicious. 4) No one makes history; all alike are the pawns of chance.
I am tired of reading erudite histories written on the basis of extensive research, elegant in style, delightful to read, and in a narrative form that keeps the reader in suspense until the last chapter ties together every loose thread, but histories which exclude the Main Character of every story that has ever taken place. I am thankful for the work of many unbelievers who have brought history within my reach, despite their unreligious, and sometimes openly atheistic beliefs. I am indebted to Barbara W. Tuchman for my interest in fourteenth century Europe and the causes which led to World War I. Gibbon is not only the greatest historian in the English language, but holds my vote for the best prose writer. I owe him exclusively for what I know about long stretches of Byzantine history. I tip my hat other writers for their work in American history. Stephen E. Ambrose and David McCullough come to mind first. Respectful as they all may have been to religion in their respective time periods, none of these authors has written a Christian history.
What will a distinctively Christian history book look like? How will a Christian writer's output differ from that of his secular colleagues? How will his faith in Providence affect his interpretation of the evils of war? Many similar questions oppress me. The only way I can see to find answers to these questions is to answer even more basic questions, not about history writing, but about the very nature of history itself. The first step to writing a Christian history is a Christian philosophy of history.
Next blog:
Imagine a world in which God is . . .
Next next blog:
Safety and probability
When I began driving a truck to support my family eight years ago I found that I no longer had time to read theological and Biblical materials like I used to do. Instead the world of my reading became confined to those books which had been recorded as audiobooks, of which precious few had anything to do with theology. I decided that rather than wasting my time reading fiction all the time, I ought to read whatever I could find that bore even remotely on Biblical studies. It was not too hard to find books of history recorded on audiobooks, even from the period that interested me most, the first century Roman world of the New Testament, as well as the centuries just before and after it. I read Josephus' Wars and Herodotus early on, and they became my favorites. My fascination with ancient history grew quickly as I read Livy, Books I-V, Tacitus' Annals, Caesar's Commentaries, Sallust, Eusebius, and Socrates Scholasticus, though not in that order. I read nearly every audiobook in the history section of our local library, covering periods ranging from fourteenth century France to biographies of Mao and Stalin. I read about two World Wars, the American Civil War, the Punic Wars, the Revolutionary War, the Napoleonic Wars, Alexander's conquests, the Holocaust and the Rwandan genocide. I read about the discovery of Antarctica, the sources of the Nile, and the New World. I read sea adventures of Magellan, Drake, Nelson, Frobisher, Cook and a dozen others. Some books were written by the participants of the events they describe, others by contemporary chroniclers, and still others by modern historians. All this reading has done nothing to quench my thirst for an understanding of history.
I have been seeking more and more to understand the connections that tie the events together and unite them to a wider framework which will give them meaning. These connections between historical events and their meaning are interesting, but seldom discussed in histories. Historians almost never inform their readers of the basis of their jumps from the particulars of history to an absolute interpretation of the events, or else they avoid giving interpretations. As long as the reader and the writer share the same philosophy, there is really no need to put it on paper. Most readers today share a common secular worldview which includes elements such as a mechanistic universe, pure chance without the interference of spiritual forces, and aimlessness. Since both reader and writer do not believer that any particular world event moves history forward toward a predetermined goal, ther is no need for the author to say anything about it in his book. I, however, am not one of those readers. Even when writers make absolute statements about history, I can seldom agree with them because they cannot fit into my Christian interpretive framework. For example, when Tolstoy said, "A king is history's slave," he left out the most important party in the relationship, the Author of history, the Lord Himself.
God's hand moves history along according to his good pleasure toward a goal which He has predetermined before the world began. Few historians, especially modern ones, have acknowledged this in their interpretation of events. Sometimes I run across a writer who gives lipservice to Providence, while recording events as if there were no Hand guiding them. Other times I read old Christian authors who attribute all events to God without admitting the possibility of intermediate causes, or who subtily identify God's causes with his own, or fail to recognize the role of man's sinfulness in the outworking of His plan. Many of the Christian writers of whom I speak do not appear to be genuine believers. Some Christian writers simply mimic the methods of their secular exemplars, and then polish their work with a Christian varnish. Still other Christian writers have sound theology and aim at true Christian edification, but are just plain lousy historians. Some Christian biographies are really just hagiographies in Protestant disguise; they sift out all the historical data that do not glorify their subjects.
This failure to understand how God moves in this world both by means of and in spite of man's rebellion against Him has led historians into several common errors. 1) God is on the winning side. God was pro-American and anti-British in the Revolutionary War, but pro-British and anti-French in the Napoleonic Wars. God was on Alexander's side. However, Isaiah 10 says that God was not on Assyria's side, even He gave them victory over the ten northern tribes. 2) Religious factors are always less important in societal conflicts than political, cultural, and economic ones. The Reformation was only a power struggle betweeen the church and the growing power of the secular establishments of Europe. The settlement of New England was prompted by economic and political forces, not religious ones. 3) Great men make history. The opposite mistake is just as pernicious. 4) No one makes history; all alike are the pawns of chance.
I am tired of reading erudite histories written on the basis of extensive research, elegant in style, delightful to read, and in a narrative form that keeps the reader in suspense until the last chapter ties together every loose thread, but histories which exclude the Main Character of every story that has ever taken place. I am thankful for the work of many unbelievers who have brought history within my reach, despite their unreligious, and sometimes openly atheistic beliefs. I am indebted to Barbara W. Tuchman for my interest in fourteenth century Europe and the causes which led to World War I. Gibbon is not only the greatest historian in the English language, but holds my vote for the best prose writer. I owe him exclusively for what I know about long stretches of Byzantine history. I tip my hat other writers for their work in American history. Stephen E. Ambrose and David McCullough come to mind first. Respectful as they all may have been to religion in their respective time periods, none of these authors has written a Christian history.
What will a distinctively Christian history book look like? How will a Christian writer's output differ from that of his secular colleagues? How will his faith in Providence affect his interpretation of the evils of war? Many similar questions oppress me. The only way I can see to find answers to these questions is to answer even more basic questions, not about history writing, but about the very nature of history itself. The first step to writing a Christian history is a Christian philosophy of history.
Next blog:
Imagine a world in which God is . . .
Next next blog:
Safety and probability
Monday, October 31, 2011
Postscript
Did I actually leave out Kant? Also Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Presuppositional in my apologetics, and holding to the bondage of the will and to total depravity, Kuhn made me respond as I read it, "Yeah, that's what I thought before I picked up the book.
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