When I completed my latest book in June, The Five Pillars of Biblical Leadership, I told my wife that this would be my last book. She smiled. She has heard that declaration many times.
I do not mind writing books, but I hate doing indexes. I had to do two of them in the spring: the one for my leadership book and one for the re-typeset edition of my 2008 book, The Five Pillars of Biblical Success.
On Wednesday, I decided to write another book. Of the making of books, there is no end. It will be a parallel book to The Covenantal Structure of Christian Economics. Title: The Covenantal Structure of History.
I was motivated to write the next book because, on Sunday, I went into the church library. Hardly anybody ever does this. It is mainly a room filled with stacked-up chairs. I was scanning through the books when I saw one written by a professor of church history at a theological seminary. It is on writing history. I checked it out. I read it on Monday. I was impressed by its stunning mediocrity. The man holds a Ph.D. in history from Cambridge University. There was nothing of any substance in the book with respect to writing Christian history. It provided zero information on what a Christian approach to writing history would be or should be. It was just a collection of essays on other people’s poorly written histories, or at least other people’s revisionist histories that do not conform to the official dogmas of the historical guild. He is a card-carrying guild member. It could have been written by anyone who has a Ph.D. in history.
In his book, he singles out only one Christian scholar as appallingly incompetent as an historian: R. J. Rushdoony. His criticism is based on three pages in The Institutes of Biblical Law, which is not a book on history. Yet Rushdoony wrote more books on history than this professor has written, and they are better books. The Messianic Character of American Education (1963) is a masterpiece. So is Foundations of Social Order: Studies in the Creeds and Councils of the Early Church (1968). So are the chapters on Egypt, Greece, and Rome in The One and the Many (1971). The critic mentions none of these.
I then re-read the chapter on history in the book I edited, Foundations of Christian Scholarship: Essays in the Van Til Perspective (1976). It was written by C. Gregg Singer, who wrote several books on American history, including The Unholy Alliance (1975), a history of the National Council of Churches. You can download it here. He began his essay with this personal reminiscence.
Some five years ago at an annual meeting of the American Historical Association the writer had the occasion to meet informally with a group of the more famous historians in attendance at that conference. The subject under discussion was the meaning and purpose of history. These half-dozen scholars were of the opinion that history lacks any decisive meaning and any discernible purpose. The writer then posed to this group distinguish scholars one question: If this be the case, then why do we teach history? The scholars looked at him with surprise and even disgust, but no answer was forthcoming from any of them. The group broke up as each went to his own particular luncheon group and discussion of various phases of a subject which they could not really justify as part of a college curriculum and yet which they continue to teach as if the knowledge of it had some inherent value.
He then drew a conclusion.
This incident is by no means unique. The professional historians in this country and in Europe have come to the place where they have little faith in the subject to which they have devoted their lives. Historians with increasing and distressing frequency are openly admitting that history has no meaning and shows little or no purpose or goals. But neither is this anti-intellectual attitude peculiar to the professional historians. The existentialist and positive philosophies have entered into the thinking of most areas of human thought and activity with devastating results. In conjunction with the Freudian school in psychology, they have made a rationalism and anti-intellectualism fashionable and have virtually removed the concepts of purpose and meaning from the thinking of many historians and those who proclaim themselves to be “social scientists.”
Unfortunately, he never wrote a book on the purpose and meaning of history. His article offered no unique insights regarding the Christian way of interpreting and writing history. He was therefore in that distressing position of trying to beat something with nothing.
In my senior year of college in the fall of 1962, I took a course in historiography. I was probably the only student in that course who would have taken it if it had not been required for graduation. One of the least effective teachers in the department taught it. I thoroughly enjoyed it. As part of that course, I read the two articles and the book that Singer referred to in his essay as marking the self-admitted futility of modern historiography. I knew at the time that they were empty shells in terms of offering a coherent epistemology. They were pure subjectivism based on philosophical nominalism.
On Wednesday, it came to me what I must do. I will take the five-point model that I have used in so many of my books, and I will apply it to the theory of history and the theory of how to write history. They are linked. Because non-Marxist historians have no theory of history, they have no theory of how to write history. They have an agreed-upon methodology of research, but they do not have a theory that undergirds this methodology. In this respect, they are like the social sciences.
On Wednesday evening, I had the outline of the book. You can see it here.
I am planning to write one chapter per week. That means that I ought to be able to finish it in four months. It will take a month to index it.
I am confident that the book will not be read by the vast majority of professional historians. But if they did read it, they would hate it because it exposes them as incapable of developing a coherent theory of history. Christian historians will also not read it. They also would not like it, since they have bought into the humanist paradigm in grad school, and they write in terms of it.
I intend to use the book in the final month of my proposed four-year high school course on Western civilization. I want to motivate a few seniors to become professional historians. I want to equip them intellectually and emotionally to make this lifetime commitment and then fulfill it.
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