Relativism, the modern corollary to skepticism, is the belief that truth is relative to the position of the person making a statement. It has generated a pervasive lack of confidence in the ability to find truth or even to establish that there is such a thing as the truth. Relativism leads directly to a questioning of the ideal of objectivity, because it undermines the belief that people can get outside of themselves in order to get at the truth. If truth depends on the observer standpoint, how can there be any transcendent, universal, or absolute truth, or at least truths that hold for all groups for many generations? – Appleby, Hunt, and Jacob, 1994.
Part 3 of the biblical covenant model is ethics.
Part 3 of Christian social theory is law.
Part 3 of humanistic thought, including a theory of history, is ethical relativism. The modern form of ethical relativism was developed by eighteenth-century Scottish Enlightenment thinkers, above all David Hume. They were pioneers of the idea of unplanned social evolution. Charles Darwin picked up this idea and applied it to biological evolution: unplanned biological evolution through natural impersonal selection. This substitution of unplanned yet coherent biological change led to the intellectuals’ widespread abandonment of natural law theory by 1900. Then came Freud’s theories of human psychology.
Darwinian evolutionism undermines all standards. There is no way to show that, for an evolving species in an evolving impersonal universe, there are fundamental principles of ethics that must not be broken. Ethical standards are constantly changing, along with society. This means that there can be no legitimate appeal to a fixed source of ethics that shows men exactly which ethical principles are dominant in any given era. The flux of history undermines the continuity of ethical standards. This is the basis of modern relativism. This is situation ethics.
In 1994, three outstanding female historians wrote an incisive and yet readable book: Telling the Truth About History. All three taught at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA): Joyce Appleby, Lynn Hunt, and Margaret Jacob. The book was fairly long: over 300 pages. It covered the debates over scientific history versus modernity. It talked about national histories and how they have shaped national consciousness. It described the breakdown in historians’ confidence about the results of their own work and the work of their peers. I began this chapter with their statement on page 7.
The most important statement in the book is on page 257. The authors probably would not regard this as the most important statement, but that is because they are not Christians. Here is the statement: “Objectivity remains with the object. As one contemporary philosopher trenchantly put it, ‘Objectivity does not require taking God’s perspective, which is impossible.’” (This is their footnote: Mark Johnson, Body and the Mind: The Bodily Basis of Meaning, Imagination, and Reason, 1987, p. 212.) Prof. Johnson affirmed the presupposition of modern humanist epistemology regarding objective truth: objectivity does not require taking God’s perspective. He had it backwards. Objectivity is impossible if you do not take God’s perspective. You must accept the idea of a Trinitarian God who providentially controls the world and imputes meaning to it. He is the cosmic judge, and He judges everything. This judgment is objective. Without this as the presupposition of all knowledge, objective knowledge disappears in the cacophony of humanism’s conflicting historical interpretations, none of which invokes God as the foundation of objective truth.
The three authors did their best to avoid a complete rejection of the idea of objective history. Yet they had to admit that historians subjectively impute meaning to the past. This imputation is basic to humanism’s understanding of history. Men have no access to objective history, assuming it exists, apart from subjective interpretations of the past. This is why, on the basis of their humanism, the three authors failed to make the case for the possibility of objective historiography. They preferred it, but they did not explain the basis of their preference. They insisted that it can exist, but they did not explain the intellectual foundations of their faith. They did not show how historians’ purely subjective interpretations can get back to bedrock objective history. They also did not show how competing views of the past can be reconciled in terms of the presuppositions of humanistic historians regarding history and historiography. They did their best, and it is as good a job as you are likely to read from within the camp of humanist historians, but they failed.
They identified the two most prominent advocates of the concept of historical relativism: Carl Becker and Charles Beard.
As early as the 1930s, the American Progressive historians Carl Becker and Charles Beard raised the clarion call of historical relativism by insisting that every man (their term) would write his own history. They seemed to imply that since every man had his own version of history, history functioned as a cultural myth rather than as an objective account of the past (a position not far from Nietzsche’s). They argued that the ideal of a definitive, objective reconstruction of the past was chemerical. Facts did not present themselves directly to the historian; the historian picked and chose among them, guided by his ideological presuppositions. In Beard’s words, the historian performed “an act of faith,” based on subjective decision not a purely objective discovery. Thus, not long after historians have established their discipline as an autonomous field of study emulating scientific methods of research, belief in its scientific status and capacity for objectivity began to waver (pp. 216–17).
I agree with their assessment of the importance of the statements by Becker and Beard. These were important declarations that have shaped the thinking of historians from the early 1930's until today. For this reason, I analyze Becker’s presentation in detail in this chapter. In the next chapter, I analyze Beard’s essay in terms of a related issue: nominalism. Nominalism is the philosophical foundation of Becker’s relativism and relativism in general. Nominalism denies objective truth. Nominalism is the philosophy of subjective imputation by multiple observers.
Philosophical, ethical, and historical relativism stem from covenant-breaking men’s assertion of autonomy. Mankind is not unified. Mankind is multiple. Every man has his own opinions. Once a man declares his autonomy from God, he must substitute another worldview. Most men do not do this self-consciously, but all men have a deeply religious view of the way the world works. The doctrine of historical relativism is an outworking of covenant-breaking men’s assertions of autonomy. I have dealt with autonomy in Chapter 7. It is now time to deal with the issue of relativism.
1. A Turning Point Speech
Carl Becker’s 1931 presidential address to the American Historical Association’s annual convention remains the most famous presidential address in the organization’s history: “Everyman His Own Historian.” The AHA has had a tradition stretching back over a century regarding presidential addresses. At the annual meeting, someone is elected president for the next year. His primary task is to deliver the presidential address at the next convention. The people elected to the position are regarded by their peers as exemplary scholars. It is an honor to be elected. Most AHA presidents write a speech suitable for a general presentation. They rarely write on some narrow topic that would be of interest only to specialists in the presidents’ professional niches. They write speeches that they think will be of interest to their peers, and perhaps even gain some influence. The model for such speeches is Becker’s speech.
In a symposium held in 1984, two college-level historians and a high school history teacher delivered papers on Becker’s influence in the historical profession. One of the papers was by Milton Klein: “Everyman His Own Historian: Carl Becker and Historiography.” He began with this observation: “It received a standing ovation and created shock waves in the historical profession that have not yet subsided.” (The History Teacher, November 1985, p. 101.)
Becker’s speech dealt with the important issue of objectivity versus subjectivity. He came down squarely on the side of subjectivism. In doing so, he came down squarely on the side of historical relativism.
2. Methodological Dualism
Becker began with a description of his methodology. (I use the pagination of the original article, published in The American Historical Review in January 1932). “Once upon a time, long long ago, I learned how to reduce a fraction to its lowest terms. Whether I could still perform that operation is uncertain; but the discipline involved in early training had its uses, since it taught me that in order to understand the essential nature of anything it is well to strip it of all superficial and irrelevant accretions—in short, to reduce it to its lowest terms. That operation I now venture, with some apprehension and all due apologies, to perform on the subject of history” (p. 221).
He was searching for some sort of Parmenidean core of human history, something that can withstand the test of time. The test of time is Heraclitus’ flowing river of history. “Panta rhei,” he supposedly declared in Greek: “everything flows.” But, if everything flows, then whirl is king. There is no hard core of history. Only that which is timeless can survive this onslaught, but only because it has no connection with history.
Then Becker introduced another dualism. This was at the core of his historiography. There is a dualism in his definition of history: the objective events of the past vs. the subjective reconstruction of the past. This dualism is basic to all humanistic theories of history. Becker’s definition was in no sense unique. He was challenging the concept of objective past events. He was also challenging the concept of objective historiography. He was rejecting the tradition of positive historiography that became widely accepted among academic historians in the mid-nineteenth century. It was called scientific history. Becker rejected the concept. Why? First, because the past is dead and gone.
I ought first of all to explain that when I use the term history I mean knowledge of history. No doubt throughout all past time there actually occurred a series of events which, whether we know what it was or not, constitutes history in some ultimate sense. Nevertheless, much the greater part of these events we can know nothing about, not even that they occurred; many of them we can know only imperfectly; and even the few events that we think we know for sure we can never be absolutely certain of, since we can never revive them, never observe or test them directly. The event itself once occurred, but as an actual event it has disappeared; so that in dealing with it the only objective reality we can observe or test is some material trace which the event has left—usually a written document (p. 221).
Second, this raised the issue of the proper use of documentation. This issue in turn raises a series of related issues. He asked a fundamental question: to what extent do documents enable historians to imagine the past?
With these traces of vanished events, these documents, we must be content since they are all we have; from them we infer what the event was, we affirm that it is a fact that the event was so and so. We do not say “Lincoln is assassinated”; we say “it is a fact that Lincoln was assassinated.” The event was, but is no longer; it is only the affirmed fact about the event that is, that persists, and will persist until we discover that our affirmation is wrong or inadequate. Let us then admit that there are two histories: the actual series of events that once occurred; and the ideal series that we affirm and hold in memory. The first is absolute and unchanged—it was what it was whatever we do or say about it; the second is relative, always changing in response to the increase or refinement of knowledge. The two series correspond more or less, it is our aim to make the correspondence as exact as possible; but the actual series of events exists for us only in terms of the ideal series which we affirm and hold in memory. This is why I am forced to identify history with knowledge of history. For all practical purposes history is, for us and for the time being, what we know it to be (pp. 221–22).
Conclusion: history does not have any independent existence apart from historians’ imaginations. Becker was arguing for the same concept of history that Collingwood defended in far greater detail four years later. Because he self-consciously repudiated the idea of a sovereign God who rules over all events, imputes meaning to all events, and guides the preservation of historical records, Becker invoked the sovereignty of the historian to provide meaning to the past. But this is a weak sovereignty. “Even the few events that we think we know for sure we can never be absolutely certain of, since we can never revive them, never observe or test them directly.” Then in what sense is there original history? How do we know what happened? The events are gone. Were they ever objective? Events move from the present to the past instantly. Everything flows. A person imputes meaning to the world around him, including the flow of events. There is recent history and ancient history, but it is all imputed history. There are no brute facts, Van Til insisted. There are only interpreted facts. Becker came to the same conclusion. “The event was, but is no longer; it is only the affirmed fact about the event that is, that persists, and will persist until we discover that our affirmation is wrong or inadequate.”
3. Discarding Objective History
He said there are two histories. “Let us then admit that there are two histories: the actual series of events that once occurred; and the ideal series that we affirm and hold in memory. The first is absolute and unchanged—it was what it was whatever we do or say about it; the second is relative, always changing in response to the increase or refinement of knowledge.” But he did not explain how there can be an original, unchanging, objective history. His presentation militated against any concept of objective history. “The two series correspond more or less, it is our aim to make the correspondence as exact as possible; but the actual series of events exists for us only in terms of the ideal series which we affirm and hold in memory.” In the context of his epistemology, this is a weasel phrase: “more or less.” How much more? How much less? By what standard? How do we discover this standard? How do we apply it accurately to the historical documents? So far, his essay is a muddle of contradictions.
He still had not come up with a definition of history. He listed several. “History is the knowledge of events that have occurred in the past.” There is a problem with this definition. What is knowledge? “Resenting a definition that denies me the title of historian, I therefore ask what is most essential to knowledge. Well, memory, I should think (and I mean memory in the broad sense, the memory of events inferred as well as the memory of events observed); other things are necessary too, but memory is fundamental: without memory no knowledge. So our definition becomes, ‘History is the memory of events that have occurred in the past’” (p. 222).
Memory is a slippery concept, as he knew. It is subjective. It includes so many events. “An occurrence need not be spectacular to be an event.” So, he offered this: “History is the memory of things said and done in the past.” But what is the past? “The word is both misleading and unnecessary,” he immediately added. “Therefore I will omit that word, and our definition becomes, ‘History is the memory of things said and done.’ This is a definition that reduces history to its lowest terms, and yet includes everything that is essential to understanding what it really is” (pp. 222–23).
This got him nowhere. First, whose memory? Everyone has memories. Second, which things were said and done? Third, who said them? Fourth, who did them? Fifth, how accurate are the records? Sixth, whose memory is authoritative? Seventh, why? Here is the epistemological nightmare of nominalism. If every man is his own historian, cacophony drowns out memories of professional historians.
At this point, Becker began his long section on how everyman is his own historian. “If the essence of history is the memory of things said and done, then it is obvious that every normal person, Mr. Everyman, knows some history.”
4. Mr. Everyman
He then presented a story of a man who wants to find out whether he ordered a shipment of coal. This man goes looking for evidence. Becker filled three pages of his 15-page essay with a discussion of Mr. Everyman and his quest for information about a coal delivery. In this sense, he achieved his stated goal. This surely came close to being the lowest common denominator. “I have tried to reduce history to its lowest terms. . .” (p. 223).
He said that he suspected—he was not sure—that “memory of the past and anticipation of future events work together, go hand in hand as it were in a friendly way without disputing over priority or leadership” (p. 227). This was hardly a sophisticated assessment. He continued:
At all events they go together, so that in a very real sense it is impossible to divorce history from life: Mr. Everyman can not do what he needs or desires to do without recalling past events; he can not recall past events without in some subtle fashion relating them to what he needs or desires to do. This is the natural function of history, of history reduced to its lowest terms, of history conceived as the memory of things said and done: memory of things said and done (whether in our immediate yesterdays or in the long past of mankind), running hand in hand with the anticipation of things to be said and done, enables us, each to the extent of his knowledge and imagination, to be intelligent, to push back the narrow confines of the fleeting present moment so that what we are doing may be judged in the light of what we have done and what we hope to do. In this sense all living history, as Croce says, is contemporaneous: in so far as we think the past (and otherwise the past, however fully related in documents, is nothing to us) it becomes an integral and living part of our present world of semblance (p. 227).
He invoked judgment, which is itself an aspect of imputation: “. . . what we are doing may be judged in the light of what we have done and what we hope to do.” Judged by whom? There is no God, he believed. How is one person’s judgment better than anyone else’s? If all opinions are equal, then there is no way to judge historical accuracy. Everyone can impute his own meaning to the past. Becker understood that this was the logical implication of his position. So, he challenged his listeners with a task that has no solution in a world without a sovereign God as the judge. They had to find a way to reconcile conflicting interpretations of the past.
It must then be obvious that living history, the ideal series of events that we affirm and hold in memory, since it is so intimately associated with what we are doing and with what we hope to do, can not be precisely the same for all at any given time, or the same for one generation as for another. History in this sense can not be reduced to a verifiable set of statistics or formulated in terms of universally valid mathematical formulas. It is rather an imaginative creation, a personal possession which each one of us, Mr. Everyman, fashions out of his individual experience, adapts to his practical or emotional needs, and adorns as well as may be to suit his aesthetic tastes. In thus creating his own history, there are, nevertheless, limits which Mr. Everyman may not overstep without incurring penalties. The limits are set by his fellows. If Mr. Everyman lived quite alone in an unconditioned world he would be free to affirm and hold in memory any ideal series of events that struck his fancy, and thus create a world of semblance quite in accord with the heart’s desire. Unfortunately, Mr. Everyman has to live in a world of Browns and Smiths; a sad experience, which has taught him the expediency of recalling certain events with much exactness (pp. 227–28).
Mr. Everyman lives in a world of constant change. He remembers little of it. He lives in a fog of facts. But so do we all, if everyman is an historian.
Daily and hourly, from a thousand unnoted sources, there is lodged in Mr. Everyman’s mind a mass of unrelated and related information and misinformation, of impressions and images, out of which he somehow manages, undeliberately for the most part, to fashion a history, a patterned picture of remembered things said and done in past times and distant places. It is not possible, it is not essential, that this picture should be complete or completely true: it is essential that it should be useful to Mr. Everyman; and that it may be useful to him he will hold in memory, of all the things he might hold in memory, those things only which can be related with some reasonable degree of relevance and harmony to his idea of himself and of what he is doing in the world and what he hopes to do (p. 229).
Becker referred to something he called “the specious present.” What does specious mean? Here is one definition: “superficially plausible, but actually wrong.” It means something other than the objective present. Becker did not believe in an objective present. He wrote: “The extent to which the specious present may thus be enlarged and enriched will depend upon knowledge, the artificial extension of memory, the memory of things said and done in the past and distant places. But not upon knowledge alone; rather upon knowledge directed by purpose. The specious present is an unstable pattern of thought, incessantly changing in response to our immediate perceptions and the purposes that arise therefrom” (pp. 226–27). How can Mr. Everyman make sense of the specious present around him? He must learn to be creative. “In constructing this more remote and far-flung pattern of remembered things, Mr. Everyman works with something of the freedom of a creative artist; the history which he imaginatively recreates as an artificial extension of his personal experience will inevitably be an engaging blend of fact and fancy, a mythical adaptation of that which actually happened. In part it will be true, in part false; as a whole perhaps neither true nor false, but only the most convenient form of error” (pp. 229–30). In short, Mr. Everyman creates myths. These myths are mixtures of fact and fancy. Becker was steadily moving to a conclusion: the historian’s task is myth-making. “What then of us, historians by profession? What have we to do with Mr. Everyman, or he with us? More, I venture to believe, than we are apt to think. For each of us is Mr. Everyman too. Each of us is subject to the limitations of time and place; and for each of us, no less than for the Browns and Smiths of the world, the pattern of remembered things said and done will be woven, safeguard the process how we may, at the behest of circumstance and purpose” (p. 230).
Becker based his case for the legitimacy of history and historical writing on nominalism. He did not use the word, but he used the concept. The problem that every nominalist faces is this one: from the point of view of epistemology, it is every man for himself. (See Chapter 9.) Yet Becker was speaking to an assembly of professional historians. They thought of themselves as belonging to a profession. They did not believe that Mr. Everyman was in their league. To believe such a thing would be to commit professional suicide. It would mean giving up the profession and all of the benefits thereof. So, Becker invoked professionalism. But what kind of professionalism?
5. Historians as Myth-Makers
He reduced historiography to literature. Historians work with what he called “artificial memories.”
True it is that although each of us is Mr. Everyman, each is something more than his own historian. Mr. Everyman, being but an informal historian, is under no bond to remember what is irrelevant to his personal affairs. But we are historians by profession. Our profession, less intimately bound up with the practical activities, is to be directly concerned with the ideal series of events that is only of casual or occasional import to others; it is our business in life to be ever preoccupied with that far-flung pattern of artificial memories that encloses and completes the central pattern of individual experience. We are Mr. Everybody’s historian as well as our own, since our histories serve the double purpose, which written histories have always served, of keeping alive the recollection of memorable men and events. We are thus of that ancient and honorable company of wise men of the tribe, of bards and story-tellers and minstrels, of soothsayers and priests, to whom in successive ages has been entrusted the keeping of the useful myths (pp. 230–31).
He reduced historians to bards and storytellers: masters of poetry. In short, professional historians really are the same as Mr. Everyman is. They are creators of myths.
Let not the harmless, necessary word “myth” put us out of countenance. In the history of history a myth is a once valid but now discarded version of the human story, as our now valid versions will in due course be relegated to the category of discarded myths. With our predecessors, the bards and story-tellers and priests, we have therefore this in common: that it is our function, as it was theirs, not to create, but to preserve and perpetuate the social tradition; to harmonize, as well as ignorance and prejudice permit, the actual and the remembered series of events; to enlarge and enrich the specious present common to us all to the end that “society” (the tribe, the nation, or all mankind) may judge of what it is doing in the light of what it has done and what it hopes to do (p. 231).
Yet the word “myth” is not harmless. It is almost invariably used by common people as referring to stories that are not true. But that is exactly what Becker was proclaiming. The present is specious, he said. We construct our historical narratives—our myths—based on the specious world around us. We work with documents from the past. That is to say, we reinterpret the past in terms of our creative attempt to make sense of the specious world around us. It is a world of chaos. There is no God. There is no providence. There is only a series of inherently meaningless events.
On this philosophical basis, in what ways do written records allow historians to differentiate fact from fiction? Men interpret historical documents in terms of their creative imputation of meaning to what Becker called the specious present. He insisted that it is possible to differentiate historical narratives from literary myths. He wrote that “with the increase and refinement of knowledge the historian recognizes that his first duty is to be sure of his facts, let their meaning be what it may” (p. 232). Meaning is not fixed. Yet he immediately revoked this assertion. “Nevertheless, in every age history is taken to be a story of actual events from which a significant meaning may be derived; and in every age the illusion is that the present version is valid because the related facts are true, whereas former versions are invalid because based upon inaccurate or inadequate facts” (p. 232). He said that “in every age history is taken to be a story of actual events” (p. 232). He used the passive voice. I ask: taken by whom? On what objective basis? He offered no answers. Historians move from illusion to illusion.
It is worth noting at this point that Aristotle believed that poetry is far more important than history. He wrote: “What we have said already makes it further clear that a poet's object is not to tell what actually happened but what could and would happen either probably or inevitably. The difference between a historian and a poet is not that one writes in prose and the other in verse—indeed the writings of Herodotus could be put into verse and yet would still be a kind of history, whether written in metre or not. The real difference is this, that one tells what happened and the other what might happen. For this reason poetry is something more scientific and serious than history, because poetry tends to give general truths while history gives particular facts” (Poetics, 1451a-b). This outlook is anti-biblical to the core. The Bible presents history as the arena of a great covenantal battle between two kingdoms. History has eternal consequences for individuals. Poetry does not. By reducing historiography to poetics, Becker trivialized both history and historiography.
6. Relativism vs. Relativism
Becker brought his speech to a conclusion. He was a systematic relativist. He told his audience that what he had just said was tentative. At some point, his view will be replaced.
I do not present this view of history as one that is stable and must prevail. Whatever validity it may claim, it is certain, on its own premises, to be supplanted; for its premises, imposed upon us by the climate of opinion in which we live and think, predispose us to regard all things, and all principles of things, as no more than “inconstant modes or fashions,” as but the “concurrence, renewed from moment to moment, of forces parting sooner or later on their way.” It is the limitation of the genetic approach to human experience that it must be content to transform problems since it can never solve them. However accurately we may determine the “facts” of history, the facts themselves and our interpretations of them, and our interpretation of our own interpretations, will be seen in a different perspective or a less vivid light as mankind moves into the unknown future.
Everything is up for grabs. Every successful grab will be matched by a series of myths that defend the grabbing. There can be no common narrative.
Regarded historically, as a process of becoming, man and his world can obviously be understood only tentatively, since it is by definition something still in the making, something as yet unfinished. Unfortunately for the “permanent contribution” and the universally valid philosophy, time passes; time, the enemy of man as the Greeks thought; to-morrow and to-morrow and to-morrow creeps in this petty pace, and all our yesterdays diminish and grow dim: so that, in the lengthening perspective of the centuries, even the most striking events (the Declaration of Independence, the French Revolution, the Great War itself; like the Diet of Worms before them, like the signing of the Magna Carta and the coronation of Charlemagne and the crossing of the Rubicon and the battle of Marathon) must inevitably, for posterity, fade away into pale replicas of the original picture, for each succeeding generation losing, as they recede into a more distant past, some significance that once was noted in them, some quality of enchantment that once was theirs (p. 236).
As history continues, the facts that we think are important today will be forgotten. They will disappear because the memories of them will disappear. The extension of history down through the ages guarantees the annulment of what we call history. Mr. Everyman is sovereign, and he has a short memory.
This was a message of extreme pessimism regarding historical understanding. It was greeted with a standing ovation.
Appleby, Hunt, and Jacob commented on the relevance of Becker’s lecture today. “Within the context of universities more democratized anything Beard or Becker could imagine, cultural warfare erupted along a front running from history and literature to law and education” (p. 217). They referred to cultural history, also known as multiculturalism. This has been a battleground of conflicting presuppositions and methodologies. They commented: “When swimming in culture, neither causes nor effects could be distinguished. As a consequence, cultural history and the philosophical issues of relativism and skepticism began to intersect and reinforce each other” (p. 223). They discussed the impact of postmodernism. Postmodernism is radical relativism. It affects all of the cultural and humanistic disciplines. Postmodernists challenge the cultural authority of artifacts, including written texts, in shaping thought and culture. They insist that the texts do not refer to anything beyond themselves. Analysts therefore must confine their comments to a text, not to the meaning imputed to them by the wider culture. I put it this way: texts are radically autonomous. The three historians spelled out in detail the implications of such a worldview. “But postmodern theories of interpretation invariably go further than simply insisting on the integrity of the cultural artifact. They challenge all endeavors to relate culture or discourse or text to something outside or beneath it, either to nature or material circumstances, and in so doing they undermine the traditional foundations of knowledge claims in both the natural and human sciences. If postmodern theories are taken seriously, there is [sic] no transhistorical or transcendent grounds for interpretation, and human beings have no unmediated access to the world of things or events” (p. 225).
The authors nowhere discussed what should be obvious: postmodernism’s epistemology, if adhered to by historians, would produce cultural Alzheimer’s disease. Without transhistorical or transcendent grounds for interpretation, no school of humanist thought, including any school of historical thought, can avoid the implications of postmodernism. The postmodernists are more consistent in spelling out the inevitable implications of a worldview that denies transcendence: the fragmentation of knowledge. This leads to skepticism and relativism. The three authors valiantly attempted to defend the concept of historical objectivity against the onslaughts of the postmodernists, but their attempt was in vain. They and their peers, going back to the Renaissance, have adopted the worldview of the postmodernists, namely, that there is no transcendent appeal beyond history that would enable mankind to identify truth.
Rushdoony saw the implications of this long before postmodernism appeared on the scene. He wrote this in 1967 in The Biblical Philosophy of History.
First, by removing God from the universe and making history impersonal, morality is removed from history and process replaces it. By this simple act man transfers himself, in his thinking, from a sinner to a victim. The result is a tremendous "advance" for humanistic man. It removes him from the criminal’s bench and puts him in the role of plaintiff. In the role of criminal, of sinner, man is the object of God’s judgment and legal action. In the role of plaintiff, man is the party who begins in action at law. Man thereby makes himself an accuser of any God who may appear on the scene against him.Second, by removing God from the universe, man gives priority to himself and his own purposes. The universe in history, instead of being under the sovereign purposes of the triune God, are instead open to the attempt of scientific, humanistic man to impose his will and purpose upon them. Man becomes thereby his own god and sovereign. It is to man’s advantage therefore to ridicule the concept of a personal God expressing his wrath and judgment in history. A mindless universe is preferred, because it can beget a man-God to govern that “open” universe (p. 76).
Whenever self-proclaimed autonomous men adapt faith in a mindless universe, they find themselves unable to persuade others of the truths that they hold dear. It is their word against the silence of the impersonal universe. It is their word against entropy: the heat death of the universe. (See Chapter 10.)
“My truth is just as good as yours!” This is the reigning affirmation of nominalists. What they really mean is this: “My truth is better than yours.” But they cannot get other people to accept the truth of their affirmation. This produces relativism.
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