So far, I have presented a great deal of information regarding history and its interpretation. I have attempted to persuade you of two facts. First, history is not neutral, theologically speaking. I mean its actual structure. I covered this in Part 1. Second, humanistic historians are not neutral toward history and its structure. I covered this in Part 2.
Humanists ever since the fifth century B.C. have adopted some version of the myth of neutrality in order to promote their vision of God, man, law, sanctions, and time. Christian theologians and intellectuals have repeatedly been deceived by this myth. This has compromised their testimony regarding the God of the Bible and His impact in history. This has compromised their testimony in every field of thought and practice in which they have imported the myth of neutrality. This means virtually every field.
In Part 1, I discussed why history itself is not neutral. It is structured in terms of God’s covenant with mankind in Genesis 1:26–28. Now it is time to discuss why historiography cannot be neutral. It cannot be neutral because history is not neutral. God expects men’s historiography to be consistent with the covenantal structure of the processes of history. Men’s historiography must reflect this fundamental underlying structure, which philosophers call metaphysical. Because of the presuppositions of humanism regarding the autonomy of history and the autonomy of man, humanist historiography is always in revolt against God. I discussed this in Part 2.
I recommend a strategy for Christians to begin to reconstruct historiography: study the creeds of Christendom, especially the creed known as the Apostles Creed. It was not a creed written down by the apostles. It grew out of the church’s Council of Nicaea in 325. There are numerous versions of it stretching over centuries. This is called the received form.
I believe in God the Father Almighty; Maker of Heaven and Earth; and in Jesus Christ His only (begotten) Son our Lord; who was conceived by the Holy Ghost, born of the Virgin Mary; suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, dead, and buried; He descended into hell; the third day He rose from the dead; He ascended into heaven; and sitteth at the right hand of God the Father Almighty; from thence He shall come to judge the quick and the dead. I believe in the Holy Ghost; the Holy catholic Church; the communion of saints; the forgiveness of sins; the resurrection of the body; and the life everlasting. Amen. (International Standard Bible Encyclopedia, Vol. 1, Author: James Orr)
In recommending that we begin with the creeds of the church in our attempt to understand the structure of history, I rely heavily on R. J. Rushdoony’s pioneering book: The Foundations of Social Order: Studies in the Creeds and Councils of the Early Church (1968). I regard this book as indispensable for understanding early church history. It has been ignored by the academic community, the Christian intellectual community, and virtually all pastors. It helped structure my thinking when I read it in 1969, when I was beginning to research my doctoral dissertation on the economic thought of Puritan New England.
Chapter 1 is “The Apostles Creed and Creedalism.” In this chapter, he set forth principles of Christian historiography. He started with this principle: creeds govern the way we think in every area of life. Everyone has a creed, either implicit or explicit. There is no neutrality in creeds. Creeds are inescapable concepts. There is no such thing as a creedless society. There is no such thing as a creedless individual. Most people are not self-conscious about their creeds, but they do have opinions regarding God, man, law, sanctions, and time. They have opinions about the way the world works.
Rushdoony made a crucial observation about the uniqueness of the Apostles Creed. I regard his comment as fundamental for a correct understanding Christianity and its impact on the world. The creed makes affirmations concerning history.
The Apostles Creed is unlike all other creeds of other religions, whether humanist, Buddhist, Modern, Hindu, or otherwise. The face of all the religions is in a body of ideas or claims concerning reality. It may be a belief in the ultimacy of man, or the ultimacy of nothingness, in the office of a man (Mohammed as prophet), or an ultimate dualism or monism, but, in any event, it demands a belief in certain ideas or claims. The Apostles Creed is radically different: it offers a synopsis of history, created by God the Father Almighty, requiring salvation by Jesus Christ, His only begotten Son, who entered, lived, died, and was resurrected in history, and is now the Lord and Judge of history. His holy congregation is operative in history, which culminates in the general resurrection and everlasting life. The whole creed therefore is a declaration concerning history (p. 4).
Rushdoony was not aware of the biblical covenant model in 1968. Ray Sutton’s book was published in 1987. Yet, in 1968, he wrote clearly of the five principles undergirding the covenantal structure of history and historiography. He did not present them in the order found in the covenant model for history, but he did present them.
Point 1: Creation
Implicit in this declaration that God the Father Almighty is maker of heaven and earth is the claim of God to be the law-giver, determiner, and sustainer of heaven and earth and of all of history. He is its maker, and it is totally subject therefore to Him. An assertion of the doctrine of creation is also an assertion of the doctrines of sovereignty and of the eternal decree, of predestination (p. 5).
Point 2: Image
If God is the true source [of law], then the Word of God must be hearkened to by church, state, school, and every sphere of life as the one authoritative source of morality and law. As institutions and orders declare law, they must do it ministerially, as administrators under God. The Word of God therefore speaks to every sphere including church and state, and the Word of God is over the church and corrects and disciplines the church (p. 5).
Point 3: Law
The Creed thus has vast implications concerning history because of its declaration that God is the creator of all things. This declaration immediately makes God the source of all ethics, of all morality, and of all law. In all non-Christian systems, the source of ethics and of law is the state; it is the polis, the empire, or the kingdom. There is no understanding the gulf between Aristotle and Plato, for example, and Christianity, apart from this fact, and the gulf cannot be legitimately bridged. Either God is the true source of morality and law, or the state is (p. 5).
Point 4: Imputation
History is a succession of judgments, wherein God comes in clouds of judgment, and all these crises and judgments are for the shaking of the nations, to destroy the reprobate realms of man and to establish by sifting Christ’s faithful in His realm. As God declared through Ezekiel, “I will overturn, overturn, overturn it; and it shall be no more, until he, whose right it is; and I will give it to him” (Ezek. 31:27). The purpose of this overturning, according to St. Paul, is “the removing of the things that are shaken as of things that are made, that the things which cannot be shaken may remain” (Heb. 12:27). The successive judgments have as their purpose the removal of destruction “of all things that are made,” i.e., of the humanistic and apostate orders of history, so that Christ’s kingdom which cannot be shaken may remain.” These are all partial judgments, forerunners to the final judgment (p. 172).
Point 5: Inheritance
Not only a theology, but an eschatology, or doctrine of last things, which renounces history or sees it as defeat, is faithless to Christianity. God is maker of heaven and earth, not Satan. History culminates in God’s plan and triumph, not in Satan’s victory. To the extent that any eschatology involves the victory of evil in history, to that extent it surrenders and retreats from history (p. 5).
There is a war going on between church and state. The church claims to represent God in history, although not as the sole interpreter of God’s word and law. Christianity has always acknowledged the separation of church and state. But the state has not acknowledged the legitimacy of such a separation except when pressured to do so by a strong church. The war between church and state extends back to the confrontation between Moses and Pharaoh. (I cover this in my commentary on Exodus, Volume 1: Representation and Dominion, [2012].)
Christian historiography must recognize the existence of this continual confrontation between Christianity and the humanist state. The absence of a clear-cut exposition of this conflict in history is characteristic of humanist historiography. Unfortunately, it is also characteristic of most Christian historiography. Christian historians do not return again and again to the confrontations between church and state throughout history. They do not regard this confrontation as inherent to history because of the war of the two views of history. Rushdoony made clear the nature of this confrontation. He did so in the chapter on the church.
The more faithful the Church, the greater its visibility, i.e., the more clearly its witness to the word and power of Christ in this world. But the true church is not alone in claiming visibility, and claiming to be the visible representative of Christ’s invisible order. The state claims its own kind of visibility; the state sees itself as the visible expression of the true order of man, and, sometimes also, of whatever gods may be. It then becomes a contest, first, as to who represents God’s true order, and, second, what is the order which is to be represented.The humanistic order strives for visibility, first, as the dominant force in man’s society, as the omnipresent fact on the human scene, and, second, as the new order of salvation. Accordingly, man’s dominant concern in the era of humanism is political, since politics is the area where the hidden deity becomes visible. The 19th century was thus the era of political visibility; the religion of most men tended increasingly to become political. “Democracy” as the hope of the world found its culminating messianic expression in Woodrow Wilson’s dream of making the world safe for democracy by war and diplomacy (p. 181).
Church and state have separate legal jurisdictions. They also have separate systems of law. There is civil law, but there is also canon law, which governs the church. Canon law has a long tradition in the West, yet Christian historiography has generally ignored it. There are no detailed treatises of the historical development of canon law, and especially there are no discussions of the impact of canon law on the church in its development of the principles of Christian civilization. We do not have detailed studies of the interaction between civil law and canon law in confrontations between church and state for domination in society in the West. We need such studies.
In his chapter on canon law, Rushdoony set forth a coherent framework for any discussion of canon law in relationship to civil law. With respect to canon law, he wrote:
The independence of the church required it. Political absolutism, however, then as now, has been hostile to canon law. Instead of the multiple law orders, and multiple variety of courts, which characterized the era of Christian feudalism, absolutism in the state has worked steadily to reduce all human society to one law-order, the state. Every other realm must be subjected to the state rather than to God: the church, economics, science, education, agriculture, the arts, all things are made aspects of the life of the state (rather than of man under God) and therefore under the government of the state (p. 133).
There is a logic behind this. Rushdoony described it: “The supposition of the state in its absolutism is twofold. First, by asserting overall sovereignty and jurisdiction, the state is usurping the power and prerogative of God. The state makes itself the ultimate creator and lawgiver rather than God. Second, the state declares itself to be the true man as well as the true god. Every God-given aspect of the life of man, the state declares both to be its creation and also an aspect of its life” (p. 133).
Rushdoony’s chapter on the Council of Chalcedon (451) is titled: “The Foundation of Western Liberty.” The Council of Chalcedon’s focus of concern was the question of the unique divinity of Christ. It produced this declaration:
Following, then, the holy Fathers, we all unanimously teach that our Lord Jesus Christ is to us One and the same Son, the Self-same Perfect in Godhead, the Self-same Perfect in Manhood; truly God and truly Man; the Self-same of a rational soul and body; co-essential with the Father according to the Godhead, the Self-same co-essential with us according to the Manhood; like us in all things, sin apart; before the ages begotten of the Father as to the Godhead, but in the last days, the Self-same, for us and for our salvation (born) of Mary the Virgin Theotokos as to the Manhood; One and the Same Christ, Son, Lord, Only-begotten; acknowledged in Two Natures unconfusedly, unchangeably, indivisibly, inseparably; the difference of the Natures being in no way removed because of the Union, but rather the properties of each Nature being preserved, and (both) concurring into One Person and One Hypostasis; not as though He was parted or divided into Two Persons, but One and the Self-same Son and Only-begotten God, Word, Lord, Jesus Christ; even as from the beginning the prophets have taught concerning Him, and as the Lord Jesus Christ Himself hath taught us, and as the Symbol of the Fathers hath handed down to us.
Most Christians have never heard of the Council of Chalcedon. They have certainly never read what you have just read. When they read it, they do not ask this question: “What has this to do with Western liberty?” Rushdoony made it clear exactly what this had to do with Western liberty. This declaration was a denial of the possibility of the divinity of man or of any agency of man. This declaration is as important today as it was in 451. He wrote:
The problem centered on the definition of the two natures of Christ and their union. Behind the problem stood the resurgence of Hellenic philosophy in Christian guise and the claims of the state to be the divine order on earth, to be the incarnation of divinity in history. The Hellenic faith held to a radically different concept of being than did biblical faith. The Christian distinction between the uncreated being of God and the created being of man and the universe placed an infinite gulf between the two, a gulf unbridgeable by nature and bridged only by grace, by grace of the salvation and by grace permitting a union or community of life, not of substance. For the Greeks, as for non-Christian religions generally, all being is one undivided being; the differences in being are of degree, not of kind. In this great chain of being, it is a question of place on the scale or ladder of being, whereas for Christian faith the difference is one of divine and uncreated being as against created and mortal being.In terms of this Greek perspective, salvation is not an act of grace but rather of self-deification. Moreover, the central institution in history becomes the state, because the state as the highest point in power in history maintains the nascent or incarnate divinity of being either in the body politic, the rulers, or in their offices. In various forms, this faith was the substructure of all pagan statism. Thus, the issue very literally was one between Christ and Caesar (pp. 63–64).
I am aware of no textbook on the history of Western civilization that is written self-consciously in terms of the theological conflict between humanism and Christianity. There is no textbook that describes the creeds and councils of the early church as setting forth the principles of Western liberty. Obviously, we cannot find textbooks written by humanists that explain this. The problem is that we cannot find textbooks written by Christians that explain this.
Chalcedon challenged more than humanistic political theory. It challenged non-Christian views of the structure of history. “Statist theology however demands that time govern eternity, and man govern whatever god exists, or, better, be his own god. Any theology which weakens the Definition of Chalcedon weakens the primacy of the triune God over history, and any theology which denies Chalcedon must of necessity to affirm history as the primary area of determination. Time then alone is the source of the historical, and the supernatural is denied” (p. 75).
Any denial of Chalcedon’s declaration goes beyond weakening the primacy of the triune God. It is a denial of the divinity of Christ. “God the Son not only does not determine time in history, He is denied historicity because He demands reference to the ontological Trinity, to eternity, to be understood. The only Christ permitted is a totally human Christ, one totally immersed in time and exclusively and totally a product of history. This is ‘the historical Jesus’ of higher criticism. ‘Demythologizing’ criticism has a similar goal: to reduce Jesus to history, to a total meaning from within history” (p. 75).
Few Christians understand the nature of the comprehensive challenge to Christ’s divinity by humanism. Is also a challenge to biblical ethics. Here is the issue: “A God who is not the creator is an alien to the universe: it is its own evolving law. A God who is truly the savior of the world is of necessity its creator: He has made it, and its only possible health is in the restoration to communion with Him. His law therefore as the only truly regulative principle for the world” (p. 77). “Sovereignty, duty, and law are inseparably united. The source of law in any system is not only the locale of sovereignty but also the god of that system. God only is the true sovereign and the true source of law” (p. 77).
Chalcedon’s declaration made it clear that Jesus Christ has two natures: divine and human. As the Incarnation of the Second Person of the Trinity, Jesus Christ was God, but His perfect human nature was not divine. Man did not become God. This declaration was crucial for the maintenance of liberty. “To have permitted belief in the confusion of the natures would have meant that man could become an aspect of his own God, aspire to be, in his union with Christ, his own lawmaker and co-creator. Humanity would have been introduced into deity, not in a community of life but in a community of substance” (p. 78).
Thus, he concluded, “In the Christian view, man’s life is not comprehended by the state; it is comprehended only by the triune God. Man’s unity is only truly realizable in God and His Kingdom; man’s individuality is again only realizable in and through God. This means that man’s eternal destiny is a predestined one and bound to the grace of the ultimate One and Many, the Trinity. But it also means that man’s present life is freed from the predestination of the state. Man’s self-realization is not in the state but in God” (p. 79).
With this as background, I now discuss Christian historiography. Christians must be self-conscious in their understanding of the comprehensive warfare between the kingdom of God and the kingdom of man. This understanding must govern what Christians think about every area of life. They should be alert to the invasion by humanism and the categories of humanism into their thinking in every area of life. Christian historiography must be comprehensive. It must reconstruct the history of man in terms of the battle between the kingdom of God and the kingdom of man. Who is Lord? Who is sovereign? Christians must be clear in their answer. This means that they must also be clear in their discussion of history. They must understand history in terms of this covenantal warfare. Sadly, they have not been given guidance in this battle by Christian leaders. Self-conscious Christians who understand the nature of this warfare are rare. Therefore, most Christians have been guided by Christian leaders who have been confused about the comprehensive nature of the confrontation between the kingdom of God and the kingdom of man. Christian historians have rewritten history in ways that make it more humanistic in tone and content than Christian. Christian historians in their writing ignore God. They do not mention the providence of God. They ignore the laws of God. They ignore the structure of historical sanctions that God announced to the generation of the conquest.
When thou hast eaten and art full, then thou shalt bless the Lord thy God for the good land which he hath given thee. Beware that thou forget not the Lord thy God, in not keeping his commandments, and his judgments, and his statutes, which I command thee this day: Lest when thou hast eaten and art full, and hast built goodly houses, and dwelt therein; And when thy herds and thy flocks multiply, and thy silver and thy gold is multiplied, and all that thou hast is multiplied; Then thine heart be lifted up, and thou forget the Lord thy God, which brought thee forth out of the land of Egypt, from the house of bondage; Who led thee through that great and terrible wilderness, wherein were fiery serpents, and scorpions, and drought, where there was no water; who brought thee forth water out of the rock of flint; Who fed thee in the wilderness with manna, which thy fathers knew not, that he might humble thee, and that he might prove thee, to do thee good at thy latter end; And thou say in thine heart, My power and the might of mine hand hath gotten me this wealth. But thou shalt remember the Lord thy God: for it is he that giveth thee power to get wealth, that he may establish his covenant which he sware unto thy fathers, as it is this day (Deuteronomy 8:10–18).
Christians today have eaten and are full. In every area of life, they have begun to forget the God whose sanctions have blessed them. They have offered thanks to modern science, modern politics, and modern economics for their blessings. It is time for Christians to rethink sovereignty, authority, law, sanctions, and time in terms of the biblical covenant. It is time for them to become highly suspicious of history as interpreted by covenant-breakers. It is time for them to adopt biblical historiography.
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