And the eyes of them both were opened, and they knew that they were naked; and they sewed fig leaves together, and made themselves aprons. And they heard the voice of the Lord God walking in the garden in the cool of the day: and Adam and his wife hid themselves from the presence of the Lord God amongst the trees of the garden. And the Lord God called unto Adam, and said unto him, Where art thou? And he said, I heard thy voice in the garden, and I was afraid, because I was naked; and I hid myself. And he said, Who told thee that thou wast naked? Hast thou eaten of the tree, whereof I commanded thee that thou shouldest not eat? And the man said, The woman whom thou gavest to be with me, she gave me of the tree, and I did eat. And the Lord God said unto the woman, What is this that thou hast done? And the woman said, The serpent beguiled me, and I did eat (Genesis 3:7–13).
Part 4 of the biblical covenant model is oath. Every covenant is established by an oath between God and man. Sanctions are attached to every covenant oath.
Part 4 of biblical social theory is sanctions.
Point 4 of biblical historiography is retroactive justice. Biblical justice is attained by imitating a trial conducted by God. So is biblical mercy. God conducted this trial in the garden of Eden. He will conduct a trial for all mankind at the final judgment.
The story of mankind after the fall is this: the transition from wrath to grace. God imposes negative sanctions on covenant-breakers in history. But He also grants the mercy. He does so on the basis of a series of informal trials. All of human history reflects the outcome of these trials. There is a mixture of wrath and grace in all of them. It is the task of Christian historians to assess the effects of both wrath and grace in history, person by person and institution by institution.
There will be justice at the final judgment. For covenant-breakers, there will be no additional mercy.
Genesis 1 and 2 present the story of the first phase of history: the transition from grace to wrath. This phase did not last long. Genesis 3 presents the story of the transgression of God’s law. Ethics is point 3 of the biblical covenant model. It has to do with boundaries: judicial and moral.
There was a judicial boundary around the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. God verbally marked this boundary in Genesis 2. He told Adam not to eat of this tree. Adam and Eve violated this prohibition. So began the story of history through Revelation 20: the transition from wrath to grace.
The story of the fall of man is a story of the violation of God’s law. It is also the story of how God deals in history with people who violate His law. It is the story of a trial, sanctions, and a declaration by God about future conflict between kingdoms.
First, God suspected that something was wrong. It was wrong in terms of the environment. It was also wrong in terms of his moral standards. Adam and Eve were missing. They were not doing their work in the midst of the garden. The garden was a walled-off area of their responsibility. It was to serve as a training ground for them. They should have been at work, but they were not. This was a specific area of inquiry. “What is going on?” This was the what question.
Second, God began an inquiry to find out where they were. “And the Lord God called unto Adam, and said unto him, Where art thou?” (Genesis 3:9). He knew where they were supposed to be, but they were not there. So, there was a location aspect of the inquiry. This was the where question.
Third, when God called out to Adam, He expected Adam to answer. Adam did answer: “And he said, I heard thy voice in the garden, and I was afraid, because I was naked; and I hid myself” (v. 10). When did this happen? God did not ask, but there was evidence available: they had sewn fig leaves for themselves. This had taken time, but it had not taken much time. They had ceased their labors in the garden on behalf of God. They had begun labors on their own behalf. They had adopted a new form of living: living autonomously. But this had only recently begun. This was the when question.
Fourth, “And he said, Who told thee that thou wast naked?” (v. 11a). It was clear who had told them this: each other. This was the first step in their lifetime journey of knowing good and evil. It was the first step in mankind’s lifetime journey of knowing good and evil. This was the who question.
Fifth, God asked a what question: “Hast thou eaten of the tree, whereof I commanded thee that thou shouldest not eat?” (v. 11b) Adam answered, and in doing so, he answered the question of why: “And the man said, The woman whom thou gavest to be with me, she gave me of the tree, and I did eat” (v. 12). God then asked Eve the same what question. She had a variation of Adam’s why answer. “And the Lord God said unto the woman, What is this that thou hast done? And the woman said, The serpent beguiled me, and I did eat” (v. 13).
These five questions are familiar to historians and journalists: what, where, when, who, and why? There is the subordinate question: how? In the case of the story of the fall of man, this trial answers mankind’s universal question: “How did we get into this mess?” Every society has had an answer for this question. It is an inescapable question because of the magnitude and the universality of the mess that mankind has been in ever since the fall of man.
God brought a covenant lawsuit against Adam and Eve in response to their violation of the judicial boundaries around the tree. He knew exactly what had happened. Nevertheless, He adopted a specific judicial procedure in order to determine their guilt or innocence. He held a trial. This is the research model for Christian historiography. The story of the transition from wrath to grace is the story of a series of trials. Put differently, it is the story of a series of repetitions of the fall of man. Man has continually revolted against the judicial boundaries that God set up. Man has also revolted against the ethical boundaries that God set up. God has brought covenant lawsuits against the violators. These covenant lawsuits had a pattern. This pattern should govern all historiography, and surely must govern Christian historiography.
In Genesis 4, we have another story about the violation of God’s law: murder. This is the story of Cain and Abel. Once again, we see the same kind of judicial procedure that we saw in Genesis 3. “And Cain talked with Abel his brother: and it came to pass, when they were in the field, that Cain rose up against Abel his brother, and slew him. And the Lord said unto Cain, Where is Abel thy brother? And he said, I know not: Am I my brother’s keeper? And he said, What hast thou done? the voice of thy brother’s blood crieth unto me from the ground” (vv. 8–10).
God knew exactly what had taken place. Nevertheless, He adhered to a specific judicial procedure, a procedure based on a series of questions. This was part of God’s historical investigation of what had taken place. He asked Cain the where question. Where was Abel? If Cain had given an honest answer, he would have told God exactly where Abel was: buried. But Cain adopted a strategy that has become familiar. He answered a question with a question. Was he his brother’s keeper? That is to say, was he in charge of Abel? Of course not. So, why should God expect Cain to know where Abel was? Adam and Eve had given direct answers to God. Cain had become devious.
Then God asked a what question. “What hast thou done?” But before Cain could think of a lie, God pointed to evidence: “The voice of thy brother’s blood crieth unto me from the ground.” This statement did not mean that Abel’s blood was literally crying out to God for vengeance. Here is the second example of metaphorical language in the Bible. (The first is “heel” and “head” in Genesis 3:15.) God knew what had happened, and He knew where the body was. He was reminding Cain of His omniscience.
He then pronounced judgment on Cain: “And now art thou cursed from the earth, which hath opened her mouth to receive thy brother’s blood from thy hand; When thou tillest the ground, it shall not henceforth yield unto thee her strength; a fugitive and a vagabond shalt thou be in the earth” (vv. 11–12). Again, this was mataphorical language. The earth really does not have a mouth. But the symbolism of the language conveyed to Cain the nature of the available evidence against him. He had killed his brother. He had buried his brother’s body. That body was not hidden from God. God was providing testimony to Cain regarding Cain’s infraction. God used metaphorical language to point to a pair of witnesses: his brother’s blood and the earth. This was a double witness against Cain. This was consistent with the Mosaic law. “At the mouth of two witnesses, or three witnesses, shall he that is worthy of death be put to death; but at the mouth of one witness he shall not be put to death” (Deuteronomy 17:6). This is why God did not execute Cain. There was no human witness to testify against him. No one had inquired about where Abel was. No one had investigated to see if there had been foul play.
God then pronounced sentence. The sentence was consistent with the symbolism of the earth as being a witness against Cain. “When thou tillest the ground, it shall not henceforth yield unto thee her strength; a fugitive and a vagabond shalt thou be in the earth” ( v. 12). Cain protested: “And Cain said unto the Lord, My punishment is greater than I can bear. Behold, thou hast driven me out this day from the face of the earth; and from thy face shall I be hid; and I shall be a fugitive and a vagabond in the earth; and it shall come to pass, that every one that findeth me shall slay me” (vv. 13–14). God then promised him protection: “And the Lord said unto him, Therefore whosoever slayeth Cain, vengeance shall be taken on him sevenfold. And the Lord set a mark upon Cain, lest any finding him should kill him” (v. 15). Other people would know about Cain’s transgression, but they did not possess the judicial authority to impose the death penalty on him. He had not been convicted in a human court of law.
The history of man reveals a series of transgressions, which were followed by a series of negative sanctions. The whole earth became wicked, and God brought the flood against them. But He saved Noah and his family. Noah and his family became the central covenantal agents of the transition from wrath to grace. God had reduced wrath on a worldwide basis by means of the flood. God destroyed the tower’s construction by scattering the people. God destroyed Sodom and Gomorrah. Joseph’s brothers would have killed him, but Ruben spoke in his favor. So, they sold him into slavery. He later became an agent of grace in their lives. They knew they were guilty, and they feared that he would kill them all. But he did not. God brought judgment against Egypt at the time of the exodus. Soon thereafter, He brought judgment against representatives of Israel because of their worship of the golden calf. The stories of covenant lawsuits continued until the final judgment against the nation of Israel when the Romans conquered the city and burnt the temple.
Jesus was tried by the Sanhedrin, by Herod, and by Pontius Pilate. In each case, there was an inquiry. The Sanhedrin pronounced judgment against Him. Herod did not, and then sent Jesus back to Pilate. Pontius Pilate declared Him innocent, but then imposed the crucifixion anyway. That was the most important trial in history. That trial and the subsequent sanctions are the judicial foundation of the transition from wrath to grace.
I am arguing in this chapter that the model for the Christian historian is this: begin a search for historical evidence that points to some anomaly. You are looking for the equivalent of Adam’s absence from the garden. Historical investigation should begin with suspicion that the widely accepted historical account is not only incomplete, it is erroneous. More to the point, because the vast volume of historiography has been written by humanists who are in revolt against God and His kingdom, their anti-covenantal worldview has shaped their interpretation of the past.
A Christian historian must begin an investigation. He must question the historical documentation, just as God had questioned Adam and Eve. He must ask these questions: what, where, when, who, why, and how? He asks himself these questions. How is the textbook narrative consistent with what the evidence reveals regarding the answers to these questions? Is there other evidence, meaning testimony, that would point to a different set of answers?
A Christian historian must look at the documentation past to see if some historical figures should have been condemned, but were not. He should also look to see if some historical figures who were condemned should be declared innocent? In other words, a Christian historian looks at the past as if history was a series of covenant lawsuits, which it is. There were lawsuits brought by covenant-breakers against covenant-keepers. These lawsuits tend to be favorably reviewed by humanist historians. On the other hand, God brought lawsuits against covenant-breakers, and the results of those trials have been ignored or downplayed by humanist historians.
The world is cosmically personal. It is not impersonal. Facts are interpreted facts, which means they are not neutral. There are no brute facts. There are no neutral documents.
Documents testify to someone’s memory of what took place in the past, if only the immediate past. Memories can be incorrect. Also, documents can be shaped by people’s desire to avoid posthumous convictions in the court of public opinion.
In his book, The Idea of History, R. G. Collingwood returns repeatedly to the metaphor of a Sherlock Holmes-type investigator. This investigator looks for oddities in the documentary record. He looks for errors of interpretation by the local constable. One reason why Collingwood’s book is still in print is the power of those sections of the book that use the metaphor of criminal investigation. This metaphor sticks in people’s minds. Also, it is fundamentally correct in terms of the nature of biblical historiography. Historiography is the investigation of the past in terms of the covenant lawsuit that God will bring against all people on the day of final judgment. History is shaped by people’s adherence to or violations of the laws of God. God will announce this to all mankind on the day of judgment.
A Christian historian must examine documents as if they were witnesses speaking on the witness stand. He has to cross-examine them. They cannot reply. He must think through the most likely explanations for the existence of a document, its preservation, its origin, and its original purpose in the thinking of the person who wrote it. He applies to the documents the five questions: what, where, when, who, and why? Then he uses his judgment as a Christian who believes in the providence of God to extract information from the document.
A Christian historian should begin with this presupposition: God has imputed meaning to every fact in the universe. He providentially controls each fact. He also controls the historical context of each fact. He establishes each fact’s importance in the development of history. Not only is every fact an interpreted fact, every fact is interpreted by God. God has a flawless memory. He has preserved some some pieces of evidence but not others. Also, He has preserved some pieces of evidence that have not yet been discovered, or whose significance has not yet been recognized. This is why there is lots of work for every Christian historian. There are lots of documents to discover. As surely as God accepted testimony from Abel’s blood and the earth, so can a Christian historian accept testimony from a lifeless document. He must assess (impute) its relevance in the collection of documents available to him. In short, he must think God’s thoughts after Him.
God has established a procedure of inquiry. Christian historians must respect this procedure. They must begin with an inquiry based on a court of law. Specifically, it is God’s court of law. He conducted the first trial in Genesis 3. He will conduct the last trial as described in Revelation 20. “And I saw a great white throne, and him that sat on it, from whose face the earth and the heaven fled away; and there was found no place for them. And I saw the dead, small and great, stand before God; and the books were opened: and another book was opened, which is the book of life: and the dead were judged out of those things which were written in the books, according to their works” (vv. 11–12).
History is about ethics. It is about the law of God and men’s violations of it. History is about God's negative sanctions brought against covenant-breakers, and also God’s positive sanctions visited on covenant-keepers. That is to say, it is about Leviticus 26 and Deuteronomy 28.
Written texts reflect the worldview and also the information available to the people who wrote them. They also reflect the motives of the people who wrote them. It is not easy to discern what their motives were unless you have more than one text from the author, preferably during the same period of time.
People have an extremely limited amount of information about what is going on around them. The further back in history we look, the less information that anyone had. Communications were slow and expensive. Literacy was limited. Information was filtered through a small number of organizations that had access to literate employees and which relied on written materials. Interpretation depends on the context in which the document was written. What kind of information did the writer have at his disposal? Was it accurate information? The historian needs information on the kinds of information that the writer drew upon when he wrote the document. Historians rarely have this kind of detailed information. So, they have to exercise their imaginations in order to impute accurate meaning to the document. This is not easy. It takes years of experience. It takes years of understanding the context of a particular society or a particular region in a limited timeframe.
In philosophical terms, this is the problem of the one and the many. The one is the overarching context in which the documents were produced. The many are the multitudinous documents that somehow survived and are available for historians to investigate. Unless you are familiar with a large quantity of documents from a particular era, it is difficult for you to reconstruct the historical context of any one of the documents. In other words, you need to be familiar with many documents in order to understand what one of them means. How important was it? How important was the person who produced it? If the person who produced it was not important, but he knew somebody important, and the document testifies what that other person said or did, then the document may be important. However, the story needs multiple documents to confirm the opinion of the document’s writer. So, it takes a great deal of knowledge about what was going on at the time in order to impute accurate meaning to a particular document. This requires context. Historians can master only a limited number of topics within a limited geographical area in a limited time frame. They become dependent on summaries by other historians who have devoted years of study to other documents and other kinds of evidence that were produced in the same era and the same region. How accurate are the assessments of those historians? When someone has carefully examined many historical documents, he may begin to lose confidence in the judgment of other historians. He may begin to suspect that their narratives have been shaped more by their worldview than by their familiarity with documents.
A Christian historian should be primarily interested in the broad context rather than a particular text, unless he is specializing. Why? Because he is looking for evidence that would confirm his theory of historical development, namely, the transition from wrath to grace. He should be aware of documentation that points to a temporary reversal of this trend in a particular region and time period. But he should remain confident that the longer trend will reappear as he studies what came after the period of the reversal.
The more experience that a historian has with other historians’ interpretations of the past, the more easily he will recognize either the absence of a coherent theory of historical development in their writings or else an interpretation that is hostile to the biblical structure of history. So, he needs to read widely, yet he also needs to become familiar with documents of a limited period of time in a particular region. By doing his own work of interpretation of texts and context, he can recognize the techniques used by humanist historians to shape their narratives of the past. He should be like a professional magician. He should learn the tricks of the trade in order to recognize the nature of the deceptions that his peers present to each other and to the general public.
There are standards of interpretation that are common within the guild of professional historians. These standards are enforced by the guild in order to defend members of the guild from deceivers within the guild. Nobody wants to be caught citing the work of another historian, when that work is later exposed as incompetently written and not supported by the evidence. There is self-interest among historians to avoid this kind of embarrassment.
One way to reduce the risk is peer review. Books and articles are reviewed by specialists in the same area of investigation. Editors of academic historical journals assume that if there are any egregious errors or egregious misquotations of original source documents, one of the reviewers will find it. Then the editor of the journal will send back the article to the author. It will not appear in his journal. He will not risk being embarrassed retroactively.
One of the ways that editors of journals protect themselves against such an outcome is to accept mainly articles on narrow topics of marginal importance historically. This is why most articles in most academic journals in every academic field do not get read or cited by scholars. Only a tiny percentage of these articles is quoted by other scholars. Because an author’s primary goal for getting published is to secure tenure or a promotion, this absence of influence does not discourage authors from continuing to do research and sending the results to editors of journals. The fact that almost nobody ever reads or quotes their articles is of only marginal importance in their careers.
There is no written list of rules and regulations associated with publishing articles. Familiarity with these unwritten rules takes time. It takes years of experience in writing term papers in graduate school. Basically, the rules and regulations associated with academic publication are more like rules of etiquette than rules governing chemical experiments. Probably nothing is going to blow up in the faces of the editors. If it does, it will not be a major explosion.
Early in his distinguished career, David Hackett Fisher wrote a book, Historians' Fallacies: Toward a Logic of Historical Thought (1970). It lists a lot of fallacies that historians have committed. Predictably, another historian, L. O. Mink, wrote a negative review in 1971. This is standard operating procedure. Historian A says this; historian B says he is mistaken. Most historians pay no attention to either of them. I do not think many historians have read Fisher’s book. I do not think most graduate students read it. It sits unread on the shelves of people who edit historical journals.
It is so rare for any historian to be severely sanctioned for having produced a third-rate book that the guild has little influence in shaping the content of books directly. The shaping begins through a long process of training in graduate school. Would-be historians find out from their professors what is considered respectable documentation and what is not. They find out which historians are acceptable in footnotes, and which historians are not. The academic guild of historians can be described accurately as an old boy network. A handful of research universities produce most of the Ph.D. students who wind up teaching in the second-tier universities and even third-tier universities. The glut of these people has been so great since 1969 that, unless you graduated from one of these major universities, you will not find a teaching job in college.
In 1962, the University of Chicago Press published a short book: The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. That book created something of an intellectual revolution in academia. The author, Thomas Kuhn, had received his Ph.D. in physics from Harvard in 1948. The president of Harvard, James B. Conant, allowed him to teach courses on the history of science. In 1956, he moved to the University of California, Berkeley. He taught in both the philosophy department and the history department. His field of expertise was the history of science, but his book created an academic sensation in numerous fields.
He argued that science has developed through a series of unexpected intellectual revolutions. It did not develop as a result of a series of experiments that led to new discoveries in a slow, evolutionary way. He called the intellectual revolutions “paradigm shifts.” This phrase got into the English language. Most scientists work at what he called normal science. They study limited areas in their field, and they conduct experiments that do not affect other scientists’ understanding of the field. Their discoveries confirm the existing outlook of the guild. A field is not changed dramatically as a result of normal science. It changes because of major intellectual breakthroughs. Kuhn argued that major breakthroughs come primarily from two groups: young scholars and outsiders to the guild. They discover anomalies that cannot be explained by prevailing interpretations of cause and effect. I would call these anomalies “suspicions.” This is like God going into the garden and finding it empty. “Where is Adam? Something does not add up.” The revolutionary scientist sees something, and he thinks this: “That’s strange.” The people in charge of the guild resist these revolutionary breakthroughs. They do not want to re-think the prevailing explanation that has long governed the guild. They fight back. They try to suppress the spread of some revolutionary idea. There is an old phrase: “Science advances, one funeral at a time.” Eventually, the new idea gains wide acceptance, and the guild adjusts to it. What had constituted an unchangeable law in the field a generation earlier gets modified. Parmenides has to adjust to Heraclitus. He does not like it, but he has to do it.
Kuhn’s book became a kind of Bible for younger scholars in the social sciences after 1965. A paradigm shift took place in academia. This was the five-year era of the counter-culture. It spread across the West. It affected numerous academic disciplines. Young scholars embraced Kuhn’s thesis as a way to justify their own reaction against the established academic guilds in the universities. The moderate political liberals who had dominated American universities from 1950 to 1965 received challenges from younger members of the faculties.
I am arguing that a Christian historian should see himself as part of a revolutionary movement within the field of history. He comes with a different set of presuppositions about God, man, law, sanctions, and time. He comes with a different view of the structure of history: creation, image, law, imputation, and inheritance. He should regard himself as an outsider in the field. He should not regard himself as part of the "loyal opposition" to the humanists who dominate the field. This should apply to every Christian and every academic field. The Christian’s attitude should be one of revolution. He seeks to overturn the paradigm of humanism. He should be self-conscious about this.
As an exercise, he should read three textbooks on Western civilization. (He can buy used ones a lot less expensively.) He should identify the grand narrative. If he could find one or two textbooks on Western civilization written before 1965, that would be informative. Has the grand narrative changed?
I recommend that Christian colleges teach Western civilization, but from an explicitly Christian standpoint. The instructors should produce videos and reading assignments based on primary source documents. The course should show that, apart from Christianity, there would not have been a distinctly Western civilization. Classical Greece fell to empire through Alexander. Then Alexander’s shattered empire fell to the Romans. Then the Roman Empire collapsed. Western Europe would probably be Islamic today, had there not been an existing Christian civilization that developed after 325.
The category of justice is an implication of point 4 of the biblical covenant: sanctions. Sanctions are imposed by God in terms of people’s guilt or innocence. Sanctions are therefore a matter of justice. Consider the ninth commandment. It is the fourth commandment in the list of five kingly commandments. “Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbour” (Exodus 20:16). This commandment applies to all false testimony, but the judicial context is a civil court.
We think of this commandment as applying only to contemporary events. This is too limiting. It applies to all events in history. The Christian doctrine of the final judgment teaches that everyone will be judged at the end of time in terms of what he has said and done. God’s standard of evaluation is God’s law. God will impute guilt or innocence retroactively. This is the model for Christian historiography.
A major goal of Christian historiography is to identify significant covenant-keepers and covenant-breakers in history. These people must be representative of their respective worldviews. Presumably, they were leaders in some way. Humanistic historians have created a narrative in which Christian leaders are presented as threats to the development of civilization. They have praised political leaders who promoted the expansion of the state. A Christian historian should look at these narratives to see whether the humanist historians have misrepresented these people. He should look at contemporary evidence to discover the truth or falsity of the judgments against these people. An important area of revisionist Christian historiography is to judge retroactively the extent to which significant historical figures have adhered to or violated biblical law. What were the results of these violations?
In the Introduction, I discussed the antipathy of the humanist philosopher Benedetto Croce against assessing the guilt or innocence of historical figures. He was not alone in his opinion. One of the most distinguished historians in the first half of the twentieth century was the French historian, Marc Bloch. In an unfinished book that he wrote in 1941 and 1942, he condemned the practice of judging the ethics of historical figures. In Chapter IV, “Historical Analysis,” he began with this supposed dichotomy: “Judging or Understanding?” He said these must be rigorously separate assessments by historians. I argue that judging guilt or innocence is crucial for historical understanding. Bloch resisted this suggestion. “Now, for a long time, the historian has passed for a sort of judge in Hades, charged with meeting out praise or blame to dead heroes.” He said this idea is wrongheaded. He said that historians must not judge guilt or innocence because all that we have to judge past morality is our contemporary standards.
Bloch was an historical relativist. He ignored the possibility that Christian historians should use biblical standards to judge people’s actions. He asked a rhetorical question: “Are we so sure of ourselves and of our age as to divide the company of our forefathers into the just and the damned?” The correct answer to this question is this: we had better be sure of biblical standards. We should be sufficiently sure to pass judgment on contemporary leaders as well as leaders in the past. That is to say, we must deny historical relativism. Bloch continued: “How absurd it is, by elevating the entire totally relative criteria of one individual, one party, or one generation to the absolute, to inflict standards upon the way in which Sulla governed Rome, or Richelieu the States of the Most Christian King!” Bloch assumed that ethical standards change, generation to generation. Therefore, historical judgments on people’s behavior always are revised. “Moreover, since nothing is more variable than such judgments, subject to all the fluctuations of corrective opinion or personal campus, history, by all too frequent preferring the compilation of honor rolls to that of notebooks, has gratuitously given itself the appearance of the most uncertain of disciplines. Hollow indictments are followed by vein rehabilitations.” Then he drove home the point rhetorically: “Robespierrists! Anti-Robespierrists! For pity’s sake, simply tell us what Robespierre was” (The Historian’s Craft, Vintage edition, 1953, p. 140). I ask: “How can we assess what Robespierre was unless we can also make moral judgments regarding what Robespierre did?” He was a tyrant whose Committee on Public Safety sent at least 17,000 innocent people—a retroactive judicial assessment—to the guillotine. In addition, 10,000 more died in prison without trials. He was the essence of the worst aspects of the French Enlightenment in the late eighteenth century.
Humanist historians who pretend they are not making retroactive judgments delude themselves. They structure their narratives to persuade readers that historical progress is based heavily on the expansion of state power—power that turns civil magistrates into implacable bureaucrats and political tyrants. They present the growth of the secular state as almost always positive. They present the contraction of the influence of the church as almost always positive. They do this in the name of neutral historiography. It is time for Christian historians to stop playing the humanists' game.
The supply of documentation is a function of its price. The lower the price, the greater the demand. With the development of the Internet, the price of documentation has fallen dramatically. Students can now get access to English translations of primary source documents in every historical field. They do not have to pay to gain this access.
As the publication of primary source documents by major research libraries continues, materials that have been long forgotten will be discovered by search engines. Online language translation software will get better. The availability of video hosting will make it possible to post detailed information about geography, monuments, statues, and other artifacts. Detailed historical maps will become available.
Then there is digitized information, especially economic information. This field is called cliometrics. It became increasingly popular after 1960. Today, computerization is spreading across national borders. Vast databases are becoming available at low prices or even for free that enable historians and social scientists to see developments over time.
The amount of data that is available as a result of what is called the internet of things is already a tsunami. Most of this data is proprietary, but companies will be able to bring in extra money by letting research institutes gain access to the data for explicitly educational purposes. This development is now part of the international social order. There seems to be no conceptual limit on the amount of information that will be made available. Over time, historians will be able to study social behavior in ways that are impossible today.
This new information will make narratives more accurate, though maybe not more clear. Statistical information is not a competitive substitute for historical narration. People want stories, not pages of statistics. But well-designed graphs can help them understand what is going on. A well-designed graph can convey information that would be difficult to convey through narrative alone. The interaction between charts and narration will lead to greater understanding on the part of specialists and also the general public.
The great breakthroughs in the field of documentation lie ahead of us.
There will be greater awareness of an explicitly biblical worldview and of explicitly biblical systems of ethical causation. The Christian school movement will begin to produce young adults who are ready to re-think the worldview of humanism. When they do this, they will begin to re-think the conclusions of humanism in every academic discipline. They will begin to ask questions that the humanist worldview is incapable of answering. They will find themselves facing this thought more often: “That’s strange.” There will be interaction among Christians in multiple academic disciplines. This will be cross-pollination. People will ask questions that can be answered only through new research paradigms. There will be a flowering of Christian academic endeavors. I say this because I believe in Christian education. If researchers begin with a view of the world that is accurate, they are going to be more productive in their various academic disciplines than they would be if they held tightly to the humanist worldview, which is in the process of disintegration.
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