catapult magazine

I’m really glad I took the time to plod through this classic by Tolstoy. The author really starts kicking it into high gear around page 837 or so.

I know it’s a long shot that anyone else is reading this right now too, but I’d love to talk about it here. I’ll just put the hook out there for anyone to bite. It’s an excellent book to read at this or any other time in our history.

Grant, you have mentioned before the advantage Christians have knowing the future, that “all events can only end in the Lordship of Jesus Christ.”

How does this change a Christian’s understanding of history? Does it given them an advantage when interpreting, say, Columbus’s discovery of America?

I’m curious about the same thing. Because here I am studying history, and I should really know about this whole ‘advantage’ thing if I’m going to get ahead in the field.

Concerning Aristotle’s Poetics, they are extremely important for the study of history, as is Augustine’s Confessions (Book XI). Aristotle argues that the fiction writer can tell his story regardless of whether he uses true events or not. The historian can tell whatever story he wants too but he has two limitations: one, he has to use historical events, stuff that actually happened.
two, he must tell a compelling story, one that appeals. The Christian historian would have one further restriction wouldn’t she? That her story conforms to Christian norms in some way. But I’m not sure about this.

Advantage. I know that word sounds kind of competitionist, but I’m not sure how else to say it. I don’t mean to suggest that Christians will have a more accurate account of the facts. Rather, a Christian way of doing history has a different value, a different end in mind. A Christian historian will see God’s rule over all creation in the stories she/he tells while a secular historian might see the results of a technological innovation and come to the conclusion that technology is what rules humankind. Every story has an end. For Christians, that end is Jesus Christ. For non-Christians, they have to come up with their own substitutes for such an end if they are to reach any adequate “conclusions” to their book, paper, essay, etc.

Historiography has always been based on an essential principle in the Western tradition: “cause and effect”. A historian writes a story that shows how one thing CAUSEd another and has led to this or that EFFECT. During ancient times, the historian would write the causes that led to the victory of the conquering king. During Modern times, the historian would write a cause and effect story about the progress of mankind toward the end result of perfection or human autonomy. In postmodernism, historians realize that the dream of progress is over, indeed “history” is over, and all that’s left is telling a story from your own experience (broad generalization): history is told from the present, not from an objective “timeless” view of the past.

In our contemporary context, history—as that which will someday end—has ended and now we just tell stories with no end in sight. According to the commonly held convictions of today, we cannot draw histories up from some view of the future. There is only an eternal recurrence of the same (Nietzsche) or the constant expectation of what is “to come” (Derrida). The idea that there is some final resting place we’re trying to reach as a human race is considered antiquated and without authority.

But what authority does a historical record have if it is only a document drawn up in its time and place? The Bible has more authority than our limited human drawn-up histories because what the prophets foretold in the OT, what God promised the people of old, came to pass in history through Christ’s death and resurrection. The coming of Christ proved that God is the God of history. God has historical authority because when the Creator speaks, things happen. Of course, in order to believe this, you have to confess that Christ rose from the dead just as much as you have to confess your trust that Aristotle lived and died and wrote this or that book. But that’s precisely the point.

Historiography depends on the convictions of the authors and readers. And history itself, the “happenings” of time, depends on the God who makes things happen. A non-Christian historian is at a disadvantage because she doesn’t know the God who makes the things happen, the things that she’s recording and researching. She’s at a disadvantage because she’s writing the history of a kingdom that will be blown away like chaff by the Kingdom of God IN THE END. She will be like the conquered kings whose names were erased from the walls of public buildings in Rome when the newest tyrant came to power.

I’m reading Daniel right now and it is striking how different this account of historical events is from those of Greek and Roman historians. The first two verses of Daniel says it all. God led the Jews into the hands of the Babylonians because they sinned against the Lord of lords. The Jewish defeat had nothing to do with having a weaker army or developing poor strategies etc. I believe this is what Tolstoy was getting at with War and Peace, though Tolstoy still was a few years from his conversion. Tolstoy showed that people can try to write their own destinies, but they are at the mercy of some greater power that rules them. Daniel reveals that his God is that greater power. God is the god who rules over all humankind because God interprets what happens AND makes what He interprets HAPPEN. Daniel’s god is the one true God, the one who is behind what was, what is, and what is to come. No other god can claim such dominion, even still today.

Grant, I appreciate this post. A lot of food for our thought here. Even if the Christian historian does not acheive a more accurate account of the past, he or she has the Bible, God’s Word to check his or her faulty assumptions (i.e. about time, which is linear rather than circular). To be sure, God has already interpreted the most important events in the history of the world.