48 Chapter 4: History and the Biblical Worldview Richard Tison The great American economic historian Charles A. Beard, in his presidential address to the American Historical Society, offered this grim outlook for his discipline: History is chaos and every attempt to interpret it otherwise is an illusion. History moves around in a kind of cycle. History moves in a line, straight or spiral, and in some direction. The historian may seek to escape these issues by silence or … he may face them boldly, aware of the intellectual and moral perils inherent in any decision — in his act of faith.1 As we can see, history had no intelligible or moral meaning for Beard; it was simply irrational to him — and yet, he continued to write and publish as if history had value. For the Christian, of course, history does have purpose and meaning — but only within the intellectual framework of a biblical world and life view. Unfortunately, the academic rules of this discipline undermine the very possibility of doing meaningful history, for the secular approach to knowledge, by definition, disregards the Christian worldview and with it, any certainty of knowledge. This is the awful price of fallen man’s independence from God: the loss of objective truth and meaning to his experiences. But why is historical knowledge — let alone any knowledge — uncertain apart from God’s Word? The answer is that we are not sufficient unto ourselves but were made to be dependent on our Maker. It is impossible for us to be self-sufficient in knowledge for only God — by definition — can be self-sufficient; this is why we are commanded to live by every word that proceeds from the Father’s mouth (Deut. 8:3). Man as a creature is rationally limited and thus needs to be programmed with basic information about the nature of the universe in order to increase in knowledge and establish dominion over all things; only his Creator — God — who exists outside the created order can furnish this necessary intellectual framework by which man can then make sense of the world around him. It was the Creator who equipped humankind with a set of assumptions about how the world is organized; this is the creature’s 1 Charles A. Beard, Written History as an Act of Faith, American Historical Review 39, no. 2 (January 1934), 228–29.
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