His Story

By Dr. George Grant - Posted at Florilegium:

Doing Christian History

Published January 3, 2025

“Every day that passes should be lived in light of the past, in light of the future, and in light of eternity.” Thomas Chalmers (1780-1847)

History is so rich and so resplendent that there is not a single date that does not offer great lessons in heroism or ignominy, brilliance or foolishness, inspiration or admonition. There is not a single date that does not point us toward the remarkable cultural and spiritual legacy of our Christian inheritance in Western Civilization. And there is not even a wrinkle in time that does not bear the obvious impress of God’s own good providence.

Alas, you could hardly tell that by looking at the average history textbook these days though. If history is, as Stephen Mansfield has quipped, “More than dates and dead people,” you would never know it based on most of the printed evidence.

There are very few things that modern historians can agree on. But when it comes to God there is sudden consensus. The long-held notion that history is His story is fiercely resisted in our day. The once dominant view that history is not merely the record of what happened in the past but that it is a kind of moral philosophy has been superceded by a kind of narrow structural assertions by a handful of pretentious experts.

But history is full of the indecipherable mysteries of providence, and thus any attempt to reduce the process of its legends, epics, movements, heroes, and villains to a mere mechanical or material science is destined to be more than a little ridiculous--as the sad legacies of Marx, Toynbee, Wells, and Wilson have proven. Alas, now many credentialed Christian historians are following unquestioningly in their footsteps.

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