The Christian faith encourages attention to history.
-Bradley Green, "The Gospel and the Intellectual Life" (The Imaginative Conservative)
It is always a good idea to define terms. So, what is a worldview? According to the Oxford Reference, "it is a set of presuppositions and beliefs that every person has" which influence how they see society and truth. In the case of this post, worldview influences how a historian interprets history.
For me as a historian, the Christian worldview is a way for me to honor and remember God with my historical studies. The following are tenets that I believe are part of a Christian worldview of history:
1. God is in control of all history. He directs and intervenes in human affairs. Because God is in control, a Christian view of history focuses on eternity. Human history is moving towards God's ultimate will, as stated by Kenneth Scott Latourette: History moves toward a culmination. Whether within or beyond time God's will is to be accomplished and His full sovereignty will be seen to have prevailed.
2. The birth, crucifixion, and resurrection of Jesus Christ were the most important events in world history.
3. Man is made in the image of God, and history is the study of man in God's world. According to John Fea in Why Study History?, "The primary task of the historian is to describe the way that humans-created in the image of God-have 'endured' and 'inhabited' the mysteries of life".
Finally, what is not an aspect of the Christian worldview? It is over spiritualization. Because of man's limitations, we cannot discern God's will in history. The Bible says in Romans 11:33, "Oh, the depth of the riches and wisdoms and knowledge of God! How unsearchable are his judgments and how inscrutable his ways!" Instead of spiritualizing events, Christians should employ historic-thinking skills to study history. Those skills are context, cause, complexity, change, and contingency.
Works Cited
2. Kenneth Scott Latourette, "The Christian Understanding of History", The American Historical Review 54, no. 2 (January 1949): 264, accessed April 17, 2024, http://www.jstor.org/stable/1845386?searchText=&searchUri=&ab_segments=&searchKey=&refreqid=fastly-default%3A1e6ec457197701c559dd87bd21b5c3ca
3. John Fea, Why Study History? Reflecting on the Importance of the Past (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2013), 82.
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