NavigoArmatus.com

...the Wall Street Journal has an important article that appeared over the weekend entitled,

“Bye, Bye, American History.”

The author is Daniel Henninger, it’s the Wonderland column of the Wall Street Journal. When he is saying goodbye to American history, he’s talking about the fact that history, especially as it is taught in colleges and universities and now even in high schools and elementary schools, history has become a very controversial subject and from a Christian worldview perspective we need to understand why. If you tell the story of the history you are defining terms and that’s exactly why history has always been so controversial, especially in the modern age, especially at the intersection of the secularized worldview and the traditional understanding of history.

The new issue is the AP curriculum. That’s advanced placement and that’s very important because the AP curriculum sets the standards that will be followed by many high schools in particular, and the AP standards also signal what’s expected in terms of historical knowledge, or in this case historical interpretation, by the mainstream of America’s academic historians operating at universities. As Henninger writes,

“Last week, 56 professors and historians published a petition on the website of the National Association of Scholars, urging opposition to the College Board’s framework.”

So as you look more closely at the situation, you have a group such as the National Association of Scholars that group includes a good many conservative historians amongst its numbers and then you have the very liberal American Historical Association. Now predictably, the two groups are in a face-off over these new AP standards and the new standards by any measure represent what’s called a revisionist understanding of American history. And that revisionist understanding we should note is driven by a very leftist ideological bias that also comes through in the materials for the new AP standards.

But from the Christian worldview perspective the important issue is to understand that history matters, if we understand what happened and we have the right understanding of how to tell the story we’ll know the truth. This is not to say that history is just a collection of facts. History always requires interpretation. But we need to note that interpretation will happen according to some ideological grid, according to some worldview. And the worldview that dignifies history the most is the Christian worldview because Christianity we should note is an historical faith, not just the fact that it’s a very old faith, it’s an historical faith in that its truth claims are deeply rooted in time and space and history. The same is true of biblical Judaism, but Christianity in particular makes very clear claims about events that took place in history. Events that are documented and revealed to us in the Holy Scriptures, events that are understood to have taken place and time and space and history, events that are for our knowledge and that knowledge for our salvation and for our maturity as Christians. And furthermore, we have to understand that if you deny that historical basis, you are undercutting the very central truth claims of Christianity.

The Christian worldview doesn’t insist that history is easy or simple to understand. Instead, it tells us that we are dependent upon divine Revelation to know not only the who, the what and the when, but also the why. The Bible’s unfolding story which we call the gospel and the metanarrative of Scripture, that story is central to Christianity itself. Take away or diminish in any way the historical claims and you have redefined Christianity, you have redefined the gospel. And if you redefine the gospel according to the New Testament itself, you lose it. It is interesting that secular historians understand that history is important. Of course what’s more important for us is to understand that for Christians, history is less important than it is for secular historians, it is far more important.