I am taking a few courses at a Christian college online, and one of them is basic American history. The author of the history textbooks, whom I believe to be a brother in Christ I will be blessed to spend eternity with, is driving me out of my mind. Granted, that is no difficult task, but let me treat you to some of nuggets of his philosophy of history, bearing in mind he has a B.A. in education, an M.A. and Ph.D. in history, and he is a professor, lecturer, and author of 13 books and over 500 articles on history.

Every story with some basis in fact is history. Every bit of gossip either purports to be or is history. All that has ever happened to a person is history. Virtually every joke, every anecdote, every cartoon, every witty saying…

You get the idea. He gives a painstakingly precise explanation of how important it is to understand civilization in order to understand history, giving definitions of the word and even its etymology.

Civilization is an advanced condition of human arrangements and achievements … the conditions which make such an advanced state possible … civilization, as a concept is closely related to the city. One word, “city,” derives from the Greek word, civitas, which is the root also of “civilization.” That is no accident, for there has never been a high civilization without cities.

The Greek word for city is, in fact, polis, and the word civitas is actually Latin.

And then, my favourite quote so far.

History is an account of things that actually happened.

I was still amused at this point, and tried to get on with my homework. In my head, I kept hearing him singing like Billy Flynn,

Study history, history, facts, actual facts, and you will learn, you do, you learn, ’cause it happened, oh yes, it did, it did, it did, it really did, really did, really, really, history happened, it did.

He speaks of history as some kind of science, which can be learned like the table of elements.

One of the ways that history enriches is that it is the story of actual people, actual events, and some sort of actuality in the past. History is concrete, not abstract … We [must deal] with the factuality of history … students sometimes wonder how we know all that we assert to have happened in history … My point is that a great deal of trouble has been taken to prove the correctness of many alleged facts, and, in many instances, the evidence is still available for any who would make the effort to verify their accuracy. That is not to say that every statement in a history book is indeed factual.

For all that he seems to want to pin down the facts, he can’t quite manage it to convince himself of it. “… some sort of actuality … concrete, not abstract … facts … evidence … accuracy … not to say it is all factual.”

Ask anyone who has had to mediate a dispute, whether at toddler or international level, and you know simply determining the facts is often extremely difficult, not to mention people’s motives. When dealing with intelligent men with strong opinions who relate what they saw as happening, concrete history liquifies into mystery juice. What are “facts,” anyway?

Here is the inimitable Mencken, in his Minority Report, Note #138, on the unknowability of history.

The unreliability of history is one of the crying scandals of civilization. To this day no really convincing account of the origins of the Civil War has been written. Worse, there exists no adequate history of the United States. When historians began to turn to so-called “sources” they undoubtedly made a step towards accuracy, but it is now evident that most sources offer no more than special pleading, and hence are almost indistinguishable from what are now called pressagents’ hand-outs. James Ford Rhodes apparently made a further step when he began to mine contemporary newspapers, but it is hard to believe that anyone forced to read American newspapers during World War II will ever believe in them again. In all probability it will be eternally impossible to arrive at the precise truth about the majority of salient historical events. At best, only half of the story can ever be known. Worse, there is little indication that historians, as a class, have any actual desire to establish even that half. Those of the academic moiety seldom lift themselves above the level of mere pedagogues, and those outside the fold are commonly highly prejudiced partisans. It would be hard to imagine honest history being written by Woodrow Wilson on the one hand or Henry Cabot Lodge on the other, yet both have respectable places as American historians, and are in fact rather more reliable than most. The best are probably chance bystanders - for example, Gideon Welles. Welles set up his famous diary, I suspect, because he was uncomfortably aware that what was generally believed about the Civil War and its chief actors was not true. But having written it, he began to realize that the truth was not generally relished, so he kept it secret, and it was not published until 1912, a third of a century after his death.

Autobiography, though it always makes interesting reading, is hardly more to be trusted than academic history. It seems to be almost impossible for a man who has had a hand in great events to tell the truth about them. Even the narratives of such realistic and iconoclastic fellows as William T. Sherman and of such dull, unimaginative clods as U. S. Grant are full of palpable evasions. If Woodrow Wilson had written his autobiography it would have been a genuine marvel of false pretences. Even among the official histories, it would have stood out in that respect. Less puissant men sometimes make an effort to tell the truth, but save in a few exceptional cases they do not know what it is.

If history is just facts and nothing more, where does it take us? When the “facts” conflict, which they do often, if not always, whose account should we accept and on what basis? How should God-fearing people relate to history? None of this is dealt with in my “Christian” history textbook. The book is Christian, not Muslim or Mormon, insofar as it acknowledges Christ and the Cross to have “actually happened,” but it is the kind of “Christian” that Satan enjoys watching. (I wanted to copy and paste this whole book here, but I decided against it. Hehe.)

Though the author did not intend it, I am sure, to me his attitude towards history feels ultimately blasphemous because it does not acknowledge God as Creator or Christ as Lord of history. History is not a bunch of “facts” that just “happen.” History is the handiwork of our Triune Creator, glorious and mysterious.

It is a story … about love. The love of the Father, Son, and Spirit for each other, love they have poured out on us. Learning history is learning about God, our Father and our King, and the Spirit Who dwells in us.