By C.L. Bolt
Once theology and history are separated there are insurmountable problems with the discipline. History cannot speak concerning God once this happens in an epistemology, since God as a supernatural being is not a historical fact in this false system of thought. God is no longer the kind of God who can act in history in any way that we are able to know it. Such a god is not the God of Christian Scripture. The God described in the Christian Scripture has spoken as an authority concerning His great acts in history brought about to finally accomplish the redemption of a people for Himself according to the riches of His glorious grace. In the Christian worldview, everything was created by God and for His glory; every fact of history is included.
The problems with a non-Christian approach to knowledge summarized in this introductory series can, again, be brought to bear upon history as a discipline. There are many problems with a non-Christian view of history. For example, the problem of induction is applicable to the knowability of history as well, since the uniformity of nature is necessary for speaking of currently unobservable events that happened in the past. Possibility and probability have no context to operate in given the non-Christian view of the world, as there is nothing and no one to determine them. Meaning is absent this dark view of the past, and there is certainly nothing to be learned to apply to the future. If skepticism is a problem of connection as discussed throughout this introduction, then skepticism applies especially well here when we consider whether there is any reason to suppose that historical “facts” are related to one another. There is no coincidence in history departments teaching their students that history is unknowable. It is, when one starts from the wrong presuppositions, and even if history can be known, there is no understanding of a purpose to any of its events; there is no reason why anything has happened.
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