Historiography
of the Bible
Koot
van wyk (DLitt et Phil; ThD)
Visiting
Professor
Department
of Liberal Arts Education
Kyungpook
National University
Sangju
Campus
South
Korea
Conjoint
lecturer of Avondale College
Australia
There
was a school of the past who thought about the word Heilsgeschichte and came up with the idea that the Bible does not
describe history but only Salvation-history.
It is not history proper but the history of God’s dealings with His people. The
concept has a ring of truth to it and almost makes one accept the axioms and
work with this paradigm. However, one has to think about it one more time.
Clinical history is only horizontal and operates with the axiom that besides a
human’s involvement with description there is no other. Revelation does not
exist but originates in the mind of the beholder without any supernatural inset
at all. The moment one comes to this kind of thinking, it is time to pull out a
yellow card. Pruning salvation-history from its moorings is to place the
proverbial cart before the horse. One needs to ask the question, what is
history. Clinical pruned history that removed all notions of supernatural or
God’s revelation to man, is no longer history but the description of the causes
and results of Satan’s downcasting on this earth and this universe only. It
says nothing of the other side of the coin of the Great Controversy between God
and Satan, namely, what God is willing to do to rescue people from this cause
and effect continuum on this earth. What modern science is upholding as proper history
is in fact nothing short of humanistic descriptions and focused only
horizontally. There is no vertical dimension.
The
Heilsgeschictliche Schule or Salvation-history school of thought in
the past worked with a past and present for the prophets but not a future. In
fact the future predicts of the prophets were only a prognosis of immediate “weather
guessing” and sometimes they hit the jackpot. The reader will immediately see
that this view reduces God’s ability to predict long-term future and places
that apps solely in the hands of an uncertain and risky human undertaking. This
is soft Deism. Deism is the view that God did create the earth, but when sin
came He left it by itself to run like a clock that is wound-up to tick by
itself. The guessing of the prophet is thus the short-term explanations of the
prophet of things to occur in his own time.
Preterism is
just that, that the prophet uses past events to guess what the immediate future
in his own time will be the same as weather anchors on TV is predicting the
weather for tomorrow and this week. However, this kind of prediction is no
prediction at all. It is humanistic and anthropological only. There is no way
the longterm predictions like the 490 years from 457 to 27 CE can be explained
and even the death on the cross prediction in Daniel 9:24-27 without God
revealing it to man. Human guesswork could not have established this prophetic
time schedule of God. The Bible must be true and such accurate mathematics is
outside the scope of any human achievement. The socalled Nostredamus
predictions are all in the eye of the beholder who wish to pull out what is not
clear to be there in the first place. Facts are squeezed to fit the known
events. Not so with the Bible.
For
this reason, the historiography of the Bible is the only true historical
description since it allows unreserved for the inclusion of God and His domain
and His impact in human affairs. There is no cutting out of god in this
scenario. It is not only Satan’s causes and effects that are reported but also
God’s causes and effects. The Great
Controversy in Heaven was kickstarted on earth by Adam and Eve’s choice so
this event is treated by the Bible in an open and honest matter.
Scientifically,
positivistic science is not so positive at all. It is what Hendrik Stoker
called in his book Oorsprong en Rigting,
a shrinking of the sciences. By spiraling inwardly the final authority of life
was fixed by humans to be the human mind, subjectively and not outside of
humans objectively. The drowning swimmer needs to be his own Lifesaver! This is
the Godless approach of science. It is not proper science even to have other
gods included in science methodology and epistemology.
A
history thus that describes unashamed the good and bad of events in a manner
that serves not only humanly good and humanly bad agendas but good and bad in
God’s sphere and expectations, is the only true history description.