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.