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I very quickly came to the conclusion that major pastors as well as known academia is refusing and denying history. It was abundantly clear to me after watching a Babylon Bee interview, that a prominent pastor from California has his church history as well as United States history totally muddled if not worse, purposefully thrown into disorder. I would have thought that after fifty years in the pulpit, he would have got this straight.
I believe that what C. Gregg Singer wrote in an essay entitled ‘The Problem of Historical Interpretation,’ hits the nail on the head for church leaders as well as historians:
Bible Timeline Chart with World History – https://amazingbibletimeline.com
‘The professional historians in this country and in Europe have come to the place where they have little faith in the subject to which they have devoted their lives. Historians with increasing and distressing frequency are openly admitting that history has no meaning and shows little or no purpose or goals. But neither is this anti-intellectual attitude peculiar to the professional historians. The existentialist and positive philosophies have entered into the thinking of most areas of human thought and activity with devastating results. In conjunction with the Freudian school in psychology, they have made irrationalism and anti-intellectualism fashionable and have virtually removed the concepts of purpose and meaning from the thinking of many historians and those who proclaim themselves to be ‘social scientists.’
Therefore, Critical Race Theory and any other made up modern concepts of history are all looked at as valid. You create what you believe and then make it truth when there is no foundational remembrance of history or the God of history there to guide you.
Keeping It Short
I’m keeping this newsletter very short since I’m pasting in portions of the Preface to the book ‘The Biblical Structure Of History’ for you to consider. You will find this in the Extra Reading section of this newsletter.
Program Structure
This week I talk about three points that related to our Foundational History that the pastors, politicians and academia are refusing and denying in history
1. From Anti-federalist #1, ‘If it is suitable to the GENIUS and HABITS of the citizens of these states, it will bear the strictest scrutiny. The PEOPLE are the grand inquest who have a RIGHT to judge of its merits. The hideous daemon of Aristocracy has hitherto had so much influence as to bar the channels of investigation, preclude the people from inquiry and extinguish every spark of liberal information of its qualities.’ Yes, I do bring in the Hunter Biden court case and in comparison to the President Trump persecutions. Note: this, the Trump persecution, is a global action as presented by Jim Garlow.
2. From Samuel Cheever’s sermon, a Biblical History of the church, Israel and the ancient world, ‘As God is the Maker of the nations, so all the motions of the nations, are all ordered by God, from one part of the world to another.
3. From ‘Treason In America’ by Anton Chaitkin, some notes on Aaron Burr and mostly on the ‘East India Trading Company to Marx.’ That the modern power elite, i.e. Davos Crowd, are the same today as at the founding of this nation.
Sam Adams Wisdom
TO RICHARD HENRY LEE.
BOSTON Augt 29th. 1789.
‘The Power of removing federal Officers at the Pleasure of the President is to be found the Constitution or it is not. If it is, What Need was there of an Act or Decision of Congress to authorize it? But if it is not, could Congress give so important a Power? What have the United States been contending for? Liberty. This is the great Object of their State Governments, and has not the federal Constitution the same Object in View? If therefore a Doubt arises respecting the Exercise of any Power, no Construction, I conceive, should militate with the main Design, or Object of the Charter. If there is a total Silence in the Constitution, is it not natural to conclude that an Officer holding during Pleasure is removable by the same Power which appointed him, whether vested in a single Person, or a joint Number? I am sensible, it is said, that a single Person, being amenable for his Exercise of Power will use the utmost Circumspection. This may be true, but may not this Idea be carried too far in Practice? May not some Powers vested in a single Man give him such Weight and Influence as to render any Restraint from his feeling himself amenable of little, or no Effect. If this Power lodged in the Discretion of a single Person will afford a greater Security against Corruption because of his Amenability, why should not the Power of appointing as well as removing Officers be given to him? In the one Case the gracious Hand may be held forth, in the other, the threatning Rod; and both may be used for improper Purposes. …’
Thank you to all who are subscribers to the program. Please share the newsletter and subscribe to the Rumble or YouTube channel.
References:
1. Samuel Cheever, God’s Sovereign Government among the Nations Asserted (1712)
Other references embedded above.
This Weeks News Articles
1. Poll: Millennials Say ‘Misgendering’ Should Be a Crime, Gen Z Disagrees. Millennial Americans favor making adherence to biological reality in language a criminal offense, new polling conducted for Newsweek found.
3. UPDATE: Hunter Biden Pleads Not Guilty, DOJ Sweetheart Deal Unravels
4. Judge Questions Hunter Biden Plea Deal Due to Ongoing Investigation
5. Report: Plea Deal Would Have Given Hunter Biden Immunity ‘in Perpetuity’
Extra Reading
Excerpts from the Preface for The Biblical Structure Of History by Dr. Gary North.
I wrote this book so that a hard core of Christian leaders and prospective leaders will read it and then will act on what they have read. Leaders act representatively. Action is crucial to all forms of leadership: in households, churches, and everywhere else. Knowledge alone is insufficient for meaningful change, either personally or institutionally. We must act in terms of what we believe. But, before we act, we had better count the cost. Jesus said: “For which of you, intending to build a tower, sitteth not down first, and counteth the cost, whether he have sufficient to finish it? Lest haply, after he hath laid the foundation, and is not able to finish it, all that behold it begin to mock him, Saying, This man began to build, and was not able to finish” (Luke 14:28–30).
Maybe you do not want to be a leader. You are a leader anyway. If you are a parent, you are a leader. Parents teach their children. If you make decisions on behalf of others, you are a leader. Basic to all forms of leadership is the knowledge of history. Every organization has a history. Successful leaders must know something about the past of the organizations in which they possess God-given responsibility. They need to know how they got into the positions they occupy. They need to know something about the successes and failures of previous leaders…
…More than any other religion except Judaism, Christianity is a religion based on history. Yet Christians are remarkably ignorant about the history of the church. They are even more ignorant about the culture-transforming effects of the church. Even if they know a little about a few key figures in the history of the church, they cannot explain exactly why these people were important in the history of Western civilization. They cannot tell you what difference these people made outside of the institutional church. They have no understanding of the relationship between the church’s teachings and historical progress.
One of the reasons for this ignorance is that humanistic historians ever since the Renaissance have dominated the profession of historical storytellers. They have written stories about the history of the church prior to 1500. These stories have been almost universally negative. There has been some recent improvement in the accuracy of the humanists’ accounts of the history of Christianity, but not enough. Humanists have written the history textbooks. Textbooks on the history of Western civilization have focused on the historical impact of the rediscovery of Greek and Roman historical documents and sculpture that took place after about 1350, and especially after the Turks captured Constantinople in 1453, when Greek refugees came west with copies of ancient Greek documents and the ability to teach. Humanist historians labeled the early history of the church “the dark ages.” They alsolabeled the history of the West up to about 1350 as “the Middle Ages.” The middle of what? The middle of civilization between the fall of Rome in 476 A.D. and the advent of the Renaissance.
In this book, I explain the nature of the intellectual warfare between two irreconcilable theories of history and two traditions of writing about history. The first is the Christian concept of history. The second is humanism’s concept of history. Both groups have adopted similar organizational categories for understanding history, but their presuppositions are radically opposed. I discuss this conflict of visions in terms of the rivalry between the kingdom of God and the kingdom of man. I show why you and generations of Christians before you have been deliberately misinformed about the history of Western civilization.
… Singer’s essay was titled “The Problem of Historical Interpretation.” He began his essay with this paragraph:
Some five years ago at an annual meeting of the American Historical Association the writer had the occasion to meet informally with a group of the more famous historians in attendance at that conference. The subject under discussion was the meaning and purpose of history. These half-dozen scholars were of the opinion that history lacks any decisive meaning and any discernible purpose. The writer then posed to this group of distinguished scholars one question: If this be the case, then why do we teach history? The scholars looked at him with surprise and even disgust, but no answer was forthcoming from any of them. The group broke up as each went to his own particular luncheon group and discussion of various phases of a subject which they could not really justify as part of a college curriculum and yet which they continue to teach as if the knowledge of it had some inherent value.
In the second paragraph, he drew a conclusion regarding the world of humanist academia:
This incident is by no means unique. The professional historians in this country and in Europe have come to the place where they have little faith in the subject to which they have devoted their lives. Historians with increasing and distressing frequency are openly admitting that history has no meaning and shows little or no purpose or goals. But neither is this anti-intellectual attitude peculiar to the professional historians. The existentialist and positive philosophies have entered into the thinking of most areas of human thought and activity with devastating results. In conjunction with the Freudian school in psychology, they have made irrationalism and anti-intellectualism fashionable and have virtually removed the concepts of purpose and meaning from the thinking of many historians and those who proclaim themselves to be “social scientists.”
His assessment was correct. Leading historians in 1970 no longer had faith that history reveals any authoritative meaning or purpose. This lack of faith is far more widespread today. It had been building for half a century before Singer wrote his essay. Yet this pessimism regarding the relevancy of historical research and publication has in no way slowed the publication of arcane articles in professional historical journals. Historians continue to write these articles, despite the fact that the articles are rarely quoted by other historians or even read by them. Then why write? They do it to keep their jobs in major universities if they do not have tenure, and to get job offers if they are stuck in colleges with poor academic reputations and low pay. In 1970, publishing journal articles was the way that untenured assistant professors became tenured associate professors and full professors—in every field in the humanities and social sciences.
When the acknowledged leaders in any profession begin to doubt its legitimacy, that profession borders on the fringes of irrelevancy. In the case of the academic discipline known as history, the number of students willing to major in the field has steadily declined. There are so few high school teaching opportunities available to graduates with B.A. degrees in history that the number of students willing to take two years of upper division courses has declined. In 2017, 15 million students attended American colleges. In that year, fewer than 25,000 history degrees were awarded, down from over 36,000 in 2008. The number of history majors declined by two-thirds from 1969 to 1985. (Colleen Flaherty, “The Vanishing History Major,” Inside Higher Education [November 27, 2018]. https://bit.ly/HistoryMajors)
There was a time in American history when history courses were part of the core curriculum in both high schools and colleges. In high school in the late 1950s, I took a one-year course in world history and one-year course in American history. At the University of California, Riverside in the 1960s, a one-year course in Western civilization was required for graduation. That academic world is long gone. In 2020, an article was published by Forbes, a business site: “Who’s Afraid of Western Civ?” …
…
What I wrote about modern natural science in 1988, I am writing about modern historiography in this book. The problem is the same—skepticism—because the cause is the same: the abandonment of a worldview that affirms the possibility of objective knowledge. The twenty-first century is increasingly an era of subjectivism. This started in the late-nineteenth century, and it accelerated after World War I. In his book, Twilight of Authority (1975), Robert Nisbet observed:
‘Twilight periods are rich in manifestations of subjectivity, and our own is no exception. The retreat to inner consciousness that began in literature at the very beginning of the century, but which was offset for a long time by still-powerful currents of objectivity, has become a major phenomenon in the cultural setting of the present, and may be seen not only in literature and the fine arts, but in substantial areas of the social sciences, philosophy, and, variously, in the wide range of popular therapeutic explorations of self. This subjectivity would be less significant if it were not associated with what has become an enlarging distrust of reason and science in some of the areas of inquiry which only recently have become accepted in the terms of rationalism (pp. 139–40).
…
Conclusion
I have learned after six decades of experience in teaching, primarily on the printed page and the computer screen, that it is more effective to start with a presentation of what is correct before launching into detailed criticisms of what is incorrect. The old saying is true: you can’t beat something with nothing. It is best to begin with something, and especially something true. This is why I devote Part 1 to a presentation of the biblical foundations of history and also historiography. These five covenantal categories are foundational to the study of society: sovereignty, authority, law, sanctions, and succession. The Bible identifies the content of these five categories in the realm of history: creationism, the image of God in man, biblical law, God’s imputation of meaning, and cultural inheritance over time.
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