“A sense of history is indispensable in biblical interpretation,” writes Vern Poythress (God-Centered Biblical Interpretation, 145). In many ways the Bible connects to history. The unfolding plan of redemption took place in history. The record of God’s redemptive events was made in a historical context, and it comes to us as part of a historical legacy. Understanding something of the nature of history is indeed “indispensable” in understanding the Word of God properly.
What is history? Many people answer that question by asserting that history is “bare fact.” That is to say history is just the facts, free of any interpretation and ready for us to consume. Brute fact, as some people call it, is just information that exists apart from personal understanding and interpretation. History, particularly the writing of history, must be, it is argued, just the facts. Any interpretation is an imposition on the facts, or even a contamination of the facts. This is the way our modern world views history and it affects, then, the way they view the Bible.
The Bible, it is argued, is corrupted history because it contains a theological agenda and comes with biased interpretation. We cannot trust the historical reports recorded within the pages of Scripture because they contain more than just brute fact. The Bible, then, needs to be challenged and we must be skeptical of it as modern readers. Though this is the modern view of the Bible, it assumes an impersonalist view of history. Such a view is incompatible with the Bible itself and will not allow modern readers to correctly assess Scripture.
According to Scripture history and truth are personal. So Vern Poythress writes:
…The involvement of persons and their perspective in knowledge does not in itself undermine the validity of knowledge. An impersonalist worldview may suggest that truth must ultimately be impersonal. But God is the ultimate standard for truth, and he is personal. We may express this reality by saying that truth is what God know. So personal involvement, namely God’s involvement, is necessary for the existence of truth. And of course human persons must become involved as persons when they come to know something true. This involvement takes place according to the design of God. It is not innately alien or corrupting. (Inerrancy and the Gospels, 34)
The recording and understanding of history requires personal involvement. According to the Bible there are no “bare events” or “brute facts.” Because God is the author of history, and because God has a plan for all the events that take place in this world, all events have real meaning. It is by his design. Poythress gives an example specifically in the cross of Christ. He notes that Luke 24:44-47 “indicates that the suffering, death, and resurrection of Christ were planned by God beforehand, and that they were anticipated in the Old Testament” (36). This means that the events themselves had meaning even before they took place. They were inherently meaningful events, not just bare facts. He goes on to clarify:
Historical events, according to the Bible’s worldview, are not “bare events,” “brute facts,” but events with meaning according to the plan of God. They have theology inherent in them. Therefore the theological significances highlighted in the Gospels and in other places in the Bible are not arbitrary additions to bare events. There is actually no such thing as a bare event. The idea is a figment produced by antibiblical assumptions. The Gospels draw out meanings and implications that God’s plan assigned to the events from before the foundation of the world. (37)
It is clear, of course, that Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John (and Peter, Paul, and Moses) all had theological agendas in the composition of their books. The record of Israel’s history, Jesus’s history, and the church’s history are not “just the facts.” They are written from within a certain theological perspective with a certain theological focus. But modern readers should not view that as a contamination of the “facts.” The facts contain that meaning because they are orchestrated by God as part of his plan. And the record of the events contains that meaning because God, as the ultimate author of that text, is drawing out that meaning for us. There is no history apart from theology!
History belongs to God and the Bible records specific events of history as they relate to the central feature of history: the death and resurrection of Jesus. They are written from within a specific theological perspective with the intent to communicate a specific theological point. But this does not make them false, contaminated, or unreliable. It makes them authentic historical documents. All history has meaning, because it is orchestrated and recorded by a personal God who gives it meaning.
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