History
What is history and how do we know?

History is important to the Christian. The life, death, resurrection and ascension of Jesus Christ must be “actual historical events” for believers to have salvation from their sin and God’s wrath against sin. We often tell young people, history is His-story…it is all about Christ. But, what exactly is history? In his excellent book, In Defense of History (WW Norton & Company: New York, 1999), Richard Evans lays out some of the problems in defining what history is. He sets forth that the definition of history is currently under attach by post-modernism [pomo] with its disdain of truth. He posits that before pomo, two definitions were the accepted alternatives for defining history. They come from two different British scholars, Edward Hallet Carr and Sir Geoffrey Elton.

In his book What is History? Carr presses the idea:
…that history books, like the people who write them, are products of their own times, bringing particular ideas and ideologies to bear on the past.
In Defense of History, pp. 1, 2.
In contrast to Carr’s relativistic approach, Elton in his The Practice of History mounts a defense that history:
…is a search for objective truth about the past. It concludes optimistically that historians’ efforts in this enterprise more often than not meet with success.
In Defense of History, p. 2
Their approaches were diametrically opposed. Carr’s was a sociological approach; Elton’s was a narrative of political events. Carr urged his students to study the author of the history; Elton urged his students to look at the documentary evidence as the ultimate arbiter of historical accuracy and truth.

As you would expect, in what constitutes an historical fact, Carr and Elton also disagreed. Carr defined historical fact as follows:
…a past event did not become an historical fact until it was accepted as such by historians…Historical facts were therefore constituted by theory and interpretation. They did not exist independently.
In Defense of History, p. 66.
Elton strongly opposed Carr on what was an historical fact:
A historical fact was something that happened in the past which had left traces in documents that could be used by the historian to reconstruct it in the present…the material left to us in the past must be read “in the context of the day that produced it…The present must be kept out of the past if the search for truth of that past is to move towards such success in the circumstances as is possible.” The historians question should be formulated not by some present theory but from the historical source themselves.
In Defense of History, p. 65.

Curiously, in spite of his relativism, Carr did not believe all views of the past are equally valid. He was still an empiricist who would not agree that facts are nothing and interpretation is all. He was well aware of the extreme interpretations of Bolshevik history ranging from anti to pro-Soviet accounts. He tries to integrate facts and interpretation:
The historian starts with a provisional selection of facts, and a provisional interpretation in the light of which that selection has been made—by others as well as by himself. As he works, both the interpretation and the selection and ordering of facts undergo subtle and perhaps partly unconscious changes through the reciprocal action of one on the other…History was an unending dialogue between the present and the past.
In Defense of History, p. 193.

So Carr had an objectivity about history, but it was not the same as Elton’s. Elton said:
“The purpose of history is to understand the past, and if the past is to be understood it must be given full respect in its own right.” The event of the past occurred, people lived and died, whether or not historians were interested in writing about them. They had an independent reality. The historian’s job was to discover and analyze them through the study of evidential traces they left behind. Establishing what happened, and when, and how, was a major part of historical research, he argued, and differences among historians over these matters often reflected the depth of the historian’s knowledge of the sources rather than a contemporary standpoint or opinion…Objectivity was simply a matter of reading the documents without prejudice and using them to reconstruct the past in its own terms.
In Defense of History, p. 197-98

Both views of objectivity have faults, but that does not mean we abandon history to the pomos who believe there is no possibility of objective knowledge. If all theories are alike valid, why should we embrace the pomo view of history? And, if all knowledge is relative, it is impossible to give an accurate view of pomo historians without placing our own significance to it. So, why bother? Pomos are usually leftists, anti-authoritarian and radical in their individuality. So, their theories of history, liberating man from objectivity, lends itself to the challenging, radical individuality that disdains history as we have it as written by dead white men who were winners. This permits the deconstruction of all that has been the groundwork for traditional values and virtues.

Pomos do force historians to reexamine their assumptions and interpretive categories. But pomo is not an answer to the search for what really occurred in the past. Richard Evans, in the face of Carr, Elton and pomos says this:
I will look humbly at the past and say, despite them all: It really happened, and we really can, if we are very scrupulous and careful and self-critical, find out how it did and reach some tenable conclusions about what it all meant.
In Defense of History, p. 220.

It is quite easy to fall into a belief that history is meaningless in the culture we live. But, for Christians, that is never possible. As Evans points out, history is something that “really happened”. God Himself has mediated to us Who He is and what He has done in history. Like all historians we must be scrupulous, careful and self critical in reaching conclusions about Him. But as believers, there is one critical difference. We believe the Truth of Christ not by the evidence alone (Elton) or by ordering, selecting and interpreting the evidence (Carr), but because of the work of the Holy Spirit Who brings the Truth to bear in our minds, hearts and behavior. Man wants to look at the evidence alone for history, or interpret the evidence in his way to determine history, or dismiss history as objective facts evidencing some true reality. Christians understand that history is objective truth through faith, not by any method devised or instituted by man.