Epistemology of History

I have not written on this beloved blog for some time, as an exceeding number of preoccupations concerning the state of my health have prevented me from doing much more than my seminary work and some studies at the Institute of Biblical Defense, but I am back. My intention now is to lay a basic foundation for thinking about History. By this, I mean extra-biblical history. I am rather alarmed that when history is discussed among learned people, the discourse remains at the metaphysical level (occurrences and reasons for those). I am not suggesting that all scholars do is ramble about facts and whether or not History is linear, circular, or oscillating. I am also not implying that subjects concerning historiographical method are also not spoken of. Before I proceed with my thesis, I would like to supply, if I may, a brief fact concerning historiography after a definition. Historiography is a discipline that concerns itself with the study of the methodology and development of history. How should we think about history? How do we write about it and approach it?

Basically, history is the study of past events, but this is not what I am concerned with. I am not a historian, although I read my fair share of history and have taken one year of Masters level church history and historiography in seminary. But what does this matter if I do not first ask the question: What is History? We are not looking for a definition now. One has already been provided. My question is purely epistemological. It is my exceedingly strong contention that before one can postulate anything as regards metaphysics, that one is obligated to “pan-out” a theory of knowledge (epistemology) and how it is possible to think about metaphysics (the facts of history). 

For the most part, historiography has been a study very much dominated by empiricism and concrete metaphysical reasoning, and as I have stated before, the facts of history do not arrive to us with an implicit built-in interpretation that we can ascertain through sense experience. This is why our first concern as regards history is epistemological. With what lens are we going to “view” history? After all, it cannot be observed. But someone will say “of course it can – we have relics from antiquity, and archaeologists have adduced wonders from an analysis of pottery. Our cultural anthropologists have written books about this or that, and our historians have arrived to unanimous decisions.” But this kind of argumentation has not departed from the metaphysical, and we are still left with facts suspended in mid-air. As stated before, all subject matter, including the discipline of Historiography, is controlled by a theory of knowledge that attempts to authenticate its theory of metaphysics (the facts of history) for the purpose of making sense of those facts. It is my strong assertion that an empirical theory of knowledge cannot account for the facts of History, neither can it organize history, as if the facts had their own interpretations ready to be unpacked once we observe and think about occurrences. The 5 senses can only do that – sense. They cannot lead to an intellectual adduction, much less a hypothesis about history. It is, then, the majority of historians who have taken for granted that history exists, that the past was uniform, and that the present is uniform enough in order to make meaningful statements about the past. They also take it for granted that the future will be uniform. By uniform, I am speaking of the philosophical topic of the uniformity of nature. After all, in order for the Battle of Hastings to have happened, gravity and the laws of logic must have existed back then. But historians often simply speak of facts before they even define the equipment by which they are philosophically warranted to state the facts. After all, most historians are common-sense realists although I doubt they have ever cared to adopt the views of the Scottish common-sense philosophers that they have studied.

My point is that one cannot simply assume that nature is uniform and engage in historiography “just because.” One must realize that it is the God of the Scriptures who not only created the world, but is Sovereign over history. Any attempts to make sense of history by reasoning autonomously away from God end up in futility and chaos. Historians, then, do not have a complete sense of history if they only tell us what “happened” or why they “think it happened.” They must answer other questions as to the origin of how they can say what they say in order for History to “come alive,” as they want it to. They can say that Napoleon lost to the Iron Duke, but they cannot call Napoleon “ruthless,” because by simple empirical understanding of facts, one cannot come to the conclusion that someone is ruthless. This is the task of ethics, and when it comes to ethics, the Bible is the only thing that matters – the Word of God. So History’s starting point is the Word of God, which is full of historico-theological account, and authenticates natural revelation, which in its past disguise, we call history.


Felipe Diez III
Minister_of_Music@yahoo.com