I believe in a sovereign God who ordains all things and knows all things. He knew humankind, our actions, and our inmost thoughts from before the foundation of the world, in other words, before the beginning of history. The trajectory of history was foreordained. You can see the basic arc laid out in Scripture starting with “in the beginning God created” and ending with the second coming of Christ (well, I guess that depends on your eschatology, but you get my point). The medieval chroniclers incorporated this grand sweep of history into their works. A chronicler might have been writing a chronology of the Anglo-Saxons in the 9th century, but he would start by linking his work with the time of Christ.
Most Christians hold to some grand narrative of history. The concept of the “grand narrative” is properly called teleology, the idea that there exists an end of history. I believe that all history has a beginning and an ending. A biography begins and ends with birth and death. An institutional history might show the triumphant maturation or the slow decline of a school. As William Cronon has noted, even environmental historians find themselves turning the eruptions of earthquakes and other natural events into narratives. We shape our stories into narratives because narratives are “fundamental to the way we humans organize our experience.” This fact shouldn’t worry Christian historians. As Cronon further explained, “this commitment to teleology and narrative gives environmental history – all history – its moral center.” Narratives tell the reader what is good or bad, right or wrong.
