Lincoln
In terms of the examples I gave, my point was that the ideologies I outlined, as hateful as I may personally find them, are valid conclusions from the study of history. Just as science can only tell you what can be done and not what should be done, history can only tell us what people did and not what they should have done.

So Izgad, I think that you are right to note that Christian historians are often going to write history that looks different from non-Christians. But the very act of selection requires the Christian historian to make choices based upon moral assumptions. The Christian historian cannot escape making “moral and ethical judgements about the past.”

Not to press the point, but each of the counter examples that you’ve given is a moral judgment. If someone were to say (wrongly) that the Holocaust was a sacrifice to defeat Communism, then he would be making a moral judgment that defeating Communism was a greater good than killing the Jews. Concerning the firebombing and nuclear bombing of Japanese cities, one must make the moral judgment whether killing civilians was morally justifiable to end the war. Concerning slavery, your hypothetical argument is not so far from the actual arguments that slaveholders offered to justify slavery—moral arguments that slaveholders needed slaves to reach the heights of culture.

For some scholars, the connection can be clear. Theologians, some historians, some biologists, some educators, and the like can have a role of directly advancing the church’s mission, by strengthening the faith and sharpening the knowledge of believers within the church, or by offering an apologetic to unbelievers. Here are two examples: the historian Mark Noll, besides writing histories of American religion, has also written a book titled “The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind”; the scientists at the Institute for Creation Research offer scientific defenses of creationism. I think such scholars in such roles can be described as the “Church thinking.”

But even such scholars do not spend all of their time in work directly related to the church, and such scholars are probably in the minority of all Christians in the academy. For Christian scholars generally, then, I think there is a different connection between the scholar and the church. First, there is the old Christian doctrine of vocation. Whatever a person’s job may be, it is a holy vocation from God, and therefore fits into His purposes for the church, even if we don’t know how. Second, one’s Christianity ought to shape his work in every way. In my graduate history education, I’m about to undergo a program of “professionalization.” If the advice books are to be believed, I’m supposed to order my life and approach everything within my discipline as a professional historian. If one can conform his thinking to a professional identity, is it not reasonable to expect that he first conform his scholarship to his Christian identity? Third, as I understand the Scriptures, the church is intended to be a group of people who completely fulfill God’s purposes for humanity. Even if their work doesn’t have as obvious a connection to the church as, say, a theologian or a religious historian, it must please the Lord Jesus to have criminal lawyers, molecular biologists, plumbers, farmers, and secretaries doing their work as members of His church. To reverse the perspective, it does much to strengthen my faith that the Lord is working through His church to see that there are Christians as Christians filling every occupation.

I hope that’s not just a collection of generalizations. To summarize, I think that Christian scholars can be termed the “Church thinking” because their work either advances the church’s mission directly or because it makes the church beautiful by fulfilling Christ’s desire to have an entire race and nation of redeemed people.

I agree that we “need something else besides for history, like the belief in divine providence and judgment, to keep us grounded.” But this belief brings with it a set of moral principles–because I believe this, then I (and others) must act in thus and so a way.

So certainly, history is an attempt to find out the who, what, when, where, how, and why. But all of that is imbued with morality. Take the example of the Shoah, which you mentioned. There is a story–a fact, if you’d rather–full of morality: the immorality of the Nazis, the culpability of so many others, the suffering and bravery of the Jews, the righteous Gentiles, and so on. Even your simple, one phrase summary of that fact makes a moral judgment: the Nazis murdered the Jews. We could multiply examples to find the implicit moral judgment in many histories. My point is simply that since human actions are moral, any good historian will take that into account in his history, and a Christian historian has a particular set of ethics which gives him a coherent way to approach morality.