Hi, my name is Kent Kersey. And I want to welcome you to Corban's worldview videos series.

Join us today as we talk to Dr. Scott Bruce, who's going to help us understand how a Christian worldview really helps us understand history and how a Christian interpretation of history gives a very robust understanding of what has happened in our past.

Our calling your at Corban scholars is not to merely be scholars who happen to be Christians, okay, we have to be Christian scholars, we have to approach our fields in ways that do not fully mirror what our secular colleagues are doing in our own fields, one particularly strong component that is widely prevalent and that has just infused into so much of the the way the secular worldview approaches history is Marxism. And Marxism is not just a socio economic philosophy, it is a full on worldview. It takes this group mentality and of course terms, measures the human experience through that group mentality. And so where, you know, where we're seeing this now is, you know, dividin g up the the groups of human beings in the world into the oppressors, and the oppressed. Does oppression take place? Yes, it does. Does oppression sometimes involve entire people groups, we know that it does. So we have to, to kind of temper Marx a little bit and say, all right, well, Marx wasn't completely off, but he got a lot wrong. And through a Christian lens, one of the things that we like to look at is, you know, the virtue of human beings, individual character matters. And that gets back into the biblical concept of the imago dei, the image bearers that we all are and that's, that's just so essential to understanding human history. There's an awful lot of darkness with the Marxist view of history, right? So because all you're doing is looking for villains, right? And if you're not looking for the villains, you're looking for those who are being oppressed. And so you're looking at just this constant evaluation of the depravity and the darkness and the emptiness and everything that's gone wrong with the world. And who can we blame for it? Earlier, I think on Monday, in fact, this week, I was talking to students about this. And I said, Look, when we look, when we trace through the history of something like World War II, it's very interesting part of human history, but it's also very difficult part of human history to really dig into and understand there, there's just so much. There's so much abominable activity, seeing what human beings are capable of doing to one another, right? So if we only looked at that, we could come away from World War II, we could, we could mistakenly assume that nothing good was happening. We could be questioning how, how can as many ethicists do secular ethicist asks, ask this question. Where was God in World War II? Where was God when the Holocaust was happening? And, you know, if we, if we align ourselves better, we we can actually dig in and see that God was very much active, even in the midst of the chaos of World War II. And man, if you just look at the course of World War II, there were so many who put their lives on the line. Somebody who fought back against the evil, so many who stood in the gap and said this, I'm not going to just watch this happen. I mean, I'm hearing and seeing from a lot of evangelical Christians in my life and the ones that I'm reading, I'm seeing a fair amount of fear, consternation, paranoia, maybe fear of what will happen in the culture. And, you know, I don't want to sound self righteous. I have my own concerns. I mean, look, I'm I'm not free from concern, but I would say we have opportunities here. It's in the darkness. It's in the storm. It's in those moments before the dawn before the dawn breaks, that's when it seems the most overwhelming and yet that's That's where so much powerful work can be done.

I really loved Dr. Bruce's teaching, he has a clear, like deep knowledge of all the subjects that that we're learning about. And I think the big component that especially in the world today is really valuable is the biblical integration. You know, you'll have historians quoted or you'll have different movements in history that try to claim one thing or another. And so I think having the backing from Dr. Bruce and my other corporate history professors to really think critically, and to have that complex understanding that history is not super simple. It's not just oppressor and oppressed, that there's complexity to it. And there's depth. I think, knowing that has helped me to see through some of these, some of these views that seem so easy and so tempting to be like, Oh, man, yeah, that makes sense and just go with it. It actually caused me to stop and think okay, no, it's never this simple. History is very complicated. And especially with the biblical worldview to look at, okay, what is truly righteous hearing what is unrighteous and what are the motives behind some of these movements? So I think that's been really good, the critical thinking aspect to just really think deeply about history instead of being quick to label or assume