Historification of the Big Picture

Ralph D. Winter

This reading centers around two supplementary exercises. The first exercise asks you to draw a grid, or a chart, that will enable you to visualize the various historical events important to salvation history that have been discussed thus far in the course. Details on how this grid is to be drawn will be given in the reading. The second exercise asks you to write a synopsis of the most important events in salvation history in a short enough presentation that one could read your synopsis in under 60 seconds. The details of how to write this presentation are given within the reading. s we think together of The Historification of the Big Picture, some clarification may be of assistance. By historification (an atrocity of verbal phrasing), I refer to the use of time as an organizing factor in the understanding of history. History is not always studied so much in terms of time as it is in content. There are people who study the details of great events without any reference to the previous or following periods of history, or without any reference to contemporary events in other parts of the world. That is still history. History, basically, is simply writing down what has happened, with or without regard to time.

These periods of 400 years seem more useful, however, than 100-year periods when youre talking about long spaces of time. Because a person may get confused with minor divisions like 100 years, it seems easier to talk about 400 years. In this grid, nothing will necessarily fit precisely, although the Patriarchal Period starts somewhere in the earliest of those five 400-year super-centuries. And it is true the Bible now and then makes sweeping statements about 400 years in Egypt or 400 years here or there. Let us not take that too seriously; let us just try to fit the major events of the Old Testament on this grid. The drastic problem which all will have to faceno one has any advantage in thisis the fact that there are two radically different views of the time of the Exodus from Egypt: the so-called early date and the late date. I do not personally care in which year the event occurred. I am not going to spend a lot of time trying to figure it out, as I do not see any particular advantage to knowing. In drawing your grid, it does not matter in particular whether you feel that the Exodus happened at an earlier or a later date. In drawing this grid, where will you place the major personalities of the Old Testament? For instance, where would you put Moses? Obviously, youd put him either at the early or the late date. Where do you put Abraham? You put him at the beginning. Where do you put David? (Now, the question of when we are to date the life of David has a little more definite answer; we have a little more agreement as to when David lived). What about the personality of Solomon, or Jo-

The Grid

At this point in the course we will use a grid to study the history in question. I am suggesting the use of a grid composed of 400-year periods. Therefore, when this grid is completed you will have included five 400year periods in total. Now, nobody, certainly not myself, is proposing that things happened in an exact 400 years, and then something else started after 400 years.

This article is reprinted with permission from: Winter, Ralph D. et al, eds. (2006) Global Civilization, Ancient World: Lesson Overviews, 5th ed. Pasadena: William Carey Library, pp. 208-212.

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siah, or Ezra, Nehemiah, and so forth. To put these on a grid will give a perspective on sequence. Some people go through Sunday School all their life and still do not know whether David or Moses came first. That is really too bad because it is not such a complicated picture if you have in mind the overall scheme of salvation history. In fact, it is so relatively simple that I think you ought to be able to tell the story in 60 seconds.

The Story

Im sure that you can tell the whole Old Testament story in 60 seconds, if you keep to the major periods and events and geography. Abraham and Ur of the Chaldees is where you start. Then you move to the socalled Promised Land, which is the bridge between the great mass of Africa and the great mass of Europe and Asia, the two largest land masses on the globe. They are hooked together with this narrow bridge, which is where Abraham went. Then you see other events unfold from there. So you can tell the whole story of the Old Testament within 60 seconds. That will perhaps be a help to you in drawing a picture. If you can say it in 60 seconds, you ought to be able to fit this story on a single sheet of paper. Why dont you try to write this story out? Remember, you will need to be able to read this story in 60 seconds or less- and that is without speed reading! You are welcome to read on a bit as you might gain more insight into what should be included in this story, but do try out this helpful exercise.

There are many edifying questions to be asked about the various books of the Old Testament canon. Let us take the book of Samuel for instance: When was Samuel written? We should not concentrate solely on the question, What is Samuel written about? but it is important to explore the question,When was it written? as well. It could have been written at the time the events it describes occurred. That is not true with 1 Chronicles, because Chronicles begins with Adam. And Chronicles leaves out the Northern Kingdom. 1 and 2 Samuel, 1 and 2 Kings are books that include the Northern kings, the Northern tribes. You can peruse all of your textbooks to gain insight into what I believe will be a growing concern when considering the Canon: What were the spiritual events that created the Bible? To ask such a question is not to belittle the Bible, but to magnify the importance of true, spiritual, national revival. It is no secret that Constantine, the Roman emperor, in becoming a Christian and making it legitimate and legal for Christians to operate, simultaneously allowed a man named Eusebius to collect books and documents describing the early church. It also made possible the coming out of the catacombs the various translations of the Bible so they could be widely duplicated. Humanly speaking, perhaps we would not have a Bible if it were not for the political/spiritual event of Constantines conversion. His conversion allowed for public toleration and, later, public support of the Christian religion. Events similar to this transpired in the Old Testament as well. For instance, Josiahs revival brought the book of Deuteronomy into prominence and power, and perhaps encouraged the writing of other parts of Scripture. So I think it is helpful to ask yourself, When were these books created? and to try to put a little arrow in your diagram in that respect.

The Canon

There are two different sequences of the canon. The Septuagint does include more than we call the canon. The Apocryphal books are not part of our canon (the Apocrypha is considered an important collection of books by Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox Churches). The canon means standard or norm; and both Jews and Protestant Christians accept the same canonical list of books (as far as what Christians commonly term as the Old Covenant or Testament; Jews obviously do not consider the New Testament canonical), but not in the same sequence. So if on your chart you put down the sequence of books by the Hebrew or the Septuagint canon, you will end up with a different sequence. Lines may be going back and forth, and may be crossing, to relate those two to the same time line. Thats part of the complexity of the study of the Old Testament.

The Big Picture

Hopefully, this will not be the only time in your life that you do the 60-second story exercise. This exercise should be done throughout your life, for each time you gain more insight into history you will gain more insight into those important events of salvation history. You can get that 60-second story together; you can start drawing your time-line. The time-line is absolutely impartial; its absolutely equally divided into five equally wide divisions across the piece of paper. But from then on, chaos begins

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to appear, because many aspects do not fit so neatly into time. This is what I have called, playfully, The Historification of the Big Picture. You can put the various empires outside of the Bible in there. Assyria comes into the Bible; Babylon comes into the Bible; Persia comes into the Bible; Ur of the Chaldees is referred to. You can put Egypt in there. If you want, you could even put the events of China and India. Why not? As we go along in the course, we want to get a feel for things that are simultaneous or nearly so, like Confucius, Buddha, Zarathustra, Socrates a little bit later, and Isaiah. These men are all roughly simultaneous. There is no particular reason for them to be studied in different books at different times in different places, and never be related together. The Spirit of God in the Bible says, the eyes of God run to and fro throughout the earth to show Himself strong on behalf of those whose heart is perfect toward Him ( 2 Chronicles 16:9). What does this actually mean? What did all these influential people really believe? We do not know for sure. But were they seeking God? Was God favoring them in any respect because of their heart conditions? Now, their followers have gummed up their teaching unimaginably. Buddha would be quite astonished if he saw the huge Buddhas in Thailand. The same is true, I feel sure, if the Apostle Paul saw some of the great cathedrals million-dollar organs dedicated to the simple Carpenter of Nazareth. You can not blame founders for their followers. You cannot assume that the current followers of anybody, good or bad, reflect accurately what those initial founders really believed.

Reflections

The title The Historification of the Big Picture is somewhat playful. Remember, this should not be the only time you consider Gods activity throughout history. This may take you 10 or 15 years to finish to your satisfaction, maybe never to your satisfaction, because theres a great deal of information about this 2000-year period that we probably will never know in this life. But it is very important about this time during the course to begin to pull aspects of what we are learning together, so that as further items come, they can be attached to a single Big Picture. Since we are using time as the inflexible dimension, we have called this historification. Please take note that I have only invented this word as a playful way of looking at the significance of events throughout all of global history

The Story Exercise

Now the exercise was to write up a story that could be read without hurrying within 60 seconds. Let us consider a 120-second story which was written by a student who took this course in the past. Then we will critique this story and consider other possibilities and vantage points. Student: God created the universe out of nothing at the beginning of time. After He had made the earth and filled it with plants and animals, He made Adam and Eve, the first people. Adam and Eve had close fellowship with God, but they chose to sin, and that broke the fellowship. Because of their sin, all men everywhere are sinners and need to have their fellowship with God restored. God lovingly decided to make it possible for men to be forgiven of their sin. First, He split the world up into nations by giving each nation a different language. Then he chose a man named Abraham to build into a nation. He had decided to fulfill His plan by using one nation to bless all the other nations. He promised to bless Abraham and to use Abrahams seed to bless all the nations. Abrahams descendants ended up in Egypt, where they grew from 70 people to several million people. After 400 years, they were truly a nation, the nation of Israel. God chose Moses to lead the nation of Israel out of Egypt, where they were slaves. Their exodus from Egypt, with many miracles, became a famous story in that part of the world. God gave Israel the land of Canaan for their own. He established a covenant of fellowship with them. At first

What is God doing in history?

So, what we are really interested in is this question, What is God up to? What is going on? We have no interest in simply studying a mass of facts about things that simply occurred and not attach any significance to these things. We want to understand what was going on, so that we can participate with God in His on-going activity today. What was going on then is going on today, in terms of a changeless, purposeful God. We as His disciples do well to take very seriously these kinds of questions. After you have taken time to work on your grid and then write out the 60-second presentation, then you can read on to the following reflections.

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they were ruled by judges; then later, they had kings. God renewed the promises of blessing He had made to Abraham, when He had settled Israel in their new land. But the Israelites were disobedient and rebellious. God had to warn them over and over again not to worship anyone else but Him. The prophets had a fulltime job keeping the people informed about what God was saying. Finally, the Israelites were conquered by other nations, and some were taken off into exile. This punishment taught them to worship only God. When they returned to Canaan, they renewed their promises to obey God. They also looked forward more and more hopefully to the long-promised seed, the Messiah, the One who would restore fellowship between God and man forever. Dr. Winter: This is a story which I consider to be very good. What follows is a critique. Different ways are available to approach a critique. One way to conduct a critique is to ask if theres anything in this account that is not correct, especially in a factual sense. Obviously, the problem is to state as much that is true as possible; but it might be that now and then you unknowingly write something that is incorrect. To point out a very small error, it seems to me it would be better to speak of 70 households than 70 people that went to Egypt, because the 70 people, essentially, were men: no wives were mentioned, and no children. We can assume that the number of 70 given in the scriptures is in reference to households. Now, that does not actually make the difference between feasibility or infeasibility of 70 people growing into two million in 430 years; both of them are equally possible. This is not an unusual growth rate for human populations. But I mention that for fun to give an example of what you would want to avoid. For example, later on, the student wrote that some of the Israelites were taken into captivity. I think most scholars feel that most of them were taken into captivity, and some of them came back: rather than some of them going and all of them coming back, most of them went and some of them came back. That means the community of Israel at the time of Christ was only about a third of the Jews as two-thirds of them were still back where they had been taken into captivity. This begins to help us understand the rising up of the Zoroastrian tradition, because, during the Babylonian exile, there may very well have been a good deal of contribu-

tion from Jewish thought to this tradition centered farther to the east from Palestine. The other approach to critique would be not just considering what is not true, but also reviewing the proportions of emphasis given to different events and themes as presented in the story? You could, for instance, say that since Genesis 1-11 is the Introduction to the whole Bible. In this way, the story could potentially stay in Genesis 1-11 entirely if you as a writer wanted to do this. On the other hand, Im sure more influence was given to some of the earlier events than to some of the later events simply because those later occurrences have not yet been considered in the course, and they are not quite as vivid in ones mind. I did this 60 second exercise when I first went to seminary many years ago. At that point I did not have much missiological insight. But over the years, I have periodicallyonce every ten or fifteen yearswritten up a 60-second story. I did this for fun recently, without consciously injecting any new missiological insights that have come to me in the last 10 yearswhich are many. So now you will have to critique what I am saying from that point of view. This is my 60-second story. You can actually time me if you want. Here we go: After a good creation, evil entered the planet; and out of all the lost and straying nations, God chose one person, Abraham, to launch a new nation that would be a means of re-conquest. Abraham was told to relocate from one of the most advanced early civilizations, Sumeria, to a neck of land connecting Africa and Europe-Asia. There his lineage prospered in the era of the patriarchs, fell into Egyptian captivity for 400 years, was brought out by Moses in a series of miracles, balked at retaking the Promised Land, delayed 40 years in the wilderness, finally entered and, with mixed success and failure, re-occupied the land. After 400 years of judges, kings were introducedDavid and Solomon, for example. In a series of ups and downs, the northern ten tribes were dispersed, and finally the southern kingdom was carried into Babylonian captivity. After 70 years, a partial return set the stage for new obedience, but continued failure, leading up to the appearance of Gods own Son. You can see that my emphasis was a little different; but in both cases, it seems perfectly possible in 60 seconds to give the overall picture of the Old Testament. Now, I do not think we are going to publish a book with one

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page, or lets say a third of a page and say, The Short Story of the Old Testament, and sell the book. The purpose of this kind of story, however, is to make it necessary to see the broad outlines. It forces you to drop out details, and choose the most important events. I did not get very much missiological theory into my 60 second story. I used the phrase reconquest, for example, whereas the student used the words bless all the nations. I do not think there is any difference in meaning. The blessing can only come through the subordination of people to their Heavenly Father in a loving, reconciling relationship. To call this blessing easily falls into the trap of thinking of prosperity, physical or material prosperity. On the other hand, reconquest sounds harsh and militaristic. So you may do something different from either of these two words. In any event, it is possible to review this overall story in a short period of time.

The Time-Line/Grid Exercise

A critical assignment which may take ten yearsit will certainly take more than one dayis to put the key components of the story into the form of a time line. Draw a time line from 200 BC to the birth of Christ, giving each period of 400 years equal space. The idea of stretching out the time period of 2000 years, with evenly spaced 400-year periods, is just a purely arbitrary but somewhat objective grid. We are not expecting that anything will necessarily fit that grid; but at least it can be located on that grid. Whole periods of time, which we normally gloss over, come into view, simply because the Bible itself does not give equal attention to each day in the 2000-year period. Then the great epochs of Old Testament drama which consist of Patriarchal, Egyptian Captivity, Judges, Kings, Postexilic should be included on the grid. For pedagogical purposes, I applied these five epochs to the five 400-year periods. I know they do not fit precisely, but at least there are these five epochs in sequence. They are major epochs; they do last centuries long; and they do give an overall sequence. At least for the person who cant remember which order Moses and David come in, this will help. You could also plot five major personages and add the books of the Old Testament in the periods to which they refer as a step further.

answer. I believe it would be so valuable to review the great spiritual events in Abrahamic and Israels history and conjecture the relationship of these events to the writing of the various books of the Bible. I wish Biblical scholarship more often referred to the great spiritual movements of history. While the major state universities of the country buy more religious books than all other libraries put together, their faculties are almost uniformly non-Christian, non-believing, nonreligious scholar faculties. It is very rare that you will find a devotionally believing, scholarly Christian working in a secular university. In fact, the university logic may be to deliberately choose people who have no personal loyalty, lest that color the objectivity of their scholarship. Well, of course, the other extreme is what usually happens. People who have no personal interest in fellowship with God are not going to be looking for spiritual events related to the Biblical narrative. So we have a frighteningly secular interpretation of scripture. Most of the scholarly books that one sees even at the Society of Biblical Literature are written from a secular viewpoint. When the largest meeting in all their history of over 8,000 people took place, the vast majority of attendees were not believers. So it is more and more difficult to find the scholarly resources that we need to consult that give us answers about the significance of Biblical events. These are the kind of answers that we want here. Yet it is also true, whether we can find out the details of the historical processes or not, that the Bible was not let down from heaven in the form it is now in. It was an accumulating document and was created in the context of a culture in the midst of history. That may sound a little scary. But, obviously, Abraham did not go around with a pocket New Testament, a pocket Old Testament, or even a pocket copy of the Torah, the first five books, the Pentateuch. It was obvious that God was able to deal with people apart from written Scripture. We must remember that for much of Old Testament history, the saints and prophets of that era were without the final form of Scripture that we call the Bible today. Also obvious is that, in all of the last 4000 years, written Scripture has been the primary means of dealing with humanityin addition, of course, to the appearance of His own Son. But our knowledge of Gods Son is given to us only because of written Scripture. And so, through Gods Son as presented in Holy Scripture God has reached out across the world.

The Bible

A most important dimension to consider is one to which I do not feel qualified to give a good or full

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Of course, the printed Bible is not of less importance simply because of the fact that not everyone through history has had access to the full Bible. Amazingly enough, even in the period following the apostles, when the full Bible was available to some, most Christians in history have not had access to the full Bible. This is a very embarrassing reality about the Christian tradition itself. Even those of us who have the Bible do not use it. They say that 1 out of 40 households in France has a Bible. In the United States, there are five Bibles per household. In my household, there are a lot more than five Bibles, even if I just counted the ones that have been given to me. But the number of Bibles

is not as important as how we treat the Bible: how we deal with it, how we make use of it. I think that we are now in the era of cosmetic Bibles, micro-print Bibles that are complete Bibles; so you can get credit for carrying the whole Bible with you to church in beautiful leather binding or a hand held computer. On the one hand, they say the average camera in the United States takes only one picture per year. I would say the average Bible doesnt get read one page per year in the United States. So there could be a false confidence built up around written Scripture, even though it is exceedingly precious to those who seek it and cannot find it.