History with Heart of Dakota
Merry (late) Christmas and a Happy New Year to you!
This holiday weekend, our family is still feeling the glow from Christmas and looking forward to the dawn of a new year. One thing that makes Christmas such a special holiday is that it celebrates Jesus Christ coming down from heaven and entering human history. As a history lover, this fact especially fascinates me. What a blessing it is to know that our God isn’t a clockmaker God, content to create humanity and then let its history spin out unwatched by Him. God is actively involved with us and cares about His creation! This being the case, I believe it is a disservice to Him if history (the study of the legacy of God’s creation) is studied without even acknowledging Him.
What is a Christian worldview of history and why is it so important?
Having a Christian worldview of history doesn’t have to be preachy. Some of the best Christian historians I know are able to professionally paint the picture of a world undeniably under the control of God without explicitly naming Him every other sentence. Rather, it all has to do with a set of underlying assumptions. These assumptions form the basis of how we process and interpret facts. Ultimately, since these assumptions shape how we make decisions, they end up shaping our very lives.
As Christians, we believe the Bible to be true when it declares “For from him and through him and to him are all things. To him be glory forever.” In other words, the whole course of human history points towards its Creator and functions for His glory. To remove the Creator from the story of His Creation is to remove the soul from the study of history. Without God in the picture, not only is the study of human history pointless, but so is life itself.
Consequently, I believe it is especially important to help students build a biblical worldview while they are still school-aged. These formative years are crucial for shaping students into the men and women that they will become! If they learn to think about history with God in the picture when they are young, they will have learned to wisely walk in the world from an early age.
How does Heart of Dakota include Christ in history studies?
Did you that we’ve been asked to remove Christ and create a secular version of our curriculum? However, we’ve never considered this option; at Heart of Dakota, we firmly believe that Christ belongs at the center of history. One way we do this is to have the left page in each of our daily two page spreads function as a unit study. (This is true of our guides Little Hearts for His Glory on up.) The whole left side of each day’s spread presents a unified theme that weaves a Biblical narrative along with concurrent world events. So, rather than divorcing the Bible from historical context, the history reads as one holistic picture.
Another way we do this is to include dedicated devotional and Bible study elements in our curriculum. From our earliest guide to our final high school guide, students get to interact with the Bible and with the words of great Christians throughout history in an age-appropriate manner.
As our students read the Word of God and hear the stories of faithful Christians through the centuries, it is our prayer that they take this Biblical worldview as their own. With a Biblical worldview in their hearts, they will always have a Light with them that can guide them through this dark, turbulent world.
