God in the Footnotes of History

It started as a hunger for answers. I had been restless for years, carrying questions that I did not know how to search for the answers. I could not find them in sola Scriptura. I thought I was signing up for a biblical studies program to understand God more deeply through Scripture. I didn’t know that I was enrolling in the long road of history. History would reshape my faith. 

Every course promised certainty. They all taught me Greek roots, theological clarity, scriptural context. I loved Scripture. The more I studied, the more that I realized how deeply it was rooted in time, language, and community. To study the Bible seriously meant entering the world that produced it. A world of counsels, emperors, schisms, and saints all held the history. Instead of certainty, I found more questions. the Bible didn’t exist in a vacuum. It was born in a Church and shaped by centuries of believers. To study the Word meant to study the world that carried it. Somewhere between Augustine and Aquinas, my major changed. History was my passion. It wasn’t dry to me. It was revelation, recorded in ink.

Every historian learns to trace cause and effect. Studying history trained me to see differently. It taught me that no person, idea, or belief exists in isolation. It is not simply a record, but a study of the why. It asks not only what changed, but what endured. The historian learns to hold contradictions in tension. You discover that heroes are flawed, villains are sincere, and that truth often hides between opposing sources. It demands humility. It demands a willingness to revise and admit that your assumptions no longer fit the evidence.The patterns of reform and renewal that I saw were not random. They were reminders of God’s fingerprints pressed into the ages. 

My coursework shifted from exegesis to historiography. I begin to see faith itself as history. It was lived, preserved, and transmitted. I encountered scholars like Brad Gregory, Eamon Duffy, and Diarmaid MacCulloch. They each revealed a deep complexity of the Christian story. Their work was rigorous and forced me to recognize that the history of the Church was not a tale of corruption. It was the long, uneven walk of a people trying to remain faithful through time. For the first time, I saw the Church not as an institution trapped in the past, but as a body moving through it. That realization altered my lens of the world. When you begin to think historically, you stop seeing life as a collection of isolated events. You start to see continuities which are the way decisions and events ripple through generations. History forms the imagination to look for coherence. The study of history gave me the language of process instead of instant answers. It taught me to live with evidence rather than ideology. Eventually, it led me to teaching.

Teaching was unplanned. Teaching felt like a way to make a living. I didn’t realize it was a way to make meaning until I entered the classroom. Guiding students through ancient empires, revolutions, and reformations felt strangely sacred. Teaching them to communicate, analyze evidence, and write with purpose was invigorating. I sometimes tell my students that studying history is an act of empathy. You learn to step into someone else’s shoes and to inhabit their world before judging it. Over the years, that habit has reshaped how I pray, how I read Scripture, and how I see the Church. The historian’s posture is not far from the pilgrim’s. We are both curious, patient, and attentive. Both walk slowly. Both learn through distance. Both arrive changed. 

When I moved to Montana, I thought that I would have to start over. The mountains and the open roads had something to teach me. When I enrolled in that first online course years ago, I thought I was signing up for biblical studies. Instead, I began a pilgrimage. Pilgrimage doesn’t end with a diploma or a job. It continues with every horizon you reach. I had gone back to school to study history. Instead, God taught me to study history and through it, revealed Himself. What I thought was an academic decision turned out to be a calling. 

To be continued...