Historical knowledge is a substitute for direct experience but nevertheless a distinct part of reality. Mere existentialism must always flatten out history and assume all past events are cotemporaneous. History loses its revelational content, God becomes unknowable, the Christ event is mystery, humanness is all contingency with no relation to the universal.
Of course the existential is a necessary component of knowledge but to yank the historical revelational content expressed doctrinally out of the knowledge equation leaves the subject swaying the seas of experience without the firm foundation of actual historical events.
The historical event is not merely a language game but actually provides concrete meaning to our experiences.
Happy Providence!
However, there is a vast difference between hearing about Jesus and knowing Him.
hosepipe often puts it something like this: "Jesus: you MUST be born again."
Jesus answered, Verily, verily, I say unto thee, Except a man be born of water and [of] the Spirit, he cannot enter into the kingdom of God. That which is born of the flesh is flesh; and that which is born of the Spirit is spirit. Marvel not that I said unto thee, Ye must be born again. - John 3:5-7
Totally agreed that historical knowledge is a distinct part of reality. It must be a substitute for direct experience since it deals with vast stretches of the human past in which we were not living. But history is susceptible to "doctrinalization," which may deform or even misrepresent the actual historical record. For instance, Marx's Communist Manifesto is essentially an elaboration of Marx's theory of history, which in many ways is the projection in retrospect of his own personal character, beliefs, and aspirations onto the actual historical record. In Marx's case, this deformation is so extreme that we can call it a "second reality."
Also take the example of Karl Jasper's axial time, in which he segregates the historical period roughly 800–200 B.C., focusing on ~500 B.C., noting that at this time certain great yet quite similar irruptions of the human spirit took place via such figures as Confucius, Lao-Tse, the Buddha, Deutero-Isaiah, Heraclitus, and Pythagoras — a striking contemporaneity that cannot be explained by cultural diffusion. Jaspers on a look-back sees axial time as a distinct "era," carving it out, as it were, from the stream of history; and then imbuing it with the éclat of being the very period in human history in which the few seminal, constituting thinkers established the lasting cultural bases of their respective societies.
There are two things "wrong" with Jasper's idea of axial time as the seedbed of the great historical human cultures. (1) In his search for meaning in history, he relies on his own rational criteria and lived experience (as indeed he must), backloading them onto a period when men then living would never have seen them as relevant to their own lived experience (there being no Protestant, post-Enlightenment thinkers back then). In short, this procedure is anachronistic. (2) Axial time completely omits Moses and Christ (who of course did not live in this "era") — without whom the 2000-year-old Western culture would be utterly unintelligible.
You are absolutely right to say that historical events actually provide concrete meaning to our experiences. Certainly this was true for Marx and Jaspers. My only point is that the overlay of our own personal rational criteria and experiences backwards onto history in our search for the meaning of it may distort history and the conclusions we reach about it. "History" can be distorted, deformed by "historiography." This is equally true whether we are speaking of history in general or evolution theory in particular.
I never intended anyone to think I was speaking of "language games" in my last. When I said that "experience, self-reflection, and articulation are the very foundations of everything we know or think we know," by "articulation" I meant "language." Language is not a "game." It is the only means by which human beings can communicate their experiences to one another, the only way knowledge can be conveyed and preserved. There is no other.
Note the "category" of self-reflection. It is here that men become aware of spiritual experience (if they ever do). It is here where the God–Man relation is sensed, where we encounter the divine, where we meet Christ.
the_conscience, thank you so very much for your penetrating essay-post!