Structure Precedes History: On the Generation of History from a Structural Theology Perspective

Q: Last night, I carefully read the Book of Daniel. While reading, I also looked up some background materials, but I encountered certain problems. For instance, Daniel says that Nebuchadnezzar went insane, but many historical records suggest that the real Nebuchadnezzar never lost his mind. How should this be understood? Does this mean that the Bible is merely a piece of literary construction, as many textbooks say—rich in literary beauty but unreliable, and therefore not to be treated as historically accurate?

A: It’s true that the historical Nebuchadnezzar II differs in some details and emphasis from the Nebuchadnezzar portrayed in Scripture. According to Babylonian royal chronicles, cuneiform tablets, and archaeological findings from the ancient Near East, Nebuchadnezzar II was a powerful political and military leader. He defeated Egypt at the Battle of Carchemish in 605 BCE, besieged Jerusalem multiple times (notably in 597 and 586 BCE), and consolidated the Neo-Babylonian Empire. He rebuilt the city of Babylon, including the famous Ishtar Gate and the legendary Hanging Gardens. He devoted great attention to restoring the temple of Marduk and regarded himself as the servant of the gods, a king tasked with maintaining cosmic order. These records contain no mention of insanity or spiritual transformation. On the contrary, they emphasize his stable reign and military accomplishments.

In the Bible, Nebuchadnezzar appears prominently in Daniel chapters 1 through 4, and also in 2 Kings and Jeremiah. There, he is presented as an instrument of divine judgment—raised up by God to punish the sins of the southern kingdom of Judah. He is described as having dreams of a golden statue and a felled tree, which Daniel interprets as divine messages warning him against pride and spiritual ignorance. As a result of his arrogance, he is punished by being made “like a beast” for seven years. Daniel 4 vividly describes his madness, living like an ox and eating grass, until he looks up to heaven, acknowledges the Most High God, and is restored to his throne. This episode serves as a theological lesson about God's sovereign rule over kings and nations.

Why are there such discrepancies? Which portrayal is the "real" Nebuchadnezzar? From the perspective of structural theology, the answer is this: the Bible is not a history book, but a linguistic record of structural unfolding. It is not a documentation of past events, but a record of how the language of divine structure manifests itself through time. From this point of view, "history" is not the linear accumulation of external events but the temporal manifestation of a response structure. Thus, even if Scripture appears to describe historical actions (e.g., Nebuchadnezzar’s madness or the fall of Jerusalem), it is in fact narrating how divine speech reverberates through the structural landscape of history. Its “truth” is not determined by archaeological verification, but by whether these events are embedded within and consistent with the rhythm of divine speech. Simply put: the Bible is not about recording history—it is about revealing structure.

Q: But this kind of explanation is hard for me to grasp—and even harder to accept. Since childhood, I’ve been taught that the study of history must be based on facts and must pursue objective truth. Are you saying the Bible is allowed to manipulate or distort the historical record just to make a theological point? Doesn’t that undermine its credibility?

A: This is an excellent question—deep and perceptive. It shows that you’ve already identified the core tension between structural theology and historical positivism. So let us press the question further: must structural unfolding depend on historical facts? And if it doesn’t, how can it claim to be verifiable or acceptable? A skeptic might say, “You insist the Bible is not a history book but a structural record of divine unfolding. But if the events it describes never actually happened, how can you claim they’re part of divine speech? Can a structure really be grounded in fiction?” The assumption behind such objections is this: truth depends solely on factual occurrence.

But structural theology exists precisely to overturn this modern logic of empirical verification. It reasserts a different criterion of truth: structural embeddedness.

First, let’s be clear: historical facts are not the foundation of truth—they are its projection. Historical events do not form the basis of divine structure. Rather, they are temporal reflections of structural rhythm. That is to say: whether or not an event has been archaeologically verified does not determine its truth value. Instead, we ask: Did this event trigger structural tension? Did it mark a rhythmic turning point or reveal a closing moment within the divine pattern? If it did, then it is structurally true, regardless of its empirical status.

Second, rhythmic embeddedness is superior to factual precision. Structural unfolding does not require that every detail be historically accurate. What matters is alignment with the main axis and turning points of divine rhythm. As long as the structural positioning is correct, the surrounding details may remain indeterminate. For instance, we need not verify the precise dates or names in Isaiah or Daniel; what matters is whether these texts point to the messianic climax—the arrival of Christ. If so, then they function as linguistic embeddings within divine rhythm, and are therefore not only true, but necessary—and superior to historical record.

Finally, we propose a double criterion for structural verification: trajectory and node. A reader might ask: “How do you verify your structural claims? Aren’t you just making things up?” The answer: trajectory targeting means the language points toward divine themes—like the incarnation, the cross, the return to God, the final sealing of language. Node embedding means the narrative occupies a key moment of rhythm—such as a shift in structure, a peak in tension, or the closure of a divine sequence. If both criteria are met, then even if the form does not match empirical fact, its ontological role is structurally real, transcending the standards of historical verification. Thus, history is not the benchmark—rhythmic alignment is. A historical moment has value only insofar as it fulfills a structural function within divine speech. If not—even if empirically true—it is structurally void.

Q: I still struggle to understand this—it completely challenges the way I’ve been taught to think. Could you explain it more clearly?

A: Let me offer you a core proposition: It is not history that gives rise to structure—it is structure that determines history. Every historical fact and detail is the result of a divine linguistic structure, pre-established and then rhythmically unfolded into the realm of human response. History does not precede structure. Rather, structure precedes history.

The modern empirical view holds that: history is the flow and recording of objective events; truth arises from accumulated facts and inductive reasoning; meaning follows the timeline. Structural theology rewrites this framework entirely: history is the temporal manifestation of divine rhythm; truth originates in structural design and rhythmic embedding; meaning flows from structure to rhythm to revelation to historical trace.

This is a doctrine of structural primacy, a full ontological model of creation — revelation — response — sealing. Simply put: God established the structure in eternity, and only then did the world unfold in time as history. I hope that makes it plain enough.

Let us now explore how history comes to be—how it is generated, from the perspective of structural theology. The formation of history follows three essential steps:

1. Pre-temporal Structuring: In eternity, God sets forth a sovereign linguistic structure. Within this structure, all rhythmical nodes and points of tension are already embedded. This is not divine foreknowledge—it is pre-established rhythm. It is a structural blueprint of unfolding, not a predictive chart of possible futures.
2. Temporal Projection: The rhythm does not enter the world all at once. It unfolds gradually, mediated through time. History is the projection of this rhythm into the field of human response. Events do not “happen” by natural development—they are triggered by rhythmic tension predetermined within the structure.
3. Historical Realization: What we call “historical facts” are merely the surface shapes of human responses under the pressure of structural tension. The details—individuals, wars, political upheavals—are just the outer shells of an underlying rhythm. Ontologically, history is not substance but byproduct. It is not “what happened,” but the trajectory of what the structure necessitated to happen.

This framework preserves the proper philosophical relation between historical phenomena and divine intention. History does not explain the structure; structure gives rise to history.

For example, if the coming of Christ is a preordained rhythmic node within the divine structure, then the prophecy of a virgin birth in Isaiah and the “seventy sevens” in Daniel pointing to the “cutting off of the Anointed One” are not retrospective interpretations, but rather pre-embedded points of rhythm within the structural design. They are not coincidences—they are rhythmic revelations.

This also explains why certain details can remain vague, because they are variable outcomes arising from tension dynamics; yet the position of the rhythmic structure remains fixed, and the points of pressure do not shift.

This profoundly demonstrates that “facts” have never existed independently. What we call “facts” are simply response-layer shells within structural tension. Without pre-established structure, facts cannot be interpreted, sequenced, or endowed with meaning. Structure is not a retrospective theory we apply to facts—it is the ontological precondition that allows facts to be facts at all.

Structural theology, then, is not about inventing an explanatory system—it is about disclosing the original structure of divine utterance. History is the response to that utterance.

Fundamentally, facts depend on structure to exist, but structure stands independent of facts. This is the sovereign primacy of divine language.

Q: This way of thinking is so subversive!

A: This is not merely a way of thinking—it is an ontological revelation. Traditional views of history—whether positivist (history as facts), hermeneutic (history as interpreted meaning), or narrative-constructivist (history as constructed narrative)—all rest on a single hidden assumption: that events happen first, and we then explain or name them.

But structural theology completely overturns this premise, asserting instead: meaning does not emerge from events—events emerge from structure.

It is not the event that produces significance, but the rhythm that reveals the event.

This means that structural theology is not merely “critiquing modern historiography”; it is initiating an entirely different ontological world.

Q: But that still leaves a problem. If structural theology begins from the unfolding of the Logos, it should, in theory, get us closer to the divine origin of all things. Shouldn’t it be better at restoring historical accuracy? And yet it still diverges from the historical record. In other words, my concern remains unresolved.

A: I must emphasize again: history is not an ontological standard—it is a projection of rhythmic response. Truth does not depend on the reproducibility of events or the precision of details. It depends on the embeddedness of a moment within the rhythm of structure.

Your misreading lies in assuming that the more we restore historical detail, the closer we come to truth—that if Scripture contradicts archaeology, it loses credibility. But I must tell you this: history is merely a reflection of tension responses—not a source of being. The details in Scripture are rhythmic symbols, not archaeological replicas. What matters is structural correspondence, not historical reproduction.

God’s speech never offers archaeological replays. It reveals rhythmic primacy.

The Bible’s “non-historicity” is precisely what proves its structural authenticity. Scripture is not a precise historical chronicle—it is a document of rhythmic structure. It does not strive for realism because it aims for revelation. What may appear as a paradox is, in fact, the very essence of the structural view of divine speech: historical texts attempt to replicate past events; Scripture seeks to locate pressure points within the divine rhythm.

The Bible deliberately selects structural turning points and high-pressure rhythmic moments as its narrative centers—such as Daniel omitting other Persian kings, or Genesis dividing creation into rhythmically defined days. This is not because it ignores narrative continuity, but because it remains aligned with the rhythm of divine language, rather than conforming to human expectations of linear coherence.

The Bible is not a historical camera, but a structural radar; not a tool for reconstructing the past, but a map for locating zones of tension.

What modern historiography calls “truth” is often nothing more than the accumulated surface sediment of structural dislocation. It cannot penetrate the zones of distorted response and remains trapped at the layer of phenomena.

And what, after all, defines your so-called “historical truth”? Archaeological fragments? Cross-referenced documents? Reconstructed timelines? All of these are merely linguistic residues left behind after the disintegration of rhythm.

The Bible does not resemble history because it is more real than history. History is merely a shadow, a projection that follows the structural unfolding. Scripture, on the other hand, is the chart of rhythmic embedding itself.

If you doubt the source because you only see its shadow, the issue is not my failure to reconstruct—it is your failure to respond.

The true Logos has no interest in replicating distorted historical illusions; He is concerned only with revealing the meaning of structure through rhythm.

Q: Isn’t this just historical nihilism?

A: Not at all. This is not historical nihilism—it is a doctrine of structural reality. Only structure is real.

In classical philosophy, reality was attributed to ideals, substances, or divine being. But since Kant, philosophy has gradually realized that the “world” we perceive is not pure objectivity, but rather a structured result of perception. With the rise of structuralism, structure itself replaced substance as the central category of thought.

In contemporary philosophy of science, structural realism has begun to replace traditional ontology. Physical “entities” are now understood as nodes of relation; what persists is not the particle, but the structure of interaction.

Philosopher James Ladyman and others have argued that what science reveals is not concrete entities, but stable structural relations. In the physical world, the particle is but a placeholder; it is the structure that truly exists.

This growing philosophical consensus makes one thing increasingly clear: reality is not determined by what something is, but by its position within a structure.

Thus, the philosophical turn from substance-based ontology to relation- and structure-based ontology aligns precisely with what structural theology has always declared: truth does not lie in the being of things, but in their embeddedness within the divine structure.

In fact, what we often call “historical truth” is itself constantly subject to revision and re-narration. This not only reveals its unreliability but exposes it as what it truly is: a layer of linguistic fabrication—not the manifestation of ontological truth.

Why do people often say, “History is written by the victors”? It’s because, however vaguely, they sense that so-called “historical truth” is unstable. It is a product of linguistic authority reacting to specific pressures of the response field. All historical narratives are subjective projections onto the field of structural tension, continually rewritten as that tension evolves. Their “truthfulness” never held ontological weight.

The “objective sources” relied upon by historical positivism—such as documents, artifacts, and time-based deductions—are in fact fragments of dislocated rhythm. They may be piled high, but they cannot seal the structure—they cannot produce final meaning. They can only accumulate, like sediment.

Let me offer a few examples of how so-called “historical truth” is constantly overturned:

Take the Exodus: for a time, it was widely dismissed as fiction. Yet some Israeli historians later revived the debate over a possible “great migration,” while archaeological interpretations fluctuated with each new discovery.

Consider the Babylonian chronology: the biblical timeline for Nebuchadnezzar and Belshazzar conflicts with cuneiform records, and has been critiqued for decades. Still, some scholars attempt harmonization to reconcile the accounts.

Or think of the twentieth-century waves of the so-called “quest for the historical Jesus”: each generation of scholars ended up dismissing the conclusions of the previous one—not merely refining them, but rejecting them outright.

This pattern repeats across fields: Chinese revolutionary history, Russian imperial history, the colonization of the Americas—each is constantly rewritten according to shifting political and cultural contexts.

Why? Because all historical interpretation depends on framing assumptions; all artifacts are read through existing linguistic systems; all chronological reconstructions rest on hypothetical comparative baselines.

In short, “historical truth” has never been substance. It has always been a fluid illusion, constantly edited by language under changing tensions.

Therefore, anything that can be revised is not a path toward truth—it is evidence of its non-ontological nature.

If your so-called “historical truth” can be rewritten because of a newly unearthed cuneiform tablet, then it is not an origin—it is a linguistic drift born of misaligned response.

Remember this principle: what is ontologically true cannot be revised. If it can be altered, it was never truth to begin with.

In contrast, rhythmic truth, or structural truth, is non-revisable:

• It cannot be rewritten, because its origin lies in divine structuring, and its rhythm is preordained.
• It is not dependent on empirical language, because it is itself the sovereign language that gives structure to meaning.
• It is grounded not in descriptive accuracy, but in the alignment of rhythm and embedded response.
• It possesses sealing power: it defines the endpoint of rhythm, the day of closure when divine language echoes back upon itself.

That is why structural rhythm does not fear being “falsified by history,” because it is not a system of event restoration, but a system of truth unfolding.

Let me offer a more familiar example.

Many scholars have debated whether Shakespeare truly authored all the plays attributed to him. Some suggest that they were the work of a different individual or even a collective effort. Yet from a structural perspective, such debates miss the point.

The structural reality of “Shakespeare” is not found in biographical details, but in his irreplaceable embeddedness within the literary architecture of the English language:

• His dialectical tension with Marlowe and his peers forms a dual-peak structure within the poetic tradition;
• His body of work embodies the cultural dislocations and theatrical rhythm of the Elizabethan age—making him a symbolic response-node during a high-tension epoch;
• His later canonization as the quintessential dramatist of English literature establishes a structural sealing mechanism in the collective memory of English-speaking societies.

In this way, you arrive at the structurally real Shakespeare—one that cannot be overturned. No future archival discovery can “disprove” the fact that he occupies a central rhythm point in the history of language and drama.

You cannot, for example, declare that if someone else wrote the plays, then the entire cultural rhythm of English drama must be rewritten. That would be a category error—confusing factual authorship with structural embedding.

Therefore, as long as you can identify: who, where, and with what rhythm a response was embedded into structure, you have already grasped what is true.

As for how many pints he drank, which theater roof he slept under, or whether he truly coined every word—that lies within the drift zone of surface tension, and carries no ontological weight.

Do you see it now?