| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 87.1

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 87.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

History and the Christian Historian. Ed. by Ronald A. Wells. (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1998. vi, 248 pp. Paper, $23.00, isbn 0-8028-4536-3.)

Ronald A. Wells, in the volume's introduction, states that what ties the thirteen contributors together is the insistence that "our standpoint—that God exists 'in reality' and that we 'know' God through Jesus—has an impact on how we think about our historical tasks." That may be so, but it is difficult to tell from these essays just how. None of the authors, in talking either about teaching or about research, argues a perspective of triumphal Christianity. Only one of them suggests that historians consider supernatural providence as possibly having relevance to historical explanation. A contemporary Christian perspective is strongly disassociated from the narrowness that once passed for tolerance in American Protestant circles. This is all to the good, but it leaves the truth claims of Christianity without much historical work to do. In spite of themselves, the essayists, who include some of our best historians of American religion, bear out what only D. G. Hart states candidly: the "arguments for the difference that Christianity makes for historical scholarship" are not "fully convincing." . . .

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