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History and the Christian Historian. Edited by Ronald A. Wells. Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans,1998. vi + 248 pp. $23.00 paper.
Ronald Wells, professor of history at Calvin College, has long been one of the leaders among Christian historians who have consciously sought to integrate their Christian faith and historical scholarship and prod their Christian colleagues to do likewise. Among his other publications, Wells has coedited with C. T. McIntire History and Historical Understanding (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans,1984), has been for many years a coeditor of Fides et historia, the journal of the evangelically oriented Conference on Faith and History, has edited The Wars of America: Christian Views (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1981, rev 1991), and has written History Through the Eyes of Faith: Western Civilization and the Kingdom of God (New York: Harper and Row,1989). In the volume under review Wells has assembled twelve Christian scholars-- Margaret Lamberts Bendroth, C. Stephen Evans, G. Marcille Frederick, D. G. Hart, Bill J. Leonard, George M. Marsden, Shirley A. Mullen, Mark A. Noll, Richard Pointer, Jerry L. Summers, Robert Swierenga, and Edwin J. Van Kley-to join him in reflecting on what case can be made for connecting historical work and religious convictions. All appear to be from mainstream evangelical or Reformed wings of American Protestantism. None are associated with Roman Catholic, Lutheran, Wesleyan, other holiness, Pentecostal, or charismatic religious traditions. In a future work of this type Wells might enrich the discussion further by casting his editor's net wider to include scholars from a broader range of Christian traditions.
In his brief but excellent introductory chapter Wells minimally defines a Christian historian as one who, first, accepts "the 'reality' that God exists and that God came among us in the historical person known to us as Jesus" (1), and, second, brings to the study of history a different "angle of vision," which, Wells asserts, allows the believing scholar to ask different questions, to "see what others do not" (4). He leaves it to his essayists to explain...