As I wrote in yesterday’s Patheos column, I spent the last couple of days at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School (TEDS) in Deerfield, IL. I was there with my co-editors, Jay Green and Eric Miller, for a special symposium focused on our new collection, Confessing History: Christian Faith and the Historian’s Vocation. We had the privilege of presenting a copy of the book to our friend and mentor, Dr. John D. Woodbridge.
I was a student at TEDS from 1989-1992 and came away from it all with a Masters of Divinity and a Masters of Arts in Church History. It was there that I met Eric and Jay and we have continued a close friendship through the years. In 2004, we teamed up to organize the biennial meeting of the Conference on Faith and History at Hope College. We took some of the presentations made at that conference, added a few more scholars to the mix, and produced a volume on the relationship between Christianity and the historical task.
Doug Sweeney, a professor of church history at TEDS, a leading scholar of Jonathan Edwards and his legacy, and a contributor to our volume, was a wonderful host. It was also good to see another contributor to Confessing History, Trinity College historian Brad Gundlach. We reconnected with some old friends and made some new ones during a great dinner together with the current students in the TEDS church history program.
The last few days combined a trip down memory lane, an emotional reflection on John Woodbridge’s influence on our careers, and much serious conversation about the historian’s unique calling.
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