More providential history:
In Why Study History?: Reflecting on the Importance of the Past I argued that providence is not a helpful tool when it comes to the historian’s job of interpreting the past.
Over at the blog of the Gospel Coalition, Justin Taylor has written a post summarizing the way that five Christian historians have approached this topic. He apparently saw fit to include me on this list, along with Tom Nettles (one of my former teachers), Carl Trueman, Harry Stout, Timothy Larsen, and David Bebbington. Thanks!
Taylor’s post makes for some interesting reading. Here is how he summarized my view (which he takes from Why Study History? For whatever reason the book is not listed in the bibliography).
John Fea (Messiah College) shares this perspective. “Providence,” he writes, “is a theological idea that is directly related to the character and behavior of God. History, however, is a discipline that seeks to explain the character and behavior of humans as they lived through time.” According to Fea, “providence is an unhelpful category in the interpretation of the past.” It belongs in the toolbox of the theologian but not that of the historian.
Fea builds his case theologically. God’s providence is an inscrutable mystery, and human interpreters are finite and fallible. Therefore, “Christian historians would do better to approach their task with a sense of God’s transcendent mystery, a healthy dose of humility, and a hope that one day soon, but not now, we will all understand the Almighty’s plans for the nations.”
Fea’s plea is that writers of providential history “resist the temptation to bow to the gods of modernity—gods who want to scientifically decipher the workings of the divine and claim to know, with a degree of Enlightenment certainty, the will of a sovereign God who created the modern world and will end it when he sees fit. Until then, we see through a glass darkly.”
According to Fea, “providence is an unhelpful category in the interpretation of the past.” It belongs in the toolbox of the theologian but not that of the historian.
Theological truth claims are above the pay grade of the historian.
However, historian critics of the providentialists must make their pooh-poohing of these claims on professional grounds only.
Further, the term “Christian historian” itself is problematic. How do they differ from normal people?
FTR, this exchange:
Dr, Gregg Frazer: A second monumental assumption [from David Barton] is the claim that George Washington’s “miraculous” delivery in battle demonstrates God’s special hand on him. The original source for this story is Mason Locke (Parson) Weems’s embarrassing hagiography of Washington.
Well, in a letter to John Augustine, 18 July 1755, Washington wrote
http://tinyurl.com/p3mr6mt
“By the all-powerful dispensations of Providence, I have been protected beyond all human probability or expectation; for I had four bullets through my coat, and two horses shot under me, yet [I] escaped unhurt, although death was leveling my companions on every side of me.”
Not to confuse David Barton with an actual historian, but it is so wrong for the “Christian historian” to agree with Washington?
I wouldn't go there, but I wouldn't tell a “Christian historian” that he shouldn't. A slavish caution about these things is indistinguishable from agnosticism.