Christian Historiography: Five Rival Versions

Christian faith complicates the task of historical writing. It does so because Christianity is at once deeply historical and profoundly transhistorical. Christian historians taking up the challenge of writing about the past have thus struggled to craft a single, identifiable Christian historiography. Overlapping, and even contradictory, Christian models for thinking and writing about the past abound--from accountings empathetic toward past religious expressions, to history imbued with Christian moral concern, to narratives tracing God’s movement through the ages. The nature and shape of Christian historiography have been, and remain, hotly contested. Jay Green illuminates five rival versions of Christian historiography. In this volume, Green discusses each of these approaches, identifying both their virtues and challenges. Christian Historiography serves as a basic introduction to the variety of ways contemporary historians have applied their Christian convictions to historical research and reconstruction. Christian teachers and students developing their own sense of the past will benefit from exploring the variety of Christian historiographical approaches described and evaluated in this volume.

Jay D. Green is Professor of History at Covenant College.