Redeeming Our Thinking about History: A God-Centered Approach

Poythress, Vern S. Redeeming Our Thinking about History: A God-Centered Approach. Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2022. Pp. 247. $24.99.

Vern Poythress is a highly regarded biblical scholar and systematic theologian who has taught for four decades at Westminster Theological Seminary in Philadelphia. In recent years, Poythress’s interests have ranged far beyond these fields. He has written widely about how Scripture and theology ought to impact other academic disciplines, including mathematics, philosophy, science, and language. His most recent effort of this sort is Redeeming Our Thinking about History: A God-Centered Approach.

Several key assumptions characterize Poythress’s understanding of historical inquiry. First, he is a Reformed evangelical who is committed to a strong view of God’s sovereignty over all things, including the unfolding of history. Second, he is a biblical inerrantist who believes that Scripture provides a fully trustworthy revelation from God and written by men under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit. Third, he is a Kuyperian who affirms the Lordship of Christ in every “sphere” of culture (including academic disciplines). Finally, he is committed to a multi-perspectival view of theology, informed by his close friend and sometime collaborator John Frame, which draws upon triads that are present in creation to offer a holistic theological method. These triads, which echo the Triune God, can also inform other ways of thinking, including historical method. The upshot is a robustly theological account of the purpose and craft of historical research and writing.

Poythress divides his book into five parts. Part one addresses the assumptions Christians need to faithfully analyze history. Part two examines how the Bible treats history. The third part applies these insights to how historians should study extra-biblical history, while the fourth part includes some specific case studies to illustrate Poythress’s approach. The final part reflects on the longstanding intramural debate among Christian historians about the best way to account for providence in historiography.

The latter section arrives with what are probably Poythress’s two main arguments. First, he attempts to demonstrate that a multi-perspectival method allows for a synthesis of various approaches to historiography, transcending many of the debates among believing historians. He does this in dialog with Jay Green’s Christian Historiography: Five Rival Versions (Baylor University Press, 2020), which he further supplements with a discussion of the Reformed doctrine of vocation and its implications for Christian historians.

Second, and more important, Poythress wants to redeem providentialism, a view dismissed as pietistic and simplistic by most Christians who write academic history. According to Poythress, “In sum, the Bible provides us with knowledge of God, and this knowledge gives us a sound basis to affirm a humble providentialism (211).” Simply put, Poythress is concerned that attempts by Christian historians to avoid unhealthy expressions of providentialism have resulted in an overcorrection that concedes too much to non-Christian worldview assumptions.

I appreciate Poythress offering a thoroughly theological account of historical interpretation. I agree with him that many Christian historians write as if they are not believers, reflected in either their cynical tone or their naturalistic methodology. I also appreciate Poythress’s advocacy of multi-perspectivalism, which I think has great relevance for historical method. His discussion of vocation would be enhanced by engagement with Tracy McKenzie’s thoughtful essay on this topic in the anthology Confessing History: Explorations in Christian Faith and the Historian’s Vocation (University of Notre Dame Press, 2010).

This latter thought brings me to one of my two major concerns about Poythress’s book. First, he is thin on engagement with historians who have written on this topic. Not only does he fail to engage with most recent essays on the relationship between faith and history, such as those in the aforementioned Confessing History or the journal Fides et Historia, but he also fails to engage at all with recent books by John Fea (2013) and Nathan Finn (2016) that serve as Christian introductions to the discipline. Poythress quotes from his voluminous writings on biblical and theological topics far more than he cites works by historians about their craft. Many historians will fail to take his work seriously because of these omissions, especially when coupled with the fact that Poythress himself is not a historian.

My second concern is that Poythress does not consider the best critiques against providentialist history. While I resonate with his affirmation of God’s sovereignty and his desire for historians to research and write from the perspective of a Christian worldview, I am not convinced he gives enough attention to the finitude of human knowledge of God’s providence, the influence of our other theological presuppositions on how we understand providence, or the noetic effects of sin on even spiritually mature historians. Though I share many of Poythress’s theological presuppositions myself, I am far less confident that historians can offer anything more than provisional, highly qualified providentialist interpretations of extra-biblical historical events.

Redeeming Our Thinking about History is a helpful contribution to the literature, if a limited one. It is too niche for use in undergraduate classes, but it would be a good secondary or tertiary text for capstone courses in Christian institutions. It should also be on the reading list of every Christian graduate student in history and new faculty development programs for historians in Christian institutions. While few Christian historians will agree with all of Poythress’s recommendations, we would do well to wrestle with them as we articulate our own alternatives that take seriously Scripture and the best of the Christian intellectual tradition.