Confessing History: Explorations in Christian Faith and the Historian's Vocation . Edited by John Fea, Jay Green, and Eric Miller. Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 2010. xi + 354 pp. $35.00 Paper.

(ProQuest: ... denotes non-US-ASCII text omitted.)Douglas Sweeney speaks for the authors of Confessing History when he writes, "During the mid-twentieth century, Christian scholars had to work hard to earn the respect of secular colleagues. We devoted a great deal of energy to impressing them with our work. We sought to acquire places of honor at the academic banquet. But now that we have done this, a different agenda may be in order" (308). Contributors to this volume articulate such an agenda for the field of history.Their predecessors answered the question "What does it mean to be a Christian historian?" by focusing on historical research. Scholars in this cohort--notably George Marsden, Ronald Wells, and Mark Noll--often hailed from Reformed backgrounds and brought a Reformed intellectual agenda to bear on their work: they wrestled with the role of a Christian worldview in informing scholarship. The "Marsden settlement," referred to throughout the volume, concluded that Christian historians' "background faith commitments" should shape their understanding of the past, but that humility demands they eschew claims to pinpoint God's specific interventions or purposes in history. Rather, historians should limit their explanations to "observable cultural forces" (3-4). This consensus had the effect of making Christian historical scholarship acceptable within the academy; it thus advanced the church's mission to the world by bringing Christian perspectives and concerns into dialogue with those of secular historians.The new, emerging consensus represented by the contributors to Confessing History sees the mission of the Christian historian as more expansive. Many authors build on the "Marsden settlement" and a few critique it, but all articulate fresh ways that a historian's faith can inform her work. In large part they do this by replacing the organizing principle of "worldview" with that of "vocation," an emphasis of the Lilly Foundation, whose funds partially underwrote this volume. Conceiving of the historian's work as a vocation, or "calling," leads the authors to ask not only how a historian's faith should interact with his scholarship, but also how it ought to inform a much wider range of concerns (xi-xiii). Among these are teaching, relationships with colleagues, and work outside the academy such as service to the local church and involvement in public history.Approximately half the essays in the volume explore these expanded locations for the intersection of faith and the practice of history. Essays by Lendol Calder, Robert Tracy McKenzie, Jay Green, and Douglas Sweeney spin out the implications that the Christian imperative to love holds for the historian. They conclude that it takes intentional, thoughtful effort to translate historical knowledge into effective service to students, colleagues, the local church, and the general public, and that each of these groups ought to have a claim on the historian's heart. Calder, John Fea, Tal Howard, and Christopher Shannon consider in particular detail the teaching aspect of the historian's vocation. Shannon, the most radical voice, declares that "the proper site for the return of God to history is the classroom, not the publishing house" (180). He, Fea, and Howard argue that Christian history professors must not stop at recounting the events of the past for students, or even at helping students understand sympathetically a culture foreign to theirs. …