Christian historiography
Subtitle: five rival versions
Publisher: Baylor University Press
Published: 2015
Place of publication: Baylor, TX
Language: eng
Format: Paperback
Number of pages: 252
ISBN-13: 9781481302630
Description: 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.
Table of contents: title: Introduction : How faith matters to historical study; title: Historical study that takes religion seriously; title: Historical study through the lens of Christian faith commitments; title: Historical study as applied Christian ethics; title: Historical study as Christian apologetic; title: Historical study as search for God; title: Conclusion : Historical study as Christian vocation