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Kuklick and Hart's volume zeros in on this issue repeatedly. Just what does make Christian historians Christian? A forceful expression of the crux of the matter appears in Kuklick's own essay, "On Critical History":
In their work, all professional historians have effectively accepted … the critical [naturalistic] conception of history. … For Christian scholars it has been a pact with the devil necessary for them to have any credit in the scholarly community, and it has brought about bad faith. … They think that their convictions lend some special insight into the study of the past. … But how are Christians to show this? How can they show how God peeps through in history? If Christian convictions lend no such insight, if they are not cashed out, they are worthless.
Quite a challenge! To be fair, Kuklick does not accurately represent the Christians he criticizes. There is hardly "bad faith," much less a "pact with the devil," because Christian academic historians do not in fact claim special insight without common evidence. Most scholars, Christian or not, readily agree that spiritual deduction is no substitute for scholarly induction.
But having said that, how can we accept Kuklick's call to cash out our Christianity historiographically, or answer Leo Ribuffo's sharp interrogative: "How do religious scholars in general and 'Christian scholars' in particular differ in their scholarship from other historians?" (the italics are his). The fact that Kuklick and Ribuffo believe there's no valid answer to these questions shouldn't thwart our reckoning with them. So I prefer Leslie Woodcock Tentler's equally intent, but gentler, prodding from the inside: "To assert that history has meaning beyond what we as ephemeral beings might generate is to place oneself, intellectually and emotionally, in a distinctive camp. Our own lives look different from this vantage point. Should not the record of our collective life look different too?" In other words, we should update the old angst-inducing youth-group poser: If they put you on trial for being a Christian historian, would the D.A. get a conviction?
Notice that it is the difference on the record and in our scholarship that these writers are asking about. I suspect many practicing historians on all rungs of the academic ladder could join Tentler in her frank confession: "I can see no obvious ways in which my written work betrays a Christian author." Our background beliefs, it's true, profoundly shape our work on every page; that should be beyond contention. And in answer to her urging a "greater willingness to speak frankly and to the profession at large about the meaning of faith for [our] understanding of the world," it's easy to point to plenty of recent bibliography wherein Christians float their colors and reflect on the meaning of Christianity for historical discourse. But the difficult question recurring here is whether we need to push ahead to speak as Christians within our historical accounts themselves, right down in amongst the data. Naturalism can be both ontological and discursive—might theism achieve such wider reach, too?
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