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A common narrative of the history of Western historical writing runs something like this: pre-modern chroniclers interpreted events through a biblical lens in which a providential God acted in history. They saw the world as God's creation, events as his judgments on nations and individuals prior to an eventual Last Judgment, when the risen Christ would return to separate sheep from goats forever (Matt. 25:31-46). Then in the Enlightenment, chastened by religious wars and cosmopolitanized by discoveries of new continents and new peoples, progressive Westerners embraced reason and science. They rejected the traditional Christian view of history as culturally conditioned, superstitious mythology. The modern, scholarly discipline of history that emerged in the 19th century presupposes this rejection. Claims of divine providence and divine judgment are at a minimum empirically unverifiable, if not also naive, irresponsible, and dangerous. Therefore modern historians who are also Christians must work according to critical, disciplinary canons that include writing as if they were deists or atheists, even if they believe that God acts in history. This expectation dovetails with the American constitutional separation of church and state, the idea that religion is a personal, private, subjective affair, and the de facto secularism of the academy. After all, how could the claim that God acts in history be argued seriously among professional historians?
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It is Steven Keillor's objective to do just that. His book will not convince everyone, but only a closed-minded dogmatist could dismiss it tout court. Gauging his likely audience as evangelicals, Keillor writes that "[s]ecularists of the left, center and right are very unlikely to read this book." This might well be true; if so, it would be a pity. Keillor's book is so original, so radically subversive of widespread and mostly unquestioned intellectual assumptions in the secular academy, and yet so carefully written and trenchantly argued, that it might shake up and broaden the discourse of graduate seminars in American history at our universities. It is at once a bold argument about the interpretation of major events in American history, a contribution to Christian theology as chiefly an understanding of history rather than a quasi-philosophical worldview, and a penetrating analysis of the current political, social, and cultural situation in the United States.
Those of us skeptical of Keillor's aim need not accept his premises in order to see the force of his arguments. His claim that the Bible offers a divinely revealed understanding of history can be tested (albeit never proved) by its analytical power in interpreting major historical events. Keillor seeks "to correlate known causes of the event with known categories of divine holiness and judgment" as disclosed in Scripture, well aware that such interpretations can be perilous and are often abused:
We must beware of presumption in claiming to know the mind of God. But the pendulum has swung to the opposite extreme, where the inability to know for sure morphs into a refusal to ask questions that cannot be known with certainty and then into a dismissal of the category of divine judgment.
In short: if God's purposes are such and such, then certain events are plausibly understood as his judgments in the flow of human history.
In three densely exegetical and theological chapters, Keillor develops his interpretive foundation. Central is the notion, pervasive in the Old Testament prophets, that God judges not only individuals, but nations—all nations, not only ancient Israel and its neighboring kingdoms—as part of his action in history. Keillor distinguishes clearly between divine judgments of individuals and nations; his book addresses only the latter, sensibly mindful of the implications of Luke 13:1-5.
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