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To the secularist I'm trying to say, "Take the religious side seriously." To religious people, I'm often trying to say, "Even great religious thinkers have their flaws."

I typically try to identify my own perspective. I've written in most of my books, "This is my perspective and you should know about it, and you can discount it if you care to. But I'm not pretending to write as a neutral observer."

One way to address several audiences is to be critical as well as sympathetic of one's own tradition. I see the calling of a Christian historian, with respect to serving the church, as trying to help Christians see how the culture has shaped their understanding of the Christian heritage. And that inevitably involves some criticism of things that Christians may have taken for granted, or things that they take to be eternal truths but that the historian may expose as cultural creations.

If you do that honestly, I think it opens what you do to a more secular audience as well, because they appreciate that you're investigating a religious heritage and not just celebrating it.

Partisan history often turns people off because the writer is seen as completely uncritical of whatever group he represents and critical of everybody else. Christian historians, particularly, should be willing to see the flaws in their tradition.

We can overdo that, of course, and can write history in a way that undermines the beliefs of ordinary Christians. We have to balance criticism with the positive.

Are miracles a big sticking point for Christian historians who write for a broad audience?

Miracle stories raise some hard questions. You want to acknowledge that miracles can happen, but then, in particular cases, what if you think they didn't happen? What if you're writing about Jim and Tammy Bakker?

You ought to make some distinction between how you treat miracle stories that you find credible and those about which you find some evidence of deception. So I think it is appropriate to be critical of certain religious claims to miracles.

I can't articulate exactly what the rule should be, because it depends on whether you're writing about your own tradition or about somebody else's tradition. You might be respectful of another person's tradition because it would be indiscreet not to be. The general rule in the academy is not to criticize anyone's story. You talk about their experience and leave it at that.

Many of the historians discussed in this issue also were uncritical of miracle stories, though for completely different reasons. What does a modern historian make of figures like Eusebius and Bede?

We still can learn from that kind of history. It's a source concerning the faith of the church—the only source we have on some subjects.

If you have modern historical sensibilities, you might be suspicious of some of the claims made in the stories or realize that the stories are not complete records of what actually happened. Nonetheless, these are the best sources we have, and some of the material, such as martyr stories, can be very inspiring.

That said, there's a big difference between writing church history as a cleric, in the era before there were professional historians, and being a professional historian today who is a Christian.

If you're a professional historian, you're trying to analyze historical development in relationship to other observable things that happen in the culture. And that's not at all the enterprise of the traditional church historian.

When Jonathan Edwards was writing history, he presented it from the perspective of how God is acting in history. He was doing theological history, not professional history as we currently define it. Those are really different enterprises, but they're both good. Both could be done today.

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