On the Massachusetts frontier in April 1753, a famous preacher, known for his belief in an angry and highly selective God, sat in his Stockbridge study, writing a letter. In it, he described his neighbors, a group of unconverted Indians, as excelling "in religion and virtue."

Surprising? This doesn't fit the stereotype of the preacher, Jonathan Edwards. But during this period, Edwards was assembling a "Catalogue" of hundreds of notebook pages filled with evidence that pagans had received knowledge about God the Redeemer both from the Jews and from traditions going back to Noah's sons.

Whence this open-mindedness toward those who had not heard the name of Christ? The explanation starts with the fifteenth- and sixteenth-century explorers of the East and the New World, who had discovered not just spices and trade routes but also "heathen" who exhibited better morals than most European Christ-ians.

Seventeenth-century geographers estimated that only one-sixth of the ...

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