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August 24, 1456. On or near this day, the great Bible from Johann Gutenberg's press emerged complete from the bindery in Mainz, Germany. Few events merit the breathless statement, "and the world would never be the same!" But the creation of the first book printed with movable type is one of them. Thinking about this event and how it has contributed to the spread of the Gospel around the globe, I muse, "God surely worked through Gutenberg!"

But then I hesitate. Historians, even Christian ones, don't like to say too much about where the finger of God descended to do this or that on earth. Historical rules of evidence, the precious tools that keep history from straying over into fiction or propaganda, simply can't be applied to the actions of an omniscient, omnipotent, omnipresent Spirit. Writing history from a Christian perspective is, to use the apt image of that most evangelical of evangelical historians, Richard Lovelace, like watching a football game in which half the players are invisible.

But the historian can occasionally lay down his manuscripts and ascend to the pulpit to say a few words in the role of theologian or exhorter.

A historian may be overawed, for example, by the fingerprints of God he sees all over the historical fact that Christ lived, died, and rose just in time for the pax romana. What else are we to make of this? The relative peace, the network of roads, and the far-flung ethnic diversity of the Roman empire so clearly set the stage for "the Way" to explode within a single century from a small Jewish sect to a creed for all nations. This was no surprise to God, who sees the end from the beginning!

Or we may marvel at the surpassing greatness of the power of a God who could build the persecuted, underground Chinese church into a millions-strong body. And that, not during the heyday of Western missions, but in the black oppressive chill of communism's rise, after the missionaries had been expelled.

Or we may wonder at the historically unlikely fact that the religion hypocritically professed by American slave-owners became the instrument of spiritual and eventually physical liberation for their human chattel.

We may ponder these things, and we should. History-writing is always a moral and even a spiritual task, because humans are moral and spiritual beings. So especially no Christian historian can afford to remain dull or indifferent to these colossal providences, though they remain stubbornly outside of the realm of "confirmability."

In Johann Gutenberg and his revolutionary machine, we seem to meet another of those providences. Surely Gutenberg is one of the very few most influential people in the history of the world. In his personal life, however, the working of providence seems less straightforward. In the end, I'm going to argue, God may have worked more good for Johann Gutenberg out of a personal crisis the brilliant inventor brought on himself than out of his great invention.

Johann was, from any angle, an extraordinarily gifted individual. And from his youth, he made good use of those gifts: his exceptional mechanical skills, his ability to organize large projects and convince people to finance them, and even his membership in a wealthy, influential family.

His family held a hereditary position related to the minting of money, supplying the archiepiscopal mint with the metal to be coined and sitting as legal functionaries in the prosecution of forgery cases. At the very least, Gutenberg inherited from this connection an advanced knowledge in metal working. And this he put to use in stints as a goldsmith and a gem cutter—vocations requiring the utmost skill and attention to detail.

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August (Web-only) 2004, Vol. 48