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Book Review
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History through the Eyes of Faith: Western Civilization and the Kingdom of God
Ronald A. Wells
July 1989, Harpercollins, ISBN: 0060692960
 Check it out in the Emma Waters Summar Library or Buy It At 
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This insightful volume is part of a series sponsored by the Council for Christian Colleges & Universities, which the CCCU and its advisory board designed to promote the active integration of faith with various academic disciplines. Ronald Wells, a professor at Calvin College, surveys the history of Western civilization from a distinctively Christian perspective, demonstrating that such an approach to the past yields significant interpretive benefits. This results in a serviceable supplementary text that many instructors have adopted for classroom use at several Christian institutions. The book also well exemplifies what has been dubbed the “Calvin school” of historiography, one that clearly employs Christian lenses to view the past but, at the same time, eschews aggressive attempts to discern patterns of “providential action” (p. 5) in history.
The main body of History through the Eyes of Faith utilizes traditional periodization and focuses on major historical issues from the ancient world through the postmodern age. Wells’s most helpful contributions include a handy contrast of Hebrew and Greek civilizations, a superb discussion of the dynamic relationship between the church and Western culture, a critical explanation of how the worldview of the Enlightenment clashed with orthodox Christianity, and a concluding section that centers on the value of Christian hope in light of the contemporary crisis of the West. Especially moving is Wells’s epilogue, in which he sets forth Dirk Willems, Mother Teresa, William Wilberforce, Francis Asbury, and Abraham Kuyper as historical models of believers who have influenced the world by serving the kingdom of God.
Wells comes to his tasks as a seasoned historian who has wrestled for some time with the relationship of Christianity and history. In fact, he currently encourages scholarship on these questions in his role as editor of Fides et Historia, the journal of the Conference on Faith and History. In addition, he has edited or coedited two useful collections of essays, History and the Christian Historian (1998) and History and Historical Understanding (1984).
A few minor weaknesses merit attention. First, this monograph provides little assistance for those seeking a Christian understanding of non-Western history. Second, Wells too frequently gets dates wrong (e.g., the death of Erasmus and the first edition of Calvin’s Institutes both should be 1536). Finally, although he correctly reminds his readers of the substantial continuities in history, he sometimes appears reluctant to probe the radical breaks with the past embodied in developments like the Protestant Reformation and the French Revolution. Still, History through the Eyes of Faith offers an excellent resource for Christian professors and students to think Christianly about the field of historical studies.
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