74 for that matter, agree with Butterfield’s dichotomy between providential and technical history. Let us examine this conundrum a bit closer by examining two different approaches to historical writing found among Christian historians. Not everyone agrees with Marsden regarding his understanding of the Christian interpretation of history. The Grand Debate The first Christian approach to history that we will examine I will call “providential history.” There is a similarity to what Butterfield was suggesting in using the term, but there should not be too close an association made between the usage here and what Butterfield described as providential. As an example of the “providential” approach, I will use the well-known book by Peter Marshall and David Manuel, The Light and the Glory, published in 1977. It is particularly important to recognize that Marshall and Manuel were reacting, at least in part, to the concerted effort by some in American society to secularize the education of the nation. Religious values and even religious history were being systematically scrubbed from American textbooks as secular humanism gradually became the dominant worldview in the American classroom. Various Supreme Court decisions in the previous two decades hastened these changes as the American understanding of the wall of separation between church and state gradually leaned further and further away from Christianity. Marshall and Manuel wrote American history by overtly seeking to uncover God’s hand in the nation’s past. Since God had a plan for each individual’s life, they surmised, He must have a plan for each nation as well. For example, they argued, Columbus’ voyage of discovery could be portrayed by historians as an accident or it could be seen as part of God’s plan to bring Christianity to the pagan inhabitants of the New World. Another example of this Providential approach can be seen in Marshall and Manuel’s examination of the Pilgrims. When they were attacked by Native Americans, they reported back to England that God had protected them from the arrows of the Indians in battle. The Pilgrims, and the Puritans as well, were convinced that God had called them to the New World to set up model communities based on the teachings of God’s Word. Puritan writers noted that they were about God’s business of establishing a “City on a Hill” that would be an example to English society of how a Christian society should function. Marshall and Manuel find the thoughts of these early English settlers compelling. They are willing to look at these events in a fashion that is open to the possibility that God was in fact doing something in particular in the creation of America. Given that the United States has done much good in the world and that
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