75 it has been a primary source of missionary endeavors for the last two centuries, it is not completely out of the realm of possibility to consider what God might have been doing here. To stay with Butterfield’s terminology, I will call the counter-argument to the providential approach “technical history.” As an example of this oppositional approach, George Marsden and Mark Noll will be examined. Marsden was introduced earlier. Noll is an evangelical historian who has taught at Wheaton College and the University of Notre Dame. Like Marshall and Manuel, these men are committed followers of Christ. They represent an important disagreement among believers, however, about how we should approach the study of history. Marsden and Noll are very concerned that the providential approach to history presumes too much about the purposes of God. Could God have been working through the Puritans to obtain a particular goal? Marsden and Noll would consent that He could have been, but we are not able to ascertain what He might have been doing in our evaluation of the past. While Scripture is replete with explanations for why God perpetrated or allowed various events to happen, Scripture is unique because it is divinely inspired. Unless Christian historians believe they are divinely inspired as well, Marsden and Noll maintain, they had better be circumspect about what God is intending in the past. As an example, Marsden and Noll have written extensively about the founding of America as well. While Marshall and Manuel see it as a nation blessed by God and founded on His principles for His purposes, Marsden and Noll tend to find the founding of America strangely devoid of scriptural rationale. They find the American Revolution to be contrary to biblical teaching regarding obedience to governing authorities. In addition, they argue that while the founding of America presented the first Americans with the potential to create a nation that would embody Christian principle, they fumbled that opportunity and instead created a society that was far more beholden to Enlightenment thinking than biblical teaching. In other words, the Revolution was not as revolutionary as it could have been.7 Marsden and Noll tend to attribute the providential approach to history to a particular theological position based on a belief in an inerrant Word of God. Mark Noll wrote a fairly sharp critique of this theological position and its interpretive impact titledThe Scandal of the Evangelical Mind. 7 Mark A. Noll, Nathan O. Hatch, and George M. Marsden, The Search for Christian America. Crossway Books, 1983; George Marsden, The American Revolution, Christian Perspectives on History, edited by Henry Ippel and Gordon Oosterman. National Union of Christian Schools, 1973.
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