Book Review

God and Man in Time, by Earle E. Cairns

My quest for a Christian philosophy of history has led me to a book written by the author of the well-known church history textbook, Christianity Through the Centuries. Cairns wrote this little book after his retirement from the classroom in 1977 after 34 years of teaching.

He divides the book into three parts, history as science, history as philosophy, and history as art.  In the first part he discusses the historian's materials and methods.  The second part, devoted to the philosophy of history is by far the most important of the three.  He begins with a survey of historians from ancient Egypt to modern America and their philosophies, or at least their purposes for writing.  After this survey, he proceeds with four chapters which compare the various philosophies of history.  Part three, the briefest, deals with the art of history writing.

Cairns rightly recognizes the difficulty of categorizing philosophies of history.  Dissatisfied with the traditional division into linear and cyclical philosophies, as well as with other divisions (naturalistic/humanistic/idealistic, degeneration/progress/providence; prideful man/frustrated men/redeemed man; and physical/metaphysical/theological), he suggests the categories of optimistic philosophies, pessimistic philosophies, and pessimistic-optimistic philosophies, the last group including evangelical Christians.  This division seems to work well, but is confused by the way Cairns first divides historians into those who adhere to a philosophy of history, and those who adhere to a school of history.  Schools of history tend to be positivistic, expecting to achieve a measure of certainty about past events.  Philosophies of history by acknowledging the subjective nature of the sources and of the historian, relinquish the hope of certainty about the past.  As it turns out, he categorizes the proponents of schools of history by their philosophies of history.  I found his terminology confusing.

I found only one fault with Cairns' own position.  He is too optimistic about the ability of the Christian historian's ability to graft into his work the findings of secular historians.  He clearly recognizes the importance of the historian's worldview to his interpretation of his data, but somehow fails to point out the real cause for the difference between the secular historian and the Christian.  The mind of the unbeliever is blinded.  He cannot know the truth.  He cannot see the world a God sees it.  His problem is not just that he uses a faulty interpretive grid, but that he does not even possess the spiritual sense to understand the data correctly (I use "spiritual sense" here in the same sense as Jonathan Edwards, Religious Affections, part 1, chap. 4).  Every event since creation has some relationship to the Creator.  Anyone who does not know the creator, anyone who is spiritually at war with Him, cannot, will not understand those events correctly.  Nevertheless, Cairns's position on the ability of the unbelieving historian to handle his material rightly is the usual evangelical position. 

One of the chief values of this little book for me is its annotated bibliography at the end of each chapter.  I will find myself coming again and again for new reading material.