This is a concise survey of texts written by Christian historians, on issues related to Christian faith. It is plainly aimed at US college students. The importance of Christianity in American culture means that Christian historiography is widely included in undergraduate historiography courses at secular colleges and universities; it is naturally taught in history programmes at the more than 130 higher education institutions in the USA that self-identify as Christian, including Covenant College, at which the author, Jay D. Green, teaches; and postgraduate courses on historiography are increasingly common in American seminaries. There is, then, a real need for a textbook of this type. In exploring ‘what it means to think about and “do” history in a Christian way’ (p. 1), Green has read very widely, including in a range of obscure periodicals, and he is a generally reliable, often insightful, exegete of history-writing. However, the scholars he examines are mostly from the United States, many of them members of the Conference on Faith and History. There is little consideration of devout Christian historians of other nationalities, even those who have consciously ‘thought about and done history in a Christian way’. This limits the value of Green's study not only for courses at British or European universities, but also for its target audience: there has been considerable intellectual interchange across the Atlantic, and not just in the era of jet travel.

There are five chapters on what Green describes as ‘five broad versions of Christian historiography’ (p. 9): taking religion seriously; applying faith commitments; applying Christian ethics; Christian apologetics; and ‘a search for God’, or overtly providentialist history. Green seeks ‘not fine-grade exactitude’ but ‘order and explanatory efficiency in the service of understanding … a larger picture’ (p. 3). Despite nominal neutrality, he clearly identifies with the approach to history described in chapter ii: the ‘application of background faith commitments’, or what he also calls the ‘integrationist model’, in which a Christian frame of reference informs all study of the ‘dimensions of past human life’ (pp. 7–8). While subjecting the other four versions to sustained criticisms, he praises this ‘integrationist model’ as the ‘likely … starting point for at least another generation of Christian historians’, and ‘a highly regarded strategy’ that ‘generated some very sophisticated thinking about faith-oriented historiography both among those who support and criticize it’ (p. 65).

Green admits, in an early endnote, that there are ‘key historians and works that I have neglected’, evidently hoping to pre-empt criticisms such as that his ‘examples [are] too white and male [and] disproportionately Anglo American’ (p. 166 n. 4). However, the roots of Christian historiography in the United States do not only lie in the work of distinguished American scholars such as Mark Noll, George Marsden and Nathan Hatch, who are the stars in Green's historiographical firmament. Sir Herbert Butterfield effectively created the subdiscipline of history of historiography that Green's textbook is designed to serve, while most of Butterfield's publications on Christianity, history and the Christian historian pre-date the scholarship that Green primarily engages with. But a student would not know it. Butterfield is quoted four times, including twice in chapter v, on providentialism; but it is typical that, having cited him as a ‘great twentieth-century British historian’ and ‘not a providentialist – at least not in the way described here’ (p. 138), Green neither explains that a major reason for Butterfield's eminence was his overtly Christian history-writing, nor elucidates what his understanding of providence was, even though, as Michael Bentley has recently shown, it was central to Butterfield's historical understanding. Bentley also shows that Butterfield was a frequent visitor to US universities, where he was held in high esteem, so further analysis of his thought is surely necessary, even in a book focused on the United States. Three other notable Christians have also held the Regius Chair at Cambridge since World War II: Dom David Knowles, Sir Owen Chadwick and Patrick Collinson. All were highly influential (Collinson especially so in America) and each man's faith tradition clearly shaped his scholarship, but they are entirely ignored. The philosopher of history R. G. Collingwood is cited once in passing (p. 29), but his Christian faith is overlooked, although it shapes key parts of The idea of history. David Bebbington is relegated to the endnotes, appearing, strangely, as one of the ‘members of the Marsden/Noll/Hatch circle’ (p. 174 n. 48). One could go on.

The problem is not that Green misses some historians, which is inevitable, but that his omissions define Christian historiography, in effect, as an American phenomenon, when palpably it is not. For the academic considering its purchase, Christian historiography could be a valuable supplement to other texts in courses on historiography or intellectual history with a strong late twentieth-century American component, but it cannot be recommended as a single-volume guide to its ostensible subject.