What does a modern historian make of figures like Eusebius and Bede?
We still can learn from that kind of history. It’s a source concerning the faith of the church—the only source we have on some subjects. If you have modern historical sensibilities, you might be suspicious of some of the claims made in the stories or realize that the stories are not complete records of what actually happened. Nonetheless, these are the best sources we have, and some of the material, such as martyr stories, can be very inspiring. That said, there’s a big difference between writing church history as a cleric, in the era before there were professional historians, and being a professional historian today who is a Christian. If you’re a professional historian, you’re trying to analyze historical development in relationship to other observable things that happen in the culture. And that’s not at all the enterprise of the traditional church historian. When Jonathan Edwards was writing history, he presented it from the perspective of how God is acting in history. He was doing
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