Student Handout pp. 1-16 [PDF] - Grace Church of Mentor

1. God _______ the history of man, _______ it continually along a predetermined
course, _________ works in history, and will bring history to a _______________.
a. For example, Joseph and his brothers: “God sent me before you to preserve
for you a remnant in the earth, and to keep you alive by a great deliverance.
Now, therefore, it was not you who sent me here, but God” (Genesis 45:7-8).
b. Augustine in the City of God taught that “everything in nature and history,
including the sack of Rome, falls within the plan of divine providence and
under divine governance; nothing escapes divine foreknowledge or the divine
will. Providence is a divine art which orders everything in an all-embracing
harmony, from inorganic matter through living things to the events of human
history” (John Edward Sullivan, cited in Nash, p. 52).
c. This is also the Puritan’s view of history: “History is primarily the ____ of
God in the ___ of men.” This reflects simply what we are taught in Ephesians
1:11 – “In Him also we have obtained an inheritance, having been predestined
according to His purpose who works all things after the counsel of His will.”
2. The Implications of a God-centered Providential view of History.
a. The duty of man is to _______ that history for the spiritual sake of posterity.
b. History’s real value lies in its ____________ quality – it tells us about God’s
activity in time and space.
c. History is not only for teaching us by example, but it is theology _________.
d. For the Puritan historian, there is always a two-fold consideration
determining his attitude toward his material:
e. Examples.
1) Everything that has happened has been under divine control; and
2) God regulates the universe for a purpose: “History should be seen as
a long revelation of divine intentions” (Miller and Johnson, eds., The
Puritans: A Sourcebook of Their Writings, I:81-84).
1) Urian Oakes—in New England Pleaded With (1673):
And it were very well if there were a memorial of these things faithfully drawn up and
transmitted to Posterity….It is our great duty to be the Lord’s Remembrancers or
Recorders…that the mercies of the Lord… may be faithfully registered in our hearts, and
remembered by us… that the memory of them may not die and be extinct, with the present
generation (cited in The Puritans: A Sourcebook of Their Writings, p. 81).
2) Jonathan Edwards. Central to Edward’s concept of history is
redemption, particularly God’s redemption of the elect. In his
unfinished History of the Work of Redemption (1739-58), he wrote,
“The work of redemption is the greatest of all God’s works…, and it is
the end of all His other works.”
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