Christian Understanding of the Beginnings, the Process and the Outcome of World History: Via Universalis by Paul C. Merkley (review)

humanities 319 university of toronto quarterly, volume 72, number 1, winter 2002/3 children who succeed at all levels. So, what is this book=s achievement? Not much. It could have drawn the reader to two things: one, the issue of alternatives in education (aside from any covert agenda regarding charter schools in Alberta), and two, the central issue of value-oriented schools. Canada and the United States enjoy a large number of explicitly value-oriented yet religious schools. One notably successful and enduring example is the network of Quaker (Society of Friends) schools in the mid-Atlantic states. Successful examples of what Thiessen appears to want do abound, and alas could have served his purposes. (PATRICK L. BISHOP) Paul C. Merkley. Christian Understanding of the Beginnings, the Process and the Outcome of World History: Via Universalis Edwin Mellen Press. iv, 226. US $89.95 In a striking section on Isaac Newton, Paul Merkley notes that Newton spent more time throughout his life working on biblical studies, prophecy, apocalypse, and eschatology than on the scientific studies he is known for. It is easy to get the impression from this book that Merkley, too, has been working on such themes for a long time, tucked away from his public scholarship as a historian at Carleton University. As with Newton, so with this author; we perceive that thinking on such subjects is not a hobby, but basic for everything he does as a scholar. Merkley casts the book as his >search for the elements of a faithful Philosophy of History,= by which he means a Christian understanding of world history. To conduct his search he provides very little analysis of the lengthy history of Christian views of world history. Instead he offers his own direct commentary on passages in the Hebrew Scriptures and the Christian New Testament, especially passages about Abraham, prophecy, and the end of the world. Altogether he devotes five, really six, of the seven chapters to such themes, an emphasis he knows is unusual for a historian. We can be sure that biblical specialists will find his handling of biblical passages naive, uninformed by and even combative against biblical scholarship. Merkley represents his view as explicitly Christian, and, as such, appropriately centres his attention on Jesus Christ. There are two big surprises, however, given the history of Christian views of history. The first is that he begins his rendition of world history with Abraham, rather than with the creation of the world. Whatever Christians have meant by the creation of the world, and that meaning has changed over time, the theme has served virtually unfailingly as the starting point for Christian understandings of history. The creation story underlies the persistent claims that any Christian view necessarily encompasses universal history. Merkley, 320 letters in canada 2001 university of toronto quarterly, volume 72, number 1, winter 2002/3 by contrast, starts with Genesis 12, not Genesis 1. He features the story of Abraham, who, guided by God=s promise, migrates westward from Mesopotamia to inhabit a new land next to the sea and to found there a new nation. Merkley argues that this notable particularizing of the tale is really a universalizing act, joined as it is to the divine promise that the new nation will become a great blessing to all the families of the earth. The second surprise is the role he accords in his Christian view of world history to the establishment of state of Israel in 1948. When dealing with history after the ancient period which produced the Hebrew Scriptures, Christian interpreters almost invariably move to the life of Jesus Christ as presented in the Gospels, then to the inauguration of the Christian Church in the Acts of the Apostles, and onward to the role of the Church, divisions notwithstanding, as emblem of the work of God in the world as a whole to the end of time. Merkley, by contrast, keeps his eye on the nation promised to Abraham, as above, and draws a line from Abraham to 1948. The via universalis of the book=s subtitle presumes that all the peoples of the world relate to that line in one way or another. He writes...