Abstract

This chapter considers a further appeal to history that can be made within the cumulative case for Christianity, namely the appeal to a providential reading of universal history as making, despite all evidence to the contrary, most sense of the way in which world history is moving. There are, in the so-called Christian centuries, and even in the secularised post-Christian world, signs of the admittedly partial penetration of society by the Christian Gospel’s ‘Kingdom values’ of justice, freedom, peace, and truth, and — some would argue — of democracy. In support of this view, the work of Hendrikus Berkhof and Oliver O’Donovan is cited and contrasted with that of Stanley Hauerwas and Samuel Huntington.