Stirred by A Noble Theme

History, Historiography, and Pentecostal Higher Education

Abstract

This paper proposes that Pentecostal Christian higher education has a strategic opportunity to contribute to the restoration and stewardship of religious history in Australia. Twentieth century historical shifts, especially the rise of social history, the expansion of religious history beyond the church, and the interpretive challenges presented by postmodernism have broadened the discipline’s methodological possibilities while also complicating older confidence about truth and providential explanations of causality. Additionally, in increasingly secular and theologically illiterate contexts, these developments risk rendering the Christian past as unintelligible or reducible to non-theological categories. These complexities are relevant for Pentecostals, whose emphasis on experience and renewal can tend toward presentism and a superficial historical self-understanding. Drawing on historiography and examples from Australian scholarship, this paper contends that Pentecostal Christian higher education institutions can hold together rigorous historical method and theological literacy, forming graduates capable of truthful historiography, disciplined interpretation, and meaningful public engagement. History, it is argued, is not ancillary to Pentecostal Christian higher education, but a formative interdisciplinary practice which shapes Pentecostal identity, mission and institutional stewardship.