Tucker Project

How does one become an historian? Well, the path is not an easy one. But then the learning of no skill or art is easy. It does not come through merely much reading. Nor does it come through merely much writing. There have been all kinds of journal-writers—currently prolific bloggers—but neither much writing nor much reading in themselves doth an historian make. There must be reading and there must be writing, but being prolific in either or both does not guarantee good history.

There must be discernment. There must be reflection. But before anything else there must be an attitude that takes time to be careful and precise, an attitude that is revealed in the small things of the craft. In fact, how one tackles those small things reveals the ability to handle the larger. If, with regard to the small things, the seemingly unimportant things, there is simply the desire to get them out of the way as soon as possible to make way for the truly “significant things,” the faculty of a good historian is lacking. Such an attitude is not perfectionism—an impossibility in this life for fallible humanity—though it is the desire to make everything written the best and most precise it can be.

Without precision, the faculty of taking care to be exact and right, the interest in details, there can be no good history-writing. If such a faculty is naturally present, it must be honed. If it be not present, it must be learned.

Dr. Michael A.G. Haykin is Professor of Church History at Heritage Baptist College and Theological Seminary in London, Ontario. (Original post here)

“I mean you can say you believe in the authority of scripture. So you tell me what’s most powerful: your cleverness or the Bible? You tell me what’s the most powerful. I’ll tell you when you stand up and speak what you [actually] believe. If you tell me the Bible is far more powerful and you get up in the pulpit and preach a little sermonette on a coffee machine as I’ve seen them do, or on a t.v. sitcom, what you’re telling me; that you believe the Bible is the most powerful, and what you’re doing is contradicting what you’re telling me. You don’t have any integrity. And I’m going to opt out for the fact that when you get up there in front of those people that you care to reach you’re going to use what you think is best. And if you use you and not God’s word then it doesn’t matter what you tell me about the Bible. I know by what you do what your real conviction is.” John MacArthur