Cosmic Time and the Divine Plan

Cosmic Time and the Divine Plan draws on extensive research to explore the relationship between theological thought about the story of human existence, and the histories and historical chronologies of the world, in the pre-modern period. It argues that until the sixteenth-century Reformation, two ways of thinking and two genres of writing, technical chronology on one hand and theological meaning-making in history on the other, were generally practised separately from one another, even though the relationship between them was acknowledged.

With the Protestant Reformation, histories of the world, including those inherited from previous centuries, were brought within the scope of the movement's theological project. Historical narrative demonstrated the hand of God at work in the apparently random events of history, especially when prophets foretold future events. The interpretation of Scripture, especially the prophetic writings, was thus understood to provide essential underpinning for understanding the story of world history. Biblical exegesis and historical chronology were interwoven: biblical commentaries, especially of the Book of Daniel, were often explained through detailed time-lines.

This confessional argument reflected how the Reformation saw itself. The reformers understood the divine plan of salvation to be worked out over time, through rise and decline, exile and return, loss and recovery, in the life of the Church and in the life of the individual. This approach was distinctly Protestant: while Catholic scholars also carried out meticulous historical research, their historical vision presupposed a continuous and stable, rather than interrupted, relationship between the Church and the divine.

In the seventeenth century, scholars pursued the goal of chronological exactitude with ever greater precision and skill in ancient calendars, without ever agreeing. The religious and theological rationale for the quest was never forgotten. Some calculators emphasized the use of astronomical data to refine calculations, culminating in Isaac Newton in the 1720s; others insisted that Scriptural evidence was more reliable. Only with changing intellectual fashions in the mid-eighteenth century did the quest for meaningful world history through Scriptural computations gradually forfeit the attention of the learned.