Abstract
INTRODUCTION There is no doubt that Christians and Jews accord a high degree of importance to history, since they believe that God's purposes for humanity and all creation are disclosed in the unfolding of time. [...]it is entirely possible that the entire pageant of human history, painstakingly assembled by generations of historians, with all its glittering panoply of great eras, large events, and major figures, may be no more important in the mind of God than the plight of the single sparrow that falls to the earth. To add to the sense of unease, there is the fact that increasingly influential postmodern critiques of objectivity and scientific knowledge, and indeed of the entirety of what is called "the Enlightenment project," have served to challenge the very categories by which secularism claimed to supersede religion-in much the same way that positivism and naturalism served to problematize religious belief to begin with.