Abstract

Meyer Cornelis Smit taught history and philosophy in the Free University at Amsterdam for a quarter century. Toward a Christian Conception of History presents the harvest of his scholarly output. The relation between God and history and the problems inherent in articulating that relation in a manner consistent with historic Christian belief and modern ideas of historical existence is the central theme of Smit's writing. Smit discusses the influence of one's world view on the practice and appreciation of history, the significance of the question of the meaning of history as an answer to the a-historical-mindedness of our time, and the fundamental flaw of the modernist theory of knowledge and philosophy of science.