This is the first book-length treatment of the history of Seventh-day Adventist historiography, a subject on which there has also been but little scholarship in scholarly periodicals. It represents a contribution to Adventist historiography, as well as analysis of it. Although a concise treatment, it is therefore to be welcomed.

Gabriel Masfa has read widely and intelligently on philosophy of history, history and memory, and history of historiography. Thus, his analysis is not narrowly or confessionally conceived, but informed by a wide range of scholarship. He has read a large number of works on Adventist history and one point he brings out is how much of the writing on the Seventh-day Adventist past is not by people with professional training as historians. He engages with this kind of writing, though one weakness is that he does not include in his analysis the popular Adventist genre of biographical and life-writing, works conceived as didactic and inspirational, but often about the Adventist past. Such works are a substantial part of Adventist historiography, broadly conceived, and their omission is a weakness. However, Masfa refers to virtually every work that self-designates as being on Adventist history, whether by academic historians or scholars of other disciplines, by church leaders, pastors or laypeople, and his footnotes are rich sources.

What of his approach to the subject? Herbert Butterfield, the pathbreaking historian of historical scholarship, offered warnings about historiographical writing, which, though written more than seventy-five years ago, are still apposite: ‘The history of historiography seemed at one time to mean . . . something like a chronological series of encyclopaedia-articles on individual historians, with a résumé of their careers and achievements (and a grouping into “schools” or “movements”).’Footnote ¹ Michael Bentley highlights that there is a danger of the history of historiography becoming ‘a descriptive . . . subject that simply list[s] individual historians and their works as an annotated bibliography’.Footnote ² The few existing articles on Adventist historiography have tended to fall into this trap.

What, however, of Masfa's work? The first point to make is that he largely avoids what Butterfield called the ‘temptation to give a straggling, meaningless string of names’.Footnote ³ Although at times he simply cites an author with the briefest of descriptions, leaving the reader to follow up with what is in the footnote (so that the footnotes in places do the heavy lifting), on the whole he provides some analysis of works cited. In addition, his work is structured around seven analytical categories of historical writing: ‘theological history’, ‘history as apologetics’, ‘open critical history’, ‘closed secular history’ (of religion), ‘critical conservative history’, ‘critical apologetics’ and ‘revisionist realism’ (all are defined on pp. 21–2). Masfa draws here heavily, as he acknowledges, on an unpublished paper by Nicholas Miller (forthcoming in the Journal of Adventist Archives), but he has adapted Miller's schema and individualised it.

After an introductory chapter, these categories are explored in three chapters, which are chronological, because Masfa sees the seven categories as, broadly speaking, succeeding each other. This is more than a little problematic, since there are examples of ‘history as apologetics’ still being produced, though his summary in chapter iii (in which he treats this category) concludes (pp. 123–5) with a series of statements using the past tense and he overtly states that apologetic history (which he seems to locate in the 1940s through to the early 1960s) was followed by the other categories. However, despite this broadly chronological structure, it cannot be said that Masfa is guilty of lip-service grouping of authors ‘into “schools” or “movements”’, for within each chapter his treatment is analytical, constructed around different types of history-writing, rather than simply a listing of authors and works.

This, then, is a good survey of Adventist history-writing that offers insights into the ways that different scholars have approached and have described or analysed Seventh-day Adventist history. Nevertheless, I have three reservations about it. First, the survey is very concise. It bears the hallmark of the PhD dissertation it was and while he repeatedly acknowledges that ‘more work needs to be done’ (p. 185) one could have wished that Masfa himself had done some of that work to flesh out his analysis. My other two reservations indicate where I think that extra work could profitably have been done.

Second, in common with the existing scholarship on Adventist historiography, Masfa essentially measures Adventist historians or history-writers on two axes: professionalism and faithfulness. They are either approved or disapproved on whether they do or do not meet professional academic standards and are or are not supportive of the Seventh-day Adventist Church. There is not a wider assessment of themes and of the intellectual currents identifiable within Adventist historiography and its authors of the kind one finds in Bentley's Modernizing England's past: English historiography in the age of modernism (Cambridge 2005) or Modern historiography: an introduction (Oxford 1999). Furthermore, ‘professional’ academic standards are not defined and seem in practice to mean positivism/historical modernism, though that is no longer the defining approach of academic history. There is a sense, then, in which this work seems dated.

Third, Masfa relies heavily on published works rather than drawing on historians’ private correspondence and other papers (again, in contrast to Bentley's Modernizing England's past). The bias towards published works on the Adventist past is surely one reason why there is not an exploration of the intellectual currents among those who have written on Adventist history. But it also results in another weakness. For example, Masfa's thoughtful and generally helpful overview of ‘Early denominational history textbooks’ (pp. 114–22) relies on his reading of the books themselves. Had he explored archival sources, he would have been able to flesh his analysis out with not just what authors did, but what church leaders commissioned them to do, and the differences between expectation and outcome.

Finally, the book needed careful copy-editing; there are a number of typos and a cross-reference to the two tables (on p. 22) even gives the wrong page number for where the tables are to be found. This is down, however, to the publisher.

Despite the reservations expressed above, this is a significant book that should be on the shelves of any university library in which American religious history is taught and that, because it is concise and clearly written, could be a set text for courses on Christian historiography or Adventist history. One hopes, though, that it will prove a springboard for more work on Seventh-day Adventist historiography, rather than being seen as a definitive statement on the subject.