Time & Perspective Quote by Kenneth Scott Latourette

Latourette is doing something historians don’t always dare to do in public: taking the Bible’s internal claims seriously as a historical force, not merely as literature or later doctrinal proof-text. By pairing “the prophets” with “the writers of the Psalms,” he stitches together two distinct registers of ancient Israelite faith - the courtroom thunder of moral critique and the intimate, liturgical voice of communal memory. The effect is to present a coherent worldview: history is not a closed system but a stage on which God remains an active agent.

The intent is partly descriptive and partly corrective. Latourette is reminding a modern reader, trained to treat “creation” as a distant premise and “history” as human causality, that these texts refuse that separation. God is not a retired architect; He is ongoing governance. “Continuing to work” is the hinge phrase: it collapses the gap between cosmic origin and daily politics, between the first page of Genesis and the churn of empires the prophets address.

Subtext: this is an argument against the modern habit of quarantining religious belief to the private sphere. If God acts “in all history,” then morality, suffering, and national fate are not random; they are interpretable. That interpretability is precisely what makes prophetic religion so potent culturally - it offers not just comfort but indictment.

Context matters. Writing in the early-to-mid 20th century, Latourette lived through world war and ideological mass movements that demanded total explanations. His framing suggests why biblical narratives endured: they supplied a counter-claim to fatalism and to purely material accounts of power, insisting history has intention, not merely momentum.