The Wars of the Lord by Dr. Matthew Tuininga - Faculty Book Review
From The Forum Magazine, Winter 2025 - view the full issue here
In January 2025, Dr. Matthew Tuininga published The Wars of the Lord: The Puritan Conquest of America’s First People. This book exemplifies Tuininga’s scholarly rigor and deep humility, offering readers a model for truth-filled storytelling that captures the nuances and complexities of history.
Scholarly Rigor, Grounded in Faith
Raised in a Christian home, Tuininga began his life immersed in the Gospel. After earning his undergraduate degree in history at Covenant College, he began his career working in Washington, D.C. both for Congress and the FBI. Though he had a good career trajectory, he began to realize that a career in government was not his calling.
In 2006, Tuininga enrolled at Westminster Seminary California as a Master of Divinity student. Tuininga explained his decision to attend seminary, noting, “At that point, I was still wrestling with many of the same religious questions that I'd been wrestling with when I was a teenager. I went to seminary in many ways to answer those sorts of questions for myself, not because I knew what I was going to do with it or had any vocational plans.”
As Tuininga pursued those answers, professors David VanDrunen and Michael Horton encouraged him to combine his love for history, politics and theology by studying political theology. By the end of his time at Westminster Seminary, Tuininga was admitted to Emory University’s doctoral program in Religion, Ethics, and Society. With his wife and newborn son, Tuininga relocated to Georgia, where he would spend the next five years studying John Calvin’s political theology. At Emory, Tuininga continued to pursue his questions through rigorous scholarship in both history and politics, grounding it in his faith in Christ.
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Humble Storytelling, Grounded in Truth
In 2016, Tuininga accepted a teaching position in Moral Theology at Calvin Theological Seminary, and now is Professor of Christian Ethics and the History of Christianity. Tuininga and his wife, now with three children, relocated from Georgia to West Michigan. As Calvin Seminary’s history faculty members retired, an opportunity arose for Tuininga to also teach history, once more integrating his passion for history, politics, and theology.
As part of his scholarship at Calvin Theological Seminary, Tuininga was able to pursue deeper research on Reformed political theology. His doctoral work on Calvin led him to follow the trajectory of Calvinism and the Reformed tradition into North America, particularly through the Puritans. What started as a possible journal article turned into a multi-year research project on the Puritans and Native Americans: The Wars of the Lord.
Telling the Story: The Wars of the Lord
The Wars of the Lord combines Tuininga’s strengths as a historian and theologian: scholarly rigor, humble storytelling, and a fierce commitment to telling the truth of the story.
Tuininga explains in his introduction, “Tens of thousands of devout English colonists known as Puritans came to America. They believed that bringing Christ’s kingdom to the Natives would liberate them from darkness. But their understanding of Christianity also spurred them to dominate the Natives. A conquest they believed would be spiritual, peaceable, and benevolent devolved into a conquest that was virtually genocidal.”
Over the next 400 pages, Tuininga tells the story of Puritans and Native Americans alike. From the first encounter of William Bradford and the Nausets to the Massacre at Mystic to King Philip’s War, The Wars of the Lord details the relationships, miscommunications, battles, evangelistic efforts, and theological underpinnings of this early part of American history. The story is bloody and brutal, engaging and exciting. For Tuininga, the story isn’t simply about right and wrong, or one side being better than the other. Rather, the story is about both groups doing things well, and other times, doing things poorly.
In his approach to storytelling, Tuininga exemplifies humility by resisting the temptation to simplify complex historical narratives into neat categories of heroes and villains. Instead, he seeks to present a more nuanced and honest account of both sides, acknowledging virtues and flaws of both groups without idolizing or demonizing them. Through his writing, Tuininga sets an example for readers of how to adopt a more humble and open-minded perspective, one that avoids imposing contemporary values on the past.
Readers will find that The Wars of the Lord is an instructive narrative, teaching them how to acknowledge the nuance and complexity of history. Tuininga presents the Puritans as driven by both benevolent and colonial impulses, viewing their mission to convert Native Americans to Christianity as both an act of divine obligation and a means to assert control. While they believed they were offering salvation, their attitudes shifted as conflicts arose, and resistance from Native American groups was seen as an affront to God’s will, justifying harsh retaliation. At the same time, Tuininga acknowledges the complexity of Native American experiences, showing how some tribes adapted Christianity for cultural survival and maintained their identities amidst colonization. He also highlights the complicated alliances formed between the Puritans and certain Native American groups, creating a dynamic where violence and loyalty coexisted.
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Humility and Truth Telling Today
The Wars of the Lord is both a historical and instructional account of the need for humility and truth telling, in both the past and present. Humble truth telling is not only about acknowledging past wrongs - it is about a continual conversation that is not defined or dictated by the negative parts of history. For Tuininga, humility and truth telling as a follower of Christ is anchored in unity in the body of Christ, which transcends historical, racial, and socioeconomic divisions. Guilt is not the foundation of unity - grace is.
Tuininga explains, “Our hope is that we will be in the kingdom of God, and we will sit around a table, and Puritans and Indians on both sides from these stories will be there, and we will be able to actually talk about these stories. Not making light of them, but recognizing their horrors, because we know that what Christ has done is more than enough to atone for it.”
To learn more about The Wars of the Lord and purchase your copy, visit Amazon or Oxford University Press.
