Greetings and salutations. Welcome to Life and Books and Everything. I'm Kevin DeYoung.

Today I'm reading my world opinions piece and maybe I'll give a little bit of explanation along the way for some of the terms and issues here.

The piece is entitled, The Dust Up Among the Historians, the Problem of the Historian as Activist approach to the past.

To many outsiders, the field of history probably looks like a straightforward endeavor.

Historians teach us about the people, the events, and the ideas of the past.

Sounds simple, but once you start studying the past, you realize there is no one agreed-upon way to do history.

In the last several years, this perennial difficulty has

become especially pronounced within the Guild of Evangelical Historians, Evangelicals broadly understood.

A recent online kerfuffle helps illuminate this intra-evangelical debate. At the end of November,

Jay Green, a professor of history at Covenant College,

published a piece on the new shape of Christian public discourse. That's the title of the article.

And if you read this online, you can link to this in various other articles that I referenced throughout the piece.

In this article, he tries to map public Christian voices across an X-axis that moves from

emancipationists on the left and civilizationalists on the right. Those are Greens terms and emancipationists. Think of

those who see their aims as trying to give people freedom and freedom of expression and

to live out their identities. That's emancipationists. And civilizationalists,

think of those who are trying to preserve Western civilization, and usually that means some type

of Christian civilization. So that's the X axis. And And the Y-axis moves from minimalist at the bottom to

maximalists at the top. And those two are Greens categories. Minimalists, meaning people who are

attempting their aims, but are doing so more or less according to the rules of modern liberal society.

I don't mean politically liberal, but rather classically liberal.

They're trying to play within the rules of the game, you might say.

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