Timothy Larsen, professor of Christian thought at Wheaton College:
[E]vangelical historians have tended to overdo narratives of declension. These have limited utility in the wider academy because they simply feed into a secular assumption that Christianity is defeated or in the process of breaking down and therefore can be ignored. (Some evangelical historians need to put the following verse in front of the computer screen when they do their writing: “Do not say, ‘Why were the old days better than these?’ For it is not wise to ask such questions.” Ecclesiastes 7:10).
My own experience is that secular scholars are very comfortable with grumpy, fearful, defeatist evangelical scholars documenting the rapid rate of the loss of all they value and rise of all they despise, but they are rattled and unsettled by witty, confident, urbane, evangelical scholars. Far from this being a tactic or form of capitulation, such a posture, at its best, can be an expression of faith—of confidence in the victory of God and the lordship of Christ. Who but Christians really believe that the story we inhabit ends as a comedy and not a tragedy?
—Timothy Larsen, “Evangelicals, the Academy, and the Discipline of History,” in Beyond Integration? Inter/Disciplinary Possibilities for the Future of Christian Higher Education, ed. Todd C. Ream, Jerry Pattengale, and David L. Riggs (Abilene: Abilene Christian University Press, 2012), 118.
