The author notes of this paper, given as a keynote address:

• The talk that I give tonight is not the talk that I was originally planning to deliver at this conference. When I was asked to give the keynote address, I assumed that I would simply present an elongated version of the paper that I was going to give in this morning's session on "Peace, Justice, and Evangelicals"; my paper was to be on the strengths and weaknesses and omissions in the recent literature written by evangelicals on the notion of a Christian approach to history. But the more I thought about it, the more I realized that I needed to do more than this. Presidential addresses have not been a custom in this organization — and after tonight you may conclude that not having presidents speak was a very good tradition indeed — and it gradually became apparent to me that I really needed to take this opportunity to say something about the past, present, and future of this organization. While the original title, "'The Whole Gospel for a Broken World': Evangelicals and the Writing of History," would in some sense still work — I have a fair amount to say about Christian perspectives in the writing of history — the better title is, indeed, "Faith, History, and the Conference on Faith and History."