Perhaps the real problem with taking Bebbington’s quadrilateral as a definition, though, is that it gives a historian’s descriptive analysis. That is, it seeks to describe what you see on the ground among those who call themselves evangelical. Now that is quite right for a historian trying to understand the historical characteristics of a tradition, but we should not define a Christian tradition—any Christian tradition—like that. We do not, for example, get our understanding of what it means to be