Historical anachronism and the modern moment

A key problem with the methodology of various theories of modern society is enunciated by the following quotation about historical method from Carl Trueman in an essay entitled “John Owen and Modernity: Reflections on Historiography, Modernity, and the Self” in Willem van Vlastuin and Kelly M. Kapic, ed., John Owen between Orthodoxy and Modernity (Leiden: Brill, 2019), 35:

[W]hen the terms of the question [about the past] explicitly demand that the past is approached through the lens of a later category whose definition depends upon specific later phenomena, that reality is potentially exacerbated into the problem of serious anachronism.