Christianity Today, Love Thy Dead-for-200-Years Neighbor, by Daniel K. Williams (Ashland University); Author, The Search for a Rational Faith: Reason and Belief in the History of American Christianity (2026)):

In one of his dark epistles, the devil Screwtape tells his nephew Wormwood that Satan has managed to deceive humanity by convincing scholars to adopt the “Historical Point of View.”

“The Historical Point of View, put briefly, means that when a learned man is presented with any statement in an ancient author, the one question he never asks is whether it is true,” C. S. Lewis’s character explains.

And since we cannot deceive the whole human race all the time, it is most important thus to cut every generation off from all others; for where learning makes a free commerce between the ages there is always the danger that the characteristic errors of one may be corrected by the characteristic truths of another. But thanks be to Our Father [Satan] and the Historical Point of View, great scholars are now as little nourished by the past as the most ignorant mechanic who holds that “history is bunk.”

As I think back on my graduate education in history, I realize that my own attitudes toward the past were for a while perhaps uncomfortably close to this devilish perspective. Like the scholars Screwtape describes, I learned the art of researching the past using primary source documents. I enjoyed immersing myself in the texts—but I didn’t necessarily look to them for wisdom.

John D. Wilsey’s God and Country encourages Christians to adopt a more spiritually mature attitude toward the past. Like Lewis, Wilsey knows that if we’re not “nourished by the past,” we will be more vulnerable to the Devil’s lies. And like Lewis, he wants Christians to avoid the errors of uncritical nostalgia on the one hand and unreflective dismissal on the other. …

God and Country explains both why Christians should study the past and how they should do it. …

Wilsey argues that we need to develop love for the people whose lives we examine—not a mandate to like them personally, let alone excuse their flaws—but to treat them with charity in accordance with 1 Corinthians 13. Because “Paul wrote that love is patient,” we must bear with our historical subjects “in their manifold expressions of their fallenness,” Wilsey says. “We must be fair to them and their times,” he encourages. “Our place in relation to them is as their student rather than their judge.”

“Ever since the Enlightenment, it has been common to regard the people of the past as boorish, childish, superstitious, brutal, and prejudiced,” he continues. But “love excludes arrogance toward others in the present and the past.” If we cultivate Christian virtue, we won’t be “chronological snobs.”

And if we learn to love the people of the past, with all their flaws, we will find it easier to love people in the present who also are deeply flawed.

One of those present loves Wilsey says we need to cultivate is love for country. He devotes the last chapter of his book to a rightly ordered Christian patriotism, grounded in an understanding of the country’s history. An unreflective celebration of America might be jingoistic idolatry. But a Christian student of history can love America for the good it has done while lamenting its failures. Just as we can learn to love people in the past even with all their faults, so we can learn to love our country even when it has not lived up to its ideals. …

If we find ourselves quick to denounce earlier generations who defended slavery or engaged in other morally objectionable actions, perhaps we should ask ourselves if we are treating our historical subjects with love and understanding. If we look to the past only to champion the oppressed and further our own agendas in the present, perhaps we should ask whether we’re cutting ourselves off from needed sources of wisdom.

In other words, perhaps we should ask if we’ve fallen for Screwtape’s devilish agenda.

With Wilsey’s book as a guide, readers will be less likely to succumb to this error. And maybe in the process, we’ll also become better practitioners of the Christian virtues, capable of extending grace to others—both those who lived in the past and those who are with us now.

God and Country: Upholding Faith, History, and National Identity (2026)

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