John Wilsey: History matters

MARY REICHARD, HOST: Today is Thursday, January 2nd. Good morning! This is The World and Everything in It from listener-supported WORLD Radio. I’m Mary Reichard.

MYRNA BROWN, HOST: And I’m Myrna Brown. As we mark the ending of one year and the beginning of another, WORLD Opinions contributor John Wilsey says understanding our relationship with the past is key to the future.

JOHN D. WILSEY: “What’s past is prologue.” Those are the words inscribed on “Future” … a statue that stands in front of the National Archives building in Washington, D.C. The quotation comes from William Shakespeare’s “The Tempest.” The idea is that the past sets the context for the present and the future. Who our ancestors were and what they did establish the setting in which we move and have our being in the present. Our actions, attitudes, beliefs, and wishes will also make up the setting for the world our children and grandchildren will inhabit.

The year 2024 is now past. A new year dawns. I was born in 1969, and for 30 years the 21st century was a figment of my imagination. Now, this century is nearly a quarter of the way completed. What happened?

The great 20th century champion of Western civilization Richard Weaver wrote in his book Ideas Have Consequences, that the past comprises all our knowledge, the present is a thin line, ever advancing, and the future is what we imagine about days to come. It’s made up of images from our past playing on the screen of the mind.

We often think of history as an abstraction. We look at old photographs of people who are now dead. They often seem to stare back at us with expressionless faces. The dead seem so distant from us, inhabiting a world so different than our own as to seem almost unreal.

But history is not abstract. History is made up of real people who lived in real places facing real circumstances at real times. They laughed, worked, loved, hated, played, planned, hoped, feared, lived…and died.

History matters a great deal, not because those who don’t learn from it are doomed to repeat it. Guess what, we will repeat our mistakes of the past, no matter how much knowledge of it we possess. History matters because those who inhabited past time had a nature like ours—on the one hand, possessing great dignity as divine image-bearers, and on the other hand, fallen in sin.

The Hungarian-born historian John Lukacs took human nature seriously in the way he thought about history. Human nature, he said, is not half good and half bad. Rather, it is a mixture of real dignity and real fallenness, which when mixed together makes a third thing. He writes: “In mathematics, with its rigidly fixed and immobile numbers, 100 plus 100 makes 200; in human life 100 plus 100 makes another kind of 100.” When we think about the dead, we have to remember that they were complex, and casting them in simple good-versus-evil narratives does little to give us real understanding.

Some people find history irrelevant. Some find it entertaining. Others think it’s a dull exercise in memorizing dry-as-dust details like names and dates. But everyone ought to love history, because God made each of us with an awareness of our place in time. A person may not enjoy every historical subject, but who doesn’t love to tell stories about how they met their spouse, how they became a Christian, or what they did on last summer’s vacation?

Historical thinking is central to who we are as divine image-bearers. Adjacent to the statue “Future” in front of the National Archives is the statue “Past.” That statue is inscribed with the simple exhortation: “Study the Past.” As one year dies and another is born, let us remember that we who live today will die tomorrow. Therefore, let us examine ourselves. Study the past to get knowledge and wisdom, which begins with the fear of the Lord.

I’m John Wilsey.

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