John D. Wilsey, Chair of the Church History department at Southern Seminary, received one of the highest intellectual honors this summer as the Heritage Foundation awarded him with a Freedom and Opportunity Academic Prize.
The prize recognizes scholarship that defends and advances values of freedom and opportunity. Wilsey’s latest books, God and Country and Religious Freedom: A Conservative Primer, along with his multiple speaking engagements and conference participation, made Wilsey a worthy recipient for the prestigious award.
“It is an indescribable honor to have been among those selected for the Heritage Foundation Freedom and Opportunity Academic Prize,” Wilsey said. “To be numbered among towering scholars like Bradley Birzer, Mark Bauerlein, Carson Holloway, and the others is simply amazing to me. I am deeply grateful.”
While his scholarship reaches the public squares across multiple academic disciplines (secular and religious) outside of the seminary, Wilsey’s heart remains in the classrooms at Southern and Boyce.
“My hope and aspiration for my research and teaching is that Christians would see history as essential to human identity, specifically, as a marker of being a divine image bearer,” Wilsey said. “History is not theology, that is, it is not given to us by divine inspiration (with the important exception of biblical history). History lies in the realm of general revelation. But we see God’s invisible attributes in history, just as we see His invisible attributes in nature.”
For Wilsey, thinking historically about the past, whether church history or American history, guides Christians into a greater love of God. Christians are a people rooted in history because God’s providence rules history. He desires for students and churches to recognize how studying history produces virtue and a greater dependence on God’s sovereignty.
“We see God’s wise and beneficent providence in the events, ideas, and persons of the past,” Wilsey said. “And we find the message of the Bible confirmed again and again in history—“For the LORD is good, His mercy is everlasting, and His truth endureth to all generations” (Psalm 100:5).”
By defending a conservative outlook on life through his research and writing, Wilsey hopes to make a difference in the lives of Christians and the nation. He believes properly acknowledging tradition can lead to a flourishing of the true, good, and beautiful.
“I pray that my work would make a difference in the way that Christians see the role of tradition in the church and in the nation,” Wilsey said. “Our forefathers handed down to us an inheritance found in our Christian and American tradition. That inheritance, while not always perfect, is actually marked by goodness, truth, and beauty.”
Christians not only have a calling to live holy lives, but they have a responsibility to conserve the values that lead to holy living in the lives of individuals and their communities. For Wilsey, history furthers that project.
“It is our responsibility to conserve the good, true, and beautiful things of our tradition and hand them down unsullied to those who come after us,” Wilsey said. “History can help us in that grand project.”
Wilsey represents the mission of the faculty at Southern Seminary and Boyce College. Scholarship belongs in the pews of churches and in classrooms across the world. Faithful stewardship of the task of theological education means the faculty at Southern and Boyce care about shaping the conversations regarding the direction of the culture.
By bringing a Christian worldview to bear on the reigning ideas in the academy, Wilsey’s love for God, history, and students makes him an ideal recipient of this award and an honorable representative of the mission of Southern Seminary.