In Psalm 81, we read how God delivered His people from bondage. He relieved their shoulders of the burden. He freed their hands from the basket. They called to Him in distress, and He answered. He brought them out of Egypt, tested them at Meribah, commanded them to put away all foreign gods, and promised to satisfy them with the finest wheat and honey from the rock.

Yet though He listened when they cried, they refused to listen when He spoke.

“But my people did not listen to my voice,” Yahweh says. “Israel would not submit to me. So I gave them over to their stubborn hearts, to follow their own counsels.”

There may be no more concise account of how a people squanders its inheritance.

Once they preferred their own counsel to God’s voice, they inevitably began to receive the inheritance selectively—retaining what soothed and flattered them and resisting whatever would warn or correct them.

In other words, they wanted God’s blessings without the requisite submission to that God who had blessed them. They wanted His salvation without His rule; His provision without His commandments. They wanted to inherit His story without respecting His authorship.

That is what is meant when Psalm 81 says they followed their own counsels.

But let’s not suppose their error was particular to them. We must recognize its universality.

As Paul later writes, we can also apply to Israel’s failures: No temptation overtook them that is not common to man.

Individuals and families, churches and nations, authors and filmmakers, teachers and historians—yes, even podcasters—we all inherit stories.

Our inheritances necessarily predate us.

We all have to decide what to do with them.

Will we retain everything merely because it is old?

Will we reject everything for the same reason?

Will we tell the truth about what has been entrusted to us?

Will we suppress what embarrasses us?

Will we exaggerate what flatters us?

Will we regard our inheritance as a master to whom we defer all judgment, or treat it as clay we may mold according to our appetites?

The faithful course avoids both of these errors by rejecting both servile traditionalism and arrogant revisionism.

HISTORY IS NOT CHIEFLY OUR STORY

We often speak as though our stories are our own business alone.

A family may insist that no one—not even its own children—has standing to challenge the way it tells the family lore.

A church may tell a polished account of its founding, leadership, growth, and conflicts.

A nation may preserve only inspiring, patriotic episodes while omitting failures; conversely, a nation headed up by those seeking regime change may amplify every failure until the whole inheritance is contemptible to the citizenry.

Yet in all such cases, if history is chiefly God’s story, then how we speak about the past is never just our business.

It is always God’s business whether we tell the truth.

That does not mean we can read God’s secret purposes exhaustively from every event. It means the events themselves—and every account we give of them—remain under His judgment.

Of course, we cannot include every detail. A life contains so many more moments than the most thorough memoir, documentary, family history, or obituary will ever convey. Selection is therefore unavoidable, and it does not itself amount to dishonesty.

Nevertheless, the impossibility of saying everything does not give us permission to falsify what we do say.

On the other hand, truthfulness requires discriminate disclosure. Some facts belong in private records, some in private family conversation. Fidelity asks not only whether something is true, but who has standing to know it, and in what detail.

Discretion, then, conceals without intending deception; falsification conceals by actively fostering a false impression.

So which details do we include?

Which do we omit?

Which do we treat as central?

Which do we relegate to the footnotes?

Where did we fail to live according to our own stated ideals, much less God’s righteous standard?

What did we do that we ought not to have done?

What did we leave undone that duty required?

When our choices led to injury, loss, alienation, or unnecessary conflict for others, do we faithfully recount that as well?

Or do we contrive a preferred narrative that casts us in the best possible light, then stubbornly hold to it even when God’s standard weighs and measures us and finds us wanting?

The apostle John warns in his first epistle that if we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves. Worse, if we contradict God’s judgment about us, we make Him out to be a liar. John writes that the truth is not in us in that case.

That is more serious than we want to admit.

Indeed, there is something idolatrous in preferring our version of a story to God’s truth about us.

But by God’s grace, it need not remain so.

We can confess.

We can correct the record.

We can walk in repentance.

We can become the sort of people capable of receiving and honoring an inheritance without worshiping it, and correcting it without vandalizing it.

That is necessary if we would conserve what is worth conserving and progress in ways that are actually progressive—ways that produce greater fidelity, purity, joy, truth, hope, love, and human flourishing.

As the old saying goes, we should not throw the baby out with the bathwater.

But neither should we drink the bathwater merely because we love babies.

SERVILE TRADITIONALISM

Servile traditionalism treats an inheritance as untouchable.

It treats a thing as sacrosanct merely because it is ancient, familiar, or beloved. As a result, even the fairest criticism is conflated with contempt. Correction is regarded as rebellion. Confession amounts to betrayal.

This can happen in families.

“Don’t talk back.”

“Respect your elders.”

“Don’t embarrass the family.”

Such statements may express legitimate duties or cautions.

Customs can preserve wisdom. Fathers and mothers are to be honored. Private disputes and indiscretions should not be broadcast as a rule, especially when the choice to do so is made carelessly, to entertain, or to take vengeance.

And families do need loyalty, patience, forgiveness, and discretion to endure.

Yet Biblical honor is not flattery.

Honor does not confer immunity from right judgment.

Pride, rage, cowardice, addiction, favoritism, cruelty, irresponsibility, deceit, and manipulation may persist for generations. Once the resulting pattern is cloaked in tradition, however, objection to the pattern may be treated as more offensive than the sins themselves.

Familiarity does not make wickedness righteous, though. Length of days will never change folly into wisdom.

Servile traditionalism can happen in churches as well.

A congregation may become so committed to its preferred account of itself that it will not admit even the most necessary corrective charge against its leaders, practices, and institutional culture. Thus, criticism is readily interpreted as hostility. Questions are treated as threats; repentance is waved off in the name of unity.

But if a church cannot confess sin because confession might damage its reputation, it has chosen reputation over repentance—and eventually imperils both.

The same applies to nations and civilizations.

It is possible to love one’s country, honor the sacrifices of previous generations, celebrate worthy achievements, preserve cherished institutions, and give thanks for inherited liberties without pretending every law, leader, custom, or economic arrangement was just.

Yet if honest criticism of the past is forbidden, repentance becomes impossible. There can be nothing to ask God’s forgiveness for when we refuse to admit any sin has been committed.

Servile traditionalism therefore does not protect only ancient errors. Give a recent corruption enough time, and familiarity will eventually dress it in the robes of tradition. Yesterday’s compromise becomes today’s custom and tomorrow’s untouchable inheritance.

Thus, we may inherit this pattern honestly. That will never make it righteous.

ARROGANT REVISIONISM

The apparently opposite error treats inheritance as merely the raw material for expressing and pursuing our current preferences.

The past becomes clay in our hands.

We treat collective memory as infinitely malleable, molding it into whatever form best advances our political project, social theory, artistic ambition, institutional reputation, and personal brand.

We remove the inconvenient features, enlarge the flattering ones, morally reweight the whole, and then present the hodgepodge under an inherited name so that our preferred message will enjoy unearned legitimacy.

This is one reason adaptations should be scrutinized carefully.

Changes between media are inevitable. A long book must be condensed for the screen. Characters may be omitted. Dialogue shortened. Aesthetic choices must be made where the author’s descriptions left much to the reader’s imagination. Connective scenes may be added so an audience can follow the plot.

Those are not necessarily falsifications.

But there is a world of difference between translating a work into another medium and borrowing a familiar title to tell a substantially different moral story.

Lewis and Tolkien criticized Disney’s treatment of fairy tales along similar lines. Among their objections was what they regarded as the flattening, sentimentalizing, and commercializing of essential qualities from the older stories. Someone may disagree with their judgment. A Disney admirer may ask in turn whether Lewis and Tolkien understood what Disney was attempting in his own medium.

The question cuts both ways.

Yet that merely proves all the more that this is the right kind of question.

Did the adapter listen?

Did he understand the source on its own terms?

Did he preserve its moral architecture even where he altered its outward form?

Or did he do something else entirely?

Did he commandeer familiar characters, motifs, and cultural prestige so he could tell the audience what he wanted to say?

The same questions arise with James Fenimore Cooper’s The Last of the Mohicans and the 1992 film bearing its name. They apply also with Homer’s The Odyssey and Christopher Nolan’s adaptation of the same.

And we should ask whenever someone presents a retelling as though the inherited story were merely a delivery system for their preferred sensibilities.

At some point, it is fair to say: write your own story and call it something else.

Why borrow the authority of Homer, Tolkien, Cooper, Scripture, the founding fathers, or your own ancestors if you are unwilling to let their actual words, deeds, moral architecture, and historical context constrain what you say?

The answer is that arrogant revisionism refuses judgment from outside the self.

Servile traditionalism may say, “Our forefathers must not be criticized.”

But arrogant revisionism says, “I alone will judge our forefathers, but no one can judge me.”

These twin errors, so opposite at first blush, share more than either would like to admit.

Neither submits our inheritance—or itself—to God.

One flatters the receiver’s ancestors.

The other flatters the receiver.

Both amount to following our own counsels.

FIVE QUESTIONS FOR HANDLING AN INHERITANCE

Whether we are dealing with a film adaptation, family story, historical account, church tradition, political inheritance, or literary work, ask these questions:

1. What kind of inheritance is being handled?

Is this Scripture?

An oral tradition?

A literary work?

Historical fiction?

A legal record?

A family memory?

Handling a sacred text imposes different obligations from adapting a fairy tale.

Scripture is a special case. It is not merely an inheritance over which we can stand as judges or editors. It is the authoritative Word under which our interpretations, traditions, and judgments themselves stand to be corrected.

And yet a last will and testament makes different demands from a bedtime story.

We should know what sort of thing we are receiving before determining what faithfulness requires.

2. Which changes are genuinely required, and which express the receiver’s preferences?

When I read Matthew Henry’s commentary on a podcast, my tone of voice changes the listener’s experience. It is I who choose where to pause, which words to emphasize, and when to alter my tempo. Those changes are unavoidable.

But what about when I interrupt Henry to add my own two cents?

Am I clear enough in distinguishing where Matthew Henry ends and Garrett Ashley Mullet begins?

The distinction matters immensely, even if I think the two of us are in broad agreement.

My observations, feelings, judgments, speculations, and opinions are not automatically Henry’s. Nor should either Henry’s commentary or mine be conflated with what the Bible itself says.

No receiver is invisible. Each of us brings his own voice, assumptions, emphases, and limitations to the work.

The question is whether we do so honestly.

3. What has been added, removed, or morally reweighted?

Compression is not the same thing as moral revision.

Leaving out a minor scene due to runtime constraints is different from removing a virtue because modern audiences no longer admire it.

There is also a world of difference between adding connective material for the sake of clarity or realism and normalizing a vice the original author regarded as morally and socially dangerous.

What has become more important in the new telling?

What has become less important?

What is the work now teaching the audience to love, pity, fear, despise, excuse, or condemn?

4. Does the new work illuminate the source’s moral and imaginative architecture or replace it?

An adaptation may help readers see aspects of the original story more clearly. It may make a distant world vivid and accessible. It may render difficult material in a form more people can receive.

Yet it also may seek to solve a different problem from the one the original author addressed.

Even when it does the latter, retaining familiar names and scenes may lend the adapter’s new project an authority and cultural familiarity it would not otherwise possess.

In doing so, however, it may ignore or deny the qualities that made the original enduring and recognizably human.

The crucial question is whether the new work serves up the source to a new audience.

Or has the source become a servant of the new work, lending inherited authority to ideas the audience might otherwise evaluate more critically?

5. Will the audience recognize where the source ends and the adapter begins?

A reader of J.R.R. Tolkien knows both that Peter Jackson omitted Tom Bombadil from The Lord of the Rings and that he added Tauriel to The Hobbit. He can recognize where Jackson’s films depart from Tolkien’s novels.

But what about when audiences know only the adaptation?

Will they leave believing they encountered the original story?

The more likely the audience is to mistake invention for inheritance, the greater the adapter’s responsibility to mark that distinction honestly.

WHEN THE RECEIVER REWRITES THE FAMILY

These questions do not apply only to filmmakers.

They apply to genealogy.

Recently, I resumed research of my own and Lauren’s family trees. I subscribed to Ancestry.com again, reviewed old records, investigated new hints, and worked through documents that had accumulated since I last seriously revisited the project.

Birth certificates.

Marriage licenses.

Draft registrations.

Newspaper clippings.

Obituaries.

Death certificates.

Wills.

Fragments of lives belonging to people I had never heard of, yet from whom my children and I descend.

It was overwhelming.

I think this is due, at least in part, to the morbid quality of watching entire lives collapse into names, dates, legal records, and graves.

Someday, if the Lord wills and the world continues, my descendants may have the same experience while researching me.

They may find my obituary, photographs, blog posts, podcast episodes, books, and whatever scraps of documentation survive.

In my case, the problem may be a feast rather than a famine. They may find far too much.

Perhaps they will ask for some future version of Google, Ancestry, ChatGPT—or whatever replaces them—to summarize my life.

I wonder what that summary will say.

What will it compress and omit?

Will I be recognizable?

Where will Garrett end and the future adapter begin?

Our ancestors could not ultimately control which fragments survived them and eventually reached me. Fires destroyed military records in St. Louis in the 60’s. Heirloom items have been lost to floods and hurricanes. Names changed. Stories went silent.

Some left behind little more than a name, a birth date, a spouse, and a grave.

Silence is difficult to interpret.

Were they just the quiet in the land? Were the records lost or destroyed? Did someone flee disgrace, danger, or persecution?

Did powerful people suppress an inconvenient story? Did descendants conceal embarrassing details that might threaten marriage prospects, business interests, or political ambitions?

So much of the story is not merely unknown to us, but unknowable.

Only God knows any of these stories in full.

Yet we can decide whether we will knowingly introduce new gaps into the record because the truth is inconvenient to our interests.

Will we tell our children the truth about who we are and where they came from?

Will we tell them what they may need to carry on, what they may need to turn away from, and what they may need to live up to—at least to the extent that we have some idea about each of those?

Or will we force the fragments to say what we want them to, preferring our own counsels to the truth?

A CHRISTIAN SLAVEHOLDER’S WILL

One document I stumbled across in my family history forced the problem into especially sharp relief.

It was the last will and testament of my 8^th great-granduncle John Blalock, dated 15 August 1790 in Newberry, South Carolina. Believing his death was near, he began the document by professing hope in the resurrection through Christ Jesus his Lord.

“In the Name of God Amen, I John Blalock of the County of Newberry & State of South Carolina Carpenter being in a Very imperfect State of health but of Perfect Mind & Memory thanks be given unto God Calling to Mind the Mortality of my body & Knowing that it is appointed for all Men Once to Die do Make & ordain this my last Will & Testament. [That] is to say Principally & first of all I give & Recommend my soul into the hands of Almighty God that gave it & My body I Recommend to the Earth to be buried in Decent Christian burial at the Discretion of My Executors Nothing Doubting but at the General Resurrection I shall Receive the same again by the Mighty power of God & as touching such Worldly Estate wherewith it has please’d God to bless Me in this Life I give device & dispose of the same in the following Manner & form…”

In what followed, throughout the remainder of the document, John proceeded to distribute his enslaved human beings as property to friends and family.

Will.

Jack.

Nan.

Dick.

Jeph.

Hannah.

Johnston.

Jane.

Sam.

Tom.

Tullah.

Charles.

Twelve people in all.

Four bequeathed to a certain Micajah Bennet.

Three assigned to John’s son, Lewis.

Another three assigned to a Ruben Roland.

One each assigned to a John Blalock Bennet and a John Blalock Roland—perhaps cousins or nephews, I’m not quite sure.

Lives redirected with a few words and a signature.

What am I—a modern descendant of John’s younger brother Millington—supposed to do with such a find?

One option is to preserve only the profession of faith and omit the slave-owning.

Another is to preserve only the slave-owning and treat the profession of faith as obviously disingenuous.

Yet the document contains both.

His profession of faith does not make the enslavement less objectionable. Yet neither does the will give me omniscient access to the final state of that man’s soul.

Maturity requires sitting with that tension rather than resolving it too hastily at the expense of reality.

Here was a man professing hope in Christ while regarding a dozen other human beings—men, women, and children—as his rightful property, distributable at his death however he saw fit.

Leaving either part out might spare me some discomfort.

It would also leave me and my descendants with a less honest inheritance.

The proper response is not to pretend the incongruity is trivial.

Neither is it to imagine that contempt for previous generations proves the righteousness of our own.

The modern reader can easily condemn my slaveholding ancestor, his generation, the United States of America, and every institution associated with the lot, and feel exceedingly virtuous for doing so. Yet a common folly of our own age is that the same reader may return immediately to his own sins, injustices, cruelties, and hypocrisies which are today regarded as commonplace and unremarkable.

What will my descendants two or three hundred years from now find in our records?

Which of our practices will repel them?

What sins have we normalized?

Which incongruities will they find on the same page as our professions of faith?

That is a more profitable question than flattering ourselves because we can find fault with a dead man.

This is because honest inheritance is neither hagiography nor iconoclasm.

It is truth under God and before God because this will always be His story before it is ours.

THERE ARE NO UNCORRUPTED ANCESTORS

As I worked backward through my family tree, I found myself hoping to locate someone of whom I could be unreservedly proud.

Someone great.

Someone pure.

Someone blameless.

Then it occurred to me that I could trace the line all the way back to Adam without finding such a man.

What was I expecting?

In the first Adam, we inherit a line of flawed characters at best; at worst, we descend from terrors, tyrants, nuisances, and fools.

Scripture itself makes no effort to sanitize this.

The Bible contains liars, adulterers, murderers, cowards, fools, schemers, bad fathers, bad sons, treacherous brothers, compromised kings, corrupt priests, dysfunctional families, and stiff-necked generations.

Only one man is perfectly righteous: Jesus Christ, the incarnate Son of God.

But this is actually good news for us.

If our hope depended upon finding an uncorrupted ancestor, a flawless church, a blameless nation, or an untarnished cultural inheritance, we would be without hope.

But He gives more grace.

In Christ, the second Adam, we are not required to pretend that the first Adam’s descendants were better than they were.

We confess.

We tell the truth.

We repent.

We receive good things from compromised people without calling their compromise good.

We should therefore be thankful for an ancestor’s courage without imitating his cruelty.

We should admire his piety and discipline without excusing his hypocrisy.

We can preserve useful tools, happy memories, sound beliefs, costly sacrifices, and honorable examples while refusing to pick up and pass down every sin attached to them.

TURNING THE RUBRIC ON MYSELF

It’s too easy to criticize the brilliant filmmaker Christopher Nolan for rewriting The Odyssey.

The harder and more actionable question is what kind of inheritance I am handling with this podcast.

Do I listen to the works I discuss?

When I read Scripture, am I listening for what God would correct, challenge, or cultivate in me?

Or am I scanning for evidence of the point I already wanted to make?

When I read Matthew Henry, Plutarch, Tolkien, Cooper, or anyone else, am I willing to let the facts inform and revise my theory?

Or am I recruiting every book, film, family record, conversation, and conflict into an argument I had already decided to prosecute?

Where do these inheritances end and where does Garrett as their receiver begin?

Do I distinguish clearly enough between:

what happened;

what I observed;

what I inferred;

what I suspect;

what I feel;

and what I can establish?

This question matters immensely because I can and do make mistakes.

For example, I recently repeated a familiar quote about fantasy and escapism. I attributed it to C. S. Lewis, but the remark was actually Tolkien’s.

Now Lewis may have said similar things. Lewis and Tolkien were close friends, after all. The quotation even sounds like something Lewis would have said.

And yet the fact remains that he’s not the one who said it.

Tolkien did.

That may be a small error, but it raises a larger question: if I can misattribute that quote, what else have I misremembered, misunderstood, or repeated without sufficient verification?

My genealogy work provides still more examples.

I had competing theories preserved on separate spreadsheet tabs. Some of those theories were mutually exclusive, and therefore could not all be true at the same time, or in the same way.

One proposed ancestral connection implied a child had been born when his supposed father was ten or eleven years old—and that undoubtedly deserves a closer look.

To be sure, many claims may remain highly plausible. Others obviously need correction, proof, or removal. And yet it is crucial to remember that repeating a speculation—even a plausible one—does not transform it into proof.

If I keep referring back to my own speculation about my own speculation, I am not proving anything.

I am filibustering.

The same principle applies when I talk about the motives of others.

I may observe a pattern and reasonably suspect that someone’s stated explanation does not tell the whole story. We human beings can and do deceive ourselves routinely. This is nothing new.

Fear, appetite, status, resentment, and anxiety put their fingers on the scale even as we sincerely insist our motives are only noble, even convincing ourselves that they are.

Scripture attests to this, as does history, as does any candid self-examination.

Yet only God knows motives fully.

That includes mine.

Have I been careful enough?

Have I sometimes brought more heat than light?

Has my anger—even where it arose from real injustice, pain, or concern—interfered with the clear thinking I claim to value, either in myself or in others?

Have I supplied candid personal details only because they were necessary to the argument, or have I sometimes also been bidding for pity?

Alternatively, have I sometimes highlighted facts that cast me in the most favorable light while downplaying those that might weaken my credibility?

If ever I refuse to ask and answer such questions candidly, I undermine the whole project.

And by project, I don’t mean only my podcast or blog.

I also undermine the larger project of leaving posterity a life and record that can be remembered without flattery or resentment.

ADMITTING ERROR IS PART OF THE INHERITANCE

I do not want my children to regard their inheritance from me as unquestionable or infallible, and yet I do hope they confidently receive good things:

faith in Christ;

good habits;

insightful patterns of thought;

love of truth;

wholesome household practices;

enjoyment of books and reading;

useful and beautiful mementos;

tools for repair and improvement;

fond memories;

good examples worth following.

For precisely that reason, I hope they reject servile traditionalism as it pertains to me.

I do not want them to sanctify my sins, for instance, merely because those sins were mine.

I do not want them to pretend I was right wherever I was wrong merely because I was right about some important things.

I do not want them to rationalize my folly wherever I mixed some of it in with wisdom. May they be discerning enough to separate the one from the other.

Yet neither do I want future descendants to treat my legacy like a puppet—reading opinions, motives, priorities, and judgments into my story that were never there merely because doing so would suit their own preferred narrative and agenda.

To make both errors harder for them, I must deliberately cultivate two habits:

First, I must explain why I believe what I believe. I must study carefully, distinguish sources and evidence from interpretation, and avoid reading into texts whatever may either license my appetites or shield me from accountability when I am mistaken.

Second, I must plainly admit when I am wrong.

Over the years, I have told my children when I crossed a line—when this or that thing I said or did was in poor taste, unfair, or foolish.

I should not have said what I said.

I handled that situation badly.

I set a poor example.

I am sorry.

When I have told my children these kinds of things, I have observed a counterintuitive result: saying them does not destroy my credibility. On the contrary, such admissions actually build and restore my credibility.

In this way, I also show my children that taking responsibility for a mistake does not mean life is over.

The gospel leaves no room for the idea that an error, bad habit, missed opportunity, or even sin must be the final word.

As the apostle John writes in his first epistle: “If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness.”

That promise permits truthful inheritance.

Because God’s grace is sufficient, we need not lie.

Because repentance is possible, we need not defend our failures.

Because forgiveness is available, confession need not annihilate us.

And because God is righteous, correction need not become vandalism.

CLEANING OUT THE HOUSE

A cultural inheritance resembles a house filled with the possessions of many generations.

Some of the objects belong in a museum.

Some are still-useful tools.

Some are mementos worth preserving.

Some are broken items that could be repaired and put back into service with a little effort.

Some should be given to someone who will value them more.

Some should be sold.

Some were always junk.

The difficulty is that years of neglect may leave all these things piled together until no one can walk through the door.

Servile traditionalism is like a hoarder who refuses to get rid of any of it.

Unwilling to admit that some of these things should never have been brought home in the first place, this error rebrands hoarding as faithfulness and leaves coming generations a house that is unlivable.

Arrogant revisionism, meanwhile, reaches for a match.

Burn the whole place down.

Destroy every reminder.

Assume nothing of value remains because sorting through the mess would require patience, discernment, and hard work.

Both responses fail.

Sometimes deconstruction is necessary for reconstruction. Sometimes we need to rent a dumpster. Sometimes we must remove what is broken, corrupt, dangerous, useless, or simply taking up space in the house to make room for better things.

Yet restoration and reform should be the end-goal of properly ordered deconstruction.

Even when some destruction is required, the purpose is to restore what can rightly be restored, preserve what deserves preservation, and remove whatever prevents the house from serving its proper purpose before God.

We may have to dig through plenty of garbage before discovering the heirloom, artifact, valuable tool, good habit, worthy example, or forgotten treasure buried beneath it.

But if we will neither look nor listen because it’s all the same to us, we will neither take out the trash nor find and benefit from the treasures.

LISTEN

Psalm 81 ends where faithful stewardship must begin:

“Oh, that my people would listen to me, that Israel would walk in my ways.”

God’s people lost their way because they would not listen to Him.

They preferred their own counsels.

So do we whenever we worship our inheritance as though our fathers were infallible.

So do we whenever we vandalize our inheritance as though we are infallible.

The past is not chiefly ours to flatter, despise, suppress, or reinvent.

It is part of God’s providential work in history.

Ultimately, our inheritance is not merely what came from our human ancestors. Like us, all of them were fallible, sinful, and foolish back to Adam.

Whatever good we possess, then, remains ours by the grace of God.

We are alive by His grace.

We can examine an honest account of the past by His grace.

We can confess sin where we find it by His grace.

We can repair what is reparable by His grace.

We can preserve what is worth preserving by His grace.

We can build something better in our own generation by His grace.

And in time we can hand down an honest inheritance without pretending that it was ever perfect.

So listen carefully to what has been handed down.

Build wisely what is yours to build.

Preserve gratefully what is worth preserving.

Confess plainly what is wrong.

Receive whatever your inheritance may be without worshiping it.

Correct it where appropriate without vandalizing it.

And give those who come after us something better than either blind preservation or fashionable destruction.