Beware of "Presentism"

Timothy George, in "First Things" magazine, March 2011 makes some interesting comments on our tendency toward "presentism".

C.S. Lewis noted: 'We need intimate knowledge of the past.  Not that the past has any magic about it, but because we cannot study the future, and yet need something to set against the present.' For the present can become imperial, seducing us into imagining that the assumptions that rein today have always defined what it means to be reasonable, sensible, and mainstream.  Against the tendency toward presentism, Lewis observed that 'a man who has lived in many places is not likely to be deceived by the local errors of his native village; The scholar has lived in many times and is therefore in some degree immune from the great cataract of nonsense that pours from the press and the microphone of his own age.'

Citation:
George, Timothy. "Reading the Bible with the Reformers" in First Things Magazine: March 2011. Page 28.