Even if we don’t make formal New Year’s resolutions, this time of year can have us brainstorming ways to increase our physical fitness and nutrition. For some, those goals include what we exercise and feed our minds on too, in the form of books. We might set a certain number to aim for or choose specific genres to include. There are reading challenges to participate in, book clubs to join, podcasts to read along with, book bingo cards to download.
If you are planning and plotting your reading journey for 2025, can I encourage you to look behind as well as ahead?
In one of my classes last fall, we students were asked for feedback on one of the required readings, a slim volume on pastoral care. One of my classmates said she had to admit she wasn’t quite sure what to think when she noticed it was published in 2005. But when she read it, she had been pleasantly surprised.
Meanwhile, 2005 felt like just a few years ago to me. What was “old” to her sounded so modern to me. I thought twice about disclosing that one of the best books ever written on the topic of pastoral care, in my opinion, was written in the year 590. Seriously, Gregory the Great’s Book of Pastoral Rule should be required reading for every seminary student!
Reading books that define terms the way we do, that are written in the style of our time, can certainly feel more comfortable. And it can be tempting to assume we’ll learn the most from the cutting edge knowledge of our own day. But there is a danger lurking on that edge.
As C. S. Lewis reminds us:
Every age has its own outlook. It is specially good at seeing certain truths and specially liable to make certain mistakes…None of us can fully escape this blindness, but we shall certainly increase it, and weaken our guard against it, if we read only modern books...The only palliative is to keep the clean sea breeze of the centuries blowing through our minds, and this can be done only by reading old books. Not, of course, that there is anything magic about the past. People were no cleverer then than they are now; they made as many mistakes as we. But not the same mistakes.1
If you gravitate toward new releases and the thought of picking up an old book intimidates or bores you, can I challenge you to try one (or a few) this year? You might be surprised.
Being “old” doesn’t make something “good.” So, do your research. Be choosy. Maybe pick a slim volume to start. And then persevere. Make friends with a mind from the past. You may need patience when their vocabulary is stretching, their analogies enigmatic, and their worldview peculiar to you. But I guarantee, you will find it rich and rewarding.
This is what the Lord says: Stand at the crossroads and look; ask for the ancient paths, ask where the good way is, and walk in it, and you will find rest for your souls…(Jeremiah 6:16 NIV)
- Lewis, C. S. (1951). Introduction. In Athanasius, The Incarnation of the Word of God. The MacMillan Company.
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