In his classic collection of essays, God in the Dock, C.S. Lewis emphasized the importance of reading old books. He compared reading only new or recent books to joining a conversation at 11:00 pm that actually started at 8:00 pm. I do not know about you, but I have embarrassed myself numerous times walking up to a conversation “assuming” I knew what was being discussed.
I fear too often pastors and ministers of the gospel repeat this error too unnecessarily by reading the latest books and downloading mp3’s of the cutting-edge pastors without grounding their ministerial theology in lessons learned throughout history. Certainly, the adage is true, “Preach with the Bible in one hand and a newspaper (or blog, or website) in the other.” I guess as much as anyone else I enjoy the latest books by cutting-edge authors, keeping up with the blogs, and staying in touch with current trends. But, I should not be found guilty of the “chronological snobbery” Lewis warned against.
Dr. Bruce Ashford at Between the Times has written a helpful series of blog posts on “Augustine for the 21st Century.” I would encourage you to read each entry. He says in his first post,
We rarely read old books. We tend to limit ourselves by era, tribe, and category-we read books written in our day, by people just like us, and that can be placed in one or two limited genres. But this sort of epistolary reductionism is to our detriment-the older books are precisely the ones that will help us to escape the limitations of our current era, learn from those who are not a part of our local tribe, and transcend the categories to which we have become accustomed.
I concur. Perhaps if we commit to reading Augustine, Aquinas, Calvin, Wesley, Edwards, and even Lewis we can at the very least give ourselves a broader perspective on theology, the ministry, and current events.
