More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Scripture is the ultimate grid by which we read every book. Scripture is perfect, sufficient, and eternal.
All other books, to some degree, are imperfect, deficient, and temporary. That means that when we pick books from the bookstore shelves, we read those imperfect books in light of the perfect Book, the deficient books in light of the sufficient Book, and the temporary books in light of the eternal Book.
Nineteenth-century preacher Charles Haddon Spurgeon makes this point well: All other books might be heaped together in one pile and burned with less loss to the world than would be occasioned by the obliteration of a single page of the sacred volume [Scripture]. At their best, all other books are but as gold leaf, requiring acres to find one ounce of the precious metal. But the Bible is solid gold. It contains blocks of gold, mines, and whole caverns of priceless treasure. In the mental wealth of the wisest men there are no jewels like the truths of revelation. The thoughts of men are
...more
It is possible to have a photographic memory and the capacity to remember everything you read with flawless recollection. But if the Spirit of God has not reached down and unwrapped the black veil from over from your heart, eternal truth will be pitch darkness to you. You may see words on a cold page of paper, but you will not feel the warm brightness of Christ’s glory. And you will not experience eternal life.2
Faith in Jesus brings with it a critically important benefit for the Christian reader—discernment. Discernment is the ability to do three things: the
ability to “test everything,” to “hold fast what is good,” and to “abstain from every form of evil” (1 Thess. 5:21–22). It is the skill of comparing what we hear or read with God’s Word to determine its authenticity according to God’s revealed truth. Discernment is critical for evaluating everything said inside a church building, and it is equally critical for evaluating life experienced outside the church context. We need discernment to hear sermons, to watch movies, and to read books. Discernment protects the church, and discernment protects our hearts.
The excellence of a believer is not that he has a large grasp of things, but that what he does grasp, which may be very little, he sees it in the light of the Spirit of God, in a saving, soul-transforming light; and this is that which gives us communion with God.4
Or as Martin Luther said, “To possess Scripture without knowing Christ, is to have no Scripture.”5
The ear (the receiver of God’s word) was plundered for the eye (the receiver of the image). The irony is striking. It didn’t take long for Israel to abandon God’s Word in favor of a culturally-shaped image.
At one level, this word/image tension is a battle for our hearts. God wants us to listen to him, to love him, to experience his presence, to interpret what we feel and what we see in light of his Word. He wants us to hope for a world unseen. He wants his truth and his Word to govern our hearts. Language is the basis of our relationship with God, and a deeply personal
Therefore how God is communicated is a matter of serious concern.
A touchstone is a piece of quartz that can be rubbed against what is claimed to be gold. The chemical reaction that follows will show whether the specimen of ore is real gold or fool’s gold.
Spiritual dangers are more venomous in a so-called “Christian” book.
Heresy is dangerous because it camouflages itself as the truth, it resembles the truth, it emerges from within the church as a mistreatment of Scripture.
We read more safely when our understanding of Scripture is sharp.
And many of these worldviews are evaluated in the book The Universe Next Door: A Basic Worldview Catalog by James Sire, a good resource if you want to contrast the most common worldviews in the world with a biblical worldview. A firm grasp of biblical worldview, learned directly from the study of Scripture, is essential for a Christian book reader because distortions to the biblical worldview can be found on every shelf in the bookstore. A biblical worldview, informed by the touchstone propositions of Scripture, is what distinguishes Christian readers from non-Christian readers. It equips us
...more
As book readers, we are mistaken when we categorically reject non-Christian books. And we are mistaken when we read non-Christian
literature uncritically.
Well-instructed Christians try not to offend the Holy Spirit by scorning truth in non-Christian authors over whom the Spirit has been brooding, but this does not mean that Christians can afford to read these authors uncritically. After all, a person’s faith, even in idols, shapes most of what a person thinks and writes, and the Christian faith is in competition with other faiths for human hearts and minds.30
The lesson I have learned is that a failure to cultivate the imagination leads to an unintended neglect of the imaginative literature of Scripture, and this in turn leads to some degree of spiritual atrophy. For Christians, the stories of Revelation are not optional reading. Nor are they child’s play. Imaginative literature—the kind of literature that invites us to see in our imaginations what we cannot see with our eyes—is an important part of the Christian’s literary diet. It challenges our idols. It challenges what is false and trivial in our lives.
So the Bible is rightly affirmed as the highest reading priority in the life of every Christian. We read the Bible to know the heart of our God, to understand better the work of our Savior, to find spiritual food for our souls, and to discover God’s wisdom for our lives. Scripture is delightful, too, sweet to the soul and more valuable than gold
“Let’s become known as a generation of women who
delight in, tremble before, receive counsel from, drink, devour, digest, muse upon, and absolutely cherish God and the truth that He’s revealed about Himself and about ourselves. Let’s not worry about whether we look dumb or too smart.”
If women commit to reading books of solid theology, their knowledge of Christ will grow, because “theology (of the right sort) is about knowing God and His Son intimately. Knowledge of Him (not just about Him) feeds, transforms, and vivifies the soul. This is the most delightful pursuit any woman could ever know.” R...
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
One book that helps me narrow my focus and identify my core priorities at work is Good to Great by Jim Collins. His point is simple: being good at many things prevents us from being great at one thing.
Now make your own list of reading priorities. First, look at the books you have read over the last twenty-four months that have benefitted your life. Create categories for those books. Second, include any category that you don’t currently read but would like to add, perhaps something mentioned in this chapter. By now you should have a list of two to five categories. Start small and be realistic. Third, begin making book selections informed by your reading priorities. Invest the time you need to define a purpose to why you want to read books. Once you have an answer to this question, you will
...more
Once the reading priorities are clear, then it’s time to ask specific questions. I encourage readers to write five to ten specific questions they would like the author to answer. By posing questions to a book before you begin, you establish an objective basis for why you are reading this book in the first place. As you read, those questions will make it easier to determine if the book is achieving this purpose.
Time to crack the cover for the first time and inhale that new book smell, or that old library smell—or, I guess, the warm flickering scentless pixels from your favorite e-reading device. Before I begin reading page 1 of a book I invest thirty to sixty minutes to ask broad structural questions. Adler writes, “Every book has a skeleton hidden between its covers.”1 I am trying to x-ray for that skeletal structure. First, I study the table of contents, noticing how chapters build on one another. Second, I scan the book and its section headings. Third, I read the chapter summaries and even the
...more
time spent slowly inspecting a book is a rewarding investment. And this step has protected me from wasting time reading mediocre books! Take time to x-ray for the skeleton, and take as much time as you need to do it well.
What I have learned from about twenty-years of serious reading is this: It is sentences that change my life, not books. What changes my life is some new glimpse of truth, some powerful challenge, some resolution to a long-standing dilemma, and these usually come concentrated in a sentence or two. I do not remember 99% of
what I read, but if the 1% of each book or article I do remember is a life-changing insight, then I don’t begrudge the 99%.3
When I read an important sentence or paragraph (the 1 percent), I mark it and then later return and copy it into a topical database on my computer. If you have a poor memory (like me) you will need a place to collect the sentences and paragraphs that you hope to retain for the future. How exactly you go about collecting these insights may look different. Some readers use a photocopier and folders. Others use a handwritten journal. I use a simple Microsoft Excel database. I collect quotes, which I type out verbatim, and organize by topical categories. I can tell you from personal experience, a
...more
Fyodor Dostoyevsky would alter how Christians evaluated novels. He would be remembered as one of the greatest novelists of all time, and according to theologian J. I. Packer, the greatest Christian storyteller who ever lived.2 And behind this high praise is the assumption that novels
Specifically, we misread fiction when we approach it with the hope that it will shape our worldview. In chapter 4, I argued that Scripture alone should inform our worldview. A Christian reader may view the world through biblical eyes, but this vision is not necessarily learned through fiction. Literature can help us appreciate the beauty of the biblical worldview, and it can provide examples of the biblical worldview at work, but it cannot shape the main components of a Christian worldview. It shouldn’t be asked to. This is the task of Scripture.
So what caused this fictional conversion? The defining book in my shift from opposition to embrace can be traced back to my reading of Leland Ryken’s book Realms of Gold: The Classics in Christian Perspective.14
The rewards of reading literature are significant. Literature helps to humanize us. It expands our range of experiences. It fosters awareness of ourselves and the world. It enlarges our compassion for people. It awakens our imaginations. It expresses our feelings and insights about God, nature, and life. It enlivens our sense of beauty. And it is a constructive form of entertainment.
“Is Google Making Us Stupid?” He wrote, Over the past few years I’ve had an uncomfortable sense that someone, or something, has been tinkering with my brain, remapping the neural circuitry, reprogramming the memory. My mind isn’t going—so far as I can tell—but it’s changing. I’m not thinking the way I used to think. I can feel it most strongly when I’m reading. Immersing myself in a book or a lengthy article used to be easy. My mind would get caught up in the narrative or the turns of the argument, and I’d spend hours strolling through long stretches of prose.
prose. That’s rarely the case anymore. Now my concentration often starts to drift after two or three pages. I get fidgety, lose the thread, begin looking for something else to do. I feel as if I’m always dragging my wayward brain back to the text. The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle. . . . And what the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation. My mind now expects to take in information the way the Net distributes it: in a swiftly moving stream of particles. Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along
...more
Traditionally, a reader selected one book and sat alone in a reading chair. When great ideas were encountered, the reader internalized those ideas and reflected on them. If the reader encountered points of disagreement, the reader also stopped to reflect on what made the point disagreeable. In
other words, traditional readers engaged with a book and engaged their thinking. This has changed with online social interaction. Now, when we come across an idea that we like, we are tempted to quickly react, to share the idea with friends in an e-mail, on Facebook, or on a blog. When we disagree, our initial response is to ask for the input of others. With online access to so many friends, the temptation is to react, not to ponder, and it’s a problem Kevin Kelly notices. In his article “Reading in a Whole New Way” he compares reading from a book page to reading from a screen.
Of all the people surrounded by data in the information age, Christians should be especially protective of the time required to slowly meditate (Proverbs 4).
“Most of us are cursed with a penchant toward passive reading. We read the way people watch TV. We don’t ask questions as we read. We don’t ask: Why does this sentence follow that sentence? How does
this paragraph relate to that one three pages earlier? We don’t ferret out the order of thought or ponder the meaning of terms.”3 Not asking such questions is a matter of failing to read with an active mind.
When you read a passage of Scripture, and have any enjoyment therein, go to your sick neighbor and tell them what God has said to you. If you meet an ignorant one when you know somewhat of the things of God, tell them to him. Nations are enriched by the interchanges of commerce, and so are Christians. We each have something that another has not, and he has something that we need. Let us trade together.1
Wow. I've never considered scripture as a form of commmerce.
Reading books together with other Christian
friends provides us with a place for collective discernment, and a place for spiritual illumination. And those are sweet moments!
We fail to see God’s plan for books if we view reading as nothing more than a discipline done in isolation and for nothing more than personal edification. So what can be done?
While reading is mostly a solitary task—and a very important one—comprehension is a community project. I am convinced that we forget so much of what we read not because we are poor readers, rather, I
believe we forget so much of what we read because we are selfish readers. And we all suffer because of it.
With all the new books being published—and all the old books still available—we must be careful to avoid over studying. For many of you, this will not be a problem. The risk is for those who want to read every book that looks interesting. If this is you, you will run the risk of book fatigue. You will exhaust yourself, Solomon says. For one’s life does not consist in the abundance of books.
