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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.
Literature gives a worldview arms, legs, ears, hands, and mouths. Novels activate a particular worldview.
“For no heresy has ever sprung from pagan belief, from Aristotle, and from the books of other heathen,” wrote Martin Luther. “No, these necessarily emerge from the church.”
“heresy and false doctrine are taken and adduced from no other source than Scripture.”
The Universe Next Door: A Basic Worldview Catalog by James Sire,
Sinners do suppress God’s truth in their behavior (Rom. 1:18–32). But it is impossible for sinners to suppress all the truth all the time.31
The Best of Wodehouse.
Cormac McCarthy’s novel The Road.
A Voice in the Wind by Francine Rivers,
Killer Angels by Michael Shaara,
The Children of Men
In Realms of Gold, Ryken guided me through the classics of literature: The Odyssey by Homer; Canterbury Tales by Chaucer; Macbeth by Shakespeare; Paradise Lost by Milton; The Scarlet Letter by Hawthorne; Great Expectations by Dickens; The Death of Ivan Illych by Tolstoy; and The Stranger by Camus.
When you come across a provoking or perplexing portion of a book, what are you more likely to do: react or think? When you are tempted to react, stop, and simply think and meditate about what you are reading.
Puritan Thomas Brooks (1608–1680)
It is not he that reads most, but he that meditates most, that will prove the choicest, sweetest, wisest, and strongest Christian.10
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.
