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Commit yourself to the serious reading of books, and your life will be enlightened.
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).
As Christians, we read all of our books illuminated by God and in communion with him. Gleaning facts and information is not the highest purpose of reading. Reading can be ultimately a means to eternally benefit our soul. And this benefit does not hinge upon how smart we are, upon how many books we read each year, or upon how much information we retain. We tap into the eternal value of literature when we read in the presence of God, unveiled to the glory of our Savior.
Entertainment is passive and easy; books require an active mind and diligence. Books typically get ignored.
Os Guinness: “The world of sight, the world of the eye, cannot take us beyond what is shown. Because sight can only go so far, it takes words and thought to give the real truth and meaning behind what is seen.”
Art may be powerless to save sinners, but it is a powerful tool to remind us of truth and to illustrate truth.
Image worship is the sinner’s tendency. We are prone to revere images that are beautiful, and then to misuse them. We can make idols out of anything visual: crucifixes, icons of the saints, images of Mary, images of Jesus, the profile of a potato chip, the outline created by the water stain on a wall, etc. The danger is rooted in our hearts. Our tendency is to worship bronze and to ignore the God who heals the dying.
the difficult work required to benefit from books is at odds with the immediate appeal of images.
Christian poet T. S. Eliot wrote, “So long as we are conscious of the gulf fixed between ourselves and the greater part of contemporary literature, we are more or less protected from being harmed by it, and are in a position to extract from it what good it has to offer us.”
For a young man to develop into a warrior, he first must learn the tactics of battle and develop the muscles and instincts of a warrior. So, too, our children—and those who are children in the faith—need time to grow the deep roots of a biblical worldview before being called to exercise that worldview against the force of culture displayed in non-Christian books.
We approach all books with a discerning mind and a guarded heart. If the author intends to glorify sin and unbelief, we should not read the book, unless our goal is criticism.
This skill to observe and to subdue the earth is a gift from the Creator given to all mankind (Gen. 1:26–31). We should study these books with care, wrote Calvin. “If the Lord has willed that we be helped in physics, dialectic, mathematics, and other like disciplines, by the work and ministry of the ungodly, let us use this assistance. For if we neglect God’s gift freely offered in these arts, we ought to suffer just punishment for our sloths.”
God is reflected in all truth, goodness, and beauty of this world. It is reasonable to think that God delights in all those reflections of himself without necessarily approving of the spiritual condition of the sinner. Likewise, Christian readers can enjoy the beauty in the literature of non-Christian authors because that literature images the beauty of God, regardless of the personal moral and spiritual condition of the author.
As Basil would say in his lecture to young men on the proper use of Greek poetry, “The soul must be guarded with great care, lest through our love for letters [reading] it receive some contamination unawares, as men drink in poison with honey.”
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.
If we neglect Scripture in order to read only other books, we not only cut ourselves from the divine umbilical cord that feeds our souls, we also cut ourselves from the truth that makes it possible for us to benefit from the truth, goodness, and beauty in the books that we read.
“Almost all men are infected with the disease of desiring to obtain useless knowledge,” Calvin writes. “It is of great importance that we should be told what is necessary for us to know, and what the Lord desires us to contemplate, above and below, on the right hand and on the left, before and behind. The love of Christ is held out to us as the subject which ought to occupy our daily and nightly meditations, and in which we ought to be wholly plunged.”
C. S. Lewis wrote, “Now there is a clear sense in which all reading whatever is an escape. It involves a temporary transference of the mind from our actual surroundings to things merely imagined or conceived. This happens when we read our Bible or history books, and no less when we read fiction. All such escape is from the same thing; immediate, concrete actuality. The important question is what we escape to.”
“Reading for information only is, quite frankly, a prostitution of the art of reading.”
Reading is a difficult pleasure because it requires discipline, diligence, and focus. But like in any pleasure, it is a pleasure that can be done for God’s glory.
“You first of all allowed the patient to read a book he really enjoyed, because he enjoyed it and not in order to make clever remarks about it to his new friends.”
In all honesty, it has taken me many years to simply delight myself in beautiful books. Now they provide me with relaxation, pleasure, and a delightful weapon to foil the devil.
Often our frustration with slow reading stems from a wrong attitude—of viewing books as a task to be accomplished, not as a difficult pleasure to be enjoyed.
Francis Bacon famously wrote, “Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested; that is, some books are to be read only in parts; others to be read, but not curiously; and some few to be read wholly, and with diligence and attention.”
“The fact is, people don’t know what they are expected to do with a novel, believing, as so many do, that art must be utilitarian, that it must do something, rather than be something.”
The compulsive search for diversion is often an attempt to escape the wretchedness of life. We have great difficulty being quiet in our rooms, when the television or computer screen offers a riot of possible stimulation. Postmodern people are perpetually restless; they frequently seek solace in diversion instead of satisfaction in truth. As Pascal said, “Our nature consists in movement; absolute rest is death.” The postmodern condition is one of oversaturation and over-stimulation, and this caters to our propensity to divert ourselves from pursuing higher realities.
Acting upon what we’ve just read, rather than stopping to meditate and think, is an impulse that we bring to reading books.
In order to feel deeply about spiritual truths we must think deeply. And to think deeply we must read deeply. And to read deeply we must read attentively, not hastily. If we discipline ourselves to read attentively and to think deeply about our reading, we will position our souls to delight. But our souls cannot delight in what our minds merely skim.
The skill and concentration needed to read books is worth fighting for.
Readers who weary themselves by excessively reading books get an “F” from Professor Solomon in Reading 101. Why? Book-induced exhaustion reveals a bigger failure, a negligence of wisdom.1 A wide gap separates a reader who simply consumes books from a reader who diligently seeks wisdom. Book consumers view books as “things to get read.” Wisdom seekers view books as fuel for slow and deliberate meditation.
As Christians we cannot make literature our religion. We do not value literature for itself. We do not worship classics. We treasure values and priorities that far exceed the sum worth of the greatest library. Our end is not literature, no matter how true, good, and beautiful it is. Our end is God, the One from whom all truth, goodness, and beauty originates and finds its perfection.
We are willing to sacrifice the time that we could use to read literature in order to serve our neighbors, pray for one another, fellowship with believers, and serve in our churches. We may not study literature as deeply as the world because we treasure souls seriously.
Books are great tools, but they are disappointing gods. And once books become idols, those idols will leave us deeply unsatisfied. So I frequently I ask myself: Am I drawn to new books simply because I am drawn to new things? Or am I drawn to new books because I want to experience the truth, goodness, and beauty of the Giver?
In this place we are reminded of the Christian book reader’s motto: “In your light do we see light” (Ps. 36:9). We are humbled, but we are encouraged. We grab a new book and we press on, not as slaves bound to a chore, but as liberated sinners who read to delight in the gifts of our God. We press on, reading and thanking God for the light we do see in books, and for his illuminating grace that lights our way.
