Why read old stuff?

 

There is a fantastic quote by C.S. Lewis in the introduction for my copy of On the Incarnation, by Athanasius where he says,

“There is a strange idea abroad that in every subject the ancient books should be read only by the professionals, and that the amateur should content himself with the modern books…. This mistaken preference for the modern books and this shyness of the old ones is nowhere more rampant than in theology.”

Our modern day and age, maybe more so than others seems to have a desire to throw out what is deemed as “old” and “antiquated”, and rather utilize what is new, sleek and up to date. This is likely true for every generation of humanity. It just seems the rate for us is so much quicker. We always want to tear down the fence without ever asking why it was there in the first place.

I think the same thing goes for books. I love books. I have many books and hope to have many more (my wife would disagree). It’s an attribute and love that I get from my dad, which I am so grateful for!

In our day and age of the Church we are looking for the way to reach out, modified and evolve how we are doing things to interact with a culture that is very different than 100 years ago. Because of this we are searching out for the answers of how to address this culture, and the people who we know are in need of a Savior. And rightly we are spending a lot of time searching out the answer, looking for new ways. But what if the answers are already there, thought out, tried and found working?

Be it the early church father or the reformers, there is so much examined and practiced wisdom found in the Christian tradition. So many of the questions that many are asking that leads to deconstruction have been grappled with by theologians within a few generations of the life of Christ. What I think has happened though, is we have traded the tried and ancient answers of the Church seeking out flashier answers. And is many cases, the trade off has been worse. Instead of deep and satisfying answers for the problem of pain and suffering, we hand out shallow platitudes of evangelical niceness that do more to hurt those in lament and sorrow than giving them deep and abiding hope in Christ and the resurrection.

The answer? Read old books! Things are really only as old and tired as you are. Dead religion in reality is only as dead or alive as you are. There can be life and Spirit-aliveness in a high liturgy service, and complete spiritual deadness in a Charismatic service. The question to be asked is how alive in Christ is that person? This holds true to the answers of the ancients. So many of the struggles we are grappling with have been examined and thought through my men & women smarter that I hundreds or thousands of years ago.

If you want a place to get started, you can go to ccel.org which has HUNDREDS if not thousands of books, sermons and documents that are free to access, Collections of the depth and breadth of Christian wisdom through the ages.

Read old books, live alive in the Spirit.

D.V.