As you are looking ahead to all that this new year may hold for you, I’d like to issue a simple challenge. Read an old Christian book this year. I suppose I should challenge you to read two old Christian books this year. Certainly, your soul would benefit from regular encounters with God’s Word – a two- to four-thousand-year-old book. But in addition to a regular diet of Scripture, read an old Christian book this year.
We live in a culture that highly values novelty. Whether it’s cars, appliances, homes, phones, or even apps on our phones the message tends to be the same: newer is generally better. I must confess that until several years ago, I believed this message about books. Why would I read a book on Christian living or thought from 80, 200, or 1500 years ago when there is a staggering amount of them published just in the last decade? Why indeed.
During this last Advent season, I read an old book that I read almost every Advent season: On the Incarnation by Athanasius. This book was written in the mid to late 300’s AD. It was in the preface to this book that I first encountered the challenge and wisdom of reading old books. In his preface to the modern translation of the book, CS Lewis writes how old books may combat the blind spots of our milieu, “The only palliative is to keep the clean sea breeze of the centuries blowing through our minds, and this can be done only by reading old books. Not, of course, that there is any magic about the past. People were no cleverer than they are now; they made as many mistakes as we. But not the same mistakes. They will not flatter us in the errors we are already committing; and their own errors, being now open and palpable, will not endanger us. Two heads are better than one, not because either is infallible, but because they are unlikely to go wrong in the same direction” (emphasis added).
Lewis’ first sentence has beautifully captured my own experience of reading old Christian books: a clean sea breeze. There is nothing new under the sun. So old books address very similar issues to the ones that we face today. The difference is the old books address different manifestations of those issues. They are oblivious to things like Covid 19; Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce; the 2016 and 2020 elections; and things like that. The old books do not seek to win our culture over to a particular stance on any of those issues. They are not concerned with telling us how to think about any particular issue in our time. This truly is a clean sea breeze. I can pick up CS Lewis’s The Four Loves and know that there is no hidden agenda that is trying to be communicated to me. How refreshing it is to hear somebody speak into our modern issues (albeit indirectly) without a horse in the race. The issues that are addressed are familiar (we all painfully know the realities of living in a broken world) yet foreign to me. Lewis does not tell me how to love God and my neighbor faithfully as a Christian in America in 2024. Yet his work very well may be a fount of wisdom that I can, by the power of the Holy Spirit, apply to my unique cultural context. He’s not addressing our specific manifestations of sin and brokenness – he’s addressing his own culture. So I glean the general wisdom of a great thinker like Lewis without feeling compelled to agree with him on every cultural issue – we’re not facing the same cultural issues!
Lewis articulates more beautifully and fully why reading old Christian books is valuable in his preface to On the Incarnation. Why don’t you do yourself a favor and get a two-for-one? Buy the book and you’ll get yourself an old book to read, and a brief essay on why the very book you are reading is worth it.
In closing let me offer one word of caution and a few more recommendations. By means of caution, do not idealize the world of the past. Sin is sin. We view the world of the past far more dispassionately and (by nature of our temporal vantage point) with greater clarity than those who lived in it. This oftentimes leads us to pine for the “good ol’ days” that never existed. Since we left Eden, the world has been corrupted by sin. Glean wisdom from writers of the past, but do not believe the lie that their world was any better than ours is.
Finally, if you are crazy enough to take the challenge and read an old book let me give you three suggestions[JF1] :
On the Incarnation by Athanasius (this copy has the preface written by Lewis, referenced in this blog).
https://shorturl.at/eotFJ
Orthodoxy by GK Chesterton (a literary influence of CS Lewis!)
The Confessions of Saint Augustine (by far the longest and hardest of the three – but perhaps the most valuable).
Experience the clean ocean breeze of reading an old Christian book this year.
Pastor Jason Foreman
Jason Foreman grew up in the Chicagoland area and moved to Minnesota in the fall of 2022 to be the Adult Ministry Pastor at Friendship Church. He received his Master of Divinity from Trinity Evangelical Divinity School in 2017. Jason enjoys spending time outside with his wife, Jessica, and their two boys. He also has a deep love for studying God’s Word and sharing God’s Word with others.