New habits, old texts
As almost everyone is saying, this time of lockdown is the perfect time to reflect and reset - to break old bad habits and form new good ones. Combined with the sabbatical I'm currently enjoying, the pressure's on - I frankly ought to be an essentially perfect human being by July. I'm sorry to disappoint you in advance.
But I have been able to make progress in moving away from some of the less healthy practices that I've picked up over the past few years. The manic checking of email every 20 minutes is replaced by once a day, maybe, at most; the fruitless checking of the mobile phone every 20 seconds is ameliorated by keeping it physically far away from me; the frantic consumption of bitesize media is eschewed in favour of reading books, slowly, and writing about them here. I'm sure Cal Newport would be proud of me, and probably even prouder if I'd actually read one of his books.
It has only been two weeks, mind, it might all go to pot soon.
But there's one bad habit I've noticed in my reading which I'm ashamed to confess and determined to break. It's the skimming of Bible passages in Christian books.
The new and the true
Perhaps I'm not the only one who does this. One of the wonderful things about the recent proliferation of Christian publishing is that there are hundreds of books released every year which are thoroughly grounded in the Scriptures, and which prove their conclusions by careful exegesis and by quoting extensively from the Bible. And yet as I'm reading through a chapter which includes a page or two of Bible passages, my eyes have a tendency to glaze over and lightly skim through the quotations until I reach the next section.
Now, I don't tend to do this if I'm not convinced by the argument of the book. If the author has put forward an idea that I think is a bit shaky, and adduced some Scriptural texts in support of it, then I'll be a noble Berean (Acts 17:11) and carefully check it's not just spurious prooftexting. (I know there's been some recent support for the practice of prooftexting - roughly defined as getting the right doctrine from the wrong texts - but I'm not convinced. I might pen a longer response to this at some point, but for now, just see Numbers 4:15.)
Rather, I tend to skim if I'm already convinced of the author's argument and I already know roughly what the passages they quote say. I've studied and taught the Scriptures for a number of years, and read quite broadly, and so I usually feel safe in taking this shortcut.
But why do I take this shortcut? My concern is that part of me is more interested in the new than in the true. Faced with reading something I already know and already believe, I'll impatiently skip past it in my hunger to get to something novel and exciting. One species of the fallacy this betrays is that newer content necessarily means truer content, or at least content more relevant to me, and that in some sense the new obviates or nullifies the old. Chesterton skewered this nonsense expertly:
An imbecile habit has arisen in modern controversy of saying that such and such a creed can be held in one age but cannot be held in another. Some dogma, we are told, was credible in the twelfth century, but is not credible in the twentieth. You might as well say that a certain philosophy can be believed on Mondays, but cannot be believed on Tuesdays. You might as well say of a view of the cosmos that it was suitable to half-past three, but not suitable to half-past four. What a man can believe depends upon his philosophy, not upon the clock or the century.
G. K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy
Prioritising the new
But there is always a temptation, even if you continue to believe the old revelation, to prioritise the new. The danger is that the new will always seem more relevant, and will gradually come to replace the old in your thinking, even if formally you claim to hold on to both. This was the Reformers' critique of the Roman Catholic Church in the 16th Century - not, as many assume, that it was clinging on to the old traditions and needed updating, but that is was producing too many innovations and needed to return to the old sources (see this helpful article by Scott Manetsch). And it continues to be an issue today in churches which prioritise new revelations or innovative theology, even as there is a formal recognition of the Bible as the final authority for all matters of faith and practice.
But I can't assume, simply because I'm a member and pastor of an evangelical church which puts a high priority on the word and on careful exegesis, that I'm immune to this temptation. I can't even assume that I avoid this pitfall by reading old books as well as new ones. This is a very helpful practice, famously recommended by C. S. Lewis:
None of us can fully escape this blindness [to our own culture's faults], but we shall certainly increase it, and weaken our guard against it, if we read only modern books. Where they are true they will give us truths which we half knew already. Where they are false they will aggravate the error with which we are already dangerously ill. 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.
C. S. Lewis, in his introduction to Athanasius, On the Incarnation
Of course, for me the problem is that my motivation in reading old books is that I get to read new old books - that is, new to me (see my earlier post about the desire for new toys). And perhaps even to have the pleasure of knowing that I have read it, rather than the joy of reading it. As Lloyd Evans perceptively noted concerning art, sometimes that's the only reason we force ourselves to consume something we really don't enjoy:
It’s a question of consuming art in the wrong tense, as one does with chocolate and wheatgerm. One eats chocolate in the present tense, to eat chocolate. One eats wheatgerm in the future-perfect tense, to have eaten wheatgerm.
Lloyd Evans, Art in the Wrong Tense, The Spectator 26th May 2018
Like nails firmly fixed
But back to my bad habit. I'm certainly not going to stop reading books, either new or old; especially if they're books that help me read the Book, and give me new insights into the ever-fresh, Spirit-breathed, living and active word of God. But I need to remember that my goal is not to be someone who is constantly pulled hither and yon by the latest fashion - Scripture speaks clearly enough about the dangers of that (Ephesians 4:14). Nor is it to be well-read - both up-to-speed on the latest ideas and bedded down in the teaching of mature Christians from ages past, fine though those two ambitions are. No, my goal must be to become, as John Wesley wanted to be, homo unius libri - a man of one book. To be so shaped by Scripture that every subsequent book I read is done so carefully - that is, filtered through the light of Scripture - and eagerly - that is, for insights or ideas that could drive me back to Scripture to read it more accurately or profitably.
And so here's a new habit for me to form during sabbatica-lockdown. To ensure that when I read a Christian book, the parts I slow down on, the parts pay the most attention to, are the words of Scripture itself. They are, after all, the only parts that are guaranteed to be true, inspired, Spirit-breathed, and profitable (2 Tim 3:16), in any age or time we read them. In fact, they are the only words we can read that are guaranteed not to be a waste of our time and energy. As the Teacher says:
The words of the wise are like goads, and like nails firmly fixed are the collected sayings; they are given by one Shepherd. My son, beware of anything beyond these. Of making many books there is no end, and much study is a weariness of the flesh.
Ecclesiastes 12:11-12