Christians are comfortable with the classics. But reading contemporary literature can be a search for truth too.
In his introduction to Athanasius’ On the Incarnation, C. S. Lewis famously makes the case that believers should read “old books” just as often as new ones. “If you join at eleven o’clock a conversation which began at eight you will often not see the real bearing of what is said,” he writes. While old books can help us make better sense of our present realities by offering contrasting perspectives of the past, a new book is “still on its trial,” he says, yet to be “tested against the great body of Christian thought down the ages.”
Following Lewis, much has been written on how—and why—Christians should read classic literary fiction. Jessica Hooten Wilson (Reading for the Love of God), Leland Ryken (A Christian Guide to the Classics), and Karen Swallow Prior (On Reading Well) advocate for reading the great books, those by the likes of Fyodor Dostoevsky, Jane Austen, and Charles Dickens, for edification that is spiritual as much as intellectual.
“Reading,” Wilson says, “must be a daily spiritual practice for the Christian”—and not only the reading of Scripture. Unlike our often shallower engagement with screens, reading “asks something” of us, Wilson explains. It “cultivates” our imagination and “increases [our] vision of the world.”
Reading the classics is one way we can thus benefit from books. But is there also an advantage to reading new books? What spiritual value can we gain from the latest Pulitzer or Booker Prize winner or the works of the year’s Nobel laureate?
Coming in too late to a conversation is one way to miss out. But so also is choosing to hear …