Friday, April 03, 2009
What To Read
Fred Sanders posted at Middlebrow on a book by Jonathon Edwards:
I enable ("lead" would be far too strong a word) a group of very recent or impending college grads. The variety of institutions these young people have attended is astounding - from the very liberal and secular to the very conservative and religious. Their reading lists are also quite divergent and they often characterize the same author in quite different ways. It truly makes me wonder if they have all really read the authors they discuss. In some cases it is the selected works thing, in others they have been told what the guy wrote instead of actually reading it, and in others what they read has just been so heavily filtered through some preconceived issue as to not rise to the level of "reading" at all.
The question is - what are you reading? Are you reading diversely and thoroughly? Are you reading for what the author had to say, or are you reading to discover ammunition? Are you even reading?
Have you ever read closely the New Testament and how chock full it is of literary reference of what came before? In a largely illiterate society, Jesus and the apostles were still able to rely on people to be basically literate about what had come before.
Can we say the same thing about today? I don't think so.
So what should we do about it?
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Every believer interested in making discerning judgments about spiritual experiences ought to read Jonathan Edwards’ Religious Affections. It is a balanced, careful, and mature work by the man known as America’s greatest theologian. Edwards had defended the Great Awakening against its detractors, and then he had watched abuses and weirdness spread and had warned enthusiasts about the dangers of delusion. In The Religious Affections, having watched both extremes, Edwards stakes out a position of integrity from which he can provoke the frozen chosen and reject the flaming crazies.As I read those introductory words I was struck by my literary education - one in which I was presented with Sinners In The Hands Of An Angry God as the "definitive" Edwards writing - painting him as a "flaming crazy."
I enable ("lead" would be far too strong a word) a group of very recent or impending college grads. The variety of institutions these young people have attended is astounding - from the very liberal and secular to the very conservative and religious. Their reading lists are also quite divergent and they often characterize the same author in quite different ways. It truly makes me wonder if they have all really read the authors they discuss. In some cases it is the selected works thing, in others they have been told what the guy wrote instead of actually reading it, and in others what they read has just been so heavily filtered through some preconceived issue as to not rise to the level of "reading" at all.
The question is - what are you reading? Are you reading diversely and thoroughly? Are you reading for what the author had to say, or are you reading to discover ammunition? Are you even reading?
Have you ever read closely the New Testament and how chock full it is of literary reference of what came before? In a largely illiterate society, Jesus and the apostles were still able to rely on people to be basically literate about what had come before.
Can we say the same thing about today? I don't think so.
So what should we do about it?
Technorati Tags:literature, reading, that basics
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