One of the many things I’ve learned over the years as a homeschooling mom is that there is a great deal of wisdom in books. There’s also a great deal of foolishness, and vice masquerading as virtue. It takes discernment to know the difference; if we want our children to be discerning people, it’s our responsibility to teach them how.
Two Basic Categories
As we begin our discussion on how Christians should read books, the first thing we need to do is separate books into two main categories. Tony Reinke, author of Lit! A Christian Guide to Reading Books (available in our church library), titles these two categories Eternal and Temporary. The first category, Eternal, only has one book in it, and that’s the Bible. The Bible is inspired, inerrant, authoritative, sufficient, and wholly consistent in its worldview. All other books fall into the second category, Temporary. No matter how trusted the author or how careful they are to adhere to truth, every human author is fallen and fallible. Whenever we read the Bible, we know that we’re reading Truth and there is no error in it, even though there are parts we don’t understand. Whenever we read anything other than the Bible, we must exercise thoughtful caution and hold it up against Scripture to measure its truthfulness. Reinke says, “we read the imperfect in light of the perfect, the deficient in light of the sufficient, and the groveling in light of the transcendent.” It’s important, first and foremost, to understand these two basic categories.
Whose Worldview?
The other important factor to note is that reading Scripture should be our first priority. It’s Scripture that illuminates our understanding of everything else. We cannot rightly interpret the world we live in without a thorough understanding of the Creator, His creation, the Fall and sin’s corruption of the world, Christ’s redemption of God’s chosen, the battle that rages until Christ returns, and sin’s ultimate defeat. What we know about these truths forms our worldview. The more time we spend studying Scripture, and the more time we spend teaching our children to do the same, the clearer our worldview should be. Basically, our worldview is framed by how we answer the following questions:
- Who is God?
- Who is Man?
- What is Man’s problem?
- What is the solution to Man’s problem?
As believers, we might answer the questions as follows:
- God is the Creator of everyone and everything.
- Man is created by God and subject to Him, but has rebelled against God.
- Man’s problem is sin and his inability to overcome it, and his separation from God.
- The solution to Man’s problem is Jesus Christ’s perfect life, death, and resurrection to cover our sins and reconcile us to God.
Your answers would probably be worded differently, but the gist should be about the same. Think, now, how an atheist would answer those questions, or a Muslim, or a Buddhist, or anyone who rejects the Word of God and instead worships anything else.
An author’s worldview will come through and be evident in anything that they write, and their goal is to get us – the reader – to buy in to their worldview. For this reason, we must have a thorough, first-hand knowledge of Scripture, and our biblical convictions must be firmly settled in our hearts and minds. This, and only this, will help us to be discerning in what we read, and able to separate what is true and right from what is worthless.
Does this mean that Christians should never read books by non-Christian authors? Certainly not! We’ll sort this out in a later post, but for now I’ll quote Tony Reinke again, who says, “A biblical worldview informed by Scripture equips us to see and treasure the truth, goodness, and beauty in both Christian and non-Christian books.”
Growing in Wisdom
Our faith in Christ is proven by our obedience to His Word. The Spirit is the seal of our salvation, and helps us to understand God’s Word. When we read Scripture and submit to its authority, we gain wisdom. The more time we spend in God’s Word, the more wisdom we gain. Tony Reinke points out that . . .
Faith in Christ brings discernment, which is the ability to do three things (1 Thessalonians 5:21-22):
- Test everything
- Hold fast to what is good
- Abstain from every form of evil
Therefore, Reinke argues, discernment (a form of godly wisdom) is the skill of comparing what we hear or read with God’s Word to determine its authority according to God’s revealed Truth. The converse is obvious – we can’t determine the truth of what we hear or read if we don’t know what God’s Word says. God’s Word is the standard by which we measure everything: without it, we have no ability to measure anything. It’s imperative that we make the study of God’s Word the priority above all else, so that we’re equipped to rightly interpret the world around us. When reading anything other than Scripture, no matter how reliable the author or the source, we need to remember that we’re reading the words of fallible people who are prone to error, insufficiency, and inconsistency. This is why we cannot rely on the books others write about God as a substitute for reading Scripture; second-hand information about God is insufficient for our faith in Christ and prone to error and heresy.
As we train up our children to prepare for battle in the same war we are already fighting, remember that our marching orders come straight from the Word of God. There is no substitute. Scripture illuminates our understanding of all other literature, and so our priority must always be placed here first and foremost.
