As many of us at Area 10 have been reading the Christian classic novel "In His Steps" by Charles Sheldon, I've been struck by the value of reading old books. This book was written in 1896, and my initial concern was that it would feel dated. And by dated, I mean out of touch. But so far, the book has proven to be quite in touch with our modern world.
The main characters spend a year asking themselves, "What would Jesus do?" before making any decision. This book is the true origin of the WWJD fad that swept evangelical youth groups a hundred years later. The characters start making business and personal choices using this framework of trying to do what Jesus would have done if he were in their shoes. While some of their decisions strike me as odd and even unrelatable, mostly due to the difference in their culture to mine, I see in their decision-making some principles I can apply to my life that will make me a better follower of Jesus.
Isn't doing what Jesus would do if he were in your shoes the essence of what it means to be his disciple? I appreciate that this book puts that idea front and center and attempts to look at what it looks like when people try to do this in their regular lives. I was concerned early on that the book would focus too much on the minister of the First Church and his attempts to follow Jesus, making it seem unrelatable to non-clergy. But that has not been the case. The singer, the newspaper editor, and a cast of others are all wrestling with how to take their faith seriously.
But here's the challenge with a book like that: it's dated. Some of the language seems odd to us. While it is a straightforward read (I was worried it would read more like Dickens or Tolstoy), the language and customs do take a little work to get used to. But despite the work required on the reader (or maybe precisely because of it), I suggest a few reasons why we need to read old books like this:
#1) We are not the first Christians to try to follow Jesus, so we should learn from those who have gone before us. The book of Hebrews gives a beautiful image of us surrounded by a great cloud of witnesses. I've often thought of that image as a crowd at an arena. We are still in the arena trying to fight the fight and carry our cross daily. Those who have gone before are in the stands cheering us on because they know how hard the fight is. But that great cloud of witnesses is not just people like Paul, Mary, James, and Phoebe. That cloud includes the folks from the First Church of Raymond in Charles Sheldon's book. They have tried to follow Jesus in their day, and we should learn from their experience to broaden our own.
#2) One of the best ways to understand our present moment is to read about the past. I'm struck by how many things these days pop up that are labeled as unprecedented: COVID-19, AI technology, and crypto. If you believe the social media feeds, there has never been anything like this. Except… Most things labeled as unprecedented are disappointingly precedented. Take COVID-19, for example. Did we forget in 2020 about the Spanish Flu? Did we forget about all the arguments people made back then for masks and vaccines? Has the world completely forgotten what happened? Yes, we had. And this is what happens when you don't read things from the past. You become a slave to the tyranny of the now. Whatever is hot right now, in this moment, gets our attention and drives our anxiety.
This is the way we have structured society in the West. Everything is about "right now.' We hashtag #yolo and #fomo and act as if the only things worth discussing are everyone's hot take at the moment. But history tells us that, if you look back, much of what we discussed at the moment was wrong and even unwise. Go back and look at all the things we did in the last 100 years where we were following the best science of philosophy of the day. I find myself wondering what incredibly ridiculous things are we doing and believing right now that future generations will look back on us and call us incredibly naive and stupid. We aren't using leeches to help people cure diseases, but will something like chemotherapy be considered barbaric in 50 years?
The only way out of the tyranny of the now is to look at the past. You have the past, the present, and the future. The future is unknowable. If you disagree, go back and look at your goals for the year starting January 2020 (Ha!). When the present is what we are trying to evaluate, it's tough to assess with only the present in mind. We end up being blown about by whichever pundit produces the most wind.
What we have available to us then is the past. That's how we can evaluate the present. We can ask questions like "Has anyone tried this before? How did that work out." Teacher and writer Joshua Gibbs explains why he makes his students read old books:
"But if you want to say something about race, gender, or bioengineering that will last, you're going to have to appeal to sources that have already lasted. If you want to blaze a new trail of thought on gender or race, your children will do the same—and condemn you as a bigot while they do. In the end, you have to know many interesting things that have nothing to do with current events to say anything interesting about current events."
C.S. Lewis, himself a lover of old books, made a similar point about why we need to read the past:
"We may be sure that the characteristic blindness of the twentieth century—the blindness about which posterity will ask, "But how could they have thought that?"—lies where we have never suspected it, and concerns something about which there is untroubled agreement between Hitler and President Roosevelt or between Mr. H. G. Wells and Karl Barth. None of us can fully escape this blindness, 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. Not, of course, that there is any magic about the past. People were no cleverer then 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."
So why read a classic like In His Steps? In a culture starving for truth, we don't need more truths that we already know. We need the fresh, clean sea breeze of the centuries blowing through our minds so that we won't be subject to whatever the world tells us we should fret about now.
CHRIS BARRAS
LEAD MINISTER
AREA 10 FAITH COMMUNITY