Thoughts on Reading

Josh Sowin, who blogs at Fire & Knowledge, has a helpful post on reading over at the Desiring God blog.

Christians are people of the book: God purposely chose the medium of typography to deliver his revelation to us. In that book, we are commanded to love God with our hearts and our minds (Matthew 22:34-40). This gives Christians a clear command to use their intellects — to be, in other words, a kind of intellectual.

Reading is one of the best ways to develop our minds. It can help us to know God and ourselves, gain vicarious experience, increase our perception and imagination, train our minds to think critically and logically, and teach us self-discipline. (For more on this, see Neil Postman’s excellent Amusing Ourselves to Death.)

But we have a problem: our culture is becoming aliterate. We have the ability to read but not the desire. Or maybe some of us have the desire but not the time. We make time to watch television and surf the Internet for the latest triviality, but we can’t seem to make the time to sit down and read for an hour.

Christians should be readers. We should read and meditate on the Bible, of course, but we should also read theology. Good theology systematizes and explains the Bible in ways we would be pressed to come up with on our own. Few of us are a Jonathan Edwards, John Owen, J. I. Packer or John Piper, and we would be wise to learn from them.

It’s a good and encouraging read. Head on over and read the rest, and then go grab a good book!

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