Why Read Old Writers? | The Whole Counsel

Why Read the Old Writers?

So, Jeremy, today we wanted to talk about the theme of how to benefit from the old riders, why we would even read the old riders, maybe what are some of the dangers, and how do we choose which old rider if we don't have someone who could give us some good advice?

You know, it's kind of a sea of names that we've never heard before, perhaps. So do we have any help that we could offer folks in those areas?

Personal Introductions to the Old Writers

Yeah, well, I think my experience was that I grew up in a church where some of those old riders were esteemed. My dad had a bunch of them in his own library. I have to say that he made every effort to try and get me involved in them, and I was just not remotely interested, at least not until after I was converted.

And shortly after that, I began to get an appetite for them, began to relish them, began to really appreciate them, and since then, they've been constant companions and real friends.

My path to the old riders was a little different. I grew up in a church that did not read them. You know, the church had a small library, and that's always the room that was least used in the church, but as a precocious child, I would go in there and pick a book.

I remember picking Billy Graham, because that was kind of the only famous preacher I'd ever heard of. And I picked a book that he wrote on demons as a 10-year-old with no spiritual interest. But I was very interested in people thinking that I had a spiritual interest, you know.

Why Old Books Can Still Be Profitable

I think sometimes people approach old riders for wrong reasons. Maybe the idea that just because it's old, it's better. Having stood the test of time, which many of the old riders' books haven't, but having had that filter of centuries is a real benefit.

Usually it's only the very good stuff that comes to us. One illustration I can think of that is Charles Wesley's hymns. There were hymn books that Wesley put together to counteract Calvinism. He and his brother, you know, wanting to kind of show what they felt was the error of that.

The hymns in that hymn book are not generally the ones that we sing today, because they're not the best. So there's a benefit there. But it's not just because they're old. It's because every man is a product of his time, as well as the work of God in his soul.

Learning from Suffering and Sanctification in Earlier Writers

I think we would agree that with Spurgeon, when he said he loves the books that have the smell of prison on them, like Bunyan. When men have suffered terribly to say some things to us about their Lord, like Samuel Rutherford, the things he says in his letters before he goes to prison are good.

The things he says about Christ in prison are stellar. We want to hear from men who are paying a terribly high cost to tell us about our Lord. Those are the ones I find most beneficial.

Yeah, these are the men who've walked with God, who've been purified in trials. It's not just that, as you said, sort of the creams rising to the surface over the period of time, because we have to acknowledge that there's some dross that's floated down on the stream of centuries as well.

But these are men whose experience of God often is, it's not that it's different from ours, in the sense that it's altogether of a different kind, but it's sometimes different in degree and depth. There's a real value, I think, for me in the fact that they're not thinking down the same tracks that I am.

They are themselves sinful men, and that's a filter that I need to apply, but they're not instinctively thinking as I would think. And I find that that freshness, it jars me out of my own ruts and assumptions.

It forces me to read good stuff with a degree of engagement that I've got to process in a way that I might not if it's being put to me on a plate. And so when someone says, for example, have you seen the size of these books, or have you seen the size of the print, or even worse, the size of the book with the size of the print, I'm just afraid of those things.

Yeah, I appreciate that, but the effort that is involved in reading them abundantly repays itself because of that processing that it demands.