Bunyan’s pedigree was among the lowest of the low.  Indeed, he was an everyday “Joe!”  But God rescued him from his sin and used the British tinker as a powerful instrument in God’s hands! Who would have thought that as he wrote Pilgrim’s Progress from a Bedford jail that it would become the number two best seller in the world?  

What is the rationale for unearthing the dead guys?  In his introduction to Athanasius’s masterpiece, On the Incarnation (a book written over 1,600 years ago), C.S. Lewis discusses the propensity of many people to gravitate to the new when all the while neglecting the old: “This mistaken preference for the modern books and this shyness of the old ones is nowhere more rampant than in theology.”  He goes on to describe the reason he advises people to select the old over the new.  The reason is this: “… He is an amateur and therefore much less protected than the expert against the dangers of an exclusive contemporary diet.  A new book is still on trial and the amateur is not in a position to judge it.  It has to be tested against the great body of Christian thought down the ages, and all its hidden implications (often unsuspected by the author himself) have to be brought to the light.”  So Lewis essentially argues that most people simply do not have sufficient resources to sift through the sludge of contemporary writing.  Thus, he is vulnerable to worldviews that are spiritually dangerous.

Lewis rightly says that every culture is unique.  Each culture comes with a certain amount of baggage that does not square with Scripture.  So he makes an appeal to old books, what I call reading the dead guys: “We all, therefore, need the books that will correct the characteristic mistakes of our own period.  And that means the old books.”

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