“The Abyss of the human conscience lies naked to your eyes, O Lord, so would anything in me be secret even if I were unwilling to confess to you? I would be hiding you from myself, but not myself from you.”
–Augustine, The Confessions, (Vintage, 1998), 197.
The current stage of book editing is all about trimming excess. In the next two weeks I hope to whittle off 1,500 words to keep the manuscript around the 55,000-word target. Sadly, this meant cutting out a nice quote that I discovered in my early research and had planned to include in the front matter of the book. The quote has been pruned, but it’s bloggable. Enjoy!
Gene Veith, Reading Between the Lines: A Christian Guide to Literature (Wheaton, Ill: Crossway Books), 224:
Christians to one extent or another have to read. They are ‘people of the Book,’ whose spirituality and conceptual framework is centered upon the linguistic revelation of the Word of God. As the culture moves farther and farther away from the printed word, Christians will still read. As their neighbors plug themselves in to their video images, Christians may find themselves making up a greater proportion of the reading public. Their tastes and values may matter again. Because readers exert the most influence in a society, however the masses amuse themselves, Christians may find themselves once again the thinkers and leaders of society.
Something similar happened 1500 years ago in the first Dark Age when the Vandals trashed a civilization based on law and learning. Amidst the moral anarchy, staggering ignorance, and image-centered paganism that prevailed for centuries, the tradition of literacy was preserved in the church. Behind the protective walls of the monasteries, books were cherished. They were copied out by hand, carefully stored, and eagerly read. The church was concerned for all kinds of books—Bibles, of course, but also books of medicine and science, works of pagan philosophers such as Aristotle, the poetry of Virgil and the comedies of Plautus. The Vandal aesthetic may be coming back in the anti-intellectualism of the mass culture and in the Postmodern nihilism of the high culture. Christians may be the last readers. If so, they need to be in training.
From Martin Luther’s, “A Sermon on the Estate of Marriage” [Luther’s Works (Fortress Press), 44:12]:
But this at least all married people should know. They can do no better work and do nothing more valuable either for God, for Christendom, for all the world, for themselves, and for their children than to bring up their children well. In comparison with this one work, that married people should bring up their children properly, there is nothing at all in pilgrimages to Rome, Jerusalem, or Compostella [the home of a famous shrine in Spain], nothing at all in building churches, endowing masses, or whatever good works could be named. For bringing up their children properly is their shortest road to heaven. In fact, heaven itself could not be made nearer or achieved more easily than by doing this work. It is also their appointed work. Where parents are not conscientious about this, it is as if everything were the wrong way around, like fire that will not burn or water that is not wet.
A few notes on the book:
I’m now 18 days away from submitting my manuscript to the greatest publisher in the world. That leaves one day to finalize each of the chapters and two days to dust off The Chicago Manual of Style and edit footnotes.
The publisher and I settled on a final title: Lit! A Christian Guide to Reading Books. I hope to explain more about the meaning behind the title in the near future.
By this point in the writing process I predicted that I would be sick of this project: sick of reading, sick of late night writing, sick of early morning editing, and tired of feedback and edits and changes, basically ready to kill the monster and throw its carcass to the public (Churchill). But as the book process winds down, I’m actually a bit bummed that it’s nearly over. This book has been a delight.
For the past few weeks the feedback from readers/editors has been positive, and at times overwhelmingly encouraging. I am more convinced that the book will benefit young Christians who don’t read books, especially male college students. So that’s exciting. Added to the excitement I received my first endorsement. I won’t post all the endorsements on the blog, but the first one is exciting:
I read many books, but seldom do I enjoy one more than I did Tony Reinke’s Lit! A Christian Guide to Reading Books. Many of my greatest childhood adventures, and much of my growth after I was converted as a teenager, came through reading imagination-expanding and life-changing books. Tony’s writing is thoughtful, perceptive, concise, and God-honoring. He upholds biblical authority, and offers helpful guidance, while allowing for a range of tastes. Lit! A Christian Guide to Reading Books rings true to my own lifetime of reading experience. As a reader and writer of both nonfiction and fiction, I appreciate the breadth of Tony’s treatment, which includes a variety of genres. For book lovers, this is a treasure and delight. For those who aren’t book lovers, it makes a great case for becoming one.
I am humbled, Randy. Thank you!
And thanks to everyone for your prayers as I finish up.
Tony
From a Christmas sermon by Martin Luther (Works, 52:20):
Without the gospel there is nothing but desert on earth and no confession of God and no thanksgiving. But where the gospel and Christ are, there is Bethlehem abounding in grain, and grateful Judea; there everybody has enough in Christ and there is nothing but thanksgiving for God’s mercies. But the doctrines of men [ie legalistic attempts at justification with God through pious duty] thank only themselves, and yet they permit arid land and deadly hunger to remain. No heart is ever satisfied unless it hears Christ preached properly in the gospel; when this happens, a person comes to Bethlehem and finds him; then he also comes and stays in Judea and thanks his God eternally; then he is satisfied; then, too, God is praised and confessed. Apart from the gospel there is nothing but ingratitude and we do nothing but die of hunger.
The Epic of Gilgamesh (originally composed between ca. 2000–1600 BCE) is an important ancient work of Babylonian literature, important because a few of its themes and some of its language is reflected in the book of Ecclesiastes and important because tablet 11 of the epic features an account of the flood which, though corrupted by mythology, is rooted in an oral tradition that may stretch back to the flood event, thereby supporting the Genesis narrative. I mention this because I recently found an audio archive at the University of Cambridge [HT: Wax]. The archive includes a reading of tablet 11 in its original Akkadian. Here’s what it sounds like:
Lines 1-29 (reader: Stephanie Dalley)
Lines 1-163 (reader: Karl Hecker)
Lines 8-44 (reader: Victor Hurowitz)
Lines 1-34 (reader: Nathan Wasserman)
Lines 92-139 (reader: Martin West)
Tony Reinke 