On The Sorting Of Books

Recently, as part of The Plague of 2020 and the resulting amount of time I have had at home, I have been going through my books.  On the whole I am not the sort of person that tends to just buy books and get rid of them (I have read ever book I purchased with two exceptions, both of which were so bad I had to sell them back), but I am becoming the sort of person who looks and what he owns and asks "Is this still relevant to my life?"

This weekend's review feel into two categories:  business books and religious books.

The business books were straightforward.  I own two categories.  One is the category of self improvement, life skills, and planing.  These all stayed.  The second group is the actual books "on" business and how to do well or succeed in it.  These are all books I have read and benefited from in the past, but the situation has changed thanks to Hammerfall and my change in career.  The likelihood that I will ever be in a position of leadership again is minimal and I certainly have no interest in building my career to that point again.  These went into the gifting/sell pile.

For religious books, I have acquired a hefty amount of the years - it is my largest subcategory after history.  They came from a variety of sources: ministries I supported, conferences I attended, books I purchased at Christian Book Stores (in the old days when such things existed), and the books I purchased from "regular" sources.

Over this past year I had already been making room on that bookshelf. 

The interesting thing about religious writers, the more I have read them, is that I find I prefer the dead ones to the living ones.  The dead have left us their corpus of work and we can analyze how on-target or off target their teachings were (for example, 88 Reasons The Rapture Must Occur In 1988 not really accurate, in retrospect).  We also have the total example of their lives, not just the part of their life where they wrote books so we can see if they finished as strongly as they started or fell away at some point later and all we are told of their life was the "high point" of their religious life, not the actual end of it - as if Judas had written a book extolling Christ's ministry two years into it, not after that rather unfortunate "betrayal" business.

In fairness, I do own a lot of dead theologians:  Augustine of Hippo, Martin Luther, John Owens, John Bunyan, CH Spurgeon, C.S. Lewis, Dieterich Bonhoeffer, Francis Schaeffer, Chuck Colson, R.C Sproul, various and sundry writers of the Early and Middle Ages.  These books, without exception, have remained.

I have retained one or two of the current living authors I own, but only those that (frankly) are relatively old and their corpus of work and lives stand for themselves.  Most of the newer (and by newer, I generally mean younger) are moving into the box to be sold.

The reason they are moving are precisely the two reason I listed above.  For some, like the author who did not date, he has surrendered the Christian lifestyle, divorced his wife, and moved on.  He may have had words of wisdom and possibly impacted people in wonderful ways, but in my mind I will always know that he was never really serious about what he wrote.

For others, it is simply that they are effectively "evolving" in their understanding of Christianity and how it impacts the world around them.  Suffice it to say that in many cases they have replaced the actual Gospel with the social Gospel, somehow pretending that all replacements of the Gospel in the past with something else have gone well for the Christian Church (they have not, by the way).

Not to worry about any of this, of course:  I still have books that I need bring out of my closet onto a shelf and books that I still want and need to buy.  The space will always get filled.  

 

But  I am finding the dead and old to be far more reliable and instructive than the new and fresh.