A while back Hannah and I took a day trip to Bath. There is a book binder there that has gorgeous leather embossed books that they bind and emboss themselves. Downstairs is a large selection of used old books. I picked up two to start my son’s collection. Hannah and I grew up knowing the value of reading and we have imparted that to Fae and will impart that to Flint when he is born in November. Even fiction plays an important role in the development of children in Christian families. Here is an excerpt from Douglas Wilson from his book Future Men:
In C.S. Lewis’s The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, we are given a good example of a boy who was brought up poorly. Eustace Scrubb had stumbled into a dragon’s lair, but he did not know what kind of place it was. “Most of us know what we should expect to find in a dragon’s lair, but, as I said before, Eustace had read only the wrong books. They had a lot to say about exports and imports and governments and drains, but they were weak on dragons.”
It is a standing rebuke for us that there are many Christians who have an open sympathy for the “true” books which Eustace read—full of true facts about governments and drains and exports—and who are suspicious of great works of imagination, like the Narnia stories, or The Lord of the Rings, or Treasure Island, because they are “fictional,” and therefore suspected of lying. The Bible requires us to be truthful above all things, they tell us, and so we should not tell our sons about dragon-fighting. Our sons need to be strong on drains and weak on dragons. The irony here is that the Bible, the source of all truth, says a lot about dragons and giants, and very little about drains and exports.
Like Eustace in the dragon lair, we do not recognize our surroundings because we have been reading the wrong kind of books, and this in turn causes us to read the Bible in the wrong way. And then, when the time comes to educate our sons, we stuff their heads with soul-deadening, imagination-killing factoids. But if our sons are to be prepared for the world God made, then their imaginations must be fed and nourished with tales about the Red Cross Knight, Jim in the apple barrel, Sam Gamgee carrying Frodo up the mountain, Beowulf tearing off Grendel’s arm, and Trumpkin fighting for Aslan while still not believing in him. This type of story is not allowed by Scripture; this type of story is required by Scripture. The Bible cannot be read rightly without creating a deep impulse to tell stories which carry the scriptural truth about the kind of war we are in down through the ages.
Here is a link to the source EXCERPT:
