Yesterday's News

Recently, I was in the process of refiling a number of articles from my old filing system into my new one. This resulted in reading perhaps half a dozen articles from Christian magazines published in 1994. I don't know if you have ever had this experience or not, but it is interesting to read something, written as breaking news, years after its publication. You have historical perspective and, if it is a field you have a good bit of knowledge about, you may know how things turned out. This same sort of thing can happen with books. While I was a seminary student I once came across a book that had an intriguing title, Millennial Studies. When I opened the volume I found an even more interesting subtitle, "Is Kaiser Wilhelm the Antichrist?" I suppose we know now that he wasn't.

Now, I suppose that one lesson to draw from this is that we shouldn't jump to conclusions, forecasting the darkest of all possible outcomes. Still, one of the purposes of articles and books are to alert us to possibilities. We might say that burden is on the writers, but in our information age there must also be a responsibility for the reader. There are some folks who figure that if it is in print, it must be true. We can't be that trusting, but neither do we want to become cynics. We must be discerning about what we read. I will generally look to see who the author is first and then if I'm unfamiliar with his or her work, I will look to see the publisher. When you come to something posted on the internet then all bets are off. I usually look at information from the web with a jaundiced eye. Does that mean I reject it out of hand? No, it might be accurate, it just needs some sort of verification.

I love to read. Wether it is a magazine or journal article, a book, or something on the web, I think that this is a wonderful time to be alive and swimming in the sea of information. I would just say that we need to be discriminating about what we consider a "float" in that ocean. Remember, not everything will stand the test to time.