We stand on the shoulders of others in the past. We get to know different traditions of the history of the church in order to serve God here and now with wisdom and learned experience. “A living tradition is a self-critical developing stream, not a moribund repetition of the past. Tradition is the shoulder of previous experience on which we stand as we reach upward for what is new…The sweep of that tradition will open our eyes to wide resources of spirituality and give guidance for our own choices.”[1] In order to look forward, we learn to look backward. We learn to see the works of God in the Christian experience in the past; we learn to integrate the past experience into the present. It is in this sense that C. S. Lewis encouraged us to read books from previous generations. He noted:
Every Age has its own outlook. It is specially good at seeing certain truths and specially liable to make certain mistakes. We all, therefore, need the books that will correct the characteristic mistakes of our own period. And that means the old books…Nothing strikes me more when I read the controversies of past ages than the fact that both sides were usually assuming without question a good deal which we should now absolutely deny…We may be sure that the characteristic blindness of the twentieth century—the blindness about which posterity will ask, “But how could they have thought that?”—lies where we never suspected it… None of us can fully escape this blindness, but we shall certainly increase it, and weaken our guard against it, if we read only modern books…The only palliative is to keep the clean sea breeze of the centuries blowing through our minds, and this can be done only by reading old books. Not, of course, that there is any magic about the past. People were no cleverer then than they are now; they made as many mistakes as we. But not the same mistakes. They will not flatter us in the errors we are already committing; and their own error, being now open and palpable, will not endanger us. Two heads are better than one, not because either is infallible, but because they are unlikely to go wrong in the same direction.[2]
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