Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Foreign.
[00:00:06] Speaker B: Welcome to the Truth Exchange Podcast. This is a weekly program with Dr. Jeffrey J. Ventrella where he answers questions from subscribers around the globe, answering questions about worldview, cultural apologetics and other miscellaneous items. I'm your host, Joshua Gilo, and this is another edition of the Director's Bag.
All right, we are back with another episode of the Director's Bag. This podcast is going to be dedicated really to the last dicta that went out. We had a flood of questions come in. Thank you for sending those in. If you would like to have a question addressed during our podcast, you can reach out to me, Joshua xchange.com so please keep sending those in. We love to look at those and read them aloud and have Dr. Ventrella answer them. So what I'm going to do is I am going to read just a snippet here from your recent dicta, Dr. Ventrella, and it says you wrote that in 2024. I read, and I mean read, not heard about 50 books. Some were thick, dense legal texts comprised of thousands of pages and judicial ramblings. Others were mind candy, providing sheer entertainment. Others provided worldview formation and theological rigor. I offer this glimpse at some of the books that impacted me as well as what's on deck, God willing, for 2025. Let's get the gist. Well, a lot of people took on your gist and sent in a flood of questions regarding how should we read a book? Now I know there's some books you can actually find online about reading books and how to read a book, especially in preparation for college or seminary. Some of those questions, I'm just going to sprinkle them in and allow you to tackle them. First is what is the pace that you read at and how many books at a time?
[00:02:11] Speaker A: Oh wow, that's a very insightful question. Let me just echo the really appreciate the input reflection there. We want to fine tune our content to really sustain and glorify God while also scratching where it itches there. So I think it depends and it's changed over the years. One of the things that I did was I took the six traditional areas of systematic theology and I always had a text that lined up with one of those six areas and I made myself rotate through those six areas so theology, Christology, ecclesiology, eschatology, anthropology, et cetera. And I just made myself do it so that I would have a broader understanding of an overarching view of systematic theology and dogmatics in terms of pace. I want to press myself to basically keep current but also refresh myself with respect to that. So I'm always reading in terms of texts at a time.
I probably, it's safe to say I'm in three or four books simultaneously. There's always a mind candy book, you know, as I'm going to sleep at night or perhaps taking my nutritional interlude at lunch. I'm just kind of vegetating on that a little bit. I'm always dealing within some quote, serious book and, and I can talk about how I approach serious books. And then there are just like legal texts and that sort of stuff. You just have to read that sort of stuff. And I'm excluding long form essays and things like that from the various periodicals that we receive here or look at online. That's a whole separate category of how to keep current and how to read long form op eds and all that sort of stuff. Newspapers. But in terms of books, yeah, I don't know how detailed they want me to be, but yeah, I'm reading.
[00:04:16] Speaker B: Do you ever go through like, like seasons, like there is a season that you read a particular genre of literature or, or are you more regimented and this is, you know, how, how you go.
[00:04:28] Speaker A: Well, usually I do have seasons when I find myself having a gap like something's come up and I just don't know enough about either the topic or the period that's relevant. I will just, you know, take a deep dive and read, you know, six or eight or 10 that that occurred in a couple of areas. One, I didn't have a good grasp of the Progressive Era, which is actually a very inspired by Neo Darwinism and later critical theory. So I read a number of approaches to the Progressive era in the United States to understand. Another area that I went and did deep dive was the assault on classical liberalism, largely by critical theorists and then by the New Right. So I went to some primary sources there and began to make sure I understood the components particularly as instantiated in the founding of the United States as a particular political entity nation. So I wanted to make sure that I wasn't, you know, just bloviating and spitting out opinions like we see so many today on social media. I wanted to have an informed understanding, so I did that.
[00:05:43] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:05:44] Speaker A: So yeah. Or if there's a theological issue, here's a great example many, many decades ago dealing with the topic of it's controversial cessationism. Right. How do we understand that? So that's just rigorous theological and exegetical exploration there to really get your arch arms around. At least you understand the arguments. You may not have A conclusion after that. But you're not being foolish or you're not misrepresenting particular positions on that.
[00:06:12] Speaker B: Yeah, so. Okay, that's a good point. And how many books on a subject would you recommend somebody read before they can feel confident to discuss about a certain subject?
[00:06:28] Speaker A: Yeah, I think you need to. I don't know if there's a number of books, but I do think there's a point where you get kind of cognitive rest. And cognitive rest on a topic comes when you start reading things that begin repeating ideas. Okay, I've heard. Okay, I'm familiar with that. Okay, so you get very familiar with that. But the thing I would always do is read the best representative of, quote, the other side quote.
So I think it's very important, not just in a lot of young Reformed folks. They only want to read Reformed things as if the Christian faith began in 1517, and it certainly did not, nor did it end in the time of Thomas Aquinas. Right. So we need to read something more than our own convicted tradition. And that's great to have those traditions. I have lots of those personal convictions, but it doesn't define Christian orthodoxy. And sometimes it's very helpful to read outside of it, of your tradition. And I would also caution, again, we find heroes, and that's okay to a point. But the factionalism or tribalism, I am of Paul, I am of Apollos. It can be very dangerous. And so I would really resist saying, well, you know, unless.
Pick a giant, unless RC Sproul had that position, then it's no good. Or a certain publisher, if it didn't come from Presbyterian Reform publication, it's not trustworthy, or it's not true, or if it doesn't come from Canon Press or, you know, fill in the blank, I'm not picking on either of those. But the point is that we tend to have a party spirit, and I think we need an intellectual modesty to be able to read things. Now, I will tell you, in my own personal practice, I've done that and I've read things, and sometimes I've thrown the book across the room. It's like, this is just bad. It's not good. It's not scholarly. What are people talking about? But at least I read it and I have, you know, personal knowledge concerning it. I'm not just shooting from my hip.
[00:08:35] Speaker B: Is there a method in which you begin reading a book, for instance? There's a.
Well, there's one way that I use in seminary, where you go through every single page, you look at Every chapter. Sometimes you might skim the first, the introduction and skim the conclusion to familiarize yourself with the book and possibly terms. And then you begin reading. Or do you simply just start at point A and you conclude with the ending of the book?
Are there some books that you would say that you just skim through and you kind of make a Cliff Notes?
[00:09:11] Speaker A: Yeah, so I like to read. I enjoy that. So my approach is, I have a particular text. If I'm unfamiliar with the author, I research the author. What's their perspective? Have they changed perspectives? What's the burden of their scholarship or of their popular writing? I want to know something about them because it contextualizes the particular book I have in my hands. The next thing I want to know is, when was it published, when was it written, when was it published? Because you don't know why something happened, typically until you know when it happened. Was this in response to a particular extant issue? Those sorts of things. And then I do, yeah, basically a skim through the table of contents. And the indices or appendices give you maps as to what the author is direction or her direction and what they deem important.
So I want to understand the outline. And a good book will be outlined to get the gist of it, going through it.
And then, you know, I.
If I'm doing particularized research, I may just focus on the chapter that does it. But typically I read it cover to cover, including prefaces, forwards, because then again, it gives you more clues to where they're going. I don't believe in spoiler alerts. It's okay to have a spoiler alert in my view, because it just informs you where you're going. And then I attack a book, and I mean attack with the different layers of it. I read it, I highlight using a highlighter, yellow preferably, because when you photocopy a page for reference, it doesn't show up.
And then I mark and annotate. And I have my own symbolism. I use actually on the pages, you know, an asterisk versus an arrow versus a bracket. They tell me different things, and I've developed that over the years. And then when I find something particularly salient, I go to the back of the book, write the page number down, and provide a synopsis of what that points to or why that was a good observation. Or I want to remember this, or this is a good illustration of that, or, oh, wow, there's a great quote here. So I do all that. Now, what I used to do when I had a larger staff, I would have someone go through those annotations and stuff and pull out from the pages I marked. So I had in a. Typically a word document that I could just pull stuff out. It's much, much more efficient, much quicker. And then all the scholarly annotations would be there. So I do that with every book I read, actually, but not the mind candy.
[00:11:56] Speaker B: So how often do you then go back over a book and what are some tips for digesting what you've read?
[00:12:05] Speaker A: Yeah. So a couple of thoughts there. Any good story has at least three levels of appreciation and comprehension. One is you read it to understand what happened. What's this about?
Secondly, you slow down and begin thinking about, you know, characters or motives. That's more of a literature kind of thing or a play. But you do need to dwell on that. What is this symbolize something? What's really going on, or what's doing the lifting? What's doing the work? And then you back the lens out and go, okay, what's the big picture? What big questions are being addressed and what are the answers being supplied? What's being critiqued? So if you have that kind of. It's a form of spiral curriculum. You hit it once, you hit it a second time, you hit it a third time and really contemplate that. And so I can't remember if it's Chesterton or C.S. lewis. I mean, C.S. lewis said you read new books and old books too, which I think is a good way to do it. But one of them said you need to have. I'm probably misquoting here, pushback books. And what he means by that is you're reading something and it causes you to sit up and physically lean back and go, man, I never thought of that. Or that's profound. Or, man, I could be mistaken on this. On this particular thing. I remember having that early on. I read Ours are Pink's the Sovereignty of God, the Baker edition, which is not the abridged edition by Banner of Truth. And I remember setting it down, going, there's been a whole section of God's sovereignty that in my campus groups had been carefully carved out and buried. We never heard about it. And I read that book. Oh, man, I have been, you know, and the same was true with understanding the normativity of the law of God in the early campus groups. And I'm talking 40 years ago, the early campus groups. I was with. You didn't dare talk about the normativity of the law of God, the continuing validity of the law of God and those sorts of things, because you know, the focus was get, convert converts, you know, and, boy, I felt like I had the pie without the filling on those kinds of things. And so I think having books that challenge your preconceptions, and again, that takes intellectual humility to say what's going on there. The same token, you don't want just be a sponge and be uncritical. You do need to have filters on how you digest the material, which maybe gets to another point is how do you know it's true or not? Right.
[00:14:45] Speaker B: Yes. Okay, so that leads us into the last plethora of questions that came in, which was all on this question is how do you know if what is being said is true?
And I got this question, these questions, excuse me, from a number of younger men who wrote in asking, how do I know if I'm being sold something? A sale?
That's trash. It's incorrect. It's not a correct. The telling of history or worldview. How do I catch those things? Otherwise I'm just wasting my time reading something that's just nonsense. It almost feels like I have to read a lot of books on any given subject before I know if something is accurate.
[00:15:37] Speaker A: Yeah, that's a very important question. Because if we're not careful, we become not only skeptical, but cynics. And nothing is good enough. Nothing is proved sufficiently, and that's a dangerous place to be. The other thing it can do in a negative sense is it makes the reader the ultimate arbiter of everything.
Yet Scripture does call us to test all things, and we need to see are they of God or not. And so one of the things that I think helps here, having a appreciation and command for foundational Christian orthodoxy.
And what do I mean by that? So I think the standard ecumenical creeds help prevent kind of this creep that comes in at Truth Exchange. We're concerned with neo paganism, which is often Gnostic. And so I was reading someone. Someone actually wrote me a question. He's in seminary. I won't say where, but they're. They're really heavy into the Puritans. All Puritans are the, like, the gold standard. And he was pulling out some quotes in a. In a reader that he was assigned from Stephen Charnock. Now, some of our readers may be familiar with that, the existence and attributes of God, older text. It's very valuable in some ways, but I hadn't read it in decades, you know, but he. The quotes he was pulling out from the excerpts that he was assigned really had some questionable understandings of the doctrine of God. Like Being a spiritual being is better than being a tangible being. It's more spiritual to be incorporeal than. Than it is to be material. And just some other. Really my alarm bells went off immediately interacting with this stuff, saying, okay, here's the deal. My point being is it's not because I had to go reread Charnock. It's because I had, I think, a pretty strong understanding of fundamental orthodoxy and fundamental heresy that these things came out. And what else did I do? I sent those excerpts to some trusted theologian friends. I go, am I misreading this? Here's my take on this. They go, no, you're 100% right. So that, you know, intellectual humility to not be afraid to have a take, but to also have it in a modest way to do that. So I think long way of saying be familiar, appreciative, and have under your command basic Christian orthodoxy. And then I think we want to be careful not to judge motives. But there are some platforms and that sort of thing that are designed essentially to produce clicks and followers as opposed to standardizing truth. And that's the reality.
[00:18:34] Speaker B: Yep, Yep. Yeah. As you were saying that, it dawned on me that some of our young readers may feel that itch, that inward pull and desire to say the next hot take, that next item that's click worthy. And so they're, they're wanting to read simply for that, that purpose. And that's not a good, that's not a good motive to have.
[00:18:59] Speaker A: It's undisciplined. Right. Sorry not to interrupt, but they're going to and fro with every wind and wave of doctrine. They're not steady, they're not grounded, they're not rooted.
[00:19:10] Speaker B: Yeah. And our readers and our listeners can know that that takes to have the hot takes comes from. You want to have to have a hot take. Be a person that's disciplined by the word. Be a person that's disciplined by proverbs. I always, I think about a lot. Brian Matson always tends to have some really good hot takes and one liners. And one of those one liners he said a number of years ago at our think tank in 2019, where he said, I don't want to raise my children to make a decision for the Lord. I want to raise them to make every decision for the Lord. But another hot take that he, he, he said or hot clip at our recent symposium, a very square inch, which is you want to marry the Proverbs 31 woman will be the Proverbs 1 through 30 man yes, cultivate.
[00:20:00] Speaker A: And that's not chronological. It's about character, wisdom and those sorts of things. And these folks who are out there spouting off essentially anti Christian doctrine, let's just call it what it is, they may, they may call themselves Reverend or count Counselor or whatever. They're not teaching what's true.
[00:20:19] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:20:20] Speaker A: And you know, Titus, one's very clear about that. They need to have their mouths shut. And he's talking about those people in ecclesiastical circles, you know, he charges Titus shut their mouths. You know, and that's, that's part of the apologist job and not, not an evangelist job. So that's, it's getting far afield. But I think that social media makes us even more challenging. I think that we have to develop and cultivate contentment and satisfaction with, you know, I'm going to read a 600 page book, not a six line tweet.
I'm going to spend more time doing that than I'm going to do social media or one of those things. And frankly, I know my temptation. I know the temptations of my flesh and that's a reason I'm not on X or on Instagram. You know, I, I just think that I could be sucked into that, you know, therefore, therefore he who thinks he stands, take heed lest he falls kind of a thing. So I just don't want to involve that though. I have you yourself and others point to me to things that are happening on those media, things. And we can write about it or talk about it here, but I think if people were honest to themselves and cataloged how much time they spent in prayer versus swiping left and right, I think that they would be shocked to see the allocation of resources. And I think that's really a problem. I try to read, you know, something serious, you know, early, early in the morning. I'm actually trying to shift some things so that I do, I feel, and this is just a personal thing, but I really want to because I think that being, and this sounds, this is not self promotion, but I feel a deficit of just being, you know, prey constantly, that whole deal. And I think one way to do that is to do something a little more planned and formal. So for me I'd like to be able to shift. I mean my, my time is very difficult right now in terms of lots to do, but I think I'm, I'm very much looking at aspects of, for example, the Book of Common Prayer, which is an Anglican thing, because that has, you know, time tested, articulate prayers, tons of Scripture reading. And. And, you know, you get through the Bible in three years, so there's not this, you know, gun to your head thing. Oh, I. You know, Obadiah, I can skip that today, you know, or what kind of a thing. But all that to simply say is. Your point was you need to be saturated and controlled by the word of God? Well, it doesn't happen by osmosis. Our tradition doesn't believe in implicit faith.
[00:23:15] Speaker B: That's right. Yeah.
We have a rule in our home that the children aren't to read any other books in the morning until they've been in Proverbs and been in a psalm. And our oldest is quite captivated with Ray Bradbury.
[00:23:34] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:23:35] Speaker B: And so he. I mean, he has read.
He's working on the complete works of Ray Bradbury. And he came in this morning and said, pop, I just read one of the greatest Ray Bradbury stories in my life. And I said, son, have you read your Proverbs in psalm reading? No, sir. Turn around and go back and read your phrase and bring me your Ray Bradbury. Because you need to focus on the Word first.
[00:24:03] Speaker A: That's right. It's not only the word. It's not only the Word, but it's the priority of. It's the foundation priority.
[00:24:08] Speaker B: Yes.
[00:24:09] Speaker A: We are sanctified. You want to be sanctified.
It's in the word.
[00:24:13] Speaker B: This concludes a recording of the Director's Bag. For more resources from Truth Exchange, please visit us online at www.truthexchange.com. you can follow us on X as well as Facebook for more updates and content related to Truth Exchange. Be sure to join us next week for more questions from the Director's Bag. I'm your host, Joshua Gilo, and this is the Truth Exchange podcast.
