I noticed the term “chronological snobbery” being used more frequently of late. I decided to look it up and explore why it is suddenly on the rise.
I found this article about C.S. Lewis who used the term in the ways described below. The full article is linked at the bottom.
One of the often-heard objections to faith in Christ is that it is old fashioned or outmoded, a relic of the distant past and therefore easily discarded. After all, what could a two-thousand-year-old faith have to say to us in the twenty-first century?
This was one of the obstacles that C.S. Lewis had to overcome in order to come to faith in Christ. He dubs the problem as one of “chronological snobbery.” His friend Owen Barfield often argued with him on this issue. Lewis’s question was: How could this ancient religion be relevant to my present setting? Lewis defines this chronological snobbery as “the uncritical acceptance of the intellectual climate of our own age and the assumption that whatever has gone out of date is on that count discredited.” Lewis eventually came to understand the need to ask further questions such as: Why did this idea go out of date? Was it ever refuted? If so, by whom, where, and how conclusively? In other words, you need to determine if an old idea is false before you reject it; we would not want to say that everything believed in an ancient culture was false. Which things are false—and why—and which things remain true?
Lewis came to the further conclusion that our own age was merely a period which, like past periods, has its own characteristic illusions. We can unthinkingly take for granted certain cultural assumptions, unless they are questioned. The classic illustration is the frog in the kettle. If you put a frog in a kettle of water and slowly turn up the heat, the frog adjusts to the rising temperature and therefore does not jump out—until it is too late. In a similar way, we can be affected by our cultural environment, yet be unaware of the significant impact being made on us. In Colossians 2:8 we are warned to “Beware of philosophy .…” Some believers have used this as a pretext for avoiding the subject altogether, but the only way to beware of philosophy is to be aware of it. Otherwise, you might fall captive to an alien philosophy and not know it.
So, far from rejecting ancient philosophies, we need the help of past ages in order to see our own times more clearly. Earlier cultures have not had the same assumptions as we have, and as we read books written in earlier times, we are given a helpful vantage point from which to see our present-day views more clearly. Rather than having “chronological snobbery,” Lewis advocated letting the “breezes of the centuries” blow through our minds. We can do this by reading old books. In fact, Lewis made it a rule of thumb that one should read at least as many old books as new ones.
Continue reading here: C.S. Lewis on Chronological Snobbery at C.S. Lewis Institute
Photo credit – C.S. Lewis is in the back row on the right
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