A life in books

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MYRNA BROWN, HOST: Good morning! This is The World and Everything in It from listener-supported WORLD Radio. I’m Myrna Brown.

NICK EICHER, HOST:And I’m Nick Eicher.

It's time now for our monthly feature we're calling Quest, conversations with thoughtful leaders about the books that shaped their thinking. It's built off of the same concept we publish each month in WORLD Magazine.

Here’s Lindsay Mast with this month’s Quest.

LINDSAY MAST: Today we welcome Cal Thomas, a familiar voice to our program as he contributes weekly commentary to WORLD Radio. Over the last five decades, he worked for NBC News, Fox News, and USA Today. He began his syndicated news column in 1984 and he is the author of 10 books himself. Cal, welcome.

CAL THOMAS: Thank you, Lindsay.

MAST: Cal, listeners hear you regularly offering perspective on politics and culture, but not always the influences behind that voice. I'm curious, when did you first realize that books could shape the way you think?

THOMAS: Well, other than the school books I was required to read in high school and later college, I think the one that first began to shape my political thinking was Barry Goldwater's Conscience of a Conservative. And it was about lower taxes, less spending, smaller government, personal responsibility, all of those values that continue today, supposedly within the Republican Party, but not really practiced. But that was a very influential book. I didn't really know I was a conservative until I read it.

MAST: Tell me a little bit more about that. The influence is very obvious, but what do you think looking back, what did it change in you?

THOMAS: Well, I think it reminded me that there are certain principles that always work, economic principles, foreign policy principles, personal principles and relational principles. There are ideas that have always worked. And this is why history is such an important subject and why I came to love it later as I got older.

MAST: Well, what's your second book and how did it shape you?

THOMAS: It's kind of a cliche for a believer, but the living paraphrase of the Bible was read in my presence once by the man who led me to Christ, Richard Halverson, who was pastor of Fourth Presbyterian Church in Bethesda, Maryland, and later become chaplain of the Senate.

I had never really read the Bible before. My grandfather offered me a silver dollar if I'd memorized the 23rd Psalm. It was foreign to me, almost. King James Version, Shakespearean, thees and thous, and whithers and whithersoever, and all those other words. But when I heard the living paraphrase, it spoke to me. It spoke to my heart. I got a copy. I began reading it from cover to cover.

And it changed my life and my outlook and my worldview considerably.

MAST: Let's go ahead and move on to your third book. What does this one add?

THOMAS: Francis Schaeffer was a philosopher-theologian who wrote a number of books, many of which shaped the way I process information. The biggest one, I think, for me anyway, was True Spirituality. And this line right here, I think, is really significant:

“The scripture is positive inward reality and then positive and outward results. The inward thing is to be positive and not just negative and then sweeping out of the inward positive reality there is to be a positive manifestation externally.”

Now what he meant by that was there is a negative aspect of faith which is really good because it's an understanding that we are the way we are because of sin and our fallen world and we behave the way we do because of that.

And a proper diagnosis of that leads to the positive aspect, which is Christ in you, your only hope of glory and what Jesus taught and commanded really to love your enemies, pray for those who persecute you and care for widows and orphans and visit those in prison. So the negative part is an actual diagnosis of our real problem, which is sin. And that cannot be corrected by external forces like government. But the cure is Christ in you, your only hope of glory. And that carries with it a positive and helps you see people, your fellow individuals, not as evil, but as people in need of redemption.

MAST: When you look at these books together, what do they have in common?

THOMAS: Well, they shape my thinking in different ways. You know, Paul writes about having the mind of Christ and be not conformed to the thinking patterns of this world. But most importantly, it is a realization that there is something called objective truth.

Today in our culture, it's mostly subjective, which means it's not truth at all. But the founders of our country and indeed the scriptures themselves speak to an objective truth that always works, whether it's economic, relational, historical, geographical, whatever. It's objective. And if we abandon that, then we abandon the moral law and the boundaries that our founders and Scripture put in place to promote the general welfare in the words of our… one of our founding documents, and that's what we don't have now. We're promoting individual welfare and not the common good.

MAST: I'm curious, looking back, what kind of thinker were these books shaping as they were shaping you?

THOMAS: Again, I think it is that truth exists and it exists outside of ourselves. We are not the first generation to walk the earth. We don't have to figure things out. People who have gone before us have figured these things out. And if we will study that and if we will understand that, whatever it is–economic, political, spiritual–then we can learn from it and not make the same mistakes that many in the past had made. We can look at those who've gone before, many smarter than ourselves, and learn from them. The internet is okay, but reading a good book is much better.

MAST: Well, Cal Thomas, thank you so much for joining us for Quest.

THOMAS: My pleasure. Thank you, Lindsay.

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