Each year, members of the Helwys Society have the opportunity to read and review many books. Insomuch that we find these books significant or useful, we try to bring that information to the attention of readers. In the next two posts, we intend to do that by highlighting our favorite books published in 2013, and then we’ll follow that by highlighting books from pre-2013 that we may have happened to read this year. We trust this will guide readers in the ever-difficult task of trying to prioritize their reading lists. Below are the top picks of each contributor, along with some honorable mentions.
Matthew Bracey
Jamin Goggin and Kyle Strobel (eds.). Reading the Christian Spiritual Classics: A Guide for Evangelicals. Downers Grove: IVP Academic, 2013. 332 pgs. $17.94 (paperback).
Have you ever tried to read a “Christian classic,” only to wonder why it’s such a big deal? Perhaps your complaint was that the text was difficult to read and understand, or boring, or just plain weird. Fortunately, Reading the Christian Spiritual Classics released this past year to help us wade through some of these difficulties. Compiled by editors Jamin Goggin and Kyle Strobel, this book contains fourteen chapters from as many authors, including Timothy George and Fred Sanders. These chapters are divided among four parts entitled, “Approaching Spiritual Classics,” “The Spiritual Classics Tradition,” “Reading Evangelically,” and “How to Read the Spiritual Classics.” In my estimation, this is a very helpful and practical introduction to the world of the Christian classics. By way of example, chapter 1, “Why Should We Read Spiritual Classics?” concludes this way:
“[T]he classics are a peculiarly fitting means of the Spirit’s illumination of his transformational presence and Word. The classics of Christian spirituality offer reflections on a biblical understanding of Christian holiness as well as contextualized examples of living out such holiness, and thereby extend to us the opportunity to engage the body of Christ across the centuries.”
Jeremy Craft
Gregory Alan Thornbury. Recovering Classical Evangelicalism: Applying the Wisdom and Vision of Carl F. H. Henry. Wheaton: Crossway, 2013. 222 pgs. $14.35 (paperback).
Gregory Alan Thornbury sounds the alarm for evangelicals at large by calling us to recover the vision of one of our key founders: Carl F. H. Henry. An intellectual giant, Henry called Christians to think holistically about the Christian faith. The Gospel not only affects us personally, but also has a transformative effect on societies as a whole. Thornbury calls us back to Henry’s model of being theologically robust, yet culturally engaged. For those disappointed with the state of evangelicalism and desire to see it regain focus, Thornbury’s book will be a refreshing ray of sunlight in a dismal fog. Here is a sample of the book:
“What I am trying to say . . . is that what made Henry unique was his mind, his pen, and the methods by which he deployed his enormous intellect to help evangelicals introduce people to Jesus of Nazareth, the Christ the risen Lord. Because he operated from this prime directive, Henry also made distinctive contributions to central concerns of the evangelical community: the grounds for Christian theism, the importance of reaching contemporary culture, the need for a transdenominational evangelical witness, and the preservation of faithful evangelical institutions. So this book is simultaneously about and not about Carl F. H. Henry. It is about a survival of the cherished subject of his career, and idea that some both explicitly and tacitly have concluded is little more than a wish-dream and fantasy: evangelicalism.”
Phillip Morgan
James D. Bratt. Abraham Kuyper: Modern Calvinist, Christian Democrat. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2013. 382 pgs. $17.18 (paperback).
James D. Bratt’s biography is a good introduction into the life and thought of Abraham Kuyper—the Dutch Reformed giant who advanced Calvinism’s answers to modernity. Bratt’s volume illuminates Kuyper’s writings by giving the context in which they were written, as well as explaining key features of Kuyper’s life. Kuyper was a prolific writer who, while pastoring a church, served in the Dutch parliament, and founded his own denomination and political party. Arguably his best-known contribution is his development of the idea of “sphere sovereignty,” which flows out of his voluminous writings on the doctrine of common grace. All in all, Bratt’s biography is an excellent book that covers the life of a very interesting man.
“As the father of Dutch Neo-Calvinism, Kuyper cultivated a small but potent religious strand in a small nation of outsized historical influence. He made something big of that combination by claiming a relevance for religion across the whole spectrum of public life—not “church and state” narrowly defined, but religion and politics, religion and culture, religion and society. For Kuyper, Calvinism was a world religion, indeed a world-formative one, and his titanic energies, deployed across many fields over a very long career, were devoted to fashioning fresh, authentic ways of making religion work in the modern world.”
Jesse Owens
Fred Sanders. Wesley on the Christian Life: The Heart Renewed in Love. Wheaton: Crossway, 2013. 262 pgs. $19.99 (paperback).
Wesley on the Christian Life by Fred Sanders is a wonderful contribution to Crossway’s Theologians on the Christian Life series. Sanders combines a witty writing style with precise theological language to create an exciting biography that accurately portrays Wesley’s life and theology. Many biographies simply tell the reader what a historical figure did and believed, but Sanders lets Wesley speak for himself. The book is chock full of lengthy quotes from Wesley’s sermons, journal entries, letters, and theological treatises. And while I disagree with portions of Wesley’s theology, I believe that few men have more faithfully combined warm spirituality and rich theology.
“Christianity in its clearest form is a heart religion. We do not need to be mawkish, precious, sentimental, manipulative, inward-focused, privatized, or weepy. We need to recover what Wesley argued for and acted out in the great revival of religion in the eighteenth century: heart religion.”
Chris Talbot
Jerram Barrs. Echoes of Eden: Reflections on Christianity, Literature, and the Arts. Wheaton: Crossway, 2013. 208 pgs. $12.42 (paperback).
Why does great art and literature resonate deeply with us? And as Christians, should we even care? In his book Echoes of Eden, Dr. Jerram Barrs does a wonderful job unpacking the answers to these questions. Barrs spends the first half of the book evaluating how Christians should interact with the arts, and the latter half of the book applying his principles with authors like Tolkien, Shakespeare and Austen. This volume is readable and enjoyable, while at the same time theologically robust. I highly recommend this book for those asking how we, as Christians, should think about the arts and literature.
“We may describe a Christian understanding of the arts in the following way: Our work in any field of the arts will be imitative. We will be thinking God’s thoughts after him—painting with his colors; speaking with his gift of language; exploring and expressing his sounds and harmonies; working with his creation in all its glory, diversity, and in-built inventiveness. In addition, we will find ourselves longing to make known the beauty of life as it once was in Paradise, the tragedy of its present marring, and the hope of our final redemption.”
Jackson Watts
James K.A. Smith. Imagining the Kingdom: How Worship Works. Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2013. 224 pgs. $16.94 (paperback).
How does worship work? This question is presupposed in the subtitle to Jamie Smith’s second-volume in an forthcoming three-volume series on what he calls “cultural liturgies.” In Imagining the Kingdom, Smith restates and builds upon the ideas in Desiring the Kingdom, which are essentially a holistic account of theological anthropology. In particular, Smith’s is an account of how desires and habits work together to form a Christian worldview—which is more than a set of beliefs. It is a vision of the kingdom to which we belong.
“Having fallen prey to the intellectualism of modernity, both Christian worship and Christian pedagogy have underestimated the importance of this body/story nexus—this inextricable link between the imagination, narrative, and embodiment—thereby forgetting the ancient Christian sacramental wisdom carried in the historic practices of Christian worship. . . . Failing to appreciate this, we have neglected formational resources that are indigenous to the Christian tradition, as it were; as a result, we have too often pursued flawed models of discipleship and Christian formation that have focused on convincing the intellect rather than recruiting the imagination.”
Honorable Mentions
Thomas Grantham (1633-1692) and General Baptist Theology by Clint Bass (Oxford)
Ike & Dick: Portrait of a Strange Political Marriage by Jeffrey Frank (Simon & Schuster)
C. S. Lewis – A Life : Eccentric Genius, Reluctant Prophet by Alister McGrath (Tyndale House)
Discipleship: The Expression of Saving Faith by Robert Picirilli (Randall House)
Against the Church by Doug Wilson (Canon Press)
January 1, 2014
My top book for 2013 was “Dangerous Calling” by Paul Tripp.
January 2, 2014
Amen, Brother Jeff. You’ll note that Tripp’s book was my pick last year for Top Books in 2012. One of the best pastoral ministry books I’ve ever read.