School’s out for summer! Whether we spent the last several months slogging through assigned reading, reading students’ assignments, or helping our children with homework, we all feel a sense of relief when the semester finally ends. However, don’t let that relief translate into a lazy reading regimen! Below we at the Helwys Society Forum have provided some of our recent finds and favorite repeat-reads from the last several months. Find something to help you profitably spend those hours on the beach, mountains, or front porch.
You’ll notice two selections on early church fathers, two on American and English religious history, two by Francis Schaeffer, two on ministry, two on Christian living, and one children’s fiction book. You might decide to pick out a pair and compare and contrast their views. Let us know what you find and be sure to let us know what you’re reading.
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Bruce Ashford, Every Square Inch: An Introduction to Cultural Engagement for Christians (Bellingham, WA: Lexham Press, 2015), 134 pages.
How does our faith impact our everyday lives? Throughout history Christians have tried to answer this question faithfully. In this book, Bruce Ashford argues that God wants every square inch of our lives to fall under His lordship. It is only then that we will live faithfully for the purpose of God’s glory. If Jesus is truly Lord over everything, then that means the Christian should seek to apply their faith to every dimension of culture.
Ashford draws from figures such as Abraham Kuyper, Francis Schaeffer, and C.S. Lewis to contend we should make intentional Gospel applications to inform our entire lives. One helpful aspect of the book is that Ashford ends each chapter with “Recommended Reading” sections for the reader to seek out further resources. This is especially beneficial, as each cultural context will look different for each believer to apply his or her faith towards. This is a superb introductory work for any Christian seeking to apply the Gospel to the cultural setting in which they live.
—Recommended by Zachery Maloney
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Augustine, Confessions. Translated by Gary Wills (London: Penguin, 2006), 368 pages.
There may be no work written within the first five centuries of Christianity that is more accessible and more moving than Augustine’s Confessions. It stands as a monument to the powerful work of God in the conversion of sinners. Through his personal confession of sin, Augustine brings us face-to-face with the depths and cunning nature of our own sin. But he does not stop there.
Augustine directs us towards the hand of God Who is drawing us to himself even in the midst of our pride and rebellion. He points us towards the instrumental role of the believer’s pleading with and prayer for sinners. Ultimately, he calls us to dwell on the humble Redeemer through whom sinners are both brought low and made right with God through His Incarnation and atoning sacrifice.
—Recommended by Jesse Owens
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Patricia U. Bonomi, Under the Cope of Heaven: Religion, Society, and Politics in Colonial America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 291 pages.
In Under the Cope of Heaven, Patricia Bonomi suggests that religion, more so than other factors, enabled the North American British Colonies to rebel in 1776. In a well written style, she argues that church attendance did not statistically decline over the late 1600s and early 1700s, especially amongst non-Congregationalists and non-Anglicans. This is important because many early American historians had previously assumed that the First Great Awakening was a revival of religion in response to a long decline in religious zeal and commitment after the arrival of the Plymouth Pilgrims.
Further, Bonomi goes on to claim that this religiously active populous was exposed to revolutionary ideas and methods through the contentions of the first Great Awakening. This series of revivals and the debates that ensued gave the colonies an independent self-identity. Having learned the reasons and means of revolution and having formed a self-identity that was separate from Great Britain, the colonists translated these ideas into their politics resulting in the American Revolution.
—Recommended by Phillip Morgan
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Leroy Forlines, Biblical Ethics: Ethics for Happier Living (Nashville: Randall House, 1974), 208 pages.
Among Free Will Baptists, this is an old standard, it seems. And here in 2015, more than 40 years after its publication, it holds as much relevance as ever in the basic principles it sets forth. As in other works, Forlines is deeply theological yet also pastoral. Indeed, he speaks to the whole person.
Throughout Forlines is practical, humble, and honest. For example, what are the implications of Biblical ethics upon our own personal and interpersonal development? How do we avoid an unrealistic perfectionism in our pursuit of ethics? What is our responsibility to the material world? Is it proper to have leisure time? If so, what does that look like? What do we do when our values appear to conflict?
Perhaps many of our readers have read this already. If so, it may be time to read it again. It is a great source for leading a Sunday School class or a small group through a 13-week study. If you’ve not read it, I highly recommend it. There is simultaneously a depth and simplicity to it—easy to read, but deeply impactful.
—Recommended by Matthew Bracey
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Hezekiah Harvey, The Pastor: His Qualifications and Duties (1879, repr. Rochester, NY: Backus Book Publishers, 1982), 176 pages.
Hezekiah Harvey’s concise little book The Pastor was written 136 years ago. Yet it is still wonderfully relevant today. Harvey was a Baptist minister and taught courses in pastoral theology, ecclesiastical history, and Biblical criticism and interpretation at Hamilton Theological Seminary at Madison University (currently Colgate University) during the last half of the 1800s. In response to urging from his students, The Pastor was compiled from Harvey’s lectures on pastoral theology.
The book is plainly written and gives a great deal of basic instruction about how to be a pastor. Harvey gives helpful recommendations about knowing if you are called to the ministry, how to read Scripture well in public, what sermons should consist of, how to visit the sick, the pastor’s personal spiritual life, how to perform funerals, and so on. This book is easy to read, thorough, detailed, and written by a man who understood the little questions that pop up in daily ministry.
—Recommended by Phillip Morgan
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Stephen M. Hildebrand, trans. On the Holy Spirit: St. Basil the Great (Popular Patristics) (Yonkers, NY: St. Vladimirs Seminary Press, 2011), 128 pages.
Good, theologically robust works on the Holy Spirit may be fewer in number than we would like. While many systematic theologies set aside a chapter on the work of the Holy Spirit, not as many give a chapter to His person (e.g. Grudem). One can be left wondering why there has been a slight vacancy when it comes to a thorough, exegetical approach to pneumatology in contemporary publications. Nevertheless, when contemporary volumes do not supply adequate scholarship on a subject, one can often turn to the great Christian tradition for a wealth of truth and knowledge.
Enter On the Holy Spirit: St Basil the Great from the Popular Patristics Series. In easily accessible language, St. Basil the Great’s treatise on the Holy Spirit has been translated for readers today. This short book gives a treasure-trove of insight into a proper understanding of the Spirit. Basil not only gives us a glimpse into the pneumatological struggles of the 4th century, but also gives us guidance as we try to understand the Spirit’s divinity and work in our lives today.
—Recommended by Christopher Talbot
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Richard John Neuhaus, Freedom for Ministry (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1992), 271 pages.
Few books provide an account of ministry that combines cultural criticism, theological depth, and pastoral counsel. But Richard John Neuhaus accomplishes all three in his Freedom for Ministry. First published in the late-1970s, Neuhaus narrates the theological nature of the church and its ministry against the backdrop of cultural developments in the mid-late 20th century. While Neuhaus is much better known for his book The Naked Public Square, I think Stanley Hauerwas is onto something when he says that Freedom for Ministry was Neuhaus’ best book.
Few pastors and church leaders really are honest with the types of fears that hold them captive in their service to Christ’s Church. Part of this may be hubris, but the other part of it is a lack of understanding about how our conception of the ministry and the church’s life has been shaped by the spirit of the age. Additionally, there is a “heaviness” (as one mentor of mine often says) that is pervasive in the experience of pastors and lay Christians alike. Neuhaus helps offer a Biblical release from this heaviness in his valuable book.
—Recommended by W. Jackson Watts
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Francis Schaeffer, Art and the Bible (Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 1973), 94 pages.
An important principle for every Christian to understand is that Christ’s lordship extends to every aspect of our lives. One arena that His lordship covers is that of the arts. In his book, Art and the Bible, Francis Schaeffer makes a theological argument for the goodness of the arts. Schaeffer builds his theological case for the value of art through different examples from Scripture: “religious” art in the tabernacle and temple, Jesus’ use of art, and the Biblical writer’s use of poetry.
Schaeffer begins and ends this small book by arguing for the lordship of Christ over every realm of life. He concludes by writing, “No work of art is more important than the Christian’s own life, and every Christian is cared [sic] upon to be an artist in this sense. The Christian’s life is to be a thing of truth and also a thing of beauty in the midst of a lost and despairing world.” This is a worthy read for both artists and non-artists.
—Recommended by Zachery Maloney
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Francis A. Schaeffer, A Christian Manifesto (Wheaton: Crossway Publishers, 1981), 157 pages.
We find ourselves in arguably the most morally contested age of American history. Never before has it seemed that there is such a holistic rejection of the entire Judeo-Christian ethos in our country. Because of this, many Christians from laymen in the pew to the academics in the class room are asking, “How do we respond?” Certainly, this is an age-old question because the issue of cultural engagement is at the heart of Christianity. Thankfully, a few decades ago Francis Schaeffer tackled this topic in a way that was prophetic in many ways of our day.
In his small book A Christian Manifesto, Schaeffer outlines what a Christian response might look like in a culture that is increasingly hostile to a Biblical worldview. While this brief volume was written back in the 1980s, the truth couldn’t be more applicable today. In his Schaefferian way, he develops a kind of “manifesto” in response to what we know as the humanist manifesto. What is most helpful, at least to me, is when Schaeffer properly articulates what a Christian civil disobedience looks likes in reference to the prevailing worldviews of today.
—Recommended by Christopher Talbot
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Sheila Turnage, Three Times Lucky (New York: Puffin Books, 2012), 312 pages.
I try to keep a steady diet of children’s books in my reading list. Often times, children’s books can accomplish tasks that grown-up books simply cannot. Of course authors such as George MacDonald, J.R.R. Tolkien, and C.S. Lewis have reminded us of the importance of such a habit. Famously Lewis remarked, “When I was ten, I read fairy tales in secret and would have been ashamed if I had been found doing so. Now that I am fifty, I read them openly. When I became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up.”
Three Times Lucky follows a heroine Mo (named after the Bible’s Moses) and her best friend Dale (named after none other than Dale Earnhardt) through their adventures in small-town North Carolina. Turnage gives us the Christian South, country diners, a quaint town and a murder mystery all in one. As readers, we follow our protagonists, Mo and Dale as they work to solve the mystery. In 2013, this book was chosen as a Newberry Medal Honor Book. Indeed, the characters are likeable, the settings are memorable, and the story is charming. If you’d like an easy, quick book to read set in the Christian, agrarian South, you may consider this one.
—Recommended by Matthew Bracey
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Michael R. Watts, The Dissenters: From the Reformation to the French Revolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), 568 pages.
Michael Watts’s The Dissenters is a masterpiece. Watts traces the history of those Christians who separated from the Church of England (known as Dissenters). After these Dissenters became convinced that a state Church could never form a biblically faithful Christian community they separated from the state church. Watts helps the reader navigate the often-complex political and religious setting of seventeenth and eighteenth century England, touching on the most significant events in each realm as well as their regular overlap. The grand irony of Dissent is that it flourished as a sort of Biblical renewal outside of the Church of England, but it eventually took ministers from the Church of England (John Wesley and George Whitefield) to help stoke the dwindling fires of Dissent. If you want to understand the origins and development of dissenting groups such as the General and Particular Baptists, this book is a must read.
—Recommended by Jesse Owens
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Norman Wirzba, Living the Sabbath: Discovering the Rhythms of Rest and Delight (Grand Rapids: Brazos Press, 2006), 176 pages.
Ever since studying under Dr. Norman Wirzba in graduate school, I’ve been struck by his ability to articulate theological questions and claims in a provocative, yet precise manner. His volume on the Sabbath well-exemplifies his ability to connect theology to practice for the 21st century church. In this book, he narrates the disordering of thought in the context of our late-modern, technological society. Christians, he argues, have been often implicated (intentionally and unintentionally) in forms of life that fail to receive and embrace God’s Sabbath designs for His creatures. He challenges the way our consumer practices have disconnected us from the goodness of creation, and how this has profound consequences for discipleship and the spiritual formation of the saints.
While I don’t quite agree with all the environmental-scientific assumptions on which the book rests, its larger claims and call to “discover the rhythms of rest and delight” should still rest heavily on the church of Jesus Christ.
—Recommended by W. Jackson Watts
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