by the Helwys Society
In a recent post, Forum contributors shared their favorite books from 2013. However, regular readers know that we believe that history often helps provide the best perspective on what is really significant. In that spirit, we also want to highlight select publications that weren’t published in 2013, but nevertheless were read and digested by our contributors in the past year. While some titles are still more modern, the diversity will reflect.
Matthew Bracey
Dietrich Bonhoeffer. The Cost of Discipleship. New York: Touchstone, 1959. 320 pgs. (paperback).
Dietrich Bonhoeffer was a German Christian who lived from 1906 until 1945. In his book, The Cost of Discipleship, originally published in 1937, he famously wrote, “When Christ calls a man, he bids him come and die.” This statement was proven literally true for Bonhoeffer on April 9, 1945, when he was executed by hanging at Flossenbürg concentration camp in a Nazi-occupied Germany just two weeks before the United States infantry liberated the camp and just three weeks before Adolf Hitler’s suicide. Not for the faint of heart, Discipleship, though it can be challenging, is nevertheless rich, memorable, and rewarding. Here is a sample whereby Bonhoeffer distinguishes between the doctrines of justification and sanctification:
“Justification is the means whereby we appropriate the saving act of God in the past, and sanctification the promise of God’s activity in the present and future. Justification secured our entrance into fellowship and communion with Christ through the unique and final event of his death, and sanctification keeps us in that fellowship in Christ. Justification is primarily concerned with the relations between man and the law of God, sanctification with the Christian’s separation from the world until the second coming of Christ. Justification makes the individual a member of the Church whereas sanctification preserves the Church with all its members. Justification enables the believer to break away from his sinful past; sanctification enables him to abide in Christ, to persevere in faith and to grow in love.”
Jeremy Craft
Harry L. Reeder III. From Embers to a Flame: How God Can Revitalize Your Church. Phillipsburg: P&R Publishing, 2008. 234 pgs. $11.15 (paperback).
Long time pastor Harry Reeder provides pastors and church members alike with biblical principles for revitalizing the local church. Reeder explains that the key to revitalizing any local church should not be with a focus on church growth, but on church health. A tree only bears good fruit when the tree is healthy. Likewise, churches only bear good fruit when they have good health. For any pastor or layman interested in bringing health and vitality to your local congregation, From Embers to a Flame is a must read.
“You do not need a ‘marketing plan’ to grow the church; you need a ‘biblical fitness plan’ to promote its health. And you should be preoccupied not with programs designed to produce numbers, nickels, and noise, but with biblical principles by which the Holy Spirit can bring health and vitality to the body of Christ. And while statistical growth is likely to be experienced, the functional ministry of the church is the real testimony of spiritual vitality.”
Phillip Morgan
G. K. Chesterton. Orthodoxy. New York: Double Day, 1908. 160 pgs. $7.19 (paperback).
It has been said that Chesterton’s Everlasting Man is his more excellent work, but that Orthodoxy is his more charming one, feeding the soul. Having not yet read the former, I am unqualified to speak as to which is the more technically excellent work, but Orthodoxy fed my soul tremendously. It is my favorite book read in 2013 because of the effect it had for my thinking and reading for the rest of the year. This book proves why we must read the classics, because they are timeless.
“Certain new theologians dispute original sin, which is the only part of Christian theology which can really be proved. . . . If it be true (as it certainly is) that a man can feel exquisite happiness in skinning a cat, then the religious philosopher can only draw one of two deductions. He must either deny the existence of God, as all atheists do; or he must deny the present union between God and man, as all Christians do. The new theologians seem to think it a highly rationalistic solution to deny the cat.”
Jesse Owens
Richard Weaver. Ideas Have Consequences. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1948. 203 pgs. $18.00 (paperback)
What has happened to the West? And what has caused America to become what it is today? In his prophetic masterpiece Ideas Have Consequences, Richard Weaver answers such questions by pinpointing the poisonous ideas that undergird the West’s decline. Not only does Weaver unearth the roots of our rapid dissolution, he even provides several surprising solutions to our most pressing problems. Though nearly 65 years old, Ideas Have Consequences is as relevant (and maybe more relevant) today as it was in 1948.
“An ancient axiom of politics teaches us that a spoiled people invite despotic control. Their failure to maintain internal discipline is followed by some rationalized organization in the service of a single powerful will. In this particular, at least, history, with all her volumes vast, has but one page.”
Chris Talbot
John Owen. The Mortification of Sin. Carlisle: Banner of Truth, orig. pub. 1656. 144 pgs. $8.10 (paperback).
In the spirit of Romans 8:13, John Owen’s writes his enduring classic The Mortification of Sin. While the book is dense and hard to read through (I found Kapic and Taylor’s edition to be relatively readable), it is a virtual goldmine of truth for righteous living. The book is separated into three parts: (1) the need for mortification, (2) what it means to mortify sin, and (3) how we mortify sin in our lives. The pastoral counsel from Owen to “be killing sin, or it will be killing you” is as potent today as it was in 1656.
“Do you mortify; do you make it your daily work; be always at it while you live; cease not a day from this work; be killing sin or it will be killing you. Your being dead with Christ virtually, your being quickened with him, will not excuse you from this work.”
Jackson Watts
Richard John Neuhaus. The Naked Public Square: Religion and Democracy in America. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1984. 292 pgs. $17.45 (paperback).
The relationship between religion and democracy in America is a complicated one. Yet Neuhaus’ 1984 publication is still incredibly relevant in explaining this relationship, and helping Christians understand the way that faith can speak into the public square in a meaningful way. Though the legacy of Neuhaus’ thought provokes varied reactions across Protestant and Catholic bodies, his analysis contains a depth that must be reckoned with.
“If the myths of secularism are collapsing, and if there is a resurgence of publicly potent religion, we need to look for quite unprecedented ways of relating politics and religion. Our question can certainly not be the old one of whether religion and politics should be mixed. They inescapably do mix, like it or not. The question is whether we can devise forms for that interaction which can revive rather than destroy the liberal democracy that is required by a society that would be pluralistic and free.”
Honorable Mentions
Christ & Culture Revisited by D. A. Carson (2008)
The Democratization of American Christianity by Nathan Hatch (1989)
Washed and Waiting: Reflections on Christian Faithfulness and Homosexuality by Wesley Hill (2010)
Center Church: Doing Balanced, Gospel-Centered Ministry in Your City by Tim Keller (2012)
Mere Christianity by C. S. Lewis (1952)
A Short Life of Jonathan Edwards George M. Marsden (2008)
Tempted and Tried: Temptation and the Triumph of Christ by Russell Moore (2012)
Proper Confidence: Faith, Doubt, and Certainty in Christian Discipleship by Lesslie Newbigin (1995)
Culture Counts: Faith and Feeling in a World Besieged by Roger Scruton (2007)
A New Song for an Old World: Musical Thought in the Early Church by Calvin Stapert (2006)
The Nature of Poetry by Donald Stauffer (1946)
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