A Reading List

• Agape and Eros — 5 stars, A difficulty
  One of the major formative books for my thinking. I can hardly overstate the impact this book had on me. In particular, it taught me to understand the meaning of the verse that says, “In this is love, not that we have loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins.”

  Important ideas in this book are:

  • Anthropocentric vs. theocentric religion
  • Fundamental motifs
  • “Lost love”
  • The fusion of agape and eros that constitutes the spirituality that became the central theme of the Roman church, which Nygren calls charitas.

• Romans — 5 stars, A difficulty
  Excellent commentary, what I would call a “reading.” Rather than trying to put various views in perspective, he takes a particular viewpoint and explicates it. Since I consider that viewpoint to be valid and important, I find this book very helpful.

First serious Christian author I read. Still go back to him — he never gets old.

• Mere Christianity — 5 stars, B difficulty
  This book had a fundamental impact on my faith. It is one of the first really deep Christian books I read when I became a Christian. Most of all, it showed me that you could think about your faith.

• Miracles — 5 stars, B difficulty
  In some ways like Mere Christianity in that it centers on an argument against naturalism (Mere Christianity starts with the Moral Argument for God’s existence). This book focuses on the particular topic of miracles and tries to address some of the philosophical issues associated with it. Again it helps one think about the Christian faith.

• Screwtape Letters — 5 stars, C difficulty
  I give this a “C” in difficulty because the writing is an older style and at times requires the reader to follow trains of thought. This may derail some.

  The book is fundamentally humorous, and at one point while reading it I found myself laughing until tears came to my eyes.

  Many editions have an epilogue called Screwtape Proposes a Toast which involves Screwtape giving a speech at the Tempters’ College graduation ceremony. This essay is amazingly prophetic regarding the effects of egalitarianism on society, in particular its effect on the education system.

• The Four Loves — 5 stars, C difficulty
  Probably the best book on the idea of love from a Christian perspective. Many of the themes in this book are worked out in fictional form in the book Till We Have Faces which I also advise people to read.

• Pilgrim’s Regress — 5 stars, C difficulty
  The title is an illusion to Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress. The book itself is a humorous and sarcastic telling of Lewis’s own journey to faith. A big part of the joke of the book is that once Lewis found what he was looking for, he realized that he had been going in the wrong direction the whole time and had to retrace his steps.

  The book is actually quite relevant even now because many of the intellectual trends it castigates are still present in contemporary thought. It is also very funny. One part that stuck with me: the pilgrim (John) has a long discussion with a Modernist and sums up the argument as follows: “Most stories about the Landlord [that is, God] are probably wrong; therefore all are probably wrong.” (Lewis sarcastically calls this the “inductive method.”

• The Meaning of the City — 5 stars, C difficulty
  Ellul taught me how to read the Bible thematically. As a sociologist he also helped me understand the relationship between Christianity and society including politics. This book traces the theme of the City from Cain, who founded the first city as an expression of rebellion against God, to the New Jerusalem, where man and God are reconciled and dwell together.

• The Political Illusion — 5 stars, B difficulty
  Why do Christians pursue the political will-of-the-wisp? Why do we, as one person put it, scramble for the scraps of power that fall from Caesar’s table?

  This book discusses the notion that politics is the idol of the 20th century (though this has not changed in the new millennium). His thesis is that the political illusion is the notion that all problems are political problems and have a political solution.

  This book always reminds me of the following scene from Fiddler On the Roof:

  Perchik: There’s a question… A certain question I want to discuss with you.
  Hodel: Yes?
  Perchik: It’s a political question.
  Hodel: What is it?
  Perchik: The question of… marriage.
  Hodel: Is this a political question?
  Perchik: Well, yes. Yes, everything’s political. Like everything else, the relationship between a man and a woman has a socioeconomic base. Marriage must be founded on mutual beliefs. A common attitude and philosophy towards society… Hodel: And affection? Perchik: Well, yes, of course. That is also necessary. Such a relationship can have positive social values. When two people face the world with unity and solidarity… Hodel: And affection? Perchik: Yes, that is an important element! At any rate, I… I personally am in favour of such a socioeconomic relationship. Hodel: I think… you are asking me to marry you. Perchik: Well… in a theoretical sense… yes. I am. Hodel: I was hoping you were.

• Propaganda — 5 stars, B difficulty
  Somewhat alarming look at the way the word can become instrumental rather than relational.

  There’s a quotation I ran across somewhere that says, “The purpose of propaganda is to interfere with the will.” (It may even be in this book.) Ellul discusses the way propaganda seeks to treat people as objects. Interestingly, propaganda eventually produces apathy, as people become tired of being manipulated but cynical about alternatives.

• The Technological Society — 5 stars, B difficulty
  A sociological view of what Ellul calls technique — the idea that the best way of doing everything is to come up with rational processes and methods. Note that this is not necessarily associated with technology — the title is a kind of translator’s compromise — though technology enables technique to an unheard-of degree.

  Technique depersonalizes society while allowing an unprecedented level of administrative control. It gives the appearance of efficiency but the appearance may mask the reality.

  This book interacts with the notion of the Political Illusion because modern bureaucratic governments depend on technique to accomplish their aims.

  This book is not explicitly Christian but it plays an important role in allowing one to think Christianly about society.

• The Supper of the Lamb — 5 stars, E difficulty
  How many books are excellent exemplars of more than one thing? I learned to cook from reading this book. It is also a meditation on the spirituality of ordinary things that has repeatedly inspired me.

• An Offering of Uncles — 5 stars, C difficulty
  A meditation on the meaning of priesthood — as in “priesthood of all believers.” God wants us to offer up the world to him and reveal him to the world. He suggests, among other things, that beards are a good way to do that.

• Trinity and Process — 5+ stars, A+ difficulty
  Probably the best theology book I’ve ever read. This book was an education in itself. I read it four times over the course of about three years and gradually came to understand many of the ideas.

  The book takes the idea of Process Theology as put forth by Charles Hartshorne, and critiques and recasts it. From the resulting perspective, Boyd critiques what is often called “classical theology” (derived from Aristotle and formulated most thoroughly by Aquinas) and arrives at what is usually called the “Open View” of God. The “openness” aspect of this view is more about the future than about God. Boyd argues that the thing that distinguishes the future from the past is that the past is definite while the future contains only possibilities that aren’t fully actualized.

  Process thought often seems to require that God create the world as a source of experience that God can “prehend” and synthesize into new actuality. Boyd shows that this is based on certain fallacious assumptions; amazingly enough, he concludes that something like the trinitarian view is metaphysically necessary.

  There are two ideas that I am still wrapping my mind around: the notion of “perspective” and “disposition.”

  The idea of perspective argues that different levels of reality are all equally real on their own terms. The “subatomic” perspective that sees a table as mostly empty space is real, but so is the perspective of normal senses that sees the table as solid. No perspective has metaphysical priorities over the others. Only God has an all-encompassing perspective from which every other perspective can be explained.

  The idea of disposition is a perspective that explains the continuity of things. Something is what it is because it has a disposition to be that thing. This notion “mediates” between the concrete perspective, in which things act on the basis of their “prehension” of past experiences to synthesize a new concrete instance of themselves, and the abstract descriptions of how things do that.

  An example would be a stone. Concretely a stone when released will fall toward the earth. Abstractly that effect is described by the law of gravitation. But abstractions cannot make concrete things act. Abstractions only describe what concrete things do. Dispositions say that stones have a power to be what they are, and that power is orderly enough to be described by the abstractions of natural law. Dispositions operate at all levels of reality and persist even when they are not being actualized.

  I am still grappling with these two ideas. But they seem both powerful and relevant to the experience of Christians.

  The book as a whole makes a powerfully reasoned case for the view that God does not exercise meticulous control over everything that happens, but empowers creation to act on its own. This applies especially to humans who “are disposed to be self-disposing” for good or for ill.

• Satan and the Problem of Evil — 5 stars, B difficulty.
  Applies the ideas from Trinity and Process to the notion of spiritual warfare. Evil comes because God has empowered entities in his creation, and some of those entities have misused that power to attempt to negate God’s purposes.

  The premise of this book is more grounded theologically and more clearly worked out than many that make the same kind of point. Definitely worth reading.

• Myth of a Christian Nation — 5 stars, B difficulty.
  Basically an argument against seeing politics and violence as a way of advancing the Kingdom of God. This book is an excellent corrective for those who identify the agenda of the Church with some agenda either on the so-called “right” or the so-called “left”.

• Collected Poetry — 5 stars, A Difficulty
  There are several editions of E. E. Cummings’ poetry. Whatever edition you wind up with, “preserve it as your chiefest treasure….”

  For good or ill, Cummings shaped the poetic scene in the US for the 20th century. His poetry went from traditional to highly experimental. My view of poetry was changed forever when I realized that one of his really weird looking poems was actually a sonnet.

• Poems — 5 stars, A difficulty
  A posthumous collection of his poems, this book has journeyed with me for many years. Some of his poems helped me ride out some tough times:

  Not, I’ll not, carrion comfort, Despair, not feast on thee;
  Not untwist—slack though they may be—these last strands of man….

  Others helped me understand ideas that became part of my makeup:

  No wonder of it: sheer plod makes plough down sillion
  Shine, and blue-bleak embers, ah my dear,
  Fall, gall themselves, and gash gold-vermilion.

  And there are simply masterpieces (such as The Windhover which I just quoted, and the following):

  …O pity and indig|nation! Manshape, that shone
  Sheer off, disseveral, a star, | death blots black out; nor mark
  Is of any of him at all so stark
  But vastness blurs and time | beats level. Enough! The Resurrection,
  A heart’s-clarion! Away grief’s gasping, | joyless days, dejection….

  This quotation is from a poem called That Nature is a Heraclitean Fire and of the comfort of the Resurrection. This poem is worth reading if only for the title!