Some friends have been pestering me not to let the new year come and go without a list of ten which, for some reason, is the New Year’s kind of thing to do. So below please find ten books that stood out to me in the past year. They are not all 2007 volumes, just books I read in 2007. Of course, I don’t endorse everything in them. They are just ten books that come to mind that made me think in the past year. Some made me thankful. Some made me sad. Most made me pray.
1.) The Collected Letters of C.S. Lewis, edited by Walter Hooper.
Most of the Christian apologists and writers I found so appealing early in my ministry tend to fade in usefulness to me over time. I still appreciate them, but they sit on the shelf somewhere. Not so with Lewis. Each time I read him, I am amazed to see how my thought has been shaped by his in ways I don’t even recognize, often for years at a time. I also am startled by how the longer I know Christ, the more my heart is “strangely warmed” by the Narnian.
You will want to read this collection of letters, from 1950 to Lewis’s death in 1963. Find out why Lewis hated Texas, why he thinks women don’t like the autumn, his tips on clear writing, and what the taste of an orange tells one about heaven. In the midst of all this, you’ll find some arresting counsel on everything from the question of remarriage to a divorcing woman to the teaching strategies of Jesus to tender words of consolation to doubting believers and probing words of encouragement to wavering skeptics.
These letters made me love Lewis more, and thank the Lord for his witness and ministry.
2.) Schulz and Peanuts: A Biography, by David Michaelis.
This is the most unexpectedly theological book I’ve read all year. It also may be the most depressing. The author traces the life of the cartoonist creator of Charlie Brown and Snoopy from his days as a fervent, tithing Church of God evangelical to his deathbed, hopeless and angry at God.
The book shows what Scripture has already told us. Human lives need a narrative, a counter-narrative to the reign of death story we see around us. Schulz found his in a narrative of his own making, an alternative world of big-headed children and a wise-cracking dog. Michaelis shows us how the crushing sadness of Schulz’s life showed up in his strip. Hint: the roadside psychiatric stand, the little red-haired girl, and Schroeder’s piano…not accidents.
Michaelis also shows how this cartoonist, unable to believe that anyone could love him, gradually shifted in his beliefs from the Luke 2-reading Linus from the Peanuts Christmas television program to the dejected Linus of the Halloween Christmas special, waiting all his life for a Great Pumpkin who never shows up.
I have a review of this coming in a forthcoming issue of Touchstone about why this book is important for everyone in Christian ministry to read, and heed.
3.) Commentary on the New Testament Use of the Old Testament, edited by G.K. Beale and D.A. Carson.
The Bible has authors, and the Bible has an Author. The Bible has themes, and the Bible has a Theme. I am often amazed by how many born-again Christians read the Scripture like liberals, as though there is no storyline at work other than that found in the immediate consciousness of the human authors or the human audience. They then fragment the Bible up in ways they would never read any other book, and lose what the apostles tell us the Bible is about: Christ Jesus.
This volume is a brilliant help for pastors and other leaders to understand that if you are not seeing how all the promises of God find their “Yes” in Jesus in any given passage of Scripture, you are not listening.
4.) Forbidden Fruit: Sex and Religion in the Lives of American Teenagers, by Mark Regnerus.
One of the most famous Southern Baptists in the world is Brittany Spears. And therein is a parable.
Do abstinence pledges work? This sociologist concludes that, yes, to a degree and for a short period of time, they do. To our shame, though, he demonstrates that sexual behavior is regulated among evangelical Christian teenagers less by convictions about Christ and the Gospel and more by pressures from parents to avert risk and keep options open for the future. The book argues that teenage Christian sexual mores are more influenced by class considerations than by faith commitments.
This study shows why some of our own church teenagers are learning not just sexual immorality but a conscience-destroying self-deception about “what the meaning of the word ‘is’ is.”
This book ought to shake us, and change the way we preach, teach, and parent.
5.) Andy Catlett, by Wendell Berry.
My favorite living novelist and essayist returns in this novel to the Port William community of rural Kentucky, the year 1943. This book reminds me of all the reasons why I love Berry. He sees the permanent things, he cherishes the bonds between the generations and between persons and the land, and he knows how to lament, with beautiful longing, a world that is increasingly lost to us.
I think Berry’s longing is actually for a New Jerusalem, a cosmos made whole with the resurrection of the human steward-kings of the universe in Christ. He doesn’t fit all that together, but he is at least on the right path to the narrow way, and has much to teach us about the suburban captivity of the church.
In the novel, Andy reflects about how the lives of his grandfather and another contemporary would be “unimaginable to most people” of whatever circumstance in the modern situation. He writes: “They both belonged entirely to the older world, the world of the team and wagon. They both were born farmers, utterly reconciled to the demands of weather and work. Neither of them expected life to be easy or to get easier, or thought it was supposed to get easier. Both lived and died in society that depreciated their work, took it for granted, and increasingly held them and others like them in contempt for doing it.”
6.) Justin Martyr and His Worlds, edited by Sara Parvis and Paul Foster.
Other than Irenaeus of Lyons, my favorite figure in church history since the apostles is Justin Martyr. His Dialogue with Trypho remains, I think, the classic work of Christian apologetics and biblical theology. This collection of essays looks at Justin’s relationship to the Old Testament, to Greek philosophy, and to the Roman empire.
My favorite essay is one by Larry Hurtado on Justin’s view of Jesus as the “embodied name” of God. Justin argued that Joshua’s typological significance has everything to do not just with his leadership of the Israelites into Canaan, but with his very name, a name that points to God’s name, a name He will exalt above all others: Jesus.
Often we assume that those who went before us, if they weren’t inspired apostles, were theological cavemen, since they didn’t have access to German journals or Eerdmans paperbacks. Justin proves us wrong.
7.) Enough: Staying Human in an Engineered Age, by Bill McKibben.
I wrote about this extraordinary book earlier last year, and I am still taken by the insight of a volume authored by a man with whom I would disagree on a thousand really important things. Even so, this book is a Joshua and Caleb into the Canaan of bio-technological utopianism before us.
McKibben shows how we are being transformed from anti-glory into anti-glory by everything from television commercials to nano-technology to artificial intelligence.
What McKibben seems to need, what all of us need, is precisely what the utopians tell us we need: a utopia. What we need is a harmonious universe, ruled by a righteous humanity beneath a glorious and personal God. McKibben doesn’t quite see this, but he seems to be groping in the darkness in the direction of it.
Enough is not the contemporary equivalent of the Psalms or the Proverbs. There are few answers here. It is more like a contemporary restatement of Ecclesiastes, pointing out the vanity of a self-made existence.
8.) The Neglected Voter: White Men and the Democratic Dilemma, by David Paul Kuhn.
Yes, this book will show you how the contemporary Democratic Party has lost its once-crucial electoral base: working-class men. But that’s not what is most interesting about the volume to me. It’s about the nature of masculinity itself.
Kuhn argues for an essentially patriarchal vision of leadership, including political leadership. He eschews the Chris Matthews distinction between a “Daddy Party” and a “Mommy Party,” seeing both parties as Daddy parties. It’s just that the Republican father is a 1950s male while the Democratic father is a 1970s male. He contrasts a Father Knows Best dad with the father from Family Ties.
Kuhn also points out perceptively the kinds of upheaval that come when men are no longer in the role of protector and provider, at least at the societal level. He argues that contemporary “culture war” arguments over affirmative action, gun control, and the feminist movement are really about American males who are split off psychologically from their sense of self. It’s also why economic anxieties aren’t just about economics.
Kuhn writes: “Joyless work has begun not to pay off for white men. At mid-century, the sacrifice served their family, their country, and their sense of manhood. But as their ability to provide decreases, these white men come to feel downsized in every respect of their life.”
I would disagree with Kuhn that this is unique to white men, but instead would argue that the provision/protection sense of responsibility is hard-wired into all the sons of Adam who are, as Moses tells us, designed from the beginning to bring forth bread from the dust from which they were made.
This book is perceptive, but not so much at the level of politicial strategy. This book could help Christians to understand the spiritual stakes behind the factory closing down the street or the fatherless son in Vacation Bible School or the college dropout young man who plays video games for hours on end.
9.) The New Encyclopedia of Southern Culture, vols. 1-8, edited by Charles Reagan Wilson.
Why do so many Southern male children have “Jr.” or “III” after their names? Why has Pentecostalism found such fertile ground below the Mason-Dixon line? Where has the civil rights movement succeeded, and where does it have a long way to go? Why has the South, once the breeding ground of Jim Crow, made more progress than some other regions when it comes to electing African-American leaders to public office? Why is country music so popular in rural Oregon but not in Manhattan? Why did Elvis Presley like peanut butter, banana, and bacon sandwiches (and don’t knock it until you’ve tried it)?
These questions, and a thousand more, are answered in the first four volumes of this fascinating encyclopedia, sponsored by the Center for the Study of Southern Culture at the University of Mississippi.
This set is not just for those who live or minister in the South. Behind it are bigger questions of human culture, and the southern influences on American literature, religion and politics, no matter where you are.
10.) Artificial Happiness: The Dark Side of the New Happy Class, by Ronald Dworkin.
Do you ever wonder why every third television commercial seems to be for an anti-depressant? Do you wonder why so many people in church are drawn to what seem to you to be obvious hucksters such as Joel Osteen and Joyce Meyer? This secular M.D. can help show you.
Dworkin argues that much of the clamor for pharmaceutically engineered happiness in today’s world has much to do with the effort to silence the conscience. He argues that organized religion’s emphasis on temporal happiness, whether from the Right or from the Left, has produced the very kind of hedonistic society Christians claim to oppose. Is it a straight line from Norman Vincent Peale to your local abortion clinic? This book will make you wonder, and might make you change the way you share the Gospel.
