Like every professor, I love to read! I read over 30 books
in 2014, and thought I’d give a list of the top 10 best books I read this year
(or at least most helpful to me) with some brief reviews to stimulate your own
intellectual curiosity and give a little insight into the theologians and other
authors I’ve been wrestling with in 2014.
1. Timothy Tennent, Theology in the Context of World Christianity.
(almost finished)
I had read a few chapters of Tennent’s book in seminary and
read almost all of it this year. Tennent seeks to theologically reflect on the
key areas of Christian theology in dialogue with issues that come up in
religiously diverse contexts around the world. For example, how do we respond
to the question of whether Christians and Muslims worship the same God when
their views of God share some but not all of the divine attributes? Or, how do
we explain the atonement in a culture that focuses on honor and shame more than
forgiveness and guilt? What is the relation between guilt and shame in biblical
theology? Or, perhaps most provocatively, does the Bible really require us to
say that all non-Christians religions hold to a form of works-based salvation
as goes the popular apologetic argument for the gospel? What about True Pure
Land Buddhism that seems to hold to some kind of salvation by grace through
faith?
Tennent’s attempt to engage the questions is brilliant and
his arguments largely convincing. For example, he shows that we can’t just
choose between guilt or shame as arbitrary models for the atonement, but that
both are aspects of the broader biblical teaching that must be taken into
account. In the case of True Pure Land Buddhism, he shows how the diagnosis of
the human problem and the identity of the savior are the absolutely essential
differences between it and Christianity—Buddhism rejects a Christian view of
sin and the Amida Buddha (their savior figure) simply doesn’t have the necessary
qualities to be able to save. This is important, because many Christians fall
into the wrong idea that it is the act of faith that ultimately saves us rather
than the object of our faith. That is, faith is a subjective condition for salvation, but faith is in vain if it doesn’t
grasp onto the correct object, the
savior Jesus Christ and his saving work. I highly recommend this book for
anyone thinking through issues of theological evaluation of religious diversity
and as a model of how to expand our ways of thinking about theology without
rejecting the good parts of traditional western theology.
2. Daniel Doriani, Putting the Truth to Work: The Theory and
Practice of Biblical Application.
I had also read about half of Doriani’s book in seminary,
but finally got around to reading the whole thing in preparation for my
Biblical Interpretation course. Simply put, I have never seen another book as
well-balanced and comprehensive in considering the tricky issues around how to
apply the Bible to contemporary life. One of the things I like best about
Doriani’s approach is that he recognizes that narratives can establish
doctrinal and ethical teaching, something that Gordon Fee and Douglas Stuart,
in their otherwise excellent book (see #6 below), are rather hesitant about. I
also find his approach helpful in avoiding interpreting narratives in
allegorical ways but without denying that we can derive moral lessons from the
characters. Rather, he shows that narratives can apply by showing us redemptive
acts and/or by showing us models of good or bad conduct. The key is that the
models of good or bad conduct have to do with the characters’ response to God
(and often his covenants), not with reading into details of the story things
that aren’t really there. He also has some great reflections on the application
of Old Testament law today.
3. Stephen
Brookfield, The Skillful Teacher. (almost
finished)
This is a great book on college teaching, especially
challenging me to consider how students experience
my teaching. That is, how does the way I teach or lead discussion affect
students emotionally, challenge them intellectually, motivate or fail to
motivate them, etc.? There’s much more than that to the book and there are
points where the author’s philosophical assumptions don’t line up with mine,
but there is a lot more I can profit from on another read and put into
practice.
4. David Bushnell, The Making of Modern Colombia.
Bushnell’s book is primarily a political history of modern
Colombia with a substantial secondary focus on economic issues, starting with a
brief introduction on the period before independence from Spain and then
tracing the ups and downs in government from the independence period. Bushnell
seeks to show that despite the well-known problems of violence and the drug
trade, Colombia has actually been in many ways a remarkably functional country,
both politically and economically. A couple of interesting insights I gained
from the book:
First, Colombia has never had a strong left-wing or even
populist political presence, and the few dictators it has had have been
relatively moderate and short-lived. The traditional two strong parties of
Colombian politics, the Liberals and Conservatives, often were very
contentious, but they were really fairly centrist parties most of the time. In
the 19th century, the big difference was that the Liberals tended to
be more libertarian on economic policy, were actively hostile toward the
political power of the Catholic Church, and tended to support a more federalist
system of governance, whereas the Conservatives were closely allied with the
Church, were more centrists, and were more pragmatic on economic policy. These
ideological views morphed a bit in the 20th century, and today the
traditional bipartisan split no longer holds.
Second, geography has played a huge role in the development
and integration (or lack thereof) of Colombia. The largest cities are located
in the hearts of large mountain ranges and separated by large valleys. This
also contributed to strong regional cultures and made the development of road
and railroad networks extremely difficult and expensive. To this day, ground
transportation in Colombia takes a very, very long time by U.S. standards given
the mountain topography and often marginal quality of roads. It’s not uncommon
on mountain highways to have long sections where you can only average 15-30
kilometers/hour since there’s only one lane on each side, the grade is steep,
and there is a large amount of semi-truck traffic.
Overall, a great book, though a bit out of date on
contemporary issues, since it was published in 1993.
5. Fred Sanders, The Deep Things of God: How the Trinity
Changes Everything.
Sanders, a theology professor at Biola, seeks to show the
relevance of the doctrine of the Trinity to the Christian life and how we think
about our salvation. I don’t know if I would quite call it “accessible” to your
average churchgoer, but for those who like to read books about and think about
their faith, this is a great short read that people without a seminary
education can understand. Another added bonus is that Sanders intentionally
focuses on drawing on theologians from the evangelical tradition to show how
evangelicals have always been robustly trinitarian, even if we don’t talk about
the Trinity explicitly that often. In this way he shows the ongoing value of
many theologians often looked down on or ignored in contemporary discussions,
such as the authors of The Fundamentals,
the famous publications from the fundamentalist-modernist controversy of the
early 20th century.
6. Gordon Fee and Douglas
Stuart, Lectura eficaz de la Biblia.
This is the Spanish translation of How to Read the Bible for All It’s Worth, a primer on biblical
interpretation that focuses on how to properly read the different literary
genres of Scripture. I had heard it mentioned since college, but always had to
read other books in my Biblical Interpretation classes. Occasionally I have
some minor disagreements with Fee and Stuart, but this is about the best single
book (it’s around 300 pages) that I could recommend for someone wanting to know
how to responsibly interpret the Bible.
7. Douglas Davies, An Introduction to Mormonism.
Of the different books I read on other religions in
preparation for my Religious Systems course, this was definitely the best and
most academic, being published by Cambridge University Press. The single most
helpful thing in this book is Davies’s distinction between the largely
Protestant millenarian vision of Mormonism that we see in the Book of Mormon, which fails to introduce
many big doctrinal innovations, and the ritualistic temple version of Mormonism
that we find in Doctrine and Covenants,
a Mormon holy book made up of a collection of prophetic words supposedly
received by Joseph Smith and other church leaders throughout the first decades
of the LDS church. This makes a lot of good historical sense for one like
myself who doesn’t accept these revelations as legitimate—Joseph Smith started
with a fanciful tale of Jesus’ actions in the Americas and then developed a
whole new institutional framework later that made for an ever more
“sacramental” system, thus strengthening the institutional LDS church.
In many ways these two components to Mormon doctrine
correspond to the distinction between the Mormon missionary message, which
focuses on the Book of Mormon, and the message of temple Mormonism (with
baptisms for the dead, temple marriage, endowments, and the Aaronic and
Melchizedek priesthoods), which becomes the focus for Mormons more and more as
they spend time in the church. Thus, it explains why Mormon missionaries can
often sound so similar to evangelicals (though with an added Scriptural book),
but then the focus in Mormon spiritual life for the truly committed can be so
focused elsewhere.
8. Alasdair
MacIntyre, After Virtue.
MacIntyre’s classic book on ethical theory had been sitting
on my shelf for around ten years after an abortive attempt to read it in
college. His argument is dense and complex, but the most important contribution
for me was his clear argument for why any vision of ethics that excludes
teleology (a vision of what human nature is and what it is made for) fails. I
think his vision of virtue ethics is largely convincing, though in need of
supplementing by a modified divine command theory of specific moral
obligations. Such an explicitly theistic basis for ethics would give more
coherence to his vision. (To his credit, he is a believing Catholic and would
not deny the theological dimension, it just doesn’t factor prominently in the
argument).
9. Reza Aslan, No god but God.
Aslan’s book on the history of Islam is incredibly readable
and helpful. Aslan is clearly an advocate of a more progressive vision of
Islam, calling for a reformation of sorts and the rejection of much traditional
interpretation of the Qur’an, interpretations that he sees as illegitimately
imposed on the Islamic community centuries after the time of Muhammad when
individual interpretation was essentially banned and questionable traditions
about the prophet’s life were solidified. Whether Aslan’s interpretation is
ultimately the best or not regarding the validity or lack thereof on the
sources of Islamic law, this is a great first place to go if you want to try to
understand the early history and subsequent development of Islam, and
especially why intelligent westerners might find Islam or the example of
Muhammad attractive as a model by which to live their lives.
10. Kenneth Keathley,
Salvation and Sovereignty: A Molinist
Approach.
Keathley, a Southern Baptist theologian, seeks to trace out
a middle ground between Calvinism and Arminianism and show how Molinism—a
school of thought going back to the Jesuit Luis de Molina—can help do so.
Molinism has long been a hot topic in philosophy of religion, but the value I found
in this book was the way Keathley explicitly unpacked Molinism in theological terms. That is, he tries to
show what resources it provides for answering theological questions and doesn’t
spend all his time talking about the key philosophical points. I am fairly
sympathetic to a version of Molinism myself and found Keathley’s way of
describing it generally helpful and less speculative than William Lane Craig’s
version of Molinism (for those who know the discussion, I find Craig’s belief
in transworld damnation extremely speculative).
There are weak points to the book—I thought the chapter on
perseverance was not particularly well argued even though I lean toward agreeing
with his affirmation of what is usually considered a Calvinistic view of
perseverance, and his attempt to cast Molinism as an alternative to Arminianism is a bit odd, since I think it is really
a variant of Arminianism (and some scholars argue Arminius was a Molinist)—just
the variant that is closest to Calvinism. With that said, for my Calvinist
friends I think this book shows a clear example of a non-Calvinist who holds to
a very strong version of God’s sovereignty and clearly avoids anything close to
Pelagianism, something Arminians are often accused of. Whether it’s ultimately
persuasive or not to a reader, it is a good explanation of a lesser-known
option.
List of books read in
2014 (asterisked are books in above list, some partially read books not
included)
Religious Systems
class background reading
Anderson, Norman. Las
religiones del mundo.
*Aslan, Reza. No god
but God.
Braswell, George. Guia
Holman de las religiones del mundo.
*Davies, Douglas. An
Introduction to Mormonism.
Groothuis, Douglas. Confronting
the New Age.
Harris, Sam. The End
of Faith.
LDS Church. Our
Heritage: A History of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints.
McElveen, Floyd. The
Mormon Illusion.
Pearcey, Nancy. Total
Truth (partially read)
Rhodes, Ron. Reasoning
from the Scriptures with the Jehovah’s Witnesses.
*Tennent, Timothy. Theology
in the Context of World Christianity. (mostly read)
Biblical
Interpretation class background reading
De la Fuente, Tomás. Claves de interpretación
bíblica.
*Doriani, Daniel. Putting
the Truth to Work.
*Fee, Gordon and Stuart, Douglas. Lectura eficaz de la Biblia.
Ethics course
background reading
Hays, Richard. The
Moral Vision of the New Testament. (about 2/3 read)
Hill, Wesley. Washed
and Waiting: Reflections on Christian Faithfulness and Homosexuality.
Other theology and
philosophy
Carson, D.A. The
Difficult Doctrine of the Love of God. (half read)
Carson, D.A. Showing
the Spirit. (half read)
Feinberg, John. No One
Like Him. (about 2/3 read)
*Keathley, Kenneth. Salvation
and Sovereignty.
Lister, Rob. God is
Impassible and Impassioned.
Lusk, Rich. Paedofaith.
*MacIntyre, Alisdaire. After
Virtue.
McCall, Tom. Forsaken:
The Trinity, the Cross, and Why it Matters
Mitchell, Basil. Faith
and Criticism.
*Sanders, Fred. The
Deep Things of God.
Taylor, Charles. Sources
of the Self: the Making of the Modern Identity. (1/3 read)
Zagzebski, Linda. Omnisubjectivity.
Christian living
Foster, Richard. Celebration
of Discipline.
Keller, Tim. Encounters
With Jesus.
Merton, Thomas. No Man
Is an Island. (1/3 read)
Nouwen, Henri. Out of
Solitude.
Sumner, Sarah. Just
How Married Do You Want to Be?
Teaching
*Brookfield, Stephen. The Skillful Teacher. (mostly read)
Vella, Jane. Taking
Learning to Task. (half read)
Fiction
Achebe, Chinua. A Man
of the People.
Colombia
*Bushnell, David. The
Making of Modern Colombia.
