My top Ten(ish) Reads of 2022
Dr. Mark Ryan, Director of the Francis Schaeffer Institute, has put together a list of favorite books he read this year. The list comprises books by Christians who have contributed to the research in their fields, as well as non-Christians whose work can help Christians better understand contemporary cultural conversations. We hope this list helps you discern what may be helpful for your own ministry as you seek to proclaim the gospel in your context.
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Like many who may view this, I am a rather eclectic reader. In what follows, I offer brief remarks on some of my favorite reads from this past year. I found each of these volumes to be stimulating, informative, and enjoyable. Each have lingered in my thoughts even after moving on from them. In that regard, I am glad to draw other’s attention to them here, albeit in no special order.
Benjamin M. Friedman, Religion and the Rise of Capitalism (Knopf, 2021) – In this informative work, Friedman, a four-decade-long Harvard professor, respected political economist, and prolific writer, comes wonderfully close to adding “historical theologian” to his repertoire. By way of examining Adam Smith and his contemporaries within then current lines of religious thought (including the decline of Calvinism and the ascendency of Arminianism, and the “assist” of key figures within the Social Gospel movement), Friedman documents how Smith and others (including Hume) were continually exposed to the theological debates of their day, and the impact of such upon the development of their economic thinking. With clarity and with nuance, Friedman’s work ably demonstrates that our thinking about economic policy is rooted in religious thought. More particularly, Friedman chronicles the ways in which this has been true since the founding of the American Republic, and why this continues to be true today. Despite my lack of formal training in economic theory, I thoroughly enjoyed this volume as I suspect will be true of those who do possess such as well as by those with interests in 18th and 19th century cultural history, or in the history and transmission of ideas more generally.
Glen Scrivener, The Air We Breathe: How We All Came to Believe in Freedom, Kindness, and Equality (Good Book Co., 2022) – Scrivener, an Anglican clergyman, evangelist, and filmmaker, has penned one of too few books that I will re-read and keep giving away to others in 2023. The contention of this work is that Christianity is the air we breathe, and the invitation it issues is to slow down and pay attention to the Christian atmosphere we still inhabit. By way of seven values central to modern life (quality, compassion, consent, enlightenment, science, freedom, and progress), Scrivener intelligently engages “nones, dones, and wons” with the teachings of Jesus and the extraordinary impact of biblical Christianity. Christians of all stripes stand to gain from reading this, as will anyone willing to re-evaluate the usefulness of Jesus’s teachings. While those who have profitably read volumes like Broken Signposts (N. T. Wright), or Magnetic Points (Daniel Strange) are likely to enjoy this additional and very accessible variation on a theme, Scrivener’s book is by far and away the best one to place in the hands of honest inquirers.
Gavin Ortlund, Why God Makes Sense in a World that Doesn’t: The Beauty of Christian Theism (Baker Academic, 2021) – This exploration of Christianity and naturalism by a CTS graduate, now pastor and apologist, is a great example of what our core class, Foundations for Apologetics and Outreach, seeks to encourage, namely, to affirm what we can concerning the human questions and aspirations we share in common, to build a rational yet embodied bridge from where a person is toward the gospel, and the need to clarify the truth (in this case, the question of God) and to challenge not only the intellect, but the imagination as well. Deservingly, this respectful and cogently argued volume has won numerous awards and is another book that can be given to not-yet-Christians without embarrassment. For my part, I found Ortlund’s discussion of the methodology he employs (a beauty-oriented, narrative-inclined, abductive, and cumulative apologetic) to be particularly informative and rather compelling.
Malcolm Guite, Mariner: A Voyage with Samuel Taylor Coleridge (Hodder & Stoughton, 2018) – This volume, gifted to me mid-year, was a feast beyond expectation. Authored by poet, theologian, songwriter, and former chaplain of Girton College, Cambridge, this robust yet still inviting work is a biography of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, a study of his famous poem (The Rime of the Ancient Mariner), and a model of theological and artistic integration. Choreographed to move expertly between expounding Coleridge’s poem and the course of his life, the book acquaints us with “one of the great romantic poets and a prophet for our time, one with as much to say to the twenty-first century as he had to say to his own age.” Simply put, this is a beautiful work, and I am confident it will appeal to any seasoned reader of Coleridge or lover of Romantic poetry. I suspect it will also appeal to anyone seeking the kind of biography that both informs the mind and stirs the imagination.
Stefan Paas, Pilgrims and Priests: Christian Mission in Post-Christian Society (SCM, 2019) – Initially written and published in Dutch several years ago, this English edition has been adapted for an international audience and has proven itself a useful primer for pastors and others desirous of navigating our current culture with biblical and missiological insight. A work of ecclesiology—and fruitfully read alongside the author’s 2016 volume, Church Planting in the Secular West—this current work strives to make sense of two volatile poles: the secularization of the West, and the missional nature of the Church. Although not in any way a “how to” type of book, nonetheless, Paas, via the language of exiles, and by way of the metaphors of pilgrims and priests, does helpfully name our moment and invites us to consider a way forward through the establishing and nurturing of communities that witness to what Christ has accomplished, even as the claims claimed and lived out are considered weak and foolish. For my part, and having read a plethora of similarly themed volumes, I appreciated Paas’s more refined use of the exile motif, and his concern for Christian spirituality alongside our engagement of secular society.
Simon Gathercole, The Gospel and the Gospels: Christian Proclamation and Early Jesus Books (Eerdmans, 2022) – This November 2022 release pushes back on recent scholarship that minimizes or denies the distinctiveness of the four biblical Gospels in comparison with various non-canonical gospels such as Thomas, Philip, Judas, etc. Gathercole, who is Professor of New Testament and Early Christianity at Cambridge and the author of prior scholarly works on the Gospels of Thomas and of Judas, ably guides the reader across the landscape of emerging Christianity, through the thickets of “apocryphal” gospels, and toward the clear vista of the theologically distinctive writings of Matthew Mark, Luke, John, and their uniquely reliable witness to the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. Undoubtedly this volume lands a little more in the domain of New Testament specialists, but its content is important, and I think anyone with the willingness to work through the research presented will find ample reward for their effort. Moreover, at a time where so many have taken to heart the works of “other gospels advocates” Elaine Pagels and Bart Ehrman, I hope ministry leaders, campus workers, and Bible study leaders will entertain reading Gathercole’s solid work.
Leonhard Goppelt, Theology of the New Testament, vol 1: The Ministry of Jesus in its Theological Significance, and vol 2: The Variety and Unity of the Aposolic Witness to Christ (Eerdmans, 1981 & 1982) – Goppelt was a German Protestant theologian who died prematurely in 1973, before he could complete this New Testament theology which he had labored over for more than a decade. Indebted to the Erlangen School with its combination of pietism, confessional Lutheranism, and its promise-fulfillment approach to biblical interpretation, Goppelt endeavored to blend the insights of the historical-critical method with a more traditional ecclesiastic approach. Goppelt’s work is edited by Jurgen Roloff, a student of Goppelt and himself a respected exegete, and the translation into English is provided by John E. Alsupp. True confession: I had no plan to read these volumes in 2022 or at any time. However, once I picked them up, perused the structure Goppelt laid out, the headings he ably filled out, and read of his desire for a more instructive dialogue between exegetical and systematic theology, so I was quite drawn in. Indeed, I emerged roughly 600 pages later helped by many of his insights and looking forward to reading Goppelt again, this time in conversation with Adolf Schlatter, Herman Ridderbos, and Richard Gaffin.
Philip Djung, Revelation and Grace: A Critical Appraisal of Hendrik Kraemer’s Theology of Religions (Langham, 2021) – Despite never attending seminary, Hendrik Kraemer became an influential early twentieth-century linguist, missiologist, expert in Indonesian Islam, and proponent of change in how missions were to be undertaken considering the demise of Western colonialism and the rise of various nationalist movements. As for Philip Djung, he is an Indonesian pastor and theological educator, who focuses in on Kraemer’s theology of religions. In this published dissertation, Djung both commends and criticizes Kraemer. Against critics, Djung shows that Kraemer appropriately maintains and safeguards the uniqueness of Christ and that he appreciates non-Christian religions (which is to say, that he argues for a real tolerance and cooperation even as he rejects simplistic points of contact and eschews relativism). Nonetheless, Djung does point out weak aspects in Kraemer’s theological framework (and suggests that a remedy lay in appropriating the insights of both Bavincks and Kuyper). For me, two things motivated my reading of this book. First, every year I read as many Langham Monographs as I am able. (See here for additional titles: https://langhamliterature.org/books?imprint=234.) And second, as Kraemer was a contemporary of J. H. Bavinck, an influence upon David J. Bosch, and perhaps most especially on Leslie Newbigin, so this volume served to enlarge my knowledge of missiologists in the Dutch Reformed tradition and it helped shed further light on the missional nature of the church preceding the formulations of Leslie Newbigin and others since.
Amy Orr Ewing, The Apologetic Value of Theological Truth Through Story and Pattern in the Works of Dorothy L. Sayers (D. Phil., University of Oxford, 2018) – A senior Fellow at the Oxford Center for Christian Apologetics, Amy Orr Ewing received a first-class degree in theology at Christ Church before earning a master’s in theology at King’s College London. Amid OCCA lectures, evangelistic talks around the world, and raising three boys with her husband, Amy also completed a PhD at Oxford. In her doctoral thesis Amy sets out to understand the theological method of Dorothy L. Sayers and in doing so offers a new paradigm for understanding Sayers’s work and evaluating her contribution to Christian apologetics. Focused on Sayers’s own letters as the principal sources to shed light on her published work, this dissertation engages with the full diversity of genres in Sayers’s canon from a theological perspective (as opposed to taking a merely biographical approach). Having long valued Amy’s work as an apologist so I was thrilled to read her insights into Sayers’s work, and I am confident that others interested in the role of narrative, drama, and analogy in theology, in the creative communication of theological ideas, and in giving greater prominence to female voices in the fields of theology and apologetics will likewise find this a worthwhile read.
Jean Giono, The Man Who Planted Trees (Chelsea Green, 2005) – This French short story, L'homme qui plantait des arbres, written by one of France’s most esteemed writers, is brief but truly delightful. This specific edition includes wood engravings by Michael McCurdy, a foreword by Kenyan Nobel Laureate, Wangari Maathai, and afterwords by Emeritus Professor of French and Comparative Literature Norma Goodrich and Founder and President of Tree People Andy Lipkis. First published in 1953, this work of fiction tells the story of Elzeard Bouffier, a solitary figure, who single-handedly sets about to reforest a desolate valley in the Alps in Provence. Via the trope of narrated encounter spanning 33 years (1913–1947), this realistic fable has inspired real action in the face of environmental crisis. Who should read this short story? Anyone who loves trees, values environmental stewardship, and needs encouragement around the long-term benefit of small, repeated efforts.
