An acquaintance recently asked:

What books or resources have been important for your theological formation?

The following is a lightly annotated list of what I remember, in the order I remember reading these books.

• The Lord of the Rings and The Silmarillion, J. R. R. Tolkien

  My introduction, though I did not know it when I first read these books at 8 and 10 years old respectively, to a deeply Augustinian view of the world, to a sense of the power of art to awaken the intellect and the affections alike to goodness in the world, and to an outlook and temperament on pursuing the good even when it seems to be but “the long defeat” that I hold to this day. This is where my moral imagination was formed.

• The Case for Christ, Lee Strobel

  An early read in Christian apologetics, with an evidentiary bent that was good for a curious and thoughtful high schooler. (Tier 2)

• How Now Shall We Live, Charles Colson and Nancy Pierce

  I probably read this 5 – 6× in high school, trying hard to see how to think well about Christianity and culture.

• Mere Christianity, C. S. Lewis

  I don’t recall whether I first read this in high school or early college — I think the latter — but as with many evangelicals, I found it a thoroughly helpful grounding in the faith. I fully expect to revisit it with my daughters in the years ahead.

• The Everlasting Man, G. K. Chesterton

  Chesterton’s major apologetic for Christianity. I was reading my way slowly back into what is now sometimes called the “Great Tradition”, though I did not know it, starting by reading the folks who Tolkien and Lewis cited as their own inspirations. Rich reflections on the Incarnation, refracted through Chesterton’s one-of-a-kind style.

• The Mind on Fire, Blaise Pascal; ed. James M. Houston

  The Pensées, in an abridged and edited form. More early college-era reading that helped me as I was starting to dig into what folks earlier in the history of the church had thought and written.

• Desiring God, John Piper

  A lightbulb kind of read for me. I came to this as a sophomore in college as I was wrestling hard with the many questions my upbringing in a very unhealthy (hyper-charismatic, thoroughly schismatic) congregation had left me. Piper’s contention that God himself is what — who! — we are to enjoy most caught me as exactly what I didn’t know I was seeking.

• Above All Earthly Pow’rs, David Wells

  The Desiring God 2006 national conference took its title and subject from this book, and I found the preaching at the conference (including from Wells himself) so compelling that I went out and read this. I hardly remember anything of it in detail, but I do remember Wells’ pointed critique of evangelical churches captivated by appeals to lowest-common denominator, market-oriented approaches, and I agreed with Wells in my bones. (I read the rest of the quintet of related books, but this was the only one that really stuck with me… in part because I quickly discovered that Wells had one beat and his books were therefore much of a piece.)

• Systematic Theology, Wayne Grudem

  My first systematic theology, the one that was popular at the time among most baptistic evangelicals. I learned a lot by reading it. This one is one of the few I’ll flag, though, as one I think so deeply mistaken on essential points (Trinitarian theology!) that I would actively recommend against it. There are a lot of better systematic theologies out there.

• Sacred Marriage, Gary Thomas

  A book I read while dating Jaimie, and which stamped me deeply in ways I am profoundly grateful for. Thomas’ claim, right there in the subtitle, “What If God Designed Marriage to Make Us Holy More Than to Make Us Happy?”, was deeply helpful as we encountered some extraordinarily challenging times right out of the gate.

• Institutes of the Christian Religion, John Calvin

  I only finished Books I and II, if I recall correctly, reading through this in the first years after college, but I was deeply formed by those. Calvin, I noted then, was much better than either his critics or, sadly, many of his fans.

• The Holy Trinity: In Scripture, History, Theology, and Worship, Robert Letham

  A mostly-very-helpful introduction (in an academic sense of “introduction”) to the doctrine of the Trinity. “Mostly”, I say, because Letham advocated (at least at the time) for a relatively mild form of eternal submission of the Son to the Father in the Trinity. I remember reading his combined defense of that position and of its implications for male-female relations with some confusion at the time, before my own thinking on that had crystallized (i.e., landed on classical Trinitarianism!). But on the other hand, “very-helpful” I say because I think Letham’s treatment of the Trinity was in the main very good and helpful, not least in its treatment of the East – West relations and the filioque clause.

• Nine Marks of a Healthy Church, Mark Dever

  My first serious reading on ecclesiology. It meshed perfectly with my baptistic views at the time. I still think it’s a good read, and much of what Dever argues for holds across denominations, though you’d have to do a fair bit of “translation” here and there.

• Culture-Making, Andy Crouch

  One of two volumes (see the next entry) that I read in parallel in the early 2010s along with many other evangelicals and which informed some of my thinking on the relationship of Christians to culture. Crouch’s telling is in some ways the more general of the two: simply on what and how Christians ought to be makers of culture and not only (or possibly at all) warriors for it.

• To Change the World, James Davison Hunter

  The volume which much more seriously stamped me on this front. Hunter’s thesis on how culture works and how elites and institutions in particular shape the rest of culture. In many ways a less bright and optimistic volume than Crouch’s, it is also the one that more deeply shaped my own intuitions. I not only wrote on it at the time; I was still citing it years later.

• Desiring the Kingdom, James K. A. Smith

  Another soon-after-college read, this one probably my earliest serious introduction to ideas and categories I would now articulate in terms of virtue ethics. Smith’s description is now a bit dated (who goes to the mall?) but the core insights certainly stamped much of how I thought about character development and the importance of liturgies proper.

• Every Good Endeavor, Tim Keller

  By the time I got to this, it was more a confirmation of what I had already come to think about truly Christian work — a standard Protestant view: that “vocation” and good, God-honoring work is not the sole or primary remit of clergy or missionaries, but a real calling for every kind of legitimate “secular” vocation equally — , but it was a very helpful confirmation.

• Christian Origins and the Question of God

  • The Resurrection of the Son of God (Volume 3), N. T. Wright

    I got to this shortly after college, and was quite affected by the seriousness with which Wright took the question of the resurrection in the context of Jesus’ Jewishness and the Old Testament. Wright’s view of the resurrection as utterly central to the Christian faith was enthralling. This was the first of Wright’s volumes I read (yes, I got here out of order!), and while no doubt others have made equally compelling presentations of the centrality of the resurrection, this was the volume that brought it home for me.

  • The New Testament and the People of God (Volume 1), N. T. Wright

    My introduction to the relationship of first-century Judaism and Christianity.

  • Jesus and the Victory of God (Volume 2), N. T. Wright

    Wright’s deep dive into the historical Jesus was likewise my first taste of a thoroughly Christian scholar doing serious work on Jesus as a thoroughly human person in the first century — a thoroughly human person who was also God, because Wright is thoroughly Christian.

• Who Runs the Church?: Four Views on Church Government, Peter Toon, L. Roy Taylor, Paige Patterson, and Samuel E. Waldron

  The book that persuaded me that congregationalism was perhaps mistaken. I came out thinking that both Presbyterian and Episcopalian (meaning Orthodox, Catholic, Anglican, Methodist, etc., not the American denomination) cases were stronger than I had previously assumed, with a mild bent toward a Presbyterian view.

• On the Incarnation, St. Athanasius

  My first patristic reading, and one that stamped me deeply. Athanasius’ case against the Arians is also (and arguably just as importantly) a case for the Incarnation as central to our salvation. With Wright on the Resurrection, this was one of two books that substantially broadened my understanding of the work of Christ from a kind of narrow cruci-monism to a much more robust whole-life-and-work-of-Christ view.

• Reading Revelation Responsibly, Michael J. Gorman

  A seminary read that helped me finish rethinking my eschatology. That hyper-charismatic congregation was unsurprisingly hyper-dispensationalist, too, and this was the capstone to a path of reading my way out of that and into the broader Christian tradition on the book of Revelation specifically and eschatology more generally.

• Political Visions & Illusions, David T. Koyzis

  Koyzis more effectively lays out the problem here than any solution, but sometimes that’s still useful, and I suggest it is here. I found this a helpful reframing from bipolar culture war frames on the relationship between Christianity and politics. There are, it turns out, many varieties of political idolatry. (Pairs well with Gorman’s book!)

• The Gospel and the Catholic Church, Michael Ramsey

  The first step on my path to being an Anglican, though I didn’t know it at the time — a volume I read for an independent study late in seminary and found quite convicting and encouraging. It led me to reconsider even further the value of denominations per se.

• Retrieving Eternal Generation, Fred Sanders and Scott R. Swain, eds.

  A collection of essays that I read in the late 2010s as I was working on understanding much more deeply not just that the folks who affirm the eternal subordination of the Son were wrong, but how and why and what it meant for the faith handed down once for all. I was thinking about (indirectly) related themes during our church service literally just today as I publish this.

• Confronted By Grace, John Webster

  A collection of sermons by Webster, which I have quoted and reviewed here. As I said of it in my review:

  I can say with confidence that I held fast [to my faith in a particularly trying year] because I was held fast by God; I can also say with confidence that this collection of sermons was one of the means by which I was held fast and enabled to hold fast.

• Dogmatics in Outline, Karl Barth

  Another pandemic-era read that I found soul-nourishing. Barth is “upstream” of Webster (and for that matter upstream of much of 20th and 21st century theology) and this is almost certainly his most approachable book — a collection of sermons preached in the rubble of post-World War II Germany.

• Icons of Christ, William G. Witt

  The book that changed my mind on women’s ordination — not least because it is not a book arguing that women and men are the same or interchangeable for these purposes or any other. It may or may not change other folks’ minds (I have several friends I respect whose minds it very much did not change), but I found it thoroughly compelling.

• The whole rest of John Webster’s oeuvre. I have been slowly working my way through it over the past 6 – 7 years now, and it has been a source of joy throughout. Webster may be in a real sense “merely” a mediating figure for Barth, the Reformed Scholastics, Thomas Aquinas, and the Church Fathers, but I find him a very helpful mediating figure.

There are likely others I am missing or forgetting, but these are the ones I remembered or spotted on my shelves. As a rule, if a book survived the move from Oklahoma to North Carolina and/or the move from North Carolina to Colorado, it was because I found it meaningful and significant. A few books were significant but didn’t make the cut (Grudem’s systematic, for example), but not many!