The Best Books So Far
Bulletin Roundtable Question
In this Bulletin Roundtable, our contributors respond to the question: “What is the best book(s) you've read this year, and why?”
Paul Copan
I dig into a lot of books, and most of them in recent years have centered on “the God of the Old Testament.” In fact, I’m currently working on a complementary volume to my book Is God a Moral Monster? It’s tentatively called Is God a Vindictive Bully?—although Jesus vs. Jehovah is a possibility. At any rate, this book addresses other Old Testament difficulties like the imprecatory psalms, God’s hardening Pharaoh’s heart, Elisha and the two bears, the definition of the term herem (often rendered “utter destruction”—an unfortunate translation), and much more. So for the past year, my desk has been stacked high with books addressing these kinds of issues. I’ve especially appreciated the work of Old Testament scholar John Goldingay. He’s been a rich, insightful resource for me.
Another book—a “freebie” I’ll mention—is Julie Lythcott-Haims’s How To Raise an Adult: Break Free of the Overparenting Trap and Prepare Your Kid for Success (Henry Holt). My wife and I read it aloud to each other and discussed it in bits and pieces, mostly on a seven-week road trip this summer. It’s not a Christian book, but it was a surprisingly impactful and insightful book on the perils of overparenting. We wish we had read it ten years ago, but, even so, it offered relevant thoughts to chew on. In addition, we’ve recently become grandparents and now desire to influence the next generation. The book gives lots of practical advice while warning against parental interventionism and protection from every pain, failure, and loss. It cautions against overscheduling our kids’ lives so that they have no time to be creative, to think, to deal with boredom, to solve problems. It also offers guidance to help children cultivate grit and resilience through risk-taking and also developing their own personal interests and gifts.
Another book—more along the lines of Worldview Bulletin reader expectations, I think—is Tom Gilson’s Too Good To Be False: How Jesus’ Incomparable Identity Reveals His Reality (DeWard). Tom is an author, speaker, blogger at Thinking Christian, and editor of The Stream. Though he had read the Gospels plenty of times, Tom decided to read them with new eyes—in light of “what Jesus didn’t say, and what he didn’t do.” This fresh perspective Tom focuses on notes something we often take for granted about Jesus: his astonishing presumed authority; his poise and decisiveness of thought and action; his character that reveals a stunning integrity and profound spirit of self-sacrifice; his uncontested brilliance of intellect and wisdom; his use of supernatural power for the benefit of others rather than for his own advantage.
Jesus brings together the virtues in remarkable balance—nothing excessive, nothing deficient. He doesn’t need to do further research to give an answer. His moral intuitions and intellectual insights are finely-tuned, and he never engages in second-guessing. When he says he is greater than the Temple or than Solomon, he is bold and unself-conscious, without a hint of vanity or arrogance. When he speaks of his own humility of heart and sinlessness, he is utterly believable. The portrait of Jesus the Gospels paint is compelling and stunning. The life and character of Jesus are indeed too good to be false.
Paul M. Gould
I love this month’s question because I love to read books. For over ten years now, I’ve been keeping a book log. Whenever I finish a book, I record the date, title, author, and a one-sentence summary of the book in my book log. I tend to read between 40-50 books a year and it has been fun to flip through my log from time to time to see all the ground I’ve covered. You can see some of my “best of” for each year on my website.
So, what are some of the best books I’ve read so far this year and why? To date, I’ve read 37 books. If I may, I’ll select a “best of” in a couple of categories.
Best of philosophy Richard Swinburne, Are we Bodies or Souls? My one sentence description from the book log: “A tightly written summary of the main argument for dualism.” I like this book because it is a nice distillation of Swinburne’s many writings on the reasons for believing in souls. While my own view of human persons differs slightly from his, I think that bold, clear, and powerful arguments for some version of dualism are much needed today in the academy. And the fact that this book is accessible to others is an important added benefit. We need to be able to argue why we are more than our bodies. Of course, we are not less than our bodies. We are, on my view, souls that have bodies, or as my friend Brandon Rickabaugh puts it in some of his work, we are bodily souls. Runner up: Erik Wielenberg’s Robust Ethics.
Best in theology Sarah Lane Ritchie, Divine Action and the Human Mind. You can read my review of this book, along with a symposium on the book here. My one sentence description: “A proposed new framework for understanding divine action in the world.” I appreciate this book because it considers more “participatory” and theological understandings of God’s action in the world. Conversant with contemporary philosophy of mind, divine action theory, and the theological turn away from standard causal joint models, this book is a must-read for those interested in understanding better the God-world relation.
Best on Jesus Jesus the Great Philosopher, by Jonathan Pennington. To see my Christianity Today review click here. I’m super excited about this book. One sentence summary: “Christianity is a philosophy and Jesus is a philosopher King.” I think that this is an important book to remind us that we follow the smartest person ever: Jesus the great philosopher.
Best in fiction (do I really need to pick just one!!) Dune, by Frank Herbert. Following my policy of reading the book before the movie, I’ve finally gotten around to reading Dune. And I loved it. I read a lot of science fiction, and now I see where almost all of them have found their inspiration.
Best in non-fiction A Walk in the Woods, by Bill Bryson. One sentence summary: “An inspiring story of Bryson’s summer hiking the Appalachian Trail.” I’m reminded that life is a journey and that we ought to take time to enjoy it. And we should get out in nature. And we should be different.
So many honorable mentions: James K. A. Smith’s On the Road with Saint Augustine, Katherine James’s A Prayer for Orion, Joshua Swamidass’s The Geneological Adam, G. K. Chesterton’s The Everlasting Man, Andrew Peterson’s Adorning the Dark, Philippa Foot’s Natural Goodness, Douglas Murray’s The Madness of Crowds, and every book I’ve read from C. S. Lewis this year (an annual repeatable treat). I could go on, but perhaps you’ll have to wait until January at my own website to see my full list of “best ofs” for the year. In the meantime, pour a cup of coffee and tolle lege.
David Baggett
Perhaps the book I would identify as the best book I have read this year isn’t a book fresh from the presses, but one from a few years back I never read until now. It came out five years ago, and it is Os Guinness’s IVP Fool’s Talk. The subtitle is “Recovering the Art of Christian Persuasion.” This is a really fine book. Guinness, as most of you are aware, is a tremendously gifted writer. His chapter titles are always snappy, and each chapter is engaging, often engrossing. His prescience is on ample display throughout the volume, particularly in his ability to see the need for an expansive apologetic that takes seriously winning people, not just arguments. That very phrase in more recent years has been repeated a lot, approaching the status of cliché, but Guinness was clear-eyed on this priority years ago.
I especially relished his account of two powerful pieces of moral evidence that played a pivotal role in W. H. Auden’s eventual conversion to Christianity. I’ll relate the account here:
At the outbreak of the Second World War in 1939, people who knew the young English poet W. H. Auden would have considered him an unlikely prospect for becoming a Christian. Along with his Oxford contemporaries Stephen Spender and Cecil Day Lewis, he was one of the most influential English-speaking poets of his age, and many considered him a prophet. He was also an atheist, a left-wing socialist, a homosexual, and a veteran of the Spanish Civil War, where he had volunteered on the Republican side for seven weeks. There might not have seemed much in his life that would draw him to the Christian faith. But what happened surprised even some of his closest friends.
When Auden arrived in the United States with Christopher Isherwood in January 1939, he was not religious, and he had not been since he was thirteen at Gresham’s School in England. Both his grandfathers had been clergymen, but he described the religion he encountered at boarding school as “nothing but vague uplift, as flat as an old bottle of soda water.” “At thirteen,” he wrote, “I was confirmed. To say that shortly afterwards I lost my faith would be melodramatic and false. I simply lost interest.” From then on, confirmed by his time at Christ Church, Oxford, he was convinced that “people only love God when no one else will love them.” Needless to say, the times in which he lived were hardly conducive to faith either. In his famous poem “September 11, 1939,” which he wrote in a dive on 52nd Street in New York, Auden described the dismal 1930s as “a low dishonest decade.”
Two experiences, however, stood out among those that jolted Auden into rethinking. The first had been earlier in 1933, when he was a schoolmaster at the Downs School in the Malvern Hills. Sitting with three fellow teachers, he was suddenly overwhelmed by the sense that all their existence somehow had infinite value and that he loved them for themselves. But why? Years later he described this experience as a “Vision of Agape” (Love).
The second and deeper experience came in New York two months after he had written the poem “September 1, 1939.” He was in a cinema in Yorkville on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, which unbeknown to him was still largely a German-speaking area. Eager to follow news of the course of the war, he went to see Sieg in Poland [“sieg” means victory], a documentary of the Nazi invasion and conquest of Poland. S. S. Storm Troopers were bayoneting women and children, and members of the audience cried out in support of their fellow-countrymen, “Kill them! Kill them!”
Auden was horrified. His philosophy of life at the time was a broad mix of liberal-socialist-democratic opinions, following his earlier intellectual odyssey through the dogmas of Sigmund Freud and Karl Marx. But one thread had always linked his successive convictions—a belief in the natural goodness of humankind. Whether the solution of the world’s problems lay in politics, education, or psychology, he believed that once the problems were addressed, the world would be happy because humanity was good.
Suddenly, however, as Auden watched the S. S. savagery and heard the brutal response of the audience, he knew he had been wrong. With everything in him he knew intuitively and beyond any doubt that he was encountering absolute evil and that it must be judged and condemned absolutely. There had to be a reason why Hitler was “utterly wrong.” Profoundly shaken, Auden reflected on this experience. Just as in the nineteenth-century Dostoevsky’s belief in the goodness of the Russian peasant had been shattered by the peasant depravity he encountered in Siberia, so Auden’s facile confidence in human goodness had collapsed like a pricked balloon.
For Auden, the experience thrust up two troubling issues—how to account for the undeniable evil he had encountered, and how to justify condemning it with an unconditional and absolute judgment. After all, for educated people like him there were no “absolutes” of any kind in his universe. (A favorite phrase of William James was “Damn the absolute!” and in The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, James Joyce’s Stephen Daedalus repeats his mantra, “the Absolute is dead.”) To judge anything absolutely was naïve and unthinkable, the sort of thing done only by the great unwashed. Following Nietzsche, all self-respecting philosophers had abandoned absolute judgments for relativism. And long before the day of political correctness, psychologists had thrown over absolutes in favor of nonjudgmental tolerance and acceptance.
Auden raised his concerns with his friends. “The English intellectuals who now cry to Heaven against the evil incarnated in Hitler have no Heaven to cry to,” he told one friend. It was clear to him that liberalism had a fatal flaw. “The whole trend of liberal thought,” he wrote the next year, “has been to undermine faith in the absolute….It has tried to make reason the judge….But since life is a changing process…the attempt to find a humanistic basis of keeping a promise works logically with the conclusion, ‘I can break it whenever I feel convenient.’” He spoke similarly in an interview in the Observer, “Unless one is prepared to take a relativist view that all morals are a matter of personal taste, one could hardly avoid asking the question: ‘If, as I am convinced, the Nazis are wrong and we are right, what is it that validates our values and invalidates theirs?’”
The only remedy to use when facing such evil, Auden concluded, was the renewal of “faith in the absolute.” Or as he posed the challenge in a poem written soon after his visit to the Yorkville cinema: “Either we serve the unconditional/Or some Hitlerian monster will supply/An iron convention to do evil by.”
If I may, I would mention one other book, not because it’s in the running for the best I have read this year, but because my wife Marybeth and I contributed a chapter to it and we had a lot of fun doing so. If you are a fan of the television show The Good Place, check out The Good Place and Philosophy. Bill Irwin, a good friend and one of my old colleagues at King’s College in Pennsylvania, originally started the Philosophy and Popular Culture series at Open Court, and he has now moved it over to Wiley Blackwell. The series has shown some serious longevity, likely because it is constructed on a brilliant premise, and one that we can all learn from: using popular culture to help people think about more serious issues.
In the piece that Marybeth and I wrote, we discussed the “coincidence thesis,” the notion that there is ultimate airtight correspondence between happiness and holiness. Such coincidence or correspondence makes best sense on a theistic depiction, which is an important aspect of the moral case for God in light of the need for the full rational authority of morality. Sadly, however, it is a direction the thoroughly secular show is never willing to broach, despite its subject of the afterlife. This led to the penultimate line in our piece: “Although The Good Place may be second to none as a brilliant sitcom, we have principled reason to hope for an even more divine comedy.”
Guest Contributor Naomi Noguchi Reese
This year has been an interesting year for me as far as my reading of books go. I have three books that impressed me so far. They are Wonderful Fool by Endo Shusaku (1923-1966), 2084 by John Lennox, and How to Fight Racism by Jemar Tisby (forthcoming).
I am an avid reader of Shusaku Endo (1923-1996), a Japanese novelist whose work explores the relation between faith and culture in Japan. The most popular work of Endo’s is Silence, which film director Martin Scorsese recently made a movie from (having been in the works for more than twenty years). His lesser-known novel, Deep River, is my favorite. This was his last novel before his passing in 1996 and was also translated into English. In this book, Endo brings back Gaston Bonaparte—a Christ figure—from his earlier novel Wonderful Fool (1959). He is a descendant of Napoleon Bonaparte. But, unlike his famous ancestor, Gaston does not fit the mold of a hero at all. He is slow and ignorant and has no beauty or majesty to attract people. But Gaston has one thing going for him—his ability and willingness to suffer along with those who are weak and oppressed. He comforts those who seemingly can’t be comforted and loves those who are unlovable. I have always wanted to learn more about Gaston—mainly how Endo might have developed this character and how Gaston may reflect the progression of Endo’s theological thinking on Christ. Wonderful Fool is light reading and a bit mysterious from time to time, but it forces you to think about who this wonderful fool is. One of the characters, career-driven Tomoe (pronounced Toe-moe-ay), exclaims, “He is a fool, but he is a wonderful fool!”
The next book that I enjoyed reading this year was 2084 by John Lennox. He deals with the rise of artificial intelligence (AI) and challenged me to think about how we should coexist with AI. Lennox covers science, technology, philosophy, and some biblical studies, which makes the material somewhat dense and complex. But this is a must-read, in my opinion, especially since we are living in a time when people are turning to AI not only for information but also friendship (e.g., the Replika app, which provides an “AI companion who cares”).
The last book that I enjoyed reading this year was How to Fight Racism by Jemar Tisby, the author of The Color of Compromise. This book is forthcoming and set to be released in January, 2021. This is also another must-read, in my opinion. Tisby provides practical ways to counter racism and helpful guidance for thinking about racial justice.
Do you have a question you’d like us to consider for an upcoming Roundtable? If so, please email us at worldviewbulletin@gmail.com.
Recommended Resource
One primary goal we have as Christians is to understand the Bible in order to grasp what God has communicated to us through it. This is challenging, however, because we are separated from Scripture’s authors by language, culture, and time. Thus, much in Scripture can appear to us to be confusing, mysterious, or even contradictory. That’s why a volume like Murray Harris’s Navigating Tough Texts: A Guide to Problem Passages in the New Testament is so useful.
Harris, Professor Emeritus of New Testament Exegesis and Theology at Trinity Evangelical Theological School, draws on a lifetime of expertise to clarify and explain dozens of challenging passages throughout the New Testament. A few examples include:
What Jesus meant when he said, “the kingdom of heaven has been subjected to violence, and violent people have been raiding it” (Matt. 11:12).
What he meant by “binding and loosing” on earth and in heaven (Matt. 16:19).
The meaning of Paul’s reference to those “who are baptized for the dead” (1 Cor. 15:29).
How we should understand Paul’s attitude toward slavery as expressed in the book of Philemon, and many more. This question is excerpted below.
PAUL AND SLAVERY (Phlm 15–16)
Onesimus was a slave of Philemon in Colossae who had not only run away from his master (Phlm 15–16) but had also absconded with some of Philemon’s money or possessions (vv. 18–19). Attracted by the anonymity and excitement of a large metropolis, he traveled furtively to Rome, where somehow he met the imprisoned Paul, who led him to faith in Christ (v. 10). Paul soon discovered him to be an able and willing helper as well as a Christian companion (vv. 11–13, 16). Other considerations apart, Paul would have liked to keep Onesimus at his side (v. 13), but he felt compelled to send him back to Colossae so that Philemon, the legal owner of Onesimus (v. 16), might himself have the opportunity of receiving him back as a Christian brother (v. 16) and of possibly releasing him for further service to Paul (vv. 14, 20–21). Accordingly, Onesimus returned to Philemon with this letter.
Although this letter is not an essay on slavery, from it we may deduce Paul’s attitude to slavery. To begin with, Paul apparently accepted slavery as an inevitable part of the social, economic, and legal status quo, without questioning or trying to justify its existence. But acceptance of the status quo should not be equated with endorsement of the status quo. Toleration is not the same as approval. Paul did not object to slave ownership within Christian ranks, but he encouraged masters to reward slaves suitably for honest work, to desist from threatening them (Eph 6:8–9), and to give them just and equitable treatment (Col 4:1). He elevated the status of slaves by addressing them as persons and as moral agents who were responsible, and ought to be responsive, to their earthly masters as well as to their heavenly Lord (Eph 6:5–8; Col 3:22).
Further, when Paul emphasizes Onesimus’s true identity as a dearly loved Christian brother (v. 16), he sets the master-slave relation on a new footing. “It may be that he (Onesimus) was separated from you (Philemon) for a short time precisely so that you may have him back permanently, no longer regarded as merely a slave (hōs doulon) but as more than a slave—as a dear brother” (vv. 15–16). Paul is undermining the discrimination that is at the heart of slavery and sounding its death knell. In this letter, Paul, a highly educated Roman citizen, is championing the cause of a destitute runaway slave whose life was potentially forfeit because of his flight and his theft (vv. 17–19).
Did Paul advocate freeing slaves? When he expresses his confidence that Philemon would obey him and accept Onesimus back and forgive him (v. 21a), he adds that he knows Philemon “will do even more than I ask” (v. 21b). That undefined additional element could well be the setting free of Onesimus for Christian service either at Colossae or at Rome with Paul. When he is discussing possible changes of status for believers (including slaves) in 1 Corinthians 7:17–24, his general advice is “remain as you were when God called you” (see 1 Cor 7:17, 20, 24). But in 1 Corinthians 7:21b, he parenthetically states an exception to the general principle: “But if you are actually able (kai dynasai) to gain your freedom, seize it all the more.”
It is fair to conclude that by his teaching and his example, Paul was laying one of the explosive charges that would one day—although sadly, belatedly—detonate and destroy the institution of slavery.
Find Navigating Tough Texts: A Guide to Problem Passages in the New Testament at Lexham Press or Amazon.
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