This post is a compilation of the books I’ve read in the second half of the year, including my summer reading and books assigned for the fall semester. The list is divided into Biblical & Theological Studies, Biography, and Fiction/Poetry/Philosophy.
Biblical and Theological Studies:
Much of my engagement with the Bible and theology this fall was through two classes. The first was a systematic theology seminar on the life and works of Martin Luther, and the second was a biblical theology class on Paul’s letter to the Romans. My Luther class gave me the chance to reflect on how a theologian is formed through attention to Luther’s own theological method and the resulting works. An important take-away from the class was learning about the theology of the cross, which is explained well in Forde’s book, primarily drawing from Luther’s 1518 Heidelberg Disputation. A theology of the cross runs through all of Luther’s theology and is arguably one of the cornerstones of his theological method. We prefer to see God in power, but a theology of the cross recognizes that God suffered and was humiliated. Similarly, even though we might not admit it, we act as though our acts can be efficacious and pleasing to God. Luther strongly disagreed with this way of life, for his theology was so God-centered that he found human identity in justification through Christ. Like Christ, Christians also suffer. Life is not always an upward climb to the glory of God, but often includes a journey on the via negativa. To repackage T.S. Eliot’s epigraph of “Burnt Norton” taken from Heraclitus, “ὁδὸς ἄνω κάτω μία καὶ ὡυτή,” or “the way upward and the way downward is one in the same.”
My biggest take-away from my class on Romans was how familiar I could be with a book of the Bible. Each week, I studied approximately one of the sixteen chapters of Romans, read the corresponding chapters in Leon Morris’s commentary on the book, and wrote out a one-page summary of that chapter. At the end of the semester, the final exam was an in-class essay with the goal of outlining Paul’s argument in Romans from memory. After writing this essay, I was surprised how much of the book I had internalized. Above all, I am moved to give thanks to God for the concise and powerful explanation of the gospel that Romans is.
- The Bible: Romans, I,II,III John, Ezekiel
- Gerhard O. Forde: On Being a Theologian of the Cross
- Paul Althaus: The Theology of Martin Luther
- Martin Luther: The Essential Luther (Edited and translated by Tryntje Helfferich)
- Robert Banks: Going to Church in the First Century
- Leon Morris: The Epistle to the Romans
- Kenneth Berding: Walking in the Spirit
- Tim Keller: Counterfeit Gods
- Thaddeus Williams: Confronting Injustice without Compromising Truth: 12 Questions Christians Should Ask About Social Justice
Biography:
A Bible class I took this summer on pilgrimage focused on viewing life as a journey. One focus on the class was on spiritual autobiography, or how a person makes sense of their spiritual development over the course of their life. While this development could be a greater understanding of Christian love as in the case of I’ll Push You, this also included stories of conversion, as in Lamin Sanneh’s autobiography, which takes readers from his upbringing in Muslim-dominated Gambia to his gradual conversion and transition to the United States. As the year came to a close, I reflected on the biography and poetry of T.S. Eliot, writing an essay which analyzed his poem Ash-Wednesday as an interpretive key to Eliot’s own conception of conversion to Christianity. The essay is titled: “Because I Do Not Hope to Turn: Conversion in T.S. Eliot’s Ash-Wednesday.”
- Herman Selderhuis: Martin Luther: A Spiritual Biography
- Lamin Sanneh: Summoned from the Margin: The Homecoming of an African
- Paul Hattaway: The Heavenly Man: The Remarkable True Story of Chinese Christian Brother Yun
- Justin Skeesuck and Patrick Gray: I’ll Push You
- Russell Kirk: Eliot and His Age: T.S. Eliot’s Moral Imagination in the Twentieth Century
Fiction, Poetry, Philosophy:
- Italo Calvino: Difficult Loves
- Rachel Joyce: The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry
- Gabriel Garcia Marquez: One Hundred Years of Solitude
- Ernest Hemingway: The Sun also Rises
- William Wordsworth: Selected Poems
- Mary Shelley: Frankenstein
- Herman Melville: Moby-Dick
- Gerard Manley Hopkins: Selected Poems
- Charles Darwin: The Origin of Species
- T.S. Eliot: Selected Poems
- Jean-Paul Sartre: Nausea
- Ralph Waldo Emerson: Nature, The American Scholar, An Address Delivered Before the Senior Class in Divinity College, Cambridge, Self-Reliance, The Over-Soul, Experience
- Thomas Traherne: Centuries of Meditations
- Aristotle: Physics
Crossing the Jordan 
I enjoyed your recap of reading.
* Did you read the entire work, The Origin of Species, by Charles Darwin? What impact did it have on you? Are you open, at least in principle, to the compatibility between biblical religion and evolutionary biology, otherwise known as “evolutionary creation” or “theistic evolution”? At some point, I encourage you to read Where the Conflict Really Lies: Science, Religion, and Naturalism (Oxford 2011), where Christian philosopher Alvin Plantinga makes a persuasive argument for “guided Darwinism.”
* What impact did Thomas Traherne’s Centuries of Meditations make? I have wanted to read his writing. He was born shortly after George Herbert’s death, and he is regarded as one of the most important Anglican poet-theologians.
* Editing suggestion: poem titles, unless I’m mistaken, should be in quotation marks, not italicized like book titles.
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I read the Introduction, chapters I-IV, VI-VII, VIII: Objections to the Theory of Natural Selection as Applied to Instincts: Neuter and Sterile Insects, Summary, IX, and XV. This adds up to about three-fourths of the book. Unfortunately, the book did not have much of an impact on me because of time constraints and the fact that the register was hard for me to understand. Because Darwin is so ingrained in the language of the scientific community in the 1800’s, it takes a Bible major in the 21st century a significant amount of effort to track with Darwin’s basic argument. As a result, much of my understanding of the book was guided by seminar discussion (Thank God!). It seems like the distinction between micro and macro evolution is important to the connection between biblical religion and evolutionary biology. I am not familiar with that book by Plantinga, but his position does not surprise me. I am more familiar with the young earth creation model, but my astronomy teacher at Biola taught our class about theistic evolution. Simply put, I have not spent very much time deciding what I believe on this issue, so I am not prepared to say which of the models is better than the other. If a person believes in theistic evolution but leaves room for faith in an all-powerful God, I would not raise any objections.
I don’t have room to make substantial remarks about all of the books on the list, so I appreciate you asking me about these two books. Traherne’s meditations were impactful for me because they articulated how a Christian can accept the created world despite its fallenness. Traherne returns over and over to the statement that “God made the world for you,” and encourages readers to live their lives in a way that accords with this statement. A good Christian is not a Gnostic, and to reject the world is to reject the God who made it! God is very involved in creation in his writing, so the book was an interesting philosophical and theological introduction to the poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins which I read later in the semester. One could say the same thing about George Herbert!
I was also under the impression that names of poems should be set in quotation marks, while books are italicized. I italicized Ash-Wednesday because I read that longer poems are usually italicized and most of the scholarly articles I read on the poem this semester also italicized the poem.
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Regarding the question of formatting, here’s what MLA says:
* Titles of books, plays, or works published singularly (not anthologized) should be italicized.
* Titles of poems, short stories, or works published in an anthology will have quotation marks around them.
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Ahh, that is interesting! I was going off of owl.purdue.edu which summarizes poem titles for Chicago style: “The titles of most poems should be enclosed in double quotation marks, but the titles of very long poems should be italicized.” This statement, combined with the fact that all major sources I read on Ash-Wednesday italicized the poem, convinced me to italicize it in this case. (https://owl.purdue.edu/owl/research_and_citation/chicago_manual_17th_edition/cmos_formatting_and_style_guide/general_format.html)
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Do Torrey papers require MLA or Chicago?
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Torrey papers use Chicago style.
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