So I am told, as a Church Times reviewer, that they're doing a feature this autumn on 'the best 100 Christian books of all time'. And they want suggestions. The criteria are:
Works should be of enduring value, influential in their time or after it. The
list will encompass fiction and nonfiction, theological scholarship and popular
titles, authors ranging from St. Augustine to Eamon Duffy to C. S. Lewis. (The
only suggestion we will not consider is the Bible, divinely inspired
authorship constituting an unfair advantage.) Among the categories to consider:
mission and ministry, church history, theology, prayer and spirituality, the Old
and New Testaments, liturgy and worship, literature and apologetics.
Now, there's a fun parlour game! What to nominate? I passed over the Prayer Book (which won't be short of friends) and
Pilgrim's Progress (likewise). Here is my initial suggestion and rationale:
Philip Jacob Spener's Pia Desideria (1675). It's a short call to arms - or
rather, to renewed piety: it was the book which kick-started Pietism, and is
therefore indirectly (no, actually, pretty directly) responsible for modern
Evangelicalism. What makes it so wonderful is that it combines two things which
are almost never brought together. First, a moving call for moral and spiritual
renewal: its insistence (which both Pietists and Evangelicals have too often
forgotten) that to be a Christian means to follow Christ, not to be able to win
doctrinal arguments. Against the hair-splitters and heresy hunters of his day,
he warned that at the last judgement ‘we shall not be asked how learned we
were’, but rather ‘how faithfully and with how childlike a heart we sought to
further the kingdom of God’. And he added that if St. Paul were to try to
follow one of the theological debates of the age, he would ‘understand only a
little of what our slippery geniuses sometimes say’. BUT, he combines this
preacherly idealism with a level-headed practicality about what should be done.
In particular, he makes the revolutionary suggestion that Christians should not
leave their spiritual fate in the hands of their ministers, nor of the political
powers who usually dominated their churches, but rather take matters into their
own hands. He recommended ‘the
ancient and apostolic kind of church meetings’, that is, Bible study and
discussion groups for mutual support and encouragement. Methodist bands and
classes got the idea directly from him. It seems so normal now that it's hard to
grasp how empowering and revolutionary it once was.
I think Spener deserves top-100 billing. But maybe just because I've been working on it these last couple of months. What other obscure gems want rescuing?
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