Thu 1 Jan, 2009
We spent Christmas with the Gilson side of the family this year. One of many very enjoyable conversations I had with there was about books, with a family member who has a Ph.D. in management, holds a senior leadership position at a state university, and is a follower of Christ. She told me about the difficulty she has had with getting in touch with excellent Christian thinking in church—a difficulty that is admittedly all too common (though that’s improving—see below). I mentioned some good books on Christian thinking, and she asked me to email her with the information on them.
So now I’m getting double use from that work by posting it here on the blog. From my own recent experience, these are some of the books I would recommend to anyone who wants an introduction to high-quality current Christian thinking.
The Divine Conspiracy: Rediscovering Our Hidden Life In God by Dallas Willard (1998). Willard teaches philosophy at the University of Southern California. This book is a unique blend of philosophical thinking and practical application for non-technical readers. As such it’s an outstanding model of how to think well in order to do well: clear without being dumbed-down in the least. It’s the first book I would recommend to any reader on general Christian thinking.
Reasonable Faith: Christian Truth and Apologetics by William Lane Craig. This is a more technical discussion of philosophical foundations for belief in Christ. The third edition came out just this past summer. Craig has a Ph.D. from the University of Birmingham (England) and a D.Theol. from the University of Munich, and is now on the faculty at Talbot Theological Seminary. He is one of a handful of thinkers who are developing a new and, so far at least, quite robust version of the Cosmological Argument for God. The book also covers some reasons for confidence in the historicity of Christ’s resurrection, based on findings that skeptics and atheists actually tend in large part to agree with.
Kingdom Triangle: Recover the Christian Mind, Renovate the Soul, Restore the Spirit’s Power by J.P. Moreland (2007). Moreland studied under Dallas Willard and received his Ph.D. in philosophy at USC. This book cuts a middle ground: he targeted it for lay persons but states explicitly that he intends to push them into more difficult territory than they’re probably accustomed to. He puts this in context of a discussion of the history of Christian anti-intellectualism, and this is one of many things he has written to try to turn that tide. The book also covers other ground besides that, including some fairly surprising information about what God is doing around the world.
By the way, with reference to the intellectual re-maturing (it wasn’t always this way) of the church, Craig had an article in Christianity Today last July that’s fairly encouraging. He credits a book by Alvin Plantinga, God and Other Minds: A Study of the Rational Justification of Belief in God (1967) as the turning point. I’m reading it now. It may not be the most technical philosophy I’ve worked through, but it’s pretty close. It’s stretching me.
With that book and a later one, God, Freedom, and Evil (which I haven’t read), Plantinga accomplished the impossible: he solved a philosophical question to virtually everyone’s satisfaction. It was an aspect of the problem of evil, about which you can read more here. (I admit: I wrote about it from secondary sources. I’m catching up now.)
Plantinga holds a chair in philosophy at Notre Dame. For a good laugh, I guarantee you’ll enjoy listening to him explaining at the beginning of this lecture what a Dutch Calvinist like him is doing on the faculty there. (He is an uncommonly excellent lecturer, by the way, so I would actually recommend listening to the whole thing.) Another book of his, Warranted Christian Belief (2000), is a favorite of mine, and rather important in showing that believing in Christianity is not irrational as some have said it is.
These are, most of them, relatively recent. Going back before them, I would refer to G.K. Chesterton, who may be the wittiest of all Christian writers and astonishingly prescient: writing 100 years ago, somehow he nailed many of today’s trends of thought. You can find his books online–I would search for The Everlasting Man and Orthodoxy. There’s always C.S. Lewis, of course, who had more widespread influence than any other conservatively-oriented Christian author in the 20th century.
Then there are a few more from a social science perspective:
Rodney Stark is a prolific sociologist and author who has a way of using empirical data to bust up myths and misconceptions. Of his many books the two I would most recommend are For the Glory of God: How Monotheism Led to Reformations, Science, Witch-Hunts, and the End of Slavery, (Princeton University Press, 2004), and the very current What Americans Really Believe (Baylor University Press, 2008) presenting about 200 pages of survey report on religion in America.
Another pair of sociologists, Christian Smith and Melanie Lundquist Denton, wrote Soul Searching: The Religious and Spiritual Lives of American Teenagers (Oxford University Press, USA, 2005). Among other things it is the best model of sociological methodology I’ve seen–not that I’m a sociologist, but from where I stand it’s still very impressive for the size and thoroughness of their sample and methods. This book received a lot of press when it came out, mostly focusing on its conclusion that a large number of young Americans hold to an indefinite sort of spirituality the authors called “moral therapeutic deism.” What I picked up from it was the difference adherence to religion makes in teenagers’ lives.
There are many more books I could have included, but this ought to suffice for a good start.
Great list. I definitely rate Divine Conspiracy as having the most impact on my faith in recent years and think Kingdom Triangle compares favourably. For some reason I have yet to get to Reasonable Faith, as there just always seems to be one more pile of books between me and buying it. I’ve read other books by Stark than the ones on your lost and commend them as well.
I would also recommend Fundamentals Of The Faith by Catholic apologist and professor of philosophy at Boston College, Peter Kreeft. The book is a series of essays in keeping with the idea of being generally non-sectarian in a Mere Christianity way.
Excellent list. I haven’t read any of these texts but I plan on picking a few of them up in the near future. Thank you for your recommendations. Sometimes I don’t know where to go to get advise about texts of this sort but I’ll be sure to bookmark your page and look at your blog more frequently in the future.
Alvin Plantinga has long been a favorite of mine and the Free Will Defense is outstanding. I still have to go back and reread it every so often, very slowly, to grasp the argument and every time I feel like I come away enlightened. Another favorite article/argument of his that I like is On Ockham’s Way Out which is about human freedom and God’s foreknowledge. This and some other good ones are found in a collection called “The Analytic Theist” which I highly recommend. A side note about the Free Will Defense, it answers the “problem of evil” question from the point that there is no contradiction between there being a good God and evil existing, in fact it answered it so well that the “problem of evil” argument in now generally stated in a “quantity” of evil. A really good book with arguments from both sides is “The Evidential Argument from Evil” which includes many good theistic thinkers such as William P. Alston, Peter van Inwagen, Richard Swinburne and Plantinga.
Another, more accessible, Christian philosophy book is “Reason for the Hope Within.”I would also recommend J.P. Moreland’s “Love Your God with All Your Mind” as something to read to remind ourselves that God wants us to know him using our minds too. And C. Stephen Evans “Philosophy of Religion: Thinking About Faith” as another accessible read on the subject.
William Lane Craig is another favorite. “Time and Eternity” is interesting look at the nature of time and how God relates. “The Only Wise God” follows Plantinga, I think, in how human freedom and divine foreknowledge relate. And as noted in the above, Craig is well known for the modern development of a cosmological argument for God in “The Kalam Cosmological Argument.” I have a fondness for the Kalam as it was one of those doorway readings for me — I read a smaller version that he had posted up online back in ‘96 and it opened my eyes to “rational” Christian thinking and influenced greatly my walk. Needless to say it was out of print and I had to borrow a copy from a college a few cities away, but it is now back in print and I highly recommend it. Craig also edited “Philosophy of Religion: A Reader and Guide” which contains lots of great contemporary reading on the subject.
Thanks, Luke, for all of that.