Seeing as I’m not getting any younger (try as I might), I’ve been reflecting on the last 10 years of my Christian walk, and wondering what books I will recommend to a younger Christian from my library. So I thought to write down the top 10 books of the last decade of my life. Note that they are in order of when I read them, not necessarily which one is the best, a judgment that I cannot make.

1Pagan Christianity – Frank Viola

This was the book that first answered some of the doubts my church family and I already had about today’s church practices. It details how modern Christianity’s idolatrous fixation with church buildings, the history and legitimacy or otherwise of tithing for Christians, the clergy/laity divide, sermons and their origin etc. have more to do with Greco-Roman paganism than 1^st century Christianity. Not safe for those who like church as it is today.

2From Eternity To Here – Frank Viola

This one unfolds God’s plan for his church which he laid out before the foundations of the earth. It discusses several images that the New Testament writers use to describe the church, including the bride, the house, the family, the temple etc. It challenges your comfort zone on why churches exist in the first place.

3The Reformers and Their Stepchildren – Leonard Verduin

A classic on the Protestant Reformation of the 16^th century, and how those who wanted to take things further than the leaders of the Reformation would allow were hunted down, tortured and killed in all sorts of macabre ways. The beliefs that these Anabaptists aka the Radical Reformation, suffered for seem self evident now, and a lot of Christians now hold to most of them, and yet very few acknowledge those who actually died to state that these practices needed to change. Popular Christianity has a lot to learn from those who chose such narrow paths to their own detriment.

Interestingly Leonard Verduin who was a Reformed theologian made enemies in his own church tradition for drawing attention to what his spiritual forefathers had done to the Anabaptists. Sigh …

4The Politics of Jesus – John Howard Yoder

Having read about Anabaptism, it seemed only logical that the next book be one by an Anabaptist himself. This book caused a revolution in Christian by questioning how Christianity had come to view Jesus as not caring much about the socio-political environment in which he lived, by virtue of which Christians have left social and economic justice to be the purview of the “world leaders”, when in fact Jesus tasks the church to be very busy following him in this direction of being “good news” to the poor, oppressed, sick, marginalized and downtrodden. Whether Christians who were ruffled by what he said decided to take Jesus seriously or go back to the apolitical Jesus really becomes a conscious choice.

5New Testament History – Frederic Fyvie (F. F.) Bruce

My first introduction to the world of New Testament history. FF Bruce really peaked my interest in understanding the world of the 1^st Century and using that as an additional tool in understanding Jesus and early Christianity. Bruce, thanks for setting me on the right path.

6Making A Meal of It – Ben Witherington III

Ben Witherington takes a good look at the meal with many names i.e. the Lord’s Supper, Communion, Eucharist etc. He sketches out how it has been observed historically from the times of early Christianity where it was a full meal sometimes taken even before the meeting began, to the Roman Catholic and Protestant interpretations of it and how it’s observed today. He encourages us to look again at how pivotal this meal is, and yet to remove the cruft that has put so much superstition around it. A good read.

7The Bible Made Impossible – Christian Smith

Why do we have many interpretations of the same bible by different people who claim to follow the same Jesus? Could it be that the attitudes with which we come to the bible are the problem, and not the bible itself? In the light of the million and 1 divisions in Protestant Christianity, should we reconsider the notion that “a simple plain reading of the bible with the Holy Spirit’s guidance” is all we need to correctly interpret the bible? Christian Smith provides a more satisfying, balanced and humble approach to how we should approach the bible, making Jesus the centerpiece for biblical interpretation.

8Jesus and the Victory of God – Nicholas Thomas Wright

This close to 700 page masterpiece on Jesus really expanded my reading of the gospels beyond the nice, safe, simplistic stories that I had been taught in Sunday school. Laying down the background of 1^st century Judaism from “New Testament and the People of God“, NT Wright lays out Jesus’s ministry by mainly seeing him as a prophet like Jeremiah, Isaiah etc. No, the parable of the prodigal son meant more than you think, the cursing of the fig tree was a proper condemnation of Israel, the cleansing of the temple was a very prophetic activity. And by the way Mk 13 and Matt 24 are not talking about some “End Times” with some great tribulation as depicted to us by the Dispensationalists – they referred to concrete actions which happened in AD 67-70. For those who don’t have the time, reading “How God Became King” by the same author will suffice, since it’s a smaller, less academic one.

9The Resurrection of the Son of God – Nicholas Thomas Wright

The 3^rd in the “Christian Origins and the Question of God” series, this does a detailed survey of what resurrection meant to the cultures that surrounded 1^st century Jews i.e. Greek platonism, and clearly differentiates it from resurrection as understood by Jesus and his disciples before it even happened to Jesus. I was expecting to get the arguments for why Jesus’s resurrection was historically plausible which this book has in spades (including debunking all the claims of similarity with other “resurrection myths”) but the additional content laying out the implications of Jesus’s resurrection for Christianity itself was the part I enjoyed the most. For those who don’t have the time, reading “Surprised by Hope” by the same author will suffice, since it’s a smaller, less academic one.

10The King Jesus Gospel – Scott McKnight

Over the centuries, the good news of Jesus has been reduced to many statements, but today almost universally the refrain is that the gospel is that “Jesus came to die for our sins”. Scott McKnight draws the difference between this the “soterian gospel” or “plan of salvation” and the gospel according to the New Testament. He expands our view of what the word means from a historical analysis of the word “evangelion” and its usage in the 1^st century to an analysis of 1 Cor 15:1-11, and places the emphasis where it should be – on the declaration of Jesus as God’s anointed king who is calling people into his kingdom now and kingdom future.

 

Others interesting books that didn’t make the list include Howard Snyder’s “Salvation Means Creation Healed” , Dallas Willard’s “Divine Conspiracy”, Greg Boyd’s “The Myth of a Christian Religion” (which I still haven’t finished fully but loved anyway and will reread all over someday).

 

And sorry, I don’t read “motivational” books. I simply don’t have the stomach for their fluffy feel-goodness.