#john woolman

Books that have left an indelible mark on my understanding of God or the Christian faith in some way. My spiritual development is unfinished, so this list is unfinished - I'm always open to suggestions

Soren Kierkegaard

The Sickness Unto Death - Explained how sin works psychologically, illustrates how it can be its own punishment

Works of Love - What it means to love, what it costs, what it gives us

Fear and Trembling - What faith means, its miraculous nature

Karl Barth

Evangelical Theology - What theology actually means, how the gospel is good news

The Epistle to the Romans - Shows the need for continual reformation of thought within the church, introduced (to me) the idea of God's freedom in communication to man

Church Dogmatics II.2 - Election is good news! It is God willing to choose humanity despite sin - universal reconciliation can and should be hoped for

The Journal of John Woolman

What undying commitment to justice means, what it looks like

Martin Luther King Jr

Letter from a Birmingham Jail - Made me understand how Romans 13:1 can be integrated into radical politics

A Gift of Love - Brought to life 1 John 4:20

A Prayer for Owen Meany, John Irving

A narrative illustration of unwavering faith

The Imitation of Christ, Thomas Kempis

What we're saved to, salvation has a telos

Flannery O'Connor

Wise Blood - Life without Christ, the perils of sola scriptura

A Good Man is Hard to Find - Shows grace as an intrusive lived experience

Marilynne Robinson

Gilead novels (Gilead, Home, Lila) - Rich illustration of Imago Dei

When I Was a Child I Read Books - Bolstered my understanding of the 8th commandment (reading with charitable intent, in interactions with others in life and on the page)

What Are We Doing Here? - Illustrates what the glory of God means in daily experience

Garry Wills

What Paul Meant - Paul and Jesus were of a unified mind, stop reading Paul as a bible thumper, start reading him as a man who loved dearly and wrote with urgency on live issues

Religio Medici, Thomas Browne

Ecumenism is a beautiful thing and should be strived for in all Christian communities

The Seven Storey Mountain, Thomas Merton

The gospel brings peace of mind and soul, searching for peace is a valid epistemology

Eichmann in Jerusalem, Hannah Arendt

Wickedness is not inevitable, it arises from moral and intellectual sluggardliness

The Cost of Discipleship, Dietrich Bonhoeffer

Learn to love the church, it is the arms of Christ; great exegesis of the Sermon on the Mount; great companion to the book of James

White Evangelical Racism, Anthea Butler

Evangelicalism did not emerge from theological first principles, it is a diseased expression of the faith informed by racism at the root

Jesus and John Wayne, Kristin Kobes du Mez

Evangelicalism did not emerge from theological first principles, it is a diseased expression of the faith informed by misogyny at the root

C.S. Lewis

The Great Divorce - Eternity begins now, sin is its own punishment and grace is its own reward

Till We Have Faces - God has compassion and patience for those who wrestle with him, to summon the boldness to contend with God can be a blessed thing

The Courage to Be, Paul Tillich

The dynamics of Christian faith explained in the abstract

As I Lay Dying, William Faulkner

The thinness of intellectual assent, the richness of faith

The Denial of Death, Ernest Becker

Explanation of the existential need faith meets in the language of continental philosophy

Confessions, St. Augustine

The most theologically and philosophically rich testimony besides that of St. Paul

An Unpublished Essay on the Trinity, Jonathan Edwards

What is the trinity, why is it important

John Milton

Areopagitica - Enforced virtue means nothing

Paradise Lost - Human beings are worth saving even if they aren't deserving of God's favor

Civilization and its Discontents, Sigmund Freud

Illustrates the necessity of grace by exploring a world through the assumption of its absence (excellent foil to A Gift of Love)

The Nature of Doctrine, George Lindbeck

Describes faith as a qualitatively different thing from any other type of knowledge or experience, provides an inventive and elegant response to Kant's First Critique without subordinating faith to the tribunal of reason

Jesus - God & Man, Wolfhart Pannenberg

Athanasius - literally impossible to imagine Christianity without his contributions, unquestionably brat

Augustine - smarter than all hell, the confessions is essential reading, his corpus is a succinct compendium of theological orthodoxy, you know he's brat

Anselm of Canterbury - satisfaction theory is actually more plausible to me than penal substitution, the ontological argument is pure lunacy but is the kind of magical thinking that I'm sad to see disappear once people started systematizing "logic" and "reason" after the enlightenment. Brat.

Thomas Aquinas - I'm kind of more inclined to platonism than aristotlianism but he's brat for this excerpt of the summa alone: “If some are occasionally begotten from demons, it is not from the seed of such demons, nor from their assumed bodies, but from the seed of men taken for the purpose; as when the demon assumes first the form of a woman, and afterward of a man.” In this case, the offspring would be fully human, “so that the person born is not the child of a demon but of a man” (ST I:51:3 ad 6)." Like c'mon that's so funny but also probably saved some childrens' lives if their parents didn't want to 'fess up to having an affair.

Thomas Á Kempis - I wish I could cultivate the humility of spirit he writes about in The Imitation of Christ! This guy knows what's up! Brat!

Martin Luther - Do you know how antisemitic you have to be in order to be remembered as antisemitic even if graded on a curve relative to his cultural context? Even his principled refusal to lean into double predestination despite it's logical coherence & consubstantiative view of the sacrament of the Eucharist won't save him from being pronounced decidedly un-brat.

John Calvin - way better than his devotees, more legitimate human compassionate distress at double predestination than the vastly inferior ulrich zwingli - brat.

Ulrich Zwingli - goes without saying - un-brat.

John Woolman - went hard in the paint to fight the transatlantic slave trade his whole life. Y'all could only DREAM of walking in humble submission before God in service of your fellow man like this. Brat.

Friedrich Schleiermacher - oh so Christianity is all about absolute dependence? That's what it is? Conjuring up feelings of absolute dependence? Get real! Not brat.

Soren Kierkegaard - Absolutely goated. Love to read a guy excoriating Christian nationalism. He's so brat for that.

Karl Barth - this page is called the Church Blogmatics so you already know what I'm thinking on this one. His doctrine of election makes me able to sleep at night and his understanding of theology as a living, breathing science makes me want to engage with it. Brat.