A Diagram to Help You Know What Books to Read

Kirk E. Miller 1 Comment

I work in a seminary library and help with collection development (i.e., selecting and purchasing books for the library’s collection). Therefore, I spend a good amount of time looking through catalogues from Christian publishers. I also rub shoulders a lot with Christians who like to read Christian books, whether scholarly or more “pop” literature.

Every time I scan through these publishers’ catalogues, I think of Ecclesiastes 12:12 – “Of making many books there is no end.”

Furthermore, as I browse these catalogues with hundreds of new books, find myself in a Christian culture in which these new books are referred to as “the next best thing” and “must reads,” and hear people talk about how they are reading or are so excited to read this or that new book, I find myself a little annoyed.

Here’s a diagram that I think might be helpful in providing a little guidance on how to determine which books you should be reading with the limited time that you have.

You’ve probably sensed my point by now.

Maybe my sense is off here, but it seems to me that in evangelicalism we are rather infatuated with the contemporary to the neglect of our heritage. And my perception is that our selection of books to read has not escaped this tendency.

Don’t get me wrong. Contemporary books are important. They will be more up to date culturally. They will be more up to date in terms of scholarly discussion and advancement.

However, in our general reading habits, why would we give so much priority to books that will in all likelihood be forgotten within 50 years, a decade, or even less time than that? Why not put those books on the top of our stack of books that have stood the test of centuries and have proven helpful to thousands throughout church history?

These are just some thoughts I’ve been having lately. It’s a challenge to my own reading habits (as much as I, a student, am able to determine them) as much as anyone else’s.

RECOMMENDED: Left Behind in America by Russell Moore

Kirk E. Miller

Russell Moore recently wrote an insightful piece at The Gospel Coalition titled, “Left Behind in America: Following Christ After Culture Wars.”

Here’s a sample,

The problem was that, from the beginning, Christian values were always more popular than the Christian gospel in American culture. That’s why one could speak with great acclaim, in almost any era of the nation’s history, of “God and country,” but then create cultural distance as soon as one mentioned “Christ and him crucified.” God was always welcome in American culture as the deity charged with blessing America. But the God who must be approached through the mediation of the blood of Christ was much more difficult to set to patriotic music or to “amen” in a prayer at the Rotary Club.

Now that Christians in America are being confronted with the fact that America isn’t a “Christian nation,” they are more and more awakening to the reality that America never was a “Christian nation” in any Christian sense of the word “Christian.”

In my experience (and my experience may not be reflective of reality more generally) I’ve found that this theme is readily apparent to many Christians in my generation (millennials) but is much more difficulty grasped or accepted by Christians of older generations who lived more of their lives in an environment in which this “Christian America” idea was pervasive.

However much this idea of a “Christian America” with its corresponding form of “Christianity” (i.e., the civil religion of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and enlightenment thought that gave birth to the “American experiment”) may have helped to keep America in moral check to some degree (and in some less than satisfying sense), I’m afraid it did the opposite to the nature of Christianity and people’s perception of the Gospel–it skewed them.

Read the full article here.

7 Free Books by D.A. Carson (PDF)

Kirk E. Miller

The following seven books by my professor, D.A. Carson, are available for FREE as PDF files. The Difficult Doctrine of the Love of God is suppose to be one of his best, if not his best, works as of yet.

The Difficult Doctrine of the Love of God.

Memoirs of an Ordinary Pastor.

Letters Along the Way.

Holy Sonnets of the Twentieth Century.

For the Love of God, Volume One.

For the Love of God, Volume Two.

Love in Hard Places.

The Seminary Strain

Kirk E. Miller

“Imagine an institution that requires its leaders to attend not only college, but graduate school. Imagine that the graduate school in question is constitutionally forbidden from receiving any form of government aid, that it typically requires three years of full-time schooling for the diploma, that the nature of the schooling bears almost no resemblance to the job in question, and that the pay for graduates is far lower than other professions. You have just imagined the relationship between the Christian Church and her seminaries.”

~ From “The Seminary Bubble” by Jerry Bowyer. Continue reading here.

I’m currently in my third year of seminary. So the intense financial, physical, relational, emotional, psychological, and (am I allowed to say it?) spiritual strain of the seminary experience is particularly vivid to me (and my wife) right now. This awareness comes not only from personal experience–although that’s my primary source–but also from the stories of many of my peers. Some of those stories are rather heart-wrenching.

I’m recuringly bothered by this. I’m troubling with how straining the seminary experience typically is and how little attention the church (speaking broadly here) seems to be giving to this problem. To be blunt, it seems that many are actually pretty oblivious to the problems. And, mind you, these seminarians are the future leaders of the Church who are putting themselves through this because of their heart for and call to serve her.

I don’t have a solution to offer for this multifaceted dilemma (I’m just well aware that there’s a problem). So, I suppose I’m leaving this post in a bit of a depressing mood (sorry). However, my goal is not to be a “Debbie downer,” but to bring some awareness to this issue.

Read the rest of “The Seminary Bubble” here.

Goodreads Review of Freedom of the Will by Jonathan Edwards

Kirk E. Miller

Freedom of the WillFreedom of the Will by Jonathan Edwards

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Absolutely brilliant!

Not any easy read by any stretch of the imagination. But what is given up in ease of ready is made up for in philosophical precision and leaving no stone unturned.

I can see how JE could be misunderstood as advocating a rather mechanistic view of human volition since he does argue for determinism. But in my understanding, that would be to misunderstand the fundamental premise of JE’s view–that man’s volitions, BECAUSE THEY ARE TRULY THE VOLITIONS OF MAN, are absolutely necessary as necessitated by man’s desire.

As JE himself says, “Nothing that I maintain, supposes that men are at all hindered by any fatal necessity, from doing, and even willing and choosing, as they please, with full freedom; yea, with the highest degree of liberty that ever was thought of, or that ever could possibly enter into the heart of any man to conceive.”

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