Books i've found helpful

Moffit has tagged me with a meme

i) What is a book you have found helpful in each category

ii) Why did you find it helpful

iii) tag 5 more people
My comments aren't great, but if I dont do it now, I wont do it

Theology
Theology through the Theologians- Colin Gunton
This book managed to easily introduce me to Colin Gunton’s thought (ie. I could read it), the practice of historical theology, and some really helpful perspectives on all sorts of theological topics, especially christology, pneumatology and the church.


Biblical Theology
Days are Coming, Symphony of Scripture- Mark Strom
Somehow this book manged to be deeper, more detailed, better applied, more engaging and shorter than Graeme Goldsworthy’s biblical theology. It made me realise that biblical theology applied to today and that I needed to know the Old Testament to understand Jesus.

God
Jurgen Moltmann
The Crucified God
I know others have put this under Jesus, but this book really made me think hard about what it means for a crucified Jesus to be God. It made me critique my own view of Jesus and my own tradition.


Jesus
Richard Bauckham
God Crucified
The great thing about Bauckham is that his books are short and to the point. Want to know how Jesus fits into a biblical picture of God, read this



Old Testament
Awed to heaven, rooted in earth
The prayers of Walter Brueggemann

So Brueggemann is a bit wacky sometimes. I love his Old Testament soaked prayers though. He somehow manages to make the Old Testament texts urgently relevant for contemporary life by being attentive to their very strangeness and letting them unsettle us.
Brueggemanns poetic approach to language also opened up the bible, so that I could use it’s language and not abstract conceptualisations of it.

New Testament
Jesus and the Victory of God
Moffit gave me this book when I was half way through Old Testament 1 at SMBC. We were up to the exile. Need I say any more. Well, yes, probably. This book put the pieces together about Jesus in a way that simply makes better sense than anything else I have read.

Morals
Improvisation: The drama of christian ethics-Sam Wells
Sam is a student and collegue of Hauerwas. I picked this book up before I came to college, standing in Koorong, and was attrracted by the fact that 1. He had my last name. 2. The book mentioned improvisation.
It was a pleasant surprise when the book turned out to be good.
Wells works through an NT Wright like five act structure of redemption and approaches ethics as improvisation within the bounds of this script and tradition.

Church History
Nicaea and it’s Legacy- Lewis Ayers
I haven’t read that much church history. This book reminded me that the world is an incredibly complex place, that people can’t be labelled as goodies and baddies very easily (though often are), and of God’s grace in it all.
Biography
Yeah, like plenty of others, not a massive biography reader. Some stuff about Richard Wurmbrand that a friend gave me was pretty influential. I vaguely remember reading a Spurgeon biography and a McCheyne bio too

Evangelism
Hmm books on it. Chappo’s Know and tell the gospel. umm I guess Tom Sine’s book the New Conspirators. umm, well probably the christianity explained handbook is the most influential book

Prayer

Prayer and Spiritual warfare- CH Spurgeon.
This book rules.
rules.
rules.
How was it helpful.
How to pray biblically and mean it

Psalms and the Word of God- or, Mikes flight of fancy

When we think about what it means for the scriptures to be the Word of God, to be written by both humans and God, to be a revelation of God, the paradigm we most often use is that of the Old Testament prophets. God generally comes to the prophet and says “ Go to my people...x and say to them, thus says the Lord.....”. God gives words to the prophet to pass on to the people.

But what happens when this paradigm hits the psalms. Of all the parts of the Bible, the psalms are most obviously human. They are prayer and praise directed from humans to God. How then can they be considered the word of God? How do they reveal God?

Since the Psalms are in the canon, as much as the prophetic literature, I want to do a little thought experiment with you to see what would happen if we made the Psalms our paradigm for what it means to be the word of God.

First God’s word gives us our response to God. The psalms, given from God, give us words with which to praise him. They place in our mouths a range of God ordained ways to respond to him. They shape us into worshippers. The knowledge of God they give is not simply information detached from us, but a knowledge which affects us, which places us in a specific role, praisers. We know this God as we respond to him in appropriate praise.

So what would this mean for Jesus as the word of God?
Well, here is the one who shows us the Father by his obedience. Here is the one who shows us the perfected human response to God. Here is the one who offers himself as sacrifice, and whose sacrifice is vindicated. God’s word to us is “follow this one”, for our lives to sing the psalm that is Jesus. Jesus shapes us into thankful worshippers, and this is his role as the word.

If the heavens and earth are made by the word of the lord, we find that they too are shaped by that word to be worshippers of God. “The heavens declare the glory of God”

In Romans 15, Paul describes his letter and his writing as presenting the gentiles as an offering, that they might praise God for his glory. The letter isn’t to dump a bunch of theological info, but that a people might be shaped who respond to God well.

So if we take this forming-God-approved-worship as the point of the Word of God, what does that do to our reading of the rest of scripture? For the way we study it at college? For what kind of things we do in church? Perhaps we should all read the scriptures out aloud, as God’s word to us and our word back? Hmm, Cramner seemed to be big on scripture in liturgy too.

Well there’s one wacky thought for the day

James allison and Halden on worship

In his Undergoing God, James Alison says a lot of provocative and important things, not least about the nature of worship. He details two different accounts of what worship is, which he terms “the Nuremberg” and “the un-Nuremberg,” drawing on the imagery of Hitler’s Nuremberg rallies. “The Nuremberg” form of worship consists in the crowd being whipped into a frenzy of devotion to the Führer on the basis of past humiliations and future threats which necessitate the loyalty and devotion of the populace. As such this form of worship is always centered on the reproduction of an in-group identity that makes enemies (i.e. the Jews) necessary.

What lies at the heart of this is that “In the case of Nuremberg, it was the party officials, for whom the faithful only had interest in as far as their mobilisation served the purpose of keeping party officials in power and wealth. The faithful had to be made ready to do things, or acquiesce in things, with which calm and unenthusiastic people might disagree. A quite specific set of desires was being put forward, and the faithful were being inducted into acquiring these as their own.” In short, this sort of “worship” is a form of utilitarian calculus centered in a discourse of power. The Führer needs the worship of the populace to get them to do what he needs them to do. The worship is all about the one in power, the one worshiped.

In contrast to this form of worship, which Alison thinks is at the heart of what usually passes for worship in the world, he offers a vision of “the un-Nuremberg”:

In the case of the un-Nuremberg we have something rather different: the “they” whose desire the faithful are being inducted into acquiring as their own is God, who has made his desire manifest. God has no desire for us to worship him for his sake; he needs no worship, no adulation, no praise, no glory. No divine ego is flattered, stability maintained, nor is any threatened petulance staved off, by our worship. No, the only people for whom it matters that we worship God is ourselves. It is entirely for our benefit that we are commanded to worship God, because if we don’t we will have no protection at all against the other sort of worship. . . .

In other words, True Worship is for our own good, no one else’s. It is the gradual process by which someone who likes us reaches us while we are in the middle of a Nuremberg rally, and gradually, and slowly gives us our senses, allowing us to stumble out of the rally, and walk away, being amazed at what it is we have been bound up in, and shocked at what we have done, or might have done as a result of where we were going. On learning to give glory to God, to render God praise, is our being given to have our imaginations set free from fate, from myth, from ineluctable forces, from historical grudges. It is a stripping away of our imaginations from being bound down by, tied into, inevitability, submission to power, going along with things. It is the detox of our Nuremberg-ed imagination. (p. 37-8)

Tf Torrance on the Word forming the church

Thomas F. Torrance, When Christ Comes and Comes Again (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1957): 27.

None of the Gospels ever give us the slightest hint about what Jesus looked like. They tell us nothing at all about His appearance, but they do speak about His voice, and they tell us of the amazement of the multitudes who wondered at the gracious words that fell from His lips…When Jesus rose again from the dead, even Mary Magdalene did not recognise Him until Jesus spoke to her by name, and then immediately she recognised Jesus by His voice. We recall also how the two disciples walking to Emmaus on Easter evening did not recognize Jesus when He joined their company, although the words He spoke to them made their hearts burn within them.

That is just how it is today. We cannot see Jesus, for He has withdrawn Himself from our sight; and we will not see Him face to face until He comes again—but we can hear His voice speaking to us in the midst of the Church on earth. That is the perpetual miracle of the Bible, for it is the inspired instrument through which the voice of Christ is still to be heard. Jesus Christ was the Word of God made flesh, the still small voice of God embodied in our humanity, and it is that same Word, and that same voice, that is given to the Church in the Bible. It is by that voice that the Church in all ages is called into being, and upon that Word of God that the Church is founded. The Church is, in fact, the community of the Voice of God, for it is the business of the Church to open the Bible and let the voice of Christ speaking in and through it to be heard all over the world. It is the mission of the Church to carry the Bible to all nations, and to plant it in every home in the land, and by preaching and teaching, and the witness of its members, to make the Word of God audible, so that the living Voice of Jesus Christ the Saviour of men may be heard by every man and woman and child.

True humans are ordered to the cross

To be conformed to the risen one–that means to be a new human being before God. We live in the midst of death; we are righteous in the midst of sin; we are new in the midst of the old. . . . The new human beings live in the world like anyone else. They often differ very little from other people. They are not concerned to promote themselves, but to lift up Christ for the sake of their brothers and sisters. Transfigured into the form of the risen one, they bear here only the sign of the cross and judgment. In bearing them willingly, they show themselves as those who have received the Holy Spirit and are united with Jesus Christ in incomparable love and community.”

~ Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Ethics

The parable of the theologian

Some of you wont even follow a link, so I thought it was worth posting the full text of Ben Myers post here. Fantastic


"Beneath the blue skies of Switzerland, in the cheerful bustling town of Basel, there once lived a great theologian. Each week he taught a seminar at the university, ruminating and chewing his pipe happily, while students crowded the floor, pressed hard against those ancient walls, laughing at his jokes and responding to his questions with nervous sincerity. He spent his evenings drinking wine and going to concerts and entertaining visitors from faraway places who asked him questions shyly in halting German. On weekends he tossed bread to the ducks at the river or rode horses or went to see the animals at the zoo. On Sunday mornings he went to prison and preached in the dimly lit whitewashed chapel; he spoke like a young man (though he was old, with a heart full of old men’s stories) and after the service he exchanged cigars and jokes with the inmates, assuring them that God was, after all, a very jolly God.

But more than anything, the theologian loved to return each day to his study and to sit writing at his desk, a dark little question-mark hunched in his crumpled suit amidst curling pipe smoke and walls of books that peered down at his labours with all the curious attentiveness of indulgent friends or obstinate relatives. In this manner, day in day out, he filled reams of paper with that cramped inky hand. Volume upon volume tumbled brick-like from his pen, solemn great tomes as big and hard and sturdy as workmen’s boots.

And so, while he sat thus writing and smoking, the fame of those books spread far and wide. Throughout Europe and in remote exotic places—South Africa, Scotland, America—people mentioned his books at dinner parties, taught them in seminaries, wrote books and then entire libraries about them. The Holy Father sought an audience with him. Martin Luther King asked him questions and leaned close to listen. The Japanese formed a school around his name. The Catholics held a council and invited him. The Americans splashed his frowning face across the cover of Time magazine. His birthdays were greeted with a clamour of praise and jubilation, while printing presses in many languages ground out books and journals and essays to honour or refute him. His followers proclaimed his heavy tomes to be the dawning of a new era, while some antagonists and former students devoted every waking hour to trying to prove him wrong on even a single point. Entire scholarly careers were thus busily occupied in this fashion.

The theologian was bemused by these attentions, but he enjoyed all this in his own self-deprecating way. And though he travelled and shook hands and talked solemnly and accepted honorary degrees, always he returned before long to that stark little desk with its pipe and pen and tantalisingly clean sheets of paper—empty slates shimmering with promise, like that formless materia prima in the beginning beneath those vast and brooding wings.

Then one December night, while the snow slept on the ground and all the city’s children lay dreaming of Christmas, the theologian died.

Quite suddenly he awoke and found himself standing at the gates of heaven. An angel took him by the elbow and led him in, explaining in hushed tones that everyone was waiting. Inside the gate, the city was bustling with sound and colour, like Basel’s Market Square in the summertime. The theologian looked around. He tried to take it all in. Then somewhere in the crowd a voice announced his name, and there followed a tumultuous cheer. Women and men pressed in close, clasping his hands and shoulders and pounding his back warmly. Children laughed and clapped their hands. Angels blushed and fluttered their wings in the sunlight.

The theologian felt quite overwhelmed by the crush of bodies, the vigorous handshakes, the beaming faces. He tried to smile and nod politely, as he had always done when receiving a foreign dignitary or an honorary doctorate. He was relieved when again the angel took him by the elbow and steered him through the crowd, out to a side-street off the busy square.

They walked on a little way, and the theologian, still trying to regain his composure, confessed that he hadn’t expected quite so warm a reception. The angel seemed surprised, and assured him that indeed everyone in the city knew his name. They had all been expecting him.

“For are you not Karl Barth?” the angel declaimed with a theatrical flourish. “Of course we have heard of the great Karl Barth!” The theologian nodded modestly, and the angel continued: “Aren’t you the one who visited the prisoners on Sunday mornings? Didn’t you eat and drink with them? Didn’t you tell them jokes to make their hearts glad? Didn’t you put fat cigars in their mouths, and strike a match for them? Didn’t you go to see them when even their own families had forgotten them? Why my dear fellow, there is not a person in this city who doesn’t know your name!”

The theologian had stopped in the street. He looked at the angel. “The prison? Well yes, I suppose... But I thought perhaps… my theology. My books…”

“Ah!” the smiling angel said, and touched his arm reassuringly. “There’s no need to worry about all that! That’s all forgiven now.”

“F—forgiven?”

“But of course! All those books are forgiven—every last word of it!” The angel took his hand fondly. “No need to dwell on all that now—everything is forgiven here. Come now, my dear, there are still so many people waiting to meet you. And the prisoners you visited—they live down there by the river, in the best part of town—they’ve prepared a feast to welcome you. Come, come along now…”

And so, hand in hand beneath a summer sky, the angel and the theologian made their way together down the city street."
Ben Myers, Faith and Theology, May 2009

Love bade me welcome

Love bade me welcome: yet my soul drew back,
Guilty of dust and sin.
But quick-ey'd Love, observing me grow slack
From my first entrance in,
Drew nearer to me, sweetly questioning,
If I lack'd anything.

A guest, I answer'd, worthy to be here:
Love said, You shall be he.
I the unkind, ungrateful? Ah, my dear,
I cannot look on thee.
Love took my hand, and smiling did reply,
Who made the eyes but I?

Truth, Lord, but I have marr'd them: let my shame
Go where it doth deserve.
And know you not, says Love, who bore the blame?
My dear, then I will serve.
You must sit down, says Love, and taste my meat:
So I did sit and eat.

George Herbert

Theological Exegesis with Michael Gorman

People who write great books have blogs too!

Michael Gorman, who has a new book out on justification Inhabiting the Cruciform God also blogs.

hereis a series of his on theological exegesis.

Enjoy

Belated prayer Mondays: Spurgeon

"Our Father, we have listened to your gracious words. Truly Your paths overflow with abundance. Wherever You are, mercy abounds. Before your feet, rivers of grace spring up. When you come to man, it is with the fullness of pardoning love. You bid us to come and seek you while you may be found. We come now. May your Holy Spirit help us. May Jesus lead the way and be our Mediator now.

Blessed be Your name! there are many who sought after your face years ago. Since then, we have tasted tha You are gracious, and we know by deleightful experience that You do indeed give milk and honey to those who trust You. Oh we wish we had known you earlier.
Lord, You have been full of truth and faithfulness to us throughout every step of our journey, and though you have not withheld the rod of the covenant from us, we are as grateful for that now as for the kisses of your lips. You have dealt well with your servants according to your word. Blesses be Your name forever and ever.

But there are some who have never come to you. They are hearers, but hearers only. They have listened to gracious invitations thousands of times, but they have never accepted them. Say to them " You have gone this far, but you will proceed no further in your carelessness and trifling. Here you will stay and turn to your God" O Saviour, You have all the power in heaven and earth; therefore you can, through the preaching of your word, influence the hearts of men. Turn them, and they will be turned. Oh do it this day Lord.
We want to come to you now in our prayers. As we came at first, we want to come again. WE want to renew our vows, we want to repeat our repentance and faith, and then look at the bronze serpent and touch the hem of your garment. WE want to begin again. O Lord, help us to do it in sincerity and truth. First we want to confess that we are by nature lost and by practice ruined. "WE are all as an unclean thing, and all our righteousnes are as filthy rags". We want to lie at those dear pierced feet, bleeding at heart because of sin wounded, mangled, crushed by the fall and by our transgression. We confess that if you were to number our sins against us and deal with us accordingly, we would be sent to the lowest hell.
We have no merit, no claim, no righteousness of our own. Now, dear Saviour, we look to you. Oh, that some might look for the first time. Oh that those of us who have long looked would fix our happy gaze again on that blessed substitutionary sacrifice in whom is all our hope. Dear Savior, we do take you to be everything to us, our Sin bearer and our Sin destroyer. We do not have a shadow of hope anywhere but in you- your life, your death, your resurrection, your ascension, your glory, your reign your second advent. These are the only stars in our sky.
We look up to you and are filled with light. But oh, dear, dear Saviour, we dare not turn to ordinances. We dare not turn to our own prayers and tears and almsgiving. We dare not look to our own works. We only look to You. Your wounds Emmanuel, bleed the balm that heals our wounds. Your head once covered with thorns, Your body once laid in the silent tomb, Your godhead once covered and concealed from man, but now resplendent amid triumphant hosts- these we gaze upon. If we must perish trusting in you, we must perish. But we know we cannot, for you have bound up our salvation with your glory, and because you are a glorious saviour forever, none who trust in you will ever be ashamed.
We do trust you now. If all our past experience has been a mistake, we will begin at the cross today. If we have never had any experience of you before, we would begin today. Oh hear, Lord, hear our prayer.

Dear Saviour, draw reluctant hearts;
to you let sinners fly
BY Christs agony and bloody sweat, by his cross and passion, by his precious death and burial, we implore you, hear us now! We plead with you for some who are not pleading for themselves. O Spirit of God, do not let it be so any longer. Sweetly use your key to open the locked door and come into mens hearts and dwell there so that they might live.
We have a thousand things to ask. WE would like to plead for our country and for all countries. We would like to plead with you for the sick and the dying, for the poor and for the fatherless. We have inumerable blessings to ask, but somehow they all fade away from our prayer just now, and this is our one cry. "Save Lord we pray. Even now send salvation! Come Holy Spirit, to open blind eyes and unstop deaf ear and quicken dead hearts.
Father glorify your son that your son may glorify you. Holy spirit take these things of Christ and reveal them to us. We gather all our prayers in that salvation through the blood of the Lamb. Amen

Washing your hands of your Christian brother

What room is there for writing off someone who professes faith in Christ?
How much leeway should we give ourselves for negative personal remarks against a christian brother?
Is it ok to make jokes about them?
To strawman their thoughts?
To have a sense of superiority when they may not get as many things right as us?

"But God says to the wicked 'What right do you have to recite my statutes and to take my covenant on your lips?...You unleash your mouth for evil and harness your tongue for deceit. You sit, maligning your brother, slandering your mothers son. You have done these things, and I have kept silent, you thought I was just like you. But I will rebuke you and lay out the case before your eyes. Understand this, you who forget God, or I will tear you apart, and there will be no rescuer. Whoever sacrifices a thank offering honours me, and whoever orders his conduct, I will show him the salvation of God"
Psalm 50:16, 19-23

And what kind of sacrifice is acceptable?

"The sacrifice pleasing to God is a broken spirit
God you will not despise a broken and humbled heart"
Psalm 51


Slander and arrogance are dangerous.
God may find our offering of theology interesting, it may even honour him. But what he wants is our humbled hearts. Especially if the words of grace drip from our lips.



God the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ,
our only Saviour, the Prince of Peace;
give us grace seriously to lay to heart
the great dangers we are in by our unhappy divisions.
Take away all hatred and prejudice,
and whatever else may hinder us from godly union and concord:
that, as there is but one body, and one Spirit,
and one hope of our calling,
one Lord, one faith, one baptism,
one God and Father of us all,
so we may be all of one heart, and of one mind,
united in one holy bond of truth and peace,
of faith and charity,
and may with one mind and one mouth glorify you;
through Jesus Christ our Lord.

Comfort of the resurrection

That Nature is a Heraclitean Fire and of the comfort of the Resurrection


CLOUD-PUFFBALL, torn tufts, tossed pillows ' flaunt forth, then chevy on an air-
built thoroughfare: heaven-roysterers, in gay-gangs ' they throng; they glitter in marches.
Down roughcast, down dazzling whitewash, ' wherever an elm arches,
Shivelights and shadowtackle in long ' lashes lace, lance, and pair.
Delightfully the bright wind boisterous ' ropes, wrestles, beats earth bare
Of yestertempest’s creases; in pool and rut peel parches
Squandering ooze to squeezed ' dough, crust, dust; stanches, starches
Squadroned masks and manmarks ' treadmire toil there
Footfretted in it. Million-fuelèd, ' nature’s bonfire burns on.
But quench her bonniest, dearest ' to her, her clearest-selvèd spark
Man, how fast his firedint, ' his mark on mind, is gone!
Both are in an unfathomable, all is in an enormous dark
Drowned. O pity and indig ' nation! Manshape, that shone
Sheer off, disseveral, a star, ' death blots black out; nor mark
Is any of him at all so stark
But vastness blurs and time ' beats level. Enough! the Resurrection,
A heart’s-clarion! Away grief’s gasping, ' joyless days, dejection.
Across my foundering deck shone
A beacon, an eternal beam. ' Flesh fade, and mortal trash
Fall to the residuary worm; ' world’s wildfire, leave but ash:
In a flash, at a trumpet crash,
I am all at once what Christ is, ' since he was what I am, and
This Jack, joke, poor potsherd, ' patch, matchwood, immortal diamond,
Is immortal diamond.

Gerard Manely Hopkins

Spurgeon on prayer

"Dear friend, do you have your mouth full right now? What of? Full of complaining? Pray to the Lord to rinse that black stuff out of your mouth, for it will little help you, and it will be bitter in your bowels one of these days. Oh have your mouth full of prayer, full of it, so that there is room for nothing else.. Still, prayer itself is an art that only the Holy Spirit can teach us. He is the giver of all prayer. Pray for prayer. Pray until you can pray. Pray to be helped to pray, and do not give up praying because you cannot pray. It is when you think you cannot pray that you are most praying. Sometimes, when you have no sort of comfort in your supplications, it is then that your heart, all broken and cast down, is really wrestling and truly prevailing with the most High"

Prayer, Wisdom and Biblical Theology

A few weeks back in Ethics, Brian Rosner briefly outlined St Paul's use of scripture. His thesis was that Paul repudiates the Law, as Law; but reapropriates the Law as prophecy and as wisdom for christians.

In my neck of the woods, the reappropriation of the Torah as prophecy has been pushed quite hard (think Graeme Goldsworthy, Biblical theology, typology etc.), often at the expense and ridicule of more allegorical readings of the Old Testament.

What hasn't been pushed so hard is the reappropriation of the Old Testament as christian wisdom. Many now look at the Old Testament as something that makes sense, is all about Jesus, but has no direct use or impact on them, other than to provide a little filler for our concept of Jesus.


Recently I've been reading Charles Spurgeon on prayer. It is incredibly refreshing, for a number of reasons, one of which is his use of the Old Testament as wisdom. CH is no slouch when it comes to understanding typology and fulfillment in Jesus, and yet is far happier to treat say, the psalms, as a book of prayers that are useful to look at when thinking about prayer.

The same thing struck me with Barry Webb's sermons at college, because the scriptures are about Christ, and we are in christ, they are about us too.

Just for further reference, Spurgeon's essay "Order and Argument in prayer" is the most useful short article on prayer I've read. Especially useful for biblical enrichment of public prayers. Take a look. I found it in "Spurgeon on Prayer and Spiritual Warfare" published by Whitaker house

Join a car sharing club

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