Daily Archives: June 24, 2008

Pre-Seminary Reading List

Posted by on June 24, 2008 31 comments

Recently I was asked by a friend who is going to seminary in the next year or so to give him a list of theological books that I would recommend for reading prior to seminary.  Here’s what I gave him.  I can’t help but wonder how much better off I would have been if I had read these books before I started seminary.

  • Rowan Williams, Resurrection; The Wound of Knowledge
  • Alan Lewis, Between Cross and Resurrection
  • David Bentley Hart, The Beauty of the Infinite
  • Robert Jenson, Systematic Theology I & II; The Triune Identity; Story and Promise
  • Stanley Hauerwas, The Peaceable Kingdom; A Community of Character
  • John Howard Yoder, The Politics of Jesus; The Priestly Kingdom
  • Lesslie Newbigin, The Gospel in a Pluralist Society; The Household of God
  • Colin Gunton, The One, The Three, and the Many
  • William Cavanaugh, Torture and Eucharist; Theopolitical Imagination
  • James Torrance, Worship, Community, and the Triune God of Grace
  • Hans Urs von Balthasar, Love Alone is Credible; Mysterium Paschale
  • Chris Huebner, A Precarious Peace
  • John Milbank, Theology and Social Theory
  • Richard Hays, The Moral Vision of the New Testament
  • Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Sanctorum Communio; Discipleship; Ethics
  • Karl Barth, Evangelical Theology; Dogmatics in Outline

Of course, these books are really just some of the ones that I have found particularly formative and which have shaped my vision in a significant way.  They are not necessarily the most important theological books ever written, though I think they are some of the most helpful in terms of shaping the kind of theological vision I think the New Testament calls for.

High and Low Church Worship

Posted by on June 24, 2008 13 comments

“The higher Christian churches – where, if anywhere, I belong — come at God with an unwarranted air of professionalism, with authority and pomp, as though people in themselves were an appropriate set of creatures to have dealings with God.  I often think of the set pieces of liturgy as certain words which people have successfully addressed to God without their getting killed.  In the high churches they saunter through the liturgy  like Mohawks along a strand of scaffolding who have long since forgotten their danger.  If God were to blast such a service to bits, the congregation would be, I believe, genuinely shocked.  But in the low churches you expect it any minute.  This is the beginning of wisdom.”

–Annie Dillard, Holy the Firm (New York: Perennial, 1977), 59.

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