Even the Devils Believe

Dwight asks about the books that have been formative for us in our faith journey. He points to some really good ones (and some geeky ones that only an expert in early 20th century liberal Protestantism would read!).

I mentioned a few in this response to Daisy's question about Roman Catholic writers in a post from this weekend. Those tend toward the devotional side of things but have been very important nonetheless.

One of the very first theological works I ever read was Dorothee Soelle's To Work and to Love: A Theology of Creation. Soelle was an incredible, progressive theologian, but because she was writing primarily from a European standpoint, I think she was better able to see the dangers of too intense a skepticism on the part of liberal Christians. So she links up some incredible insights into how Christian progressives can work for justice on feminist issues, for example, and yet take the tradition seriously, too. Her book Theology for Skeptics: Reflections on God is great, too.

I only gave Howard Thurman's Jesus and the Disinherited a brief mention in my comment this weekend, but it was always hugely important for me. If someone asked me for a brief summary of what Christianity is all about, I'd point to this book before any other.

The book that started giving me a sense for what we mean when we talk about "God" and what implications Christian Trinitiarianism has for morals, religious practice, justice concerns, and so on was Kathryn Tanner's Jesus, Humanity and the Trinity: A Brief Systematic Theology. I hope Tanner writes a longer system — her short system leaves too many details unexplored. Her later, more applied book Economy of Grace is very, very good and builds on insights from the short system.

It may make him blush, but John Plummer's The Many Paths of the Independent Sacramental Movement was enormously important for me as a seminarian. Many folks in the biggest churches of the Independent movement can lose a sense for what the rest of the movement is up to. I had very little experience with our common life outside of the specific jurisdiction I was in at the time, and John's book opened me up to lots of other perspectives on what Independent Catholicism might mean.

Finally, Ministry and Imagination, written by Urban T. Holmes, Anglican priest and sometime dean of the seminary at the University of the South (Sewanee), confirmed in me the conviction that there was nothing frightening about doing ministry in the fertile middle-ground between extremes. He also lays out a vision for the priesthood that helped me transition from my largely role-based understanding of the ministry, having grown up Protestant, to a ministry focused more intensely on drawing an experience of God into the world.

Dwight didn't cast this question as a meme exactly, but I am curious about what books have been formative for others. So I thought I might tag Derek, Jane, and Young Fogey to answer the same question — and everyone else is invited to share as well!