Captain Thin

My friend Karl recently challenged me on Facebook to name ten books that have changed my life. Or, more accurately, I was to “write down ten books that have affected your life in some way and tag ten friends including me so I can see your choices as well.” Ignoring the fact that the word “affected” is “abominably vague” (as Karl also noted), here’s my list. It’s eclectic, to be sure, with fiction, poetry, theology, and more.

The books follow in no particular order.

1. The Chronicles of Narnia – C.S. Lewis

This series served, in many ways, as my gateway to both fantasy and theology. As a child, it was my favourite series of books, and I still reread them all every few years. The Christian symbolism is not something I become aware of until some years later, when my pastor explained it to me. At first I rebelled at the knowledge, but eventually the secret of it (Another story beneath! Deeper magic!) led me to read more of C.S. Lewis, including…

2. Mere Christianity – C.S. Lewis

This. This was my first introduction to serious Christian thought. My first introduction, as it were, to theology. More detailed study into the various focuses of Christian theology came later, as did wide reading in the writings of Christians from across the centuries. But Mere Christianity was, for me, where it all began. And for that, I am truly grateful to C.S. Lewis.

3. The Man Who Was Thursday – G.K. Chesterton

This book was my first introduction to Chesterton, and thus an introduction to numerous other important books in my life (like Heretics, Orthodoxy, Napoleon of Notting Hill, etc). The ability to make the ordinary strange is a particular gift of Chesterton’s and a prevailing theme in much of his other writing; but nowhere is the concept so well enfleshed as it is in The Man Who Was Thursday. This book is my favourite novel, bar none—even if (or perhaps because?) it so often confounds me.

4. The Augsburg Confession (Confessio Augustana) – Philip Melanchthon

The primary Lutheran confession of faith, important not only for articulating Lutheran theology over/against contemporary abuses, but also for stressing the theological continuity of Lutheranism with the faith of the ancient Church. “The churches among us,” Melanchthon writes, “do not dissent from the Catholic Church in any article of faith.” Indeed.

5. The Freedom of a Christian – Martin Luther

Too many people (including too many Lutherans) seem to think that salvation by grace through faith alone means works are excluded from the Christian’s life. Nothing could be further from the truth. In this book, Luther explains the proper relationship between faith and works. While only the former justifies before God, he writes, both are nevertheless necessary in the Christian’s life. This little work, too seldom read, also introduces a number of other important Lutheran ideas, as I’ve summarized elsewhere: “Here Luther touches on the simultaneous sinner/saint state of Christians; explains Law and Gospel; argues justification by faith alone; defends the necessity of works as a fruit of faith; discusses what makes works ‘good’; expounds on the priesthood of all believers (both what it does and doesn’t mean); and delves into his theology of vocation, as well as hinting at the doctrine of the ‘two kingdoms.’”

6. The Spirituality of the Cross – Gene Edward Veith

This is the quintessential introduction to Lutheranism for those wanting to know more about “the way of first evangelicals.” Veith provides a winsome case for the Evangelical Catholic (aka Lutheran) tradition, taking readers on a tour through the major points of Lutheran theology in clear and eminently readable prose. And it never descends into mere academic musings; this is a theology that is forever relevant and applicable to Christians today. Looking for a sacramental evangelicalism? A protestantism that is, at its core, nevertheless catholic? Veith explains why Lutheranism is the church you’re seeking.

7. Poems (1633) – John Donne

Where do I begin? Donne’s poetry, whether focused on the earthly or the divine—and really, Donne would say (and I would agree), everything in creation counts under the category of “divine”—is deeply profound and deeply moving. Meaning is packed tightly into each line, each phrase, like a compressed spring waiting to be released. The Holy Sonnets have especially been important to me in my own spiritual journeys. While what I’m writing here applies to any edition of Donne’s English poetry, there’s something particularly pleasing about holding my reproduction copy of the 1633 edition, as I reflect on Donne’s Holy Sonnets. It provides a tactile experience, a weight in my hands to mirror the weight in my heart—a heart that Donne (and God) batter, for my good.

8. The Pilgrim’s Progress – John Bunyan

I know what you’re thinking: “That old book? That long-on-words and short-on-plot book? That thinly-veiled not-at-all-veiled allegory? Why that book?” I know this book isn’t everyone’s cup of tea, but it’s been important to me for a number of reasons, not least of all because Bunyan’s thoughts have helped me formulate my understanding of what literature is for. I also acknowledge this book for Bunyan’s theology of despair, a condition in which I have an interest both personally and academically. Christian’s encounter with Giant Despair is, for those interested, made all the more illuminating when reading it alongside Bunyan’s own spiritual battle with despair (as described in Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners).

9. The Gospel of John

While the Bible in its totality has had an obviously massive impact on my life, the Gospel of John is particularly dear to me. St. John’s surprisingly simple vocabulary make accessible complex theological ideas—mirroring, in a way, the enfleshing of the Divine Word in the Man Jesus. God humbles Himself that we may be brought up—He discloses Himself that we might to know Him Who made us.

10. The Odyssey – Homer

I am a lover of classical mythology and culture, and for me there is no greater story from the era than Homer’s Odyssey. This text led to my wider interest in the literature and philosophy of Ancient Greece and Rome—studies which have significantly impacted how I view all other literature and philosophies.

I can’t help but feel I’ve cut too many books that should also be on this list, just in order to keep it to ten. An expanded list must needs include some classic science fiction (such as the works of Jules Verne and H.G. Wells), children’s adventure stories (Hatchet and My Side of the Mountain), philosophy (Plato), drama (Shakespeare) fantasy (JRR Tolkien), and more from the Inklings (especially Charles Williams’ The Place of the Lion and War in Heaven). I should also mention the first book of C.S. Lewis’ Space Trilogy, as the description of Ransom learning alien language is what first kindled my interest (and subsequent degree) in Linguistics.

But there is one other book I just must mention, and that is C.S. Lewis’ The Great Divorce. Now what is so important about this book you ask? Well, it’s responsible (at least in part) for my marrying Leah. Some years ago, not long after Leah and I had first met, we fell into conversation at a large-group dinner event. We began by chance to speak of Lewis, zeroing in on The Great Divorce. I made some remark about the characterization of George MacDonald in the text. But Leah promptly corrected me, telling me in no uncertain terms I was wrong. Surprised, I actually went home that night and reread the book. Leah was right: I was wrong. About that time I began to realize just how attractive Leah was….

I count it a great blessing that Leah and I can talk so easily together about big ideas, and that each of us can learn from (and correct) each other. But it’s never lost on me that The Great Divorce led, in our case, to a rather Great Marriage.

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Edit (August 27): I have no idea how I forgot to put The Screwtape Letters on this list. Major oversight.

In a justly famous passage from the preface to Mere Christianity, C.S. Lewis pictures the Church universal as a great hall. In this hall are many rooms, he says, and the rooms represent the various denominations which can rightly be called “orthodox” Christianity. This hall “is a place to wait in,” he writes, “a place from which to try the various doors, not a place to live in.” “But it is in the rooms,” he explains, “not in the hall, that there are fires and chairs and meals.” That’s not to say all such rooms are equal, but any is better than wandering aimlessly in the hall, unattached from the benefits which come from the Christian community found inside the rooms. And yet, despite their (often substantial) differences, these rooms share some thing or some things in common and this, Lewis argues, is “mere Christianity.”

Lewis is, by his own admission, borrowing the terminology of Richard Baxter in his use of the term “mere Christianity.” But I wonder whether he might also be channeling another 17th century theologian as well, consciously or no. Back in 1625, John Donne preached a sermon which beat Lewis to the punch. In this sermon, Donne describes the Church as if it were a great house—a house in which one can find differences of theological opinion (differences between the rooms, we might say), but which nevertheless shares a common foundation. “The Church is a House, it is Gods house,” Donne writes, “and in that House, wee are of the household of the faithfull.” And its foundation, Donne is clear, “is Christ himselfe in his Word; his Scriptures.”

What is the Church?

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The text for the sermon comes from the Psalms: “If the foundations be destroyed, what can the righteous doe?” (Psalm 11:3). And while he talks about a number of different “houses” that Christians inhabit (namely, the family, the state, and the individual soul), the one on which he dwells most at length is that of the Church. In Donne’s time, the Church had been fractured: the Church of England was not the Church of Wittenberg was not the Church of Rome. Given that reality, Donne’s sermon asks us a question of practical theological importance: what is the Church? Is it a visible institution? Is it reserved to those who subscribe to the 39 Articles? The Council of Trent? The Augsburg Confession? Or is there, perhaps, something deeper still, a foundation on which all these churches might be understood to be part of the universal Church, despite their very real theological differences?

For Donne, the answer is obvious: the foundation of the house we call the Church cannot be equated with any particular church body in the world; the Church transcends such boundaries. And Christians should strive to maintain peace in the larger household of the Church. The righteous, Donne says, should keep silence unless the foundations of the faith are themselves under attack. But that does not mean we pretend theological differences were a thing of no matter. Donne explains: “Now this should not prepare, this should not incline any man, to such an indifferencie, as that it should bee all one to him, what become of all things; all one, whether wee had one, or two, or tenne, or no Religioun; or that hee should not bee awake, and active, and diligent, in assisting trueth, and resisting all approaches of Errour.”

No, God’s people are to seek out and defend truth. But in many cases Christians make spectacle of themselves by backbiting and devouring one another over small things. They fling accusations over “matters not Doctrinall, or if Doctrinall, yet not Fundamentall.” And—as Donne has said before and will say again—until the foundations be destroyed, the righteous should keep quiet. They should keep peace. Instead, Donne laments, a “Torrent of uncharitableness” is at work, even among Christians of the same church bodies. They  pour forth “such Exasperations, such Exacerbations, such Vociferations, such Ejulations, such Defamations of one another, as if all Foundations were destroyed.”¹

Bearing with one another in charity

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“Who would not tremble,” Donne asks, “to heare those Infernall words, spoken by men, to men… when God in heaven knowes, if their own uncharitablenesse did not exclude him, there were roome enough for the Holy Ghost, on both, and on either side, in those Fundamentall things, which are unanimely professed by both.” Instead, “wee see more Bookes written by these men against one another,” Donne reflects sharply, “then by them both, for Christ.”

We see more Bookes written by these men against one another than by them both for Christ.

And it is on Christ that this House—the Church—truly finds its foundation. It is in our joint faith in Christ as the Son of God, as the one whose death and resurrection brings salvation to sinners that we find ourselves united. We confess the Scriptures to be the very Word of God, and we each believe the creeds. We must start from that very basic position and attempt, in the hallways of the house, to make progress in resolving our differences.

Indeed, as members of the same house, we must resolve to treat each other well, earnestly meaning good and not harm to one another. We cannot, as Donne describes above, give in to the “Torrent of uncharitableness” so common between Christians who disagree. All Christians—of whatever room they be—are required, Donne says, to be faithful one to another. “You see there is a faithfulnesse required in every man, in all the house of God, not in any one roome,” he writes, “a disposition required to doe good to the whole Church of God every where, and not onely at home.” We must not attack each other as heretics when the issue at stake is not Christ, the foundation Himself. “Bee not apt to call Super-Edifications, Foundations,” Donne warns. “And doe not call the cracking of a pane of glasse, a Destroying of foundations.”

Christians against Christians today

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Alas, we are apt to accuse one another of overturning foundations merely on the basis of the bad decorating and cheap furniture we see in another’s room. The fact is, Christians can and (regrettably) often do build shoddy constructions on the firm foundation of Christ. But those broken buildings do not themselves mean the foundation itself has been uprooted. St. Paul declares this in his own letter to a divided church: “No one can lay any foundation other than the one already laid, which is Jesus Christ. If any man builds on this foundation using gold, silver, costly stones, wood, hay or straw, his work will be shown for what it is, because the Day will bring it to light. It will be revealed with fire, and the fire will test the quality of each man’s work. If what he has built survives, he will receive his reward. If it is burned up, he will suffer loss; he himself will be saved, but only as one escaping through the flames” (1 Corinthians 3:11-15).

How we build our rooms in the household of Christ matters. “Each one should be careful how he builds” (1 Corinthians 3:10). But we must remember that, while a room itself may be built of hay or straw, its inhabitants do not for that reason fall off the foundation of Christ. God is merciful; He saves people on the basis of the foundation, not the buildings they erect on it.

Catholics vs Protestants

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For Donne, it is the greatest hubris to insist that what is on top of the foundation is of equal importance to the foundation itself. It is incredibly important, of course, but as St. Paul has stated, it is not necessary for salvation. For this reason, Donne in this sermon takes great exception with the Church of Rome in his day. In his assessment, the Roman Church was declaring the decor of one room of equal importance to the foundation on which the whole house stood. His frustration boils over here and he calls the “uncharitablenesse of the Church of Rome toward us all” not merely “a Torrent” nor even “a Sea,” but instead “a generall Flood, an universall Deluge, that swallowes all the world.” They “will not allowe possibilitie of Salvation to the whole Arke, the whole Christian Church,” Donne laments, “but to one Cabin in that Arke, the Church of Rome.”

Their great error is in condensing the whole House to one Room, Donne says. And “not because wee affirme any thing, that they denie, but because wee denie some things, which they in their afternoone are come to affirme.” They saw the difference in furnishings between rooms, and declared the other rooms outside the House—even though, if they had looked, they would have found a common foundation beneath each.

If they had looked, they would have found a common foundation beneath each.

“In a word,” Donne says, “wee charge [the Roman Church] with uncharitablenesse, that they will so peremptorily exclude us from Heaven, for matters that doe not appertaine to Foundations. For, if they will call all Foundations, that which the Church hath, or doth, or shall decree, we must learne our Catechisme upon our Death-bedd, and inquire for the Articles of our Faith, when wee are going out of the world, for they may have decreed something that Morning.” There was a time when trusting in the creedal faith handed down by the Church through the centuries was enough; this faith in Christ was a firm foundation; now, no more. “All things are growen deare in our times,” Donne sighs, “for they have made Salvation deare; Threescore yeares agoe, he might have been saved for beleeving the Apostles Creed; now it will cost him the Trent Creed too.”

The Case of Melanchthon

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To be fair, it is worth noting that what Donne accuses the Roman Church of is something many Protestants (both in his day and ours ) could also be accused of: teaching that salvation is available only to members of our own specific, visible church body. But in Donne’s time in particular, the Roman Church had closed the doors to discussion. The Lutherans, for example, tried desparately to make the case that they were still Catholic—still teaching doctrine within the pale of historic Christianity. And so in their profession of faith, The Augsburg Confession, they attempted to clarify their concerns “in order that it might be understood that in doctrine and ceremonies nothing has been received on our part against Scripture or the Church Catholic.”

“For it is manifest,” the author Philipp Melanchthon continues, “that we have taken most diligent care that no new and ungodly doctrine should creep into our churches.” Their hope was that “dissensions in the matter of our holy religion and Christian Faith” could be explored together in a spirit of respect and love—“that in this matter of religion the opinions and judgments of the parties might be heard in each other’s presence; and considered and weighed among ourselves in mutual charity, leniency, and kindness.” By talking freely and openly, correcting error on both sides, they might be brought “to live in unity and concord in the one Christian Church.”

That opinions might be weighed among ourselves in mutual charity, leniency, and kindness.

The attempt at peace-making was firmly rejected. Melanchthon writes in the Apology to the Augsburg Confession: “It has always been my custom in these controversies to retain, so far as I was at all able, the form of the customarily received doctrine, in order that at some time concord could be reached the more readily.” But this approach, while he would employ it throughout his life, was unsuccessful: “The adversaires are treating the case in such a way as to show that they are seeking neither truth nor concord,” he laments, “but to drain our blood.”

That sentiment was common among non-Roman Christians in the days before Donne. For his part, Melanchthon continued (fruitlessly) to try to repair relations between the broken churches—calling loud and often for a free council to hammer things out together, “as iron sharpens iron.” But the only council that came was that of Trent, in which salvation by faith alone was rejected as heresy whole-sale. There was no common hall for Christians to meet in; the Roman Catholics had declared the whole house theirs and theirs alone.

Re-entering the hall

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In this sermon, Donne is trying to reverse some of that damage by calling his hearers to more charitably approach the subject of theological disagreement. Not that it is wrong to challenge and question one another; we must do so. “In Heresie,” Donne warns, “there is nothing to bee called little, nothing to bee suffered.” The Arians, after all, were heretics by virtue of “one letter.”²

But among fellow Christians, among those who  those with whom we share a solid, firm foundation in Christ, surely we can disagree charitably. And when another should defend an opinion we consider wrong, but which is not so errant as to destroy the foundation, we ought to treat them kindly: “wee forebeare, and wee are quiet.”

God grant that we should all approach theological disagreement in this way.

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1 Compare this complaint to the still brilliant “Sermon against contention and brawling from Thomas Cranmer’s 1547 Book of Homilies. “St. Paul could not abide to hear among the Corinthians these words of discord or dissension: I hold of Paul, I of Cephas, and I of Apollo. What would he then say, if he heard these words of contention, which be now almost in every man’s mouth: He is a Pharisee, He is a Gospeller, He is of the new sort, He is of the old faith, He is a new-broached brother, He is a good catholic father, He is a papist, He is an heretic? O how the Church is divided!… We cannot be jointed to Christ our Head, except we be glued with concord and charity one to another. For he that is not in this unity is not of the Church of Christ.”

2 The difference between homoousios and homoiousios: one little “i.”

Note on the text: the sermon framing the discussion in this paper is “The First Sermon Preached to King Charles, at Saint James: 3, April 1625.” You can read it online here. It’s also available (along with other excellent sermons) in an attractive little volume entitled “John Donne’s Sermons on the Psalms and Gospels,” edited by Evelyn M. Simpson.