Books Which Helped Me Make Up My Mind
More memories from those days when I was becoming Reformed and working in the Christian Bookstore industry
Previous posts in the series:
I was already well along in my journey to becoming Reformed back in 1981 when Sinclair Ferguson’s Know Your Christian Life appeared on the InterVarsity book rack in our store. Now out of print (and replaced by several more recent books from Ferguson on various aspects of the Christian life), this tome offered a succinct and devotional take on the major Reformed doctrines—including justification and sanctification. At the time, I was wrestling with a host of theological issues. I was working full-time, and commuting to Escondido, and I was feeling sort of wrung out from having so much of what I had always believed turned upside down during my studies at Westminster Seminary California. It was nice to read something about these same doctrines in a different context—one framed by John Owen and the Puritans now coming from the pen of someone new on the Christian publishing scene, Sinclair Ferguson. J. I. Packer described Ferguson’s book as, “Reformed theology of the older, riper, deeper sort.” That it was. It was also a great supplement to my initial seminary course work. Ferguson made it clear that in the Reformed tradition head and heart were not at war with each other. This breakthrough came to me at the very time when my anti-Calvinist evangelical friends were warning me that Calvinism was nothing but “head knowledge.”
I was so impressed with the book, I actually wrote to Dr. Ferguson at Westminster Theological Seminary, thanking him for it. I received a very nice reply, and have benefited from his work (especially his preaching) ever since.
While I was making the journey from American fundamentalism to Reformed Christianity, a nagging question was looming and unanswered. If Puritanism, Jonathan Edwards, and the Old Princetonians (Charles Hodge, A. A. Hodge, and B. B. Warfield, and later, J. Gresham Machen) exercised such a great influence upon American Christianity, how did they lose their prominence in post WW2 America to dispensationalists, fundamentalists, and the rise of a distinct evangelical movement? This was also the opening phase of the culture wars and the rise to prominence of those celebrity pastors who led the fight. Like most American evangelicals, I simply assumed that the Reformation got rid of most of the “catholic” stuff, but with the Reformed and Lutherans still hanging on to several Roman Catholic relics—like infant baptism. They hadn’t come all the way to “biblical Christianity” as we evangelicals had.
Marsden’s Fundamentalism and American Culture provided me an explanation as to why American fundamentalism was indeed an altogether new movement, and largely disconnected from historic Christianity. The impact of which took a long time for me to fully process since the thesis was so foreign to my thinking at the time. In those decades after the Civil War, American Christianity—largely in reaction to post-Puritan secularism, Darwinism, and the importation of critical methodology from Germany now applied to biblical studies—was increasingly open to these destructive forces. Fundamentalism was largely a protest movement and a healthy corrective to “liberalism” by seeking to defend conservative biblically based Christianity. Yet, the movement and its associated ministries rose to prominence outside traditional denominational boundaries. Churches which were the direct descendants of the Reformation were viewed as suspect by fundamentalists and evangelicals, even though confessional Reformed and Lutheran churches had a much better understanding of the basics of the Christian faith and church history than I could find in any of the evangelical churches I attended.
As I jettisoned my dispensationalism, learned about the doctrine of justification and imputed righteousness (from Rod Rosenbladt), and embraced covenant theology, things like the law/gospel distinction, the importance of the sacraments, the Trinitarian and Christological debates in the early church, and the importance of the ecumenical creeds and Reformed catechisms and confessions grew in importance. This gradual but steady change in my thinking eventually pushed me to leave the fundamentalist churches of my youth for confessional Reformed Christianity.
Marsden helped point the way ahead, by explaining the past—how and why American Christianity had moved so far away from its Protestant and Reformation heritage. For good reason, Marsden’s Fundamentalism and American Culture was named to the one hundred most important books of the twentieth century by Christianity Today. It is still an important book and well worth a read.
Anyone who was on the Reformation road in the 1980’s encountered two very wonderful and life-changing books. J. I. Packer’s Knowing God was first published in 1973 and to this day is one of those books which is worth re-reading periodically. It is hard to believe that it has been in print 50 plus years! It often lands on the lists of the most influential evangelical books published in the 20th century. No doubt, it will continue to appear on such lists for decades to come. A great book and a must read.
I had been listening to R.C. Sproul’s lectures given at the Ligonier Valley Study Center. He generated much buzz in those circles in which I was beginning to travel. I purchased cassette tapes of most everything Ligonier Valley Study Center offered. Sproul was a great lecturer—he was compelling, passionate, and tackling subjects in apologetics, philosophy, and church history which were becoming of interest to me. Sproul certainly whet my whistle for further studies in all those areas. But his lectures on the holiness of God were life-changing. The Holiness of God first appeared in book form in 1985. We sold cases of them. Customers who had read it were effusive in their praise for it, and often came back to buy copies for their Christian friends. And it was very clear to them that they were not hearing passionate, solid, Reformed theology like this in their home churches. No one did more to awaken Bible believing Christians to the importance of sound doctrine to the Christian life than R.C.