A Thinking Reed

Category: Theology & Faith

  • In the midst of a great revolution

    One of the interesting things about H.R. Niebuhr is that he is often trying to walk the middle ground between a liberal or “natural” theology based on reason or experience and a Barthian “revelational positivism” that limits our knowledge of God to what is revealed.

    For Niebuhr, philosophical reasoning, religious experience, psychology, and history all have a role in the formation of our idea of deity. After all, how could we recognize or respond to revelation if we had no prior idea of God whatsoever? What revelation does, on Niebuhr’s view, is transform this idea without necessarily replacing or negating it.

    It is true that revelation is not the communication of new truths and the supplanting of our natural religion by a supernatural one. But it is the fulfillment and the radical reconstruction of our natural knowledge about deity through the revelation of one whom Jesus Christ called “Father.” All thought about deity now undergoes a metamorphosis. Revelation is not a development of our religious ideas but their continuous conversion. God’s self-disclosure is that permanent revolution in our religious life by which all religious truths are painfully transformed and all religious behavior transfigured by repentance and new faith. It is revolutionary since it makes a new beginning and puts an end to the old development; it is permanent revolution since it can never come to an end in time in such a way that an irrefragable knowledge about God becomes the possession of an individual or a group. Life in the presence of revelation in this respect as in all others is not lived before or after but in the midst of a great revolution. (The Meaning of Revelation, p. 95)

    Niebuhr identifies three particular aspects of our idea of God that undergo revolutionary transformation in light of the revelation we receive through Jesus:

    —Divine unity: God’s unity is not the unity of a hierarchy with a “supreme being” at the top; rather, it is the unity of one “meeting us in every event and requiring us to think his thoughts after him in every moment” (p. 96). I think what Niebuhr is getting at here is a more “immanent” idea of God–the pulsating life at the center of every being.

    —Divine power: We want a God who is the ultimate force in the universe, who’s on our side and will make sure that nothing bad happens to us or those we love, and will ensure the success of our projects and values. But in Jesus the power of God is “made manifest in … weakness” (p. 97); God conquers evil not by overpowering it, but through the death of an innocent man on a cross. “We cannot come to the end of the road of our rethinking the ideas of power and omnipotence” (p. 98).

    —Divine goodness: Our “natural” tendency is to worship God (or the gods) both for what he is and for what he can do for us. And religious life is often organized accordingly: acts of devotion partly undertaken to ensure divine favor. In Christian revelation, however, “[w]e sought a good to love and were found by a good that loved us” (p. 99). God is active in love, seeking us out. A “transactional” understanding of religion, which puts ourselves and our projects at its center, is replaced by the demand that we learn to receive God’s love for us and for those whom we would rather not love.

    It follows from this understanding of revelation that we never possess a final definition or understanding of God. We are always “on the way,” with the revelation we receive in Jesus prodding us beyond the comforts of our inherited opinions and orthodoxies. “This conversion and permanent revolution of our human religion through Jesus Christ is what we mean by revelation” (p. 99).

  • H.R. Niebuhr on revelation, ethics, and nature

    For Niebuhr, revelation is not a revelation of divinely inspired propositions–as some theories of biblical inerrancy would have it. Instead, it is a fundamentally personal encounter–a revelation of God’s self. In this encounter, we don’t apprehend an object; it is more accurate to say that we are apprehended by–in judgment and love–the ultimate Subject.

    But this irreducibly personal revelation has implications for, or casts a particular light on, our understanding of truths about the world. Two important examples Niebuhr offers are ethics and science.

    With regard to ethics, revelation doesn’t mean that God gives us new ethical rules of which we were previously unaware. The Bible, Niebuhr points out, presupposes that people know the difference between right and wrong prior to revelation. However, revelation transforms our ethics in three important respects:

    –First, it intensifies the moral demand. What may before have been thought of as a transgression against my personal code of conduct or society’s norms is now experienced as a transgression against God’s holy will, which is inexorable and inescapable. This gives ethics a heightened seriousness.

    –Second, it universalizes the scope of moral concern. Revelation “shatters” our various idols of self, tribe, nation, class, etc. All too often we rationalize these idolatries–elevating the penultimate to ultimate status–with our various ethical codes. But the God of Christian revelation is the God who has an unrestricted concern not only for those we consider strangers or enemies, but for non-human life and non-human creation. God’s cause is the cause of being.

    –Third, it makes it possible to experience morality in the indicative rather than the imperative mood. This means that we need not be experience the moral life as an external duty imposed on or restraining us. The possibility has arisen of a spontaneous love of the good, “a free love of God and man” (p. 89). This is something we only experience a foretaste of in this life, but it foreshadows our destiny of freedom from sin.

    Regarding science, Niebuhr says that revelation transforms how we should perceive the natural world. So much of our view of the non-human creation is bound up with a need to assert and justify a sense of human superiority. But, he points out, for Christian revelation, the ground of our value is not our alleged superiority over animals or the rest of nature, but in being loved and valued by God. This frees us from the need to look at nature through an anthropocentric lens:

    Faith in the person who creates the self, with all its world, relieves the mind of the pagan necessity of maintaining human worth by means of imaginations which magnify the glory of man. When the creator is revealed it is no longer necessary to defend man’s place by a reading of history which establishes his superiority to all other creatures. To be a man does not now mean to be a lord of the beasts but a child of God. To know the person is to lose all sense of shame because of kinship with the clod and the ape. The mind is freed to pursue its knowledge of the external world disinterestedly not by the conviction that nothing matters, that everything is impersonal and valueless, but by the faith that nothing God has made is mean or unclean. (p. 90)

    These are themes that Niebuhr reaffirms in Radical Monotheism and Western Culture. I posted a bit on that here. In both places Niebuhr emphasizes that the revelation of God’s universal love radically undermines our inevitable tendency to put ourselves at the center of the universe and to invest finite or partial goods with ultimate significance.

  • H.R. Niebuhr’s principles

    In the preface to his The Meaning of Revelation, H. Richard Niebuhr outlines three convictions that he says underlie his argument:

    –self-defense is the most prevalent source of error in all thinking and perhaps especially in theology and ethics;

    –the greatest source of evil in life is the absolutizing of the relative, which in Christianity takes the form of substituting religion, revelation, church, or Christian morality for God; and

    –Christianity is “permanent revolution” or metanoia which does not come to an end in this world, this life, or this time.

    “Positively stated,” he adds, “these three convictions are that man is justified by grace, that God is sovereign, and that there is an eternal life” (p. xxiv).

    The first point means that Christians shouldn’t try to “prove” their faith from some allegedly neutral, ahistorical premises. Niebuhr embraces the “historicity” of all truth-claims–that they are situated in a particular context and that we always view the world from a particular perspective. This doesn’t mean that our beliefs don’t bring us into contact with an independently existing reality, but that our convictions don’t necessarily rest on the kind of public evidence upheld as the ideal by the sciences. Rather, Christians should be “confessional”–telling the story of their lives and how they have been changed by their encounter with God in Jesus Christ.

    The second conviction summarizes what Niebuhr elsewhere calls “radical monotheism.” Following Paul Tillich, Niebuhr identifies sin as humanity’s tendency to elevate finite goods (self, family, nation, even moral values) to the status of “ultimate concern.” Authentic biblical faith, however, insists that only God is ultimate; rather than enlisting God in our cause–as the one who meets our needs or guarantees the success of our projects–we should enlist in God’s cause, which is the cause of being itself.

    Finally, the third point is that the Christian community should be “reformed and always reforming,” to use a favorite Protestant slogan. If “confessionalism” can under some circumstances lead to a hardening of identity, this principle calls for constant self-criticism–and for receiving criticism from outside the community. Some recent theology seems at times to interpret confessionalism to mean that the church should think of itself as a hermetically-sealed “language game” or set of cultural practices immune to outside critique or influence. But Niebuhr insists that its boundaries must remain permeable to some extent if the church is not to become an idol that takes the place of God.

  • Do we need a Christian party?

    Today I came across this article (via Crystal) arguing that American Christians should abandon the Republican and Democratic parties and form a “Christian party” that embraces something like Phillip Blond‘s “Red Tory” or “Big Society” program:

    British theologian and political philosopher Phillip Blond correctly notes that, “the current political consensus” in the United States is “left-liberal in culture and right-liberal in economics. And this is precisely the wrong place to be.” It’s also the fundamental reason why Christians cannot be at home in either political party – the Christian vision of the social and economic order is almost exactly the opposite of the current consensus.

    The author, Michael Stafford, a lawyer and Catholic, argues that we need an American version of a European-style Christian democratic party to put this vision into action:

    What would the views of a hypothetical presidential candidate from an American Christian Democratic Party look like? I think they would closely track Marcia Pally’s description of the ideal candidate new evangelicals are longing for, a candidate neither of the current major political parties are capable of producing – “someone who will help the poor, protect the planet and dramatically reduce the need for abortion, someone who will help both secular and faith-based organizations to do this work.”

    I’d be the last to deny that both our major political parties have significant flaws. But even if it was possible to overcome the institutional barriers to third party success in the U.S. (ballot access, campaign finance, and our first-past-the-post election system), I don’t think that a “Christian” political party is particularly desirable.

    Lucky for me, I don’t have to spell out the reasons why in any great detail, because this was ably done by C.S. Lewis over 70 years ago in an essay called “Meditation on the Third Commandment.”* Lewis points out that a Christian party “must either confine itself to stating what ends are desirable and what means are lawful or else it must go further and select from among the lawful means those which it deems possible and efficacious and give to these its practical support.” However, all political parties generally agree on ends: happiness, security, freedom, etc. Where they disagree is about what means are most effective in attaining these ends. But Christians, as Christians, have no special expertise or insight into what means will be most effective.

    Lewis goes on to argue that, if all Christians formed a party, they would inevitably disagree over the means to attaining their ends. Lewis imagines three “types” of Christians who might make up such a party: an authoritarian, a democrat, and a revolutionary radical. All agree about the ends, but disagree radically about the preferable means. So what happens?

    The three types represented by these three Christians presumably come together to form a Christian Party. Either a deadlock ensues (and there the history of the Christian Party ends) or else one of the three succeeds in floating a party and driving the other two, with their followers, out of its ranks. The new party — being probably a minority of the Christians who are themselves a minority of the citizens — will be too small to be effective. In practice. it will have to attach itself to the un-Christian party nearest to it in beliefs about means — to the Fascists if Philarchus has won, to the Conservatives if Stativus, to the Communists if Sparticus. It remains to ask how the resulting situation will differ from that in which Christians find themselves today.

    The chief danger here (and this is presumably what the title of the essay means to refer to) is that a Christian party would be tempted to give its political views a kind of divine sanction:

    By the mere act of calling itself the Christian Party it implicitly accuses all Christians who do not join it of apostasy and betrayal. It will be exposed, in an aggravated degree, to that temptation which the Devil spares none of us at any time — the temptation of claiming for our favourite opinions that kind and degree of certainty and authority which really belongs only to our Faith. The danger of mistaking our merely natural, though perhaps legitimate, enthusiasms for holy zeal, is always great.

    […]

    All this comes from pretending that God has spoken when He has not spoken. He will not settle the two brothers’ inheritance: `Who made Me a judge or a divider over you?’ By the natural light He has shown us what means are lawful: to find out which one is efficacious He has given us brains. The rest He has left to us.

    What Lewis suggests is precisely the course of action that Mr. Stafford is arguing against: Lewis says that instead of forming their own party, Christians should act as “leaven” in the existing political parties. He suggests that Christians might establish an interdenominational “Christian Voters Society” that would “draw up a list of assurances about ends and means which which every member was expected to exact from any political party as the price of his support.” I take it that what Lewis has in mind here is a determination of what ends and means are “lawful” (i.e., morally permissible or obligatory) rather than what means are effective in bringing about desired ends.

    In a fallen world where our knowledge is inevitably limited and our motives are clouded by self-interest, faithful Christians, like everyone else, are going to disagree on political issues. As Lewis argues, to try and paper over this disagreement with the formation of a Christian party will either result in political failure or religious betrayal.
    ——————————————————————–
    *Found in the collection God in the Dock; a slightly truncated version can be found here.

  • Updated thoughts on Christianity and capitalism

    A while back I wrote a post called “What’s a Christian to do with capitalism?” in which I tried to outline some principles for a Christian approach to economics. I’ve since thought that those principles weren’t stated as clearly or exactly as they should have been, and I’ve updated the post to try and reflect this.

  • John Wesley on slavery and human rights

    I’ve been reading Theodore Runyon’s The New Creation: John Wesley’s Theology Today, which aims to offer a synoptic account of Wesley’s thought and its relevance for the contemporary church. As the title suggests, Runyon argues that the notion of the renewal of creation is key to understanding Wesley’s theology. Specifically, it refers to the renewal of the image of God in humanity through the power of divine grace. Runyon offers the analogy of a mirror to help understand Wesley’s account of the “image of God.” It doesn’t refer to some inherent capacity of human nature, such as reason or freedom, but is a relational notion: we receive the love of God and we reflect it back to the world around us. Wesley was a genuine “evangelical catholic” who combined the Reformation emphasis on justification by faith with an equally strong belief that God’s grace would transform human life and, ultimately, the entire creation.

    In the final chapter, “Wesley for Today,” Runyon discusses how Wesley’s theology might be applicable to some current pressing social and political issues. And in articulating Wesley’s approach to what we would now call human rights, Runyon draws extensively on Wesley’s ardent opposition to slavery, which I admit I wasn’t really aware of.

    Here’s a pamphlet Wesley published on the question of slavery. An excerpt with Wesley’s response to certain pro-slavery arguments:

    “But the furnishing us with slaves is necessary for the trade, and wealth, and glory of our nation” [says the defender of slavery]. Here are several mistakes. For, First, wealth is not necessary to the glory of any nation; but wisdom, virtue, justice, mercy, generosity, public spirit, love of our country. These are necessary to the real glory of a nation; but abundance of wealth is not. Men of understanding allow that the glory of England was full as high in Queen Elizabeth’s time as it is now; although our riches and trade were then as much smaller, as our virtue was greater. But, Secondly, it is not clear that we should have either less money or trade, (only less of that detestable trade of man-stealing,) if there was not a Negro in all our islands, or in all English America. It is demonstrable, white men, inured to it by degrees, can work as well as them; and they would do it, were Negroes out of the way, and proper encouragement given them. However, Thirdly, I come back to the same point: Better no trade, than trade procured by villany. It is far better to have no wealth, than to gain wealth at the expense of virtue. Better is honest poverty, than all the riches bought by the tears, and sweat, and blood, of our fellow-creatures.

    And here’s a letter–one of his last, written on his deathbed–to William Wilberforce, then a member of parliament:

    Unless the divine power has raised you up to be as Athanasius contra mundum, I see not how you can go through your glorious enterprise in opposing that execrable villainy which is the scandal of religion, of England, and of human nature. Unless God has raised you up for this very thing, you will be worn out by the opposition of men and devils. But if God before you, who can be against you? Are all of them together stronger than God? O be not weary of well doing! Go on, in the name of God and in the power of his might, till even American slavery (the vilest that ever saw the sun) shall vanish away before it.

    Wesley, Runyon notes, is sometimes caricatured as a conservative, or even reactionary, “high-church Tory,” but according to Runyon this misunderstands his reasons for, e.g., supporting the monarchy. Wesley distrusted democracy precisely because he feard that it would ride roughshod over the liberty of the individual, particularly religious liberty. He had first-hand experience to draw on, as early Methodists were often attacked by angry mobs, sometimes whipped up by local authorities. Wesley saw “liberty under law” in the form of a constitutional monarchy as the best defense against mob rule. He also observed the hypocrisy of American colonists complaining about the “tyranny” of the crown while at the same time maintaining the institution of chattle-slavery. Had Wesley lived to see the establishment of genuine liberal democracy he might have changed his mind, but his opposition at the time was rooted in a concern for what we would today call human rights. And for Wesley, this inherent dignity was in turn based on the creative love of God.

  • From religious diversity to “confessional pluralism”

    In the final chapter of The Many Faces of Christology, Tyron Inbody looks at the issue of religious diversity. He considers the standard responses–exclusivism, inclusivism, and pluralism–but finds them wanting for familiar reasons. Exclusivism, in addition to resting on a questionable and selective interpretation of the biblical witness, greatly exacerbates the problem of evil by implying that the vast majority of the human race will be denied even the possibility of salvation. Inclusivism, while appearing to be more open-minded, is in the end a kinder, gentler form of Christian exclusivism, implying that the exclusive basis of salvation is still the Christian revelation. Finally, pluralism, in insisting on an essential similarity among religions, tends to smuggle in particularist assumptions. For instance, John Hick’s pluralism makes a number of assumptions that are really theistic in nature and not neutral between the various religious traditions.

    Instead of adopting one of the familiar perspectives, Inbody argues for what he calls “confessional pluralism.” This form of pluralism makes two key affirmations. First, it insists that all religious traditions are irreducibly contextual. That is to say, none can claim to have a neutral, “god’s-eye” view of things. It entails “a lack of finality and absoluteness” and an affirmation of “modesty about theological claims” (p. 209). In other words, we can only speak about other religions from the perspective of our own particular viewpoint; we should therefore not claim to possess a “view from nowhere.”

    Second, confessional pluralism, in its Christian form, affirms the universal significance of Christ and interprets the plurality of religions from an explicitly Christian point of view. For instance, Inbody suggest that, arguing analogously from the triune nature of God, we can posit plurality as an irreducible fact about the world. The world is characterized by pluralism–including religious pluralism–because unity-in-difference is the character of the divine life itself. God is the Creator of all, the Wisdom that can be manifested in a multiplicity of religious traditions, and the Spirit that is at work in the world and in all cultures to bring creation to fulfillment.

    This perspective strikes me as very similar to the one developed by Marjorie Suchocki in her Divinity and Diversity (which I blogged about here and here), as well as the “confessionalism” of H. Richard Niebuhr. Inbody is arguing for an appreciation of pluralism, not from purportedly “universal” premises, but from explicitly Christian ones. Confessionalism as Inbody understands it can be pluralist in affirming that no one tradition possesses the unvarnished and complete truth, but that all the “great ways” embody part of that truth; it can also be particularist in claiming universal significance for the revelation of God in Jesus.

    Perhaps a good way to think about it is offered by John V. Taylor, the Anglican bishop and theologian. In his book The Christlike God, Taylor writes the following:

    The different ‘faces’ of God which are set forth [in the various world religions] will seem in some respects to be mutually contradictory, and for a long time we may not be ready to guess how, if at all, they will be reconciled. I believe we can confidently leave that in the hands of the future if we will only persevere in the agenda for today. And for us who are Christians this is, quite simply, in reverent appreciation of the beliefs and prayers of others, to affirm that, whatever else he is, God is Christlike–humble and vulnerable in his love–and that we have found in that revelation the salvation that all peoples look for. (p. 5)

    This seems to strike the kind of balance Inbody is talking about–neither surrendering our loyalty to the revelation we have received nor presuming to be in possession of the entire truth.

  • “Are you the one who is to come?”

    Tyron Inbody has a very interesting chapter on Christianity and Judaism in his Many Faces of Christology. With “post-Holocaust” theologies, he notes that the contention between Judaism and Christianity isn’t over Jesus’s teachings–which scholars now believe fell largely within the parameters of 1st-century Pharisaic Judaism. Nor is it over his death–which was not the fault of “the Jews” but of the Jerusalem politico-religious establishment and the Roman occupying government. It’s not, he contends, even necessarily over Jesus’s resurrection–resurrection was a core belief of the Pharisees, and Inbody cites the contemporary Jewish New Testament scholar Pinchas Lapide, who actually accepts that Jesus was resurrected. While this is obviously a minority view, Inbody argues that it shows that the resurrection as such is not incompatible with Judaism.

    But this also highlights where the true point of contention lies–in the messiahship of Jesus. Inbody points out that the resurrection does not per se prove that Jesus was the Messiah. Jews can, in principle, accept the fact of the resurrection. What faithful Jews deny, however, is that the world has been redeemed by the death and resurrection of Jesus. This isn’t, as Christians sometimes like to think, because Jews wanted a “political-military” Messiah and thus couldn’t accept a “spiritual,” nonviolent one. While this view is self-flattering for Christians, it misses the point. That is, for Jews, the advent of the Messiah is inextricably linked with the redemption of the world–that is, the end of violence and suffering and the establishment of God’s universal kingdom. 1st-century Judaism had a variety of concepts of what the Messiah would be like, and even varied on whether the Messiah should be indentified with a specific individual at all. But the consistent theme was that the messianic age would user in peace, justice, and wholeness for God’s creation. Jewish rejection of the messianic status of Jesus isn’t due to “stubbornness” or “blindness” as much Christian tradition has had it, but can in fact be seen as a faithful response to God’s promises as they were revealed through the Torah and Prophets.

    Inbody argues that Christians were able to identify Jesus as the Messiah only by reinterpreting the meaning of messiahship. Christians, if they’re being honest, must admit that the death, resurrection, and ascension of Jesus did not establish God’s kingdom. Rather, Jesus provides a “foretaste” of the kingdom, which will only be established in its fullness at the end of time. Somewhat paradoxically, this shows that Christians and Jews may be closer together than it at first seems. If Christians view Jesus’s messiahship in terms of prolepsis and promise, then they have much in common with Jews who still await the coming of the Messiah. Both are awaiting the same Kingdom–God’s universal reign of shalom. Whether or not Jesus is the one who will reign as Messiah in that kingdom is ultimately an eschatological question that we can’t definitively settle now–even if we agree that Jesus was resurrected!

  • Christology and worries about “theosis”

    I’m reading Tyron L. Inbody’s The Many Faces of Christology, and while this isn’t a direct comment on the book, it is inspired by something he writes about.

    In discussing the Christological controversies of the 4th and 5th centuries, Inbody emphasizes that these were about soteriology first and foremost. All the seemingly esoteric talk about substance, person, essence, etc. was, at bottom, aimed at safeguarding the Christian experience of salvation. In other words, what kind of being must Jesus be/have been in order to be the Savior?

    Inbody uses this soteriological lens to discuss the debate between Arius and Athanasius. For Arius (according to Inbody) salvation was primarily a moral matter, so the Savior had to be a creature–someone whose pattern of life it was possible for us to replicate in our own lives. By contrast, Athanasius viewed salvation as more of an ontological matter–the Logos must be divine because it was the unity of the divine and human natures that makes our own “deification” and salvation from death and corruption possible.

    What was interesting to me about this discussion was that it enabled me to sympathize with Arius more than I had before. On Inbody’s account, not only was Arius concerned to safeguard the unity of God, but he also thought it was important for the Savior to be like us if we were to share in the sonship of Jesus, where sonship is understood as a moral relationship to God.

    It also made clearer to me some of the issues I have with talk of salvation as “deification” or theosis. On Athanasius’ view, human mortality is a result of our separation from God. What’s needed in order for us to be saved from death is for humanity to be united to deity in an ontological or metaphysical fashion.

    I have a couple of worries about this. First, contemporary science doesn’t really permit us to see mortality as a result of some spiritual “fall” that happened once upon a time. If we are to live beyond death, it will have to be the result of some supernatural act on God’s part.

    Secondly, the language of theosis–at least as it is sometimes used–seems to present salvation as a “sub-personal” affair: we’re saved by having the right “stuff” (God stuff) injected into our humanity. I realize this is a crude characterization of at least some versions of this view, but I think ontological language does easily lend itself to this kind of misuse.

    It has long seemed to me, rather, that Christians should think of salvation in fundamentally relational terms. That is to say, salvation consists in having a right relationship to God restored (and, correspondingly, a right relationship to other people and to the rest of the created order). I think some of the church fathers (e.g., Irenaeus) got this–by seeing salvation more in terms of Jesus reorienting humanity toward God rather than as the mere fact of the divine/human union understood in a metaphysical, quasi-substantialist sense. In other words, Jesus “re-narrates” human life (“reacapitulates” in Irenaeus’s terms) so that its relationship to God is restored.

    This doesn’t mean that Jesus is simply a moral teacher, as some crude “moral exemplar” Atonement theories have it. (Or that “sonship” should be understood in narrowly moral terms.) And I would certainly want to affirm the intention behind the creedal affirmations that Jesus is both fully God and fully human. But to see this union primarily in metaphsical or ontological terms may not be helpful if the nature of sin and salvation is understood in terms of relationship.

  • 25 books every Christian should read(?)

    That is, according to a book recently published by Harper under the auspices of Renovare, the evangelical-ish spiritual renewal movement. (Actually, since this book has the list, aren’t there 26 books every Christian should read? Seems like some sort of paradox there…)

    In any event, here’s the list, with titles I’ve read in bold. An asterisk means I’ve read at least selections.

    1. On the Incarnation, St. Athanasius
    2. Confessions, St. Augustine
    3. The Sayings of the Desert Fathers, Various
    4. The Rule of St. Benedict, St. Benedict
    5. The Divine Comedy, Dante Alighieri*
    6. The Cloud of Unknowing, Anonymous
    7. Revelations of Divine Love (Showings), Julian of Norwich
    8. The Imitation of Christ, Thomas a Kempis
    9. The Philokalia, Various
    10. Institutes of the Christian Religion, John Calvin*
    11. The Interior Castle, St. Teresa of Avila
    12. Dark Night of the Soul, St. John of the Cross
    13. Pensees, Blaise Pascal
    14. The Pilgrim’s Progress, John Bunyan
    15. The Practice of the Presence of God, Brother Lawrence
    16. A Serious Call to a Devout and Holy Life, William Law
    17. The Way of a Pilgrim, Unknown Author
    18. The Brothers Karamazov, Fyodor Dostoevsky
    19. Orthodoxy, G.K. Chesterton
    20. The Poetry of Gerald Manley Hopkins*
    21. The Cost of Discipleship, Dietrich Bonhoeffer
    22. A Testament of Devotion, Thomas R. Kelly
    23. The Seven Storey Mountain, Thomas Merton
    24. Mere Christianity, C.S. Lewis
    25. The Return of the Prodigal Son, Henri J.M. Nouwen

    Of the ones I haven’t read, I most feel like I should read Benedict and Julian. One glaring omission that jumps out at me is Martin Luther. If I were adding something it would probably be his On Christian Liberty.

    Anyone care to suggest other titles they’d add to (or subtract from) the list?

    UPDATE: Tony Jones offers an alternative list he and some friends came up with here. It includes some good additions like Origen, Anselm, Wesley, and Luther, as well as some worthy books from more recent times (Barth, Gutierrez).