Hello and welcome to Oak Hill College's Deep Roots podcast,
conversations about theology and ministry.
My name is Tim Ward and I'm one of the lecturers here at Oak Hill.
And if you're wondering why at least a couple of us are in shorts,
that's because we're down in the basement of Oak Hill Towers here, but up and out there
it's just hit 40 degrees, a UK record. So yeah, those of you watching this in August, maybe when it's like five degrees and raining,
we are recording on that day.
So this may be the shortest podcast we ever have. Who knows? My name is Eric.
I'm also one of the faculty members here and we are joined today by our friend and colleague, Chris Stead.
Hi.
Chris, can you tell us a little bit about yourself?
Sure. So I am the Mike Ovi fellow here at Oak Hill, and that's meant teaching a lot of systematic theology and or doctrine,
depending on what kind of language you like.
So I've been doing that for years, full time here, but I did a bit of teaching while I was a curate before then.
And we'll be talking about some of the some of the theological areas that I've enjoyed teaching as we go through the format of today.
A particular student, I think, asked you for some Chris Stead's top book recommendations.
We heard of that and thought, here's the next podcast, Chris Stead's Book Club.
Yes. Yeah, yeah.
Just tell us how that came about.
Yes. So one of the students in my fellowship group, well, I'll name him, Dan Halpin of Canterbury, well, very soon to be of Canterbury,
asked for a list of books that have really had an impact upon me that I've really enjoyed, that have shaped me in particular ways.
And I thought, well, why not?
And so I spent a bit of time coming up with two lists just because as anyone who's been taught by me knows, I tend to have a lot of a lot to say.
And so I came up with two lists. One of them was top 20 reads from the 20th century onwards.
And there's more than 20 on there, but it's around about 20.
And then the second list is top 20 must haves from the first 20 centuries of the church.
So two lists and both of them idiosyncratic, very much my own personal choice.
The second list, the sort of must haves are slightly more objective, as they refer to works that everyone recognises.
These are just standards.
But particularly the must reads, which is where I think we're going to be chatting most of our time today around.
Yeah, that's just books that have shaped me as a Christian, as a Christian student here at Oak Hill, as a pastor, and then latterly as a theological educator.
So there's a there's a range of books on there, but they're all very much in my favourite warehouse.
That's wonderful. But you have not brought 40 books with you today.
So are we going to get our top five from each list?
Yeah, well, I mean, I'll give you maybe some snippets in addition to the it's mainly going to be five from the top 20 must reads, but I brought some Augustine with me as well as well.
But yeah, it's I'll give you some of the snippets and some of the highlights on the list and then do a bit of a deeper dive.
Where would you like to start?
Okay, great. Well, why don't I start with a few that I haven't brought with me just to say what's on the list.
And I couldn't do this. And I realized that I haven't warned either of them on what I'm about to do now, which is, Eric, I'm afraid I don't have a book of yours on the list.
I'm very, very sorry. I do have a book of Tim's on the list there, which is the awkwardness in the room.
You have very good taste.
I was taking your list incredibly seriously till I saw one.
No, no, no. So, so starting off Tim's book, Words of Life, I remember in my first year here, I'd come to Oak Hill.
I'd read a fair bit of theology before coming with young, punky and arrogance.
And now I'm just slightly less young, but still a bit too punky and arrogant.
Maybe I don't know. And thinking I want to do some serious theological reading.
And I wanted to find a good book on scripture and this little IVP number.
And I thought this would be a really helpful introduction, I'm sure.
Sort of maybe a few a few good points in here that are really going to help me.
But, you know, I'm a theological student. I want something more serious than this.
And then I opened up this book and there was Barvink and Warfield and Calvin and some rich theology on the doctrine of scripture.
And it really blew me away.
And so now Tim's book, Words of Life, I think is the book to point people to for an accessible and yet very rich introduction to scripture.
So there we go.
Thank you. That's wonderful.
That's very kind of you to say.
Just occasionally I get an email from someone I've never heard of saying your book really helped me.
And I don't know about you, actually we all feel this.
If any, you put time and effort in and it costs other people's money and it's just you're working your way.
And if anybody says, you know, what you did was worthwhile.
I'm the kind of British person who just wants to go, oh, no, it was nothing.
But thank you.
My pleasure. That was great.
And what I throw in is I haven't yet read this.
I'm hoping to get to it quite soon.
Mark Thompson from More College has just produced a sort of a shortish accessible 200 page book on the doctrine of scripture, which I'm really excited to get to.
Great. I think this could be could be a new go to.
He he's building in some more recent theology that I just didn't know of and take account of at all when I was reading people like John Webster building into a really orthodox doctrine of scripture.
I'm confident that's going to be great.
Looking forward to getting to it.
Excellent. Excellent. Good.
So that was that was one on the list.
Any others on the list that I'm not going to spend time and say Sinclair Ferguson, the Holy Spirit.
I think that's a fantastic book on the Holy Spirit.
I've got quite a lot of Michael Horton on here.
So he counts as one entry, but I've got a fair few things by him.
Probably the in terms of living reformed authors, he's probably had more of an impact on me and my sort of thinking I've had than anyone else.
Is that his four volume theology?
It's a variety of ones on here.
I've got the Christian faith, which is the one volume kind of distillation of that four parts.
He did.
Christless Christianity is on there.
That's the first one of his I read.
And that was basically his he uses the reformed distinction between law and gospel to argue that lots of modern evangelical is actually law light.
And he's thinking particularly in American perspective, it was written a while ago now.
Maybe things have changed, but there's a phrase that sociologists called Christian Smith use called moralistic, therapeutic dayism.
I first came across it in that book by Michael Horton, Christless Christianity,
and basically completely reduces the sense of weightiness that historically attributed to the so-called first use of the law.
The idea that the law shows you that you cannot save yourself and that you need Christ.
And once you reduce that, then you actually make Christianity something perhaps that is about rule keeping and doing good.
And that book shows that actually that's led American evangelicalism, at least to a very dark place.
And what you need is a weighty sense of the law so that you can really hear the good news of the gospel.
And so that's why it's Christless Christianity, because it's Christianity that doesn't need a savior.
So, yeah, that was a really influential book for me.
Wonderful. This is so Michael Horton, H-O-R-T-O-N.
Yeah.
And if someone's listening in hasn't particularly heard of him or maybe heard of him not reading before, Christless Christianity would be a good way in, do you think?
It would be a good way in.
I think so. I mean, that was my way in and it was a really helpful way in.
He's got lots of books on the list.
His The Christian Faith is his one volume systematic theology and I think that's a really good one to have on the shelf.
I think if a pastor is looking for a contemporary systematic theology, my choice would be Horton's.
Wow.
There's lots of other good ones out there, but for me Horton is a good one.
And the big one, if I remember rightly, he did an abbreviated thing, is it called Pilgrim Theology?
Pilgrim Theology, yeah.
And if a pastor is thinking, that, well that, what would your recommendation be?
Depends what they're wanting it for.
Okay.
If they're wanting a book to teach doctrines to their congregation and to work through Pilgrim Theology would be a good one to go with.
If they want a truly systematic theology in the sense that it really does hold together with particularly the use of covenant and redemptive history as a real theme that drives the book forward,
then The Christian Faith I think is a really good one for a pastor to hold on their shelf.
Great.
Yeah. So, deeper dive then.
So the five I've brought with me, this is the first one.
I think I'm going in sort of chronological order in terms of when I read them and then the impact they had on me.
And so the first one is this one.
The good news we almost forgot.
Rediscovering the gospel in a 16th century catechism, which is a rubbish book title I have to say, no offence to Kevin D. Young.
I don't, particularly the subtitle, it doesn't sound very exciting, but this is on my top 20 absolute must reads from the 20th century.
And I read this, a friend of mine who's a reformed pastor in America who used to live in the UK gave it to me because I just,
I wanted to figure out how do you go deeper into Christianity?
Where are the resources to really help you go?
This was right at the start of my sort of older Christian life way back when.
And he introduced me to the idea of confessional Christianity in the sense of looking to particularly the reformed confessions and catechisms of the 16th and 17th centuries as teaching tools,
as points of doctrinal unity, but also as ways of getting the gospel into your bloodstream so that when you come to any part of scripture,
you have a sense of the big story, the big shapes of the Christian faith so that you understand how this part of the Bible fits into the bigger whole.
And he gave me this book and I read it and it was absolutely superb.
I think Kevin D. Young's written a lot of very good books.
For me, this is my favourite by a long way because what it is, it's 52 chapters and it's a very short commentary on the Heidelberg Catechism.
Heidelberg Catechism was produced in 1564 as a way of uniting these newly emerging reformed churches around what they thought was the rediscovery of the gospel,
that it had been lost or at least very heavily covered. And so in rediscovering the gospel, they wanted, well, a particular prince in a particular region
wanted something to bring people together, to be able to teach children the faith, teach adults the faith and be a point of unity with these new reformed churches.
And so he got a variety of people together, but Zacharias Ersinus is the sort of lead writer to write a series of questions and answers about the Christian faith, to teach it,
to write a point of unity. And the Heidelberg Catechism was what came out of that.
And Catechizing has been around since the very early days of the church.
People sometimes hear Catechism and think, oh, that's what Roman Catholics do, I didn't realise Protestants do it.
Well, actually Roman Catholics, so I've heard, heard what Protestants were doing, things like the Heidelberg Catechism, and thought, well, that seems like a good idea.
Let's get in on that action. And the Heidelberg Catechism was one of the earlier Catechisms, and it treats the Apostles' Creed, the Lord's Prayer and the Ten Commandments.
And it moves in sort of three stages of guilt, grace, gratitude. So the state of humanity's misery under sin, the grace that is available in the gospel,
and then how to live your life in gratitude, in worship and obedience.
And the Catechism takes you through all of that in 52 chunks, but there are several questions within each chunk.
The idea is you teach, you go through one chunk every week. So there are 52 Lord's Days, the Heidelberg Catechism.
And your motive for all of this was growing in Christ, growing as a Christian.
Yeah, yeah, absolutely.
That was the larger motive. And did that happen as you worked through the book?
And that's why I love the book, because it really helped me do that.
And it's, yeah, Kevin DeYoung said, he says it in his introduction, he set aside a year to blog his way through the Heidelberg Catechism.
It must be nice when you set aside a year, blog your way through, and then someone goes, can we publish that, please?
Which, well, it works for him in various ways, I think. But certainly in this book, that's what they did.
And it was fantastic, really accessible, straightforward language, just saying, look, this question gets at this.
So you may, if you've never heard of the Heidelberg Catechism, you may have heard of the first question, which goes like this.
What is your only comfort in life and in death? Answer, that I am not my own, but belong body and soul in life and in death to my faithful Saviour Jesus Christ, and so on and so on.
It's such a wonderful reformational pastoral instinct, isn't it? Question one, what is your comfort?
Yes, absolutely.
What is your comfort?
Yeah.
For some folks who maybe have not been brought up in traditions that have been strong on Catechesis, Heidelberg may have heard of it, there can be, as I've heard this too,
there can be reasons for this being a legitimate worry, a worry that getting really excited about things like Heidelberg Catechism is in the end going to produce people who are just excited about micro points of doctrine,
arguing about the proverbial angels on pinheads and not really getting on with gospel ministry or not really a heart of warmth toward Christ.
Yeah, yeah.
Clearly this was not the impact that that book had on you.
No, and on lots of other people as well. I mean, the Heidelberg Catechism so claims introduction, and I've seen this verified elsewhere.
Behind the Bible, the Pilgrim's Progress and Imitation of Christ, the Heidelberg Catechism is the most circulated book in the world.
And within, I think, a century after its publication had been translated into languages covering most continents of the world because it was used as a missional tool to go and reach people with the gospel,
as well as build those who had received and believed the gospel.
So historically that doesn't pan out and certainly in lots of people's experience, that's not the case.
Then anything can produce formulaic hardness of heart, I guess, to things of God.
So yeah, that Catechisms may have done that in the past doesn't mean that they're to blame, as it were.
I think one of the things in terms of ministry then that I really found with this is you kind of do something like a Christianity explored course at your church.
Which is a really helpful course and lots of people become Christians through it.
What do you do next? Well, I know there's discipleship explored, a few weeks of extra stuff.
But then you want to give people the big shapes of the gospel and the Christian life.
What do you do to achieve that? Well, attending church regularly, maybe in small group things.
But something like the Heidelberg Catechism, which is designed to be gone through in a year, is a fantastic way to introduce people to the Creed.
So the big doctrines of the faith, the Ten Commandments.
What does it look like to follow Christ and the Lord's Prayer? What does it look like to worship and pray?
And if you've gone through that with a guide as trustee as Kevin DeYoung, then you've got some pretty good stuff under your belt in a year then.
So as a discipleship tool, something that's proved its worth over the centuries, pretty good place to start.
So again, this is Chris Stead's list, not the absolute must have list for everyone.
And so I think this is a really great tool.
And I think Kevin DeYoung's Cometron is a good place to start.
Tremendous, tremendous. Shall we move on? Yes, sure.
I'm reading upside down the author of the next book.
I'm quite excited about this book. Yes. Okay. Yes. Is this with it?
And I read this book on your recommendation and enjoyed it a great deal.
Oh, did you? Okay. What's the big point?
There are a number of big points that I really enjoyed. The big point, the way I would say it in a simple way is that.
Should you say what the book is first? That's probably best. Say that first.
This is your book club, but I'll summarize it if you want. Does God Suffer by Thomas Wynandee.
So, Eric, does God suffer? I took him to be saying that God is not the kind of being who is ever overwhelmed with emotional turmoil.
And he never has any emotional needs that he has to attend to first before he gives to you, comforts you, loves you and receives you.
So these sorts of doctrines can very easily make God sound cold or ghostly or distant.
They are not intended to do that. But just that God is always able to be perfectly loving, kind, sympathetic, tender hearted to you out of his own fullness and out of his own unruffled fullness, if I can put it that way.
Yes. Is that fair? That's a very good introduction, I think, to the book.
So it touches on the doctrine of divine impassibility and from the Latin pacio meaning to suffer or to undergo some sort of change.
And so therefore the question does God suffer? The short answer is no.
But the reason why no is such good news is what Thomas Wynandee spends this book setting out.
And I read this in my first... Because it can sound like bad news, can't it? It can sound like God is now...
It's quite easy in a kind of loose pastoral way to make God feel more relevant to my life and closer if he experiences what I do in the troubles of this life.
Yes. So in a sense it's counterintuitive, isn't it?
Yes. And Thomas Wynandee is very alive to that. And in fact, he even says in his introduction, you know, the thing that frightens me most about writing this book is Auschwitz.
How do I write a book saying God does not suffer when the weight of 20th century theology has said, look, the only way we can offer a God who answers the protests of so-called protest atheism,
which is I don't care about rational arguments for the existence of God, but look at how wretched the world is. I'm going to disagree and disbelieve in God just out of protest.
And he says, I recognize that is hugely weighty and hugely significant. And yet he presses on and says, no, no, the answer that the Christian tradition has always set about impossibility.
And Anglican from the early 20th century called Eric Maskell said basically theology has very few doctrines as stable and well attested as divine impossibility.
It's there in the Chalcedonian settlement. The assumption is, of course, God can't suffer. So how do we make sense of the incarnation?
But everyone at Chalcedon said, but we know God doesn't suffer and it's there, it's captured.
That was not in question.
That was not in question. And so it even has in that sense, creedal weight, divine impossibility.
But the way, one of the reasons that, so I read this book in my first year of Oak Hill and it had a huge impact on me for a number of reasons.
One of them is the way that Thomas Wynandy goes about reading the Bible, which is to say that I'm going to take the Bible so seriously,
I have to read the whole thing and let the whole thing weigh upon my interpretation of the whole thing.
And one of the big issues in thinking about the doctrine of God is the apparent tension between those texts which present God as beyond this world,
as the big sovereignty type texts, sometimes called the texts that speak of God's transcendence, to transcend, to go beyond.
God isn't part of the world order. God isn't affected by the world order because he made it all, bigger than it all.
You've got those texts. You then got texts, the so-called immanent texts, the kind of present to texts where God is really intimately involved in the life of his people.
And sometimes those are set off against each other as they're parallel modes of God's existence or their intention with one another.
Thomas Wynandy does this, has a whole beautiful chapter on Yahweh the Holy Other where he says,
you read the whole picture carefully and what you have is a God who is so intimately involved in the lives of his people that no created being,
nothing in the universe could be that intimately involved.
And in fact, the very texts which speak of God's immanence reveal God's transcendence.
Only a God who is outside the limitations of the created order could be the kind of God that Israel enjoys, for instance, in the book of Isaiah.
They depend on each other.
Exactly. So what kind of God could be the God of Psalm 139, who is closer than my inward thoughts, who knows every word even before I speak it?
What kind of God could be that God apart from the transcendent, sovereign, majestic creator who is not in any way limited by any part of creation?
Only that God. So the immanence texts Wynandy says reveal the very transcendence of God.
For me that really then made sense of the whole.
This is immanence, isn't it? When we say immanence, it's not immanence as in happening any moment, immanence remaining with, present to.
So he has a whole chapter on that. He moves through a variety of different arguments to show that actually the impassibility of God is not that God is, in the words of some people, a metaphysical iceberg, that he's frozen static and that that's why he doesn't suffer.
It's because he is so alive with his own life in the word. He's a Roman Catholic, so he uses the language of Thomas Aquinas a lot. God is so fully actual that there isn't any passive part of him that's just sort of lying there waiting to come to life.
Every part of him is alive all at once and particularly in the life of the Trinity.
Each person of the Trinity is fully alive. The being of God is fully alive in the relation to the Trinity.
So it's not that God doesn't suffer because he's static, he's like a rock, it's that he is so alive and so full of love and life that he can't be moved to anything else other than who he is.
Can I ask you this? You've got very young children.
Yeah.
If you wanted to explain to your oldest child, your oldest child is seven, explain it to her, how would you do it?
And why it's good news.
Why it's good news? Wow. Well, I'm not saying these are the words I'd use, but some of the things that I'd want to touch upon are to show that we often think that God should be just like us, that we want God to be like us but just bigger.
And yet, we all know that we don't love perfectly, that because of who we are as creatures, who we are as sinful people as well, that our love is imperfect.
It is often broken and frail. Pete Sandlin in his book Simply God talks about this, that we want for some reason God's love to be as feeble and frail as ours.
Unchangeable.
Unchangeable, exactly. And actually the good news of God's love is that in the words of 1 John 3 verse 1, it is from another place, literally see what kind of love the Father has lavished on us.
And the word that John uses is from what place? From what place is this love? God's love is not like the love that we know. It's not even just a better kind of love, it's a different kind of love, it's an alien kind of love.
Two things that have really helped me with this are that impassibility does not mean God has no emotions. It means that his emotional life is one proper to a divine being who is perfect and never changes, unlike a creature like me.
And this is getting a little bit off topic, but secondly I'm praying to a Father who never changes, who is never, his emotions are never chaotic and overwhelming within him.
But I'm praying to him through Jesus Christ, who is two natures joined together, one man who has a passable, suffering human nature.
I find it so moving in John 11 where Jesus sees his friend in the grave and it always gets under translated. The Greek is something like, it's like to make a noise like a horse makes.
It doesn't mean Jesus is going, like Jesus has a breakdown, which you know what, which God can't have.
And yet I'm praying to an unchangingly loving Father through Jesus Christ who never changes and who utterly understands what emotional turmoil is like.
Getting a little bit off topic when we say this, but it's comforting to me to think I can't change God's heart toward me. He has no other emotional needs to deal with.
But in his Son he knows exactly what that's like.
Yes, yeah, absolutely. I mean the question of God's emotional life is precisely that for a start when we have emotions, we have embodied emotions.
And God doesn't have a body. Yes, the second person of the Trinity has a body because he is incarnate, but God as God has no body.
So straight away whatever you want to say about God's emotional life is going to be radically different to what we say about ours.
And that's one of the things I really like about this book is when Andy is very happy to then bring hugely rich and mature biblical reading into conversation with things like simplicity or actuality,
which are technical terms which come to the doctrine of God at Oak Hill and you'll find out what they mean.
But some philosophical notions that Thomas Aquinas drew on quite heavily that the church had drawn on long before Thomas Aquinas
to try and capture exactly what the Bible says, which is God's life is fully alive and there aren't parts to God which are less alive or parts to God which are less essential to God,
but that all of God is fully alive all at once and that precisely because that life is untouchable, he is free to be close to us, intimate, loving, saving.
He doesn't save out of any need. He didn't create out of any need. Thomas Aquinas brings all of that together.
This is one of my favorites, theological books of all time, I think.
Fantastic. It's wonderful.
And it's wonderful how you are building on the work of others. I mean, you mentioned the doctrine of God module, which is kind of a capstone in our 30s,
but it's wonderful how you and others have really put that front and centre of the kinds of things we're trying to do here, because it is the case, isn't it?
Just as you said, impossibility, just unquestioned across the board of Orthodox faith until roughly around about 1900 when,
and then evangelicals in various places can either deny it or forget it or ignore it or even not know about it.
And so to bring these vital historic doctrines back onto the table. And you've already pointed out how pastorally that's crucial.
Just in terms of if someone wanted to read around this a little bit, how accessible is that book?
What level of theological education is someone to have had for that really to be useful?
Some, I think. So some familiarity with certain Christian doctrines like the Incarnation and the Trinity in order to really understand why it is you can speak about Jesus suffering as a man without that needing to compromise his divinity, things like that.
So there does need to be, I think, some foundation there in order to be able to make sense of it.
There are a number of books out there that are deliberately written for people who might not pick up Thomas Wanandi. So Gary Williams, Love Endures Forever.
That's a really lovely book on the attributes of God. That's fantastic.
It ends with a prayer each time, doesn't it?
Oh, it's brilliant. Yeah, yeah. Every chapter is very devotional and meant to lead you to reflect and meditate.
And similarly, Pete Sandlin's Simply God does the same sort of thing, which is to move towards that devotional side of things.
Matthew Barrett's None Greater does something similar as well.
I don't think it finishes each chapter in the same devotional key, but again, doing this thing called looking at the attributes of God, which historically was quite a thing that people did.
I think that's a bit of a fall in their side of favor. If you want something that's a bit chunkier and breaks down particularly divine impossibility more,
there's a book written by some Reformed Baptists called God Without Passions, I think.
Something like that. It's a sort of book of essays by a variety of people on a variety of topics,
trying to argue for divine impossibility from biblical, historical, pastoral, theological. So that's a good one there.
Wonderful. Now, I'm very excited about the next book you have here because it's not nonfiction.
No, it is not nonfiction. It is Gilead by Marilynne Robinson. So this is...
You've read this, haven't you? I have. Have you? No, I haven't. I'm interested to hear about it.
So Marilynne Robinson is, for a start, a fantastic user of the English language.
I've read lots of things that she's written and her ability to articulate ideas is just wonderful. Her novels are beautifully written.
Gilead, I don't know the publication series. I think this might be the first, but I might be wrong.
It is one of a series of novels relating to a particular family in rural America.
This was the first one I've read. I've read the others. This was my favourite.
It's a series of letters written by an aging father to his young son.
An aging father is a pastor of, I think, an Episcopal church. It's never quite clear to me, quite the domination.
It's a series of letters written by this father to his son, just reflecting on his life, telling the story,
this very slow-paced story of just a couple of characters in his own life.
But the reason why I love it and why I've included it in this explicitly Christian literature is that he reflects very deeply on the nature of the past or task,
on the things of God, on the Gospel, forgiveness and sin and redemption, on heaven and hell and everything that is within the range of Christian things that you might think about is reflected upon in this book.
But one of the things that I really loved in reading this book is the way in which it shows that people are far more complex and rich and interesting than I think we can often assume in quite a reductionistic way of,
well, there's sin, there's need for salvation, people are sinners, let's just hit them with that and move on.
That people are far more complex and as I said, far more interesting than that. And so the pastoral ministry is a practice in patience and in slow burn, just seeing people grow, getting alongside them,
not being quick to correct what they think just because you know what the right thing to think is, but being there and loving people and doing that kind of thing.
And so I loved it for that alone as well as the incredibly profound theological reflections.
I adored that book. I would so love to read it again. I found it so moving. I found it hard to put down.
It's not a thrill a minute kind of book, but I would get reading it and it was difficult to put down.
Part of the reason I found it so moving was all the things you're talking about, just the ordinariness of their lives and like the church roof being leaky and needing to repaint it.
And these really profound meditations on scripture and this man's son and his wife and other things going on.
And he's a very realistic character and there are a couple points in the novel where he's worried about sin in someone's life and it's like he doesn't need, it pains him even to say.
And it's like he doesn't want to think the worst about someone. And toward the end of one letter, he's starting to get worried and he stops and he says, I need to get a hold of myself right now because I'm not trying.
In fact, I think at one point in the letter he says, I have two choices. I can continue to worry or trust God. Yes, exactly. Those are my choices.
Put in fleshing that in a very believable character. Yeah. Made it doubly moving.
It still would have been so valuable if Marilyn Robinson had said all these things in a nonfiction book directly to me. Yes. But having creating this character and having them say it.
Yes. I mean, I just don't know how novelists work generally, but novelists of this caliber to create this character and draw and bring out the kind of reflections that she does.
So, yeah, that's on the list. I think it's a really good one for pastors to read for the very reason that it's a pastor thinking very deeply.
He's very well theologically educated. And one of the themes of the book is the desire to make sure that the quick theological answers aren't just thrown out carelessly, but that there's a lot of paying attention to who it is, the audience and speaking appropriately.
Chris, before you go on, could I slightly sidetrack and say, well, what if someone were to say, I'm just not really a reader, or I don't like reading fiction, and you're saying Gilead is so wonderful to read.
Well, what would you say to someone who said, I just don't enjoy reading or I don't like reading fiction. I never do it.
Or even, I like reading fiction, but I'm a pastor and my time for reading is really limited. And I'm frankly, I'm going to get more bang for my buck of time reading Wynandie or the young wading through pages of description in fiction.
Yeah, I mean, all legitimate points and I don't want to. And again, this is this is Chris Stead's book club, and I like reading and say that's, you know, if you don't like reading, then I have absolutely no problem with someone saying I'd never read any of those.
That's fine. I'm not going to lose any sleep over that and I don't think you're a worse person for it. But I guess what if someone was saying convince me that I should do more.
I think for some of the reasons we've just been saying in that what Marilynne Robinson does is to translate some of the technical theological, not jargons the wrong word, technical theological concepts and frameworks and put them in a concrete lived out life in real relationships.
Real, you know what I mean in interpersonal relationships and pastoral situations that everyone will encounter. And the way he can move from talking about the leaky roof to the incomprehensibility of God and his reflections.
So, so I guess in reading different genres of books, you, you can start then seeing how you might make those moves and connections and saying well actually yeah what does that really helpful commentary that I read on that passage in Ephesians, how might I start working
that into the conversation over cleaning up after a coffee morning on a Tuesday, and just seeing, seeing it in examples like this I think is a really helpful way. So there is value in doing that.
Plus, I just think it's good to mix it up and not, not have one diet of books at the time.
Great. Gilead. Gilead. Tremendous. If we keep going we can squeeze two more in. Okay, great. Well I have two more to squeeze in. So look at that.
So my next one. My wife, Abby and I have been, been a few difficult times in our life and marriage and we've read a lot of books on suffering, and people always say what's the best book on suffering you've read.
My name is Eric Ortlund, suffering wisely and well in his work on Job. Certainly some of the, some of the stuff you've said about Job I've found tremendously helpful. And so I have no doubt that that book will be a real blessing to many.
Podcast number one.
Absolutely. Yeah, yeah. And just, in fact, just pausing there, something you said in there that really struck me that I've been, always tried to teach in doctrine of God and never found a way to say it the way you said it. And I might be putting words in your mouth here.
But just the way in which God's complaint against Job's comforters was that they, I mean I'm again paraphrasing what you're saying, but basically they didn't believe that God had big enough shoulders for Job to say shocking things about him.
And the view of God was small enough, or so small, that they had to correct people's, correct Job's, you're saying something shocking about God, stop it. And it's almost like they couldn't handle that. So they were speaking wrongly of God by assuming God couldn't handle it.
And as Job is, and I think your phrase was, we need to allow people to say shocking things about God. Because in their pain and their suffering, they, sometimes that's all they've got and if we clamp down and don't let people be honest, then actually, we could do some damage.
And Job's big enough to deal with it. And I think that's really valuable to say, well actually, the aseity of God, the from-himselfness, the way in which God ultimately is not affected in any kind of negative way by the world means that his children can mouth off and he doesn't stop loving them.
And the huge difference there is that Job wants to reconnect with God. That's what generates the, where are you? And this is not fair. And that's what's crucial there.
Yes, absolutely. And it's that, actually, if you really care about this, you will be angry and have some real feeling about it.
If Job didn't really love God, he would not have said the terrible things about God that he did.
Yeah, yeah. And I think that's the, there you go.
And if you can discern in a friend who's suffering, there's a heart of love for God here. That's what's generating the agony. Then you don't correct them theologically because they said something crazy and they're in agony.
And in the same way that, I guess, a parent knows when their child is, you know, shouting at them, I hate you, I can't stand this, but you're a parent and you go, look, I know they love me, I can handle this. I'm well able to take this.
Yeah. And that's how I think that's the picture you get of God. Obviously, it's much more complex than that. But anyway, I found that helpful. But it's not about you, Eric. It's about my books.
The book that I recommend, the best book that I've read on suffering is this one, Rejoicing in Lament, Wrestling with Incurable Cancer and Life in Christ by J. Todd Billings.
And I think one of the reasons why I really like this is Todd Billings is a theology professor who thinks and writes very deeply about complex theological things.
He got diagnosed with a form of myeloma, which I think is a form of leukemia, kind of blood related cancer. He went through some pretty agonizing treatment and obviously very difficult news about prognosis and length of life and things like that with two young children.
And he in this book shows that incredibly complex, deep, extended theological thought doesn't go against you when it comes to suffering well, but when employed and deployed well is a hugely helpful resource.
And so he brings his thinking about union with Christ and the Psalms and Job and divine impassibility to bear on how do I deal with incurable cancer as a father and a husband and someone who is now facing probably a much shorter life.
And I think that's just so helpful. But also the way he does it is to use the Psalms particularly to say the Psalms give us language to lament, to trust, as well as to think about our union with Christ and the nature of the God that we're trusting in.
So I think he also weaves together questions about providence, how does a good God allow evil without getting sidetracked into any of the sort of pat theological discussions or philosophical debates.
He just weaves it all in there really nicely.
Fantastic. I love everything I've read by Todd Billings. I haven't read that one.
But you're, you're making it sound like it does a great deal. If someone was thinking, I would love my past during of others in their suffering or even as it were frankly my past during of myself in my own suffering to be deeper and richer theologically, but
without sitting at someone's bedside giving them a lecture on divine impassibility in ways that are well grounded and expressed in simple terms. Is he helping someone towards that?
Yes, yeah, I think so. I mean, again, would this be the book I'd put in everyone's hands? He's going through a hard time. Probably not.
But for you, for me, it was it was ideal. And I would encourage again encourage pastors to read this and think, actually, there's, there are a lot of resources available in, in Christian theology to think about suffering, and that go beyond.
Well, think of the resurrection or hear it here a few verses on sovereignty. All things work out for good or something.
Yeah, that sort of thing. So, so yeah, I think I think it's really, really helpful for that.
Wonderful. Thank you, Chris.
Final book. One more.
Final book. So, I'm a big fan of the late John Webster, British theologian who died in 2016. He's written some very complicated and complex theological essays which have been brought together in a variety of books, sort of compilations of his work.
The book I've chosen, however, isn't one of those, the book I've chosen is a transcription of a lot of his sermons. So while he was in Oxford, he preached a lot at, I want to say Christ Church Cathedral or something, somewhere in Oxford, an old building, a big church.
These are a series of sermons, some taken from his time there, some from elsewhere. Various students of his have produced a couple of books of his sermons.
And I love these one because they're short because they're homilies in a relatively broad church setting and so they tend to be about five to seven minutes long. So that means about six or seven pages.
And again, what I love about these particular is, you can use them devotionally in that sense, he deals well with the text that is before him, but he shows again how, a bit like Todd Billings in his book on suffering, how a rich and well thought through theology is a help, not a hindrance to the past or task.
So for Todd Billings, I think, generally in suffering, for John Webster in preaching and in handling the Bible in the context of teaching it and declaring it from the pulpit, his phenomenal theological grasp of most things, everything, is brought to bear.
He deploys it really well and it means he picks things out very much there in the text and sort of picks it out and looks at it and examines it and seals it and sends it. It's just, it's wonderful.
He also had a great, like Marilyn Robinson, great grasp of the English language and is able to express himself well. Because they're sermons, they're not the sometimes quite dense, slightly difficult prose of his essays, but much more accessible.
Let's be honest. If you've not done postgraduate theology, Webster is a stretch to read.
He is, he is.
He really is, yeah, yeah.
I once heard that he's kind of increasingly a big news and he is a massive influence on a lot of terrific mainstream reform theology increasingly.
And a very good influence.
Oh yeah, absolutely. All to the good.
Would that be a good way in? So what's all the Webster who are about?
Definitely. So this one is confronted by Grace, Meditations of a Theologian. On the back, it's endorsed by Michael Horton and Graham Goldsworthy from Sydney.
They think this is a fantastic book. This is the first one. There's another one.
I wonder how many books those two have both connected.
They go together on the same back.
There's another one, I can't remember it, it has Christ in the title, but another book of sermons.
And that one, interestingly, that in the introduction, the person who edited the book went to sit with the late John Webster to say, you know, how do you go about the sermon writing process?
And he said, well, I read the passage quite a lot and then see if John Owens written anything on it, then pray, and then I write the sermon.
And yeah, so which I think is a nice approach.
Is the order important there?
Well, I presume he prays before he reads it as well, but that's how he spoke about that.
I mean, yeah, John Webster.
I would shorten my preaching courses here if we just did that.
Check John Owen.
Don't tell the authorities here.
Yeah. And anyway, it is a good way.
If you want to see how really rich theology makes a huge difference in the pulpits and to get a sense of how John Webster approached Christian life, it's a good place to start.
I mean, for you, as the person who teaches preaching, I've got to ask this question.
Is it in any in terms of form and language and style, do you think there's any way in which it's sort of exemplary for quote, ministry?
Or is there just a sense that this is a professor in a cathedral and it's just and that's going to be different from ordinary pastor?
I'd say it's somewhere between the two.
There are times you are aware he's a professor of theology in an Oxbridge Cathedral.
And so there's that comes with certain requirements and expectations.
And yet even even then, even in those sermons, there's still a sense that this is this is a man who wants to tell you about Jesus and to to help people know how to to live the Christian life in a fuller and contented way.
So, yeah, so somewhere between the two.
But I think I think any pastor who is thinking about preaching on a regular basis will be benefited by this book.
Wonderful. Wonderful.
Chris, thank you. Thank you very much for being with us, Chris.
I do have Augustine here, but bye Augustine.