Titles on my Christmas wish list

By David Daniels and ChristianWeek | December 1, 2008

As far back as I can remember, Christmas morning has always carried with it the hope that someone will give me a book. I simply cannot imagine life without a good book or two on the go. And though no one has asked, I'm compiling a list of books I'd love to receive this year.

Like Philip Yancey, I grew up in a strict fundamentalist home and church (though I have not made my career writing about surviving it) and I continue to cherish many memories of childhood and youth in that setting. Despite being raised to view it with suspicion, I find the renewed evangelical interest in cultural engagement fresh and exciting. My Christmas wish list includes three recent books exploring this theme.

Andy Crouch's Culture Making: Recovering Our Creative Calling (IVP, 2008) asks Christians to resist simply condemning, critiquing, copying or consuming culture. If asked twenty years ago what characterized my relationship with culture, I would have quickly responded: "Condemning and critiquing."

However, in more ways than I care to admit, my practice was more like copying and consuming—though always with a veneer of Christian commitment. Crouch issues a clarion call for Christians to learn how culture works, then to become creative culture makers. One reviewer says Culture Making is "as refreshing as it is smart…a significant addition to contemporary Christian thought."

John G. Stackhouse Jr., in Making the Best of It: Following Christ in the real world (Oxford University Press, 2008), challenges Christians to resist seeing only two options for cultural engagement: wholesale attempts at Christianizing society or cloistering themselves in sectarian fellowships.

With careful attention to the history of Christian cultural engagement, along with biblical and theological understandings of culture, Stackhouse encourages a renewed commitment to faithful and distinctively Christian living as full participants in our diverse world.

Miroslav Volf, theology professor at Yale University Divinity School, calls this a "must read for those who are concerned with the role of faith in contemporary societies." Having appreciated several other books by Stackhouse, I now want to own this one.

D.A. Carson's Christ & Culture Revisited (Eerdmans, 2008) examines the five "Christ-culture options" articulated in H. Richard Niebuhr's Christ and Culture (Harper Torch Books, 1951).

Carson reminds us that Christians are called to be in the world, but not to be of the world. It's a tough balancing act that grows harder and harder as the Church becomes further enmeshed in that culture. While Carson finds Niebuhr's categories helpful, he nevertheless warns that they ought not to be given "canonical force." Carson's biblical-theological approach strives to help Christians "untangle current messy debates on living in the world." In Tim Keller's opinion, Carson's treatment is "the most balanced one out there." This one goes on my "must read" list for 2009.

In a day when polite acceptance is craved by so many, David F. Wells, Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary's professor of historical and systematic theology is a refreshingly frank voice from academia.

Already known for his bold critiques of a spiritually sick American evangelicalism, Wells has issued yet another call to return to a better, bolder expression of evangelicalism. The Courage to be Protestant: Truth-lovers, Marketers, and Emergents in the Postmodern World (Eerdmans, 2008) is a "jeremiad against 'new' versions of evangelicalism." He pointedly contrasts the "doctrinal seriousness" of "historic, classical evangelicalism" with "new movements of the marketing church and the emergent church." I have thoroughly appreciated earlier books by Wells, and am hoping that this one will soon find a place on my reading pile.

My final book in this year's wish list is Recalling the Hope of Glory: Biblical Worship from the Garden to the New Creation (Kregel Publications, 2006) by Allen P. Ross, professor of divinity at Beeson Divinity School. The late Robert E. Webber, no stranger to the theme of worship said of this book: "Not only is this a comprehensive theological vision of creation, incarnation, and re-creation, it is also a genuine work of praise."

John D. Witvliet, director of the Calvin Institute of Christian Worship, says Ross has produced a "vision of worship that is at once luminous, transcendent, and inexhaustible." It sounds to me like this is a substantial treatment of a topic of perennial interest to the Christian church.