Suggested books for students

During my recent visit to Grove City College, I was given the opportunity to have lunch with some students in the cafeteria, along with Michael Coulter, my principal host in the political science department. During our conversation, Michael asked which books I might recommend the students to read. As I had just discussed Dietrich Bonhoeffer's witness the previous evening in response to a question from the audience, the first book I thought of was his Life Together, a magnificent book that emphasizes the need to love the existing Christian community, with all its warts and flaws, over our own aspirations for such community.

A second book I thought of is H. Richard Niebuhr's classic Christ and Culture, which I've read multiple times over the decades. Although I can now more easily see the flaws in Niebuhr's analysis, the five typologies he set out have aided us in understanding the various ways that Christians have related to the larger culture, at least in the western world. Christ against culture, Christ of culture, Christ above culture, Christ and culture in paradox, and Christ the transformer of culture may not exhaust the alternatives lying before us, but they provide a place to begin the discussion.

A third book prompted one student to wonder whether I am an aficionado of the mid-20th-century Neo-orthodox school of theology: Richard's brother Reinhold Niebuhr's The Children of Light and the Children of Darkness. No, I am not Neo-orthodox, but I do think that Reinhold's book constitutes a perennial caution for those Christians and others persuaded of their own uprightness to be wary of "the corruption of self-interest in their professed ideals" (151 in the Scribner's edition, 1944). Niebuhr wrote this in response to his own earlier adherence to the ideals of the Social Gospel movement of the early 20th century. But his warning is just as applicable to those of a more conservative bent who believe that their own efforts will usher in God's kingdom, especially those who think their aspirations for public life should take precedence over established institutions and procedures intended to allow diverse communities to live together in peace. Sometimes this approach is labelled post-millennialism, the Seven Mountain Mandate, or something similar This is not, of course, to say that Christians should withdraw from public life. Far from it. But as we discharge the responsibilities of citizenship, we need to be aware of our own failings and tainted motives and to recognize that our political opponents may have grasped truths that have eluded us.

Later I thought of two more books to recommend to the students. The first is Carl Trueman's The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self, which I reviewed here in 2021. Either that or his abridged version, Strange New World: How Thinkers and Activists Redefined Identity and Sparked the Sexual Revolution, published in 2022. Trueman is, of course, a colleague of Coulter's at Grove City College, and I was pleased to connect with him during my visit. The second is Patrick Deneen's Why Liberalism Failed, which Bruce Ashford and I reviewed for The Gospel Coalition six years ago.

I do not claim that these particular books constitute a basic education on the relationship between Christianity and the larger culture. But each of them offers something that addresses our current situation and thus makes for profitable reading.