Yes, These Are Some of the Writings That Changed the World
Are these the 25 best Christian writings?
By Jennifer Woodruff Tait
Just this week Christian History released an issue on the top 25 Christian writings after the Bible. You can read it online, as well as ordering hard copies, here.
Of course, any time you publish a list of the best anything (which CH has done twice previously, on the top ten Christians of the 20th century and the 100 most important events in church history) you invite critique, and we immediately got it, from the Pietist Schoolman, otherwise known as Dr. Chris Gehrz, professor of history and chair of the history department at Bethel University in St. Paul, MN. You can read Gehrz’s penetrating thoughts over at his blog, but they boil down to four things: the list is too Western, too white, too male, and too theological.
As a historian I sympathize very much with Gehrz’s desire to keep the “theologians, biblical scholars, and philosophers one floor up from me at Bethel from thinking that they’re at the center of the Christian intellectual universe.” But I thought I’d first of all note that we knew our folly and included an article by G. R. Evans on how compiling lists is actually rather dumb, and secondly say a bit more about how we got the list.
We wrote to about 250 scholars and journalists who have written for CH in the past ten years, and about 70 of them were kind enough to answer their email and take the survey from which we compiled the list. Admittedly, this was a bit of a self-selecting bunch, since scholars who write for CH are by definition interested in the topics that have already graced the pages of CH, which have tended towards the Western, and somewhat towards the white and male as well. (We’re actually pretty good at publishing issues on the kind of Christians for whom, in Gehrz’s words, “lived experience is more central to Christianity than belief”.)
When I became aware that the list was tending in “heady” directions, I picked from the writings that hit the list between 25 and 50 some other worthy books (some of which, like Julian of Norwich’s Showings, Gehrz wishes had been in our top 25). And, in many cases, we found people for whom those writings had been deeply meaningful to write about them in short pieces. You can read those scattered throughout the magazine, and you can read features on many other worthy folks by checking out our daily Today in Christian History. (Let me say right now that besides many Gehrz mentions, I regret not putting John Chrysostom’s Paschal Homily in one of those spots. It’s not Easter at our house without hearing it, it forms a crucial moment at the Easter services of Orthodox and Eastern Catholic churches worldwide, and it’s just plain awesome. Go read it.)
Which leads me to what I want to say back to Gehrz. There were many works that could, and perhaps should, have made the list of the total of 34 writings featured in the issue. But every work that is on the list is on there because it was important to somebody, not only as a focus of academic study, but as a focus of spiritual life and renewal.
While preparing the issue, I had the good fortune of returning to one of my favorite pieces of prose by C. S. Lewis. His Mere Christianity is #8, but outside of his fiction, I’m perhaps most fond of his introduction to a modern translation of Athansisus’s On the Incarnation (#9). It rings with stellar quotes, some of which made it into the issue. But one of my favorites which didn’t is his comment “For my own part I tend to find the doctrinal books often more helpful in devotion than the devotional books, and I rather suspect that the same experience may await many others. I believe that many who find that ‘nothing happens’ when they sit down, or kneel down, to a book of devotion, would find that the heart sings unbidden while they are working their way through a tough bit of theology with a pipe in their teeth and a pencil in their hand.”
With the exception of the pipe, that’s been my lived experience too. And I think it was the lived experience of many of our authors for the issue, and many of the Christian writers treated, who, we found, loved to keep circling back and citing many of the other writings on the list. Not because they were on our list, but because they had changed their lives too. Every writing that is on the list is on there because it made someone’s heart sing unbidden. And if that doesn’t make them the 25 best Christian writings, it makes them something awfully close.
PS. Stay tuned to find out here at the blog what 27-50 on the list were! (26 was the Apostles’ Creed, which actually made it into the issue.)