If you had to choose 20 Christian books to take with you to a desert island, which would those be? Obviously the Word of God itself trumps all other books, but assuming the prime position of the Bible, what Christian books should we prioritise in our reading? Wesley said we ought to be people of one book, but students of many. With Scripture being our Book of books, we’d do well to learn from those Christian writings that have seemed to rise to the top of Christians’ favourite lists, and have withstood the winnowing of time. We call some of the most famous of these the “devotional classics”
They are so called because they are best known for aiding Christian devotion. They tend to be focused on the inner life, on Christian living, on sanctification and on worship. They are not without meaty theology or deep doctrine, but they are more than theological treatises. They give us a theology of the Christian life, a theology of spirituality, a theology of loving God.
These “devotional classics” span time, denomination or tradition, and genre, for lack of a better term. They come from Ante-Nicene, Nicene, post-Nicene periods, from the Middle Ages, and from Reformation, Enlightenment, Awakening, and modern periods. They were written in Africa, Asia, Europe, and America. Their authors are bishops, martyrs, monks, scholastics, reformers, separatists, mystics, puritans, pastors, and missionaries. They are from the Eastern and Western church, reformers who were in the Roman Catholic church, reformers who came out, and reformers who remained in. They are Anglican, Congregationalist, Lutheran, Presbyterian, and Baptist. And they write sermons, poems, confessions, prayers, autobiographies, letters, and general treatments of the Christian life.
What books are we talking about? Here is a starter list, in (loose) chronological order.
On Contempt For the World – Eucherius of Lyons
Confessions – Augustine
On Christian Doctrine – Augustine
Proslogion – Anselm
On Loving God – Bernard of Clairvaux
The Adornment of Spiritual Marriage – John of Ruysbroeck
Sermons of Meister Eckhardt
The Imitation of Christ – Thomas à Kempis
Theologica Germanica – Anonymous
Institutes of the Christian Religion – John Calvin
Treatise on the Love of God – Francis of Sales
The Devotions of Bishop Andrewes
The Practice of the Presence of God – Brother Lawrence
Pilgrim’s Progress – John Bunyan
Centuries of Meditation – Thomas Traherne
Spiritual Progress – Francois Fenelon
The Practice of Piety – Lewis Bayly
Autobiography of Madame Guyon
Psalms and Hymns of Isaac Watts
The Life of God in the Soul of Man – Henry Scougal
The Letters of Samuel Rutherford
Communion with the Triune God – John Owen
Selected Sermons George Whitefield
A Serious Call to a Devout and Holy Life – William Law
Pensees – Blaise Pascal
Religious Affections – Jonathan Edwards
Orthodoxy – G.K Chesterton
A Call to Prayer – J. C. Ryle
The Hidden Life of Prayer – David McIntyre
The Light Within – Thomas Kelly
The Screwtape Letters – C. S. Lewis
The Knowledge of the Holy – A. W. Tozer
The Christian Book of Mystical Verse A.W. Tozer
What is the value of reading these dusty treasures? I can think of three reasons.
First, reading some of the best devotional works will be deeply improving to your Christian life. A.W. Tozer wrote, “After the Bible the next most valuable book for the Christian is a good hymnal. Let any young Christian spend a year prayerfully meditating on the hymns of Watts and Wesley alone and he will become a fine theologian. Then let him read a balanced diet of the Puritans and the Christian mystics. The results will be more wonderful than he could have dreamed.”
Second, reading these classics helps your Christianity be both timeless and relevant to your own generation. Reading these classics is a way of hearing what generations other than our own have said. You only understand your times if you have viewed your own generation from the perspective of other generations. You will only know what is distinctive (for good or ill) about your generation if you have regularly inhabited a world that transcends your particular time and place. Failing this, you are just an echo-chamber for the thoughts of our day, and if they be in error, you are a repeater-station for widely accepted error.
As C. S. Lewis said, “Every age has its own outlook. It is specially good at seeing certain truths and specially liable to make certain mistakes. We all, therefore, need the books that will correct the characteristic mistakes of our own period. And that means the old books. All contemporary writers share to some extent the contemporary outlook—even those, like myself, who seem most opposed to it…None of us can fully escape this blindness, but we shall certainly increase it, and weaken our guard against it, if we read only modern books. Where they are true they will give us truths which we half knew already. Where they are false they will aggravate the error with which we are already dangerously ill. The only palliative is to keep the clean sea breeze of the centuries blowing through our minds, and this can be done only by reading old books. Not, of course, that there is any magic about the past. People were no cleverer then than they are now; they made as many mistakes as we. But not the same mistakes. They will not flatter us in the errors we are already committing; and their own errors, being now open and palpable, will not endanger us. Two heads are better than one, not because either is infallible, but because they are unlikely to go wrong in the same direction. To be sure, the books of the future would be just as good a corrective as the books of the past, but unfortunately we cannot get at them…It is a good rule, after reading a new book, never to allow yourself another new one till you have read an old one in between. If that is too much for you, you should at least read one old one to every three new ones.”
Third, reading the classics helps you to major on majors and minor on minors. We begin to discern what is truly “catholic” (universal) to the faith, across the ages. We recognise what is fundamental to our faith, and what is secondary and tertiary.
But, asks one, should we read writings from doctrinal traditions quite different from our own, especially those with serious error? We sit at their feet not because we want to embrace all their errors, nor because we seek to re-make them in our image (or vice-versa). A bee can find nectar in the weed as well as in the flower, said the holiness preacher Joseph H. Smith.
Reading these works will require some spiritual effort, which I heartily encourage. Again, Tozer: “To enjoy a great religious work requires a degree of consecration to God and detachment from the world that few modern Christians have experienced. The early Christian Fathers, the mystics, the Puritans, are not hard to understand, but they inhabit the highlands where the air is crisp and rarefied and none but the God-enamored can come.”
