Reading

Tip 1: Capturing Reading Time

Tony Reinke Reading

On the first day we moved into our home in Maryland, our gracious friends arrived in work clothes to help unload furniture and boxes from the truck, to fill the air with sweet fellowship, and to assemble beds. O, the sweet taste of hard labor accomplished within the ceaseless hum and energy of joy-filled fellowship.

On the second day I said, “Let there be a library.” And by the end of the second day there was a library—my library. All my books were unboxed, organized topically, and aligned properly on the bookshelves. It took the entirety of the second day. The boxes full of, oh little things like clothes, toys, and my wife’s books could wait until the third day.

I love books. I love to buy new books, collect old books, and cover my walls with books. Books are the scholarly jolts that begin my day and the literary nightcaps that bring my day to a close. Books are my hot chocolates, my Irish cream coffees, and my hot lattes with extra shots of espresso.

Are my biblio priorities healthy? I suppose at times I lack self-control, like the jogger who runs for 20 miles when he should only run 5. Or maybe like the chocoholic who measures serving sizes by the bag, not by the piece.

Vice aside, I suppose it’s out of a love of reading that I invest so much time in the discipline. But a question I receive a lot, and even more frequently now that I’m posting my reading digests, is this:

How do you read so much?

Which is a misleading question because it can be interpreted and answered in any of three different ways:

(1) Often the question arrives more in the form of a rhetorical exclamation than a question, more like: How do you read so much!

(2) Sometimes the question is asked with a schedule in mind, like: How do you find all the time to read?

(3) Sometimes it’s asked with achievement in mind, Like: How do you read so many books?

In the case of (1) let me just say that I’m a normal guy. Maybe less than normal. One fact I try to forget—and would forget if not for its value as a bludgeoning cudgel to smack pride in the nose—is that for at least one third of my college years in I found myself on “academic probation.” Which sounds a lot like criminal probation, except that criminal probation is a recovery phase following a guilty verdict. “Academic probation” is what you get on the spiral downward before someone officially pronounces you guilty of stupidity and kicks you out.

So I don’t read a lot of books because I got born smart.

In the case of (2) I don’t think I spend much more time reading than some of you. My calendar is full, my honey-do list is long, my kids are hyper, and my boss is active (or is it the other way around?). My running shoes are muddy, my weight bench is dusty, and my 10-foot front yard needs to be mowed at least twice a year.

And this leads me to the first of three tips.

Tip 1: Capture Reading Time

So, when do I read? Everytime I get a spare moment. Sometimes I read over my morning bowl of Crispix, sometimes I read over my lunchtime can of tuna, and sometimes I read over my evening cup of decaf.

I read at the DMV. I read when I’m waiting on my barber. I read when the kids are climbing all over my back on the living room floor. And on Mondays I retreat for 4-6 hours to read at Starbucks.

Books I have no intention of reading cover-to-cover are kept beside my bed. I’ll grab one of these volumes and read for about 20 minutes each night before falling asleep. This stack is constantly cycled, but here is a current picture:

Kindle

A month ago a friend introduced me to the Kindle, Amazon.com’s electronic book reader ($359). Having immediate access to 200 books on this one device has improved my reading productivity, especially while traveling. The little device switches between books quickly, allowing me to pick up books where I left off. I’ve found ways to make my own free ebooks of Spurgeon sermons and the works of Jonathan Edwards. Really any text document can be converted into a book (via Mac OS X and the free program Stanza). And there are more than 23,000 free books already formatted for the Kindle. The Kindle is a traveling library of sorts.

Hours x WPM =Books Read

In sum, I read for about 15 hours a week. This sounds like a lot, but you can capture 15 minutes here and here and easily come up with 5 hours of reading time per week.

Here’s a quick calculation (from someone who took the same college Algebra class three times) to prove how small moments of reading time really do add up.

The average reader moves through a book at a pace of 200-250 words per minute. In finding 15 hours to read each week, I read for 900 minutes. Assuming the average book is around 60,000 words in length, and figuring nothing more than an average pace, I am positioned to complete 3-4 books per week! Do the math: That’s a pace of nearly 200 books per year. At this pace, I could read the complete works of William Shakespeare (850,000 words) in a month (but that would be an awfully boring month).

Your personal goal may be 5 hours of weekly reading. Sounds like a lot. But you hit this goal if you set aside 15 minutes to read the morning, 15 minutes to read at lunch, and 15 minutes to read before you fall asleep. Reading at 225 words per minute, you could easily read one book every week.

My point is that time is a precious commodity for the reader. And we all can make extra time within our day to invest in reading. Reading 50 books per year is a realistic goal for most of us (paying for 50 books is quite another problem).

Conclusion

So perhaps you can now see, I don’t read a lot of books because I have an abundance of smarts or free time. I just try and capture moments throughout the day, and redeem the time.

Next time, I will disclose tip #2 for reading more efficiently and effectively (no Kindle needed).

On Reading

Tony Reinke Reading

This week I’m not posting a reading digest so that I can compile my books of 2008 and my top-10 list. The list is about done and I will share it with you soon. Since we’re talking books, though, I will take this week to share some thoughts on reading. In the coming posts I will share with you two secrets for efficient and effective reading.

First, a few thoughts.

Reading can be spiritually liberating. God has given us books are a means of grace to expose our souls to what is hidden behind the black veil of personal ignorance. Like faithful friends and good churches, reading good books will help protect us from self-deception. The late Oscar Levant said he stopped reading because, he chided, “I find it takes my mind off myself.” I’m thinking in a different direction. Books save us from ourselves.

And books inform us of truth. Obviously not all books enlighten, but many books do. Through disciplined reading we discover the reality of our condition. Through reading, we can see the depth to which our sin is rooted in our hearts and reflected in our attitudes and activities. It’s through reading that we come to appreciate the deep glories of Calvary.

And reading is deeply enjoyable. The pleasure of literature—those existential moments when the reader falls into the page and becomes oblivious of this world—is one of the great blessings we can never take for granted. This imaginative quality is possible only because we have been made in the image of God.

Not surprisingly the life that we experience through reading is a glimpse into the experience of what we call “eternal life.” God reveals Himself to us that we may commune with Him. It’s in this communion we experience the bliss of eternal life (John 17:3). Think of that: Eternal life is the indefatigable and unending communion with God as He reveals Himself.

This pursuit was depicted by Jonathan Edwards in an image I can best describe as a pair of figure skaters facing each other and spinning in the same circle, yet caught in the upward and tightening spiral of an inverted tornado.

Hang on with me there for a moment.

For Edwards, eternity included an opportunity for us to grow closer to God as He reveals His infinite character to us. As He discloses Himself, we better come to understand His infinite character. As we come to know Him more completely, we grow closer and tighter to Him, and spinning ever faster towards Him, we rise to an infinite and inexhaustible height–yet never fully understanding God in His fullness. This spiraling attraction in the inverted tornado is a picture that never ends in a perfect point. We never arrive at a full comprehension of God, and therefore the process of revelation and communion never ends.

Dizzy?

The centrifugal force has already begun for those who treasure the gospel. God has revealed Himself in Scripture, and we learn and grow through the Holy Spirit as we read Scripture. And other books can be used by God to enlighten Scripture.

We now see God reflected dimly as in a polished metal mirror, but there we will learn “face to face” (1 Cor. 13:12). One day our library will be replaced by the Incarnate Word Himself.

I love reading for many reasons, but especially for the eternal bliss it foreshadows.

Next time I’ll answer a common question: How do you read so much?

Learning Theology…Together

Tony Reinke Preaching, Preaching Legacy, Reading

It’s about 11:00 PM Saturday night. After a productive weekend in Orlando I’m looking forward to being home tomorrow afternoon. But tonight I’m thinking about church. One thing I appreciate about the local church (alongside the coffee, godly friends, and a well-stocked bookstore) is the chance to learn theology together. In the kindness of God’s curriculum for my soul, I can recount a number of times in my life that reading a particular theological work on a particular topic coincided with a sermon. For me many of these “coincidences” were the moments when the theology, once only engrafted in paper, spread wings and lifted off the 17th century page and animated to life like some dusty Aztec cave opening its secret treasure with the push of a hidden button in an Indiana Jones movie.

During these sermons the theology clicked and sticked.

This is true of the most monumental sermons early in my Christian life. I’ll never forget Pastor Phil Green’s sermon on John 10:1-21 (Jesus the Good Shepherd). It was in that message that the sovereignty of God in salvation became clear and I from thence was happy to be identified as a Reformed, Calvinist, Anti-Pelagian, Soteriological Augustinian, Biblical Predestination-ite-er. Whatever label you want, from then on I was formally consenting with a man (Calvin) whose theology is said to drive men insane (according to Chesterton).

But my convictions were forged (and are sustained) not ultimately due to the fact that I was reading Calvin’s Institutes or Boettner’s Reformed Doctrine of Predestination. I saw the truth of scripture laid plain in an expositional sermon at church. There the secondary literature clicked and sticked.

And this was true later on in my Christian life when I heard Rick Gamache preach a sermon on God’s adopting grace or when Joshua Harris preached a message on Christ uniting all things in Himself. The list could go on.

My point is that I think this is the way I think our Savior intends for me to learn theology—together with others. Not (as I often think) as an over-caffeinated bibliophile at a round table in Starbucks and with wires curving from my ears as if I could attempt to manufacture an audiological deserted island (or shack) to learn about God. It’s not that reading alone is wrong, it’s just that I often place an over-exaggerated hope that in secret I will discover the most effective place for the truths of scripture to click and stick.

Should we read and learn and study on our own? Yes, of course. But our anticipation should be awaiting how God will affirm what we’re reading as we gather together as a local church to learn truth and have our souls fed. And this is especially true as we seek to discover the depths of God’s love revealed in the cross. I pray that we “may have strength to comprehend with all the saints what is the breadth and length and height and depth, and to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge, that you may be filled with all the fullness of God” (Ephesians 3:18-19).

For this understanding of Christ’s love we need more than our own table in Starbucks. We need God to bless us with corporate strength and unity (Eph. 3:18). We anticipate Sunday because it’s in the church that he has called us to learn theology together.

Warming flame or hardening ice?

Tony Reinke B.B. Warfield, Pastoral Failure, Pastoral faith, Pastoral Ministry, Pastoral Sin, Preacher's study, Preaching, Reading

tsslogo.jpg“We are frequently told, indeed, that the great danger of the theological student lies precisely in his constant contact with divine things. They may come to seem common to him, because they are customary. As the average man breathes the air and basks in the sunshine without ever a thought that it is God in his goodness who makes his sun to rise on him, though he is evil, and sends rain to him, though he is unjust; so you may come to handle even the furniture of the sanctuary with never a thought above the gross early materials of which it is made.

The words which tell you of God’s terrible majesty or of his glorious goodness may come to be mere words to you – Hebrew and Greek words, with etymologies, and inflections, and connections in sentences. The reasonings which establish to you the mysteries of his saving activities may come to be to you mere logical paradigms, with premises and conclusions, fitly framed, no doubt, and triumphantly cogent, but with no further significance to you than their formal logical conclusiveness.

God’s stately stepping in his redemptive processes may become to you a mere series of facts of history, curiously interplaying to the production of social and religious conditions, and pointing mayhap to an issue which we may shrewdly conjecture: but much like other facts occurring in time and space, which may come to your notice. It is your great danger.

But it is your great danger, only because it is your great privilege. Think of what your privilege is when your greatest danger is that the great things of religion may become common to you!

Other men, oppressed by the hard conditions of life, sunk in the daily struggle for bread perhaps, distracted at any rate by the dreadful drag of the world upon them and the awful rush of the world’s work, find it hard to get time and opportunity so much as to pause and consider whether there be such things as God, and religion, and salvation from the sin that compasses them about and holds them captive. The very atmosphere of your life is these things; you breathe them in at every pore; they surround you, encompass you, press in upon you from every side. It is all in danger of becoming common to you! God forgive you, you are in danger of becoming weary of God! … Are you, by this constant contact with divine things, growing in holiness, becoming every day more and more men of God? If not, you are hardening!”

– B.B. Warfield, The Religious Life of Theological Students (P&R). Address delivered at Princeton Theological Seminary on Oct. 4, 1911.

Book: Sweet Communion by Arie de Reuver

Tony Reinke Book announcement, BP > Reformation Heritage Books, BR > Baker Books, BR > Reformation Heritage Books, Calvinism, Communion with God, Doctrine, Doctrines of Grace, Gospel, Joel R. Beeke, Justification by Faith, Meditation, Puritans, Reading, Reformed theology, spurgeon, Wilhelmus à Brakel, Willem Teellinck

Book Announcement
Sweet Communion by Arie de Reuver

So I was all ready to wind down a bit this weekend, and not push to get another post up. That was all disrupted Saturday when a bubble mailer arrived in my mailbox from Baker Academic. I simply could not wait until next week to announce their new release. The book is Sweet Communion: Trajectories of Spirituality from the Middle Ages through the Further Reformation by Arie de Reuver. The book was published in Dutch in 2002 and translated into English by James A. De Jong.

To explain the importance of this book, I need to give some background.

We are familiar with the English Puritans (men like John Owen, Richard Sibbes, John Bunyan, Thomas Brooks, etc.) primarily because their original works were written in English, and easily reprinted over the centuries with little editing necessary. However, in the Netherlands another “Puritan” movement was taking place. Like their English counterparts, men like Willem Teellinck, Herman Witsius and Thodorus and Wilhelmus à Brakel were producing valuable theological and spiritual works in Dutch. But until only recently has the work of Dr. Joel R. Beeke and the Dutch Reformed Translation Committee made these works more accessible. In fact, one of the great highlights of Beeke’s Meet the Puritans is a section entirely devoted to the Dutchmen of the “Further Reformation” (see pages 739-824). Books of the Dutch “Further Reformation” authors (like the recently translated The Path of True Godliness by Willem Teellinck) bear all the marks of brilliance we see in the English Puritans.

One of the most noticeable strengths of these “Dutch Puritans” (as I call them) is their emphasis on Reformed spirituality and their enjoyment of sweet communion with Christ. Theirs was a deep and sincere devotion to Christ where their union with Christ was the means of experiencing vibrant communion with Christ. They defended the doctrines of grace and simultaneously enjoyed a joyful and warm spirituality.

This beautiful Reformed spirituality can be seen in the works of Wilhelmus à Brakel (1635-1711).

Wilhelmus à Brakel is most noted for his four-volume work, The Christian’s Reasonable Service (Reformation Heritage Books; 1993; 4 vols.). While it looks like another Reformed systematic theology it is actually more practical in nature and intended to provide content for small group discussions as Christians gather to encourage one another in the Christian life. It is one of the beautiful works of the “Dutch Puritans.”

I have noticed in the past the “sweet communion” of the believer with Christ is a theme that sparkles from this work. After emphasizing the marriage union between the Groom (Christ) and His Bride (the Church), à Brakel explains the believer’s communion with Christ within this marital union. Once this union between the sinner and his Savior has taken place in conversion “Jesus Himself delights in having communion with you” (2:93). Read that incredible sentence again! This communion produces a “sweetness and overflowing delight … Here they (Christians) find balm for their sick souls, light to clear up their darkness, life for their deadness, food and drink for their hunger and thirst, peace for their troubled heart, blood to atone for their sins, the Spirit for their sanctification, counsel when they are at their wit’s end, strength for their weakness, and a fullness of all for their manifold deficiencies” (2:93,94).

Of this marital union and the communion that follows, à Brakel writes,

“A temporal believer concerns himself only with the benefits and has no interest in Christ Himself. Believers, however, have communion with the Person of Jesus Christ, but many neither meditate upon nor closely heed their exercises concerning Christ Himself. They err in this, which is detrimental to the strength of their faith and impedes its growth. Therefore we wish to exhort them to be more exercised concerning the truth of belonging to each other, and the union and communion with Jesus Himself. They will then better perceive the unsearchable grace and goodness of God that such wretched and sinful men may be so intimately united with the Son of God. Such reflection will most wondrously set the heart aflame with love. It will strengthen their resolve to put their trust in Jesus without fear. It will give them strength and liberty to obtain everything from Him to fulfill the desires of their soul, causing them to grow in Him, which in turn will generate more light and joy. Therefore, faith, hope, and love are mentioned in reference to the Person of Christ. Scripture speaks of receiving Him, believing in Him, trusting in Him, living in Him, loving Him, and hoping in Him” (2:91).

This beautiful passage points the believer back to the Person of Christ to find her joy and strength in the beauty of Jesus Christ. This light and joy is the byproduct of communion with Him and this communion goes back to the believer’s union with Christ in justification.

Later, à Brakel explains that since our union with Christ is absolute, our communion with Christ does not shift with circumstances or emotions. “By faith, hold fast to the fact that you are reconciled to and are a partaker of Him and His benefits, even if you do not perceive and feel this. This belonging to Him is not based on feeling. If the souls may truly believe this and be exercised therewith, this will lead the soul toward communion with Him” (2:96). Communion can never be separated from our union and our union is described by our justification by faith alone and in our election in the Son. So à Brakel and the “Dutch Puritans” remind us that our sweet communion with Christ is inseparably bound to our understanding of our union with Christ in the gospel!

In his conclusion on the teachings of Wilhelmus à Brakel, de Reuver writes that his “spirituality is one that is rooted in Christ through the word believed, even in its most intimate and mystical moments. This foundation protects his mysticism from spiritualism” (258).

Many today are drawn towards Roman Catholic mysticism or a non-theological spirituality by thinking a deep spiritual experience of Christ can be separated from a genuine understanding of the gospel. This, as à Brakel displays, is not the case. Neither does Reformed theology favor a cold orthodoxy. Following the best intentions of the Medieval theologians, the Reformed “Dutch Puritans” always believed that rich biblical doctrine is the vein for the warm blood of spiritual experience of the Son in communion.

So here is the importance of Sweet Communion by de Reuver: The rich spirituality we have received from the “Dutch Puritans” is a spiritual legacy following the spiritual traditions of Bernard of Clairvaux (1090-1153) and Thomas à Kempis (1379-1471) but is firmly rooted in the precious theology of the Reformation. The final conclusion of de Reuver is that the all-controlling center of the Dutch Further Reformation spirituality rested in the Reformed theology. This is a beautiful and timely book to further dismantle the idea that Reformed theology is cold and stiff intellectualism. Our rich theology actually leads us deeper into true “mysticism” of direct communion with Christ.

Title: Sweet Communion: Trajectories of Spirituality from the Middle Ages through the Further Reformation.
Series: Texts and Studies in Reformation and Post-Reformation Thought
Author: Arie de Reuver (Dutch)
Translator: James A. De Jong (English)
Reading level: 4.5/5.0 > academic and some untranslated Dutch quotations
Boards: paper
Pages: 303
Volumes: 1
Dust jacket: no
Binding: glue
Paper: normal
Topical index: no
Scriptural index: no
Text: perfect type
Publisher: Baker Academic
Year: 2007
Price USD: $29.99/23.99 from Baker
ISBNs: 0801031222, 9780801031229

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Related: Communion with God by Kelly Kapic. Another gem from Baker this year on communion with God. Kapic studies English Puritan John Owen’s understanding that communion with God takes place within a balanced Triunity of the Father, Son and Spirit. Highly recommended.

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Mark Dever’s Canon of Theologians (Annual Reading Plan)

Tony Reinke Augustine, C.H. Spurgeon, John Bunyan, John Calvin, John Owen, Jonathan Edwards, Mark Dever, Martin Luther, Martyn Lloyd-Jones, Puritan Library, Puritans, Reading, Richard Sibbes

books.jpg

Thursday morning (4/12/07)
Breakout seminar #2
Mark Dever: “Watch the Past: Living Lessons from Dead Theologians”

GAITHERSBURG, MD – Being one who loves to read the books of dead theologians and preachers, Mark Dever’s session was a personal highlight. The point was to encourage us to broaden our theological and biographical reading to at least 12 different authors, each to be read for one month annually. Dever himself uses a yearly reading plan where he reads a specific author each month of the year (like Augustine in February). Then every April he moves on to John Calvin, reading a new biography or theological work. Each year the reading plan starts over.

For readers of the Together for the Gospel blog, this will sound familiar. On February 1, 2006 Dever wrote a short post titled “An apostolic agenda” outlining this very thing. On Thursday morning at the Sovereign Grace Ministries Leader’s Conference, Dever filled out the details.

Dever began with a lengthy quote from C.S. Lewis’ introduction to Athanasius’ On The Incarnation which outlines some reasons why old books are important. Lewis writes,

There is a strange idea abroad that in every subject the ancient books should be read only by the professionals, and that the amateur should content himself with the modern books. Thus I have found as a tutor in English Literature that if the average student wants to find out something about Platonism, the very last thing he thinks of doing is to take a translation of Plato off the library shelf and read the Symposium. He would rather read some dreary modern book ten times as long, all about “isms” and influences and only once in twelve pages telling him what Plato actually said. The error is rather an amiable one, for it springs from humility. The student is half afraid to meet one of the great philosophers face to face. He feels himself inadequate and thinks he will not understand him. But if he only knew, the great man, just because of his greatness, is much more intelligible than his modern commentator. The simplest student will be able to understand, if not all, yet a very great deal of what Plato said; but hardly anyone can understand some modern books on Platonism. It has always therefore been one of my main endeavours as a teacher to persuade the young that firsthand knowledge is not only more worth acquiring than secondhand knowledge, but is usually much easier and more delightful to acquire. …

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.

With this introduction, Dever launched into his “canon of theologians.” He encouraged us to read on theological issues that are not a particular struggle at the time. Let the theologians talk about what they want to talk about. Dever then outlined his own personal reading plan.

The ‘canon of theologians’

January – Early church writings (1st-3rd centuries). Recommended reading: Many and various works and authors were mentioned like the Epistle of Dionysius, The Didache, Clement, The Martyrdom of Polycarp and the Penguin paperback, Early Christian Writings: The Apostolic Fathers (0140444750). When asked if he used the early church writings in his expositional research, he said ‘no.’ He is familiar with the Ancient Christian Commentary on Scripture but has not found them exegetically beneficial. [This helps answer an important question we asked earlier this year]. Dever’s use of the early church fathers is predominantly theological and historical.

February – Augustine (354-430). The most influential extra-biblical theologian in the West. Recommended: City of God and The Confessions (Henry Chadwick edition). Dever’s disagreement: That the church is the conduit of salvation. “Augustine got it bad wrong on ecclesiology.”

March – Martin Luther (1483-1546). Lessons learned: 1. Justification is by faith alone, all of sheer grace. Luther “cleanses the church from the barnacles of traditionalism.” 2. Luther’s boldness. Read biography Here I Stand. Recommended reading: 95 Theses and Bondage of the Will. You can read Bondage of the Will out loud to children and they will be engaged because of the vigorous prose and Luther’s name-calling towards Erasmus (Dever is very funny). Best bio being Here I Stand by Roland Bainton (0452011469).

April – John Calvin (1509-1564). The greatest theologian of the Reformation period. Lessons learned: 1. God’s glory at the center of everything. The world is the “theater” of God’s glory. 2. Centrality of man’s depravity, shown especially in the heart’s perpetual idol production. 3. He was careful with Scripture. Calvin had a very rare combination of gifts that balanced the theological, linguistic, pastoral, and exegetical. 4. He filled both the offices of pastor and scholar. 5. The diligent training of his spiritual children even as he knew sending these pastors back into France would mean certain death [see the concept of “Calvin’s School of Death”]. Disagreements: That the state is responsible for the church. He confused the church and state, a distinction we take for granted today. Recommended: Sermons on the Ten Commandments, commentary on 1 Cor. 12-14, The Institutes of the Christian Religion and anything written by T.H.L. Parker. He does not recommend modern bios of Calvin and especially warned against McGrath.

May – Richard Sibbes (1577-1635). Lessons learned: 1. The tenderness of Christ. The Bruised Reed and Smoking Flax a great example of Jesus’ tenderness and it makes for a great read together with your spouse. Sibbes was able to point out evidences of grace very well. 2. “Diagnostic evangelism.” Sibbes continued to hold out the biblical truth of what a genuine Christian looks like and, by consequence, sorted out those who nominally professed faith. By authenticating the Christian life he naturally separated the sheep from the wolves and goats. He was clear that one’s salvation does not come through assurance but rather assurance comes from genuine salvation. Sibbes pointed those who were never converted to run to grace in the Cross. Disagreement: Infant baptism. Recommendations: Sibbes stuttered in his preaching so he kept his sentences relatively short and this makes him easier to read than his contemporaries. Start with the sermons in volume seven of his collected works.

June – John Owen (1616-1683) and John Bunyan (1628-1688). John Owen is known for his argument on limited atonement in Death of Death. It’s a good book to scare Arminians, but there exist better exegetical ways to argue for limited atonement. Lesson learned: Linger with Scripture. “Diligent meditation reaps great rewards.” Dever especially recommends the Owen volumes by Kris Lundgaard (The Enemy Within and Through the Looking Glass) and those by Kapic and Taylor (Overcoming Sin and Temptation). … John Bunyan was a “pot-repairer with extraordinary preaching gifts.” Bunyan clearly expresses himself without the use of long, Latin sentences. His life was marked by a sincere pastoral concern. Recommended: Saint’s Knowledge of Christ’s Love, Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners (autobiographical) and The Pilgrim’s Progress. The Pilgrim’s Progress being a “great systematic theology” built around the “centrality of heaven.”

July – Jonathan Edwards (1703-1758). There are many lessons and warnings from the life of Jonathan Edwards. Lessons learned: 1. Diligent meditation. “Edwards can stare at an idea” and has “a powerful ability to think out and illustrate” that idea. An excellent example of this is Edward’s sermon The Excellency of Christ. 2. Edwards demonstrates a zeal for the purity of the church. 3. Understands the connection between his ministry and his congregation. In his Farewell Sermon, after Edwards was fired, he tells his congregation “I’ll see you before the throne.” Disagreements: 1. Infant baptism. 2. The logic of God’s centrality seemed a bit philosophical rather than always biblical. 3. He shows some pastoral carelessness especially with the “young folks’ Bible” controversy [see chapter 18 in George Marsden’s biography]. Nevertheless, Edwards demonstrates a powerful ability to think out and illustrate. Read his sermons and especially his sermon The Nakedness of Job which he wrote when he was 18 years old! As an interesting side note, Dever has preached an Edwards sermon to his congregation. On October 5, 2003 he took Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God, marked up the manuscript as he would his own and preached it. You can listen to the final product here.

August – C.H. Spurgeon (1834-1892). Lessons learned: 1. Evangelism. Spurgeon preached the gospel from any and every text. “More than anyone else, I think of Spurgeon when I prepare my sermons.” Preach each sermon as though someone may be converted. 2. His life is filled with stories of God’s kindness upon his ministry. Read Spurgeon’s autobiography and be amazed at the stories. Spurgeon’s autobiography “may be the most fun thing to read apart from Scripture.” It will encourage you to see that we have a glorious God. 3. He had a lively faith. Spurgeon had “a heightened God-consciousness.” Even in the midst of a prolonged depression, Spurgeon shows that depression drives a faithful Christian to God. Read his Morning and Evening devotional.

September – B.B. Warfield (1851-1921). “Warfield strengthens my faith.” Like John Calvin, Warfield had a wonderful mix of scholarship and piety. Disagreements include infant baptism and Presbyterian polity.

October – Martyn Lloyd-Jones (1899-1981). Not much in disagreement. Lessons learned: 1. Gave his life to preaching and lived confident in the power of God’s Word. 2. Deadly earnest. It was no light thing for him to preach. The pulpit was the “desk of God.” Recommended: Studies in the Sermon on the Mount, Preaching and Preachers, Spiritual Depression and his biography by Iain Murray.

November – C.S. Lewis (1898-1963) and Carl F.H. Henry (1913-2003). Because time ran short, Dever simply finished off his list of writers he reads in November and December without further comment or recommendation.

December – Contemporary authors like John Stott, J.I. Packer, Iain Murray, R.C. Sproul and John Piper.

Conclusions

This breakout session encourages me to pursue the study of the early church writers, although I’ve become more convinced that they will not prove as helpful in my expositional research and sermon preparation as others. It also encourages me to narrow my focus to a handful of great writers and focus attention on their writings each year. I’m in the process of creating my own “canon of theologians” for annual study.