Here it is, a list of books; the best books we’ve read in 2024, which are different from the best books published in 2024. Why give you a list of books? Because we think reading is important and we think Christians ought to be reading books. If you have time for Instagram and Netflix, you ought to make time to read soul-shaping books.

This is the first of three such posts. Part Two will appear December 16 and Part Three will appear December 23.

Jason’s Recommendations

1. Peter Leithart, Delivered From the Elements of the World: Atonement, Justification, Mission (Downers Grove, ILL: IVP Academic, 2016)

This book is an account of the atonement, which is, in Leithart’s argument, an account of the entirety of Christian reality. He begins with the question, “How can the death and resurrection of a Jewish rabbi of the first century … be the decisive event in the history of humanity, the hinge and crux and crossroads for everything?” Leithart argues that the atonement is social theory because Christ transforms the elemental forms of the world. Christians must stop returning to the old elementary principles. There is no more “circumcision” versus “uncircumcision.” There is no holy place other than the sanctified human being and human community indwelt by the Spirit of Jesus. Christ has transformed the physics of religion and society in such a way that the old elemental system is now immaturity. In Christ you grow from slaves to sons. There is a world beyond the old elemental principles. It’s a saved world, a world fulfilled as the new creation.

Originally God dwelt in Eden. Then God went outside of Eden and established the tabernacle to find his unfaithful bride and take her home. What would it look like if Yahweh came out from his house and mingled with crowd and ate with sinners without the temple curtain? What would washing and cleansing look like then? Jesus is the Temple, on two legs, establishing the fullness of Torah-keeping. The culture of Torah looks like the life of Jesus such that Jesus accomplishes all that Torah intended to. The sacrificial system is supposed to bring Israel near to Yahweh. Jesus brings Creator and creature together in shared space by qualifying lepers and bleeders with cleansing life (136-138).

The book also includes a rugged biblical theology of flesh, sacrifice, Torah, justice, and justification. Each chapter includes insights that go deeper than the conventional treatment, offering lots of theological mileage.

Excerpt:

“We cannot make sense of Jesus’ suffering the penalty for others’ wrongs unless we see it as a summary of the plot of the gospel story. Jesus’ substitutionary death is one moment in a sequence of redemptive acts, in a complex sacrificial movement, and without the other moments before and after, it is no redemption at all. Isolating the moment of substitutionary death does havoc to our theology of atonement and our soteriology generally, not to mention our ecclesiology and sacramental theology and practice … atonement theology must be social theory if it is going to have any coherence, relevance or comprehensibility at all.” (pg. 17).

2. Joshua D. Chatraw & Mark D. Allen. The Augustine Way: Retrieving a Vision for the Church’s Apologetic Witness (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2023).

Saint Augustine lived in a fourth century pluralized environment where the coming-of-age story was that of embracing all the gods except Christ. As a young man, he set out to achieve cosmic significance through worldly achievements in a time of cultural collapse. As the Bishop of Hippo, he developed an apologetic approach that sought to demonstrate the legitimacy and livability of the Christian faith in just such an environment—an apologetic of contextual persuasion. We ourselves live within codified religious pluralism (i.e. pagan idolatry) where Christianity is cast as immaturity and Atheism as maturity. We need an apologetic, like Augustine’s, that tackles the social imaginary of particular people living in our very particular context.

Apologetics must address the person’s social imaginary—the framework of assumptions that dictate what you find meaningful. Each person has categories of thought, forms of sensibility, imperatives of the moral conscience, and aspirations of the inner person. If modern music, entertainment, politics, and video shorts, reinforce and spread the assumptions of the post-Christian imaginary, then Christian apologetics must keep these assumptions from multiplying. Indeed, we need to wield the gospel in such a way that begins to reverse them.

The myths of culture shape the desires of people. When the cultural myth is that of carbon footprint, pregnant people, systemic racism, pornographic empowerment, and TikTok addiction, then it's no wonder people’s souls are deadened. But those are the people a post-Christian society produces. The church’s apologetics must speak to those who are under the great demon’s spell.

There are certainly some worthy books that do something similar to what Chatraw and Allen call for. Though a bit dated, David F. Wells’ five-book series is a thorough cultural apologetics—No Place for Truth, God in the Wasteland, Losing our Virtue, Christ in a Postmodern World, and God in the Whirlwind. Though lacking in explicit or bold theological solutions, Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age, helps readers understand the conditions of belief in the current social imaginary, a term coined by Taylor. A Secular Age is a powerful description of the anthropological shift. Yet, Taylor’s book is itself influenced by the new conditions of belief that he seeks to explain, as evidenced in how he avoids traditional or biblical descriptions of God. Taylor’s book closes with a chapter called “Conversions.” By telling stories of conversion with the secular age, he demonstrates an apologetic insight that personal stories are persuasive when they provide mimetic power. More recently, Carl Trueman’s The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self is a riveting historical explanation of how we arrived at the incoherence of the late-modern social imaginary. But it’s beyond the scope of the book to capture the deconstructed narrative of secular insanity within a Christian metanarrative. Augustine’s triumph is that he takes the strands from the false narrative that are true and reinterprets them into the gospel story.

Chatraw and Allen make me wonder what the new The City of God should look like, referring to Augustine’s great apologetic tome. Just like the original The City of God, the new one must have a scope and approach that is ambitious and innovative. Perhaps it needs to be a genre-busting amalgamation that is a third novel, a third Plato’s Dialogues, and a third Pascal’s Pensées. Why a novel? Because you can’t puncture the rival narratives if you don’t also reconstruct a sweeping sociohistorical narrative with real explanatory power. Why Plato? Because the highest ideals and deepest aspirations of late-modernity don’t deliver on their promises. People need to critique secularism on its own terms. Why Pascal? Because part of the apologetic efficacy of The City of God is that Christian wisdom, when pitted against pagan wisdom, wins out every time. It needs to be the sort of book the busts the bounds of words on a page and cries out to be made into a film.

Whatever we call the genre, it must critique the decaying underpinnings of society and offer a Restoration narrative that satisfies man’s higher hunger. It must critique the current social order from a higher vantage point than the encyclopedic approach. “Where does it lead? Does its path take us to the fulfillment of our heart’s desire or to deepest disappointment? Are we on a path to the fullness of God or to a vacuous emptiness? Is it a bridge to eternal life or a dead end? Does it restore us to creational goodness and beauty or plunge us into confusion and despair?” (121f) It’s a book that must not only diagnose the misdirected aspirations of late-modernity but show that a fulfilling social order can only be realized in Christ.

Excerpt:

“Persuasion happens not in the abstract but in the particular—a specific person or persons with their own personal time-bound experiences speaking to others, who have their own culturally embodied stories. In this sense, all apologetics is cultural apologetics, because persuasion always happens within a particular culture, responds to particular challenges, and addresses particular maladies. Augustine’s own struggle to find a unifying story and a place to call home while experiencing soul-crushing disillusionment and a disintegrated self makes his voice particularly relevant to us, for we are living through what has been labeled the ‘age of anxiety’—a society absent a coherent, sustainable, unifying narrative” (pg. 14).