Laura's Top Five for 2005

5. Gilead, by Marilynne Robinson. Kudos to Ashley Hales for convincing me to read and review with her and Amanda McClendon a piece of modern (yet slightly postmodern) fiction! This was not at all my typical experience with the stuff, although that's a rather uncritical generalization. The frame of the novel is a letter (more like a series of journal entries) written from the dying third-generation pastor of a small Iowa town to his young son (and indirectly, to his young wife). Poignant, latently charming, and thoughtfully provocative could be a starting place for describing the impression the novel left on me. I especially recommend reading it in the summer.

4.Wuthering Heights, by Emily Bronte. A gothic romance, full of the imaginative and poetic elements that could be called implausible, I read this in January for a research paper; while the paper was not so stimulating, I consistently got chills reading Bronte's creepily evocative prose, and it wasn't because I was reading it during a central Texas January. Ideally the book should be read in the bleak midwinter where winter actually happens, and by dim lamplight if possible. Avowed realists need not apply. ;)

3. Love Your God with All Your Mind, J. P. Moreland. This is a surprisingly comprehensive book that starts out with the failures of evangelicalism to fulfill said command, and moves in a positive direction with the implications in various disciplines and for all kinds of people. Unapologetic in his insistence that learning is a universal vocation for Christ's disciples, Moreland provoked me deeply to reconsider my view of the place for theology in a believer's life, and perhaps more importantly, to reform my understanding of the place of extrabiblical studies. Since I picked this up toward the end of my high school days and into the summer before I started college, it was the perfect watershed of a read, and I would without hesitation loan it to any who are on their way to being a professional student just as soon as to any who are not.

2. Theopneustia, by Louis Gaussen. By a 19th-century contrarian pastor in the Swiss Reformed tradition, this is a thorough defense of the plenary inspiration of Scripture--not merely to clear alleged variations and contradictions, though there is a section devoted to specific cases to clear out of the way for those worried about the Bible's scientific, historical, and overall integrity. Moreover, to the giddy delight of one who thought VanTil was the first presuppositionalist, he completely undercuts the assumptions of liberal textual criticism, which was on the rise in his time and now is pervasive in biblical studies. What commended the book most to me, though, was how Gaussen encourages concerned Christians with all the stalwart tenderness of a pipe-smoking grandfather. His gentle, passionately rational exhortations really are reminiscent of Paul's letters at times. This is the unique element that makes it a book suitable for pastors or scholars and the laity alike.

1. City of God, Augustine. Admittedly, this was assigned reading for a freshman seminar--the best class I will ever take at Baylor, I am happily and ruefully convinced--and though at the time I didn't regret skipping the three or four books (or sections; there are 22, I believe) that we had to pass over for lack of time, it was because there was so much to be gleaned from nearly every sub-section of every book that we did read. I almost felt like it was an offense against such an intellectual masterpiece that we had to speed through it so quickly. The best way I might describe it is that Augustine accomplished for the kingdom of God something like the intellectual equivalent of the geopolitical advances that Constantine achieved a century earlier for what he thought to be the physical kingdom of God: tearing down the idols of Roman religion and civic life (which he shows to be significantly interrelated), he constructs on those ruins the first complete Christian apologetic for the Church from which to draw almost exclusively for the following centuries, until the Reformation. It's a tossup which was more enduring, but if you ever have a chance to study Constantine and Augustine in the same setting, don't think twice.