Most honest Christian adults would have to list some children’s books among those that have shaped them most. I have vivid memories, for example, of the geography book used in elementary school. From it came images of “young, rugged mountains” and “old, worn-down mountains,” of city and country and shining sea. Having traveled more than I liked or should have, I still carry images from its maps. Similarly, who could or would purge from mind the illustrations of Bible storybooks?
Next come landmark books along the adult path; here classics are privileged. I define a classic as “a book behind which one cannot get,” a book that defines and determines a culture or tradition. Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, Milton . . .
My faith has been shaped as much by the Large Catechism of Martin Luther as by any other book after the Bible. We all need guides for divining the Bible, for discerning what in it should have most access to our minds and hearts. How to sort past Ezra and 2 Kings to Romans and John? As a Lutheran, dedicated, fanatic, but also ecumenical and open-minded, I have resorted constantly to this catechism and used it for instructing congregations. The proportion of space devoted to the Ten Commandments suggests that Luther was anything but antinomian or uninterested in care of the neighbor. The clues to God’s continuing creation, the divine act of constantly bringing cosmos out of chaos, or the “gathered” and congregating character of faith prior to hearing and feeding on the Word, at the breast of the Church, has done its shaping. And, of course, so has its sacramental teaching.
Behind Luther, there is Augustine. The Confessions reminded me that God’s risks occur in the lives of very mortal mortals, that divine activity comes with the proper names of humans. But my vocation impels me to connect faith with public life, so The City of God, for all its boring stretches and for all the places where I must part company with it, has been decisive. Always, the eternal city beckons; yet Augustine by the very length of the book showed an attachment to and concern for earthly Rome that seems to deny part of the plot of the book, and that is well and good.
Pascal’s Pensees, by their brokenness, apparent random character, and existential stabs, serve to disrupt the ordering that comes with catechisms, confessions, and cities of God. Here is the basis for a theology that affirms in the face of the absurd, for a piety that disciplines an often undisciplined spiritual life. It taught me that the heart has reasons which reason does not know- while also celebrating reason in the human, a reed, but a thinking reed.
Historians do not have many chances to sift past archives, through attics, beyond libraries to pick the one book in their field that influenced beyond all others. Our minds are cluttered junk shops. But for this vocation and profession, Jacob Burckhardt’s Reflections on History (sometimes, Force and Freedom) did its work. From it I learned to look for subtle influences in culture and to separate history from the “centaur” of the philosophy of history. The Christian begins work as historian where the secular historian does: “. . . the one point accessible to us, the one eternal center of all things-man, suffering, striving, doing, as he is and was and ever shall be.” But, beyond Burckhardt, in the light of eternity, as Augustine saw the human being.
While I may have disagreed with the author’s strangely optimistic view of human emergence, much in Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s Letters and Papers from Prison molded my outlook during the early years of pastoral and professorial ministry. Bonhoeffer taught a generation of us to come to terms with our middle-class status, our ordinariness, even as he was extraordinarily engaged in the resistance to Hitler. His question “Who is Jesus Christ for us today?” still bums, will bum.
A cluster of thinkers helped me form an approach to life and Christian life around the notion of “response.” Gabriel Marcel in Creative Fidelity and Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy in his eccentric The Christian Future and elsewhere reinforced the themes, against individualism, that to be is to be with, esse est coesse, Sein ist Mitsein. “I respond, although I will be changed,” translates Rosenstock-Huessy’s life motto and comes close to being mine.
Sometimes books provide insights and categories that never leave. Among these are H. Richard Niebuhr’s Christ and Culture and my teacher Sidney Mead’s The Lively Experiment. And in the years when one aspires to be a poet, or lets poetry do its speaking, books of poetry have their opportunity. For me, above all others at the important passages was T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets.
What impresses me as I read this list which sneaks thirteen named and unnamed books into an article that is supposed to mention five or six, is that the really decisive works outlast so many good books once they are anchored in the mind and put to work in behavior. As a Depression child, I would sometimes dream of walking down the street behind some person who disappeared after having lost or strewn coins. As an adult I could dream about such a trail of books. As a review editor I have lived in such trails, among books that pile to the height of hillocks. They constantly corrode old notions and surprise with new ones. Yet many are momentary, merely functional, disposable in the mind. For reasons we can not quite discern, others stay and will not be moved. They live in us. We live, or would live, by them.
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