I discovered books late in life. Our home, like others in our neighborhood, was not literary, the margin of survival a bit too narrow for book acquisition. I recall my astonishment when I enrolled in Bible college and discovered the other students’ shelves of books. I couldn’t believe they owned them all. At eighteen years old, a personal library had never been part of my life. I hadn’t realized the loss.
The only exception was a book I came across shortly after my conversion at age sixteen: the Book of Ephesians. It was my first exposure to God’s family planning and the first time I felt the exhilaration that comes from knowing I had been chosen in Christ before the foundation of the world. What joy for a teenager trying to find himself in a society where already he felt alien.
Bible college exposed me to some theology, most of it eminently forgettable. What impressed me most was a small volume (the title escapes me) which told the stories of “famous” Christians from William Carey onward who initiated the great missionary thrusts of the Western church. In retrospect, the stories were more romantic than factual in crucial areas, but they served to stimulate my thinking about “the regions beyond” and the price God’s people have paid to proclaim good news to the nations.
Books became even more important to me when I entered full-time evangelism. James Stewart’s A Man in Christ became a solid basis for studying the life of Paul and the central themes of his theology. It also provided much sermon material, as did Stewart’s Heralds of God and A Faith to Proclaim. These books combined good scholarship, fine writing style, and a warm evangelical tone.
Around this same time, I came across the writings of Ruth Paxson. Her Life on the Highest Plain and her work on Ephesians, The Wealth, Walk, and Warfare of the Christian, extended my exegetical and devotional horizons. By now, I was deep into an evangelistic/revivalistic ministry, and for a fledgling evangelist, good sermon material was priceless. Paxson’s work was seminal and served to counter or at least balance some of the more unsavory aspects of rigid Wesleyanism picked up in Bible college.
Yet revival was my passion, and it was in this mood that I welcomed my first exposure to Charles Finney. His autobiography was fascinating, and his Lectures shaped my thinking about the relationship between the means and ends in revival. Helpful, too, was Oswald Chambers’s My Utmost for His Highest. I was attracted to Chambers’s no-nonsense view of spirituality, a robust, wholesome discipleship often missing in other devotional writers.
The sixties were exciting. And demanding. It was not a good time to be black and evangelical. But the decade was notable in forcing a clearer understanding of the relationship between evangelism and social ethics. My debts here run the gamut from Mennonites to Martin Luther King, Jr. Stride toward Freedom, King’s early work, was sobering and provided a necessary breakthrough in my thinking regarding the larger dimension of the church’s mission in the world. The climax in this early exposure to social ethics was King’s masterpiece, Letter from a Birmingham Jail. From here, it was a small step to the discovery of James Baldwin, the historical writings of Lerone T. Bennett, Jr., and J. Saunders Redding’s On Being Negro in America. W. E. B. DuBois, Langston Hughes, and others led me to see “the Promised Land” more clearly and how the cultural lobotomy performed on all Americans had so tragically affected our images of one another.
I was much attracted to the writings of the old Puritan divine John Owen, especially the book The Holy Spirit. Again, the emphasis on hard thinking and good biblical exegesis served to balance the earlier exposure I had in a revivalist tradition.
Toward the end of the decade, I was greatly helped by Theological Ethics, Vol. 2 by Helmut Thielicke. This fine work gave needed perspective on church tradition vis- … -vis society and the pastoral function of the church in steering its course past the extremes of false conservatism on the one hand and false revolutionism on the other.
This period was for me a time of transition. I came alive to literature of another sort-the novel as social commentary. Here, Walker Percy’s work was important. The Moviegoer set me up for his more recent work, The Second Coming, a remarkable commentary on American cultural values and the search for religious certitude. While not a novel, Lionel Trilling’s published lectures, Sincerity and Authenticity, have been helpful in giving a perspective on the evolution of cultural values. Most impressive.
More recently, I’ve been working on theology. Here I am greatly affected by a range of offerings-from Allan Boesak’s Farewell to Innocence, which is a fine statement of evangelical black theology out of South Africa, to Hans Kng’s On Being a Christian and Does God Exist? with their apologetic possibilities, to Geoffrey Wainright’s Doxology and its radical centering of theology in the church’s acts of worship. I am also in debt to Lesslie Newbigin for his insight on the need to rethink mission theology and strategy in the light of the increasing gaps between Western and non-Western cultures. His work is entitled The Open Secret.
This list could go on at length. But this pleasant walk through the past has reminded me of the sources that have influenced my mind and heart and hopefully, set the course my pilgrimage should take.
William E. Pannell is associate professor of evangelism and director of black ministries at Fuller Theological Seminary, Pasadena, California.
Copyright © 1983 by the author or Christianity Today/Leadership Journal. Click here for reprint information on Leadership Journal.
