1999 Christianity Today Book Awards

The Bible is not only a book of incomparable stories and poems; it is also a book of divinely inspired lists. I suspect that my lifelong love of lists was sparked when I was a small boy, listening only half-comprehending to the Bible being read aloud. (I'm sure I was not the only child spellbound by the recitation of clean and unclean animals in Leviticus: "And the stork, the heron after her kind, and the lapwing, and the bat. All fowls that creep, going upon all four, shall be an abomination unto you.")

If you are also a lover of lists, and a lover of books, this issue of CT is for you. Here is our list of the best books published in 1998. More than 200 titles were nominated. Ballots were sent to a large panel of pastors, scholars, writers, and other church leaders, who chose the titles for our "Top 25" list. (Because of ties, the list includes a total of 26 titles.)

CT's Book of the Year is The Divine Conspiracy: Rediscovering Our Hidden Life in God, by Dallas Willard, published by HarperSanFrancisco (the copublisher of last year's Book of the Year, Billy Graham's Just As I Am). Eerdmans led all publishers with a total of six titles.

As always, the books play off each other, as if in conversation. Poet Kathleen Norris's Amazing Grace shares a spot on the list with Roger Lundin's Emily Dickinson and the Art of Belief; many of the words in Norris's "vocabulary of faith" were central to Dickinson as well. I'd read both of these books, but I never thought about them at the same time; now I will.

In After Heaven, Robert Wuthnow reports on America's spiritual "seekers." In The Divine Conspiracy, Dallas Willard observes that it is quite possible to be a Christian today without being a disciple of Jesus. Maybe we should read Wuthnow and Willard together, in the same Sunday-school class or small group or seminar.

And certainly, if we pay attention to Richard Foster's Streams of Living Water: Celebrating the Great Traditions of Christian Faith, we will celebrate the appearance of the first two volumes of a projected 27 in InterVarsity Press's Ancient Christian Commentary on Scripture. (Why not get together with a few friends in your church and commit to buying the series for your pastor as the volumes appear?)

Of the five scholars featured in Tim Stafford's February 1999 CT cover story, "The New Theologians," three are represented among the award winners: Ellen Charry (By the Renewing of Your Minds: The Pastoral Function of Christian Doctrine), Miroslav Volf (After Our Likeness: The Church As the Image of the Trinity), and Kevin Vanhoozer (Is There a Meaning in This Text? The Bible, the Reader, and the Morality of Literary Knowledge). All attest to the truth that there need be no conflict between rigorous scholarship and Christian faith grounded in Scripture and directed by the Spirit.

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By John Wilson, Book Review Editor.

1999 BOOK of the YEAR

AN EXCERPT THE DIVINE CONSPRIACY

When Jesus directs us to pray, "Thy kingdom come," he does not mean we should pray for it to come into existence. Rather, we pray for it to take over at all points in the personal, social, and political order where it is now excluded: "On earth as it is in heaven." With this prayer we are invoking it, as in faith we are acting it, into the real world of our everyday existence . … The reality of God's rule, and all of the instrumentalities it involves, is present in action and available with and through the person of Jesus. That is Jesus' gospel.