Archive for the ‘Epistemology’ Category
An Attempt at How Cultural Orthodoxies (Dogmas) Form
I’ve been pretty surprised at the rate at which new cultural orthodoxies have been formed over the course of my lifetime but particularly the last decade. This post serves as an attempt at dissecting how cultural orthodoxies form and serves to appreciate the complexity of their genesis. There is too much reductionistic thought out there about how cultural shifts occur and most of it centers on just one or two cultural factors and fails to take into account the massive web of multiple reciprocities that is this thing we call culture. Most of the current cultural commentary picks two or three sources as the root causes. Typically the cited sources are institutional – the (liberal) media, corporations, the current political milieu, or highly organized elite power brokers. I think these things have certainly played a role, even key roles, into the cultural shifts that we have seen. That said, I think these views are pretty reductionistic and fail to understand the complexities the constitute culture. As Justin Holcomb has said, “The most powerful aspect of culture is that which we do not think or reason about.” My main point in this piece is that the forces, elements, and ingredients that cause cultural change are very complicated and cannot be boiled down to just a few people, tribes, or institutions.
First, we need to understand what elements of culture are at work, both conscious and unconscious:
There is a constellation of at least 8 things that add to the formulation of cultural dogma – NOTE: 5 of these 8 are directly taken from a presentation delivered by Justin Holcomb and represent heavily thoughts from UVA’s department of Sociology (particularly that of James Davison Hunter) and also that of Christian Smith (Notre Dame)).
1. Artifacts: iPhones, iPads, or other iDevices that unconsciously reorder how we interact with stimuli or information. Artifacts can also be cultural icons such as the Cowboy, Bald Eagle, or Coca-Cola. Artifacts unconsciously impact how we think and interact about our world.
2. Language: Language is the carrier of culture… this is why terminology, accents, vocabularies, technical terms, pronunciations, and word meanings can very heavily geographically even within the same linguistic system. The use of the various aspects of language heavily determines tribal identity.
3. Beliefs, Symbols, or Ideas: these comprise some of the commonly held notions, brand identities, or thoughts of a people group or tribal faction.
4. Social Forces (aka Deep Structures) – Note the first 6 are from Justin Holcomb:
- Individualism
- The Therapeutic – the making of everything as not anyone’s own ultimate responsibility and the centrality of personal happiness of the goal of the individual
- Consumerism – the commodification of things that should not be commodified
- Pluralism – the acceptance of mutually exclusive systems of thought as being equally valued and/or true
- Secularism – the intentional lessening of religious authority in a culture
- Technology
- Democritization of knowledge – consensus is king and if the consensus doesn’t agree with you, bludgeon them until they do
- Post-Modern-Pragmatism – this is my own personal soap box on the mis-labeling of all things post-modern and what we really mean when we say the term “post-modernism”
- Globalism/Mobility – this also relates closely to the rapid rise of urbanization, the velocity of ideas, the fluidity with which people change geographic location, and the role of the worldwide marketplace and supply chain
5. Institutions: politics, education, economic, spiritual, media… etc.
6. Practices or Rituals: these are the conscious (places of worship) or unconscious (shopping, sports, entertainment) liturgies of a culture – more on that here, and here.
7. Elites: these can be media, political, athletic, celebrity, or other cultural curators and definers. One could categorize these as being the heads of various institutions (#5 above), but elites are more individuals than groups and seem to transcend even the institutions that gave them their platforms.
8. The Marketplace: dollars (or perceived dollars) can be the most significant voters of cultural change and this can happen on both the macro (Mozilla) and micro levels (Worldvision).
Second, we need to understand what some of our cultural orthodoxies (dogmas) happen to be:
(Note – I have in view here principally the West and specifically the American cultural context)
-“The highest moral good lay[s] in personal self-fulfillment” – see George Marsden’s book, The Twilight of the American Enlightenment: the 1950s and the Crisis of Liberal Belief – WSJ review here
-Public conversation (or dialogue or discourse) is only to be about facts and not beliefs – in other words it is taboo to talk about God
-Marriage is fundamentally about (romantic) love
-Homosexual behavior is to be accepted at least as non-abnormal and in some instances as normative
-What doesn’t hurt other people is morally permissible
–Authenticity to self and personal happiness are very important virtues and perhaps the highest of all the virtues
-Personal happiness is ultimate
-Sex is principally intended for pleasure
-Be good (in your own eyes) in order to be self-actualized (happy)
-The subjective individual self, in combination with the herd (read: democritization of knowledge), is the greatest interpreter, curator, and judge of what is true, good, and beautiful (over against history, data, or external authority)
Third, we need to understand the interplay of the cultural elements with the culture, our tribal faction, and ourselves
Velocity of ideas:
Before movable typeset, ideas and culture were principally only shared along trade routes. Those trade routes which were often roads or nautical routes were the only means by which one culture (or tribe) might cross-polinate another group. This made the velocity of ideas was much slower than in post-industrial and pre-internet age. Another complexity to the transmission of ideas dealt with low levels of literacy and significant linguistic barriers that existed for millennia. Oral traditions can travel remarkably quick yet must gain certain thresholds of cultural penetration in order to take route and multiple through generations. The paradigm shifts in the transmission of ideas were principally the Gutenberg printing press, transportation advances (cars, planes… etc.), and communication revolutions (radio, television, satellite, internet, web 2.0). These paradigm shifts in transmission of ideas has radically increased the velocity of ideas. In the modern era, ideas can travel at nearly limitless speed, spread through thousands of seemingly disparate and unconnected networks or tribes, and reach saturation levels significant enough to change public opinion, shape political policy, or even to overthrow governments (ie. Twitter and the Arab Spring).
Cultural Interaction is Determinative of Belief:
Humans naturally gravitate toward like kind and like minded. That said, there is significant interplay between what we believe and how you come up with what you believe. Orthodoxy (right beliefs) affects orthopathos, (right emotions) affects orthopraxis (right practice), affect orthodoxy, affects orthopraxis, affects orthodoxy… ad infinitum. So how we interact with culture – whether we engage it, critique it, or embrace it will impact consciously or unconsciously what we believe. You can evidence this very clearly with radically undercontextualized and/or cultish groups like the FLDS or the Westboro Baptist folks.
Unconscious Cultural Elements:
The seven cultural elements listed above are constantly influencing our lives in good ways, bad ways, and every shade of grey in-between. Most of this influence is unconscious, subconscious, selectively ignored, or down played as not playing a role in what we believe. I have had several hundred conversations with people about what they believe. In an overwhelming number of such instances, people believe the set of ideas that justify their wants, desires, and passions. In these instances the horse was the wants, desires, and passions of the heart that drove the cart of the justifications, rationalizations, and knowledge of the head. In other words, people seek evidence, truth, arguments, facts, and knowledge about their beliefs after those beliefs are formed by their belief system (secular, religious, philosophical, or other). There are notable exceptions, but this seems to be more normative than not. Most folks could not even name a single thinker, writer, philosopher, sacred text, or cultural element that was the genesis of their most central tenets, dogmas, orthodoxies, or beliefs.
Conscious Elements:
That said, some of these cultural elements above are very conscious. These elements are the ones that tend to get the most ink spilled about them. It is usually institutions and elites that get the most attention and the usual scapegoats for when their is some rising cultural dogma that is contrary to our own tribal orthodoxy. I do not wish to downplay the role of celebrity, elites, the marketplace, and institutions of all kinds in the formulation of new cultural dogmas. The role of these conscious elements has been well noted in the sexual revolution, the rise of feminism, the rise of fundamentalism and evangelicalism, and have shaped the battle lines on other issues like abortion, gender, and sexuality.
Concluding thoughts: If you have bought into the idea that the contours of the cultural landscape are complex and inter-related, then I hope that you might be willing to think and interact on those contours with more deftness and in a manner than is more winsome. I would hope that you would be able to identify more readily some of unconscious elements that comprise the invisible hand of culture. Be patient with people who do not understand or do not care that they hold numerous mutually exclusive ideas in their worldview. Have compassion on the culture for it is harassed and helpless:
When he saw the crowds, he had compassion for them, because they were harassed and helpless, like sheep without a shepherd. Matthew 9:36
For further reading:
Culture Wars, James Davison Hunter
Intellectuals, Paul Johnson
Total Truth, Nancy Pearcey
The Twilight of the American Enlightenment: the 1950s and the Crisis of Liberal Belief, George Marsden
Social and Cultural Dynamics, Pitirim Sorokin
To Change the World, James Davison Hunter
Desiring the Kingdom, James K. A. Smith
One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, Alexander Solzhenitsyn
Doctrine of the Knowledge of God, John Frame
Best Links of the Week
Makoto Fujimura has an excellent open letter to the churches in North America concerning Art and Christianity.
Interesting piece on how Google avoids the USA’s 35% corporate tax employing a “double irish” and “double sandwhich” strategy.
“Top Ten Mistakes Made by n00b Car Buyers” – I might add a #11 to this list that says buying a new car instead of a quality used one.
John Muether has a provocative piece on social media over at the Ligonier Blog. I think he is a bit out of touch at points but makes some excellent points as well. A worthwhile read.
One of my seminary professors (Chuck Hill) pieces in the Huffington Post of all places – “The Conspiracy Theory of the Gospels.” Also, Chuck has an important book coming out entitled, “Who Chose the Gospels.”
FED pumping $600,000,000,000.00 into the system for some “quantitative easing.”
Oxford, Rice, and Open University release a bunch of free ebooks on iTunesU.
Details on the new “Touchdown Jesus“… this is the Cincinnati, OH version and not the Notre Dame version.
Excellent Piece from 60 Minutes on how Wall Street and employers have used and abused 401ks to the detriment of the working man:
This commercial makes some good critiques of the smartphone age… not sure how it really connects to the actual smartphone it is promoting… but the critique is sound… Really?
A Tribute to the Retiring Alvin Plantinga
Alvin Plantinga has been a professor of philosophy for over 50 years, spending his last 28 years at Notre Dame. To be quite frank he is one of the best philosophers in the past few centuries. I think the greatest complement I have ever heard of Plantinga came a Jewish atheist professor at UF, who said something to the effect, ‘Alvin Plantinga has single handidly made Christianity respectable again in philosophy… his arguments are so damn good, that I have reconsidered my atheism.’
In analytic philosophy circles, Christianity was seen as an epistemological joke. Plantinga painstakingly carved out a space for Christianity back at the discussion table in even the most hostile departments. It is perhaps somewhat ironic that Plantinga was at Notre Dame considering his theological and philosophical heritage was from the Reformed tradition. However, from what I understand the President of Notre Dame at the time wanted the best Christian thinking and at that time it happened to be Reformed epistemology. So, Notre Dame grabbed guys like Plantinga, Alasdair MacIntyre, and Peter van Inwagen.
Here is a poor attempt at a brief and uncomprehensive summary his contribution to Christian thought:
Warranted Christian Belief and God as properly basic (Reformed Epistemology)
In Warranted Christian Belief, Plantinga makes a case that several things are properly basic. Something that is properly basis does not require proof and functions as the bedrock that we layer our daily lives on top of. One such example is Descartes’ famous “cogito ergo sum” or “I think therefore I exist.” The most important thing that Plantinga voraciously argues for is that the existence of God is properly basic [and the atheists gasp, throwing the yellow flag calling for a 5 yard illegal motion penalty]. Plantinga makes a very good case (along with the presuppositionalists) that belief in God requires no proof or justification. Consider the following – can you prove that other minds exist. It sounds like a stupid question, but can you? I could be a brain in a vat, or Neo in the Matrix, or the muse of some evil genius and all of what I think is reality could be completely constructed, and I am on the only thinking being. None of us thinks or believes that we are the only mind in existence. In simple terms, the belief in other minds is properly basic in a similar way that belief in God is properly basic. Plantinga spends the rest of the book defending that the Christian worldview is justifiable.
Free-Will Defense Against the Logical Problem of Evil
There are several Problem(s) of Evil in philosophy. The most common had been the logical problem of evil:
1. If a perfectly good god exists, then evil does not. 2. There is evil in the world. 3. Therefore, a perfectly good god does not exist.
Most philosophers have conceded that Plantinga has solved the logical problem of evil in his Free-Will Defense, and have given up on the logical problem of evil. First off, it is important to say that his argument is a defense and not a theodicy. A theodicy is a justification for why evil exists in a world created by God. A defense exists merely to show a logically possible set of premises that refutes the trilemma above. Plantinga’s argument goes like such:
A world containing creatures who are significantly free (and freely perform more good than evil actions) is more valuable, all else being equal, than a world containing no free creatures at all. Now God can create free creatures, but He can’t cause or determine them to do only what is right. For if He does so, then they aren’t significantly free after all; they do not do what is right freely. To create creatures capable of moral good, therefore, He must create creatures capable of moral evil; and He can’t give these creatures the freedom to perform evil and at the same time prevent them from doing so. As it turned out, sadly enough, some of the free creatures God created went wrong in the exercise of their freedom; this is the source of moral evil. The fact that free creatures sometimes go wrong, however, counts neither against God’s omnipotence nor against His goodness; for He could have forestalled the occurrence of moral evil only by removing the possibility of moral good. God, Freedom, and Evil, pp. 166-167.
In undergrad, I wrote a paper reworking Plantinga’s argument removing a free-will view of Divine Sovereignty and human responsibility and inserting a compatibilist view in its place. I believe that my paper did no harm to Plantinga’s argument and that his argument is still compatible with compatibilism.
Evolutionary Argument Against Naturalism
The evolutionary argument against naturalism is sheer brilliance. He argues that if evolution and naturalism are true then it seriously undermines both evolution and naturalism. Naturalism is the idea that we hold ideas “true” today because they have “survival value.” If evolution and naturalism are true, then human thinking evolved to produce ideas that have survival value and not necessarily truth. The set of beliefs that maximizes my ability to eat, reproduce, and fight is not always what is true. Evolution and naturalism, therefore, are tuned to survival rather than truth. Therefore, this casts significant doubt on trusting our thinking itself, and included in that thinking are both the ideas of evolution or naturalism themselves. Genius.
Modal Logic Version of Ontological Argument
It took me 3 years, 4 philosophy professors, and 4 versions of the argument to finally understand its genius. It is not sophistry; it is not a parlor trick; it is not a aberration of grammar. Do not go chasing the ontological argument unless you have copious amounts of time, a willingness to make your brain hurt, and the patience to deconstruct why Gaunilo and Kant’s objections are incorrect. If you are up to the task, start here.
In the wake of evangelicalism’s massive receding from all public spheres (particularly the University), Plantinga has nearly single-handidly re-carved out a space for the Christian to have a voice in philosophy and respectability in the University. You would be wise to have a basic understanding of his thinking.
Thank you Alvin. I am deeply indebted.
Top 10 Apologetic Works
This is a highly selective list of what I think are both good and useful apologetic works.
1. Apologetics to the Glory of God by John Frame [y, l, e, p, s]
At the end of the day, I think the presuppositionalists have the most Biblical and best defense of Christianity. This is the best of the presuppositional works.
2. Pensees by Blaise Pascal [y, l, e, p, s]
This book should come as no surprise considering the title of this blog. Pascal speaks to the heart and the mind. His analysis of man’s greatness/wretchedness, propensity towards boredom, and love of diversions make so much sense of the human experience in light of the Christian story.
3. Warranted Christian Belief by Alvin Plantinga [p, s]
This is Plantinga’s magnum opus. He presents his epistemology. It is not an easy read, a background in philosophy would be very helpful.
4. Tactics: A Gameplan For Discussing Your Christian Convictions by Gregory Koukl [y, l, e, p, s]
While not necessarily an apologetic work, this is a helpful book for creating discussion about your faith. I included it here because it is so helpful and practical.
5. Darwin’s Black Box by Michael Behe [l, e, p, s]
See write-up here.
6. The Reason for God by Tim Keller [c, y, l, e, p, s]
Keller presents a third way between pure science/reason and pure faith.
7. Cornelius Van Til: An Analysis of His Thought by John Frame [e, p, s]
If you are seriously interested in presuppositional thought, then this is a good place to dig deeper.
8. Defending Your Faith by R.C. Sproul [y, l, e, p, s]
R.C. has put together a very solid and readable introduction to apologetics. A good first book on the subject.
9. God and Other Minds by Alvin Plantinga [p, s]
Here, Plantinga discusses the classical arguments for/against God. Also, his God, Freedom, and Evil is pretty good. It is not an easy read. A background in philosophy and/or logic is very helpful.
10. Every Thought Captive by Richard Pratt [c, y, l, e, p, s]
This brief book is an accessible and good read for everyone.
(c=children; y=young adult; l=lay leader; e=elder; p=pastor; s=scholar)
The 25 Most Destructive Books Ever Written…
…and why you should read them (or at least be familiar with them).
These are books that have had a deleterious affect on humanity (almost exclusively Western in their thinking). Some of them had “good intentions”* but fell flat on their face with horrible unintended consequences. The Christian has the responsibility to defend the truth of the Gospel. One part of defending the truth is refuting all untruth. We need to be reading primary sources of the things we are seeking to deconstruct – not summaries, the wikipedia article, or a blog post about it.
*1. The Origin of Species: By Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life by Charles Darwin
I do not think Darwin would agree with half of Neo-Darwinianism or macroevolution. He makes massive concessions that geology and microbiology would need to corroborate his thesis. He was a good scientist who followed the evidence, I think he would be in the intelligent design camp (perhaps this is a controversial statement, but read Origin for yourself). I have listed this as #1 as this work was critical in pretty much all of the destructive thoughts of the past 150 years: Eugenics, Scientific Naturalism, Nietzschean atheism, New Atheism, Liberal Protestantism, and Communism.
2. Critique of Pure Reason by Immanuel Kant
This book is probably the most influential book in philosophy since the ancient Greeks. Kant seeks to synthesize the great debate of the history of philosophy: Being vs. Becoming aka Plato vs. Aristotle. In the process, Kant comes to the conclusion that our minds cannot have knowledge of things that are not physical – ie. God and many other absolute truths. In defense of Kant, his thinking did begin to change in his third work as he makes some wiggle room for faith as being a legitimate pathway for knowledge (but almost no one reads his third volume).
3. The Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels
20,000,000 dead under Stalin, 6-8,000,000 dead under Lenin, 40,000,000 dead under Mao Zedong, 1,700,000 dead under Pol Pot… case and point.
4. On Religion: Speeches to Its Cultured Despisers by Friedrich Schleiermacher
This guy birthed liberal Protestantism. His ideas split Protestantism and millions think they know Jesus when they don’t.
5. Thus Spoke Zarathustra by Friedrich Nietzsche
Nietzsche decries how humanity has killed God through our apathy. He then espouses why humanity needs to move beyond God, morality, truth, and the good, in favor of embracing exerting power and control over the weak.
*6. Meditations on First Philosophy by Rene Descartes
Descartes had every intention of proving through pure axiomatic reasoning that God existed. In short, his arguments for God’s existence were awful and his arguments for doubting everything were excellent. His legacy is solid argumentation for skepticism. Epic Fail.
7. Mein Kampf by Adolf Hitler
11-17,000,000 dead. Hitler sees Judaism, capitalism, and communism as the three major threats to Germany. The Final Solution means purging all associated with these things and the result is the Holocaust. Awful.
8. Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity by Richard Rorty
In my view, this is the most important book to be read today for the Christian. For an explanation why, read my previous blog post on post-modern-pragmatism.
9. The Prince by Niccolo Machiavelli
In order to be successful in life you must exercise control through power and manipulation. Morality hurts your ability to exert your will.
10. Origins of the History of Christianity by Ernest Renan
The New Testament is essentially myth. This revisionist history was seminal in classic liberalism and influential in the later Jesus Seminar.
11. Discourse on the Origin of Inequality Among Men by Jean Jacques Rousseau
Society is corrupt, man is good.
12. The Pivot of Civilization by Margaret Sanger
Sanger promoted sexual liberation and then birth control, abortion, and eugenics. 39,000,000+ babies dead worldwide… this year from abortion.
13. Leviathan by Thomas Hobbes
Humans are immoral, therefore only Leviathan is the solution… Leviathan is a strong and aggressive central government.
14. The Essence of Christianity by Ludwig von Feuerbach
Christianity is superstition that will soon be replaced by humanism.
15. The Future of an Illusion by Sigmund Freud
Humanity has invented God and this delusion is a kind of mental illness.
16. Various Writings by Pelagius
Denial of the doctrine of original sin, denial of efficacious grace, and the denial of the sovereignty of God. 1600 years later his teachings still plague the church.
17. Sexual Behavior in the Human Male by Alfred Kinsey
This was just painful to read (and I was unable to finish) and I am not endorsing actually getting a copy (hence no link). Kinsey basically says that no sexual behavior or orientation is immoral. All is permissible.
18. The Gnostic Gospels by Elaine Pagels
Some bit of gnosticism had to make this list. I wrestled with what to choose here. Pagels is your run of the mill critic who says that the gnostic “gospels” are the real story and history. These ideas are ridiculous due to their pseudepigraphic nature, date of writing, and mutually exclusive theologies.
19. Prolegomena to the History of Israel by Julius Wellhausen
Wellhausen espouses that the first five books of the Old Testament were not written by Moses but by editors from four schools of thought. A flood of Bible criticism followed Wellhausen.
20. Why I am Not a Christian by Bertrand Russell
Russell is one of the few atheists other than Nietzsche that I respect. His thoughts are well ordered and argued. The New Atheists (Dawkins, Hitchens…) wish they could hold a candle to Russell.
21. Process and Reality by A.N. Whitehead
Whitehead argues for Process Theology. Read about Process Theology here.
Justification by faith alone is anathematized. Veneration of Mary and saints upheld. Transubstantiation upheld. I love my brothers and sisters who are Christians in the Catholic church despite the Catholic church. Trent had the opportunity to listen to the Reformation and return to God’s Word for truth. It did not and left in its wake countless eternal casualties.
23. His Dark Materials Trilogy by Philip Pullman
Pullman sought to write the opposite of Milton’s Paradise Lost. He seeks to commend humanism and ultimately atheism as the commendable life path. His Dark Materials is aimed at young adults and has been recently popularized by the Golden Compass film.
24. Protagoras by Plato
For clarity sake, these are sayings ascribed to Protagoras and not Platonic thoughts. The famous quote is “Man is the measure of all things.” Protagoras is the first person to espouse a kind of moral relativism.
25. Coming of Age in Samoa by Margaret Mead
The logical consequences of naturalism and Darwinianism applied to anthropology and sociology. What is primitive is good, therefore the sexual inhibition she evidenced in primitive Samoa ought to be writ large.
Some thinkers who nearly made this list:
Leon Trotsky, Mao Zedong, Jean-Paul Sartre, Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Victor Gollancz, Lillian Hellman, Cyril Connolly, Norman Mailer, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Bertolt Brecht, Johann Fichte, Georg Hegel, Arthur Schopenhauer, John Dewey, Joseph Smith, Percy Shelley, Henrik Ibsen, Edmund Wilson, James Baldwin, Kenneth Tynan, Jean-François Lyotard, Claude Levi-Strauss and Noam Chomsky.
What did I miss?
Top 40 Books to Read While in College
You will never have more discretionary time than while in college. This is a critical time for you to develop your character and mind. This is a list of what I think are the most important books to work through during your time as an undergrad. These books focus on developing your heart to affection (orthopathos), renewing your mind to truth (orthodoxy), and provoking your hands to kingdom work (orthopraxis). Take 10 books a year and devote 30 minutes a day – you’ll finish the list, perhaps even early.
Note: I have listed them in order of how I think they should be read and not necessarily in order of how good they are. For sake of space, I am not going to do a writeup on each of these. If you have a question(s) about a book(s), just post in the comments.
1. Don’t Waste Your Life by John Piper
2. Nine Marks of a Healthy Church by Mark Dever
3. The Pursuit of God by A.W. Tozer
4. Designed for Dignity by Richard Pratt
5. The Fuel and the Flame by Steve Shadrach
6. Tell the Truth by Will Metzger
7. The Master Plan of Evangelism by Robert Coleman
8. Holiness by J.C. Ryle
9. The New Testament Documents: Are They Reliable by F.F. Bruce
10. Universe Next Door by James Sire
11. Knowing God by J.I. Packer
12. Total Truth by Nancy Pearcey
13. Redemption Accomplished and Applied by John Murray
14. Pensees by Blaise Pascal
15. No Place for Truth by David Wells
16. The Cross of Christ by John Stott
17. Culture Wars by James Hunter
18. Let The Nations Be Glad by John Piper
19. Salvation Belongs to the Lord by John Frame
20. Desiring God (or something else more substantial) by John Piper
21. The John Frame Trilogy: Doctrine of the Knowledge of God, Doctrine of God, Doctrine of the Christian Life by John Frame
22. The Clash of Civilizations by Samuel Huntington
23. Christ of the Covenants by O. Palmer Robertson
24. Darwin’s Black Box by Michael Behe
25. Religious Affections by Jonathan Edwards
26. Love the Lord Your God With All Your Mind by J.P. Moreland
27. Darwin on Trial by Phillip Johnson
28. Rise of Christianity by Rodney Stark
29. Church History in Plain Language by Bruce Shelley
30. Systematic Theology by Wayne Grudem
31. How to Read the Bible for All its Worth by Fee and Stuart
32. He Gave us Stories by Richard Pratt [there is a nice summary here]
33. Institutes of Christian Religion by John Calvin
34. Confessions by St. Augustine
35. Warranted Christian Belief by Alvin Plantinga
36. Thus Spoke Zarathustra by Friedrich Nietzsche (I included this book because it is important for us to study antithetical works, I will make a list of books like this one later)
37. What is a Healthy Church Member by Thabiti Anyabwile
38. Habits of the Mind by James Sire
39. Why We’re Not Emergent: From Two Guys That Should Be by Ted Kluck and Kevin Deyoung
40. Baptism and Fullness by John Stott
What books would you add?