Short list

Long Before Luther 

Nathan Busenitz

Protestants and Catholics for five centuries have debated the Reformation doctrine of justification by faith. Nathan Busenitz shows that long before Luther theologians such as Origen, Augustine, Anselm, and Bernard of Clairvaux understood that we are saved by God’s grace. Busenitz skillfully examines Augustine’s writing and includes many specific quotations from church leaders before and after him. As Ambrose stated in the fourth century, “I do not have the wherewithal to enable me to glory in my own works, I do not have the wherewithal to boast of myself, and so I will glory in Christ.”

God Among Sages 

Kenneth Richard Samples

Kenneth Samples compares Krishna, Confucius, Muhammad, and the Buddha with Christ and shows “why Jesus is not just another religious leader.” I wish this book had been around 10 to 20 years ago when I taught a comparative religion course at the University of Texas: It shows how other extraordinary religious leaders were still broken and far from divine, yet Christ claimed to be God and showed through His life and resurrection that He is. Samples also examines the strengths and weaknesses of pluralism and tolerance and notes that historic Christianity “consistently resists and defies all attempts to homogenize and mythologize its central truth claims.”

Uncomfortable 

Brett McCracken

Spoiler alert: Brett McCracken begins Uncomfortable with a hilarious send-up of many millennials’ dream church: architecturally contemporary and environmentally sustainable, with a community arts space and organic garden, a sanctuary rented out multiple nights a week as a concert venue, a fully equipped fitness center with CrossFit and personal training, Robinson and Malick societies for fans of 21st-century fiction and films, and so forth. His book is then a plea to avoid bubbles like that and instead embrace what’s uncomfortable: cross, holiness, truths, love, mission, worship, unity, commitment, and more. Christianity means the uncomfortable loss of being your own boss.

Hearing the Message of Daniel: Sustaining Faith in Today’s World 

Christopher J.H. Wright

Christopher Wright provides a deeper sense of the distinction between Jerusalem and Babylon. The latter was like a beast of prey, but Daniel and his three friends nevertheless did not choose “pious separatism.” Instead, they were diligent during their “downright offensive and idolatrous” Babylonian education. They said yes to hard jobs but no to majority religious pressures. Wright opposes separatism and says we “need to understand the culture we live in without sharing its belief system.” He notes how the revelations of Chapter 8 left Daniel “worn out. I lay exhausted for several days. Then I got up and went about the king’s business.”