I love to read. I find it helpful to summarize my thoughts on each book and I offer those thoughts in the hope that you will be encouraged to either read or pass over the given title.

Bonhoeffer’s Seminary Vision: A Case for Costly Discipleship and Life Together by Paul House. It’s easy to forget that Bonhoeffer’s best known works—The Cost of Discipleship and Life Together—both originated as lectures to seminary students. There is thus much to learn about Bonhoeffer’s seminary vision in each book. Paul House has done us all a favor by analyzing and applying Bonhoeffer’s thoughts on seminary life to our current academic culture. Although I think House is prone to a more romantic view of Bonhoeffer’s teaching than is necessary, he nonetheless makes a compelling case for embodied, communal, and spiritual seminary education. This is a valuable read for any seminary administrator or faculty member wrestling with how to best train ministers in our 21st century context of online education and just-check-it-off-the-list coursework.

Bonhoeffer on the Christian Life: From the Cross, For the World by Stephen Nichols. As part of my final prep for leading some discussion over Bonhoeffer at an upcoming doctoral seminar I managed to squeeze in Nichol’s entry on the German giant in Crossway’s Theologians on the Christian Life series. I love Steve Nichols and have profited from many of his books, so I expected great things from this volume. Yet, in the end I was quite disappointed. As so often seems to happen, Bonhoeffer is made to fit into an American evangelical vision of who we want Bonhoeffer to be more than who he really was. Nichols is right to hang Bonhoeffer’s thoughts about spirituality on Christ and community, but organizing the remainder of the work spiritual disciplines misses out on the complexity and heart of Bonhoeffer’s thought and practice.

The Compelling Community: Where God’s Power Makes a Church Attractive by Mark Dever and Jamie Dunlop. Dever’s book The Deliberate Church is the resource, outside of Scripture, we value most when training future officers at IDC. It offers an astonishing amount of biblical truth and practical wisdom on matters of pastoral ministry, church polity, corporate worship, and even gets down to things like hiring church staff and running elders’ meetings. Whereas The Deliberate Church aims to set a foundation for healthy church, The Compelling Community is something like a sequel that tries to let us know—as difficult as it can be to capture in print—what a healthy church feels like. And what a fantastic sequel this is! The Compelling Community offers a vision for healthy church life from which any pastor or church leader can profit. I found the discussion of a church being a place of either “Gospel Plus Community” or “Gospel Revealing Community” worth its weight in gold. I’ll cast aside all other superlatives that come to my mind and simply say, “Get this book!”

Life of Constantine by Eusebius. Next week I’m out in Louisville for a doctoral seminar on “Pastrisic & Celtic Spirituality” and am slated to give a presentation on the piety of Eusebius as shown in his panegyric (think “gushing oration put to paper”) written in honor Emperor Constantine. Eusebius is out to show, in hagiographical form, that Constantine was among the most pious of men. In the course of his appreciation I think we get a decent sense of the kind of piety Eusebius thought worthy of emulation. Life provides patristic scholars with no small amount of fodder for historical and theological debate, but my aim in analysis is simple: what we see encouraged is a moral, prayerful, political, and eschatological piety. If you aren’t a PhD student, I’d be hard pressed to see why you’d need to read this one . . . so you’ll probably want to just move along.

The Unquenchable Flame: Discovering the Heart of the Reformation by Michael Reeves. Good ol’ Mike Reeves has written my favorite intro on the Trinity, my favorite intro on life in Christ, so it shouldn’t surprise you to find out he’s also written my favorite introduction to the Reformation. Reeves has an envious amount of winsome and witty wisdom on Scripture and history, characteristics that live in full color on every page of The Unquenchable Flame. I reread this book with the staff at our church and Reeves managed to win over one of our staffers predisposed to loathe history (I know, we are working on such silliness). If you are looking to get a brief, but substantial sense of what the Reformation was all about, this is the book for you.

Click here to find other entries in the Recent Reads series.