The Top 5 Christian Books Of 2024
In this episode, I broke down my top 5 Christian books from 2024. The list is as follows:
Honorable Mentions:
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Official Review:
Shepherds for Sale – Megan Basham
Shepherds for Sale was the most important Christian book of the year. Along with being the most important book, it was also the most controversial book of the year. In this book, Megan Basham (reporter at Daily Wire), explains how liberal theology and progressive politics have infiltrated the broader evangelical church in America. Basham gives insight into how the liberal doctrines of “environmentalism”, illegal immigration, abortion, CRT, LGBTQ, and the MeToo movement ideology have been pushed into Christian churches due to large “Christian” media outlets like Christianity Today and The Gospel Coalition taking money from liberal donors to push an agenda for the sake of political change. Basham does not hold back in her calling out many prominent “Christian” leaders and organizations including Gavin Ortlund, Timothy Keller, Marvin Olasky, and Andy Stanley. When this book first came out it received massive pushback from legacy Christian institutions like CT and TGC, along with pseudo-intellectual political outlets that claim to be Conservative like The Dispatch. It appeared that most of the pushback from these outlets were highly emotional and derived from those who have never read the book at all. For example, Gavin Ortlund (a YouTube theologian and Apologist) was on the receiving end of some critiques from Basham claiming that everything that she said about him in her books was not true. This would mean either:
1. Gavin did not read Megan’s book, and therefor purposefully mischaracterizes her and her motivations.
2. Gavin is a pure postmodernist who believes that his own words are not fundamentally grounded in reality and thus can be changed and redefined so Gavin can avoid the Christian virtue of repentance.
I tend to think that it is a mixture of both. But you can decide for yourself. That said, Gavin was not the only person to respond to this book in a way that showed his true character and failed reading comprehension. The Dispatch also released a review of the book by Warren Cole Smith, another pseudo-intellectual coward who made the same exact claims that Gavin made; Megan’s book is just factually untrue. This time though, Warren makes his argument on the rock-solid basis of his friendships and personal relationships with people that Megan called out. Thus, we must believe that Warren is right, and Megan is wrong and that all of the cited sources found in Megan’s book are not accurate because Warren Smith is friends with these people, and we should just trust his word. Brilliant stuff. That said, after I interviewed Megan about her book, I reached out to both Gavin Ortlund and Warren Cole Smith to see if they wanted to have a legitimate debate/conversation with Megan and confront her personally on her degenerate and evil lies and manipulation found in her book. Gavin’s response to me was that he would “be happy to reconcile with her” but “for that to happen would require her to soften and stop attacking”. To this, I responded by saying that maybe the “attacks” could be stopped if there was a mediated dialogue about his claims on climate change and her claims about him in the book. I pushed him on the theological truth that forgiveness requires repentance. Thus, his “forgiveness” was not genuine or complete because Megan and he were not reconciled to the truth through dialogue and conversation. He then responded that he agrees that forgiveness is not possible without repentance and said he will continue to pray about the situation. Of course, this is not a situation Gavin must pray about, rather it is a situation that requires Biblical obedience and seeking reconciliation to the truth. Gavin was not interested in Biblical obedience. He was interested in virtue-signaling cowardice.
I also reached out to Warren Smith and asked if he would be interested in having a conversation with Megan. His response was as follows,
“I honestly think I’ve had my say on this. Thanks for the invitation, unless something new happens (such as Harper Collins retracting the book), I think I will respectfully decline at this time.”
This all proves a couple of important things. One is that many of these institutional shills like Gavin Ortlund and Warren Smith are all bark and no bite. They love to run their mouth and make claims without having the backbone to back them up and have a serious dialogue about the claims being made. I will add that it seemed to me that Megan was open to talking with any of these men if they were willing. Two; Megan’s books struck a serious chord in the Evangelical world. Her claims and reporting, along with her receipts and citations, were able to call out the heretical and pharasitic reality of the American church at all different levels. Lastly, Megan’s book can give us hope in the unfailing doctrines of the faith. Though, through the 2000-year history of the church, many false teachers have come and gone with theories and ideologies that are out of alignment with Scripture, the fundamental and eternal truths of the Bible are unfazed and remain standing tall amid the chaos and evil of the human race. My takeaway from Shepherds for Sale is that Christ demands that I, as an individual, read and understand His Word and His commands. I cannot and should not abdicate my responsibility and rely on only the thoughts and ideas of theologians, pastors, and institutions for a proper understanding of the truth. At the end of the day, Christ is our Shepherd, and He is not for sale.
To Gaze Upon God – Samuel Parkison
In Samuel Parkison’s book, To Gaze Upon God, he retrieves the Beatific doctrine that the church has stood upon for centuries. This is the most significant theological work of 2024. In it, Parkison begins by explaining what the doctrine is and how it has been one of the few agreed-upon doctrines of the broader church for centuries (Roman Catholic, Eastern Orthodoxy, and Protestant). The Beatific Doctrine (or Vision) is the Christian view of Heaven – that is, it is the idea that what makes Heaven, Heaven is that we will see the face of God. The idea of “seeing the face of God” is seen throughout the Scriptures from the Old Testament to the New Testament. Parkison begins this retrieval by affirming the Doctrine’s rootedness in Scripture (as any good Protestant should!). He begins by calling to attention all of the theophanies (visible manifestation of God) in the Bible going back to Genesis 3 in which God walks in the garden of Eden in the cool of the day. And moving forward, he brings to mind the time when Jacob wrestles with God and says, “I have seen God face to face, and yet my life is delivered.” The OT encounters with God are many, but none are more memorable than in Exodus 33 when Moses sees the glory of God and then, as a consequence, his own face beams with light that is representative of God’s glory. The Israelites are afraid of Moses because he is like God in this way and asks him to cover his face. One of the interesting facts that Parkison reveals in this book is that there is an intrinsic connection between seeing God face to face and conceptualizing that “face to face” in terms seen in Numbers 12:6-8 as “mouth to mouth”. This means that there is very little (maybe none) difference between God’s face and His Word (or mouth). This was just one of the many aspects of this book that blew me away. To Gaze Upon God culminates in Parkison giving one of the best explanations of the meaning and purpose of the Transfiguration in which Jesus brings John, James, and Peter to the top of a mountain where they meet with Moses and Elijah. In this event, Jesus’s “face shone like the sun, and his clothes became white as light.” (Matthew 17:2). Parkison gives incredible insight into John’s perspective of the Transfiguration. He shows that through John’s other New Testament writings (Gospel of John, Revelation, and 1,2,3 John) we can see there is a sense that when John went up the mountain to see the Transfiguration of Christ, he never came down. John never mentions the Transfiguration in his Gospel and yet one would know that John has seen the Glory of God in his descriptions of Christ. He says Jesus is light and life and we know that light is one of the main themes of John’s Gospel. All of this points us toward the Beatific Doctrine and, more importantly, toward the idea that the Christian life is incomplete without this Doctrine. There is some true sense in which we cannot aim towards Christ if we have no understanding of His Glory and Light. Finally, Parkison gives examples of reformed theologians who also hold to the Beatific Doctrine in their writings such as John Calvin and John Owen (as well as many others). This book is crucial to the modern theological conversation. In a time of political unrest and philosophical confusion, Christian theology is the light of truth that must account for all that is good and right in the world and all that can point us toward Christ in His fullness. There is no doubt that the Beatific Doctrine if grasped by the Protestant world, will do both.
Making Sense of Man – Vern Poythress
Vern Poythress is one of the most important theological giants of our time. Earlier this week I was thinking about who the three most important Protestant theologians are in the past 100 years. Theologians who have grasped the times we live in and have responded to them with theological clarity and precision. Theologians who have not compromised (many have) and have dug their heels in further to the Truth as the world has feasted on lies. The three names that come to mind are as follows:
1. J.I. Packer
2. J. Gresham Machen
3. Vern Poythress
The similarity between these three men is plain but profound; they understand the enemy of our day and are unafraid to attack it with the Truth. That enemy is Liberalism, Postmodernism, and Expressive Individualism. In Vern’s book, Making Sense of Man, he gives us a 700-page theology of humanity. Poythress uses his method of Biblical Perspectives to explain who man is and what he must do. Beginning with the book of Genesis, Vern explains why the Christian’s understanding of human origins is incompatible with modern evolutionary theory. He then begins to break down the original nature of man, that is, man being made in the image of God. Vern gives a multitude of perspectives on what it means to be made in the image of God. I will add here that Vern is not making an appeal to the postmodern theory that reality is only in the eye of the beholder. But he is picking up on the reality that though many different people have different perspectives on reality, there is still only one true and objective reality. What Vern argues is that we can understand the fullness of what is real by using different perspectives to create a whole conceptualization of a particular subject. In this book he is doing just that – he is looking through the pieces of Biblical teaching on the nature and purpose of man to create a larger picture of the fullness of man and his relationship to God. Vern hits on the fall of man, sexuality, the Image of God, free will, and many other topics related to God’s relationship with human beings. In a time of continual talk of “identity” and the over-psychologizing of the individual, Poythress gives depth and clarity to the theological reality and study of the human person. As Poythress quotes Calvin in his book,
“Again, it is uncertain that man never achieves a clear knowledge of himself unless he has first looked upon God’s face, and then descends from contemplating him to scrutinize himself.”
It is important for us modern Christians to first look to God for our understanding of ourselves before we look to the world or anything else. This book is pivotal for the modern church which is falling away from faith in Christ due to the idolization of the self and the desire for Freudian and psychosocial integration. Poythress’s book is a must-read for every Christian in this dehumanizing age.
We Who Wrestle With God – Jordan Peterson
I was hesitant to add this book to the list. Jordan Peterson is not a Christian and has not accepted Christ as his Lord and Savior. So, by definition of the word “Christian”, this book is not a “Christian” book. I understand that. The main reason I wanted to add this to the list is that, as I read through this book, I was impressed with some of the mythological and structural themes that Peterson picked up on in his survey of the Old Testament. But before I get into some of the legitimately interesting things in his book, I have to make a theological disclaimer. Jordan Peterson’s reading of the Bible is not operationally correct and cannot be used by serious Christian theologians and laymen. Peterson comes to the Bible with an entire set of presuppositions that are not in alignment with the Biblical worldview and are downright heretical at certain points. For example, Peterson’s characterization of God can at times be blasphemous. His referring to God as “the future” on many occasions is just plain wrong. God cannot be defined and contained within human restraints (like time) and cannot be what He has created. We also should note that Christians must not come to the Scriptures from a psychological perspective first! There is an interpretative order of operations that is in alignment with God’s orderly character. As Peterson so plainly points out, God is orderly and brings order out of chaos. So, why would that same logic not be applied to our hermeneutic? If God has ordered the universe then he must have also ordered our method of interpretation. The Christian hermeneutic is not psychologically driven but rather is driven theologically. This means that we must take on a literal approach to reading the Bible first and then discuss symbolic, typological, and allegorical realities within the text (because these realities do exist and will enhance our understanding of God). Peterson’s approach is not literal, therefore he misses some of the main foundational points of the passages he reads – this leads him to pick up on certain universal truths that can be found in nature and are indicative of his scientific approach to psychological study but can also allow for him to completely miss truths in Scripture because nature can only point us in the direction of the truth, but is not the truth itself. That said, if you can read this book and sift through certain theological inaccuracies, the truths that Peterson picks up on are seriously beneficial.
For example, Peterson’s understanding of the symbolic and even mythological reading of the origin story in Genesis is interesting. He argues that God is the Spirit that brings order out of chaos (as seen in Genesis 1). This is true and should be considered more extensively by the modern evangelical Protestant (non-denominational to be exact) who practices Christianity in a way that is completely disordered and chaotic. If Peterson is right, we must conform ourselves, despite our sinful nature, to the ordered reality of God’s creation and God’s nature. This point by Peterson is seriously important for young modern readers who are tyrannized by the modern philosophy of Expressive Individualism and Liberalism. If Peterson is correct, it would make logical sense that we must then order our lives from top to bottom. This point can be made at both the individual level and at the broader communal level. If Christians take nothing away from this book other than this one point, I would be happy – that we as Christians must not only order our personal lives to be in accordance with God and His Word but we also must order our worship service and communion to be in accordance with His Word. This would mean that many of the nondenominational, non-liturgical, and non-confessional churches would need to cease to exist because they are, in function and operation, contrary to the orderly and perfected nature of God Himself. We Who Wrestle With God helped me to understand why God sets the foundational framework for our conceptualization of His character in Genesis 1 in such a way that we cannot overlook His absolute orderliness and disdain for chaos. This fact should permeate every single part of our lives. Peterson also gives a very helpful explanation of the structure of letters, words, and phrases that we must connect to the nature of Jesus as the Logos (Word).
The body of any human language contains within it an empirically derivable coding of meaning. We can map this coding as the statistical relationship between letters, words, phrases, sentences, paragraphs, and so on up the living tree of the Logos. A word is identifiable as a word because it fits the mathematical pattern of the relationship between letters that characterizes all comprehensible words. It is this pattern that makes certain nonwords plausible, such as vims, blin, and flumptuous, and that enables them to be distinguished at a glance from implausible nonwords, such as kjlk and zxng and gwielritl, or even more radically m4a3s2tIr. Plausible nonwords adhere to the sound patterns of the language in which they are created. They possess combinations of consonants and vowels that are both familiar to, say English speakers and pronounceable in English. In contrast, implausible non- words contain letter combinations that are either unfamiliar or impossible to pronounce in English.
We see an analogous situation at "higher" or "more fundamental" levels of meaning. Just as there is a calculable probability that a given letter will follow any other given letter (in fact, there is a hierarchy of such probability, in that the letter e, for example, is more likely than a to follow any given consonant but a is more likely than q), there is a high and calculable probability that any given phrase, and therefore concept, will co-occur or exist in close proximity to a network of other concepts with associated meaning. That set of proximate conceptions are the so-called symbolic associations that help connote, rather than denote, the meaning of the phrase in question. In a well-constructed story, any given network of such associations is surrounded by other networks of comparative similarity and contrasted with networks of contrasting dissimilarity.
This mathematically systematized hierarchy is in alignment with the ordered nature of God and the Logos as the nature of Christ. It is my belief that Scripture teaches both explicitly and implicitly that to believe in the Logos is to believe in the exact definitions of the Word of God outlined in the revealed Scriptures. Further, sanctification is Godly living, meaning that it is the revealing, through the Holy Spirit, of the definitions of the Word of God and then the conforming of one’s life to those definitions as they are revealed. This is precisely why Confessional and liturgical Christianity is the proper expression of worship and spiritual growth – as we confess the faith, we are faced with the truth and the truth is either purifying or divisive. Those who are true believers will be transformed by the confession of the faith continually because of the working of the Holy Spirit in their hearts. Those who are not Christians will depart from us because the truth they are confessing is not aligned with their real belief system. Peterson’s book was very helpful in putting certain theological pieces together in my mind and helping me to understand the full reality of the order of God. Peterson is one of the most important thinkers of our time, but we must read and listen to him through the discerning lens of the Truth of Jesus.
Charles Spurgeon: A Life – Alex DiPrima
A good list of Christian books must always include a great biography. Spurgeon: A Life by Alex DiPrima gives a comprehensive account of the life of one of the most important pastors in church history: Charles Spurgeon. This book had me laughing at certain points and crying at others. One of the most memorable parts of this book is found in the chapter on Spurgeon building and maintaining an orphanage in London. Spurgeon would buy the kids clothes so they wouldn’t have to wear ugly and old orphanage clothing, and he would go there on Christmas with gifts and talk with the children. He had a serious conviction to take care of the poor which was rooted in the Bible. Spurgeon was willing to spend his money and resources on the poor because he loved them. This is something that the modern American church has failed to do. We have instead given our responsibility to take care of the poor to the federal government, and in return, the government has failed to take care of them (for many reasons). Spurgeon’s strong-willed conviction should be seen as a rebuke of the modern church and its endless spending of money, time, and resources on useless ministries and building campaigns. DiPrima also did a great job in explaining the Pastors College that Spurgeon founded. He founded this college for the purpose of building up theologically sound and doctrinally faithful pastors to go out and preach the truth to sinners. Spurgeon himself was not a college-educated man, but he did see education as important and necessary for the ministry – this is why he founded the pastor’s college. This college was founded for pastors – those who would shepherd the flock, not mere intellectuals who would sit in ivory towers and theologize and theorize all day. This institution was for the edification of the church. In Spurgeon: A Life, Alex DiPrima gives us a beautiful and truthful insight into a theological giant. My main takeaway from this book is that Charles Spurgeon was not aiming to become the massive historical figure that we would later characterize him as (unlike so many pastors and theologians today). Instead, he was interested in the Word of God and the pastoring and caring for the flock that God had given him. Charles Spurgeon is a unique man because he spent everything he had in talent, money, and resources to build the kingdom of God and Alex DiPrima paints this picture with clarity and historical accuracy in his book.