Books That Changed Me
- God’s Way Of Reconciliation by D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones (1)
- Basic Christianity by John Stott (2)
- The Forgotten Spurgeon by Iain H. Murray (3)
- The Gospel Story Bible by Marty Machowski (4)
- A Very Contemporary Mediaeval Saint (5)
We love books! A quick visit to our house and you will see ‘his’ and ‘hers’ libraries. We are constant readers so it is easy to say that the last book I read, Through a Glass Darkly: Journeys through Science, Faith & Doubt, by Alister McGrath, (which I highly recommend), is the one that has influenced me most but that wouldn’t be quite accurate.
Picture if you can a naïve Christian, who was longing to go back to her beloved Africa, where she’d spent her formative years. A missionary, perhaps? ‘I’d better be theological and useful’, she thought. This led to her moving from her suburban Kent grammar school to Bangor University to study a joint honours degree in Biblical Studies and Social Theory and Institutions. The trouble was that there were only two students studying that combination of subjects and it was a relatively new course. You’ve guessed it, that naïve believer was me!
It was a tough course and New Testament Greek was compulsory, along with a plethora of other modules. I was always the last to leave the university library at night, having spent the evening conjugating Koine Greek verbs.
In the third year of the BA there was a linking module: Philosophy of Religion. Protestantism and the rise of capitalism was one of the subjects in the module. This was the first time I had ever encountered Calvinism and it felt a bit odd to learn about Calvin’s doctrines in a sociology lecture! The five points of Calvinism were duly taught and I learned the acrostic TULIP: Total depravity, Unconditional Election, Limited Atonement, Irresistible Grace and the Perseverance of the Saints. I was gripped. The ‘light bulb’ moments were many!
One of the reasons for this was because of a book I had been given. I was the Bookstall Secretary of the University Christian Union and one of my fellow students had given it to me as a recommendation for the bookstall. In those days my own choices might have been theologically wider.
This paperback book was Iain Murray’s The Forgotten Spurgeon, by Banner of Truth, in its second edition. I lapped it up. I wasn’t so much interested in the ‘downgrade controversy’ as in the descriptions and explanations of the Puritan doctrines. The discussion on particular redemption resonated with aspects of TULIP and here were theological explanations, rather than sociological ones. Spurgeon attested, ‘the doctrine of Redemption is one of the most important doctrines of the system of faith. A mistake on this point will inevitably lead to a mistake through the entire system of our belief.’
This book opened my eyes to the beauty of the doctrines of grace and set me on the trajectory that took me to where I am today. The experience was relief to know that salvation was all of grace and that I could contribute absolutely nothing. It was life-giving. I was also helped to see that none was beyond the reach of God’s grace. What a spur for evangelism!
