Most Influential Books: Desiring God, John Piper

Ask my wife: She's married to a bibliophile.  Perhaps more realistically, I like the idea of reading and being well-read more than the cost, time, and labor it actually takes to read a lot.  (My Amazon.com wish list has 146 books on it!)  But either way, I really enjoy reading.  (Olivia will add, "...nonfiction, that is!  When will you ever read The Hunger Games?).  I've long thought of posting about the books that have most influenced me, so in somewhat chronological order, I'll reveal a little bit about each one and how they've molded me.

After the Bible became to me a living book in the spring and summer of 2002, I began reading some Christian books--Lee Strobel, Bill Hybels, Brennan Manning, John Eldredge, as I recall.  But when I was on a Campus Crusade Summer Project in Ocean City, NJ, in 2003, I was introduced to John Piper's book Desiring God: Meditations of a Christian Hedonist (Multnomah).  It seemed like every Crusade staff member had read it, and lots of students were talking about it.  I borrowed someone's copy and read it every week while sitting at the laundromat.  And it blew me away.

It wasn't so much Piper's thesis of "Christian hedonism" that jolted me--that God is most glorified in us when we are most satisfied in him, which is what he created us for and what he demands of us.  What really struck me was how Piper handled the Bible.  He took every word with dead-seriousness, digging for every drop of truth.  He let the text of Scripture speak for itself, never trying to gloss over anything.  He chained together each word into thoughts--grammar matters!--each thought into arguments, and each argument into a God-exalting, idol-crushing weapon in the fight for our souls.  Until that point I had never listened to or read anyone who took the Bible so seriously and so joyfully.  It was ultimately Piper's handling of Scripture that made me want to dive into every book of the Bible and let God speak plainly.

Piper vs. Wright on Justification

Many of you who frequent my blog (if "many" can be said of such a small plurality!) or have ties to it are probably becoming aware of the differences emerging within Protestantism over the traditional view on justification and that of the so-called "New Perspective on Paul" espoused by James Dunn, E. P. Sanders, and, most notably, N. T. Wright. There has been much controversy over this, because it appears that Wright challenges traditional theology in two ways: (1) He sees references to the "law" in Romans and Galatians as exclusively referring to God's covenant with Israel at Sinai and not also a universal moral law given to all nations. (2) He denies the imputation of Christ's righteousness to the believer, instead saying that though present justification is by faith, there will be a future justification upon the basis of our Spirit-wrought works. Many evangelicals claim this is a slip back into Rome, but I'm not so sure that that's really at stake (or at least not the degree some people think it is). In fact, I think there are ways that both perspectives fit together.

Christianity Today magazine has put together a very helpful table comparing Wright's view and the traditional Reformed view of John Piper (although I think Michael Horton or Douglas Moo would have been a much better representative of the confessional Reformed position than John Piper). The accompanying essay about pastoral implications quotes Kevin DeYoung, my former pastor at University Reformed Church in East Lansing, Michigan.