So you’ve got a good Bible (my choice: the HarperCollins
NRSV Study Bible), a concordance, and a set of Bible commentaries.
What next? Most of us buy what our pastor or friends recommend.
This can lead to ‘tunnel vision’ if they’re stuck in a narrow
theological groove. Far better to follow a ‘macroscopic guide’
and Peterson is about the best around…

If you’re evangelical/’Reformed’, Peterson is a Presbyterian
scholar-pastor, many of whose books have been published by IVP.
If you’re Catholic/catholic, he’s read widely in the spiritual
masters. If you’re fussy about scholarship, Peterson has done
his homework in theology and the biblical languages (‘I read commentaries
the way some people read novels, from beginning to end, skipping
nothing’ p.78). But is he a pastor? Yes, 35 years – in one-pastor
congregations. Spiritual director? The best exponent of pastor-as-spiritual
director writing today. Literateur? Yes, he reckons we should
read secular classics to understand ourselves and our world.

A person’s library tells you a lot about that one.
I haven’t met Eugene Peterson – nearest was when he followed me
as teacher of spirituality to the Doctor of Ministry students
at Fuller some years back. But if I were to give $100 worth of
one writer’s books to a serious Christian or beginning pastor,
Peterson would be my choice. His ‘Under the Unpredictable Plant’,
in my view, is his best: but any of his books (including ‘The
Message’) are well worth the investment.

Now Peterson’s suggestions about who/what you should
read are, of course, subjective. He admits that. But I like his
breadth, and depth. His favorite authors: Barth, Bonhoeffer, Buechner,
Chesterton, Kierkegaard, Kenneth Leech, C.S.Lewis, Martin Luther,
Martin Thornton, von Balthasar. Now that’s some list!

I wonder why he doesn’t like Merton more (the author
index cites two of his books, but omits a third he recommends);
or Nouwen (only ‘Reaching Out’ gets a guernsey); or Sangster (whose
son’s biography of his father should be a ‘must’ in any list:
auto/biographies are sparse here). There’s very little if anything
from Asia, Latin America or Africa – and almost nothing of a radical
tinge (so Robert McAfee Brown isn’t there, though Brueggemann
is – once). Susan Howitch might have got one of her novels-with-a-religious-backdrop
onto the list (not any more – their themes are too repetitive).
And I’d put something of Thielicke’s somewhere – probably ‘The
Waiting Father’. I’d have given ‘The Cloud of Unknowing’ a higher
rating. Maas & O’Donnell’s ‘Spiritual Traditions for the Contemporary
Church’ (Abingdon 1990) is a basic, comprehensive text on the
range of Christian spiritualities, but doesn’t rate a mention.
And I think Peterson hasn’t kept up with contemporary scholarship
about Jesus and the Gospels…

But overall, when you have conservative British Baptist
Alexander McLaren and liberal American Baptist Harry Emerson Fosdick
within five pages of each other; or Wendell Berry following Frederick
Buechner, Peterson’s doing something right: those authors wouldn’t
appear together on any narrow-minded (oops..!) lists.

Get this book before you buy any others. (Can’t get
any in Melbourne at the moment: I’ve scoured the Christian bookshops
and snaffled the four copies – four! – available).

The pastor’s task is to get to know God very well,
the world and its people very well, and themselves very well –
and introduce them to each other… Many pastors (I talk to one
every day) don’t do any of these very well. Most pastors feel
guilty reading – at least outside sermon preparation. You might
find that difficult to believe, but it’s true! Ask your pastor
– courteously – this question: ‘Your calling is to be our spiritual
director: how much time do you spend reading and praying…?’
Go on, ask! In practical terms, says Peterson in other words,
the pastor’s time-schedule shows him or her spending half their
‘working-life’ with God, half with people, and the rest in administration
🙂

Finally a quiz (answers below): # ‘Brightest mind
of nineteenth- century England’? # ‘Not everyone’s favorite, but
on everyone’s list’? # ‘More influence on Western spirituality
than any writer outside the Scriptures’? # ‘*The* theologian of
the twentieth century’? # ‘Most comperhensive and penetrating
of this century’s writers in the field of spirituality’? # ‘Best
introduction to the Psalms as spirituality’? # ‘A learned Edinburgh
pastor who prayed as much and as well as he preached’? # ‘Best
Christian account of what actually goes on in worship’? # ‘A brilliant
essay on the nature of holiness of time’? # ‘A novel less *about*
the religious experience than a novel the reading of which *is*
a religious experience’? # ‘More than half the Scriptures were
written by…’? # ‘The sanest pastoral theologian of the century’?

Answers (in order): John Henry Newman; ‘Imitation
of Christ’ by Thomas a Kempis; Pseudo-Dionysius; Karl Barth; von
Balthasar; Brueggemann’s ‘The Message of the Psalms’; Alexander
Whyte; Annie Dillard’s ‘Teaching a Stone to Talk’; Abraham Heschel’s
‘The Sabbath’; Dostoyevsky’s ‘The Brothers Karamazov’; poets;
Martin Thornton.

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