Books on Theology

Discussion in 'Theology and Doctrine' started by Mark Carrigher, Jul 16, 2019.

  1. Mark Carrigher

    Mark Carrigher New Member

    Posts:
    24
    Likes Received:
    18
    Country:
    England
    Religion:
    C of E
    Hi all, any inspiring suggestions for books on theology? I'm relatively new to the area of thought, I've read that 'the experience of god' by David Hart is good and inspiring? Let me know your other recommendations and I'll build a reading list, many thanks
     
  2. Shane R

    Shane R Well-Known Member

    Posts:
    1,138
    Likes Received:
    1,181
    Country:
    USA
    Religion:
    Anglican
    The Mosaic of Christian Belief by Roger E. Olson.
     
    Peteprint likes this.
  3. Fr. Brench

    Fr. Brench Well-Known Member Anglican

    Posts:
    242
    Likes Received:
    351
    Country:
    United States
    Religion:
    Anglican (ACNA)
    Vernon Staley, The Catholic Religion, is a great layman's book, too. May be too high-church for some(?), but it is still Anglican! Also nice interweaving of history to preface the doctrinal section. It's in the public domain so you can read it for free online if you don't mind that.
     
    Peteprint likes this.
  4. Will_

    Will_ Member

    Posts:
    77
    Likes Received:
    78
    Country:
    USA
    Religion:
    Anglican
    From an Evangelical Anglican perspective, you might look at Principles of Theology by W.H. Griffith Thomas.

    From a High Church, probably Anglo-Catholic perspective, Francis J. Hall's Dogmatic Theology can be found online and is also still in print, I think.
     
  5. Peteprint

    Peteprint Well-Known Member Anglican

    Posts:
    724
    Likes Received:
    718
    Country:
    USA
    Religion:
    High-Church Laudian
    Will_ likes this.
  6. Liturgyworks

    Liturgyworks Well-Known Member Anglican

    Posts:
    760
    Likes Received:
    442
    Country:
    US
    Religion:
    Christian Orthodoxy
    CS Lewis, my favorite Anglican of an Ulster background, wrote a very interesting introduction to Christianity from a non-denominational perspective, entitled Mere Christianity. He also expressed a view, which I share, that older books on Christian theology are better tested and less controversial, and in the spirit of that, I suggest the following:

    On the Incarnation, by St. Athanasius the Great (the translation with a preface by CS Lewis, which you can find online, is ideal), The Life of St. Anthony, and also all other books by the same, The Exact Exposition of the Orthodox Faith, by St. John of Damascus, the Panarion, by St. Epiphanius of Salamis, or if you cannot find it, the older subset of heresies catalogued in Against Heresies by St. Irenaeus of Lyons; The Philocalia of Origen, not to be confused by the Philokalia with a “k”*, is an anthology of the best writings of Origen, compiled by the Cappodacians (St. Basil the Great, St. Gregory the Theologian, St. Gregory of Nyssa), all of whose books are also good, but challenging to read; the same applies to most of the works of St. Ambrose of Milan, but these are excellent, the works of St. Augustine, but these should read with caution, and these should then be followed with a reading of the superior writings of St. John Cassian, or you might just skip to St. John Cassian altogether, and lastly, offering the greatest accessibility, The Sayings of the Desert Fathers.

    I also suggest getting a book that offers ancient liturgical texts for comparison. Three particular works stand out: The Shape of the Liturgy, by Dom Gregory Dix, The Liturgy of the Hours, East and West, by Robert Taft SJ, and Eucharist: Theology and Spirituality of the Eucharistic Prayer, by Louis Bouyer. All lf the writings of Maxwell Johnston and Paul F. Bradshaw are also enjoyable. The oldest Euchologion, in this case, a bishop’s service book, to survive intact is the Euchologion of St. Serapion of Thmuis.

    *The Philokalia is also worth reading if you can find it; it is an anthology of writings on ascetism compiled by St. Nicodemus the Hagiorite and St. Macarius of Corinth in the 18th century, but the writings are much older, with volume IV taking us into the High Middle Ages. I particularly like the seventh century writings of Nikitas Stithatos contained therein. This is of course the translation by Metropolitan Kallistos Ware and Mother Mary. The overall selection does favor Orthodox doctrine, but most of the specifically Eastern Orthodox material dates from the eleventh century or later and is in Volume IV. There is also a fifth volume they are apparently working on. This book makes for better reading than the Summa Theologica of Thomas Aquinas OP.
     
  7. bwallac2335

    bwallac2335 Well-Known Member

    Posts:
    1,718
    Likes Received:
    1,008
    Religion:
    ACNA
    And just like that my Amazon wish list just got longer.
     
    Liturgyworks likes this.
  8. Stalwart

    Stalwart Well-Known Member Anglican

    Posts:
    2,723
    Likes Received:
    2,563
    Country:
    America
    Religion:
    Anglican
    I would want put in a strong vote against everything on this list.

    The 'liturgical study' movement of the 20th and 19th centuries is what was responsible for the collapse and destruction of the liturgy in the Western Church.

    In particular Dom Gregory Dix is the great villain of the (as yet) classical Episcopal Church of the early 20th century. His 'works' (if we want to call them that) wormed their way into the 1950s liturgical commissions of the Episcopal Church, and directly flowed out into the 1979 'Book of Common Prayer' (if we want to call it that). His research was based almost entirely on fictional assumptions, presuppositions, and his own biases.

    For example see this for reference:
    https://anglican.audio/2019/03/18/fh30-the-1979-corruption-of-us-prayerbook/
    https://anglican.audio/2019/05/06/fh33-the-liturgical-destruction-in-the-1960s/

    Thomas Cranmer and the drafters of the Books of Common Prayer had a far greater understanding of the nature of the liturgy than Dix, the liberal Jesuits such as Taft, and even someone as Bouyer. Louis Bouyer's massive works, truly vast and colossal in size, are now known to have been almost entirely false, and directly contributed to the destruction of the Roman Catholic liturgy in 1969.
     
    Last edited: Jul 30, 2019
    Liturgyworks likes this.
  9. bwallac2335

    bwallac2335 Well-Known Member

    Posts:
    1,718
    Likes Received:
    1,008
    Religion:
    ACNA

    You seem to be hesitant on St. Augustine. Why?
     
  10. Botolph

    Botolph Well-Known Member

    Posts:
    2,276
    Likes Received:
    2,529
    Country:
    Australia
    Religion:
    Anglican
    Not wanting to put words in @Liturgyworks mouth, he declares himself Eastern Orthodox, and Augustine wrote in Latin. Augustine has not been taken well in the East, fortly because he write in Latin, and secondly because some in the West developed from Augustine's writing on the Holy Spirit and his expression of Double Procession for enunciate what ultimately came to be expressed in the Filioque clause, which has always been rejected in the East.

    If you want to read Augustine, then the Confessions are a good starting point. Civitas Dei (The City of God) is worthwhile, but hard work, and in many senses requires you to enter into a mindset of Kingdom and Empire such as belonged to the 5th Century. If you want reading on the Holy Trinity, then Augustine On the Trinity is certainly worth a read.

    While throwing books/authors into the ring I would recommend the Cappadocian Fathers.
     
    Liturgyworks likes this.
  11. Liturgyworks

    Liturgyworks Well-Known Member Anglican

    Posts:
    760
    Likes Received:
    442
    Country:
    US
    Religion:
    Christian Orthodoxy
    Nope. I just declare myself Orthodox, without qualification. I was first received into an Oriental Orthodox church, and I reject the schisms in the East, like many, so I tend to associate myself with whichever is closer, EO or OO. I’ve spent roughly equal liturgical hours in Syriac, Coptic, and EO churches.

    Alas not; Latin has nothing to do with it. St. John Cassian, whose theology we regard as succeeding where St. Augustine failed, also wrote in Latin. As did St. Ambrose of Milan. I also love the works of Sts. Jerome, Vincent of Lerins, Isidore of Seville, Hilary of Poitiers, Martin of Tours,and especially St. Gregory the Great. All of these works were in Latin. There are seven languages of paramount importance to the study of Patristics, of which three, Greek (in its Koine and Byzantine forms), Latin (classical and late classical/early vulgar) and Classical Syriac, are the most important (the others being Ge’ez, Coptic, Classical Armenian and Classical Georgian, these seven languages collectively containing the oldest Christian manuscripts intact).

    If you can learn Latin, this is a boon for Patristic and liturgical study, and indeed the study of Anglicanism, because a lot more is available only in Latin, or is available in Latin translation but not English. Sebastian Brock and the Indian Orthodox have really picked up the slack in Syriac studiues, so if one is a polyglot inclined towards scholarship, I daresay what we really need more of are Ge’ez scholars, who can delve into the highly obscure liturgical and theological treasures of Ethiopian, many of which exist only in manuscript form.

    Whereas it is true that most of the Eastern churches, with the exception of the Maronites, reject the filioque, I have never heard anyone blame its existence on St. Augustine. Rather Charlemagne is the person usually accused of forcing the Roman Pope against his will to adopt it. My own view is that the filioque emerged in the heresy-ridden Spanish Church, and was an attempt to deal with a specific Spanish heresy; if translated into Greek it comes out wrong to the point where even the Roman Catholic Church, well before Vatican II, rejected the use of the filioque in the Greek language (which is why most of the Sui Juris Eastern Catholic churches, historically called “Uniates”, a term they hate and which should be avoided, by the way, do not use it, and historically, the various Greek Catholics (except for the Ruthenians), the Ukrainian Greek Catholics, and the Melkite Catholics, never used it.

    Rather, my main reason for advising caution regarding St. Augustine relates to his hamartiology (the ideas of St. John Cassian on original sin are much better), and also some of his bizarre and unfounded suggestions, such as the idea that unbaptized infants go directly to Hell, which is something the Orthodox do not accept and I daresay most Anglicans would not accept, except for a minority of Anglo Catholics of the sort who use the Anglican Missal rather than the BCP, and a minority Anglo Papalists. Indeed this idea was too much even for the Roman church, which moderated it with the unfounded and unscriptural doctrine of Limbo. St. John Cassian has always been very widely read in the Catholic church; in particular, his work tended to be read in monasteries in the refectory (I expect the Summa partially displaced it, and I dare to think what, if anything, liberal Catholic nuns of the Nuns on A Bus variety read in the refectory), and the Orthodox understanding of original sin and our arguments against the vile heresy of Pelagius come from St. John Cassian; his criticism of the Nestorian heresy is also excellent and probably more accessible than Pope St. Cyril of Alexandria. I should add the epistles of Pope (well, technically Archbishop) St. Celestine regarding Nestorianism I regard very highly.
     
    Botolph likes this.
  12. Botolph

    Botolph Well-Known Member

    Posts:
    2,276
    Likes Received:
    2,529
    Country:
    Australia
    Religion:
    Anglican
    I apologise, my mistake. For some time I have held the Oriental Orthodox Church is high regard.

    Sorry for the wrong impression. In no way do I blame Augustine for the Filioque, and I feel Augustine make that point quite clearly at one point. I do however feel that the development of the theology of double procession advanced relying on Augustine (there is a difference between double procession and filioque) and then based on a misunderstanding of the double procesion the filioque made its way into the Nicene Symbol some time after the Third Synod of Toledo and the rise of Pepin the Short. Charlemagne sought to use it as a political weapon against the Byzantines, though there is no evidenc it was used in Rome before 1014 (14th February at the coronation of Henry II as HRE).

    I agree that the concepts of original sin in Augustine have perhaps been overplayed along the way, and I think article 31 points us somewhere here.

    The Offering of Christ once made is that perfect redemption, propitiation, and satisfaction, for all the sins of the whole world, both original and actual; and there is none other satisfaction for sin, but that alone.​
     
    Liturgyworks likes this.
  13. Liturgyworks

    Liturgyworks Well-Known Member Anglican

    Posts:
    760
    Likes Received:
    442
    Country:
    US
    Religion:
    Christian Orthodoxy
    First of all Stalwart, allow me to salute you for another stimulating and excellent reply; I love talking with you more than most people I meet online. You, sir, are a gentleman and a Christian, a man of piety and tradition, worthy of respect. :tiphat:

    You are doubtless thinking of the Liturgical Movement, and I disagree; the early Liturgical Movement produced positive results, like the improvements Pope Pius X made to the Roman Rite, and the 1928 BCP. And indeed, Dom Gregory Dix, who belomged to this first wave, died before any of the disasters occurred, however, his work directly influenced the 1962 Canadian BCP, and the exquisite experimental Holy Communion service from the Second Trial Series in the Church of England, which was beautiful and devoid of weirdness.

    The real villain who ruined the 1979 BCP was not Dix but Cardinal Bugnini, the architect of the Novus Ordo Missae, which the revised BCP sought to copy, and the International Commission for English in the Liturgy, which was responsible for the horrible contemporary liturgical language, the Revised Common Lectionary, et cetera. And also the “active participation” crowd. In The Shape of the Liturgy, Dom Gregory Dix does not call for the active participation of the laity, the use of an unprecedented three year lectionary that intentionally omits passages such as 1 Corinthians 11:27-32 (and to be fair, the initial three year lectionary of the 1979 BCP permitted, although to its credit, did not require, the reading of verses 27-30, which are sufficient, on Maundy Thursday, which perhaps contributed to the Episcopal Church deciding to switch to the RCL), nor did he call for the still greater disasters of women priests; I expect he would be apalled by much of this, and still more horrified by homosexuality.

    Rather, The Shape of the Liturgy is simply about that. It contains an excellent set of quotations from the liturgy of the early church and seeks to identify a common pattern, structure, or shape from it, which I think he got right. Later, more liberal liturgical scholars disagree with nearly all his conclusions and often regard his work in a derisory manner, and baselessly so, in my opinion, because as far as I can tell, to the extremely limited extent Dix directly influenced Anglican liturgics, before the liberals who took over the Liturgical Movement in the 1950s (such as Pope Pius XII), those liturgies most influenced by Dix and Anglican tradition, and nothing else except the usual bickering between people of different churchmanship, represented the apex of Anglican liturgics, and it has all been downhill from there.

    The only error Dix may have made is to characterize Cranmer as a Zwinglian.

    For their time, the drafters of the BCP had a versatile knowledge of the liturgy, which is why we see, for example, the Prayer of the Second Antiphon from the Byzantine Rite showing up in the Anglican Divine Office as the Prayer of St. Chrysostom (which was a good name for it, if perhaps, unlike the prayers attributed to St. John Chrysostom in various Byzantine prayer books, this was not assuredly one of the many prayers St. John Chrysostom actually did write; the synaxis of the Byzantine Rite liturgy is shared between at least three anaphorae, including St. John Chrysostom, St. Basil, St. Peter (a variant of the Roman canon), and in a variant form with different prayers of the antiphons, but otherwise identical, the Anaphora of St. Mark).

    Indeed, the main liturgical accomplishment of the BCP was its revival of the Divine Office, which due to Roman Catholic abuses had fallen out of widespread parochial congregational use in the Western Church; it was primarily something for monasteries and to a lesser degree, cathedrals, but the Breviary had become a private devotion of the priests, and the BCP reversed this degeneration. It implemented an equivalent of Russian All Night Vigils by merging Vespers and Compline into Evensong, and it likewise unified Matins and Lauds into Mattins or Morning Prayer, and then followed this by a Litany and Ante-Communion, or for a brief period of extreme joy in the late 19th and early 20th century, Morning Prayer followed by the Litany followed by Holy Communion.

    As for the Eucharist itself, however, I feel like the Holy Communion service had a brief moment in the sun after the reception of the work of Dom Gregory Dix and before the darkness brought on by liberals and the active-participation people like Cardinal Bugnini, Pope Pius XII through Paul VI, the women’s ordination people, ICEL, the liturgical clowns, the homosexuals and so on.

    And as for the works of Dom Gregory Dix, the scholarship in The Shape of the Liturgy is excellent, and the book is worth having even if one disagrees with its conclusion for the excellent selection of liturgical material translated into English.

    I think it would be wrong, both on the basis of Nil Nisi Bonum with regards to the recently departed, and factual accuracy, to label Taft a liberal Jesuit; while he was a Jesuit, he was not Pope Francis, and his death in January of this year was lamented by the Anglophone Eastern Orthodox community; it is a rare site to see Orthodox Christians saying “Memory eternal” with regards to a Jesuit.

    The aforementioned Liturgy of the Hours, East and West, is something I can recommend with great confidence, and I think its content and conclusions should be uncontroversial; someone who rejects Dix utterly might well enjoy Taft: the work is almost exclusively a survey of the Divine Office in the different liturgical rites, and an accurate one at that (I know, because I read the original texts long ago, and many times since, and owned a Byzantine Horologion, a Coptic Agpeya, a Syriac Shimo, a Roman Breviary and a Book of Common Prayer for years before I even found out about Taft’s book, and had even with some difficulty obtained a copy of the Assyrian offices, and did once read the Armenian offices, so that is everything except for the Ethiopian offices, which are obscure, and the Maronite Offices, which I haven’t found in English except in Taft, and some of the other Protestant offices, some of which I had and some of which, for example, the German Lutheran offices, I had not bothered to look for). The four main conclusions I took from the work, which I agree with, is that the congregation celebration of the Divine Office is extremely important, the Roman Breviary was a disastrous mess, and its transformation into a private devotion, while private devotions like Novenas became public offices, was dreadful; that the Byzantine Divine Office, especially in its Russian or Church Slavonic form, is really really good, and that the Anglican BCP was a great triumph in that it managed to restore the congregational celebration of the Divine Office for several centuries, until very recently when this had regrettably stopped, and this was something the post-Vatican II Novus Ordo Liturgy of the Hours had attempted but failed to do. The work was published by the Benedictines in 1986, with a second edition in 1993, after the badness of the 1979 BCP and the worseness of the Alternative Service Book had become the status quo.

    His other popular book, A Brief History of the Byzantine Rite is just that, a brief history, uncontroversial in its conclusions and rejected only by an annoying minority of Old Calendarists who would consider him, and all of us, to be heretics, because we either use or are in communion with people who use the Gregorian Calendar.

    I don’t know enough about his other works to comment, but his book Eucharist: Theology and Spirituality is not especially vast; I recommend it primarily because it contains one of the best selections of Patristic liturgical texts from the Divine Liturgy of the Eucharist (which are authentic, and not false; one can independently verify them elsewhere) available anywhere. I don’t entirely agree with his commentary, but he is not in the rogues gallery of Vatican II / Novus Ordo villains commented on, on the most excellent blog New Liturgical Movement, which seeks to restore the old Tridentinr Mass and preserve other traditional liturgies in use elsewhere in the Roman Catholic Church, run by Gregory Dipippo, with articles by liturgical conservatives such as Alcuin Reed.

    Now, Bradshaw and Johnston are another matter; their works I largely disagree with, but again, one comes across liturgical texts which are otherwise obscure, and it is agreeable to read a work that one disagrees with (I disagree with much of what Rev. Percy Dearmer has to say, but regard him nonetheless as the greatest contributor to the practicum of the Anglican Rite and the most important author on the same from the end of the Victorian era, until Dom Gregory Dix). The Oxford History of Christian Worship and The Oxford Guide to the Book of Common Prayer are also extremely useful books, which make conclusions that I disagree with vehemently (the former favors the unpleasant world of new liberal liturgies and the latter celebrates the arrival of liturgical horror shows like Common Worship and the New Zealand BCP). These books also contain most of the anti-Dix hate I have seen.

    Perhaps I might arrange to share with you my liturgical library, with a bibliography denoting which works I find useful but disagree with, which works I agree with largely, which works I love, and which works i detest utterly and read only if I feel like getting ticked off; I would wager, except for the fact that wagering is unbecoming pious Christians such as yourself :tiphat:and to a lesser extent :blush: myself, that you would in general, with a few prominent and probable exceptions, agree with my opinions on these works. :)
     
  14. Liturgyworks

    Liturgyworks Well-Known Member Anglican

    Posts:
    760
    Likes Received:
    442
    Country:
    US
    Religion:
    Christian Orthodoxy
    Indeed so; I think St. John Cassian harmonizes more precisely with the BCP and thus Anglican theology, and with the volumionous Orthodox service books (Evangelion, Prophetologion,, Euchologion, Liturgikon, Horologion, Menaion, Triodion, Pentecostarion, Irmologion, Octoechos) and thus Orthodox theology than St. Augustine.

    St. Augustine is still worthy of veneration, its just that his specific model of original sin is overly complex and led the Roman church into having to develop absurd dogmatic innovations like Limbo and the Immaculate Conception in order to support earlier dogmatic positions generally shared with the other apostolic churches. The Orthodox Churches reject dogmatic development; there is one faith handed down from the apostles, and we cannot change or refine dogmas or innovate in the realm of doctrine, and traditional Anglicanism it seems is based on the same idea (and specifically, a process to attempt to backtrack from the errors the Roman church was making during the Renaissance).
     
    Botolph likes this.
  15. Rexlion

    Rexlion Well-Known Member

    Posts:
    4,188
    Likes Received:
    2,122
    Country:
    USA
    Religion:
    Christian attending ACNA
    I am in the process of reading and enjoying
    "Essential Truths for Christians" by Right Rev. John H. Rodgers, and
    "Christian Theology, An Introduction" by Alister E. McGrath.
    If the OP is looking for some "broad overview" books on Anglican theology that aren't difficult reading, these might be good. Both were recommended by my rector.
     
    Will_ likes this.
  16. Scottish Knight

    Scottish Knight Well-Known Member

    Posts:
    498
    Likes Received:
    569
    Country:
    Scotland
    Religion:
    Christian
    Augustine's confessions are good although I find the translation makes a big difference. I tried reading an old translation and had to give up before finding the book gripping in a more modern version. The Bridge-Logos classic version reads very well

    I'd also like to recommend

    'Hunger For God' by John Piper - a book about the theology of fasting with an appendix of quotations about fasting from the early church to the modern period.

    and also 'In my place, condemned he stood' by J I Packer - which explains and defends penal substitution very clearly.
     
    Liturgyworks and Will_ like this.
  17. Liturgyworks

    Liturgyworks Well-Known Member Anglican

    Posts:
    760
    Likes Received:
    442
    Country:
    US
    Religion:
    Christian Orthodoxy
    Just out of curiosity, what church are you a member of? I have been seeking information on the precise disparity between the worship of the established churches of England and Scotland, historically and at present, aside from more obvious differences like the lack of the BCP.

    Conversely, if you are a Scottish Episcopalian, I love your communion rite and am inordinately fond of the 1929 Scottish BCP.

    If you are a Covenanter, that would be greatly interesting; I have a Psalter published by the Reformed Presbyterian Church in North America, which is aligned with the covenanting Scottish Presbyterians and has the same motto “For Christ’s Crown and Covenant”, and practices a capella exclusive psalmody, with the psalms made metrical and rhyming in English and set to popular chorales of the early Reformation. However, I only have the hymnal; I have not been able to find a video of RPCNA worship on YouTube or any recordings of their music, or that of their Scottish counterparts.

    And lastly, if you are a member of the Free Church of Scotland or another denomination, that would be very interesting, because I do not know much about them.
     
  18. Liturgyworks

    Liturgyworks Well-Known Member Anglican

    Posts:
    760
    Likes Received:
    442
    Country:
    US
    Religion:
    Christian Orthodoxy
    Oh, by the way, a direct and more doctrinally orthodox alternative to David Bentley Hart’s book is A Brief Introduction to God, by Fr. Andrew S. Damick of the Antiochian Orthodox Church. DBH is Eastern Orthodox but not doctrinally orthodox, whereas Fr. Damick is, but alas he is not sympathetic to Anglicanism.

    On that same note, De Incarnatione by St. Athanasius is the definitive exploration of the Incarnation of the uncreated only begotten Son and Word of God, our Lord Jesus Christ, who is God incarnate. And this work predates all present schisms and is accepted by Orthodox, Anglicans, Assyrians, Lutherans, Methodists, Reformed and Roman Catholics, among others.
     
  19. bwallac2335

    bwallac2335 Well-Known Member

    Posts:
    1,718
    Likes Received:
    1,008
    Religion:
    ACNA
    Just something I am going to be exploring soon is the works of the Cappadocian Fathers. I got an intro into them and will hopefully follow up to more of their works.
     
  20. Shane R

    Shane R Well-Known Member

    Posts:
    1,138
    Likes Received:
    1,181
    Country:
    USA
    Religion:
    Anglican
    A suggestion, don't read the crusty old translations edited by Philip Schaff that are available at most of the free Christian resource sites. New Advent has modestly updated much of the corpus: http://newadvent.org/fathers/

    St. Vladimir's Seminary Press has retranslated many of the works: https://svspress.com/
     
    bwallac2335 likes this.