Hi,
I was wondering what books I can read to further my knowledge of following Christ. I really loved Basic Christianity by John Stott and this is pretty much the only book I've read that really helped me (I don't read much).
Thank you.
The answer I would give depends a bit on what level you can read at, not really how much you read.
Now one thing I find is that there is an idea of dumbing down everything for people in general and that only someone planning on graduating from seminary needs to take on the more difficult books. I find that not necessarily to be true and it wasn't until I moved up so to speak to more difficult books that I really understood things. The rather incomplete simplistic answers of many books left me very unsatisfied.
Now one thing that I have found very useful is the Dogmatics books from Concordia Publishing. The wonderful thing is they focus on the fundamental doctrines (they even define that in a way that makes sense) fundamental doctrines are those things which scripture links to salvation.
Once I worked through them and only then did things really snap into place and make sense to me, maybe it's different for you.
Now a good general book used for many adult classes would be Edward Koehlers "A Summary of Christian Doctrine". Very good, quite understandable, logically arranged.
The book though that really brought things home to me is Francis Pieper's 4 volume "Christian Dogmatics". That intimidates a lot of people and he uses a lot of Latin phrases and such so that's where the question of your reading level really comes into play.
John Muellers single volume "Christian Dogmatics" is a one volume condensation of Pieper's and is quite good, the thing is, he doesn't go into the background and such as much.
It was that background that I found so valuable. When Pieper spends page upon page laying out the foundations of how things work that was something missing from other works and was actually what I needed, the basic doctrine and some bible passages giving it I actually already had. Some people hate Pieper because they don't like his condemnation of errors and those who make them. In short his style isn't what they like.
If you are still kind of beginning and don't feel like taking on too much, Robert Kolb's "The Christian Faith: A Lutheran Exposition" would be a good choice.
If you like reading electronic books they are all available in Libronix format at
cph.org - Concordia Electronic Theological Library Complete Collection
You can just buy which ever collection you want too. Collection 5 The Basic Theological Collection would give you three of the volumes I've mentioned. All the books in the collection represent a very good look at many different aspects of our faith.
If you get into wondering about history and what exactly is historical Christianity, then Martin Chemnitz would be the guy you want to read. Either his sytematics "Loci Theologici" or his "Examination of the Council of Trent" are full of references to why the reformers and what they taught was the true historic faith.
There, that should keep you busy for a year or two. Sorry if it seems to much, I just thought you could go through and personalize it to your situation and go from there.
