Comments by "Phil Theo" (@pattube) on "These books get me through hard times" video.

  1. Some books that have helped me (and continue to help me) in similar circumstances: * A Backward Providence (Steve Hays). A memoir of merit. By turns insightful and edifying. * The Bruised Reed (Richard Sibbes). Salve to a sad soul. * Faith and Life (B.B. Warfield). Warfield was a giant among theologians. He combined world class biblical studies, systematics, and "polemics" – no mean feat! Perhaps America's greatest theologian alongside Jonathan Edwards. Certainly Warfield was the preeminent intellectual standout of Old Princeton. My favorite work from his corpus is Faith and Life, a collection of sermons. Among other things, it shows Warfield was not an old stuffy academic, but also a passionately devoted human. * The Four Quartets (T.S. Eliot). Time and memory. Echoes of eternity. The “still-point of the turning world” in the Word of God made flesh. In a sense Eliot is autobiographical in his writings, for he moved from a bleak nihilism in The Waste Land to a sacramental high church Anglicanism in Four Quartets. * The Letters of Samuel Rutherford (Rutherford). Rutherford’s life was a life of constant turmoil in a tumultuous period of history. He suffered the death of his wife at an early age as well as the loss of all save one of his children. He was perpetually hounded by established state churchmen; he would have been tried for treason and executed had he not first died. Yet through it all Rutherford was a devoted pastor who dearly loved his flock. Ironically, the bulk of his letters (approximately 220 out of 365 letters) were written while Rutherford was in exile away from his flock. His flock lived in and around the little town of Anwoth in southwest Scotland near the English border. However, Rutherford was forced to move away from Anwoth by the ecclesiastical powers-that-be of the day. They forced Rutherford to live far north in Aberdeen where they thought he’d be silenced. Yet thanks to providences, thanks to God who can bring good out of evil, Rutherford’s exile did the opposite of silencing him inasmuch as his exile gave him occasion to pen his letters. "Though he died, he still speaks" (Heb 11:4). * The Little Prince (Antoine de Saint-Exupéry). In my view, the stand-out quotation is: “What is essential is invisible to the eye.” That goes for many truths in life, but perhaps most especially love. That is, love should be deep, not merely skin deep. * The Once and Future King (T.H. White). A gentle story written by a gentle soul in a harsh world, though tyrant shades lurk between its sheaves. * Proslogion (Anselm). The ontological argument is a stimulating argument for the existence of God, whether or not it's entirely successful. I think Alvin Plantinga may have the best version of it, though Plantinga later became skeptical of his own argument. In any case, I appreciate Anselm’s fides quaerens intellectum project. His reflections on the relationship between faith and reason are most stimulating. John Frame argues it may be a proto-presuppositionalism. * The Wind in the Willows (Kenneth Grahame). A father (Kenneth Grahame) writes bedtime stories to tell his only child, a sickly son (Alastair Grahame) who would die in his youth. These stories are set along the river Thames, in Edwardian England. Several heartachingly moving stories. A nostalgic voice in a nostalgic time. Beautifully told. Poetic.
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