If you didn’t know, I’m a big fan of books. I’m also a big fan of trying to understand things through logic and clear explanation and with a decent economy of words to get me there.
I’ve been a Christian for almost 25 years now, and over those years I’ve done a lot of reading and studying and thinking. I’ve read all kinds from many sides and at many levels, and in the course of those readings have discovered a few books that have been helpful to me. Among those, there are a few that have been most helpful in explaining the basics to me simply. They range from straight-up “this is the Gospel,” to deeper philosophical information like “what does it mean when we hold it up to the world around us.”
One of the dangers in me making any recommendations though is that I’ve read these books as a believer. They really struck a chord with me – a lot of “Ahhh, I see” moments. Perhaps it was the bias of my own “intuitiveness” (a fancy way of saying I thought I was right in the first place), but who knows? Maybe you can read them and think, “I can see where that makes sense” too. I certainly hope so.
One more point about many of these books: (as far as I can tell) they don’t throw a bunch of theological terms and biblical quotes at you except to show you how what they are saying really is in the Bible. I think this is an important point because Christians forget that saying, “the Bible says…” to someone who doesn’t believe the Bible is mostly fruitless. But if we can say, “Here is our world, and here is where the Bible pretty much predicts what I’m showing you,” maybe that could be useful to you.
So, here are my recommendations:
Timothy Keller has long been a favorite of mine. I first heard him nearly 15 years ago when he presented the message, “The Supremacy of Christ and the Gospel in a Postmodern World” at the 2006 Desiring God National Conference. He’s written quite a few books, but the two that fit the basic Christianity category for me are The Reason for God and Making Sense of God. Keller is thoughtful and intelligent in his presentation, and writes (and speaks) with a sense of both logic and humor. The Reason for God is probably number one on my list of the basics and I’ve read it several times. I read Making Sense of God much later and it still gave me a lot of those “a-ha” moments.
Keller quite often refers to the next author in his works, and this is an absolute classic in the category: C. S. Lewis’s Mere Christianity. Lewis is well known for his Chronicles of Narnia, and the story behind his coming to Christ and many of his subsequent works are thoughtful and enlightening. Mere Christianity was born out of talks he gave on the radio during World War II that were published soon after. He has an interesting way with explanation, and you’ll find this book mentioned often by believers as one of the first books they read when they became a Christian.
Keller and Lewis are both so thoughtful in their writing, and to be even more challenged in that way, I recommend a book by Gregory Ganssle titled, Thinking about God: First Steps in Philosophy. This of course is a more directly philosophical work, but Ganssle writes on a level that is understandable. He talks about reasons to believe, the problem of evil, and then gets into what God is really like – what can he do? What can he know? So often Christian are confronted with accusations of being “anti-science,” but in reality, science cannot answer some of these deeper questions. You cannot measure what people are thinking. You cannot measure what it means to love, or even why we exist. This book was very helpful in guiding me along those lines.
But if we want to talk science and evidence, there are a couple of very good books written by J. Warner Wallace – Cold-Case Christianity and God’s Crime Scene. Wallace was a homicide detective that has been featured on Dateline NBC for his involvement in solving cold-cases. He takes the same tools, methods, and training he’s used in that (as well as a background in architecture to create the illustrations) to write his books, and the results are fascinating and easy to follow.
Finally, there are a few books that present the basics of Christianity itself rather simply. While the books I’ve listed above give you a deeper and more thoughtful explanation of things, these books are fairly short and cover all the issues more broadly:
Core Christianity by Michael Horton
The Story of Reality by Greg Koukl
Why I am a Christian by John Stott
What is the Gospel by Greg Gilbert
In reality, there are hundreds of books you could read for the basics, but these are the ones I’ve read and found helpful. They’re also among the easiest to follow – not written at some high level of theology with words that confuse you. To tell you the truth, I’m not a fan of word count, and I’ve run across plenty of books that could’ve said all they said (and reached a broader audience with more effectiveness) in a pamphlet. Unfortunately, a publisher approached the author and said, “I need 36,000 words on subject ‘x’,” and the author obliged. Hopefully, the books I’ve listed here will be worth the words that go into them. I thought so, and I pray that you do too…