W e know from website data that many readers are searching for books by Christian authors, so here we have put together a list of some of the most notable books on our site that have appeared on Five Books over the years, as recommended by our expert interviewees. We’ve divided the book recommendations roughly into sections: firstly, the Classic devotional texts and masterworks from historical Christian figures; next, theological writing from major modern thinkers and scholars from the 20th century onward; and finally, fiction and nonfiction books by authors whose literary work was inspired or explored their Christian faith.
Classic texts
“St Augustine is, in some ways, misunderstood and misappropriated in modern scholarship and popular perception. I can understand why, because reading him can be a bit of a hard slog to begin with. His Confessions can seem unfashionably self-hating, and the drama that’s being played out, the way he makes a first-person address towards this God figure, feels a bit artificial and it can put people off. But if you work out what’s going on, what his motivation is, and what the context is, what he’s making is an incredibly modern, intimate, psychological diagnosis of the human condition.” Read more...
The best books on The Saints
Simon Yarrow ,
Historian
“It’s a poem that comes out of conflict in Florence in various ways. In a most literal sense it comes out of Dante’s exile – he was exiled in 1302 as a result of the conflicts between several political factions and he remained exiled, in various parts of Italy, for the remainder of his life (he died in 1321). The Commedia reflects that acute sense of the loss of one’s homeland and the resentment of that – Florence gets attacked quite viciously by characters in the Inferno . And then there’s the epigraph for the Inferno : ‘A Florentine by birth but not by disposition.'” Read more...
The best books on Dante
Nick Havely ,
Literary Scholar
“According to Christian theology there are two ways to know God. There is what’s called the positive way, where you try to say things about God, and then there is the negative way, where you have to unsay everything you have said about God and go into a kind of unknown. This is because everything we say about God can be somewhat misleading because we talk in metaphors all the time. And metaphors are always as untrue as they are true. They have to be broken and then remade and broken and remade. And therefore to know God as he truly is, instead of purely our projection, we need to go beyond all our metaphors into what he referred to as ‘the cloud of unknowing,’ where you simply reach out to God himself, whom you can’t characterise or describe at all.So this book, for me, is very important because Christianity has this strong mystical tradition, which can often be neglected. And this is one of Christianity’s most important mystical writings.
This book, for me, is very important because Christianity has this strong mystical tradition, which can often be neglected.” Read more...
The best books on Christianity
Richard Harries ,
Theologians & Historians of Religion
The Desert Fathers tells the stories of the early Christians who turned their backs on civilisation and retreated to the deserts of North Africa, Syria and Asia Minor. They were pioneers of the contemplative tradition and witnesses to the joys and benefits of a solitary existence. Sara Maitland, who celebrates her own remote life in the wilds of Scotland in A Book of Silence The Desert Fathers , “their adventure is something Waddell describes with heartbreaking empathy.”
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“All the best English stuff is said so simply with no long theological words or going over the top. It’s gentle stuff. Like Pilgrim’s Progress , book which has stuck with me throughout my life. Now that I’m over eighty, I’m reading more and more the part where Christian and Christiana are preparing themselves to go across the River of Death and get to the Celestial City, and he gives an account of all the people who are trying to go across that river and the different ways that they approach it. It’s an incredible amount of good sense and observation. I went to Bedford and I stood on the banks of the River Ouse, trying to imagine myself as Bunyan looking at the Celestial City and a swan nearly attacked me. Which just shows you. So that’s a book I wanted.” Read more...
Rabbi Lionel Blue chooses his Favourite Books
Rabbi Lionel Blue ,
Memoirist
“This is Teresa’s own account of her journey. And it was written at the request of her confessor. She was already attracting a certain amount of unfriendly attention from the authorities, including the Inquisition… So Teresa’s confessor is really saying, ‘Look, get down on paper, what you think you’re doing, just in case things get difficult.’… What she’s doing in The Book of Her Life is explaining why it is that she is a reformer of the monastic life.” Read more...
The best books on Saint Teresa of Avila
Rowan Williams ,
Theologians & Historians of Religion
“Aquinas is a Christian theologian as well as a philosopher. Certainly, a lot of what he has to say about God is based on what he takes to be divinely revealed sources such as Scripture and the teaching of the church. But, all the same, a great deal of what he has to say is based instead on purely philosophical considerations. So I would say that Aquinas is generally considered to be the greatest of thinkers who approach the question of God’s existence and nature by way of natural theology. One of the reasons that Aquinas is so important has, of course, to do with the power of his own ideas. By anyone’s accounting, he had a very powerful intellect. But another reason why Aquinas is so important has to do with the way he borrows from the past. That’s why he can be thought of as a representative thinker of the classical theist tradition.” Read more...
The best books on Arguments for the Existence of God
Edward Feser ,
Philosopher
“Julian of Norwich is something else… She lived in the little cell which you visit when you go to Norwich. She had a weird experience in the reign of Edward III and wrote up a very short version. Then, much later in life, because she thought she was going to die, she wrote the long version, which is what most of us read. That was at about the time Chaucer was writing The Canterbury Tales . She completely removes from Christianity the concept of punishment and anger, the anger of God. It’s revolutionary.” Read more...
A N Wilson recommends the best Christian Books
A N Wilson ,
Biographer
Modern Christian theologians and thinkers
“Rudolf Bultmann was the greatest New Testament theologian of the 20th century. He was an exegete, a Classicist and a historian, but also a theologian. He was a professor of theology relating what he knew as a historian to what he believed as a Christian. The reason I picked him out—in a book that is now 90 years old and therefore in some ways out of date (it was written before the Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered in 1947)—is that he was writing after 60-odd years of people writing lots of lives of Jesus. What he is saying is, ‘That’s not the point.’ A positivistic historical picture of Jesus misses the main point about him, and misses the main point about history too. History is about an encounter with the past, it’s not just a description. It’s about our own relationship to the past, our identity. So when he was asked to write yet another historical book about Jesus, he agreed, but he thought he would try and write one which communicated some sense of why Jesus was important to him.” Read more...
The best books on Jesus
Robert Morgan ,
Theologians & Historians of Religion
“This is a very different kind of book. St Augustine gives you a feel for the Christian belief and The Cloud of Unknowing gives you a feel for the life of prayer. Moral Man and Immoral Society is about how Christian faith impinges on the world. What is interesting about Reinhold Niebuhr is that he was hugely influential on the top swath of American political thinkers and politicians in the Democratic Party. Jimmy Carter, for instance, kept a collection of Reinhold Niebuhr’s writings by his bedside. He referred to them as his political bible. He has been one of the few Christian writers who have really been able to speak to two generations of political thinkers and he is beginning to come back into fashion again now. He was a huge influence on President Obama, for example.” Read more...
The best books on Christianity
Richard Harries ,
Theologians & Historians of Religion
“In my view, Rowan Williams is the biggest intellectual genius of our time by quite a long way. Rowan translates from about 11 languages; anything you think you know about, he knows far more. It is really rather depressing! Some of his work is very easy – for example, some of his simple sermons. But some of his essays on theology need quite a lot of grappling with. I am assuming that my five books are for people who really want to grapple quite seriously, so there must be something of Rowan Williams. On Christian Theology is a collection of his essays from the 1980s and 90s and on a range of subjects.” Read more...
The best books on Christianity
Richard Harries ,
Theologians & Historians of Religion
“It is a history of the whole of Christianity, but he has a wonderful subtitle: A History of Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years . It takes a little bit of thinking about because you think, ‘Hang on, surely he means two thousand years?’ He doesn’t, of course, because he refers back to the Old Testament, and the history of Christianity before Christ. It’s a hugely ambitious book, but it’s just wonderfully told, and it’s full of such variety and colour, but also a tremendous amount of sympathy. He’s a very erudite, cultured writer, and I enjoyed this book very much.” Read more...
The best books on English Church Music
Andrew Gant ,
Christian writers whose literary work was inspired by or influenced by their belief
Even if you’re an atheist, it’s hard, as a historian, not to be interested in Jesus. The Christian religion he gave rise to dominated events in Europe—and other places—for close to two millennia and has more than two billion adherents today (just under a third of the world’s population). The Shadow of the Galilean is an absolutely fascinating (and sympathetic) fictional account of Jesus’s life as an itinerant preacher by the German theologian Gerd Theissen. Though you never actually meet Jesus, you feel you’re absolutely there with him, in the dusty desert, hearing about his ministry to the poor.
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After growing up in a noisy household as one of six, and later bringing up her own children, Sara Maitland found herself living alone in silence. In this erudite memoir, Maitland explores silence as a practice and experience through history, from desert monks to long-distance sailors, and documents her building of a hermitage on a moor in southwest Scotland as part of her search for holy tranquility.
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“I think that this book, almost more than any other, certainly of books written in my lifetime, shows what is so very distinctive about it. Because it is not a set of moral commandments, it isn’t just a myth that happens to be true, it is something which encapsulates everything that’s ever happened. The extraordinary thing which he captures completely brilliantly is that Christianity is something that is universal, but it only makes sense in terms of each individual person who subscribes to it.” Read more...
A N Wilson recommends the best Christian Books
A N Wilson ,
Biographer
“Everyone knows Lewis’s Narnia books are a foundational work of the modern fantastic. But I don’t think Lewis gets enough credit for his craft as a writer. Those books are deceptively simple. Look at the way he constructed the opening of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe . He puts the shadows of the war in the background, the excitement of a new house in the country in the foreground. Look at how he carefully sketches all the relationships between all four of the Pevensie children. And when he sends Lucy through the wardrobe—on page five, he doesn’t waste time—it’s like nothing else in fiction up to that point. There are no sparkles, no wondrous rhetoric, just one precisely observed sensory detail after another. There are no sparkles, no wondrous rhetoric, just one precisely observed sensory detail after another: A dead bluebottle on a windowsill; some soft coats; some cold crunchy snow; some prickly pine branches – and then you’re in Narnia. People dismiss Lewis as a Christian propagandist, but that’s a mistake. He was a novelist before he was a Christian.” Read more...
The best books on Fantasy
Lev Grossman ,
Novelist
“In a sense, it’s science fiction. But it’s laced through with a deep thread of theology. The protagonist, Meg Murray, encounters angels and she encounters an absolute evil. In this book, a deity—in the sense of absolute good—does not show themselves, but their subordinates, the messengers, the ones who help to do the will of the supreme being, are all very present. The spiritual elements appear side by side with the physics aspects in a way that you don’t often see being done either in children’s literature or in speculative fiction.” Read more...
The Best Speculative Fiction About Gods and Godlike Beings
Karen Lord ,
Novelist
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