Books and ABC’s

There’s this great used bookstore in Chattanooga, McKay Used Books and CDs, that I used to visit all the time when I lived there. Most of my CDs and a good number of my books I discovered there. They opened a Nashville store about a year ago, but I have to be careful how often I go there. A couple weeks ago, I met some friends for lunch on a Saturday afternoon at a pub, and then we made our way to McKay, walking out over an hour later with almost 50 books between us. So normally I would avoid it for a while. Instead, while I was down in Chattanooga for Thanksgiving, my mom and I decided to visit McKay there. And we both found about 20 books we wanted. Now I really should stay away until I get through most of these. Here’s a list of the books I found (that aren’t for gifts).

The two Buechner books at the top of the list are ones I’ve been meaning to pick up for a while. In them, Buechner offers his own definitions of common words, words like grace and evil and wine and patriotism. Here are a couple of my favorites I found when I was flipping through them a couple days ago.

THEOLOGY
Theology is the study of God and his ways. For all we know, dung beetles may study us and our ways and call it humanology. If so, we would probably be more touched and amused than irritated. One hopes that God feels likewise.

APOLOGISTS
C.S. Lewis once said something to the effect that no Christian doctrine ever looked so threadbare to him as when he had just finished successfully defending it. The reason is not hard to find.
In order to defend the faith successfully-which is the business of apologists-they need to reduce it to a defendable size. It is easier to hold a fortress against the enemy than to hold a landscape. They try to make each doctrine as it comes along sound as logical and plausible as they can. The trouble, of course, is that by and large logic and plausibility are not the heart of the matter, and therefore apologists are apt to end up proclaiming a faith that may be quite persuasive on paper but is difficult to imagine either them or anyone else getting very excited about.
The other danger is that apologists put so much effort into what they do that they may end up not so much defending the faith because they believe it is true as believing the faith is true because they have worked so hard and long to defend it.

TOURIST PREACHING
English-speaking tourists abroad are inclined to believe that if only they speak English loudly and distinctly and slowly enough, the natives will know what’s being said even though they don’t understand a single word of the language.
Preachers often make the same mistake. They believe that if only they speak the ancient verities loudly and distinctly and slowly enough, their congregations will understand them.
Unfortunately, the only language people really understand is their own language, and unless preachers are prepared to translate the ancient verities into it, they might as well save their breath.