Great Reads

If you want to be changed, read a good book. Or so said A. W. Tozer: "The things you read will fashion you by slowly conditioning your mind." Of the millions of books published this century, only a few hundred have shaped people in extraordinary ways. Here are some of those—100 books that had a significant effect on Christians this century.

Christianity Today asked more than 100 of its contributors and church leaders to nominate the ten best religious books of the twentieth century. By best books, we meant those that not only were important when first published, but also have enduring significance for the Christian faith and church. We have included books which do not always prompt agreement, but which are important for evangelical Christians to read and contend with. A few "period" pieces also made the list of 90.

By far, C. S. Lewis was the most popular author and Mere Christianity the book nominated most often. Indeed, we could have included even more Lewis works, but finally we had to say: "Enough is enough; give some other authors a chance."

The Top 10

1. Mere Christianity - C. S. Lewis

   The best case for the essentials of orthodox Christianity in print.

2. The Cost of Discipleship - Dietrich Bonhoeffer

   Leaves you wondering why you ever thought complacency or compromise in the Christian life was an option.

3. Church Dogmatics - Karl Barth

   Opened a new era in theology in which the Bible, Christ, and saving grace were taken seriously once more.

4. The Lord of the Rings (trilogy) - J.R.R. Tolkien

   A classic for children from 9 to 90. Bears constant re-reading.

5. The Politics of Jesus - John Howard Yoder

   Some 30 years after this book was published, the church has found itself culturally in a more marginal position, and this book is making wider and wider sense.

6. Orthodoxy - G.K. Chesterton

   A rhetorically inventive exposition of the coherence of Christian truth.

7. The Seven Storey Mountain - Thomas Merton

   A painfully candid story of one Christian soul's walk with grace and struggle, it has become the mark against which all other spiritual autobiographies must be measured.

8. Celebration of Discipline - Richard Foster

   After Foster finishes each spiritual discipline, you not only know what it is, why it's important, and how to do it - you want to do it.

9. My Utmost for His Highest - Oswald Chambers

   A treasury of daily devotional readings that has fed the souls of millions of Christians in the twentieth century. Future generations of Christians must continue to draw from this treasury.

10. Moral Man and Immoral Society - Reinhold Niebuhr

    Introduced a breathtakingly insightful, shrewd, and cunning realism about human sin, especially in its social expressions,rooted in biblical theology and a penetrating appraisal of the dark era into which the Western world had entered.