OK. I'm not saying I won't buy any more books. That would be like saying I'm not going to breathe for the rest of my life. But a conversation the other day had me saying something I didn't know I thought. Amongst other things, the difference between primary and secondary - no, not schools - sources. Primary and secondary sources. In mid-discussion I found myself saying the tidal wave of theological books has become wearisome. That I'd rather spend a month reading a few volumes of a really original if difficult writer than wade through serial doses of derivative, pragmatic, market hyped, Christian celebrity authored, allegedly indispensable but definitely transient stuff that has the remarkable built in capacity to make God boring. The difference between primary and secondary is the difference between original and derivative, between temporary fashion and permanent value, between a contribution to the publisher's sales figures and a contribution to knowledge, between what is a waste of trees and what might just about be a fair cost of nurturing the tree of knowledge.
Then I had another conversation about a slim book that is worth half a dozen books three or four times its length. I found myself saying that most of the really, I mean "really can't live without it" kind of books that I own, could fit in one six shelf bookcase 30 inches wide. Now don't press this too far. I'm not ready to start proving myself right or wrong about this yet. But in the past few days I've talked with College staff and/or students, University staff, and a friend on the phone about half a dozen books that are what I would call primary, original and permanent value. And none of them are big.
Life Together by Bonhoeffer is a massive book, of just over a hundred pages; it remains seminal in any discussion of what Christian community under Christ should look like. John V Taylor's The Go-Between God, written against the context of charismatic renewal and the need for a balancing statement on pneumatology, is one of the truly original and creative volumes of the last third of the 20th Century. W. H. Vanstone's Love's Endeavour, Love's Expense is simply the best book on pastoral theology and the nature of love that I have ever read or ever hope to. Nicholas Lash, Believing Three Ways in One God is the distilled essence of modern theology, self-consciously constrained by theological tradition and responsible biblical reflection, and yet pushes the edges in order not to confine God to what we think are acceptable theological limits imposed by our ideas of soundness. Denise Levertov's Collected Poems, the textured weaving into words of the text of her life; and the two collections of R S Thomas, whose arguments with and about God, and with his own heart and many of the ways of a world both daft and beautiful, provide some of the finest spiritual writing I know.
All of which concentrates the mind when you are moving house. Thin books are easier packed, carried and read. Thickness of book and word count, primary source of originality - interesting criteria for pruning a library.....
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