On Baptism and Books

Praise God that by his grace and sovereign will he has led me to salvation. On January 26th of this year, I was baptized in the Holy Spirit; on April 8th, I was baptized by immersion. (The church I attend is a Mennonite Brethren church—essentially an evangelical Mennonite church—with strong Reformed tendencies. The MB come out of the same tradition as the Baptists, and like the Baptists hold believers' baptism as one of their distinctives.)

Over the many years before God saved me, I read countless books, chapters, articles, commentaries, sermon notes and the like on Christianity, but upon being born again, I had to start from scratch—relearn everything from a new, Christ-centered, evangelical paradigm. Most of my reading since January has been the scads of contemporary and historical writing available online, but I have actually managed to read the occasional physical, "hard-copy" book—above all, the Bible, including the Gospel According to John, which I read through on "Easter eve" as a sort of cram course in preparation for the Easter church service.

I should have kept better track of what I've read "offline," but apart from sections and chapters of a number of books, I've only actually read one book full through from beginning to end since I've been saved (apart from John): Now That You're a Christian from the Christianity 101 series by Bruce Bickel and Stan Jantz. Okay, stop laughing. Yes, it's a short book with some Arminian overtones, but I needed to start somewhere, and this short handbook on how to live after salvation was not so bad. In the same vein, I'm now working on Dave Branon's Where Do I Go From Here? which seems to be doctrinally sound and is actually pretty good.

For meatier stuff, I'm halfway through Michael Green's The Day Death Died, an apologetical work on the bodily resurrection of Christ. Praise the Lord for showing me through apologetics (a field I discovered before picking up Green's book) that it is possible even in the 21st century to have an intellectually solid faith in the reality of the Risen Christ. Next up will be John R. W. Stott's Our Guilty Silence: The Church, the Gospel, and the Word (1967), which is a call to evangelism.

Now, those are all short books and ones that are easily available to me (through my church library). The stuff I really want to read may be trickier to obtain, for reasons of finance or simply availability. Just within the last couple of days, I've had all the following authors or books recommended or mentioned to me—all books definitely worth taking a look at:

* David Wells' various books on the state of modern evangelicalism;
* J. Gresham Machen's What is Faith? and Christianity and Liberalism (the latter available online);
* Carl F. H. Henry's The Uneasy Conscience of Modern Fundamentalism (the link is not a book review per se but includes some excerpts);
* And far above and beyond any of the above three authors, Jonathan Edwards' A History of the Work of Redemption.

Edwards' work in particular is important, both for the obvious fact that it's Edwards, but because I need to find a wholistic understanding of God's redemptive history that among other things, is consistent with God's promise to believing Jews in Romans 11:23 (for how else could I have been saved?). From what little I know of them, dispensationalism and supersessionism won't do it for me; Edwards' theology, on the other hand (which apparently is somewhat related to covenant theology) seems to be closer to the right approach.

At any rate, I'd better get busy!