The Library
1277 works catalogued century by century, from the literature the Bible was written among to the present — each with a note on what it is, why it lasted, and where to read it.
1901–2000
11 works
1908
English
G. K. Chesterton · 1874–1936
Chesterton's account of how he tried to invent a philosophy of his own and discovered he had rediscovered Christianity — argued through paradox, fairy tales, and the claim that orthodoxy is the wildest of the options rather than the safest.
1919; second edition 1922
German
Der Römerbrief
Karl Barth · 1886–1968
A commentary that reads less like exegesis than an explosion: a Swiss village pastor, disillusioned by his teachers' support for the war, insists that God is not the highest human value but the one who confronts every human project as its crisis.
1925
English
G. K. Chesterton · 1874–1936
A history of the human race in two halves — before Christ and after — written to answer the popular evolutionary histories of the day by insisting that both man among the animals and Christ among men are discontinuities, not gradual steps.
1937
German
Nachfolge
Dietrich Bonhoeffer · 1906–1945
An exposition of the Sermon on the Mount written while training pastors for an illegal seminary under the Nazi regime, opening with the distinction between cheap grace — forgiveness without repentance, grace as a doctrine rather than a call — and costly grace.
1939
German
Gemeinsames Leben
Dietrich Bonhoeffer · 1906–1945
A short account of the shared life of the Finkenwalde seminary — the day together, the day alone, confession, service — with a warning that a community which loves its own ideal of community will destroy the real one.
1948
English
Thomas Merton · 1915–1968
The conversion story of a rootless, clever young writer who moved between France, England, and New York, found his way into the Catholic Church, and then vanished into a Kentucky monastery of the strictest observance.
published 1951
German
Widerstand und Ergebung
Dietrich Bonhoeffer · 1906–1945
Letters smuggled out of Tegel prison to family and to his friend Eberhard Bethge, mixing ordinary requests with the fragmentary late thinking about a world come of age and what Christ actually is for us today.
1952, from wartime broadcasts
English
C. S. Lewis · 1898–1963
Radio talks given to wartime Britain and later gathered into one book: the moral law as a clue to the universe, then what Christians believe, Christian behaviour, and finally the doctrine of the Trinity — all in the plainest possible language.
1971
Spanish
Teología de la liberación
Gustavo Gutiérrez · 1928–2024
Theology reframed as critical reflection on Christian practice in the light of the word, written from Peru and arguing that God's preferential option for the poor is not an application of the gospel but part of its content.
1973
English
J. I. Packer · 1926–2020
Doctrine written for ordinary readers on the conviction that knowing about God and knowing God are different things: the attributes, the wrath, the adoption of believers as sons, each turned toward worship rather than left as information.
1998
English
Dallas Willard · 1935–2013
A philosopher's argument that the gospel has been reduced to a transaction about the afterlife, and a recovery of Jesus as a teacher whose Sermon on the Mount describes an available kind of life in the kingdom now.
11 of 1277 works