Books I read in 2025

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For what it's worth, here is the list of books I completed this past year. (Besides the Bible, which of course we read every year, and which is the only God-breathed word that we have, and therefore stands above any list of merely human works that we can read.  If you don't read anything else, read the Bible!  By the way, if you are looking for a Bible reading plan for the new year, I would heartily recommend M'Cheyne's Bible Reading Plan to you.)  The following books are listed in the order in which I finished reading them.

1. The King James Only Controversy: Can You Trust Modern Translations?  by James R. White.  This is an excellent treatment of the subject.  I honestly don't understand how anyone could read this and still stay in the KJV-Only camp.  
2. The Glory of Christ, by John Owen.  Excellent book - one of Owen's last, and most mature and spiritually edifying, works.  One of my long-term projects is to work through all of Owen's works.
3. Romans (Vol. 3), by D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones.  This covers Romans 3:20-4:25.  Working through his exposition of Romans as I preach it.  Very good.
4. To the Golden Shore, by Courtney Anderson.  A biography of Adoniram Judson, the first American Baptist missionary, who ended up giving his life to Burma.  I read this out loud to my kids.  This is one of the best-written biographies I have ever read.  Just fantastic!  And I dare you read it without weeping (I think I cried through about half the book).
5. Amidst Us Our Beloved Stands: Recovering Sacrament in the Baptist Tradition, by Michael A. G. Haykin.  There has been a push in many corners of the evangelical world, including among Baptists, to recover a more mature posture towards tradition and history, and that has led, in part, to push-back against what is sometimes called Zwinglianism as regards the attitude towards the sacraments.  This book is part of that effort.  But to be honest with you, I'm not even sure Zwingli was guilty of half the views on the Lord's Supper that his name is associated with, and some of the push-back seems to me to be little more than shadow-boxing.  Nevertheless, this is a good volume if you want to see how Baptists have traditionally viewed the sacraments, and especially the Lord's Supper.
6. Baptism in the Early Church, by H. F. Stander and J. P. Louw.  This is thorough yet very readable survey of beliefs and practices of the Christian church with regard to baptism in the first four centuries of its existence.  Stander and Louw were classicists who were also themselves paedo-baptists.  But they argue, conclusively I think, that believer's baptism by immersion was the standard practice, and that infant baptism was introduced, not at first as a universal practice, but one which eventually did take hold.  
7. Don't Waste Your Breath: Ecclesiastes and the Joy of a Fleeting Life, by Brian Borgman.  This is a commentary on the book of Ecclesiastes.  It is excellent.  There have been some who have questioned his interpretation of "vanity," but I am convinced. For many years, the various interpretative lens by which I read this book felt like putting on a shirt where one sleeve was longer than the other - parts of it fit the interpretative model, but others didn't.  Borgman's take makes the most sense of the book, and now it feels like both sleeves fit!
8. Romans (Vol. 4).  Lloyd-Jones.  Covers chapter 5.  His sermons from Romans chapter 5 are some of the best I've read so far.  So encouraging!
9. Jesus the Son of God, by D. A. Carson.  This is basically Carson's argument that one should not translate "Son of God" by "Christ" or something similar in order to take away the offense of that term to the Muslim world.  He shows that Son of God language in the NT is much more comprehensive and cannot be put in a one-to-one correspondence with the name Christ.
10. Spiritual Disciplines of the Christian Life, by Donald Whitney.  Strange to say, I hadn't read this book until this year.  Read it with the men of our church.  Very good on this topic!
11. The Old Baptist Test, by John M. Watson.  This is a book written in the 1850's by a Primitive Baptist minister who was mainly trying to stem the tide against a heresy known as the Two-Seed Heresy, or Parkerism, or, as Watson himself put it, Neo-Manicheanism, which pretty much sums up the substance of the heresy.  But he deals with other issues as well, and it is very enlightening in the sense it shows, before 1860 at least, that there were still reputable Primitive Baptists who believed God uses means in the eternal salvation of the elect.  (On this blog I have shared excerpts of this book here, here, and here.)
12. Calvin, by Bruce Gordon.  This is a re-read for me.  Very good, scholarly, and complete biography of John Calvin, the Genevan reformer.
13. Delighting in the Trinity, by Michael Reeves.  Another re-read, which I did for a book study in our church.  This is probably the best introduction to the doctrine of the Trinity out there, in my opinion.
14. The Pioneers, by David McCullough. About the settlement of Ohio in the late 1700's and early 1800's.  McCullough is just an incredible story-teller.  All his books are good, and this one did not disappoint.
15. Romans (Vol. 5), by Lloyd-Jones.  Covers chapter 6.  Very good, and has been fairly influential in helping many understand the teaching of the apostle in this chapter.
16. The Life and Times of Howell Harris, by Edward Morgan.  The biography of one of the Welsh revivalists of the Great Awakening.  A friend and contemporary with Whitefield and Wesley.  The story of a godly, humble, and courageous man, mostly through the words of his own letters.
17. The Autobiography of Elder J. H. Oliphant. Oliphant was a leader among the Primitive Baptists in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.  He was also the moderator of the Fulton meeting that adopted the 1900 Fulton Confession of Faith, which was basically the Second London Baptist Confession of Faith (although with a lot of re-interpretative footnotes).  
18. The Text of the New Testament (3rd edition), by Bruce Metzger.  This is a very good introduction to the study of the textual criticism of the New Testament.  A re-read for me, but I first read this probably 25 years ago, so it was like reading it for the first time!  I just love this kind of stuff though.
19. The Final Perseverance of the Saints, by J. H. Oliphant.  Not an incredibly organized treatment of the subject, but still decent.
20. Child-Proof: Parenting by Faith not Formula, by Julie Lowe.  A good reminder of Biblical principles for parenting.  Not a lot of new stuff, but as the apostle Peter put it, it's sometimes really good to remind people what they already know.  That was certainly true for me as relates to this book.  One experience I had while reading this book was to feel convicted enough at one point to put it down and go practice what I was reading!  
21. John Wyclif: Myth and Reality, by G. R. Evans.  I'm going to rant a bit here.  This was hardly a good book, in my opinion, unless you want to know how Oxford did education in the 14th century.  It's good for that.  But this hardly makes up for its inadequacies.  First of all, Evans is not an incredibly gifted writer, so there's that.  But secondly, and what makes this book really unforgivable, is the fact that she goes out of her way to ascribe to Wyclif the worst possible motives in the life and theological choices that he made during his career, without any solid evidence to justify such ascriptions.  If anything, this treatment left me wanting to read someone else's perspective.  I know that hagiography is a thing, and you don't want to make the subject float on clouds as it were, but there is the mistake of the opposite ditch, and Evans certainly jumped into it head first.
22. Romans (Vol. 6), by Lloyd-Jones.  Covers 7:1-8:4.  Of all the volumes so far in this series, I disagreed with Lloyd-Jones far more here.  His interpretation of 7:14-25 is puzzling and even contradictory, for he claims that the man in that text is both regenerate and unregenerate at the same time. 
23. Pastoral Theology: The Man of God, by Albert Martin.  This is an excellent book for every pastor, but especially for young men who are aspiring to the work of the pastorate.
24. The Holy War, by John Bunyan.  I did read this in an updated English edition (edited by Valeria Richardson), which just reiterated the need to read the Puritans in the original English if you can!
25. Family Shepherds, by Vodie Baucham.  A good treatment of the role dads have in their homes and the responsibility of shepherding the souls of those under his care.  Especially needed in our times.
26. John Bunyan: Pilgrim and Dreamer, by Ernest W. Bacon.  This is a well-researched yet very readable and delightful biography of the author of The Holy War, and (more famously) Pilgrim's Progress. 
27. The Dawn of Redeeming Grace, by Sinclair Ferguson.  We read this together as a family for Advent this year.  It is a wonderful devotional that covers the content of Matthew 1-2.  
28. The Wright Brothers, by David McCullough.  A truly fascinating history of the brothers who were the first in flight.  Their story is a monument to the virtues of perseverance and hard work.  What was said of Wilbur was true of Orville too: "He is driven by a will of iron which animates him and drives him in his work." 

Another long-term project of mine is to read through the church fathers. I am only just beginning, currently working my way through volume 1 of the Ante-Nicene Fathers.  At the moment of this writing, I am reading in Justin Martyr's Dialogue with Trypho.  One of the things you hear from non-Protestants is that we just quote-mine the fathers, but that if you really read all they have to say, you will have to be a Catholic or Orthodox.  I have to say, so far, after reading Clement of Rome, Mathetes, Polycarp, Ignatius, Barnabas, Papias, and parts of Justin Martyr . . . not so!  Reading the Fathers doesn't make me regret being a Baptist at all - if anything, it has strengthened my theological and ecclesiastical commitments.