Believers are all called to be Christlike. We are meant to be slowly but surely transformed into his image. Christians are little Christs in a sense. Along with right teaching, all of Christ’s followers are meant to model right living. Orthodoxy and orthopraxis are vitally connected.
Paul said we could follow him as he follows Christ. And all great men and women of God can be emulated to a large extent. Indeed, the author of the epistle to the Hebrews exhorts the readers to “Remember your leaders, those who spoke to you the word of God. Consider the outcome of their way of life, and imitate their faith” (Hebrews 13:7).
As such, along with Scripture, we can be greatly helped out by studying church history and Christian biography. Indeed, as I and others have often said, next to the Bible, there are two great sorts of books that can really help you grow as a believer: Christian biographies, and a good old hymnal (those with the older and much more theologically rich hymns).
Plenty of resources are available on this. As I say, simply reading the biographies and autobiographies of the great saints, both past and present, can substantially help you in getting the desire, the knowledge, and the wherewithal in developing a deeper and fuller Christian walk.
Here I want to draw your attention to just one quite valuable set: the “Theologians on the Christian Life” series. This rather recent set is put out by Crossway. It looks at the practical issue of how various great Christian teachers and theologians of the past viewed the Christian life and how it is to be lived. It is an excellent series, and all the volumes are very good indeed.
In the Series Preface, the editors (Stephen Nicholls and Justin Taylor, who did the first 16 volumes; Justin Taylor and Thomas Kidd who have done the last three so far) discuss the purpose of these volumes:
Some might call us spoiled. We live in an era of significant and substantial resources for Christians on living the Christian life. We have ready access to books, DVD series, online material, seminars—all in the interest of encouraging us in our daily walk with Christ. The laity, the people in the pew, have access to more information than scholars dreamed of having in previous centuries.
Yet for all our abundance of resources, we also lack something. We tend to lack the perspectives from the past, perspectives from a different time and place than our own. To put the matter differently, we have so many riches in our current horizon that we tend not to look to the horizons of the past.
That is unfortunate, especially when it comes to learning about and practicing discipleship. It’s like owning a mansion and choosing to live in only one room. This series invites you to explore the other rooms.
As we go exploring, we will visit places and times different from our own. We will see different models, approaches, and emphases. This series does not intend for these models to be copied uncritically, and it certainly does not intend to put these figures from the past high upon a pedestal like some race of super-Christians. This series intends, however, to help us in the present listen to the past. We believe there is wisdom in the past twenty centuries of the church, wisdom for living the Christian life.
The 19 volumes that have appeared thus far were written between 2012-2025. There may well be more new volumes forthcoming. They are (in alphabetical order of subject):
Augustine – Gerald Bray, 2015
Herman Bavinck – John Bolt, 2015
Dietrich Bonhoeffer – Stephen Nichols, 2013
John Calvin – Michael Horton, 2014
Jonathan Edwards – Dane Ortlund, 2014
Francis Grimké – Drew Martin, 2025
C. S. Lewis – Joe Rigney, 2018
Martyn Lloyd-Jones – Jason Meyer, 2018
Martin Luther – Carl Trueman, 2015
John Newton – Tony Reinke, 2015
John Owen – Matthew Barrett, 2015
J. I. Packer – Sam Storms, 2015
J. C. Ryle – Andrew Atherstone, 2025
Francis Schaeffer – William Edgar, 2013
Charles Spurgeon – Michael Reeves, 2018
John Stott – Tim Chester, 2020
B. B. Warfield – Fred Zaspel, 2012
John Wesley – Fred Sanders, 2013
George Whitefield – Tom Schwanda and Ian Maddock, 2025
Before proceeding, the especially observant reader here will look at my list and look at the photo of my books in this series and notice a discrepancy: 19 are listed, but just 18 are shown in the photo. That is because the Ryle volume is days away from being released and hopefully it will soon be in my possession, so stay tuned.
Quotes
To further interest you in this series, and in the ones being discussed, I conclude by sharing a few quotes from some of these volumes.
Augustine by Bray
The first thing we notice about Augustine is the emphasis he placed on the relationship of the individual to God. . . . In putting this personal relationship with God in Christ at the heart of his confession of faith, Augustine set a standard that has remained fundamental to the life of the church ever since. We can have all the superstructure we like, but without the transformed lines of individuals who know they have been saved by the grace of God, it is worth nothing. Our own experience may be very different from Augustine’s, but all true believers will recognise the heart of the matter in his account of what happened to him. Nobody before or since has stated this with as much clarity and consistency as he did, and for this alone his witness remains of central importance for the entire Christian world.
Edwards by Ortlund
To become a Christian is to become alive to beauty. This is the contribution to Christianity that Jonathan Edwards makes and no one has made it better. Augustine gave us a theology of will-transforming grace that liberates the Christian life by replacing our loves. Luther left us the utter settled-ness of God’s favorable verdict over our morally fickle and despair-prone lives. . . . And Edwards has given us the beauty of the Christian life—first, the beauty of God, beauty that comes to tangible expression in Christ, and second, the beauty of the Christian, who participates in the triune life of divine love. Divine loveliness, enjoyed and reflected in his creatures: this is Edwards’s legacy. Sinners are beautified as they behold the beauty of God in Jesus Christ. That is Edwards’s theology of the Christian life in a single sentence. If Luther was a St. Paul, terse and punchy and emphasizing faith, Edwards was a St. John, calm and elegant and emphasizing love.
Lewis on the Christian Life: Becoming Truly Human in the Presence of God (Theologians on the Christian Life)by Rigney, Joe (Author), Nichols, Stephen J. (Series Editor), Taylor, Justin (Series Editor)
Lewis by Rigney
Lewis is a master of the soul. He understands the human heart, in all its deceitfulness and grandeur, both in its good design and in its twisted corruption. He is a master of revealing the secret springs of our actions, of unveiling the true motivations underneath the lies we tell ourselves and others. He knows that our motives are complex; yet he can untangle them and sort through the knottiest bundle with unusual clarity. And because we have the sense that he discovered these secret springs through his own painful introspection (or apocalypses), we are not put out by his candor. Lewis speaks not from abstraction but from experience. He knows that of which he writes. He has had the severe mercy of his insights thrust upon him, so that he knows his matter from the inside and out. This is what makes Lewis’s voice so refreshing and unique.
Spurgeon by Reeves
As Spurgeon saw it, joy in God is part of the very fiber of Christian vitality, and thus he would connect it to every other aspect of holiness. This could be quite striking, as when he connected the enjoyment of God with both jealousy and fear. Joy in God, he believed, makes us jealous for Christ, so giving us a stern intolerance of all the sin that grieves him. . . . Joy in God is also instrumental in that most sacred motive, the fear of the Lord. A true enjoyment and appreciation of God as holy, exalted, and almighty produces a right fear of him. This is not the sort of fear a criminal would have before a judge, or a child would have before a monster; it is “the fear which bows the tall archangel in adoration before the throne, the fear which makes the cherub veil his face with his wings while he adores the Lord. Such a constant fear as this is the mainspring of Christian holiness.”
Wesley by Sanders
Some theologians have written comprehensively on the full range of doctrines. But John Wesley was above all a preacher and a pastoral theologian, and almost everything he wrote was in the field of “practical divinity,” or the Christian life. A book like Aquinas on the Christian Life or Augustine on the Christian Life would only deal with a subsection of each theologian’s overall thought. But salvation and the Christian life are practically all that John Wesley ever wrote about; indeed, “it is sometimes said that, as a theologian, John Wesley specialized in the doctrine of the Christian life.” So this book comes close to surveying his entire theology.
Whitefield by Schwanda and Maddock
Promoting the gospel of Jesus Christ throughout an itinerant ministry that saw him preach a staggering eighteen thousand sermons—an average of nearly 530 sermons a year from 1736 to 1770—Whitefield was relentlessly ambitious about proclaiming the gospel to those who had never recognized their need for salvation and those who needed to mature deeper in their relationship with Christ. . . . Without a doubt, his vocation and self-identity as an evangelist were tightly bound together. Overflowing from a heart shaped by God’s grace, Whitefield’s sermons proclaimed the gospel boldly and passionately, in that he first devoted himself to cultivating a life of communion with God. Before calling others to follow Jesus in a life of discipleship, he first sought to walk intimately with God through the intentional use of the means of grace and a perennial reliance on the felt presence and experience of the Holy Spirit. A hunger and thirst for knowing and loving Jesus Christ enabled him to delight in and enjoy God and motivated his desire to serve as a spiritual guide. In the process, God used him to help usher others into a deep friendship with God that so characterized his own experience of walking with Christ.
If you do not already have some of these excellent books, why not grab a few now? You will not just learn a lot, but you will likely develop and deepen your own Christian life substantially.
That is a masterful collection about the epic Christian leaders of the past. Modern Evangelicals lack perspective from greats like these fathers in the faith. I’m glad to hear that a volume on Ryle is forthcoming. Thanks for sharing this collection.
That is a masterful collection about the epic Christian leaders of the past. Modern Evangelicals lack perspective from greats like these fathers in the faith. I’m glad to hear that a volume on Ryle is forthcoming. Thanks for sharing this collection.
Many thanks Dave.