Forgive me, this post is moderately pretentious.
I’m intrigued by the idea of summarising someone’s thought. Particularly for a thinker who has a ‘project’ (in the academic sense), there’s an interesting thought experiment about which book or essay is the quintessential summary of their thought. For C. S. Lewis it’s Till We Have Faces—and for people who know Lewis, that claim from me tells you a lot about how I understand Lewis’ thought, and others might disagree—for James K. A. Smith it’s Imagining the Kingdom; for James Jordan it’s Through New Eyes; for Hans Boersma, it’s Heavenly Participation; for Peter Leithart it’s his commentaries on Samuel, Kings & Chronicles.
Each of those is a contentious claim (possibly not Jordan). They may tell you more about how I interpret those thinkers than their thought. There are plenty of writers who write books on things rather than having a unified thought, and you need to have some sense of the whole before you can make this sort of claim about someone.
You can also ask the question the other way around and summarise a thinker via their influences. That is potentially the more interesting and unless they wear their influences loudly (e.g. for Smith its Augustine, Taylor, and the phenomenologists) requires a much deeper understanding to make suggestions.
The reason this post is pretentious is because I thought it was an interesting idea to attempt to do the same for myself. This is making the assumption that I have a coherent ‘thought’ (or any coherent thoughts for that matter), which is something I’ve been edging around in the last year or two: I feel like my key interests and emphases are beginning to weave together. If you’ll forgive the self-absorption for a few more paragraphs, I’ve not written enough formally for the first sort of summary to be especially interesting. I suspect you’d be looking at my essay on institutions at Mere Orthodoxy[] and my essay on trees in Theopolis[].
The more interesting question is that of influences. What is the T. M. Suffield starter pack that you’d need to absorb if you were to want to develop my thinking from first principles?
Augustine, De Doctrina Christiana
James K. A. Smith, Desiring the Kingdom
James B. Jordan, From Bread to Wine
Andrew J. Wilson, Spirit & Sacrament
Peter Leithart, 1 & 2 Chronicles
Kevin Vanhoozer, The Drama of Doctrine
C. S. Lewis, Surprised by Joy (I had a long debate with myself about whether this should be Till We Have Faces or The Weight of Glory instead).
About three readers are still with me at this point, we’re at the epitome of niche, but I think it’s an interesting intellectual exercise: what are your influences?
Of course, in the broadest sense there will be myriad, we’re influenced by everything from the reels we watch on Instagram to the layout of the supermarket in the way we think about the world. There’s a temptation to say ‘the Bible!’ because surely that’s the right answer? I was deliberate in not including God’s word in my list because it seems trite (or even proud, ‘if you read the Bible, you’d agree with me’), and the challenge is that we all need to ask ourselves whether or not we’ve been influenced enough by the scriptures.
It can equally seem strange if you aren’t trying to do some sort of intellectual project, surely this is just a game for certain academic geeks? I’m not so sure. Not only do I think most people have something that they’re interested in that they think about, even though that may not be in an academic way and all the sources might be Facebook groups, but we do all have a way that we approach the world. Looking at it ‘slant’ enough that you can define or describe it, especially if it isn’t particularly different from those around you, is a challenging thing, but an interesting challenge.
What forms you? What makes you think in the way you do?
I’ve noticed that every interesting idea I have finds its roots in something I read, often a long time ago. I was surprised when I reread James K. A. Smith some years after his first reading his Cultural Liturgies trilogy, by how often I would think ‘that’s where that idea came from.’ The ideas don’t necessarily stay the same, and they get mashed into other things from other sources, but they have their roots in something you read. That was even more true with Irenaeus’ Against Heresies, which I first read at University and had not consciously realised I’d taken anything from at all.
Tim Keller famously commented that if you read a book on a subject you’ll agree with it, if you read two you’ll put yourself between them, and you need to read ten to come up with your own ideas. That’s probably a little overstated, lots of people disagree with the first book and don’t go any further, and I think it undervalues the formative effect on things we absorbed when we weren’t thinking about a particular question, but its true that our ideas are jigsaws we make out of the pieces we pick up elsewhere.
It’s worth taking the time to notice where you’re picking up pieces from. I think for Pastors particularly it can feel like a waste of time to consider questions of influences (or of theological method, which is tightly connected), I understand that. Knowing what you’re doing is the first step towards mastery over it: don’t be mastered by ideas, master them yourself.
Photo by Kimberly Farmer on Unsplash
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