On My Shelf: Life And Books With Chris Watkin

On My Shelf helps you get to know various writers through a behind-the-scenes glimpse into their lives as readers.

I asked Christopher Watkin—professor of European languages and author of Biblical Critical Theory—about what’s on his bedside table, his favorite fiction, the books he regularly revisits, and more.

What’s on your nightstand right now?

I like the idea of a nightstand! I have more of a little table with jumbled ornaments and things made by my children: absolute chaos!

But if I had a nice orderly nightstand with books on it, here’s what they’d be right now. First, James B. Jordan’s Through New Eyes: Developing a Biblical View of the World. It’s helping me understand more fully how Scripture presents us with a symbolic world, not just a sequence of ideas about God. I’m enjoying following Jordan as he shows how places, objects, people, and events in the Bible carry patterns of meaning that recur and deepen across the canon.

I also recently finished Gregory W. Lee’s The Essential City of God: A Reader and Commentary. I like to keep coming back to Augustine, and this is a lovely combination of substantial excerpts from City of God and reflective essays that help readers find their way through the work. I particularly appreciated how the book doesn’t sugarcoat Augustine or skate past the difficult aspects of his thought but engages them directly and constructively.

What are your favorite fiction books?

My undergraduate degree didn’t manage to turn me off European literature despite having to write academic essays on it, and it’s still my favorite.

Franz Kafka is extraordinarily evocative, isn’t he: The Metamorphosis, certainly, but also shorter stories such as “A Hunger Artist.” With remarkably sparse materials, he can conjure an entire world (I suppose that’s my fascination with Jordan again, how texts call forth worlds), and in Kafka’s case it’s absurd, bureaucratic, claustrophobic, and yet somehow immediately recognizable.

Marcel Proust does something comparable in In Search of Lost Time, though in a completely different register. Where Kafka pares the world down, Proust seems to expand every passing sensation, memory, and social encounter until it opens onto a whole universe.

I love fiction that does not merely tell a story but teaches you how a world feels from the inside, and Proust and Kafka both do this wonderfully.

What biographies or autobiographies have most influenced you and why?

I am not a great reader of biographies, but Arnold Dallimore’s George Whitefield: The Life and Times of the Great Evangelist of the Eighteenth-Century Revival left a deep impression on me. So did J. C. Ryle’s Five English Reformers. Both communicate something of the cost, courage, and spiritual seriousness of lives given to gospel ministry.

I love fiction that does not merely tell a story but teaches you how a world feels from the inside.

It would also be remiss of me, if a bit clichéd, not to mention Augustine’s Confessions. I seem to draw on it almost every week in one way or another. It is autobiography, prayer, theology, biblical interpretation, and spiritual diagnosis all at once. Few books have understood so well, or stated so honestly, how it feels to be a human being in the midst of disordered loves.

What are some books you regularly reread and why?

It will be no surprise to hear that, apart from the Bible, I return most regularly to Augustine, especially City of God and Confessions. After all these centuries, I still find him the finest cultural critic the church has produced outside Scripture. Since I write in the field of cultural criticism, that makes him indispensable reading.

Augustine sees that a culture is not finally held together by its stated ideas but by its loves, habits, hopes, fears, and forms of worship. I do feel that we’ve only scratched the surface of what he can offer us in our day in the way of cultural analysis.

What books have most profoundly shaped how you serve and lead others for the sake of the gospel?

When I first began finding myself in leadership positions, I was helped by the work of Michael Hyatt, especially Living Forward (written with Daniel Harkavy) and Free to Focus. His idea of developing a life plan helped me think deliberately about the different callings and relationships for which I am responsible, rather than allowing the most urgent part of life to consume everything else.

I have also benefited from his emphasis on the “double win”: seeking success in work without achieving it at the expense of success in life more broadly—in family, friendship, church, health, and the other relationships God has entrusted to us. It’s not a battle I pretend to have won, but at least he helped me see that, for the Christian, faithfulness in one sphere shouldn’t require unfaithfulness in another.

What’s one book you wish every pastor would read?

That is very difficult, because pastors serve such different congregations in such different contexts. I suspect I would encourage different pastors to read whatever they’re not used to reading, to go against the grain of their existing habits: If you read only new books, read an old one; if you read only old books, read something written for the world in which your congregation is presently living.

For a substantial older book, I would warmly recommend Richard Baxter’s The Saints’ Everlasting Rest. It is the sort of book I don’t think gets written very often now: patient, searching, expansive, and full of exultation in the glory to come. It reminds pastors that ministry is conducted under the horizon of eternity, and that one of their great privileges is to help people desire the rest for which they were made.

What’s your best piece of writing advice?

Draft and redraft. Then redraft again. And once more. Write something (anything!) first. I tell my students to begin with the “rubbish draft.” Very few people can write wonderfully at the first attempt, and the demand to do so is often what stops them writing at all. Once something exists on the page, you can question it, rearrange it, sharpen it, cut it, and refine it over and over again.

And enjoy writing as much as you can (sorry, that’s two pieces of advice, but they sort of go together). Let your personality come out on the page. It is usually easier to rein that back later than to breathe life into prose that was timid and impersonal from the beginning.

What are you learning about life and following Jesus?

I am learning afresh, or rather God is teaching me afresh and I need to pray I’d learn it, that unless the Lord builds the house, those who build it labor in vain, but that, conversely, when the Lord is building the house, he provides what is needed.

I would encourage different pastors to read whatever they’re not used to reading.

In recent months, the Lord has been extraordinarily generous in bringing alongside me friends whose gifts and experience are very different from my own. We have been able to work together on shared projects in ways I could never have managed alone. Things that would previously have appeared impossible now seem achievable, not because I have suddenly become equal to them, but because God has supplied people, opportunities, encouragement, and resources at the right time.

It has been a lesson both in dependence and in the grace of Christian friendship: The Lord often provides for his work by giving us to one another.