“Reading Spiritual Classics as Evangelical Protestants” (from Reading the Christian Spiritual Classics)

Jamin Goggin and Kyle Strobel edited a wonderful book called Reading the Christian Spiritual Classics: A Guide for Evangelicals (IVP, 2013). J.I. Packer called the book “an absolutely unrivaled mapping by experts of the whole church’s rich, smorgasbord heritage of Christ-centered, sanctification-focused devotional writing.”

I got to write a chapter about discernment, and specifically about learning how to read widely in the Christian tradition from the specifically evangelical Protestant standpoint. So while most of the chapters in the volume do the work of introducing a wide range of spiritual classics from all corners of Christianity, my chapter was tasked with pointing out the criteria that evangelicals already have on hand (the gospel, a high doctrine of scripture, blurbs from J.I. Packer, etc.) that they can make use of while exploring widely.