Which book would best lead you to God? Here are my recommendations
The roads leading to religious belief are many and various – here are some possible sign posts to help travellers along the way.
The famous journalist and broadcaster Andrew Bolt has expressed one disappointment with his friend Cardinal George Pell, who died a few years ago and whose innocence Bolt bravely, and rightly, defended. Bolt has written a brilliant little chapter in a new book, Remembering George Cardinal Pell, edited by the almost impossibly distinguished theologian Tracey Rowland. It’s a collection of 36 memories of Pell from his friends around the world. (Full disclosure: I contributed a piece as well.)
Pell knew Bolt, not all that well, for several decades. Obviously they became friends.
All through that time Pell good-naturedly, without being overbearing, tried to get Bolt to come to belief in God. Pell sent Bolt British philosopher Antony Flew’s book There is a God: How the World’s Most Notorious Atheist Changed His Mind. Bolt objected, reasonably enough, that this was ghostwritten when Flew was very old and in any event wasn’t very persuasive.
So here’s a challenge: which book would best lead you to God (which, alternatively, might lead you away)? I’d love to hear from readers on this.
Christian writing, starting with St Paul’s letters and the four Gospels, have been fundamental to spreading knowledge and belief in God and Jesus. What about more contemporary books?
Most people I guess come to God directly, or by meeting God in someone they love, rather than through books. Viktor Frankl, in a Nazi concentration camp, once yearned that he might be given just a few minutes to contemplate the face of his wife, who was in another Nazi camp where she died. In that moment, he later wrote, he understood for the first time the idea of the angels spending eternity in the rapturous contemplation of God.
There are, I should think, three ways books might lead someone to God. There is rational argument, personal testimony and creative art. I’ve spent the past 10 years, apart from my day job, writing books about Christianity. When I started, I thought I should read the New Atheists – Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens et al. Frankly, I didn’t find their books interesting or challenging. They seemed to me dogmatic and tedious and, for anyone who knew anything about Christianity, absurdly tendentious, often choosing ridiculous caricatures of Christianity to abuse.
The sheer antiquity of sophisticated, profound, theologically rigorous, humanistic and Christ-centred Christian belief is one of the enchanting elements of Christianity. This year, 2025, marks the 1700th anniversary of the Nicene Creed, when the early church assembled a coherent, concise and entirely accessible statement of core Christian belief. Among the two billion Christians today, the Nicene Creed is recited in countless churches every Sunday.
It’s thrilling that we inhabit the same beliefs, the same moral universe, as these early Christians. We keep discovering new things about them. John Dickson, an Australian historian and author and now an academic in the US, has produced a brilliant film called The First Hymn. Based on a fragment of papyrus discovered in Egypt last century, it’s the first recorded Christian hymn with music. In the discovered papyrus, musical annotation accompanied the words. It starts: “Let all be silent” and praises “The Father, Son and Holy Spirit”.
It feels eerily contemporary. Apart from being a fine piece of music, it shows early Christians, certainly no later than the 200s, believing the same things Christians believe today, expressing their beliefs with sublime aesthetic effect and joyful at a time when they were widely persecuted. (The First Hymn will play in 100 Australian and New Zealand cinemas from July 31.)
The antiquity of Christian belief doesn’t demonstrate its truth. As I started writing Christian books, I thought I should read some works that made the case for belief. I started with a little book, Believing in God, by Neil Brown, a Sydney Catholic priest. This superb, readable, easy yet erudite book makes the case for God arising from the nature of humanity. One argument was especially intriguing. To abolish God, Brown wrote, it’s necessary to abolish meaning in human life. For once you accept that human life has meaning, real meaning, you seek the author of that meaning.
The next book I read in this sequence was The Reason for God, by Timothy Keller, a renowned Presbyterian pastor who ran an astonishingly successful church in New York. Everything Keller wrote was gracious and wise, especially helpful to contemporary readers. One of his best insights is that while there are plenty of persuasive arguments for God, none is absolutely incontrovertible. Reason neither proves nor disproves God. So don’t look so much for proof. Many areas of life don’t offer proof. What proof do I have that my parents were my parents?
Rather, Keller suggests, look for clues of God, observe divine fingerprints, listen for echoes. Keller’s intelligence is rational but also humanistic, poetic. It thus deals with a wider range of reality than narrow hyper-rationalism can grasp.
Perhaps the most intellectually formidable powerful book I read of this sort was The Great Partnership by Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, one of the greatest moral and religious thinkers of the 20th century. As with fine writers in any century, his books are accessible to any conscientious reader.
The partnership Sacks refers to is the natural partnership between religious belief and science. Faith is the friend of reason, indeed the basis of reason. Faith is mostly a question of who you believe rather than what you believe. Science is also the friend of reason. The two work naturally hand-in-hand. Scientists have come to religious belief as they discover the wonders of creation.
Sacks examines non-religious philosophies and their foul consequences. Social Darwinism was key to Nazism. Marxism led directly to Soviet communism. Sacks examines the universality of the Book of Genesis. God created humanity in the likeness and image of God. He celebrates the explosive, democratic and humanistic nature of religious belief: “Monotheism summons us, all of us, not an elite, to greatness.”
Magnificent as these three books are, perhaps the most haunting melody of reason in favour of God I stumbled on was the chapter Believing in God in The Soul of the World, by Roger Scruton. Scruton, who died a few years ago, was one of the great philosophers. Although he writes clearly, there are parts of some of his technical philosophical considerations in some areas I’m not competent to follow or judge.
But in this sublime chapter Scruton makes the most sophisticated case for the most obvious reason for believing in God, and that is the long, continuous, almost universal testimony of the human experience of God. The New Atheists won’t permit testimony of this kind because they say it’s subjective, as though their own unsupported rhetorical speculations are delivered from the Mount Olympus of perfect, objective truth.
Scruton wrote: “One part, at least, of the encounter with God lies in the irruption into consciousness of an intersubjective state of mind, but one that connects with no merely human subject.”
Any one of these four books would be dangerous to the faith of an atheist and might well lead to that crisis of unbelief that recently, in particular, has seen so many lapsed atheists searching both for truth and meaning. But as I say, I don’t think most people reason themselves into or out of belief.
Reason is part of the story but not the whole story. The testimony of believers is often powerful in moving someone to recognise this irruption of the sacred in their own lives, to hunger after a patch of the truth they find in the person giving the testimony.
Famously, Thomas Merton joined the Trappist order of monks in Kentucky in 1941. At the suggestion of his superiors, he wrote his life story. This became the book The Seven Storey Mountain. Like St Augustine’s Confessions, it’s the story of a soul, worldly and successful, yet searching for God. It was published in 1948 and in its first 30 years sold three million copies and has never been out of print. It inspired hundreds of men to embrace the monastic life.
I read Merton’s book and found it absorbing. But it didn’t move me in the way it did so many others. I was much more affected by Evelyn Waugh’s The Sword of Honour trilogy, the story of a very ordinary Christian, Guy Crouchback, who is by way of being an ordinary man. But his faith is real and he tries to live by it. It’s in the presentation of this quotidian struggle that this incomparable novel finds its genius.
The life and also the letters of JRR Tolkien, author of The Lord of the Rings, are also a powerful testament to belief. His Christian faith was the very centre of Tolkien’s life, which in childhood had more than its share of tragedy. Tolkien was influential in converting his closest friend, CS Lewis, to Christian belief. Lewis wrote an account of his conversion in his memoir Surprised by Joy, my favourite of all of Lewis’s books.
The lives of priests, pastors, monks and nuns are a perennial favourite for imaginative artistic exploration. The finest psychological insights into the life of a Catholic priest are in Death Comes for the Archbishop, written by Willa Cather 100 years ago. It concerns two French priests establishing a diocese and ministering mainly to Indians in New Mexico in the US in the 19th century. Cather was never a Catholic. She began life as a Baptist but became a serious and devoted Episcopalian.
What powers of imagination, empathy and research these novelists have. There’s a plot, there are incidents, but Cather renders the pattern of life, the pattern of mind, of her protagonist, Archbishop Latour, who lives for the love of God and expresses his love of God in service to everyone he meets and ministers to.
The finest representation of a Protestant pastor comes in Marilynne Robinson’s novel Gilead. I’ve written before that I think Robinson the greatest Christian novelist of the 21st century. She won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for Gilead, which is the account a 77-year-old Congregationalist pastor, John Ames, writes of his life for his young son. In Ames, Robinson has created a unique literary figure. Do you remember as a kid, as an early reader, not wanting to get to the finish of a novel because you didn’t want the experience to end? That’s just how I felt in reading Gilead. I didn’t want to lose Ames’s company.
Humble, thoughtful, devoted, unaffected, yet Ames is practical, as befits a pastor in rural Iowa in the middle of the 20th century. He’s also a sensitive, learned man who has spent his life in conversation with God. He writes to his son: “When you love someone to the degree you love her (the boy’s mother, Ames’s wife) you see her as God sees her, and that is an instruction in the nature of God …” Ames also remarks: “It is religious experience above all that authenticates religion, for the purposes of the individual believer.”
He worries that when he’s gone his wife might become involved with a tortured and unhappy man of their acquaintance. This leads to a luminous Ames reflection: “It is one of the best traits of good people that they love where they pity. And this is truer of women than of men. And so they get themselves drawn into situations that are harmful to them … I have always had trouble finding a way to caution against it. Since it is, in a word, Christlike.”
Recently I’ve come across the most exquisite treatment of life in the convent, Kathryn Hulme’s The Nun’s Story, which was made into a very good film with Audrey Hepburn and Peter Finch. (Magnificent point of trivia, when depicting priests Hollywood chose Catholic actors – Spencer Tracy, Bing Crosby, Gregory Peck. When depicting nuns it chose non-Catholic actresses – Ingrid Bergman, Deborah Kerr, Audrey Hepburn. A trivial fact of no possible consequence.) Hulme was not a Catholic when she wrote this, yet it’s an authentic, intimate exploration of the spiritual and psychological experience of a dedicated nun.
The order Sister Gabrielle belongs to is both active and contemplative. She serves for a time in an insane asylum, then in a hospital in the Congo. Her entire mental effort, when she is a nun, is devoted to the worship of God, the love of Christ, the practice of prayer and penance, and the service of others. It’s a life, at the surface, against nature, and yet in harmony with some deep part of nature.
As the first scene of the film makes clear, Gabrielle ultimately leaves the convent, though she loves it still and certainly doesn’t leave faith or Christ. She thinks she will be an oddity in civilian life, so to speak. But instead “the ingrained habits of acting with charity and justice, with selflessness and sincerity, were to stamp her always with a certain strangeness and make her seem to future nursing colleagues like some sort of enchanting revolutionary who practised a way of life quite new and unheard of”.
All these books have, I guess, a better chance than Flew of alerting people to God. But I’ve just read a unique Christian book that is sublime in this way. You’ll probably know of Stan Grant, as I did, as the great broadcaster and journalist who fell foul of an angry, abusive, verbally violent, frequently racist and hate-filled social media mob.
He resigned from on air from the ABC’s Q+A program and from journalism. He offered his critics not some vitriolic blast of defiance but said to them, the strangest words spoken on TV, you wanted to hurt me and you did, and I’m sorry I’ve made you hate me so much. Grant went off and undertook a PhD in theology and has returned to the deepest Christian belief. Last year he published Murriyang: Song of Time. I have never read a book quite like it. It is majestic, enthralling, sublime, reflective.
It’s a reflection on the nature of time and is quite learned, though always easy to read. It’s also a meditation on his love for his father, also called Stan, and an account of Aboriginal spirituality, which has so fully embraced Christianity. Most Aboriginal Australians are Christians. They practise at a higher rate than the rest of their population. Their knowledge of God was pervasive in their culture and true, and prepared them superbly for understanding the God of Abraham.
Murriyang is also part memoir as Grant explains why, ultimately, he walked away from journalism, seeing it now as too prone to promote conflict, as part of the problem, wanting to concentrate now instead on the most important things. He offers profound social commentary: “Homo solus valorises self-creation above divine creation.” Most of all, though, Murriyang is a wonderfully, almost shockingly, honest account of Grant’s encounters with God and his long dialogue with God.
He reflects: “We should see that to be human is miraculous” and “I would hope there is still just enough of the trace of my ancestors to lose myself in the face of God. I don’t seek to know God but for God to know me.”
In the beginning was the Word. There is something wonderfully life-enhancing about sacred books as they seek the sacred truth. Words exist, ideally, to serve the truth. These books do so beautifully. I recommend them to you.
Greg Sheridan’s new book, How Christians can Succeed Today, reclaiming the genius of the early church, will be published by Allen and Unwin on September 1.
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