The Formation Library

Where this list comes from

• Made for the Mountains: How the Preached Word Built the Free American Mind and How to Recover ItVolume Two of The First Republic Series. The Formation Library on this page is its appendix.
• Forge the Son: A Father's Manual for Raising Sons by the Spirit That Built AmericaVolume One of The First Republic Series.
• AmRev ResurrectedWhere Brett writes.

The eight sections

1. One. The Word Itself 18 readings
2. Two. Jesus and the Free Mind 5 books
3. Three. The Reformation and the Crossing 5 books
4. Four. The Preachers and the Revolution 7 books
5. Five. The Great Awakenings 5 books
6. Six. The Free Mind and Its Enemies 5 books
7. Seven. The Formation of the Free Mind 5 books
8. Eight. The Fire for Our Time 4 books

One. The Word Itself

The colonial preachers did not read the Bible as one book among many. They read it as the primary document of human reality. Every book on this list is downstream of this one. Read the following books of Scripture in the order listed. Read them as the men in this book read them: as the living Word of the God who made the wild horse and set the captive free.

• Genesis 1-3

  Read for the imago Dei and the fall that produced the slavery the rest of the Bible answers.

• Exodus 1-20

  Read for the pattern of liberation that recurs across every formation chapter of this book.

• Deuteronomy 6-8

  Read for the formation command that built the colonial household and is still binding on the modern father.

• 1 Samuel 8

  Read for the biblical definition of tyranny and the warning every covenant community needs to keep on the shelf.

• Job 38-42

  Read for the wild horse passage and the Voice from the whirlwind that names what God made the man to be.

• Psalms 1, 2, 22, 23, 46, 121

  Read aloud at the family altar morning and evening for one month and notice what changes in the household.

• Proverbs 1-9

  Read with your son one chapter a week to build the moral grammar Solomon wrote down for his.

• Ecclesiastes

  Read for the seasons. Every faithful generation has had to discern the time it is in. Solomon names the seasons.

• Isaiah 40, 58

  Read 40 for the strength promised to the formation faithful. Read 58 for the trumpet voice the prophet still requires of the man who would speak.

• Habakkuk

  Read for the cry of the man who watches injustice and waits on the Lord without flinching.

• Micah 6

  Read for what the Lord requires of you. Three things. Nothing else. Apply accordingly.

• Matthew 5-7

  Read it as the constitution of the free mind. Then read it again as if it were addressed directly to you, by a man who knows you better than you know yourself.

• John 8

  Read it for the definition of the freedom that no empire can grant or revoke.

• Romans 8, 13

  Read 8 for the man who has been freed from the law of sin and death. Read 13 in the company of 1 Samuel 8.

• 1 Corinthians 15

  Read for the resurrection that emptied the empire's primary enforcement tool.

• Galatians 5

  Read for the freedom Christ has set us free for, and for the warning against returning to the yoke.

• Hebrews 11

  Read for the long company of free men whose names are still being added to. You are reading to find out where to stand in the line.

• Revelation 18

  Read for the call to come out of every Babylon the formation tradition has had to leave.

Two. Jesus and the Free Mind

The free mind begins not with a political philosophy but with a person. These books recover the Jesus of the Gospels in his full force and apply him to the formation of the man who would follow him.

• Beautiful Outlaw

  John Eldredge

  Read this first. Eldredge recovers the Jesus the institutional church has muted into a customer service representative. The Jesus you meet in these pages is the Jesus who preached the Sermon on the Mount and walked into Caesar's empire and dismantled it from the inside. Read it before you read anything else in this section.

• The Divine Conspiracy

  Dallas Willard

  Read this slowly. Willard treats the Sermon on the Mount as the constitution of the kingdom of God and applies it with the precision of a philosopher who took his Lord seriously. The book is long and deliberate. Plan a year to read it. The year will pay.

• Simply Jesus

  N.T. Wright

  Read this for the historical Jesus inside the political and religious context that crucified Him. Wright places Jesus inside Second Temple Judaism, the Roman occupation, and the messianic expectation. The political weight of the Gospel becomes visible. The book recovers what the Sunday school curriculum never told you.

• The Cost of Discipleship

  Dietrich Bonhoeffer

  Read this when you have begun to feel the cost. Bonhoeffer wrote it before the Gestapo arrested him and lived its argument until the day he was hanged. The chapter on cheap grace and costly grace is the test the modern American church has failed and the test the modern American Christian still has the option of passing.

• The Pursuit of God

  A.W. Tozer

  Read this when the formation feels mechanical. Tozer pulls the man who has been doing the work back to the source the work was always for. The book is short. It will undo you and put you back together. Read it once a year.

Three. The Reformation and the Crossing

The crack in the wall of the medieval mind began with men who read the Word and followed it where it led regardless of the cost. These books trace the crack from Wycliffe to the Atlantic.

• The Freedom of a Christian

  Martin Luther

  Read this in one sitting. Luther wrote it in 1520 and its argument is the doctrinal foundation of every sermon every colonial preacher ever preached on liberty. The Christian is at once the freest of all and the bondservant of all. Hold both halves at once.

  Read it free public domain, complete text

• Institutes of the Christian Religion, Book Four

  John Calvin

  Read Book Four. Skip the rest if you must, but read Book Four. The chapters on civil government are the political theology that crossed the Atlantic in the bones of every Puritan and Presbyterian who built the colonies.

  Read it free public domain, complete text

• Jonathan Edwards: A Life

  George Marsden

  Read this as the biography of the most rigorous theological mind America has produced. Marsden writes Edwards in his eighteenth-century context without softening him for modern readers. The book is the door into Edwards's own writings.

• John Winthrop: America's Forgotten Founding Father

  Francis Bremer

  Read this to understand the man who delivered A Model of Christian Charity on the deck of the Arbella and held the Bay Colony together for two decades. Winthrop is the bridge between English Puritanism and American self-government. Bremer makes him visible.

• The Faithful Shepherd

  David Hall

  Read this for the colonial pulpit as institution. Hall traces the Puritan preacher's training, his daily life, his weekly rhythms, and his civic role with the precision that makes the Election Sermon tradition legible.

Four. The Preachers and the Revolution

The American Revolution was preached before it was fought. These books trace the specific men who preached it and the specific arguments they made from Scripture.

• The New England Clergy and the American Revolution

  Alice Baldwin

  Read this first in this section. Baldwin documents the specific role of the New England clergy in producing the ideas that the Declaration later expressed. Her thesis is the thesis of this book in scholarly form.

  Read it free public domain, complete text

• Political Sermons of the American Founding Era

  Ellis Sandoz, editor

  Read this with a pencil. Sandoz collects fifty-five of the most significant political sermons preached between 1730 and 1805. Read Mayhew's 1750 sermon first. Then West. Then Langdon. Then read whatever else the volume opens to.

• The New England Soul

  Harry Stout

  Read this for the Puritan sermon as cultural form. Stout argues that the sermon was the central intellectual and cultural document of New England for a century and a half. The argument is the central historical claim this book rests on.

• Christians in the American Revolution

  Mark Noll

  Read this for the Christian content of the Revolution made visible. Noll is a careful historian who refuses to oversimplify and refuses to dismiss. The book is a calibration for anyone tempted to overstate or understate the religious dimension of the founding.

• 1776

  David McCullough

  Read this for the men in the field. McCullough tells the year of the Declaration with the human texture that returns the Revolution to the men who fought it. Washington in this book is not a monument. He is a man.

• His Excellency: George Washington

  Joseph Ellis

  Read this for the man whose private formation produced the public restraint that made the Republic possible. Ellis writes Washington as a man under sustained pressure who chose against the temptations every founding general has faced.

• The Radicalism of the American Revolution

  Gordon Wood

  Read this for the scale of what the Revolution actually accomplished. Wood argues that the American Revolution was the most radical social transformation in modern history. The book gives the long view that makes the formation tradition's stakes legible.

Five. The Great Awakenings

The free mind was not built once. It was renewed in every generation that received the Word with the urgency the Word demands. These books trace the two renewals that extended the formation tradition from the colonial seaboard to the continental frontier.

• Religious Affections

  Jonathan Edwards

  Read this when you want to know how to test what is happening in a soul under the work of the Spirit. Edwards distinguishes the genuine work from its counterfeit with the precision of a man who watched both at close range. The book is the standard for every revival evaluation since.

  Read it free public domain, complete text

• George Whitefield: The Life and Times of the Great Evangelist

  Arnold Dallimore

  Read this for Whitefield in full. Two volumes. Worth the time. Dallimore tracks Whitefield across his thirteen Atlantic crossings and his seven American tours with the detail the man requires.

• The Democratization of American Christianity

  Nathan Hatch

  Read this for the Second Awakening's structural transformation of American religion. Hatch shows how the camp meeting tradition produced a Christianity that no institutional hierarchy could control and that remade the American social order accordingly.

• Cane Ridge: America's Pentecost

  Paul Conkin

  Read this for the gathering itself. Conkin writes Cane Ridge with the historical care it deserves and refuses to dismiss what cannot be dismissed. The book is the historical anchor for Chapter Twelve of this book.

• Lectures on Revivals of Religion

  Charles Finney

  Read this for the practical theology of revival. Finney was the Whitefield of the Second Awakening and his lectures are the playbook he used. The book is dated in some particulars and undated in its core. Read accordingly.

  Read it free public domain, complete text

Six. The Free Mind and Its Enemies

The rebreaking is not accidental. These books name the mechanism of the breaking and the specific failures that have weakened the formation tradition in the modern era.

• Democracy in America

  Alexis de Tocqueville

  Read Volume One Part Two on the township system. Read Volume Two Part Four on the soft despotism that would replace it if the formation tradition collapsed. Tocqueville saw both possibilities in 1831. He was right about both.

  Read it free public domain, complete text

• The Abolition of Man

  C.S. Lewis

  Read this in one evening. Seventy pages. Lewis names the philosophical mechanism of the rebreaking before the rebreaking had reached the level it would reach by 2026. The phrase men without chests is the diagnosis. The book is the prescription.

• A Free People's Suicide

  Os Guinness

  Read this for the connection between virtue and republican government made specific. Guinness argues that liberty cannot survive without the formation tradition that produces internally governed men. The book is the contemporary version of John Adams's letter on the moral and religious people.

• Mere Christendom

  Douglas Wilson

  Read this for the case that Christian formation is the precondition of political liberty made without apology. Wilson does not soften the argument for institutional comfort. The book is the corrective to the personal-piety-only Christianity that has accommodated the rebreaking.

• Deschooling Society

  Ivan Illich

  Read this against your instincts. Illich writes from the political left and arrives at conclusions about institutional formation that the formation tradition recognizes immediately. The book is a useful outside corroboration of the diagnosis Chapter Thirteen makes.

Seven. The Formation of the Free Mind

The formation tradition is not a historical memory. It is a living practice. These books give the man who wants to build the formation in his own household and community the specific tools to do it.

• The Spirit of the Disciplines

  Dallas Willard

  Read this for the practical theology of formation. Willard recovers the spiritual disciplines as the ordinary means by which the man who has been set free is formed into the kind of man who can live as a free man. The book is the operating manual for the post-conversion life.

• A Long Obedience in the Same Direction

  Eugene Peterson

  Read this slowly over a year. Peterson works through the Songs of Ascent and recovers the long obedience that is the actual shape of Christian formation. The book is the corrective to every program that promises in months what the text says takes decades.

• Humility

  Andrew Murray

  Read this annually. Murray names the disposition without which formation does not produce the man it claims to produce. The book is short and difficult. The difficulty is the point.

  Read it free public domain, complete text

• The Imitation of Christ

  Thomas a Kempis

  Read this for the medieval voice that survived the corruption of the medieval church and still speaks. Kempis is direct. The book has been read by every serious Christian for six centuries because it speaks at the level the soul actually lives.

  Read it free public domain, complete text

• Meditations

  Marcus Aurelius

  Read this for the discipline of the interior life recorded by a man who was emperor and held himself to a standard most men cannot meet in private. Aurelius is not a Christian. He is a Stoic who sees more of the truth than the modern reader expects. The colonial founders read him with care. So should you.

  Read it free public domain, complete text

Eight. The Fire for Our Time

The tradition does not end in the past. These books are the formation tradition doing its work in the most recent generations. Each one is a man who lifted his eyes to the mountains in the specific valley of his moment.

• Letters and Papers from Prison

  Dietrich Bonhoeffer

  Read this when you want to know what the formation tradition produces in a man who has been arrested by the state for his faithfulness. Bonhoeffer wrote these letters from a Gestapo prison in the last two years of his life. The man who wrote them had read the same texts the colonial preachers read and had reached the same conclusions about what was required.

• Letter from Birmingham Jail

  Martin Luther King Jr.

  Read this carefully. King applies the resistance theology of Mayhew and the Black Robe Regiment to the civil rights situation of 1963 with the precision of a man who knew exactly what he was doing. The letter is one of the most important political sermons of the twentieth century. It is also a model of how a formed man writes from a cell.

• A Christian Manifesto

  Francis Schaeffer

  Read this for Schaeffer's diagnosis of the rebreaking applied directly to the late twentieth century. Schaeffer was an evangelical who refused to accept the personal-piety-only Christianity that had emptied the public square. The book named the situation in 1981. The situation has only deepened. The argument has only sharpened.

• If You Can Keep It

  Eric Metaxas

  Read this for the recent argument that the Republic depends on the formation of the men who live under it. Metaxas restates the John Adams principle in modern vocabulary. The book is a useful introduction to the argument this book has made and a recent confirmation that the argument is still being made in serious places.