The Influence on Influential People
Author: DavidJones
A couple weeks ago, I posted a blog asking people what books have influenced them in their lives. Over the past couple months, I have been asking that question to many people, including former professors and mentors of mine.
Today, I am posting the responses of President J. Matthew Pinson (President of Free Will Baptist Bible College), Dr. Kevin Hester (Professor at Free Will Baptist Bible College), and Mr. Bert Tippett (former “everything” at Free Will Baptist Bible College). If get more responses, I hope to post more of these lists:
Mr. Bert Tippett
“It will be hard for me to single out many individual books. One, however, would be The Man In The Mirror, by Patrick Morley. The writings of G. Campbell Morgan and Leon Wood have also been significant in my life.
Dr. Kevin Hester
C.S. Lewis – Mere Christianity and God in the Dock
Augustine – Confessions
Loyola – Spiritual Disciplines
Anselm – Cur Deus Homo
John Wesley – Journal
Leroy Forlines – Biblical Systematics
William Golding – Lord of the Flies
John Steinbeck – East of Eden
George Orwell – Animal Farm
Aristotle – Ethics
President J. Matthew Pinson
“Several years ago, I began to read the Bible with the saints and martyrs of the church’s past. And everything they said—across centuries and millennia, across age groups and generations, across races and cultures, across geographical boundaries—sat in judgment on my narrow modern way of seeing the world. I realized that I was very narrow minded and needed to broaden my horizon, no longer interpreting the Bible and answering life’s inescapable questions from the vantage point of my small slice of reality. This was liberating for me. So I commend the Christian tradition to you. It is a liberating thing.”
Augustine of Hippo
Jean Calvin
Jacobus Arminius
Balthasar Hubmaier
Thomas Grantham
John Bunyan
Leo Tolstoy
C. S. Lewis
The Vanderbilt Fugitive-Agrarians
Leroy Forlines
Francis Schaeffer
Neil Postman
Kenneth Myers