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Theology: The Bondage of the Will by Martin Luther. The first time I read The Bondage of the Will, I was a senior in college, tackling it for my thesis, mainly because it was famous and important and I figured I’d better take a crack at it. Not even halfway through I fired off an email: “Dad, this book is really disturbing me.” His reply: “Good. It should.” Even though Luther grants a certain amount of “free will” as pertains to the “things below us” (in our age of advertising and algorithms, I suspect he’d restrict the domain of free will ever further), he certainly doesn’t grant so much as an ounce to things above us, namely with respect to God. Then what was the point of church? and faith? and the hard work of growing up and the consequential choices that lay down the kind of grooves for the adult you’ll become? Luther’s argument wasn’t so much unpalatable as unactionable. (Of course.) Then I came back to it a couple years later in seminary. Maybe even that little additional span of growing-up time was enough to make me embrace The Bondage of the Will like the proclamation of the gospel it had always been: No, really, your faith not in your hands… and that is good. By any other name, this is the doctrine of predestination (the good Luther version thereof, not the icky Calvin version thereof). Predestination turns out to be good because we know who God is through His Son and, just as crucially, through His Spirit. It turns out this treatise could just as easily, and even more fittingly, have been entitled On God the Holy Spirit. That second reading is when it really took root in my mind and soul, and even now I can see its effects, all the way down to my mission work in the exceedingly non-Christian context of Japan. I revisited the treatise recently with my dad in a podcast, which you can listen to here; and if you would like further guidance in sorting out Luther’s argument, I highly recommend Miikka Ruokanen’s brilliant study Trinitarian Grace in Martin Luther’s The Bondage of the Will. Novel: Broken Bonds by Amy Mantravadi. That’s all well and good, but what if reading a 300-page tirade penned 500 years ago is a little beyond your pay grade or attention span? Trust me, I sympathize. By the end of my last reread, even I was saying, “All right already, Luther, I get it!!” Impassioned as it is, it can come off abstract, divorced from the living of human lives. That’s where Amy Mantravadi has pulled off an unparalleled literary coup. She has taken the polemical exchanges between Luther and Erasmus (the target of Luther’s ire in The Bondage of the Will) and traced out its very human history: what was in the hearts and experiences of these two men that brought them to write their respective treatises, and why it matters. Never was such unlikely material for a novel translated to such vivid colors. And if that weren’t enough, Mantravadi brings in a third player, namely Philip Melanchthon, always less loved by posterity than Luther, yet he is the most relatable character, and his being pulled between the two rivals shows all the more what’s at stake. The first book of this two-volume novel was released just last November by 1517 Publishing; the second installment is due out later this year. Cookbook: Bitter by Jennifer McLagan. Bitter is not a flavor you start out loving; it’s one you learn to love. Sort of like the doctrine of predestination. On the other hand, once you learn to love it, you belong to the elite (or the elect). This startlingly delicious assortment of recipes dares you to increase your range of bitterness, and not metaphorically. I was a latecomer to coffee and grapefruit, so I enjoyed the expansion of range there (such as Grapefruit Tart and Coffee Cardamom Sweetbreads—meaning the thyroid gland, not a fruity loaf at Christmas), but I was already devoted to bitter lettuces, and McLagan gives them their due, from Radicchio Pie to Dandelion Potato Rösti. Tea and beer also appear as ingredients rather than drinks, along with Campari, Tonic Water, and Black Latvian (only for the recklessly bitter). And on the discoveries go. If your cooking routine has gotten bland and boring, this should cure you in no time. Just like an anemic Erasmian church needs a blast of pungent Lutheran theology.
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