TODAY’S CHRISTIANITY IS AN ECCENTRIC THING, an ad hoc something or other intended to meet some parochial enthusiasm or some idiosyncratic taste. This is a bad thing. It is a bad thing for many reasons I won’t go into now except to say it is always a bad thing to treat a means to one end as a means to another. If religion is a means to make men pleasing to God, for example, then it is a bad thing when it is used as a means to make men happy about themselves. (They may perhaps feel good about themselves once they are pleasing to God, or they may not. But that desirable thing shouldn’t become a usurping purpose of such a religion.) And if this is the state of affairs today, if your knowledge of Christianity is the product of the misapprehension or exploitation of those you hang around, then you are the child in the epigram.

What I recommend is that you make that childhood temporary, and to do that I don’t ask that you adopt my views: that’s hardly a solution to the problem. I ask that you consider what generations other than your own have said. Here is a short list of contending views of Christianity. You owe it to your own adulthood to read them all. There are many others you ought to read as well, but this is an honest start. It is short, most of the works are relatively short, and I daresay most literate people could work their way thoughtfully through this list in a year. The list is arranged alphabetically, so don’t feel it’s necessary to start with number one. It is a mix of treatises, essays, thoughts, songs, and sermons that have the imprimatur of centuries of Christians.