Four tiers, forty authors

Last August I wrote up a long piece about “tiers” in Christian/theological writing. Go there for the details. Regular readers will know all about this by now; it’s become a bit of a hobbyhorse, as well as a shorthand—both with fellow writers and with editors and publishers.

I’ve found that, in these conversations, we don’t limit ourselves to one of the tiers but say “a high two” or “a low three” or “maybe a one point nine.” Four slots ain’t much. So I decided to unpack the tiers by decimal points into a total of forty options. I’ve also taken the liberty to put an example of the kind of author I have in mind for that particular number. If the author is prolific or tends to write on the same “level” across his or her books, then I don’t mention a title. If not, though, I give a sample book title to indicate which “version” of said author I have in mind.

Consider this your friendly reminder that the point of the original post was not that these rankings are indexed by quality; you don’t get books that are per se “better” as you get bigger numbers, nor are higher tier books per se “harder” to write compared to lower tiers. A lot of Tier 3 authors wish with all their hearts they could manage a successful Tier 2 book. But it’s really hard to do that, and to do it well.

The tiers, rather, are about intended audience, style, accessibility, density, presumed education, background knowledge, literary purpose, and so on. From normies with a day job who may read no more than a handful of books per year to fellow scholars in the academy who read hundreds—that’s the range of imagined readers for these books. Which isn’t to say that folks in the former category don’t occasionally wander “up” into Tiers 3 and 4 or that academics don’t enjoy books in Tier 1 and 2 (I do!).

But enough preliminaries. Here are forty authors across four tiers, limiting myself to authors who are either living or who have published in the last few decades and whose books continue to be in print.

1.0 – Sadie Robertson Huff
1.1 – T. D. Jakes
1.2 – Tony Evans
1.3 – Max Lucado
1.4 – Beth Moore
1.5 – Jonathan Pokluda
1.6 – Austin Channing Brown
1.7 – John Mark Comer
1.8 – Bob Goff
1.9 – Andy Crouch (in The Tech-Wise Family)
2.0 – Ben Myers (in The Apostles’ Creed)
2.1 – Tish Harrison Warren
2.2 – Jemar Tisby
2.3 – Henri Nouwen
2.4 – Alan Jacobs (in How to Think)
2.5 – Tim Keller (in The Reason for God)
2.6 – James K. A. Smith (in You Are What You Love)
2.7 – Esau McCaulley (in Reading While Black)
2.8 – N. T. Wright (in Simply Christian)
2.9 – Cornel West (in Democracy Matters)
3.0 – Beth Felker Jones (in Practicing Christian Doctrine)
3.1 – Tara Isabella Burton
3.2 – James Cone (in The Cross and the Lynching Tree)
3.3 – Ross Douthat
3.4 – Lauren Winner (in Dangers of Christian Practice)
3.5 – Miroslav Volf
3.6 – Justo González
3.7 – Fleming Rutledge (in The Crucifixion)
3.8 – Stanley Hauerwas
3.9 – Peter Brown
4.0 – Sarah Coakley
4.1 – Katherine Sonderegger
4.2 – Paul Griffiths
4.3 – Kathryn Tanner
4.4 – Willie James Jennings
4.5 – Jonathan Tran
4.6 – David Bentley Hart
4.7 – Bruce Marshall
4.8 – David Kelsey
4.9 – Alvin Plantinga

I imagine most readers would rank these authors a bit differently; others would include names I’ve not mentioned and scratch ones I have. I hope the gist is accurate, though. I’m going to use it as a springboard for further reflections later this week or next.