Deserted Island with Joel Kim: History and Leadership

If you could take only five books to a deserted island, which would you choose? Today, Joel Kim joins Stephen Nichols to share titles he’d bring, and what they reveal about leadership, perseverance, and history.

DR. STEPHEN NICHOLS: Welcome back to another episode of 5 Minutes in Church History. Once again, we are recording live from Ligonier's National Conference and one of our speakers this year is a very good friend of ours at Ligonier and at Reformation Bible College and an academic, a seminary president, no less.

REV. JOEL KIM: It was a demotion from teaching in the classroom.

SN: From faculty to president. I can relate. Rev. Joel Kim is here. It's good to see you.

JK: Thank you for having me.

SN: Yeah, I'm glad to have you on this. And you're a very busy man. I know you travel a lot. You have a seminary you're responsible for and a lot of pressing duties. So I'm going to give you a favor. I'm going to let you pull away from your duties for a moment. We're going to send you to a deserted island where you can just enjoy some books. Now, this is an odd deserted island. It's a very theologically informed and enriched desert island. It already has Calvin's Institutes, it has Augustine's classic texts, it has Luther's works. It even has the works of Jonathan Edwards on there.

JK: What kind of island is this?

SN: It's a unique island. It's a very theologically driven island, and it's an imaginary island. But for now, we'll pretend it actually exists. So we're going to send you, the trick is you can only take five books with you. So what are your five books?

JK: Well, to be honest, I was mentioning the possibility of this podcast to one of my colleagues, and his immediate response to me was, you're going to have to take the Army Manual of Survival because he said, you have no manual skills and you certainly don't have any outdoor knowledge, and as a result, you need to make sure that you take that along so that you know exactly what can kill you, what would allow you to survive. I realized that this is meant to be more theological in nature, but for survival purposes to enjoy those theological books. I think I would need to take that.

SN: You actually remind me of Dr. Sproul's answer. When I had Dr. Sproul do this, the first book, he said, well, How to Get Off a Deserted Island. This is the book he would take. You know what? I'm going to throw that one out. Well, I'll tell you what. I'll let you take that as a bonus. I want you to survive, and I realize that academics really don't have practical skills, so I want you to be able to survive and come back to your seminary and family. So we'll give that as a bonus. So what would be your actual first book?

JK: This is a difficult one because I am not exactly sure if I'm one of those guys that reads books over and over again. It's one of those things where I enjoy them. Maybe I'll read them twice, maybe I'll read them three times. But overall, it's not something that I come back to over and over again. But I love biographies and one of the biographies I really have enjoyed and read a couple times was actually Team of Rivals by a presidential historian named Doris Goodwin Kerns. And this actually is set in the time of Abraham Lincoln who ran against a number of people for the presidency who eventually end up in his cabinet, and he's working with his rivals, thus the Team of Rivals. But in terms of thinking through for the country, how to run and manage a country, especially in great turmoil, and I found that to be instructive, not just in terms of learning more about Abraham Lincoln, but in terms of his own leadership in terms of the country at that point in time. And so I found great enjoyment in it. It was also very well written.

SN: It's a great book, Team of Rivals.

JK: Right.

SN: That's a great choice. That's, you're off to a great start.

JK: I wouldn't mind reading that over and over and over and over again on a deserted island.

SN: You can have it. How about your second book?

Jk: The other interest that I have is actually the Asian theater of Second World War. My major in college was history, which happened to be actually in the ancient history in particular, my senior paper was on the use of Athenian coin for voting. So this doesn't really affect us very much in terms of what we do, but The Rising Sun by John Toland. And it's about what happened in terms of the rise and fall of the Japanese Empire. And part of the reason for that interest is oftentimes in our both popular media as well as books, the focus is on the European theater, not necessarily the Asian theater. And so that piques my curiosity. But also Korea, where I was born, was actually occupied during that time by the Imperial ambition of Japan. So it brings in multiple points of interest in history personally that allows me to enjoy that quite a bit.

SN: Your mere mention of the Athenian coin as your senior paper tells me that you really do need that Army manual survival while you're on the deserted island.

JK: For sure.

SN: For sure.

JK: Yeah.

SN: Well, we'll come back for another episode to finish off your deserted island book. That is the Rev. Joel Kim. And I'm Steve Nichols and thanks for listening to 5 Minutes in Church History.