Book Review of Simply Christian by N. T. Wright.

Revelation

Simply
Christian

Why Chris tianity

Makes Sense

H

N. T. Wright

For Joseph and Ella-Ruth

Contents

Introduction

Pa r t O n e
Echoes of a Voice

1. Putting the World to Rights 3
2. The Hidden Spring 17
3. Made for Each Other 29
4. For the Beauty of the Earth 39

Pa r t Tw o
Staring at the Sun

5. God 55
6. Israel 71

7. Jesus and the Coming of God’s Kingdom 91
8. Jesus: Rescue and Renewal 105
9. God’s Breath of Life 121

10. Living by the Spirit 131

v

v Contents

Pa r t T h r e e
Reflecting the Image

11. Worship 143
12. Prayer 159
13. The Book God Breathed 173
14. The Story and the Task 185

15. Believing and Belonging 199
16. New Creation, Starting Now 217

Afterword: To Take Things Further . . . 239

About the Author
Credits
Cover
Copyright
About the Publisher

i

Introduction

T
here are two sorts of traveler. The fi rst sets off in the general
direction of the destination and is quite happy to fi gure things

out on the way, to read the signposts, ask directions, and muddle
through. The second wants to know in advance what the road will
be like, where it changes from a country road to a busy multilane
highway, how long it will take to complete the different sections,
and so on.

Concertgoers are often like that, too. Some listeners prefer to
allow the music to make its own impact, carrying them along from
movement to movement without their knowing where it will go
next. Others fi nd greater enjoyment by reading a program note in
advance so that they can anticipate what is to come and have a men-
tal picture of the whole while listening to the parts as they unfold.

People who read books divide into more or less the same types.
The fi rst type can probably skip this introduction and go straight
to the fi rst chapter. The second type may like to know in advance
more or less where we’re going, how the music is shaped. This
introduction is written for them.

My aim has been to describe what Chris tian ity is all about, both
to commend it to those outside the faith and to explain it to those
inside. This is a massive task, and I make no pretense of having cov-
ered everything, or even of having faced all the questions some
might expect in a book of this sort. What I have tried to do is to
give the subject a particular shape, resulting in the book’s three-
fold structure.

Introduction

First, I have explored four areas which in today’s world can be
interpreted as “echoes of a voice”: the longing for justice, the quest
for spirituality, the hunger for relationships, and the delight in beauty.
Each of these, I suggest, points beyond itself, though without in itself
enabling us to deduce very much about the world except that it is a
strange and exciting place. Part One of the book, with its four chap-
ters, functions rather like the opening movement of a symphony:
once you have heard these themes, the trick is to hold them in your
mind while listening to the second and third movements, whose
rather different tunes will gradually meet up with the opening ones,
producing “echoes” of a different sort. The fi rst part, in other words,
raises questions which are then, bit by bit and not always directly,
addressed and at least partially answered in what follows. I only ask
that the reader should be patient, as the second and third parts unfold,
in waiting to see how the book eventually ties itself together.

Part Two lays out the central Chris tian belief about God. Chris-
tians believe that there is one true and living God, and that this
God, revealed in action in Jesus, is the God who called the Jew-
ish people to be his agents in setting forward his plan to rescue and
reshape his creation. We therefore spend a whole chapter (Chap-
ter Six) in looking at the story and hopes of ancient Israel, before
spending two chapters on Jesus and two on the Spirit. Gradual-
ly, as this part unfolds, we discover that the voice whose echoes
we began to listen for in the fi rst part becomes recognizable, as we
refl ect on the creator God who longs to put his world to rights; on
the human being called Jesus who announced God’s kingdom, died
on a cross, and rose again; and on the Spirit, who blows like a pow-
erful wind through the world and through human lives.

This leads naturally into Part Three, where I describe what it
looks like in practice to follow this Jesus, to be energized by this
Spirit, and above all to advance the plan of this creator God. Wor-
ship (including sacramental worship), prayer, and scripture launch
us into thinking about “the church,” seen not as a building and
not even so much as an institution, but as the company of all

vi

Introduction i

those who believe in the God we see in Jesus and who are strug-
gling to follow him.

In particular, I explore the question of what the church is there
for. The point of following Jesus isn’t simply so that we can be sure
of going to a better place than this after we die. Our future beyond
death is enormously important, but the nature of the Chris tian
hope is such that it plays back into the present life. We’re called,
here and now, to be instruments of God’s new creation, the world-
put-to-rights which has already been launched in Jesus and of
which Jesus’s followers are supposed to be not simply benefi ciaries
but also agents. This provides a new way of coming at various top-
ics, not least prayer and Chris tian behavior. And this in turn enables
us, as the book reaches its conclusion, to fi nd the “echoes” of the
fi rst part coming back again, not now as hints of a God we might
learn to know for ourselves, but as key elements of the Chris tian
calling to work for his kingdom within the world.

This has been an exciting book to write, not least because it
is quite personal; but in those terms it is, as it were, back to front.
I have been a worshipping, praying, and Bible-reading Chris tian
(often muddled and getting things wrong, but hanging in there) all
my life, so that in a sense Part Three is where I began. I have spent
much of my professional life studying Jesus historically and theo-
logically, as well as trying to follow him personally, and Part Two
embodies that multilayered quest. But, as I have done so, I have
found that the issues in Part One have become more and more
insistent and important. To take the fi rst and most obvious exam-
ple, the more I’ve learned about Jesus, the more I’ve discovered
about God’s passion to put the world to rights. And at that point I
have also discovered that the things to which my study of Jesus has
pointed me—the “echoes of a voice” in Part One—are among the
things which the postmodern, post-Chris tian, and now increasing-
ly postsecular world cannot escape as questions—strange signposts
pointing beyond the landscape of our contemporary culture and
out into the unknown.

vi

ii Introduction

I haven’t attempted in these pages to differentiate between the
many different varieties of Chris tianity, but have tried to speak of
that which is, at their best, common to all. The book isn’t “Angli-
can,” “Catholic,” “Protestant,” or “Orthodox,” but simply Chris tian.
I have also attempted to keep what must be said as straightforward
and clear as I can, so that those coming to the subject for the fi rst
time won’t get stuck in a jungle of technical terms. Being a Chris-
tian in today’s world is, of course, anything but simple. But there is
a time for trying to say, as simply as possible, what it’s all about, and
this seems to me that sort of a time.

Between writing the fi rst draft of this book and preparing it for
publication, I had the joy of welcoming my fi rst two grandchildren
into the world. I dedicate the book to Joseph and Ella-Ruth, with
the hope and prayer that they and their generation may come to
hear the voice whose echoes we trace in the fi rst part, to know the
Jesus we meet in the second, and to live in and for the new creation
we explore in the third.

vi

Pa r t O n e

H

Echoes of a Voice

O n e

H

Putting the World

to Rights

I
had a dream the other night, a powerful and interesting dream
And the really frustrating thing about it is that I can’t remember

what it was about. I had a fl ash of it as I woke up, enough to make
me think how extraordinary and meaningful it was; and then it was
gone. And so, to misquote T. S. Eliot, I had the meaning but missed
the experience.

Our passion for justice often seems like that. We dream the dream
of justice. We glimpse, for a moment, a world at one, a world put
to rights, a world where things work out, where societies function
fairly and effi ciently, where we not only know what we ought to
do but actually do it. And then we wake up and come back to real-
ity. But what are we hearing when we’re dreaming that dream?

It’s as though we can hear, not perhaps a voice itself, but the echo
of a voice: a voice speaking with calm, healing authority, speaking
about justice, about things being put to rights, about peace and
hope and prosperity for all. The voice continues to echo in our
imagination, our subconscious. We want to go back and listen to
it again, but having woken up we can’t get back into the dream.
Other people sometimes tell us it was just a fantasy, and we’re half-
inclined to believe them, even though that condemns us to cyni-
cism.

4 S I M P L Y C H R I S T I A N

But the voice goes on, calling us, beckoning us, luring us to
think that there might be such a thing as justice, as the world being
put to rights, even though we fi nd it so elusive. We’re like moths
trying to fl y to the moon. We all know there’s something called jus-
tice, but we can’t quite get to it.

You can test this out easily. Go to any school or playgroup where
the children are old enough to talk to each other. Listen to what
they are saying. Pretty soon one child will say to another, or per-
haps to a teacher: “That’s not fair!”

You don’t have to teach children about fairness and unfairness.
A sense of justice comes with the kit of being human. We know
about it, as we say, in our bones.

You fall off your bicycle and break your leg. You go to the hos-
pital and they fi x it. You stagger around on crutches for a while.
Then, rather gingerly, you start to walk normally again. Pretty soon
you’ve forgotten about the whole thing. You’re back to normal.
There is such a thing as putting something to rights, as fi xing it, as
getting it back on track. You can fi x a broken leg, a broken toy, a
broken television.

So why can’t we fi x injustice?
It isn’t for want of trying. We have courts of law and magistrates

and judges and lawyers in plenty. I used to live in a part of Lon-
don where there was so much justice going on that it hurt—law-
makers, law enforcers, a Lord Chief Justice, a police headquarters,
and, just a couple of miles away, enough barristers to run a battle-
ship. (Though, since they would all be arguing with one another,
the battleship might be going around in circles.) Other countries
have similarly heavyweight organizations designed to make laws
and implement them.

And yet we have a sense that justice itself slips through our fi n-
gers. Sometimes it works; often it doesn’t. Innocent people get con-
victed; guilty people are let off. The bullies, and those who can
bribe their way out of trouble, get away with wrongdoing—not
always, but often enough for us to notice, and to wonder why.

Putting the World to Rights 5

People hurt others badly and walk away laughing. Victims don’t
always get compensated. Sometimes they spend the rest of their
lives coping with sorrow, hurt, and bitterness.

The same thing is going on in the wider world. Countries invade
other countries and get away with it. The rich use the power of
their money to get even richer while the poor, who can’t do any-
thing about it, get even poorer. Most of us scratch our heads and
wonder why, and then go out and buy another product whose
profi t goes to the rich company.

I don’t want to be too despondent. There is such a thing as jus-
tice, and sometimes it comes out on top. Brutal tyrannies are over-
thrown. Apartheid was dismantled. Sometimes wise and creative
leaders arise and people follow them into good and just actions.
Serious criminals are sometimes caught, brought to trial, convicted,
and punished. Things that are seriously wrong in society are some-
times put splendidly to rights. New projects give hope to the poor.
Diplomats achieve solid and lasting peace. But just when you think
it’s safe to relax . . . it all goes wrong again.

And even though we can solve a few of the world’s problems, at
least temporarily, we know perfectly well that there are others we
simply can’t and won’t.

Just after Christmas of 2004 an earthquake and tidal wave killed
more than three times as many people in a single day as the total
number of American soldiers who died in the entire Vietnam War.
There are some things in our world, on our planet, which make us
say, “That’s not right!” even when there’s nobody to blame. A tecton-
ic plate’s got to do what a tectonic plate’s got to do. The earthquake
wasn’t caused by some wicked global capitalist, by a late-blossoming
Marxist, or by a fundamentalist with a bomb. It just happened. And in
that happening we see a world in pain, a world out of joint, a world
where things occur which we seem powerless to make right.

The most telling examples are the ones closest to home. I have
high moral standards. I have thought about them. I have preached
about them. Good heavens, I have even written books about them.

6 S I M P L Y C H R I S T I A N

And I still break them. The line between justice and injustice,
between things being right and things not being right, can’t be drawn
between “us” and “them.” It runs right down through the mid-
dle of each one of us. The ancient philosophers, not least Aristotle,
saw this as a wrinkle in the system, a puzzle at several levels. We all
know what we ought to do (give or take a few details); but we all
manage, at least some of the time, not to do it.

Isn’t this odd?
How does it happen that, on the one hand, we all share not just

a sense that there is such a thing as justice, but a passion for it, a
deep longing that things should be put to rights, a sense of out-
of-jointness that goes on nagging and gnawing and sometimes
screaming at us—and yet, on the other hand, after millennia of
human struggle and searching and love and longing and hatred
and hope and fussing and philosophizing, we still can’t seem to
get much closer to it than people did in the most ancient societ-
ies we can discover?

The Cry for Justice

Recent years have witnessed extravagant examples of human
actions that have outraged our sense of justice. People sometimes
talk as if the last fi fty years have seen a decline in morality. But actu-
ally these have been some of the most morally sensitive, indeed
moralistic, times in recorded history. People care, and care passion-
ately, about the places where the world needs putting to rights.

Powerful generals sent millions to die in the trenches in the First
World War, while they themselves lived in luxury behind the lines
or back home. When we read the poets who found themselves
caught up in that war, we sense behind their poignant puzzlement
a smoldering anger at the folly and, yes, the injustice of it all. Why
should it have happened? How can we put it to rights?

An explosive cocktail of ideologies sent millions to die in the gas
chambers. Bits and pieces of religious prejudice, warped philoso-

Putting the World to Rights 7

phies, fear of people who are “different,” economic hardship, and
the need for scapegoats were all mixed together by a brilliant dem-
agogue who told people what at least some of them wanted to
believe, and who demanded human sacrifi ces as the price of “prog-
ress.” You only have to mention Hitler or the Holocaust to awak-
en the question: How did it happen? Where is justice? How can we
get it? How can we put things right? And, in particular, How can
we stop it from happening again?

But we can’t, or so it seems. Nobody stopped the Turks from
killing millions of Armenians from 1915 to 1917 (in fact, Hitler
famously referred to this when he was encouraging his colleagues
to kill Jews). Nobody stopped Tutsis and Hutus in Rwanda from
killing each other in very large numbers in 1994. The world had
said “Never again” after the Nazi Holocaust, but genocide was hap-
pening again, and we discovered to our horror that there was noth-
ing we could do to stop it.

And then there was apartheid. Massive injustice was perpetrat-
ed against a very large population in South Africa for a very long
time. Other countries, of course, had done similar things, but they
had been more effective in squashing opposition. Think of the “res-
ervations” for “Native Americans”: I remember the shock when I
saw an old “cowboys and Indians” movie and realized that when
I was young, I—like most of my contemporaries—would have
gone along unquestioningly with the assumption that cowboys
were basically good and Indians basically bad. The world has woken
up to the reality of racial prejudice since then; but getting rid of it
is like squashing the air out of a balloon. You deal with one corner
only to fi nd it popping up somewhere else. The world got togeth-
er over apartheid and said, “This won’t do”; but at least some of the
moral energy came from what the psychologists call projection—
that is, condemning someone else for something we are doing our-
selves. Rebuking someone on the other side of the world (while
ignoring the same problems back home) is very convenient, and it
provides a deep but spurious sense of moral satisfaction.

8 S I M P L Y C H R I S T I A N

And now we have the new global evils: rampant, uncaring, and
irresponsible materialism and capitalism on the one hand; raging,
unthinking religious fundamentalism on the other. As one famous
book puts it, we have “Jihad versus McWorld.” (Whether there is
such a thing as caring capitalism, or for that matter thoughtful fun-
damentalism, isn’t the point at the moment.) This brings us back to
where we were a few minutes ago. It doesn’t take a Ph.D. in mac-
roeconomics to know that if the rich are getting richer by the min-
ute, and the poor poorer, there is something badly wrong.

Meanwhile, we all want a happy and secure home life. Dr. Johnson,
the eighteenth-century conversationalist, once remarked that the aim
and goal of all human endeavor is “to be happy at home.” But in the
Western world, and many other parts as well, homes and families are
tearing themselves apart. The gentle art of being gentle—of kind-
ness and forgiveness, sensitivity and thoughtfulness and generosity and
humility and good old-fashioned love—have gone out of fashion. Iron-
ically, everyone is demanding their “rights,” and this demand is so shrill
that it destroys one of the most basic “rights,” if we can put it like that:
the “right,” or at least the longing and hope, to have a peaceful, stable,
secure, and caring place to live, to be, to learn, and to fl ourish.

Once again people ask the question: Why is it like this? Does it
have to be like this? Can things be put to rights, and if so how? Can
the world be rescued? Can we be rescued?

And once again we fi nd ourselves asking: Isn’t it odd that it
should be like that? Isn’t it strange that we should all want things to
be put to rights but can’t seem to do it? And isn’t the oddest thing
of all the fact that I, myself, know what I ought to do but often
don’t do it?

A Voice, or a Dream?

There are three basic ways of explaining this sense of the echo of a
voice, this call to justice, this dream of a world (and all of us with-
in it) put to rights.

Putting the World to Rights 9

We can say, if we like, that it is indeed only a dream, a projec-
tion of childish fantasies, and that we have to get used to living in
the world the way it is. Down that road we fi nd Machiavelli and
Nietzsche, the world of naked power and grabbing what you can
get, the world where the only sin is to be caught.

Or we can say, if we like, that the dream is of a different world
altogether, a world where we really belong, where everything is
indeed put to rights, a world into which we can escape in our
dreams in the present and hope to escape one day for good—but
a world which has little purchase on the present world except that
people who live in this one sometimes fi nd themselves dreaming
of that one. That approach leaves the unscrupulous bullies running
this world, but it consoles us with the thought that things will be
better somewhere, sometime, even if there’s not much we can do
about it here and now.

Or we can say, if we like, that the reason we have these dreams,
the reason we have a sense of a memory of the echo of a voice, is
that there is someone speaking to us, whispering in our inner ear—
someone who cares very much about this present world and our
present selves, and who has made us and the world for a purpose
which will indeed involve justice, things being put to rights, our-
selves being put to rights, the world being rescued at last.

Three of the great religious traditions have taken this last option,
and not surprisingly they are related; they are, as it were, second
cousins. Judaism speaks of a God who made the world and built
into it the passion for justice because it was his own passion. Chris-
tianity speaks of this same God having brought that passion into
play (indeed, “passion plays” in various senses are a characteris-
tic feature of Chris tianity) in the life and work of Jesus of Naza-
reth. Islam draws on some Jewish and some Chris tian stories and
ideas and creates a new synthesis in which the revelation of God’s will
in the Koran is the ideal which would put the world to rights, if only
it were obeyed. There are many differences among these three tradi-
tions, but on this point they are agreed, over against other philosophies

10 S I M P L Y C H R I S T I A N

and religions: the reason we think we have heard a voice is because
we have. It wasn’t a dream. There are ways of getting back in touch
with that voice and making what it says come true. In real life. In
our real lives.

Tears and Laughter

This book is written to explain and commend one of those tra-
ditions, the Chris tian one. It’s about real life, because Chris tians
believe that in Jesus of Nazareth the voice we thought we heard
became human and lived and died as one of us. It’s about justice,
because Chris tians not only inherit the Jewish passion for justice
but claim that Jesus embodied that passion, and that what he did,
and what happened to him, set in motion the Creator’s plan to res-
cue the world and put it back to rights. And it is therefore about us,
all of us, because we are all involved in this. As we saw, a passion for
justice, or at least a sense that things ought to be sorted out, is sim-
ply part of being human and living in the world.

You could put it like this. The ancient Greeks told a story of two
philosophers. One used to come out of his front door in the morn-
ing and roar with laughter. The world was such a comical place
that he couldn’t help it. The other came out in the morning and
burst into tears. The world was so full of sorrow and tragedy that
he couldn’t help it. In a sense, both were right. Comedy and trag-
edy both speak of things being out of order—in the one case, sim-
ply by being incongruous and therefore funny; in the other case,
by things not going the way they should, and people being crushed
as a result. Laughter and tears are a good index of being human.
Crocodiles look as though they’re crying, but they’re not sad. You
can program a computer to say something funny, but it will never
get the joke.

When the early Chris tians told the story of Jesus—which they
did in a number of ways to make a number of different points—
they never actually said that he laughed, and mentioned only once

Putting the World to Rights 11

that he burst into tears. But all the same, the stories they told of him
constantly hinted at laughter and tears in fair measure.

Jesus was always going to parties where people had plenty to eat
and drink and there seemed to be a celebration going on. He often
grossly exaggerated to make his point: here you are, he said, trying
to take a speck out of your friend’s eye, when you’ve got a huge
great plank in your own eye! He gave his followers, especially the
leading ones, funny nicknames (“Peter” means “Rocky”; James and
John he called “Thunder-boys”). Wherever he went, people were
excited because they believed that God was on the move, that a
new rescue operation was in the air, that things were going to be
put right. People in that mood are like old friends meeting up at
the start of a holiday. They tend to laugh a lot. There is a good time
coming. The celebration has begun.

Equally, wherever Jesus went he met an endless supply of people
whose lives had gone badly wrong. Sick people, sad people, people
in doubt, people in despair, people covering up their uncertain-
ties with arrogant bluster, people using religion as a screen against
harsh reality. And though Jesus healed many of them, it wasn’t like
someone simply waving a magic wand. He shared the pain. He was
deeply grieved at the sight of a leper and the thought of all that
the man had gone through. He wept at the tomb of a close friend.
Toward the end of the story, he himself was in agony, agony of soul
before he faced the same agony in his body.

It isn’t so much that Jesus laughed at the world, or wept at the
world. He was celebrating with the new world that was beginning
to be born, the world in which all that was good and lovely would
triumph over evil and misery. He was sorrowing with the world the
way it was, the world of violence and injustice and tragedy which
he and the people he met knew so well.

From the very beginning, two thousand years ago, the followers
of Jesus have always maintained that he took the tears of the world
and made them his own, carrying them all the way to his cruel and
unjust death to carry out God’s rescue operation; and that he took

12 S I M P L Y C H R I S T I A N

the joy of the world and brought it to new birth as he rose from
the dead and thereby launched God’s new creation. That double
claim is huge, and I won’t even try to explain it until Part Two. But
it makes the point that the Chris tian faith endorses the passion for
justice which every human being knows, the longing to see things
put to rights. And it claims that in Jesus, God himself has shared
this passion and put it into effect, so that in the end all tears may be
dried and the world may be fi lled with justice and joy.

Christians and Justice

“Well,” I can hear someone say at this point, “the followers of Jesus
haven’t made much progress so far, have they? What about the Cru-
sades? What about the Spanish Inquisition? Surely the church has
been responsible for more than its own fair share of injustice? What
about the people who bomb abortion clinics? What about the fun-
damentalists who think Armageddon is coming soon so it doesn’t
matter if they wreck the planet in the meantime? Haven’t Chris-
tians been part of the problem rather than part of the solution?”

Yes and no.
Yes: from very early on there have always been people who have

done terrible things in the name of Jesus. There have also been
Chris tians who have done terrible things knowing them to be
terrible things, without claiming that Jesus was supporting them.
There’s no point hiding from this truth, however uncomfortable
it may be.

But also no: because again and again, when we look at the wick-
ed things Chris tians have done (whether or not they were claim-
ing that God was on their side), we can see in retrospect at least that
they were muddled and mistaken about what Chris tianity actual-
ly is. It’s no part of Chris tian belief to say that the followers of Jesus
have always got everything right. Jesus himself taught his follow-
ers a prayer which includes a clause asking God for forgiveness. He
must have thought we would go on needing it.

Putting the World to Rights 13

But at the same time one of the biggest problems with the cred-
ibility of the Chris tian faith in the world today is that a great many
people still think of Chris tianity as identifi ed with “the West” (an
odd phrase, since it normally includes Australia and New Zea-
land, which are about as far east as you can go!)—that is, western …