What does it mean to think and act like a Christian? It’s kind of like asking what it means to think and act like an American. It means a lot of different things to different people, and some of those things are incompatible. Or seem incompatible.
Is it possible to strip away individual ideas and articulate the heart of our faith? One author thinks so. I like reading his ideas precisely because he’s not from my country, denomination, or generation. Whether or not his conclusions mirror mine about Christianity, he challenges me to think differently.
I don’t read enough. When I read, I don’t reflect enough. And when I do reflect about what I read, I don’t share it enough.
I’ll try to improve. The blog is a good place to pause after I read a book and make a few comments. Maybe some of you will add your own in response. Maybe some of you will read the same books.
The book I just finished while getting away for a couple of days of R&R is Simply Christian: Why Christianity Makes Sense, by N. T. Wright. Wright is an Anglican bishop, scholar, and author.
Where would you start if you wrote a book distilling Christianity to its essence? Wright begins in a unique place – “echoes of a voice,” he calls his starting point.
What is it in the world around us that makes us wonder, “Is there something out there?” We may well wish the evidences of God were more obvious – so obvious that no one could miss them. Apparently that’s not the case – especially when it comes to the Christian understanding of God.
The voice is not always clear. But the echoes, Wright says, are unmistakable. And they are mostly in the form of powerful hints that something is missing. The world is not right. I am more than just a body. I need to love and be loved. The physical world is complex and intriguing, but I’m not sure I can fully understand or appreciate it.
These unsatisfied longings – for justice, for spirituality, for community, and for beauty – inspire a search for who or what might be beyond the world I see, touch, taste, hear, and feel.
The Who behind the world, Wright argues, naturally, is God – the God of the Bible. He rejects two other options for explaining the world. Option One is that God and the world are the same (pantheism). Option Two is that God and the world both exist but do not connect in a meaningful way (deism). The Bible tells and shows how Heaven and Earth overlap and interlock.
Then Wright tells of that God-world connection through the story of the Jews and of Jesus and his followers. In the end of the book, he tells us what all this means for those who believe and belong to Jesus Christ.
I like the book. It’s worth your reading. Its greatest asset is its accessibility. For the most part, the book assumes no prior knowledge of Christianity, and explains fairly well the terms as they are introduced. So it’s a good beginning.
As I started the book, I thought it might be a really great book for a skeptic to read. And it might be. It has great merit as it shows how universal human longings are fulfilled by a “simply Christian” message. It also deals honestly with the whats and whys and hows of Christians failing to be Christian – something a skeptic certainly wants to know about. Wright doesn’t shy away from the “hot topics” – dealing, for example, with human sexuality with a fresh approach that is nevertheless faithful to Scripture and the witness of the church – but not until the end of the book.
Still, his focus is on what makes Christians Christian. There are places at which a skeptic or Christian outsider might feel a little lost, because Wright is trying to present a “simply Christian” answer to a problem that perplexes and divides Christians – but non-Christians probably think the whole debate is silly or unintelligible – how Christians squabble over the precise meaning of communion or the practice of worship, for example.
But I definitely commend the book to (a) those who are interested in a “Christianity 101” type overview of the faith – from the outside or the inside, and (b) those are locked into concepts and language that emerge from a rather narrow experience with Christian teaching and history.
It’s good to step outside those boundaries and think about what it means to be “simply Christian.”
Postscript. When I went to order the book for the church library, I learned that a new edition of the book is scheduled for release in 2010. That will be interesting. How much has changed in what it means to be “simply Christian” since 2006, when Wright first published the book?