Simply Christian: Why Christianity Makes Sense

In line with his stated goal of presenting Christianity in the most accessible way possible, Wright’s approach in the opening chapters is to touch on a handful of fundamental human experiences and use those as stepping stones to tread a carefully chosen path. Starting with the premise that human beings share certain experiences, he questions the value of these and asks whether they could be signs of a greater, transcendent reality with which we are all in touch to varying degrees.

Although many people in contemporary society view claims of universality with skepticism, the experiences Wright focuses on are foundational enough that they will likely ring true with most readers; as Wright notes, for example, people generally seem to have an aesthetic sensibility even if their particular tastes vary widely. However, Wright also challenges the relativism of many Western societies directly. His objection to the idea that something can be “true” for one person and not another flows partly from his religious convictions: Christianity maintains that there are in fact objective and shared realities to human existence. However, it also intersects with his recurring critique of Western consumer culture, which he describes as atomizing society in destructive ways. To the extent that spirituality can exist in this kind of society, Wright suggests, it does so as a kind of product marketed to individuals with no ties to one another or anything beyond themselves: “We are the captains of our own souls (whatever they may be)! [...] From this point of view, spirituality is a private hobby, an up-market version of daydreaming for those who like that kind of thing” (19). Part of making the case for Christianity is therefore making the case for a shared set of human experiences and aspirations.

The first common experience Wright highlights is the desire for justice in the world—for everyone to receive what is due to them and for the injustices of the world to be set right. If we assume the world is naturally broken and ugly then we should just get on with it and live our lives to the fullest, regardless of the pain it might cause other people. However, if we recognize that something is wrong with the world and that this is not how it is supposed to be, we can recognize that perhaps there is something that can be done about, and someone who might be able to set things right.

Wright’s line of reasoning here is a variation on the “argument from morality”: the idea that, assuming objective moral standards exist, those standards must originate in some transcendent source—i.e., God. The Christian story, the author argues, is the more specific answer to this. This is so not just because Christianity claims to have the correct answers—many religions do—but most importantly because Christianity asserts that God himself, the transcendent cause of all that exists, entered into the mess of history and shared our suffering and our pain. As Wright urges: “One of the central elements of the Christian story is the claim that the paradox of laughter and tears, woven as it is deep into the heart of all human experience, is woven also deep into the heart of God” (38).

Continuing the theme, the author goes to another common human experience: spirituality. Skeptics will be tempted to claim that this is nothing more than old prejudices and superstitions that have simply not died out—a relic of an age where it was easier to attribute lightning to Zeus than to electricity and shifting weather patterns. However, Wright frames the very durability of spirituality as a monumentally important fact, and one that we should recognize as a trace of a greater truth. In fact, our longing for companionship and community here on earth is a reflection of our innate desire for relationship with God. Humans were created to live in relationship and to love others, and we fulfill this desire most perfectly when we are able to love both our neighbor and the God who placed us into creation to be its loving caretakers and to witness its beauty.

Wright next offers a variation on the “argument from beauty”—the idea that beauty transcends material reality in a way that implies God’s existence. Since we live in a world marred by sin and filled with corruption, greed, selfishness, and violence, we can overlook the beauty that exists in the world, or at least the experience of beauty within our own hearts. Something that beauty does, however, is force us outside of ourselves to recognize that we are not the center of the universe, and that there is something objectively good and desirable to which we can be drawn and to which we can wish to be united in some way: “[B]eauty is both something that calls us out of ourselves and something which appeals to feelings deep within us” (44). Wright cites Plato’s theory of the world of the forms where the real things existed in themselves; to Plato, this world was just a shadow of that one. Christian teaching, however, insists that “in full view of the apparently contrary evidence, […] the present world of space, time, and matter always was and still is the good creation of a good God” (45).

The authors of the Christian Bible, Wright notes, were not strangers to suffering and pain. In many ways they were more familiar with it than we are today. In the contemporary world we sanitize the reality of death by sequestering the sick and dying in hospitals, nursing homes, and funeral parlors; we dull any pain with any number of narcotics; we desensitize ourselves to violence and anger by parading a stream of images before our eyes provided by Hollywood and the 24-hour news cycle. Nevertheless, the biblical authors insist that God is good, that creation is good, and that we should rejoice in this fact. This tension is a reality with which they are content to rest, and yet which they also insist will one day be changed: “The things that don’t make sense at the moment will display a harmony and perfection we hadn’t dreamed of” (47).