38 pages • 1 hour read
N. T. WrightSimply Christian: Why Christianity Makes Sense
Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 2006A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Part 2, Chapters 5-10Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 2: “Staring at the Sun”
Part 2, Chapter 5 Summary: “God”
Central to Christianity is its perspective on God and the world: “The Christian story claims to be the true story about God and the world […] it offers itself as the explanation” (55). Equally important to the Christian claim is what it declares is not true, for it claims that God is not the same kind of being to which we are accustomed—that God is not something that is observable within the world. Additionally (and this is what makes a book of this sort necessary), “[M]any people today have only the sketchiest idea of what Christianity has said about God” (57).
Much of Western society lives in a post-Christian world that claims to already know what Christianity teaches and has declined the invitation to join the ranks of those who believe. One of the most common misconceptions concerns the reality of heaven and what Christianity actually teaches: Heaven is not, in fact, the ultimate destination of humanity. It is merely a waystation and preparation for the ultimate destiny of the universe: the new heavens and the new earth. For now, however, the spheres of the divine and the human overlap in all kinds of mysterious ways that force us to be open-minded and accepting of the fact that God is able to work within creation without impinging on human freedom.
Part 2, Chapter 6 Summary: “Israel”
That Jesus was born into the nation of Israel was not an accident of history but a providentially arranged event that began with the calling of Abraham narrated in Genesis. Almost immediately after our creation, human beings failed in our mission and sinned. After this “Fall,” every single time God called an individual or a group to fulfill a particular mission, they failed. The sacred texts of Israel describe God making covenant after covenant with the plan of ultimately redeeming the world; God continues to be faithful to his people even when they are not faithful to him. His plan is to work “within the creation itself” and, further, “from within the covenant people themselves” (75). This is the reason why Jesus comes to Israel.
In Israel’s long history of failure and sin, the prophets continued to declare that God would one day vindicate his people and change the narrative by sending a redeemer, or a “messiah,” who would turn things around. There would come a time when God would fulfill his promises both to Israel and the world. In the meantime Israel would cherish particular things in its tradition—king, temple, Torah—and wait for the coming messiah to bring about the new creation in which all would be harmonious, and peace and justice would rule the day.
Part 2, Chapter 7 Summary: “Jesus and the Coming of God’s Kingdom”
One of the principal claims and characteristics of Christianity rests in the fact that “Christianity is about something that happened” (91). It is not purely concerned with the moral example and teaching Jesus offered, nor is it purely about the “grand exchange” between heaven and earth in which Christ lays down his life to give humans eternal life. It is about these things, no doubt, but it is fundamentally about the work that God has accomplished in redeeming the world and leading it to glory, sparking the final movement of history towards the consummation of the world: the new heavens and the new earth.
The person of Jesus, Wight argues, is the most influential figure in Western history, and we are “spoiled for choice” when it comes to our knowledge of his words and actions (91). The four Christian Gospels are actually some of the most historically reliable documents that human history has produced, contrary to what some skeptical circles have asserted. The Gospels record words and deeds that accord with a first-century Palestinian context, and they were all produced within living memory of Jesus and those who followed him during his lifetime. Central to the preaching of Jesus was his concern with the kingdom of God: the appearance within world history of the reign of God that would finally set all things right. This very same teaching would eventually lead to the events of the cross, as the religious leaders of the time were scandalized and afraid of losing control.
Part 2, Chapter 8 Summary: “Jesus: Rescue and Renewal”
Wright contends that the remarkable thing about Jesus was not so much his mission as the messiah and redeemer—Israel had long awaited this figure—as the manner in which he accomplished this mission: suffering. Rather than arrive as a conquering warrior, Jesus allowed the wrath and violence of the current age to pour itself out against him. He was to be “both royal and sufferer” (107)—a king who would lay down his life for the salvation of his people. As before, the true enemy was evil and the hold that it possessed over the entire human race; the death of Jesus was a tragedy and an injustice that was, in the providential arrangement of God’s plan, transformed into the single necessary redemptive event of all human history.
Once this death occurred, Jesus’s followers almost immediately began to proclaim his resurrection. Unlike pagan myths that concerned the reappearance of particular seasonal gods, this was a resurrection of an individual human person after a brutal and public death. This was yet another facet of the messiah’s mission that was surprising: the resurrection of a divine human that added to the mystery of the unfolding of Jewish monotheism to include the divinity of Jesus Christ.
Part 2, Chapter 9 Summary: “God’s Breath of Life”
Once Jesus rose from the dead, all bets were off; the apostles and the other followers of Jesus had no idea what would occur next. With the ascension of Jesus, the descent of the Holy Spirit in Jerusalem sparked the birth of the church. While to many the word “church” conjures images of dusty stone buildings and unwelcoming groups of people, our understanding of the reality of the church needs to be rehabilitated. It was the church in Africa that resisted and suffered through apartheid, and it was the church in Communist Europe that resisted the totalitarian regimes and allowed human culture to survive through the violent oppression of the mid-20th century. The divine gift of the Holy Spirit works within the church itself to empower human beings to live a life of grace and glory in the here and now. The church is now the place where heaven and earth meet.
Part 2, Chapter 10 Summary: “Living by the Spirit”
It is not just the church where the Holy Spirit resides, but within the hearts of each individual believer. In the time of the Old Covenant, the day of Pentecost was a celebration of the giving of the Law at Mount Sinai, which allowed the people of Israel to live in communion with YHWH (the initials for the Hebrew name of God). Now, with the institution of the New Covenant, the Holy Spirit allows all those who have faith to live in communion with the living Triune God by empowering them by grace. Through the gift of the Spirit, God has given us access to the true wisdom by which we can live in harmony with each other and in union with God. Christian spirituality is not just a way of fine-tuning ourselves to live as efficiently as possible, but a means by which we develop a genuine relationship with God and enter into the communion of love that exists at the heart of reality.
Part 2, Chapters 5-10 Analysis
While Christianity is obviously a religion concerned with human action and human flourishing, it can only be so due to the fact that it is principally concerned with the reality of God. Human beings are contingent, but God is necessary; creation began to exist, but God necessarily exists and is the source of all creation. Recognizing that many who are critical of the concept of God imagine Christian belief to be a kind of therapeutic, moralistic fantasy about a supremely powerful creature that deigns (at times) to grant wishes, Wright stresses that God is not another kind of “being” within the universe. Nothing could be farther from the Christian concept of God as the necessary cause of existence.
One reason why a book of this sort is so necessary, in the mind of the author, is because the post-Christian society in which he and his presumed readers live already believes itself to have a handle on the Christian teaching that it has rejected. Not so, says Wright, for the vast majority of people who have rejected Christianity are rejecting something of which they are completely ignorant. Even the concepts of heaven and hell, which to some would seem relatively simplistic, are poorly understood by Christians, let alone those who find themselves outside of the Christian community. The concept of heaven, while real and important, is not the end of the road for the Christian faithful: The Nicene Creed—the basic statement of belief in mainstream Christianity—itself confesses as much when it speaks of an expectation of the “resurrection of the dead and the life of the world to come.” In the meantime, however, the spheres of heaven and earth exist in a mysterious relationship that makes this world a kind of liminal space held in existence by the love of God: “[F]or the ancient Israelite and the early Christian, the creation of the world was the free outpouring of God’s powerful love. The one true God made a world that was other than himself, because that is what love delights to do” (65). That is one of the keys to the Christian message: the universe, and each human being within it, has been loved into existence.
At the heart of this loving creation is the nation of Israel, the people whom God chose to be the channel through which he would heal and glorify a broken and sinful world. Contemporary culture might view this situation—Jesus being born to a particular family, and to a particular people—and see a kind of scandal of particularity; however, this is not the case. If the world is to be set to rights through a member of the human race, then it must be the case that a particular person would have to be born into a particular family, who in turn would belong to a particular people in a particular part of the world. The Christian faith claims that this means of salvation is providentially arranged through the people of Israel. Through the various covenants established with the Israelites, a particular people is selected through which to accomplish the divine mission:
The families of the earth have become divided and confused, and are ruining their own lives and that of the world at large. Abraham and his descendants are somehow to be the means of God putting things to rights, the spearhead of God’s rescue operation (74).
Sparking this coming renewal, Christ takes up his public ministry right on the heels of the mission of John the Baptist, a wilderness preacher and son of the priest Zechariah, who had begun a ministry of repentance and baptism. One of the most crucial aspects of Jesus’s preaching concerned the proclamation of the kingdom of God—the proclamation that “God’s future was breaking in to the present. Heaven was arriving on earth” (100). One of the most interesting facets to this kingdom proclamation concerns precisely what it was not: It was not going to be an earthly, political kingdom; it was not going to be won by violence or intrigue; it was not even going to be fundamentally concerned with worldly power. As Jesus states in the Gospel of John, “My kingdom is not of this world” (John 18:36). In fact, Jesus’s power looks almost like powerlessness: as a king, he was going to draw all things to himself (see John 12:32) by choosing to lay down his own life in sacrifice, choosing to let the world pour out its own hatred upon him without doing any violence back. The necessity of his suffering is what was so unique. Wright sums this up as follows:
The death of Jesus of Nazareth as the king of the Jews, the bearer of Israel’s destiny, the fulfillment of God’s promises to his people of old, is either the most stupid, senseless waste and misunderstanding the world has ever seen, or it is the fulcrum around which world history turns. Christianity is based on the belief that it was and is the latter (111).
This faith is the cause of Christian activity up to this day. If Jesus was not raised from the dead and was not who he had claimed to be, then the carrying on of this particular tradition and set of beliefs would be the most useless thing in the world—a fantasy derived from wishful thinking and hardly worthy of a second glance. Points resembling this one have a long history in Christian apologetics and most famously feature in Lewis’s Mere Christianity as a “trilemma”: In claiming to be God, Lewis argues, Jesus must have been either lying, deluded, or in fact divine. The first two options seem untenable given the clarity of Jesus’s moral teachings, so, Lewis says, the latter must be true. It’s worth noting that some scholars, including some who do accept orthodox Christian teachings on Jesus’s divinity, do not believe the Bible supports the assertion that Jesus himself claimed to be God. Wright, however, argues that the Bible does support Jesus’s awareness, on some level, of his divinity.
Wright further explains that since the Holy Spirit has been poured out upon the church that Jesus founded before his ascension, Christians are empowered to live out each day with supernatural grace and love. Even though evil has been committed in the name of Jesus or the church, nothing about that evil is in any way justified or made necessary by the reality that is Christianity. The church has been accused (sometimes rightly) of atrocities, but this does not diminish the supernatural character of the church or the necessity for the church to go on fulfilling her divine mission to make disciples of all nations. As the divine gift of God, the Holy Spirit lives in the hearts of each of the faithful—on account of the sacrament of baptism—infusing the supernatural gifts of faith, hope, and love into the very center of their persons, allowing them to love and live in a way that reflects the glory of God.
