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 3, Chapters 11-16Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 3: “Reflecting the Image”
Part 3, Chapter 11 Summary: “Worship”
Worship is a natural human reaction to the gift of divine revelation. Worship is not an undignified, groveling submission to a narcissistic being who brought the world into existence on account of his own ego. Worship is similar to the spontaneous utterance of joy and gratitude upon receiving a marvelous gift. Worship, by the strict definition, “means, literally, acknowledging the worth of something or someone. It means recognizing and saying that something or someone is worthy of praise” (144). It is a kind of falling in love with the object being worshiped—in this case, the object of our affection is the God of the universe. Theology, then, is not a speculative quest for useless knowledge of which we can never be 100% sure; theology is the search for knowledge of the beloved so that we can know and love God more.
Part 3, Chapter 12 Summary: “Prayer”
Similar to the human act of worship, the act of prayer is a means by which we acknowledge our relationship with God and, at the same time, attempt to set our own thinking straight in regard to him. The prayer that Jesus offers in the Gospels, commonly known as “The Lord’s Prayer” or “The Our Father,” is an example of a prayer that concerns the desire to bring heaven and earth together. Prayer is both an act of worship and an act of trust; we thank God for who he is and what he has done, and yet we also beg God to change the world and us so that his will can be done more completely and so that we ourselves can be agents of his providence.
Wright points out that
[T]he whole point of the Christian story, at the climax of the Jewish story, is that the curtain has been pulled back, the door has been opened from the other side, and like Jacob we have glimpsed a ladder between heaven and earth with messengers going to and fro upon it (163-64).
Christian prayer is about standing alongside Jesus in seeking justice from the Father, centering ourselves on the truth that God is in control and we are not, and asking (and expecting) God to make things better.
Part 3, Chapter 13 Summary: “The Book God Breathed”
The Bible is a book that is in fact made up of dozens of smaller books. Wright proposes thinking of it like a “mural,” like someone “writing a score” of music, or like “a dramatist writing a play” (174). The Christian Bible consists of two parts: the Old Testament—an older word meaning “covenant”—and the New Testament. The division demarcates the writings of Israel that preceded the advent of Jesus Christ, and the writings of Israel that followed. The central figure around which these parts revolve is, of course, the person of Jesus Christ, who came to inaugurate the new and final covenant with Israel as the fulfillment of all the promises made by YHWH to Israel.
The writings that make up the Old Testament were composed over a span of hundreds of years (if not longer) and narrate the history of the world from the creation in the opening chapters of Genesis all the way up to the Maccabean crisis in the second century before the birth of Christ. The New Testament—composed of 27 books upon which all Christians agree—narrates the time from right before the birth of Christ through the early church in the late first century before the destruction of the Jerusalem Temple. What makes the Bible special, Wright argues, is the Christian claim that it is “inspired” by God, meaning that it was written and passed down from generation to generation under the direct guidance and prompting of the Holy Spirit. This does not mean the Bible fell from the sky, nor does it mean that the authors who wrote it were simply being dictated to by a voice in their heads. Rather,
[T]he writers, compilers, editors, and even collectors of scripture were people who, with different personalities, styles, methods, and intentions, were nonetheless caught up in the strange purposes of the covenant God—purposes which included the communication, by writing, of his word (181).
The inspiration of scripture is a teaching that assures the Christian faithful that they are receiving the very real words of God through human words, in a manner that accommodates our mode of understanding.
Part 3, Chapter 14 Summary: “The Story and the Task”
The authority invested in Jesus, as well as the authority invested in the pages of the Bible, derive their authority from the same divine source. With this being the case, the Bible—as the record of salvation history, most especially the events of the life of Jesus Christ—is authoritative for Christians. What this means is that the Bible is both a set of rules—the 10 Commandments, for instance—and a narrative to model one’s life after in a more phenomenological sense. In this sense, [T]he authority of the Bible is the authority of a love story in which we are invited to take part. It is, in that sense, more like the “authority” of a dance in which we are invited to join” (186). The story scripture narrates is a story in which we are characters called to play our parts to advance the plot.
We read scripture in order to discover more about the author and more about the part we are to play. In doing so, we become agents who are capable of carrying out God’s grand design for the world, and we learn to listen to God’s voice, which is capable of speaking outside of scripture as well. This of course raises the question of how one is to read and interpret scripture. The one sure rule for interpretation is to listen to the voice of the church and to seek the answers in truth and in love. The Bible is
God’s gift to the church, to equip that church for its work in the world, and that serious study of it can and should become one of the places where, and the means by which, heaven and earth interlock and God’s future purposes arrive in the present (198).
Part 3, Chapter 15 Summary: “Believing and Belonging”
Many different images could help us understand the nature of the church. The church is like a tree because it begins small and unnoticed and yet grows high into the sky, its branches stretching out in all directions yet retaining their unity with the trunk. It grows from one into many. On the other hand, the church is also like a river, where a vast multitude of tributaries all flow together into one coursing stream, made more powerful and more dynamic precisely because the great host of smaller streams have united in one flowing movement.
The purpose of this diversity in unity is multifaceted, but at the very least we can say that the church is the people of God on earth called together to bring about the kingdom of God and work towards transforming the world in truth and in love. Wright argues that we need to recover a sense of corporate identity; the church is a family, and as such it needs to work and operate as such. As the family of God, the church is called to go on mission to proclaim the good news of God’s work in the world through Jesus Christ.
Part 3, Chapter 16 Summary: “New Creation, Starting Now”
Contrary to popular belief, the main point of Christian belief isn’t assuring oneself of going to heaven upon death. In fact, even heaven as taught by Christian faith isn’t the final resting place for the righteous soul. Heaven is a waystation: The final destination of the universe is the recreation of all that is in the new heavens and the new earth. God is moving all of creation towards a new paradigm, refashioning the world in such a way as to never need redemption again and in which we will live bodily and completely. Faithfulness to God in this life isn’t simply about being rewarded in the next life but rather is concerned with beginning to live the new life of glory in the present moment.
Likewise, Christian ethics isn’t just about following rules; it’s about discovering the deepest truths about God and the world and attempting to live as fully human a life as possible. Christian ethics is concerned with happiness, justice, and love. As such, we must reject much of the world: hatred, injustice, and all situations that continue to perpetuate the darkness and suffering that we have to endure due to sin. At the same time, we must rediscover what it means to be a human person, and what it means to say yes to God and to love our neighbor as we should. As the author insists: “Every Christian is called to work, at every level of life, for a world in which reconciliation and restoration are put into practice, and so to anticipate that day when God will indeed put everything to rights” (226). Christian living celebrates the goodness of God’s creation, and Christian holiness is a means by which we unite ourselves to God and begin to refashion the world in anticipation of the final work that God will bring about at the end of all things.
Part 3, Chapters 11-16 Analysis
The final section of Wright’s text moves from considering who God is as a Trinitarian communion of love to who he means humans to be as we strive for union with him. He begins with the reality of Christian worship, noting that worship is not the slavish bribery of an unknown higher power that it is often depicted to be. Rather, worship is like bursting out in song on some joyous occasion or feeling gratitude at receiving an unexpected gift.
In recounting the narrative in the Book of the Apocalypse, Wright declares that the narrator is able to see into heaven and get a glimpse of the true nature of reality: “Here we see God’s world as it should be, God’s world as it already is within the dimension of heaven. All creation worships God” (145). In worshiping God here and now, the human person is simply entering into an act that is already occurring in God’s own sphere. To worship God makes one “more truly human” (148), as the human person is literally created in the image and likeness of God. In this sense, worship of the living God is both a supernatural act of adoration and a completely and fully human activity that allows us to be more fully who we are and are meant to become.
As a companion point, the next chapter deals with the concept of prayer, both as an act of worship and an act of communion with God. The ultimate paradigm in this regard is the prayer that Jesus specifically hands on to the group of apostles, commonly referred to as the Lord’s Prayer. This prayer has a number of specific themes that sum up the whole of Christianity: “It’s a prayer about God’s kingdom coming on earth as in heaven—which, as we’ve seen, pretty much sums up what a lot of Christianity is all about” (159-60). Continuing the theme of this third section of the book, prayer is not just about asking for stuff that you want or asking for things to change in some way—it’s not about getting in touch with yourself, nor is it sending a message across the void to an unknown entity whom you’re attempting to bribe. It is principally about being in communion with God through the agency of the Holy Spirit.
In one of the more practical chapters, Wright next moves to a discussion of the Christian Bible—one of the most important and yet most complex issues of the entire book. Giving an overview of the text, he lays out the various parts of the Bible and the way in which they came to be part of the canon (the list of books that make up the Bible as a whole). The comparison of scripture to a mural or a novel evokes an author telling a story made up of disparate parts that are nevertheless unified and cohesive when seen from a distance. This manner of speaking about scripture takes up a long tradition in Christian reflection that speaks of God as an author, both of scripture and of all creation itself.
Inserted into this discussion of scripture is a discussion of why God would reveal himself to the world through scripture, as well as a discussion of the means by which to read and interpret scripture. The latter is a topic that can cause tension even within Christian communities themselves. Reflecting on the nature of the Bible, Wright contemplates the fact that it might seem strange that an omnipotent God would speak to humans in their own language. Upon further reflection, however, the heart of the Christian message is that God desires relationship with human beings:
[W]hen this God is going to work within his world, he wants to work through his image-bearing human creatures, and that, since he wants to do so as far as possible with their intelligent cooperation, he wants to communicate with and through them verbally (181-82).
That God offers his speech to human beings in human speech is a marker of the divine condescension that culminates in the incarnation of the Son of God in the person of Jesus Christ.
Following upon this discussion is a reflection on the interpretation of the Bible in the history of Christianity. There are aspects of the Bible that are explicitly clear and nearly universally agreed upon among Christians: the 10 Commandments, the basic stories of the Old and New Testaments, the various injunctions to do good and avoid evil. However, the fact that the Bible is not simply a list of laws is what makes it a difficult document to decipher, especially in regard to moral teaching and dogmatic statements. The authority of scripture derives from its source—God—and yet it is an authority that is more interested in persuasion and invitation than injunction and command. The Bible is “a love story in which we are invited to take part […] and we are invited to become living, participating, intelligent, and decision-making characters within the story as it moves toward its destination” (186). Interpreting scripture is the attempt at discerning both what God has to say to us in the moment and what he calls us to do in order to play our parts to perfection.
In the final two chapters, Wright explains the nature of the church—the community in which God calls the Christian to live and work—and the reality that the world and even heaven itself are not the last word in the human story. The church, as Wright describes it, is not a particular congregation or sect; rather, it is like a tree or a river in which there is a great deal of diversity in unity and vice versa. He also brings up the biblical images of the church as the people of God and the body of Christ to help explain the mysterious nature of the church as a living community in which the Holy Spirit is currently at work. As he states,
The church is the single, multiethnic family promised by the creator God to Abraham. It was brought into being through Israel’s Messiah, Jesus; it was energized by God’s Spirit; and it was called to bring the transformative news of God’s rescuing justice to the whole creation (200).
The mission of the church is central to the mission of each individual Christian believer, and as such it is not something that one can gloss over or relegate to somebody else. On account of the fact that a particular event has occurred in history—the Christ event—the faithful are called to live out their own history as participating in the larger story of salvation. In the end, this is the ultimate reason for morality and for Christian ethics: God is calling all of creation to be renewed. To that end, he has given human beings the gift of the Holy Spirit, calling the Christian to begin the new life of glory here and now on earth and work for the good of God’s kingdom by acting out of love. The Christian faith insists that “God’s plan is not to abandon this world, the world which he said was ‘very good.’ Rather, he intends to remake it” (219). A concern for the ultimate end of the universe—for the next life—necessarily impacts the life that we are currently living: “[T]he whole world is now God’s holy land, and God will reclaim it and renew it as the ultimate goal of all our wanderings” (222-23). In living as a Christian, the human person is fully alive, living in the space in which heaven and earth intersect within the human heart itself.
