Simply Christian: Why Christianity Makes Sense

“[T]he Christian faith endorses the passion for justice which every human being knows, the longing to see things put to rights.”

One of the principal theses of the book is that the human desire for justice is an “echo” of the presence of God in the world. The author contends that this search for true justice serves as a marker and precondition for the search for the divine within the world. Christianity is the system that most satisfies the human thirst for things to be set right.

“Saying ‘It’s true for you' sounds fine and tolerant. But it only works because it’s twisting the word ‘true’ to mean, not ‘a true revelation of the way things are in the real world,’ but ‘something that is genuinely happening inside you.’”

Here the claim is that an absolute moral relativism is a descent into the absurd. Ultimately, there must be some common truths that are not simply unique and subjective. This common phrase is actually a claim that there is absolutely no way to really and truly know what is going on in the world around us at an objective level—a claim that Wright views as fundamentally irrational. Here Wright offers another glimpse into why he sees being Christian in contemporary society as “anything but simple” (xii): Wright is pushing back not so much against scientific empiricism (which maintains that an objective reality exists, even if it might deny that spiritual experience is part of it), but against a postmodern ethos that centers subjective experience as the only reality (or at least the only knowable one).

“[W]e humans were designed to find our purpose and meaning not simply in ourselves and our own inner lives, but in one another and in the shared meanings and purposes of a family, a street, a workplace, a community, a town, a nation.”

Contrary to popular belief—especially in the modern West—human beings are not meant to go through life alone but to live in community and in relationship with other human beings. Humans are only truly themselves when in communion with and for others; this is the great purpose to which, Wright argues, God calls each individual.

“In the early stories, the point was that the Creator loved the world he had made, and wanted to look after it in the best possible way. To that end, he placed within his world a looking-after creature, a creature who would demonstrate to the creation who he, the Creator, really was, and who would set to work developing the creation and making it flourish and fulfill its purpose.”

The creation narrative in the opening chapters of Genesis reveal that God created humans, among other things, specifically to look after the rest of creation: God desired human beings to be his representatives, caring for creation and demonstrating a shared love for all that exists. Not content to retain the glory within his own divinity, God created human beings to be true agents in the world—ones able to cultivate the earth, protect it, and participate in its flourishing.

“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.”

At the core of Christian teaching is the claim that it is not only the human being but God who experiences joy, sorrow, and pain. In the person of Jesus Christ, the human experience is wrapped up in divinity. Christianity is not a religion beholden to a cold and far-off master, but a way of life devoted to one who entered the suffering and chaos of the world out of love and compassion.

“[B]eauty is both something that calls us out of ourselves and something which appeals to feelings deep within us.”

Like the human thirst for justice and equity, the experience of beauty is another of these “echoes” which force us to ask greater questions and seek greater answers. Beauty is something that awakens something deep within the human heart and at the same time forces the one who experiences it outside of themselves, thrusting them into an existential moment of questioning. The paradoxical nature of beauty is that it pierces the heart and calls from above, again making it, in Wright’s view, a compelling claim for Christianity: Beauty simultaneously speaks to the divine part of human nature and calls humanity out of our fallen state.

“The great monotheistic faiths declare, in full view of the apparently contrary evidence, that the present world of space, time, and matter always was and still is the good creation of a good God.”

The human experience is far too often an ugly one, filled with suffering, pain, and injustice. The claim of Christianity, however, and indeed of any system that posits a single super-transcendent cause of reality, is that creation is in fact good. The Christian faith is able to claim that creation is fundamentally good while also acknowledging the real tragedy that makes up the human experience.

“The point of the story is that the masterpiece already exists—in the mind of the composer. At the moment, neither the instruments nor the players are ready to perform it. But when they are, the manuscript we already have—the present world with all its beauty and all its puzzlement—will turn out to be truly part of it. The deficiencies in the one part we possess will be made good. The things that don’t make sense at the moment will display a harmony and perfection we hadn’t dreamed of. The points at which today the music seems almost perfect, lacking just one small thing, will be completed.”

What makes the Christian faith unique, Wright argues, is that it does not try to shy away from difficult questions, pretend that they don’t exist, or that they’re only figments of one’s imagination. Christianity claims that reality is so overwhelmingly beyond our capacity to comprehend that we can only make sense of one small fraction of the truth at any one time. However, when we are face to face with God, we will be able to see the whole story in such a way that the providential ordering of God will be clear; the world will be at peace, and we will be able to see the harmony of the universe in which God is able to bring good out of evil and joy out of suffering.

“It is all too easy to make the mistake of speaking and thinking as though God (if there is a God) might be a being, an entity, within our world, accessible to our interested study in the same sort of way we might study music or mathematics, open to our investigation by the same sort of techniques we use for objects and entities within our world.”

The most common error made by those outside the Christian community is to view the Christian claim concerning the existence of God as a claim concerning a particular being within the created order. This is a category mistake, for the claim of Christianity is not that about the existence of a kind of superbeing at the top of the chain of existence, but that God is beyond existence as the very cause of created existence. Since God is the cause of all existence, it is impossible that we could investigate and test this cause in the same manner we do other things.

“[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.”

There is an ancient philosophical principle that states that “the good is self-diffusive.” This means that goodness, by its very nature, gives itself to others. Love is perhaps the greatest good, and the Christian principle is that God is love and creation is the totally free outpouring of a God whose only desire is to share his love and goodness.

“Sometimes God is described as the father, and Israel as the firstborn son; sometimes God is the master, Israel the servant. Sometimes, hauntingly, the covenant is spoken of in terms of a marriage, with God as bridegroom and Israel as bride. We need all these images (remembering, of course, that they are only images, and that they are taken from a world quite different from our own) to get the full flavor of the story.”

The Christian perspective on the relationship between God and the human race is that it is a supremely complex one no single image or metaphor can explain. All of the various images that the Bible contains say something true about this relationship without claiming to be exhaustive. Only by the kaleidoscopic unity of the variety of images does the truth of the matter shine through.

“Part of the central task of the king, should a true king ever emerge, would not only be to establish justice in the world; it would also involve the proper reestablishment of the place where heaven and earth met.”

A true king, not one in name only, would establish peace and harmony in all human spheres. Not only would there be peace between neighbor and neighbor and between nation and nation, but there would even be peace between heaven and earth. Real justice is about being in right relationship, and Israel’s entire history was about their failure to maintain right relationship with their God.

“[T]he Torah was all about living as the people—the family—of God. It was an answer to that cry for true relationship, with God and with one another, which echoes around every human heart.”

Contrary to popular belief, the following of the Torah—literally, “the Law”—was not primarily about obeying rules. Following Torah and being obedient to the law was about setting one’s self in the proper sphere for right relationship with one’s neighbor and with God. The law existed for the sake of the person, to allow them to flourish in such a way that they would be able to fulfill their mission.

“Christianity is about something that happened. Something that happened to Jesus of Nazareth. Something that happened through Jesus of Nazareth.”

Christianity is not just about trying to be a good person, and even less is it about claiming moral superiority over others in order to grasp power and influence. In fact, Christianity doesn’t even claim to be primarily about moral teaching: It is about a historical event that it claims changed the fabric of the universe. The central claim of Christianity is that the God who brought the whole of created reality into existence broke into that very same existence in the person of Jesus Christ, who came to restore the world and mend the damage done by human pride and sin.

“The real enemy, after all, was not Rome, but the powers of evil that stood behind human arrogance and violence, powers of evil with which Israel’s leaders had fatally colluded.”

While the Roman empire might have embodied Israel’s suffering and oppression, ultimately it was not the root of the evil that they had undergone. In Christian teaching, the real enemy is sin, which causes human suffering and pain. Jesus came not to overthrow the Roman empire in particular, but to overthrow sin, evil, and even death itself.

“Resurrection isn’t a fancy way of saying “going to heaven when you die.” It is not about ‘life after death’ as such. Rather, it’s a way of talking about being bodily alive again after a period of being bodily dead.”

The Christian belief of an afterlife is not simply belief in “heaven.” Certainly, many branches of Christianity do believe in “heaven,” but they assert that it is merely an intermediate state between the earthly life with which we are familiar and the ultimate end of all things in the new heavens and the new earth. Raising up the whole of creation to a glorious new existence of immortality and splendor is the meaning of resurrection.

“But from the earliest days of Christianity we find an astonishing shift, for which again nothing in Jewish traditions of the time had prepared Jesus’s followers. They remained firmly within Jewish monotheism; and yet they said, from very early on, that Jesus was indeed divine.”

The whole history of ancient Israel’s belief was that there was only one God, and that this God was unique to himself; it was the strictest monotheism that the world had ever produced. Wright thus suggests that the fact that the early Christians—who were all Jewish—saw Jesus as divine is unexpected (and consequently, Wright implies, more likely grounded in truth). Far from diverging from their monotheism, however, the early Jewish believers in Jesus saw themselves as discovering a much deeper truth about their God than they ever could have imagined on their own.

“One key element of living as a Christian is learning to live with the life, and by the rules, of God’s future world, even as we are continuing to live within the present one (which Paul calls “the present evil age” and Jesus calls “this corrupt and sinful generation”).”

Christian living is about embracing the here and now along with the promise of the life to come. It means being honest about the hard and dark times we find ourselves in while striving to embody the best and brightest. Only by committing to this kind of ethical lifestyle will Christians be able to truly live out their destiny as sons and daughters of God in the Holy Spirit.

“God offers us, by the Spirit, a fresh kind of relationship with himself—and, at the same time, a fresh kind of relationship with our neighbors and with the whole of creation. The renewal of human lives by the Spirit provides the energy through which damaged and fractured human relationships can be mended and healed.”

The work of the Spirit, as the bond of love between Father and Son, is to refashion and sanctify the world such that harmony and healing are able to reign. The Spirit is the means by which we enter into communion with the Trinity, and also the means by which we are able to heal our wounded human nature and enter into relationship with others. Christian life in the Spirit is healed and refashioned life that pulls heaven down into the sphere of our own earthly life.

“There is always a suspicion that creeps into discussions of this kind, a niggling worry that the call to worship God is rather like the order that goes out from a dictator whose subjects may not like him but have learned to fear him.”

For those outside the Christian community—or, indeed, outside any faith-based community—the idea of worship can seem like a relic of a time when people lived in fear and superstition. This could not be further from the truth, Wright argues. To worship the God of Christianity, the cause of all existence and the source of all goodness and love, is like breaking out into song when you’re feeling an overabundance of emotions that simply can’t be contained. Worship is giving the creator what is his due at the same time as giving one’s beloved a sign of affection or devotion.

“There’s nothing wrong with having a form of words composed by somebody else. Indeed, there’s probably something wrong with not using such a form.”

As children of the Enlightenment and modernity, we all too often feel that we need to be spontaneous, personal, and heartfelt in our devotions. This puts far too much emphasis on ourselves as the source of all that could be good or genuine; this is in fact a sign of great pride. Far from being the only honest way to pray and worship, using the words and forms of ancient traditions is entering into a kind of “historical democracy” where we can take advantage of the wisdom of those who have gone before us.

“It needs to be stressed that our evidence for the text of the New Testament is in a completely different league than our evidence for every single other book from the ancient world. We know major Greek authors such as Plato and Sophocles, and even Homer, through a small handful of manuscripts, many of them medieval. We know Roman authors such as Tacitus and Pliny through similarly few copies—in some cases just one or two, and many of them again very late. By contrast, we possess literally hundreds of early manuscripts of some or all of the New Testament, putting us in an unrivaled position.”

Many people have doubts about Christianity because they question whether or not we can ever actually know the truth about Jesus or the apostles and the early church. Wright hints at an underlying hypocrisy: These same people would probably have no issue with taking other historical documents as truthful and accurate access to the past: Plato, Homer, Virgil, Caesar, Tacitus, etc. One could of course argue that the kinds of claims the New Testament makes (and perhaps the stakes of believing them) require a higher standard of evidence. This is perhaps one reason why Wright stresses that there is not only as much manuscript evidence for the New Testament as there is for other sources, but much more.

“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.”

Continuing to clear up various misconceptions and false ideas, the author reminds the reader that the church is not meant to be a homogenous group of like-minded and self-congratulatory individuals. The church is a universal gathering of those God has called to love him, to love each other, and to transform the world into a place of peace and love. The action of the Holy Spirit is the means by which this church is called into existence and continues to be active and meaningful in every age.