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.
Themes
The Christian Appeal to Human Nature
One of Wright’s principal rhetorical aims in the text is to make a point about the existence of God and the supernatural by appealing to fundamental human desires. He calls these specific aspects of human nature “echoes of a voice” and singles four of them out in particular: “the longing for justice, the quest for spirituality, the hunger for relationships, and the delight in beauty” (x). The reasonability and the attraction of Christianity is all the more apparent when it can be shown that fundamental Christian beliefs speak directly to these four aspects of the human person.
In the very first chapter Wright goes to the heart of this human longing for what is good and right: “We’re like moths trying to fly to the moon. We all know there’s something called justice, but we can’t quite get to it” (4). Continuing along these lines, the author lays out how the human person has certain innate longings—for truth, beauty, goodness—and shows how it is that Christianity provides answers (or paths towards answers) for all the most important questions that we can ask. As he notes, “[T]he reason we have these dreams, the reason we have a sense of a memory of the echo of a voice, is that there is someone speaking to us, whispering in our inner ear” (9). As he argues, this someone is God.
Wright’s appeal to human nature reflects his broader understanding of the Christian worldview. As Wright depicts it, this worldview is not a nihilistic one that would delight in the destruction of the present world, nor is it a gnostic one maintaining that possession of the right kind of knowledge will get you into the secret club where you don’t have to worry about the world: “God’s plan is not to abandon this world, the world which he said was ‘very good.’ Rather, he intends to remake it. And when he does, he will raise all his people to new bodily life to live in it” (219). The desire for justice, for beauty, and for peaceful and loving relationships are “echoes” not simply of the existence of a transcendent reality but also of what this world should and will be like. This is what allows Wright to argue that these impulses constitute proof of the Christian God specifically; Christianity has humanity’s fall and redemption at its core and therefore, Wright suggests, explains why we feel this particular existence ought to be different, independent of any afterlife or other existences we might believe in.
Redemption from Sin
As the old saying goes, “the first step to recovery is admitting you have a problem,” and the most basic teaching of Christianity is that things have gone horribly wrong. Christianity does not merely name the problem but claims to have a solution as well: the person and work of Jesus Christ. The honest person, Wright suggests, will admit that the world is a sad and broken place: “[W]e see a world in pain, a world out of joint, a world where things occur which we seem powerless to make right” (5). Christianity teaches that this is the result of sin—a result of the human tendency to selfishness, pride, violence, anger, and self-preservation at the expense of any other who might stand in our way. In other words, where some stories of a fall from paradise conceptualize the world’s brokenness primarily as divine punishment for human transgressions, the Christian story conceptualizes it more as an inevitable consequence of humans’ own broken nature—our rejection of the ultimate reality that is God.
Christianity further asserts that the mission of redemption, whereby God would set the world to rights, was fulfilled in the person of Jesus Christ. The new covenant God offered to his chosen people was to be offered in and through the person of Jesus in such a way that it would never need renewal again: “The time had now come when, at last, God would rescue his people, and the whole world, not from mere political enemies, but from evil itself, from the sin which had enslaved them” (110). The slavery of sin is what each human requires rescue from, and it is precisely this that Jesus offers to every single individual by means of his suffering, death, and resurrection and through the ministry of the church that he established (cf. Matthew 16:18).
A key aspect of this human need for redemption is the personal need for forgiveness, epitomized in the request the Lord’s Prayer voices: “Forgive us our trespasses.” Sometimes people get the impression that Christianity is about being morally superior and forcing the world to fit preconceived notions about what is right and good and ethical. Instead, the Christian life is about begging for God to break into our own lives in such a way as to transform the world from the inside, beginning with ourselves. As the author states:
The prayer says: I want to be part of his kingdom-movement. I find myself drawn into his heaven-on-earth way of living. I want to be part of his bread-for-the-world agenda, for myself and for others. I need forgiveness for myself—from sin, from debt, from every weight around my neck—and I intend to live with forgiveness in my heart in my own dealings with others. (Notice how remarkable it is that, at the heart of the prayer, we commit ourselves to live in a particular way, a way we find difficult.) (160).
The world is in desperate need of redemption, and nowhere is it more in need than in the depths of our very own hearts.
The Intersection of Heaven and Earth as Intermingling Spheres
In Chapter 5, the author asks a very important question: “How do heaven and earth, God’s space and our space, relate to one another?” (60). It may seem a rather innocuous question, or one that perhaps really isn’t all that important in the grand scheme of things, but he demonstrates that is actually of the utmost importance due to the fact that Christianity has a singular claim about the answer.
The first basic way that we could answer this question is to say that they overlap completely, that the divine sphere and the created sphere are one and the same. This option is generally known by the name pantheism—or panentheism for a subtle variation on the theme—and asserts that all things are divine in their own way: God is everywhere and everywhere is God. The basic problem with this perspective, in Wright’s view, “is that it can’t cope with evil” (61). If all things are divine, that includes serial killers, domestic abusers, world wars, and natural disasters. Wright suggests that this view leads ultimately to cynicism, nihilism, and all too often despair.
The second way that we could answer this question would be to stake out the polar opposite position and claim that the two spheres do not interact or overlap whatsoever. The ancient philosophers Lucretius and Epicurus took this approach and concluded that humans are alone in the world. In contemporary times this approach is essentially the deist one, a worldview that claims that even if God exists and sets all things in motion, he is not involved whatsoever in earthly affairs. The world simply is what it is, and one might as well get along with things and try to enjoy themselves as much as possible.
Christianity, however, offers a third option: the spheres of heaven and earth are neither coterminous nor wholly separate, but they are like a Venn diagram. While certainly distinct, they overlap in all kinds of strange and mysterious ways:
The Old Testament insists that God belongs in heaven and we on earth. Yet it shows over and over again that the two spheres do indeed overlap, so that God makes his presence known, seen, and heard within the sphere of earth (63-64).
This view is not exclusive to Christianity; it is, for example, shared by other Abrahamic religions. However, the Christian claim that God actually entered into human history in the person of Jesus Christ arguably takes this intertwining of heaven and earth to its culmination.
