Simply Christian

Every age and generation has its own quirks and challenges, its own nuance and personality. For those folks who are Christians today, speaking to and about Christianity to others, well, the world has changed a lot since twenty or thirty years ago. We’ve all moved together along this odd continuum from modernity to post modernity, and even if we don’t really know what that means, it effects how we think and feel and look at the world, and at truth, and at religion.

The American “evangelical” response to all this over the last couple of decades has not endeared many people to Christianity. Indeed, it has turned many away. The attempts to “reach” non Christians have gotten kookier and kookier by the day. But the gimmicks sell to just enough people to keep the trade going.

With the collapse of the assumptions of enlightenment materialism, "spirituality” has broken out all over. Not, mind you, Christian spirituality, but many other forms of spirituality. And though some of it is down right ugly (like the kind that would have you fly planes into buildings), there seems to be a growing and nagging sense that there is more to life than our modern technological materialist rationalistic narcissistic culture suggests.

For all of you lapsed Christians, remotely interested Christians, seekers who might consider Christianity, or anyone with spiritual yearnings but with no framework upon which to hang your hats, I want to recommend a book to you.

The book is called Simply Christian: Why Christianity Makes Sense by N. T. Wright.

It is not so much an argument as a description of what Christianity, at its core, is all about, and how that may resonate with your own longings and searchings.

N. T. Wright is not an American. He is British. He does not serve in an American church. He is Anglican. He is not really of the same stuff as what people tend to think of when they think of “evangelicals.”

More than almost any other present day theologian sympathetic to the canonical writings, he tries very hard to hear and open up the message of those writings in their own historical context, and from there to suggest how that message speaks to us today.

He might be the most important Christian writer of our era, and I can promise you, even if you don’t ultimately buy what he is saying, you will understand Christianity better -- simple, basic, real Christianity anyway.

He is also contemporary. The book is copyrighted 2006. That means he is writing post Nag Hammadi, post Gospel of Thomas, post Da Vinci Code etc. And Wright is an historian as much as a theologian. So, given these two facts, it’s not like the reader can say, “well, this is an old book and he just couldn’t have known what we were going to discover in those caves in 1946 and after.”

Wright as a man, a pastor, and a minister, is in tune with the deepest longings and aspirations of the human heart. He is culturally astute enough to see how these aspirations and longings work their way out in life and culture. There is a pastoral gentleness to his writing. It is welcoming and loving. There is a not a hard edge in the book.

I commend Simply Christian to you. I hope you will give it a read.

Peace. Joel.