Wright makes the case for Christian faith from the ground up, assuming that the reader is starting from ground zero with no predisposition to and perhaps even some negativity toward religion in general and Christianity in particular. His goal is to describe Christianity in as simple and accessible, yet hopefully attractive and exciting, a way as possible, both to say to outsides “You might want to look at this further,” and to say to insiders “You may not have quite understood this bit clearly yet.”
He doesn't start with proofs. In fact, he doesn't even try to prove anything in Simply Christian: neither the existence of God, nor the deity of Christ, nor any of the things apologists often try to prove. The subtitle of Simply Christian is Why Christianity Makes Sense. Wright does not seek to prove that Christianity is true, only that it makes sense, especially to people in today's world.
Wright begins with what he calls "the echoes of a voice." These echoes are the longing for justice, the quest for spirituality, the hunger for relationships, and the delight in beauty. We hear these echoes in our hearts, Wright contends, and they suggest that something, or perhaps Someone, first spoke that of which we hear echoes. The fact that we long for justice, desire spirituality, and so forth doesn't prove that there is a first speaker. But it does point us in the direction of God, indeed, the God of the Bible.
For example, Wright focuses first on our longing for justice. He wonders where this comes from:
How does it happen that, on the one hand, we all share not just a sense that there is such a thing as justice, but a passion for it, a deep longing that things should be put to rights, a sense of out-of-jointness that goes on nagging and gnawing and sometimes screaming at us – and yet, on the other hand, after millennia of human struggle and searching and love and longing and hatred and hope and fussing and philosophizing, we still can't seem to get much closer to it than people did in the most ancient societies we can discover? (p. 6)
Among several possible answers to this question, Wright proposes:
Or we can say, if we like, that the reason we have these dreams [of justice], the reason we have a sense of memory of the echo of a voice, is that there is someone speaking to us, whispering in our inner ear – someone who cares very much about this present world and our present selves, and who has made us and the world for a purpose which will indeed involve justice, things being put to rights, ourselves being put to rights, the world being rescued at last. (p. 9)
When I first read Simply Christian a couple of years ago, my response to Wright's first chapter on justice was: Brilliant! There is a longing for justice in people today, even if this longing takes different and sometimes contradictory forms. Some may long for laws that protect unborn children, while others long for guaranteed freedoms for women. Wright does not argue that the content of our longing for justice necessarily tells us what justice really is. Rather, his point is that the fact that we have such longing constitutes the echo of a voice, of God's voice, in fact.
By beginning with justice, rather than with the existence of God or the evidence for the resurrection, Wright is connecting with people in today's world. His is a powerful beginning, on that ultimately points to the God revealed in Scripture and the gospel of God's salvation in Jesus Christ.
In Part One of Simply Christian, N.T. Wright discusses four "echoes of a voice" that incline our hearts in God's direction. These echoes are: the longing for justice, the quest for spirituality, the hunger for relationships, and the delight in beauty.
In Part Two of Simply Christian, Wright shows how these echoes are sounded in the true Christian story of God's work in the world, a story that begins in Genesis with the first creation and concludes with the new creation of Revelation.
Part Three of Simply Christian picks up the idea of "reflecting the image of God into the world." This reflection leads into a discussion of worship (ch. 11), prayer (ch. 12), the Bible (chs. 13 & 14), and Christian community/mission (chs. 15 & 16). I'm not going to try to summarize all that Wright says in these chapters. They are filled with biblically-inspired wisdom that reflects the life experience of a faithful Christian who is also a caring pastor.
So it is with the last paragraph of Simply Christian, which circles back to the themes of Part One, picking up themes from Parts Two and Three:
Made for spirituality, we wallow in introspection. Made for joy, we settle for pleasure. Made for justice, we clamor for vengeance. Made for relationship, we insist on our own way. Made for beauty, we are satisfied with sentiment. But new creation has already begun. The sun has begun to rise. Christians are called to leave behind, in the tomb of Jesus Christ, all that belongs to the brokenness and incompleteness of the present world. It is time, in the power of the Spirit, to take up our proper role, our fully human role, as agents, heralds, and stewards of the new day that is dawning. That, quite simply, is what it means to be Christian: to follow Jesus Christ into the new world, God's new world, which he has thrown open before us. (p. 237)
When I come to the end of Simply Christian, I find myself extraordinarily grateful for N.T. Wright and his effort to communicate with non-Christian people in today's world. Bookstores are flooded these days with sundry versions the atheistic "gospel," which is hardly good news, after all. Christian responses to Hitchens, Dawkins, and the like are often logically coherent, but many times fail to move the hearts of unbelievers. We win the argument but lose the battle for people's souls. N.T. Wright has attempted to do in our generation what C.S. Lewis attempted to do in his: to speak of Christianity in a simple and truthful way that touches the minds and hearst of contemporary people. In my view, the attempt itself deserves our thanks. Moreover, I think Wright's attempt works, at least to a significant degree.
No doubt Wright's critics will find problems with Simply Christian. And, no doubt, some problems exist. But as they try to tear apart what Wright has joined together, I hope they'll try to do better in the positive task of communicating with secular people in today's world. It's one thing to win intramural Christian arguments, and quite another to hold up Christianity in a postmodern, multicultural, relativistic world. Wright has attempted what few Christians dare today, and I, for one, am both impressed and grateful.
Wright’s book does have some remarkable merits. Its overall conception and purpose are praiseworthy: an attempt to simplify Christian doctrine and explain it in a comprehensive but accessible way to skeptics and unbelievers. Wright is a witty, thoughtful, and self-aware writer. He uses compelling images and word pictures. He is exceptionally concerned to give the “Big Picture” of the story of redemption of the universe, and therefore is a helpful corrective to the isolationistic individuality of Western Christianity. And he is remarkably thorough in his topical coverage for such a brief book. For these and other strengths we can be grateful.
But for all of Wright’s laudable efforts and obvious gifts, Simply Christian clearly fails to articulate some key fundamentals of the faith: the deity of Christ, the Old Testament prophecies about his coming, God’s purposes in Israel’s history, the purpose of the Law of Moses, Christ as King over the kingdom of heaven, the substitutionary atonement in Christ’s blood shed on the cross, the perfection of the word of God, the Great Commission of gospel preaching to every tribe and language and people and nation, justification by faith alone, progressive sanctification by the power of the Spirit, Judgment Day, the personality and power of Satan and his dark kingdom, and the eternity of hell’s torments. Most pointedly, I do not believe Simply Christian tenderly and clearly warns individual sinners of their peril or calls upon them to flee to Christ and to his cross as the only remedy for personal guilt and sin before a holy God.
Simply Christian is divided into three main parts. In part one, “Echoes of a Voice,” Wright isolates four “voices” left in the human soul which point toward God: the yearning for justice, the thirst for spirituality, the craving for relationships, and the attraction of beauty. The handling of these “voices” is an excellent and useful initial foray for communicating with unbelievers anywhere in the world.
In part two, “Staring at the Sun,” Wright takes his readers through a conversational journey of Christian doctrine concerning God, Israel, Jesus and the Coming of God’s Kingdom, Jesus: Rescue and Renewal, God’s Breath of Life, Living by the Spirit. This section is more uneven and problematic, as I will highlight below. However, Wright does an excellent job of wrestling with the transcendence and immanence of God as he describes a universe in which God is neither identical to his creation (pantheism) nor aloof from it (deism), but rather actively involved in it in such a way that heaven and earth vitally overlap and intersect. This image of heaven and earth overlapping and intersecting becomes a central one for Wright’s book, for he claims that the most important point of intersection is Jesus himself.
In part three, “Reflecting the Image,” Wright also finds worship, prayer, Scripture, and the sacraments to be other vital ways that heaven and earth intersect. His call for personal repentance and faith in chapter 15, “Believing and Belonging,” is rendered powerless, as I will mention, because of his rejection of the law as a diagnostic for sin. He likens regeneration to “waking up from sleep.” The Bible speaks more of “being dead and being raised to life by the power of God” (Eph. 2:1-4). He culminates his book with a call for Christians to be active in bringing about the advance of God’s program for the new heaven and the new earth such that heaven and earth will be perfectly overlapped, as Revelation 21 says will happen.
N. T. Wright’s Simply Christian is the product of a thoughtful, articulate scholar who is seeking to give the church a tool to communicate Christianity to an unbelieving world. But if the theological and apologetic vision of this book becomes the normative pattern for the church, the results will be grievous for the advance of Christ’s kingdom to the ends of the earth.
In Simply Christian: Why Christianity Makes Sense, N. T. Wright author of such well-known (and colossal) volumes as The New Testament and the People of God (1996), Jesus and the Victory of God (1997), and The Resurrection of the Son of God (2003) offers readers an immensely readable, deeply profound, and wonderfully engaging reflection on what might be described as the eminently practical substance of Christianity. "My aim," he writes, "has been to describe what Christianity is all about, both to commend it to those outside the faith and to explain it to those inside" (ix).
Wright's willingness to question the church's role and who it serves, suggests a degree of humility and introspection that implicitly cautions Christian readers against making the harmful and dangerous assumption that we have secured our ticket to heaven, or that we know all there is to know and that our knowledge is never in need of revision. In other words, it reminds us that we all are walking through this world together, frequently longing for the very same things.
Using a variety of rich examples, analogies, and metaphors, Wright conveys what are often rather complex ideas. One particularly thought-provoking example serves as the opening for the author's chapter on God. In sum, it points out that, while it makes perfectly good sense to use a flashlight to find one's way in the dark, it is positively absurd to take the flashlight outside at dawn to see if the sun has risen yet. The implication is two-fold: first, it is naive to think that God can be investigated and comprehended in the same manner as all the other things we tirelessly seek to master through careful research and study; second, like the risen sun, it is God who illuminates the world around us.