Simply Jesus

I finished reading Simply Jesus: A New Vision of Who He Was, What He Did, and Why He Matters by N.T. Wright.  In Simply Jesus, Wright presents Jesus not so simply.  Wright, a scholar, loves to present Jesus in the historical context he came into.  So he details for us the history of Israel up to that moment as well as the history of Rome in Palestine. He combines this with the desire of God, as expressed by Jesus, to bring his Kingdom, the Kingdom of God or the Kingdom of Heaven, down to earth, to "thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven."  He uses the analogy of the perfect storm to describe what happened when Jesus appeared in the midst of all this.  He writes his aim is to answer the question put to Jesus in  Jesus Christ Superstar, in the song, Superstar, "who are you - what did you sacrifice?"

N.T. Wright (Tom Wright)

N.T. Wright (often called Tom Wright) fills both roles as a theologian and as a pastor, somewhat rare, so his writing feels approachable.  An Anglican, he served as the Bishop of Durham from 2003 to 2010.  As an Anglican, he richly draws from church tradition.  A prolific writer, he has a wide audience, including a large following of evangelicals because he represents more conservative views than other scholars.  He is associated with Open Evangelicals, a school of thought in England which combines a traditional evangelical emphasis with a more inclusive approach towards culture and other theological points of view than taken by other evangelicals.

However, many evangelicals view him as highly controversial, mainly because of his association a group of scholars known as the "New Perspective on Paul," which includes E.P. Sanders and James D.G. Dunn (though in 2003, Wright put some distance between himself and them). Basically, these scholars want to reinterpret the way we understand Paul's writings.  In the most controversial aspect, they challenge the Reformation understanding of the doctrine of justification by faith, central to Protestant and Evangelical thought.  In 2009, Christianity Today ran a table to help understand the difference between Wright's view on justification and a more traditional evangelical view. http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/special/justification_june09.pdf  I need to study this issue more myself before reaching any conclusions about it.  However, it does not make me feel completely at ease in reading Wright's writings.  I tend to approach it cautiously, even while I try to keep an open mind.

So I enjoyed most of Simply Jesus, though I felt somewhat like I was on watch duty.  He spoke of a "high-pressure system of conservative Christianity," which simply focuses on the salvation Jesus brings and tend to ignore what it means to bring the Kingdom of God on the earth.  While I have seen some conservative Christians with this focus, I have also read many other conservative orthodox Christians write about both salvation and the bringing forth of the Kingdom of God - who talk about the need to bring ethics and justice into everyday life.  To be fair, he also criticized the modernist view which tends to deny the miraculous.  However, as much as I appreciated many points in the book, I didn't feel it presented a new vision - something I hadn't seen in other writings, though Wright's manner of presentation and style of writing is compelling (even if he perhaps overused his analogy of the perfect storm).  Overall, it's an important book by an important author, written in a compelling manner, so I would recommend reading it.