Simply Christian

Grab your to-do lists and a pencil and under your last item "stop making to-do lists", write "buy new NT Wright book". This book was just released yesterday and if you are so out of touch with pop culture that you actually follow the Christian book publishing dates, then you probably already know about this. But for the rest of you get excited...

This little book is NT Wright's latest contribution to trying to increase the amount of good, recommendable books in the Christian section of the bookstore. To compare it to another Oxford/Cambridge giant who also uses initials, one of the blurbs describes it as, "a Mere Christianity for a new generation from a leading Christian scholar and Anglican bishop". I'm not sure that really is enough to do justice to what this book could be, and who NT Wright is. So, I will try to fill in the gaps for anyone who cares...

Here is what the back cover offers to casual readers in the bookstore:

Why is justice fair? Why are so many people pursuing spirituality? Why do we crave relationship? And why is beauty so beautiful? N. T. Wright argues that each of these questions takes us into the mystery of who God is and what he wants from us. For two thousand years Christianity has claimed to answer these mysteries, and this renowned biblical scholar and Anglican bishop shows that it still does today. Like C. S. Lewis did in his classic Mere Christianity, 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 outsiders “You might want to look at this further,” and to say to insiders “You may not have quite understood this bit clearly yet.”

Wright has done more for my intellectual and spiritual life than any other Christian thinker out there. I have learned more about the faith I claim as my own from him than I have from almost every other writer I've read. And here is the 'about the author' blurb:

N.T. Wright is Bishop of Durham and was formerly Canon Theologian of Westminster Abbey and dean of Lichfield Cathedral. He taught New Testament studies for twenty years at Cambridge, McGill, and Oxford Universities. Wright's full-scale work, Jesus and the Victory of God, is widely regarded as one of the most significant studies in the contemporary Third Quest of the historical Jesus. It follows The New Testament and the People of God as the second volume in his projected six-volume series entitled Christian Origins and the Question of God. Among his many published works are: The Challenge of Jesus, The Meaning of Jesus (coauthored with Marcus Borg), and What Saint Paul Really Said.

OK, so now that that is unpacked a little, let me try to do my best to persuade you to read this book and/or offer it to people you know to read. Mere Christianity was probably one of the 5 most important things that ever happened to me. I don't remember where I got it and I don't remember ever wanting to read it, but for some reason I found myself for a week straight in my room, alone, reading through it. I was a junior in college and my life wasn't really what I wanted it to be. I would say that I was depressed but I don't think it was that serious, just a tendency I have to be a little melancholy. At the time I wasn't a reader, in fact it may have been the first book I ever read outside of school. That book changed me. I looked at the world in a new way after putting that book down. The last paragraph is what put the last nail in the coffin for the old Dude:

"But there must be a real giving up of the self. You must throw it away blindly so to speak. Christ will indeed give you a real personality: but you must not go to Him for the sake of that. As long as your own personality is what you are bothering about you are not going to Him at all. The very first step is to try to forget about the self altogether. Your real, new self (which is Christ's and also yours, and yours just because it is His) will not come as long as you are looking for it. it will come when you are looking for Him. Does that sound strange? The same principle holds, you know, for more everyday matters. Even in social life, you will never make a good impression on other people until you stop thinking about what sort of impression you are making. Even in literature and art, no man who bothers about originality will ever be original: whereas if you simply try to tell the truth (without caring twopence how often it has been told before) you will, nine times out of ten, become original without ever having noticed it. The principle runs through all life from top to bottom. Give up yourself, and you will find your real self. Lose your life and you will save it. Submit to death, death of your ambition and favorite wishes every day and death of your whole body in the end: submit with every fiber of your being, and you will find eternal life. Keep back nothing. Nothing that you have not given away will be really yours. Nothing in you that has not died will ever be raised from the dead. Look for yourself, and you will find in the long run only hatred, loneliness, despair, rage, ruin and decay. But look for Christ and you will find Him, and with Him everything else thrown in." -CS Lewis, Mere Christianity

So that was it for me. I was never really the same person. A long series of events has brought me to where I was today, but Mere Christianity was the beginning.

I would like to think that this book could be a new Mere Christianity for a generation that needs to hear a fresh presentation of the Gospel. Like Lewis, Wright deals with philosophical questions in beautifully simple style but he goes one step further that Lewis was able to do in his context. Wright has long been a voice for social justice and the Christian vocation of being called to be where the world is in pain, at the place where the world is suffering and in a state of shame and sorrow. He also, for me at least, articulates God's new creation better than anyone else and the hope of the Kingdom of Heaven on earth, not some far-off-floatinig-soul diembodied Heaven we tent to speak of.

I think that this book will speak to a generation that sees the pain in the world like never before. It will speak to those who think the Church has nothing to say to global injustice. It will speak to those who read Mere Christianity. It will speak to those who have never heard the gospel of Jesus and the Kingdom. With Wright's brilliant mind and beautiful prose, there are sure to be people for generations citing this book as the beginning of something new in their lives. At least, that is what I would like to think...

Go read this book and give it away to someone that needs it. You won't be dissappointed and neither will they.

***The Dude just got a copy yesterday and has only read the first chapter. Any and all predictions are completely speculation, although The Dude believes very strongly that it will be an important book for years to come. Plus, the cover is badass.