Simply Wonderful

Ok, I've read the first chapter of Simply Christian and I have to report what I read...It was amazing. Much like Mere Christianity, the book begins by appealing to our desires. Part one is entitled Echoes of a Voice, and the first of the four chapters is entitled Putting the World to Rights. In this chapter, again like Lewis, Wright points to our innate desire for justice, to children on a playground yelling, "That's not fair!", to a sense of there being something wrong with the world. This of course doesn't immediately point to the Christian God but Wright is setting the groundwork for how Christianity actually answers these desires and in fact, in a way, is the cause of them.

Here are some excerpts that I enjoyed:

"We dream the dream of justice. We glimpse, for a moment, a world at one, a world put to rights, a world where things work out, where socieities function fairly and efficiently, where we not only know what we ought to do but actually do it. And then we wake up and come back to reality. But what are we hearing when we're dreaming the dream?" pg. 3

"There are three basic ways of explaining this sense of the echo of a voice, this call to justice, this dream of a world (and all of us within it) put to rights....We can say that it is indeed only a dream...Down the road we find Machiavelli and Nietzsche, the world of naked power and grabbing what you can get, the world where the only sin is to be caught....
Or we can say that the dream is of a different world altogether, a world where we really belong, where everything is indeed put to rights, a world into which we can escape one day for good--but a world which has little purchase on the present world except that people who live in this one sometimes find themselves dreaming of that one. That approach leaves the unscrupulous bullies running this world, but it consoles us with the thought that things will be better somewhere, sometime, even if there's not much we can do about it here and now....
Or we can say that the 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 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." Pg. 9

"It's about justice because Christians not only inherit the Jewish passion for justice but claim that Jesus embodied that passion, and that what he did, and what happened to him, set in motion the Creator's plan to rescue the world and put it back to rights." Pg. 10

The book is full of other quotable sentences and paragraphs, but just to make sure I'm not in violation of copyright laws I better leave it there.