Simply Jesus, N.T. Wright (HarperOne) $24.99
Dr. Tom Wright is a prolific author of both popular and scholarly works about the historical origins of Christianity, focusing especially on the Gospels and the Pauline writings. We spoke to Dr. Wright from his home in Scotland about his new book, Simply Jesus.
—The Editors
Your work has been tremendously helpful. I think because some of us were just so frustrated, sort of being car salesmen for the church, trying to simply get people into the pews, and then after about five or six years of that you begin to wonder, “Why am I doing this? What’s this for?”
Yes. Yes, that’s absolutely right. And of course a lot of folk in the church have simply said, “Well, it’s basically the more people we get in the pews the more people we get to heaven at the end of the day.” And, though obviously, as you know from some of my other works, the whole question of the long-term future and the new world and the new creation and resurrection is absolutely vital—you can’t do without that hope, but that plays back into the present life precisely because of the resurrection of Jesus. God has actually started this new creation project right now and when somebody becomes a Christian and starts to worship God in Christ, and join with others in doing so in the power of the Spirit, then things are supposed to be happening both in that community and through that community, in and for the world all around them. Of course the church has always basically done this and if you go back into the second and third centuries and so on, that’s the reputation that the church had, “Who are these funny people who go around being kind to everybody even though they don’t need to be?” And that’s how Christianity spread, rather than just the communication of great ideas or whatever, though they matter too. So I think the church at its best has always done this, it’s just that in the Western world we have forgotten the rationale for it.
When I picked up Simply Jesus my first question before I even opened it was, “How is this going to be different than The Challenge of Jesus?” So, is there new material here, and also maybe more importantly, what is the audience for this book? There’s a part of me that just can’t help but be curious if you had kind of an evangelistic intent about the book, given that it’s published by a very popular publishing house? Who is this for and what is your hope for it and how is it different than The Challenge of Jesus?
The Challenge of Jesus grew out of a conference at which I was speaking to last-year fellowship graduates twelve years ago, I think it was in Chicago. And as the last two chapters of that book bear witness to the fact that it’s very much aimed at the kind of the bright young graduate market who are thinking, “What difference does my faith make to my computer science, to my music theory, to my this, to my that?” And I know it had quite an impact in those circles, but perhaps those chapters particularly may have also got into a much wider circle.
I think what’s happened is, that over the twelve years between the two books, I have—well, scholarship has moved on and I have moved on because I spent most of the twelve years, of course, working in the Church of England as a bishop, and when you go around and actually work with ordinary church communities, in my case in a very impoverished area of the country, all sorts of questions about how you actually preach from Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, what you say about Jesus to folk in those communities—they have become really second nature to me and so I decided that I wouldn’t actually go back and even re-read The Challenge of Jesus, but I would sit down and map out what I most wanted to say about Jesus right now. And I think one of the things which is most clear to me is the close integration between Jesus preaching of the Kingdom and Jesus himself as the surprising, shocking presence of the living God, honored and amongst his people. And I think the sense of the Jewish people—of the time waiting for God to come back and then getting Jesus as the one who arrived. . .
(Laugh)
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At first glance this would appear to be a book that has little direct interest for a busy denominational executive or local church leader. But it’s worth the read. It is one of those books that crosses over genres and types. It surprises one with its insight into the art of cultivating the kind of imaginative change leaders are facing in the midst of deep, disruptive transformations.
