Simply Jesus: An Interview with N.T. Wright

31 Jan

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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Faith in Public Life

17 Aug

A Public Faith, Miroslav Volf (Brazos Press) $21.99

In his latest volume Yale theologian, Miroslav Volf, puts his finger on one of the most relevant and hotly contested subjects in our world today – the role of faith in public life. In particular he seeks to chart a course between what he sees as two equally unhelpful extremes – “totalitarian saturation of public life with a single religion” and “secular exclusion of all religion from public life” (xiv).

What guides Volf’s approach is the conviction that the main contribution Christianity brings to the public arena is a vision of the common good, or human flourishing, as he puts it. The primary way that Christians are called to work toward this objective is not by imposing its vision on the world but by bearing witness to Christ who first shapes our lives.

One of the most compelling and original contributions of this book is found in the opening chapter where Volf details the two primary malfunctions of faith as it seeks to engage with the world: idleness and coercion. While coercive faith is a bit easier to identify as a malfunction, idleness seems like virtue in today’s world. Having reduced faith to the private realm, modernity has no room for the public embrace of religion at all. A publicly idle faith seems ideal according to our spirit of the age.

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Jesus, Paul, and the People of God

5 Aug

Jesus, Paul, and the People of God: a Theological Dialogue with N. T. Wright, Perrin, Nicholas, Richard B. Hays, and N. T. Wright (IVP Academic) $24

At the 2010 Wheaton Theology Conference, nine prominent biblical scholars and theologians converged to interact with the scholarship of N.T. Wright. The subsequent book, Jesus, Paul and the People of God: A Theological Dialogue with N.T. Wright from Intervarsity Press, is the result of their combined work.

While their interaction with Wright’s work is critical in nature, editor Nicholas Perrin describes the book as type of festlich, saying, “the highest honor that can be paid any scholar is not undiluted applause, which in the end amounts to empty flattery, but a sympathetic and critical assessment.”

Jesus, Paul and the People of God, is divided into two parts, the first dealing with Wright’s scholarship on the historical Jesus, the second, his scholarship on Paul, often referred to as the new perspective. Each chapter is followed by a brief response by Wright, followed by his own essays on Jesus and Paul. Continue reading →

Invisible People: An Interview with Christopher Chinn

19 Jul

It was…pretty hard to see how paintings of pretty people leisurely reclining on beautiful hardwood floors, saturated in sunlight, could be relevant when thousands were outside my door reclining in filth on the streets for years on end.

Christopher Chinn just completed a larger than life sculpture of a homeless man reclining on the sidewalk and installed it for one day in May. I sat down with Mr. Chinn to find out what inspired this sculpture, what kind of conversation he is hoping to engender and what his future plans are for his work.

You can make a tax-deductible contribution to the future of his project entitled Encounter, through a partnership with US Artists. Click  here to learn more and contribute!

You just completed a larger than life sculpture of a homeless man. What was the inspiration for this piece?

The idea for this work began in 2008 during a solo exhibition of paintings. The gallery director and I were discussing ways to bring the homeless who had modeled for the work to the gallery. We ultimately decided that while well intentioned it was largely misdirected. What really needed to happen was just the opposite, to move the artwork out of the gallery and onto the streets where it could be experienced by the homeless without barriers. My interest in this subject matter developed about ten years ago after I graduated from USC. My first studio after graduate school was just south of skid row in downtown Los Angeles. There were four homeless people living in the long walkway to our new front door when we moved in. It was very difficult to witness everyday the living conditions of those on the streets. I realized pretty quickly after moving there that it was something I was going to have to deal with. I came to the conclusion that the best way for me to do that was with my artwork. It was also pretty hard to see how paintings of pretty people leisurely reclining on beautiful hardwood floors, saturated in sunlight, could be relevant when thousands were outside my door reclining in filth on the streets for years on end. My previous painting lost all meaning for me, and I realized that I wanted my work to directly engage real social issues.

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Reconciling Congregations

2 Jun

Churches, Cultures & Leadership, Mark Lau Branson and Juan F. Martinez (IVP Academic) $25

For decades church growth gurus have taught conscientious pastors that one important key to the numerical growth of congregations is the “homogenous principle.” That is, churches grow best when they focus on one type of person. “Like attracts like,” goes the popular adage. Who can deny the truth of this? A church full of young families, for example, is undoubtedly attractive to many other young families. In social settings people feel more at ease when they can identify others like themselves.

In their new book, Churches, Cultures & Leadership, Fuller Theological Seminary professors Mark Lau Branson and Juan F. Martinez, challenge this conventional wisdom, arguing that church leaders need to take a fresh look the role of churches in God’s reconciling mission.

[C]entral to this book [is the question], what is the call of the gospel on churches? How can churches model gospel reconciliation and be agents of reconciliation and justice in our cities and in our nation? We believe that God’s grace calls us beyond racism and ethnocentrism. The question is how to express the new reality of the gospel in ways that both celebrates our differences and draws us toward unity in Jesus Christ (17).

They approach their subject with academic rigor, pastoral concern for the church as well as a deep awareness of their own ethnic narratives and experiences. They have both served many years in multi-cultural congregations and now co-teach seminary students.

The book aims at an ambitious target: to outline a practical theology of intercultural, congregational leadership. Any one of those themes would be challenging enough, but here, Branson and Martinez work at integration. In the end, this is a work of practical theology.

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Speaking Christian

17 May

 Speaking Christian: Why Christian Words Have Lost Their Meaning & Power and How They Can Be Restored,  Marcus Borg (HarperOne) $25.99

Marcus Borg, scholar and leader in progressive Christian thought, takes on the language of faith in his recent publication, Speaking Christian.  He declares in the outset that the purpose of this book is to ‘redeem and reclaim Christian language,’ to help us ‘read, hear and inwardly digest Christian language without preconceived understandings getting in the way.’  But the articulated purpose that most resonates with this reviewer is his objective to ‘exposit an alternative understanding’ of the Biblical text and Christian tradition.  In this endeavor Borg achieves his goal of illuminating the language we have inherited, both from text and tradition, within an alternative framework that pulses with life and possibility.

Early into the work, Borg notes the two greatest obstacles to rightly understanding the Christian language; one is a matter of narrative and another the literalism with which so many read and hear the text.  The former is one that I have witnessed from my time in both North America and across east and southern Africa – what Borg calls the ‘heaven-and-hell framework.’  The four pillars of this framework, as he sees it, are the afterlife, sin and forgiveness, Jesus dying for our sins and believing.  The way one understands this narrative, believing that Jesus died for our sins so we can be forgiven and enter heaven, shapes how these words and many others are understood. One observation he notes first is that framing the story this way makes the death of Jesus the most important thing about Him.  This comment alone made me feel like I was not amiss in my own stance, having long thought most Christians care more about the death of Jesus than the life He lived.  But the truth is that this framework has far-reaching affects for how we understand much of our Christian vocabulary, often in distorted ways.  This is the case Borg makes throughout the book: we need to change our frame!

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Prophetic Stringency

21 Apr

By Patrick Jordan, Managing Editor, Commonweal Magazine.

Anarchy and Apocalypse: Essays on Faith, Violence and Theodicy, Ronald E. Osborne (Cascade Books) $20

Whatever one’s take on the later rise of capitalism in the Christian West, entrepreneurial genius was at work in describing the Gospels as “good news.” In contrast, the title of Ronald E. Osborn’s wide-ranging collection of essays seems dour and forbidding. That’s a shame, because the book is rich in subject matter and argument, and evangelical in spirit.

Commonweal readers will be familiar with Osborn’s clear-eyed, well-honed analysis (most recently in “Still Counting: How Many Iraqis Have Died?” February 11). This book reveals the foundation of his analysis of headline events. While neither anarchistic (in the colloquial sense of advocating violence or extreme libertarianism) nor apocalyptic (in tenor or proclamation), there is a stringency in Osborn’s thinking that is prophetic and liberating. Continue reading →

Naked and Not Ashamed: A Conversation with Brian McLaren

30 Mar

Brian D. McLaren is an author, speaker, activist, and public theologian. Brian helped form and then pastored Cedar Ridge Community Church, an innovative, nondenominational church in the Baltimore-Washington region. During his time at Cedar Ridge, the church earned a reputation as a leader among emerging missional congregations. He has been active in networking and mentoring church planters and pastors since the mid 1980s, and has assisted in the development of several new churches. He is a popular conference speaker and a frequent guest lecturer for denominational and ecumenical leadership gatherings—across the US and Canada, Latin America, Europe, Africa, and Asia and was listed in Time as one of American’s 25 most influential evangelicals.

I met Brian in 2008 during a tour for his book Everything Must Change and we were able to connect again later that year at the Amahoro Africa Gathering in Rwanda and during a subsequent—and for me, quite life-altering—trip to Burundi. We have since run into each other at several global gatherings and share many good friends. I’ve had the privilege of  seeing Brian encourage and challenge both Christians (myself included) and the not-so-religious around the world with genuine grace and humility.

McLaren is primarily known as a thinker and writer. He has published several well-know and award winning books, beginning with The Church on the Other Side: Doing Ministry in the Postmodern Matrix, (Zondervan, 1998, rev. ed. 2000) up to his most recent 2011 HarperOne release, Naked Spirituality, which offers “simple, doable, and durable” practices to help people deepen their life with God. Brian and I corresponded by e-mail about his new book.

SS

It seems, in the past, that your primary audience has been the Evangelical church. Who was this book written for and why?

I think many Evangelicals have often thought that I was writing mostly for them. But I think many Mainliners have thought I was writing mainly for them. My hunch is that I’m writing for all of the above – Evangelicals, Mainliners, Catholics, the “spiritual but not religious” – who share one thing in common: a desire for a deeper, more honest, more vibrant faith and spirituality. So I try to make points of contact with each group and build a bridge from where they are. In the end, I think we human beings have more in common than our differing labels might suggest; the deeper we go, the more in common we share. So to the degree I can address those deeper human needs, while avoiding exclusive jargon and so on, I think it’s possible to connect to a broader audience than just one tribe.

What caused you to write such a deeply personal book and how does it address the often-dichotomized realms of Christian thought and spiritual practice?

One of the ironies of my life is that I’ve been known publicly as a thinker/writer on theology and contemporary issues, yet I spent 24 years of my life as a pastor in a suburban church, preaching, leading Bible studies, leading in the eucharist, planning worship services, performing baptisms and weddings and funerals, leading retreats, and so on. For me, the theological and philosophical issues I’ve written about emerged in the context of the local church … and my work in theology and contemporary issues has always been deeply spiritual for me, not just an intellectual exercise. So for me they’ve been deeply integrated.

Yet I realize that’s not the case for everyone. For a lot of people I meet on the road, when their theological system crumbles, there’s little left … little spiritual vitality apart from a belief system, little in the way of sustaining, doable, durable spiritual practices. So I wanted to address that vacuum. I think to talk about the spiritual life in a pastoral way, we have to be personal. We have to speak from “what we have seen, what we have heard,” as 1 John says. So it felt necessary and right to share in the book some of my own struggles and breakthroughs on a very personal level, even though it’s also a little scary to do so – scary in the sense that if someone mocks your idea or trashes a concept, it doesn’t hurt in quite the same way it does when someone disregards a story that comes from your gut, so to speak. Continue reading →

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The End of Evangelicalism?

16 Mar

The End of Evangelicalism? Discerning a New Faithfulness for Mission: Towards an Evangelical Political Theology, David E. Fitch (Cascade Books) $28

Evangelicalism is a political ideology in crisis, says David E. Fitch in his new book, End of Evangelicalism? Posed as a question, however, the title gives us a clue that the author hasn’t quite scheduled the funeral. After all, how useful could 200 pages chronicling the demise of Evangelicalism be? Though some might find morbid pleasure in that pursuit and it has been tried, though in a shorter format, by the late Michael Spencer (aka Internet Monk), what this author is after is a deep questioning and reframing of the evangelical foundations.

To accomplish this, Fitch has brought together an impressive panel of scholars and church leaders, beginning with the Slovenian philosopher and cultural theorist, Slavoj Žižek. By employing the social critical framework found primarily in Žižek’s earlier work, Sublime Object of Ideology, and others, Fitch systematically dismantles the three central Evangelical theological commitments: “the inerrant Bible,” “the decision for Christ,” and “the Christian Nation.”

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Reframing Missional

11 Mar

Missional: Joining God in the Neighborhood, Alan Roxburgh (Baker) $16.99

For the last decade and a half, Alan J. Roxburgh has been a leading thinker in the missional church movement. In his new book, Missional: Joining God in the Neighborhood, Roxburgh attempts to reframe a conversation which has become muddied  since the groundbreaking work of Darrell L. Guder’s Missional Church: A Vision for the Sending of the Church in North America (Eerdmans, 1998).

In Missional, Alan seeks to take us beyond our talk about church success, to deeper conversations about the church’s mission. These conversations begin by coming to terms with a world that is going through radical changes, while learning how to ask the right questions about these changes and how they influence the role of the church in the world.

Rather than asking what God is up to in our churches, Roxburgh contends we must ask what is God up to in our neighborhoods and communities. In contrast, most of our conversations among church practitioners involve questions regarding how to make church better, such as creating more attractive programs for the outsider, instead of learning to listen to God’s Spirit moving around us beyond our church walls.

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