Wright - Simply Christian

SIMPLY CHRISTIAN

Tom Wright

First published in Great Britain in 2006

Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge

36 Causton Street

London SW1P 4ST

www.spckpublishing.co.uk

Reprinted six times

Reissued 2011

Copyright Nicholas Thomas Wright 2006

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

SPCK does not necessarily endorse the individual views contained in its publications.

Unless otherwise noted, scripture quotations are either the authors own translation or from the New Revised Standard Version of the Bible, copyright 1989 by the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the USA. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

Extracts from Common Worship: Services and Prayers for the Church of England are copyright The Archbishops Council, 2000 and are reproduced by permission.

Extracts from The Book of Common Prayer, the rights in which are vested in the Crown, are reproduced by permission of the Crowns Patentee, Cambridge University Press.

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 9780281064762

E-ISBN 9780281066247

1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

Manufacture managed by Jellyfish

eBook by Graphicraft Limited, Hong Kong

For

Joseph and Ella-Ruth

Contents

There are two sorts of traveller. The first sets off in the general direction of the destination, and is quite happy to figure things out on the way, to read the signposts, ask directions, and muddle through. The second wants to know in advance what the road will be like, where it changes from a country road to a busy multi-lane highway, how long it will take to complete the different sections, and so on.

Concert-goers are often like that, too. Some listeners prefer to allow the music to make its own impact, carrying them along from movement to movement without them knowing where it will go next. Others find greater enjoyment by reading a programme note in advance so that they can anticipate what is to come and have a mental picture of the whole while listening to the parts as they unfold.

People who read books divide into more or less the same types. The first type can probably skip this introduction and go straight to the first chapter. The second type may like to know in advance more or less where we are going, how the music is shaped. This introduction is written for them.

My aim has been to describe what Christianity is all about, both to commend it to those outside the faith and to explain it to those inside. This is a massive task, and I make no pretence to have covered everything, or even to have faced all the questions some might expect in a book of this sort. What I have tried to do is to give the subject a particular shape, resulting in the books threefold structure.

First, I have explored four areas of contemporary concern: the longing for justice, the quest for spirituality, the hunger for relationships, and the delight in beauty. Each of these, I suggest, points beyond itself, though without in itself enabling us to deduce very much about the world except that it is a strange and exciting place. We hear each theme, I suggest, in the way that we might catch the echo of a voice, the elusive but evocative sound of someone speaking just round the corner, out of sight. Hence the title of unfold, in waiting to see how the book eventually ties itself together.

becomes recognizable, as we reflect on the creator God who longs to put his world to rights; on the human being called Jesus who announced Gods kingdom, died on a cross and rose again; and on the Spirit who blows like a powerful wind through the world and through human lives.

This leads naturally into , where I describe what it looks like in practice to follow this Jesus, to be energized by this Spirit, and above all to advance the plan of this creator God. Worship, prayer and scripture launch us into thinking about the church, seen not as a building and not even so much as an institution, but as the company of all those who believe in the God we see in Jesus and who are struggling to follow him.

In particular, I explore the question of what the church is there for . The point of following Jesus is not simply so that we can be sure of going to a better place than this after we have died. Our future beyond death is enormously important, but the nature of the Christian hope is such that it plays back into the present life. This provides a new way of coming at various topics, not least prayer and Christian behaviour. And this in turn enables us, as the book reaches its conclusion, to find the echoes of coming back again, not now as hints of a God we might learn to know for ourselves, but as key elements of the Christian calling to work for his kingdom within the world.

This has been an exciting book to write not least because it is quite personal; but in those terms it is, as it were, back to front. I have been a worshipping, praying and Bible-reading Christian (often muddled and getting things wrong, but hanging in there) all my life, so that in a sense are also among the things which the postmodern, post-Christian, and now increasingly post-secular world cannot escape as questions, strange signposts pointing beyond the landscape of our contemporary culture and out into the unknown.

I have not attempted to differentiate between the many different varieties of Christianity, but have tried to speak of that which is, at their best, common to all. The book is not Anglican, Catholic, Protestant or Orthodox but, I believe, simply Christian. I have also attempted to keep what must be said as straightforward and clear as I can, so that those coming to the subject for the first time may not get stuck in a jungle of technical terms. Being a Christian in todays world is, of course, anything but simple. But there is a time for trying to say, as simply as possible, what its all about, and this seems to me that sort of a time.

Between writing the first draft of this book and preparing it for publication, I had the joy of welcoming my first two grandchildren into the world. I dedicate the book to Joseph and Ella-Ruth, with the hope and prayer that they and their generation may come to hear the voice whose echoes we trace in .

*

I had a dream the other night, a powerful and interesting dream. And the really frustrating thing about it is that I cant remember what it was about. I had a flash of it as I woke up, enough to make me think how extraordinary and meaningful it was; and then it was gone. And so, to misquote T. S. Eliot, I had the meaning but missed the experience.

Our passion for justice often seems like that. 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 societies function healthily, where I not only know what I ought to do but actually do it. And then we wake up and come back to reality. But what are we hearing when we are dreaming that dream?