Simply Jesus: A New Vision of Who He Was, What He Did & Why He Matters

Takeaway: Jesus is important.

I had decided to not read Simply Jesus until more reviews were out. I read Wright’s The Challenge of Jesus earlier this year. And knowing that Wright’s style is to write a heavy theological tome and then to revise it at a more popular level I suspected that there would be a lot of overlap. But it is more than just a revision. It is an entirely new book. Obviously, it has some overlapping content since the subject matter is the same, but it is a very different and very good book.

Simply Jesus is intended to be a follow up to Wright’s earlier Simply Christian and in the same basic series as Scripture and the Authority of God and After You Believe. As crucial as Wright’s academic writing is, his pastoral tone of this series and the intent of writing for the non-academic are very important. These are not simplistic books; the content can be quite thick occasionally. But they are written for the non-professional (there are virtually no footnotes here). In general, I like to listen to Wright’s books first, get an overview of what he is doing, and then read them later to dive a bit more deeply into the content. I am going to propose that this be the next book for a small email reading group I participate in.

What is both good and bad about Wright is that he is cohesive. Everything that he thinks about seems to be related to everything else. So his understanding of scripture is related to how he understand’s God speaking, which is related to what he understands God’s purpose to be, which is very important to understanding who Jesus is and what Jesus’ mission on Earth was, etc.

What is good about Wright’s cohesion is that he does a good job of making the case that having a well-thought-out understanding of God is important. What is bad, is that it is not possible for him to get directly to the point. He has to get to the point by catching the reader up to all the different issues involved in whatever he is writing about. If you have read much by Wright, then you are familiar with several of the points that he needs to make on his way to making his main point. So, he can be a bit repetitive.

But I really do not think he can make his point in any other way. He is very biblical in a way that many Christian authors are not. He does not take a verse and chart it out. He charts out broad themes of scripture, surfing along them to show how they are related, and usually connecting a string of scriptural ideas to show that it is a broad theme of scripture. In Wright’s view, scripture is not stories or a manual for living but a deeply textured account of how God has worked and is working in the world. Almost everything in scripture not only has a point but often has multiple points.

This makes reading scripture through Wright’s eyes exciting but sometimes overwhelming. No non-professional reader of scripture will ever be able to approach scripture with the type of understanding that a professional can. This, of course, makes sense, but it is not the way that many Evangelicals have been taught to understand Scripture. We have been taught that the clear meaning of Scripture is plain, that anyone can read it. And, of course, that is true. But that does not mean that those who spend their professional lives studying scripture, learning the original languages, learning the cultural history of the people that originally read and wrote the text and learning the history of how that text has been understood since it was written don’t have something else to share with us that we would not be able to understand without them.

Wright also spends a lot of time illustrating. This is important to the book’s structure and his theological style. He works deftly in metaphors, and that illustrative language is important to how he understands the way that scripture works as well. Scripture is a narrative that tells us the story of how God has worked and is working in the world, so it is not possible to talk about who Jesus is without understanding how God works in the world. And since God’s working in scripture are often layered and metaphorical, it makes sense that Wright uses a similar style to explain to the reader who Jesus is and how Jesus works.

It may seem at this point that I am gushing, and I probably am. But I really do think that Wright is onto something important. He is helping the church re-discover a faith that is not about doctrine as much as it is about narrative. That is to say, God is not as much concerned about what we believe (although he is concerned with that) as he is concerned that we are placing faith in Christ as King, Lord overall, fulfiller of the purpose of God and restorer of all of creation back to its original purpose.

I have been reading a number of books on scripture recently and the general theme of them is that we have been reading scripture wrong. Scripture is not about a rule book or a history book or a science book or a textbook; scripture is about God communicating his authority to us. Scripture is important because it is God communicating. And we make sense of the many issues of scripture is to read with a Christological Hermeneutic (reading through a lens of Christ). Wright does much to help us understand what that might look like.

So if you have read Christian Smith or Peter Enns or other similar authors and are concerned with seeing Christ as the central figure of scripture, then you need to read Simply Jesus as an excellent illustration of understanding Christ as the purpose and meaning of all scripture. If you have read Scot McKnight’s King Jesus Gospel, then Simply Jesus will match together very nicely to fill in some of the ways we need to focus on Christ as the gospel, not own our personal salvation.

Simply Jesus: A New Vision of Who He Was, What He Did & Why He Matters by NT Wright Purchase Links: Hardcover, Kindle Edition, Audible.com Audiobook, Scribd ebook, Scribd Audiobook

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