Simply Jesus

Simply Jesus
Tom Wright
SPCK, London 2011

I can't help but thinking that N. T. Wright is getting distracted from finishing the long-awaited massive volume on Paul in his Christian Origins and the Question of God series as writes more and more popular level books. So far we've had Simply Christian, Surprised by Hope, Virtue Reborn and several volumes to complete the New Testament for Everyone series. Now in that same vein comes Simply Jesus.

The book aims to answer three simple, yet central and profound questions for the Christian faith: who was Jesus, what did he do, and why does it matter?

There is little new here for those who have read some of Wright's previous work, but it was still gripping reading to see the arguments laid out in such a straightforward manner in this book.

For Wright, Jesus is very much the Jewish Messiah who "embodied Israel's God" (I think that's a direct quote - if not, Wright certainly says something very similar). He came to do for Israel what Israel could not do for itself - namely be God's light for the Gentiles and the rightful Lord and King of the whole world. Through this, he is able to bring salvation to everyone who has faith in him.

As we might expect, Wright takes the historical background to Jesus' life and ministry very seriously. He talks about a "perfect storm" in the form of a combination of Jewish expectations of deliverance by the Messiah, the power of imperial Rome, and God's strange and powerful purposes for history all coming together at the time of Jesus' life and shaping Christ's life, death and resurrection.

One thing I noted in this book is how firmly Wright seems to have moved towards the Christus Victor view of the atonement as the primary view, although not denying that penal substitution is also a motif in the New Testament, though a secondary one. I would perhaps take issue with this. I do not think Christ could be victorious without penal substitution.

Though most of the book explores who Jesus is and what he came to do, I actually found the short third section on what it means for us to say that Jesus is the king of the world in practical terms to be the most challenging and interesting part. Perhaps this is because I was already familiar with most of what Wright says in the earlier sections from his other books. But this third section where Wright begins to apply his views to normal life was new to me and fascinating. I was certainly excited by Wright's invitation to join in and play our part in God's work of building his kingdom.

In the end, it still seems to me that Wright says the very same things that thoughtful evangelical Christians have always said, but it's as if the thoughts are translated into a different language, using different words at times. This explains how he can both be lambasted by conservatives as a closet liberal and by liberals as a closet fundamentalist! Truth is he is neither, but in good Anglican tradition, he occupies middle ground, yet middle ground much more familiar to evangelicals than liberals I would say as he always seeks to honour what the Bible teaches over all traditions. This is very evident in the extended metaphor of the perfect storm he uses in the first part of the book, where he seeks to show that neither the liberal Jesus of social action, nor the conservative Jesus of deity and salvation in heaven do justice to the New Testament's full-orbed doctrine of Christ and his work.