Simply Christian

In his text Simply Christian: Why Christianity Makes Sense, N.T. Wright attempts to weave all of biblical history and the development of Christianity into a supposedly simple, watertight TV-dinner package. The book, which we’re currently studying in Sunday school, doesn’t really work for me, perhaps because it’s a rather complex attempt to tie so much together into one knot.
Some things Wright says are, I would venture to guess, on target. For example, he asserts that the universal human longings for justice, spirituality, beauty, and relationship all point to the presence of a bigger, as-yet-unrealized reality that is God’s kingdom. However, he limits the entirety of the human experience to any of three options for understanding God’s association with the world: God is an entity entirely separate from earthly reality, God is in everything (and yes, that table over there is God), or God’s realm intersects with the earthly realm in Jesus (God’s “rescue operation”) and his followers.

I wonder if there couldn’t be a fourth option for understanding our interaction with the divine. Here it is–a succinctly summarized, universal, non-heady, truly simple platform on which Christians can be living contributors to the kingdom of God here on Earth: God is love, Jesus embodied that love, the spirit of God resides where there is love, and the ultimate ethic and morality is to act in love, a love that includes the offering–and inevitable receiving–of grace and forgiveness. One of my university Bible professors asked this question, which I think helps us muddle through how this fourth option is to be played out: “Is ______ life giving or death dealing?”

(By the way, this was the same professor who assigned readings by Walter Brueggemann, whose comment on the back cover of Wright’s book reads, “Readers will welcome such ready access to one of the fine teachers of the church.”)

I say that this fourth option is “simply Christian” not because it’s easy, but because it lays to rest many oft-debated, bogging-down theological and doctrinal points such as biblical infallibility, the virgin birth, the afterlife, the existence of miracles, the meaning of the crucifixion, etc., and instead challenges each and every person to immediately practical godliness.