Why settle for less?

Made for spirituality, we wallow in introspection. Made for joy, we settle for pleasure. Made for justice, we clamor for vengeance. Made for relationship, we insist on our own way. Made for beauty, we are satisfied with sentiment. But new creation has already begun. The sun has begun to rise. Christians are called to leave behind, in the tomb of Jesus Christ, all that belongs to the brokenness and incompleteness of the present world. It is time, in the power of the Spirit, to take up our proper role, our fully human role, as agents, heralds, and stewards of the new day that is dawning. That, quite simply, is what it means to be Christian: to follow Jesus Christ into the new world, God’s new world, which he has thrown open before us.—N. T. Wright, Simply Christian: Why Christianity Makes Sense, 237

<idle musing>
That's the final excerpt from this book. I hope you enjoyed it enough to either buy a copy or borrow one.

I'm going on a bike trip this weekend with our son and his oldest son, so I'm not sure I'll have time to start a new one on Monday…
</idle musing>

The why of Christian sexual ethics

Christian sexual ethics, in other words, isn’t simply a collection of old rules which we are now free to set aside because we know better (the danger within Option Two). Nor can we appeal against the New Testament by saying that whatever desires we find inside our deepest selves must be God-given (the natural assumption within Option One). Jesus was quite clear about that. Yes, God knows our deepest desires; but the famous old prayer which (tremblingly) acknowledges that fact doesn’t go on to imply that this means they are therefore to be fulfilled and carried out as they stand, but rather that they need cleansing and healing:

Almighty God, to Whom all hearts are open, all desires known, and from Whom no secrets are hidden: Cleanse the thoughts of our hearts by the inspiration of your Holy Spirit, that we may perfectly love you, and worthily magnify your holy name; through Christ our Lord.Amen.

Another famous old prayer puts it even more sharply:

Almighty God, who alone can bring order to the unruly wills and passions of sinful humanity: Give your people grace so to love what you command and to desire what you promise, that, among the many changes of this world, our hearts may surely there be fixed, where true joys are to be found; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

We have lived for too long in a world, and tragically even in a church, where this prayer has become reversed: where the wills and affections of human beings are regarded as sacrosanct as they stand, where God is required to command what we already love and to promise what we already desire. The implicit religion of many people today is simply to discover who they really are and then try to live it out—which is, as many have discovered, a recipe for chaotic, disjointed, and dysfunctional humanness. The logic of cross and resurrection, of the new creation which gives shape to all truly Christian living, points in a different direction. And one of the central names for that direction is joy: the joy of relationships healed as well as enhanced, the joy of belonging to the new creation, of finding not what we already had but what God was longing to give us. At the heart of the Christian ethic is humility; at the heart of its parodies, pride. Different roads with different destinations, and the destinations color the character of those who travel by them.—N. T. Wright, Simply Christian: Why Christianity Makes Sense, 233–34

Ain't it the truth! : (

Throughout the early centuries of Christianity, when every kind of sexual behavior ever known to the human race was widely practiced throughout ancient Greek and Roman society, the Christians, like the Jews, insisted that sexual activity was to be restricted to the marriage of a man and a woman. The rest of the world, then as now, thought they were mad. The difference, alas, is that today half the church seems to think so, too.—N. T. Wright, Simply Christian: Why Christianity Makes Sense, 232

<idle musing>
I admit, I laugh when people tell me how sexually debased the US is. Sure, it's not a moral citadel, but if you read (especially) Greek history … well, in comparison we are a moral citadel! Of course, that's not to justify it!

But, as Wright says, what is different is that too many in the church have decided that scripture is wrong and society is correct. That is new and, well, to my mind, wrong. Amos's vision of the plumb line (Amos 7:8–9) comes to mind, as does his intercessory prayer (Amos 7:2, 5). That's been my prayer for over ten years now, that YHWH would relent.
</idle musing>

The irony of an emperor

But the fact that we can’t ever earn God’s favor by our own moral effort shouldn’t blind us to the fact that the call to faith is also a call to obedience. It must be, because it declares that Jesus is the world’s rightful Lord and Master. (The language Paul used of Jesus would have reminded his hearers at once of the language they were accustomed to hearing about Caesar.) That’s why Paul can speak about “the obedience of faith.” Indeed, the word the early Christians used for “faith” can also mean “loyalty” or “allegiance.” It’s what emperors ancient and modern have always demanded of their subjects. The message of the gospel is the good news that Jesus is the one true “emperor,” ruling the world with his own brand of self-giving love. This, of course, cheerfully and deliberately deconstructs the word “emperor” itself. When the early Christians used “imperial” language in relation to Jesus, they were always conscious of irony. Whoever heard of a crucified emperor?—N. T. Wright, Simply Christian: Why Christianity Makes Sense, 208

<idle musing>
I love that: "Whoever heard of a crucified emperor?" Indeed! Jesus flips things upside down. Of course, they only seem to be upside down because our world is upside down. He really flips things right side up, so that we see the reall values—ones that generally are scorned by society: self-giving love, humility, etc.
</idle musing>

Living with the authority of scripture

Living with “the authority of scripture,” then, means living in the world of the story which scripture tells. It means soaking ourselves in that story, as a community and as individuals. Indeed, it means that Christian leaders and teachers must themselves become part of the process, part of the way in which God is at work not only in the Bible-reading community but through that community in and for the wider world. That is the way to become surefooted in our proposal of, or reflection upon, fresh initiatives or suggestions about how the Christian community should respond to new situations—— for instance, in spotting that what the world now needs, in fulfillment of some of scripture’s deepest plans, is global economic justice. It means being, as a community, so attentive not just to what our traditions say about scripture, but to scripture itself, that we are able, by means of it, to live by the life of heaven even while on earth.

All this means that we are called to be people who learn to hear God’s voice speaking today within the ancient text, and who become vessels of that living word in the world around us.—N. T. Wright, Simply Christian: Why Christianity Makes Sense, 187; emphasis original

Why I don't like words like inerrancy

That is why, though I’m not unhappy with what people are trying to affirm when they use words like “infallible” (the idea that the Bible won’t deceive us) and “inerrant” (the stronger idea, that the Bible can’t get things wrong), I normally resist using those words myself. Ironically, in my experience, debates about words like these have often led people away from the Bible itself and into all kinds of theories which do no justice to scripture as a whole—its great story, its larger purposes, its sustained climax, its haunting sense of an unfinished novel beckoning us to become, in our own right, characters in its closing episodes. Instead, the insistence on an “infallible” or “inerrant” Bible has grown up within a complex cultural matrix (that, in particular, of modern North American Protestantism) where the Bible has been seen as the bastion of orthodoxy against Roman Catholicism on the one hand and liberal modernism on the other. Unfortunately, the assumptions of both those worlds have conditioned the debate. It is no accident that this Protestant insistence on biblical infallibility arose at the same time that Rome was insisting on papal infallibility, or that the rationalism of the Enlightenment infected even those who were battling against it.—N. T. Wright, Simply Christian: Why Christianity Makes Sense, 183

<idle musing>
What he said!
</idle musing>

Grow? Or shrink? Choose one

So what happens when you worship the creator God whose plan to rescue the world and put it to rights has been accomplished by the Lamb who was slain? The answer comes in the second golden rule: because you were made in God’s image, worship makes you more truly human. When you gaze in love and gratitude at the God in whose image you were made, you do indeed grow. You discover more of what it means to be fully alive.

Conversely, when you give that same total worship to anything or anyone else, you shrink as a human being. It doesn’t, of course, feel like that at the time. When you worship part of the creation as though it were the Creator himself—in other words, when you worship an idol—you may well feel a brief “high.” But, like a hallucinatory drug, that worship achieves its effect at a cost: when the effect is over, you are less of a human being than you were to begin with. That is the price of idolatry.—N. T. Wright, Simply Christian: Why Christianity Makes Sense, 148 (emphasis original)

You become what you worship

This brings us to the first of two golden rules at the heart of spirituality. You become like what you worship. When you gaze in awe, admiration, and wonder at something or someone, you begin to take on something of the character of the object of your worship. Those who worship money become, eventually, human calculating machines.Those who worship sex become obsessed with their own attractiveness or prowess.Those who worship power become more and more ruthless.—N. T. Wright, Simply Christian: Why Christianity Makes Sense, 148 (emphasis original)

It's a love game

But it would be a mistake to give the impression that the Christian doctrine of God is a matter of clever intellectual word games or mind games. For Christians it’s always a love game: God’s love for the world calling out an answering love from us, enabling us to discover that God not only happens to love us (as though this was simply one aspect of his character) but that he is love itself. That’s what many theological traditions have explored as the very heart of God’s own being, the love which passes continually between Father, Son, and Spirit. Indeed, some have suggested that one way of understanding the Spirit is to see the Spirit as the personal love which the Father has for the Son and the Son for the Father. In that understanding, we are invited to share in this inner and loving life of God, by having the Spirit live within us.—N. T. Wright, Simply Christian: Why Christianity Makes Sense, 139

By the power of the Holy Spirit alone

I have sometimes heard Christian people talk as though God, having done what he’s done in Jesus, now wants us to do our part by getting on with things under our own steam. But that is a tragic misunderstanding. It leads to arrogance, burnout, or both. Without God’s Spirit, there is nothing we can do that will count for God’s kingdom. Without God’s Spirit, the church simply can’t be the church.

I use the word “church” here with a somewhat heavy heart. I know that for many of my readers that very word will carry the overtones of large, dark buildings, pompous religious pronouncements, false solemnity, and rank hypocrisy. But there is no easy alternative. I, too, feel the weight of that negative image. I battle with it professionally all the time.—N. T. Wright, Simply Christian: Why Christianity Makes Sense, 122–23

A waste? Or Surprise! I'm alive!

Nothin in all the history of paganism comes anywhere near this combinatlon of event, intention, and meaning. Nothing in Judaism had prepared for it, except in puzzling, shadowy prophecy. The death of Jesus of Nazareth as the king of the jews, the bearer of Israel’s destiny, the fulfillment of God’s promises to his people of old, is either the most stupid, senseless waste and misunderstanding the world has ever seen, or it is the fulcrum around which world history turns.

Christianity is based on the belief that it was and is the latter.—N. T. Wright, Simply Christian: Why Christianity Makes Sense, 111

Bringing the kingdom—to the "wrong people"!

The whole point of Jesus’s work was to bring heaven to earth and join them together forever, to bring God’s future into the present and make it stick there. But when heaven comes to earth and finds earth unready, when God’s future arrives in the present while people are still asleep, there will be explosions. And there were.

In particular, the people we would today call “the religious right,” led by a popular though unofficial pressure group called the “Pharisees,” objected strongly to Jesus’s teaching that God’s kingdom was coming in this way, through his own work. They were scandalized, not least by the way in which Jesus was celebrating God’s kingdom—another strong symbol, this—with all the wrong people: the poor, the outcasts, the hated tax-collectors—anyone in fact who wanted to join in. It was in response to this criticism that Jesus told some of his most poignant and powerful parables.—N. T. Wright, Simply Christian: Why Christianity Makes Sense, 102 (emphasis original)

<idle musing>
Not a whole lot has changed, has it?
</idle musing>

Rescue operation?

If this was a rescue operation, it was one with a difference. It wasn’t a matter of the God of Israel simply fighting off the wicked pagans and vindicating his own people. It was more devastating. It was about God judging not only the pagans but also Israel; about God acting in a new way in which nothing could be taken for granted; about God fulfilling his promises, but doing so in a way that nobody had expected or anticipated. God was issuing a fresh challenge to Israel, echoing back to his promises to Abraham: Israel is indeed the light of the world, but its present policies have been putting that light under a bucket. It’s time for drastic action. Instead of the usual military revolt, it was time to show the pagans what the true God was really like, not by fighting and violence but by loving one’s enemies, turning the other cheek, going the second mile. That is the challenge which Jesus issued in a series of teachings that we call the “sermon on the mount” (Matthew 5:1-7:29).—N. T. Wright, Simply Christian: Why Christianity Makes Sense, 101

Intervention? Or loving care?

For the pantheist, God and the world are basically the same thing: the world is, if you like, God’s self-expression. For the Deist, the world may indeed have been made by God (or the gods), but there is now no contact between divine and human. The Deist God wouldn’t dream of “intervening” within the created order; to do so would be untidy, a kind of category mistake. But for the ancient Israelite and the early Christian, the creation of the world Was the free outpouring of God’s powerful love.The one true God made a world that was other than himself, because that is what love delights to do. And, having made such a world, he has remained in a close, dynamic, and intimate relationship with it, without in any way being contained within it or having it contained within himself.To speak of God’s action in the world, of heaven’s action (if you like) on earth—and Christians speak of this every time they say the Lord’s Prayer—is to speak not of an awkward metaphysical blun-der, nor of a “miracle” in the sense of a random invasion of earth by alien (“supernatural”?) forces, but to speak of the loving Creator acting within the creation which has never lacked the signs of his presence. It is to speak, in fact, of such actions as might be expected to leave echoes. Echoes of a voice.—N. T. Wright, Simply Christian: Why Christianity Makes Sense, 65–66

Made for each other, but…

We are made for each other. Yet making relationships work, let alone making them flourish, is often remarkably difficult. That is the same paradox that we uncovered in the previous two chapters. We all know that justice matters, yet it slips through our fingers. We mostly know that there is such a thing as spirituality, and that it’s important, yet it’s hard to refute the charge that it’s all wishful thinking. In the same way, we all know that we belong in communities, that we were made to be social creatures. Yet there are many times when we are tempted to slam the door and stomp off into the night by ourselves, simultaneously making the statement that we don’t belong anymore and that we want someone to take pity on us, to come to the rescue and comfort us. We all know we belong in relationships, but we can’t quite work out how to get them right.The voice we hear echoing in our heads and our hearts keeps reminding us of both parts of this paradox, and it’s worth pondering why.—N. T. Wright, Simply Christian: Why Christianity Makes Sense, 30

A central element of faith

It is important to see, and to say, that those who follow Jesus are committed, as he taught us to pray, to God’s will being done “on earth as it is in heaven.” And that means that God’s passion for justice must become ours, too. When Christians use their belief in Jesus as a way of escaping from that demand and challenge, they are abandoning a central element in their own faith. That way danger lies.N. T. Wright, Simply Christian: Why Christianity Makes Sense, 13