Simply Christian: Step-by-Step Basics of Christian Faith and Practice

by N.T. Wright

We’re called, here and now, to be instruments of God’s new creation, the world-put-to-rights which has already been launched in Jesus and of which Jesus’s followers are supposed to be not simply beneficiaries but also agents.

Beneficiaries and agents

One of the central elements of the Christian story is the claim that the paradox of laughter and tears, woven as it is deep into the heart of all human experience, is woven also deep into the heart of God.

We honor and celebrate our complexity and our simplicity by continually doing five things. We tell stories. We act out rituals. We create beauty. We work in communities. We think out beliefs.

The Christian story claims to be the true story about God and the world. As such, it offers itself as the explanation of the voice whose echo we hear in the search for justice, the quest for spirituality, the longing for relationship, the yearning for beauty. None of these by itself points directly to God—to any God, let alone the Christian God. At best, they wave their arms in a rather general direction, like someone in a cave who hears an echoing voice but has no idea where it’s coming from.

“Heaven” in this latter, very common biblical sense is God’s space as opposed to our space, not God’s location within our space-time universe. The question is then whether God’s space and our space intersect; and if so how, when, and where.

but because the word offers a way of talking about where God always is, so that the promise held out in the phrase “going to heaven” is more or less exactly “going to be with God in the place where he’s been all along.” Thus “heaven” is not just a future reality, but a present one.

Option One is to slide the two spaces together. God’s space and ours, in this option, are basically the same; or, to put it another way, they are two ways of talking about the same thing. Since God, as seen in this option, doesn’t hide in a corner of his territory, but fills it all with his presence, God is everywhere, and—watch this carefully—everywhere is God. Or, if you like, God is everything, and everything is God. This option is known as “pantheism.” It was popular in the ancient Greek and Roman worlds of the first century, mainly through the philosophy called “Stoicism,” and after centuries in decline it has become increasingly popular in our own times.

For Lucretius and Epicurus, the result of this view is that human beings should get used to being alone in the world. The gods will not intervene, either to help or to harm. The right thing to do is to enjoy life as best one can.

Separating God’s sphere and ours in the Epicurean fashion, with a distant God whom you might respect but who wasn’t going to appear or do anything within our sphere, became very popular in the Western world of the eighteenth century (through the movement known as “Deism”), and has continued to be so in many places to this day.

The Old Testament insists that God belongs in heaven and we on earth. Yet it shows over and over again that the two spheres do indeed overlap, so that God makes his presence known, seen, and heard within the sphere of earth.

Option 3

“the Tent of Meeting.”

Eden

The main focus of ancient Israelite belief in the overlap of heaven and earth was the Temple in Jerusalem.

From that moment on, the Temple on Mount Zion in Jerusalem was the primary place, according to Israelite tradition, where heaven and earth met.

place where heaven and earth overlapped and interlocked.

Eden

When they came to the word YHWH, they would say ADONAI (which means “my Lord”) instead. As a way of reminding themselves that this was what they had to do, they would sometimes write the consonants of YHWH with the vowels of ADONAI.

This confused some later readers, who tried to say the two words together. With a bit of a stretch (and because some letters were interchangeable, including Y with J and W with V), they created the hybrid JEHOVAH. No ancient Israelite or early Christian would have recognized this word.

Here we are on safe ground. We have the Old Testament itself, in Hebrew (with a few parts in Aramaic). We have its Greek translation, commonly called the Septuagint, written in the two or three centuries before the time of Jesus.

We also have several books from within a century or two of Jesus’s day, which retell some or all of the biblical story and which highlight certain features for particular emphasis. The best known of these is the massive Antiquities of the Jews by the brilliant (if maverick) Flavius Josephus, a Jewish aristocrat who fought in the war against Rome in the mid-60s, changed sides, worked for the Romans, and retired to Rome on a state pension after the destruction of Jerusalem in the year AD 70. Telling the story the way a first-century Jew might have seen it not only avoids the massive historical questions that still rage around the early period, but prepares us for understanding why Jesus of Nazareth said and did what he did, and why this had the impact it had.

The texts we have

The story of the Tower of Babel is an account of a world given to injustice, spurious types of spirituality (trying to stretch up to heaven by our own efforts), failed relationships, and the creation of buildings whose urban ugliness speaks of human pride rather than the nurturing of beauty. It all sounds worryingly familiar.

The last line is the vital one. The families of the earth have become divided and confused, and are ruining their own lives and that of the world at large. Abraham and his descendants are somehow to be the means of God putting things to rights, the spearhead of God’s rescue operation.

Putting things to right through Abraham's family

people would live together, under God and in harmony—that is, justice

Right relationships

Christianity is all about the belief that the living God, in fulfillment of his promises and as the climax of the story of Israel, has accomplished all this—the finding, the saving, the giving of new life—in Jesus. He has done it. With Jesus, God’s rescue operation has been put into effect once and for all. A great door has swung open in the cosmos which can never again be shut. It’s the door to the prison where we’ve been kept chained up. We are offered freedom: freedom to experience God’s rescue for ourselves, to go through the open door and explore the new world to which we now have access.

In particular, we are all invited—summoned, actually—to discover, through following Jesus, that this new world is indeed a place of justice, spirituality, relationship, and beauty, and that we are not only to enjoy it as such but to work at bringing it to birth on earth as in heaven. In listening to Jesus, we discover whose voice it is that has echoed around the hearts and minds of the human race all along.

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.

God’s plan to rescue the world from evil would be put into effect by evil doing its worst to the Servant—that is, to Jesus himself—and thereby exhausting its power.

He would fight the messianic battle—by losing it. The real enemy, after all, was not Rome, but the powers of evil that stood behind human arrogance and violence, powers of evil with which Israel’s leaders had fatally colluded. It was time for the evil which had dogged Jesus’s footsteps throughout his career—the shrieking maniacs, the conspiring Herodians, the carping Pharisees, the plotting chief priests, the betrayer among his own disciples, the whispering voices within his own soul—to gather into one great tidal wave of evil that would crash with full force over his head.

From that point of view, as the Eastern Orthodox churches have always emphasized, when Jesus rose again God’s whole new creation emerged from the tomb, introducing a world full of new potential and possibility. Indeed, precisely because part of that new possibility is for human beings themselves to be revived and renewed, the resurrection of Jesus doesn’t leave us as passive, helpless spectators. We find ourselves lifted up, set on our feet, given new breath in our lungs, and commissioned to go and make new creation happen in the world.

How can we make sense of this? I do not think that Jesus “knew he was divine” in the same way that we know we are cold or hot, happy or sad, male or female. It was more like the kind of “knowledge” we associate with vocation, where people know, in the very depths of their being, that they are called to be an artist, a mechanic, a philosopher. For Jesus, this seems to have been a deep “knowledge” of that kind, a powerful and all-consuming belief that Israel’s God was more mysterious than most people had supposed; that within the very being of this God there was a give-and-take, a to-and-fro, a love given and received. Jesus seems to have believed that he, the fully human prophet from Nazareth, was one of those partners in love. He was called, in obedience to the Father, to follow through the project to which that love would give itself freely and fully. This

That is why St. Paul, our earliest Christian writer, speaks of the Spirit as the guarantee or the down-payment of what is to come. The Greek word he uses is arrabōn, which in modern Greek means an engagement ring, a sign in the present of what is to come in the future. Paul

Spirit as engagement ring

belong to Jesus), what they have and are is…new creation (2 Corinthians 5:17)! Your own human self, your personality, your body, is being reclaimed, so that instead of being simply part of the old creation, a place of sorrow and injustice and ultimately the shame of death itself, you can be both part of the new creation in advance and someone through whom it begins to happen here and now.

Believers as new creation

the way to be truly of use on this earth is to be genuinely heavenly minded—and to live as one of the places where, and the means by which, heaven and earth overlap.

Be new creation

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.

Already we see the inner logic of worship. Worship means, literally, acknowledging the worth of something or someone. It means recognizing and saying that something or someone is worthy of praise. It means celebrating the worth of someone or something far superior to oneself.

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.

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.

Help is at hand not least in those who have trodden the path ahead of us. Part of our difficulty here is that we moderns are so anxious to do things our own way, so concerned that if we get help from anyone else our prayer won’t be “authentic” and come from our own heart, that we are instantly suspicious about using anyone else’s prayers. We are like someone who doesn’t feel she’s properly dressed unless she has personally designed and made all her own clothes; or like someone who feels it’s artificial

Help in prayer

When Jesus’s followers asked him to teach them to pray, he didn’t tell them to divide into focus groups and look deep within their own hearts. He didn’t begin by getting them to think slowly through their life experiences to discover what types of personality each of them had, to spend time getting in touch with their buried feelings. He and they both understood the question they had asked: they wanted, and needed, a form of words which they could learn and use.

Lord's prayer

Indeed, the idea that I must always find my own words, that I must generate my own devotion from scratch every morning, that unless I think of new words I must be spiritually lazy or deficient—that has the all-too-familiar sign of human pride, of “doing it my way”: of, yes, works-righteousness.

Pride

Lighten our darkness, we beseech thee, O Lord; and by thy great mercy defend us from all perils and dangers of this night; for the love of thy only Son, our Savior Jesus Christ. Amen. I

It’s time to give ourselves a shake—to recognize that different people need different kinds of help at different stages of their lives—and get on with it.

Perhaps the best known of these, widely practiced in the Eastern Orthodox churches, is the “Jesus Prayer,” which can be said easily and slowly with the rhythm of one’s breathing: “Lord Jesus Christ, Son of the Living God, have mercy on me, a sinner.”

Jesus prayer

Much has been written about this prayer—what it means, how to use it, where it can take you. It isn’t as restrictive as it seems at first sight. Praying for mercy doesn’t just mean “I’ve done something wrong, so please forgive me.” It’s a much wider petition, asking that God send his merciful presence and help in a thousand and one situations, despite the fact that we don’t deserve such aid and never could. And, though the prayer is explicitly addressed to Jesus himself, which is unusual though not unknown even in the New Testament itself, it’s offered in the confidence that when we come to Jesus we thereby come through him to the Father; and that, in order to pray that way, we need to be led by the Holy Spirit.

“Father Almighty, maker of heaven and earth, set up your kingdom in our midst”;

“Holy Spirit, breath of the living God, renew me and all the world.”

“Hear, O Israel; YHWH our God, YHWH is one; and you shall love YHWH your God with all your heart.” This opening sentence is found in Deuteronomy 6:4; it’s known as the Shema Prayer,

Shema

That’s why the Bible is nonnegotiable. It’s a vital, central element in Christian faith and life. You can’t do without it, even though too many Christians have forgotten what to do with it. Somehow, God seems to have delegated (as it were) some at least of the things he intends to do in the world to this book.

In the same way, many Christians—whole generations of them, sometimes entire denominations—have in their possession a book which will do a thousand things not only in and for them but through them in the world. And they use it only to sustain the three or four things they already do. They treat it as a form of verbal wallpaper: pleasant enough in the background, but you stop thinking about it once you’ve lived in the house a few weeks. It really doesn’t matter that I don’t exploit more than a small amount of my computer’s capability. But to be a Christian while not letting the Bible do all the things it’s capable of, through you and in you, is like trying to play the piano with your fingers tied together.

By contrast, we possess literally hundreds of early manuscripts of some or all of the New Testament, putting us in an unrivaled position to work back from the small variations which creep into any manuscript tradition and discern the likely original text.

The Bible does indeed offer plenty of information, but what it offers in a more primary way is energy for the task to which God is calling his people. Talking about the inspiration of the Bible is one way of saying that that energy comes from the work of God’s Spirit.

The Bible is breathed out by God (the word for “inspired” in this case is theopneustos—literally, “God-breathed”) so that it can fashion and form God’s people to do his work in the world.