Simply Christian Background

Todd Richards provided us with a great outline/summary of how NT Wright sets up his book. Here is a good overview:

N.T. “Tom” Wright is the Anglican Bishop of Durham. He was educated at Oxford and is considered as one of the leading New Testament scholars in the world today. He is as much a historian as a theologian in that Wright believes that to understand Christianity, one has to understand the Old Testament, first century Judaism and the early church.

Simply Christian is broken up into three sections. In section one, Wright looks at four “Echoes of a voice” that each hear—
• The Longing for Justice (Chapter One)
• The Quest for Spirituality (Chapter Two)
• The Hunger for Relationship (Chapter Three)
• The Delight in Beauty (Chapter Four)

These four Echoes are “universal intuitions” that each of us hear. They have been distorted though because the Voice is heard through our own line of personal defenses that we have to protect us from the outside world. As a result, justice, spirituality, relationships and beauty have been distorted and we fill our longing with versions of the four echoes that are less than they ought to be.

Section two talks about how these four themes are ultimately answered and redeemed through Jesus Christ and this thing called Christianity. Finally, section three outlines how we live into these four themes in the day-to-day of walking with Jesus.