Bishop Wright is an interesting writer. I first heard about him when I started getting interested in the New Paul Perspective (NPP). He was influential in that field. The interesting thing that I found out about Bishop Wright was that he was also active in the "Third Wave" of the historical Jesus movement. If I remember right the "First Wave" was the traditional wave where the Jesus of the New Testament was accepted. The "Second Wave" was when scholars started subjecting Jesus and the New Testament to historical research. Unfortunately this sort of scrutiny mostly does away with the miraculous and Jesus become an itinerant Jewish Rabi and not the Son of God, Creator and Savior of the World. The "Third Wave" is a response where Jesus is placed in historical context but still considered divine.
Bishop Wright had an interesting book about the historical Jesus, but I can't remember it title now, however his main thesis was that Jesus positioned himself as taking the place of the Temple in Jewish thinking. It's a little more in depth than that but that's what I remember. I do remember that I liked the book. (I tired to find the title of the book on Amazon. Man Bishop Wright has written a lot of books and nothing jumped out at me.) I can remember reading something that said that Bishop Wright was very popular with many evangelicals because of his writings on the historical Jesus, but then he upset many of those people when he started writing about the NPP. I also read a NPP book by him but only remember that it was interesting and can't remember anything that jumped out at me. I do remember that after I read the book I started thinking that Paul probably thought of himself as an observant Jew to the day he died, he just considered himself to be a correctly observant Jew, like the LDS consider ourselves to be the correct Christians.
Anyway when I bought those books there was another book called "Simply Christian" on Amazon that looked interesting so I bought 3 N. T. Wright books. I remember someone on the Amazon page comparing "Simply Christian" to C.S. Lewis' "Mere Christianity." Well I remember reading the first chapter and thinking that it was going to be a rewrite of C.S. Lewis and stopped reading it. What a dope I can be at times.
Basically Bishop Wright says that there are four longings in humans that are fulfilled in Jesus. These are a longing for Justice, for Spirituality, for Beauty and for Companionship. The first four chapters lay out how those longings manifest themselves and the rest of the book shows how Jesus fulfills them.
The idea that there is some human concept of Justice is manifest when you go to a playground and watch kids play and one child will wail "It's not fair!" Generally if an adult is around he'll tell the child that he's right it's not fair, and that we live in a fallen world that's unfair. We don't generally say it that way, but that's the point that we're making. However N.T. Wright says that they fact that the child knows instinctively that that things should be fair shows that their is a standard of fairness that everyone understands because the child is not taught that, we adults do our best to disabuse the kids of the their instinctual quest for fairness. Unfortunately C.S. Lewis used this same example and so I just thought that Bishop Wright was ripping him off.
He wasn't really, it's just that that's a true observation and both men see it. Bishop Wright then goes on to say similar things about the quest for beauty, companionship and spirituality. I'd never really considered the quest for companionship as being an indication of divinity within us. Bishop Wright talks about how we show this desire for companionship. One of his interesting examples is that people continue to get married even though they know that there's a good chance they're going to be divorced, something still drives them to want that close companionship with others. I thought that was a profound thought, especially because Bishop Wright has to go on and say that we want that companionship even though we can't have eternal companionship with anyone except the Savior. Now that's profoundly said that Bishop Wright notices that we're driven by something to seek out close companionship with others, and he doesn't know anything about the sealing power of God, and just how truly indicative that desire if of a loving Eternal Heavenly Father, and His Son. We can in fact have eternal companionship with others, and with the Savior and the Father as well.
It was an interesting book, but I think that I'd only give it about 3 stars out of 5.
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