N.T. Wright’s Simply Good News

N.T. Wright

Simply Good News: Why the Gospel is News and What Makes it Good
New York: HarperOne, 2015
Available at Amazon.com

I’m currently in Houston staying with the delightful Dr. Peter Davids and his wife Judy Davids when I notice N.T. Wright’s latest book on the shelves. So naturally I pick it up and start reading.

Simply Good News rehashes many of the things found in Wright’s earlier books like Simply Jesus, Simply Christian, and Surprised by Hope. I won’t offer a full length review since longer summaries are given by fellow patheos bloggers Dan Wilkinson and Scot McKnight. What I really enjoyed though were the last two chapters on “Surprised by God” and “Praying the Good News.”

In “Surprised by God,” Wright shows how the God of the gospel is very different to culturally prevalent ideas of theism that are, in my mind, depict God to be a kind of distant moralizing geriatric. The reason why so many people don’t believe in God is because this is the idea of God that they are operating with. God, Wright says, is Creator, Judge, and Lover. The good news is the prime moment in the revelation of the one true God as the utter, self-giving God of love.

Wright writes:

I hope I have said enough to demonstrate that the caricatures are simply caricatures and that the God who the early Christians believed had revealed himself in Jesus – and in the Spirit of Jesus, now at work through the good news in the world, in the hearts and minds of men, women, and children all over the place – is the one true God, who calls to them with sovereign love and summons them to join in his work of new creation. And that this was, and still is, good news (p. 150).

He concludes:

[T]he good news of which Christians speak is indeed good news. Once you understand it and are grasped by this, it is the best news you could ever hear. To pay attention to it – to look carefully at the news about the past (what happened in Jesus) and about the future (the eventual new creation), and to begin to discover the news about the present (the present challenge of god’s kingdom in the world, and of the transformation of your own life within that) – is to see the world with different eyes. To see your neighbor with different eyes. To see yourself with different eyes. This is the challenge of the good news for today and tomorrow (p. 151).

Then in “Praying the Good News,” Wright takes readers through a tour of the Lord’s Prayer in outline with a view to how to make gospel-centered prayers. It follows the sub-headings of Help, Forgive Us, Daily Bread, Here and Now, Honor and Glory to Your Name, and Heavenly Father.  He closes with the thought that, “All Christian prayer, then, and supremely the Lord’s Prayer, enables us to be fully home in God’s house, whichever door we come in by … Once we are grasped by the good news, we  must learn to be shaped by the good news. In prayer, we learn to become good news” (p. 171).

Another good Wright-book to add to the pile or to give people interested in knowing what Christianity is about.