A book worth Wrighting about

I just finished and thoroughly enjoyed a book called Simply Christian, by N.T. Wright. I can’t talk about the book without comparing it to Mere Christianity, which is perhaps its wiser grandfather, consisting of the same marrow, but written to a different world. Making this comparison consistently earns me responses of disbelief at my audacity from faithful fans of C.S. Lewis, but the two books are so alike that it is the only place I can think to start. The books have the same purpose, which is to explain the basics of Christianity, common to all of its true manifestations.

They both talk about the inner conscience as a hint to the fact that justice is a real thing in the universe, that there is something that makes us long for it, and that this something is the same God that the Bible talks about. Wright adds that the knowledge of spiritual reality, the enjoyment of beauty, and the longings for community are also signs that point to Christianity being true. They give a lot of time to problems they find in the rival conceptions of God. They both conclude that the God the Bible talks about is the most coherent understanding of the universe available on the market, and beyond that, that He was and is God. They both talk about central Christian acts (baptism, the eucharist, prayer). Yet for those of us who have spent a lot of time with Mere Christianity, Simply Christian is not redundant. It adds a lot to the conversation.

Simply Christian talks more than Mere Christianity about the Jewish understanding of God and how Jesus fits into that understanding. Wright’s background as a New Testament scholar is helpful here. He explains that “heaven” was understood by Jews to mean “the realm/dwelling of God.” Important to this notion is that throughout the Old Testament, heaven and earth come together. So Jews did not understand heaven and earth as always-separate realms, but that God consistently brought His realm to ours. Through God’s election of the Israelites to be the instrument of God’s blessing, through the temple, and through the reading the Torah, God meets with the Jewish people, bringing “heaven” to earth, reminding them who they are and of their purpose.

Wright has helped me wrap my mind around this notion of “heaven” as central to understanding the thinking of the Old Testament people, and how early Christians (who were also Jews) understood Jesus’ coming. Early Christians understood that the God who had seen fit to overlap the two spheres of heaven and earth in a limited way, through his calling the temple and the Torah, had now come with the message that the kingdom of heaven was among them.

As a New Testament scholar, Wright speaks with authority about the Bible, and with how we should understand the words “inspired,” “infallible,” “inerrant,” “literal” and “metaphorical.” If I had read these chapters 10 years ago, it would have saved me a lot of headaches in trying to understand the Good Book. If someone has serious questions about how Christians should approach the Bible, these chapters (13 and 14) would be a good place to go looking for well-thought answers.

In his last chapter, discussing morality and justice, Wright says the following:

“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.”

This idea struck me as an affirmation that Wright is not a wishy-washy “we’re all the same, follow your own path, and it’s all good” kind of thinker. And the point he makes has hung onto me more than any other idea the book offered. I will delve more into this idea in the sequel to this post. Stay tuned.

Safe Families

Here is a link to an article and video about Safe Families. They are an organization we have worked with to take care of babies in need. They are making the world more of what it was intended to be.

classroom quips, 3-9-10

Antonio: Hey, Mr. Stipp, we got big problems at home. Our power went out. Someone's at the house fixing it right now.

Mr. Stipp: (with all the sarcasm I could muster) Oh no, what did you watch instead of TV?

Antonio: Oh, it was no problem. My dad has a DVD player in the van, so we just went out and watched that.

Disaster Averted. Whew.

on limitedness

There are a lot of options available for explaining what’s gone wrong with our society. Blame it on the break down of the family, or on the influence of television, or our glamorization of sex and violence in media. Blame it on turning our backs on God, or on the federal government. Blame it on materialism, racism, sexism, feminism, classism, or egotism. I do not want to negate the vailidity of any of these options, but to offer another option, that I think underlies and perpetuates any problems that we already face: unlimitedness.

God created limits. He created springtime and harvest. He created day and night. He gave us the earth and our families. He created the Sabbath. A detrimental effect of industrialization and globalization has been the obliteration of our consciousness of such limits.

Hear me out.

Our country and its wealth were built upon the folly of unlimitedness. Colonialism, imperialism and slavery draw deeply from the unbridled lust for more. These forces say, “It is conceivable to make more money, to have more land and to spread our influence further…Do it.” It is clear to me that our enslavement of Africans came not from a hatred toward people with dark skin, but from an inability to recognize limits. We saw that more money could conceivably be made in a growing season, and we did it, with conscience as our only limit. And conscience doesn’t often put up much of a fight against cash. Now we have gotten rid of slavery, but unlimitedness is more alive now than ever. The symptom is gone but the cause remains. Unlimitedness is an axiom that defines us. And as a people unlimited, we will always enslave and oppress.

There is a natural, God-created order in seasons. The Bible’s wisdom literature tells us, “There is a time for everything.” Because of our technological and globalizing leaps, though, we now know that truth only in theory. We can have food which is out of season, grown by farmers in lesser-developed countries, ready for us to consume whenever we want, year round. Our homes are heated and cooled to a “perfect” temperature, so that regardless of the season, it always feels the same inside. Our knowledge of the limitations and structure that seasons bring to our lives is gone. Developed countries re-write the biblical passage to say, “Now is the time for everything.”

Another limit God gave us was dependence on land and on our families. We were all born somewhere, from some woman, and in that moment were given community and a place. Modernization and globalization have made us isolated individuals committed to no place and no one else. Getting up and leaving the place and people that brought us up is expected. I’ve written more on this here.

God created day and night, and I believe he did so as a gift that told His creatures when to start and stop work. Because of electricity, we are now capable of operating outside of the naturally created day-night boundary we were given. And the more we operate outside the natural boundaries, the more we forget there are boundaries at all.

And this must be the deepest problem. Not that we are unlimited in the particular ways that I am highlighting (and in dozens others as well), but that we have no knowledge that limits can and should restrain us.

All affronts on limitedness require counteraction to lessen their consequences. Our independence of land and manual labor has made us weak. To offset the weakness that urbanization and its resultant sedentary lifestyle have wrought, we can buy memberships at gyms to use machines, which can replace work, which used to keep us healthy and strong. It's a run-on sentence. Air travel breaks the earth-sky separation that God created. Counteracting its effects on our atmosphere will require the energy of our most brilliant scientific minds before it demands restraint on we who ruin the atmosphere.

I believe the beginning of much wisdom is saying “no” to the things we are told we have to have, the things we have to do, and the full-throttle pace we have to keep. We are wise to limit ourselves. And I believe a good place to start in keeping limitations is with the Sabbath. The Sabbath is different from the other creations, because it is also a command. There is nothing we can invent to counteract a command, as we can, say, seasons or place or community, or day and night. No matter how far we advance (or retreat) as a society, the command to keep the Sabbath holy; to rest, will still be there. I think one point of the Sabbath is that we recognize our own limitedness. Wisdom says, “work six days, and rest the seventh, even though there is more that you could do. Stop. Rest. Go this far, and no further.”

The tower of Babel was built by a people who did not understand where they should stop. But God’s limits humanize us. They remind us who we are as creatures subservient to Him, and that all we do must be done with a head not cocked to our glory, but bowed to His.