Reviews

Surprised by Scripture: Engaging Contemporary Issues by N.T. Wright

skitch41's review

4.0

Since falling in love with the works of N.T. Wright over a year ago, I have recognized in his works how the overarching theme in all his works (that with the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, the new creation has begun to break into our world, that God has declared himself the king of this new world, and that we as Christians are called, as his image-bearers, to reflect His goodness in all things and to share the Gospel with everyone) has a political dimension to it. Sometimes Mr. Wright has touched upon this in his more recent popular works, but usually has chosen to do so in a tangential way. In this book, Mr. Wright begins to articulate more fully how the message of the Gospel challenges the world and its underlying philosophies. Mr. Wright points out how modern Western pop culture, in America especially, has adopted the Epicurean thought of the Enlightenment. Epicurean meaning that God, or the gods, are probably far off (if they exist at all) and have very little to no effect on our day to day lives, so we shouldn't worry about them at all. Mr. Wright ties this in with Europe's implicit and America's explicit split government and religion as well as culture's split between science and religion. In this series of essays, Mr. Wright makes a powerful case for taking up the thoughts of the Old Testament Jews and New Testament believers, where faith and public service were not as divided as they are today and science was used to explore the intricacies of God's created world, not used to proclaim the death of God. Each chapter comes from a speech or essay that Mr. Wright wrote in the past and has been edited for this book to give some thematic flow and it mostly works. As with any work of collected essays/speeches, this book can seem a little disjointed at times, but Mr. Wright and his editors have done a fantastic job of trying to tie it all together. I would highly recommend this book to anyone who wants to know how revolutionary the message of the Gospel is even in our modern world and how the message of Jesus Christ as Savior and Lord is still the message that the world needs to hear.

sstallryan's review

3.0

A bit redundant especially when it comes to blaming the Enlightenment for all our wrong-headed thinking and doing in the church. But definitely some powerful theological ideas. My favorite, though, was the sermon at the end.