A review by skitch41
Simply Good News: Why the Gospel Is News and What Makes It Good by N.T. Wright

4.0

When you have read a lot of N.T. Wright, as I have, you tend to pick up on his style, his overarching theme. Sometimes this works effectively, other times it does not. In this book, N.T. Wright's overarching theme works beautifully. By focusing on the Gospel message, not the just the Gospel books (Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John) and not just on Jesus himself, as he has done in previous works, N.T. Wright is able to encompass everything in the New Testament that he has been saying for some time now, simplify it without losing any of its complexity, and infuse it with his characteristic awe and wonder in the God of the Bible, His creation, and His redemptive plan. The basic theme of this book, and much of N.T. Wright's other books, is this: the Gospel message is that Jesus' death and resurrection is God fulfilling His promise from ancient times to establish His kingdom and His personal rule "on Earth as in Heaven." While this encompasses saving, or setting apart, people to proclaim this message, this good news, the point was never to be saved so that people could go to heaven, a slight skewing of the Gospel message by Enlightenment philosophy as Mr. Wright explains. Scripture, and particularly Revelations 21 and 22, declares that God is going to bring Heaven to Earth, not bring us out of Earth to Heaven. Once the Gospel message is seen in this way, it may very well change how you read your Bible, see the world now and act in it. This can be a very complicated topic and Mr. Wright hasn't always done a great job of explaining it in past books. But here he has perfected and simplified things by broadening his scope. If you have never read N.T. Wright, I would highly recommend this as a good starting place.

(Postscript: As well as read this book, I also took part in Mr. Wright's online class that used this book as its basis. If you are thinking about using this book for a group study or just want to dive in a little deeper, I highly recommend that you check out https://www.udemy.com/simply-good-news/learn/#/, or go to his main website for his online class, www.ntwrightonline.org, for a link to this class and other online classes available now and in the future.)