Wright - Simply Jesus - Просто Иисус - Райт

I have spent much of my life puzzling over these questions and try­ing, from various angles, to address and answer them. This has been exhilarating as well as challenging. Having grown up in a Christian household, and having experienced the growth and development of my own personal faith from my early years through to adulthood, I have been aware of a vocation which our present culture usually splits into two but which I persist in seeing as a single whole. I have been called to be a historian and theologian, a teacher and writer special­izing in the history and thought of early Christianity, and also a pas­tor within the church. Sometimes I have been able to combine these two elements, the academic and the pastoral; sometimes the jobs to which I have been led have forced me to specialize in one rather than the other, leaving an imbalance which I have then tried to correct. The relevance of this autobiographical remark for the present topic should, I think, be clear: writing about Jesus has never been, for me, a matter simply of "neutral" historical study (actually, there is no such thing, whatever the topic, but we'll leave that aside for the moment); the Jesus whom I study historically is the Jesus I worship as part of the threefold unity of the one God. But, likewise, writing about Jesus has never been a matter simply of pastoral and homiletic intent; the Jesus whom I preach is the Jesus who lived and died as a real human being in first-century Palestine. Modern western culture, especially in America, has done its best to keep these two figures, the Jesus of history and the Jesus of faith, from ever meeting. I have done my best to resist this trend, despite the howls of protest from both sides.

 

This book is entitled Simply Jesus, in conscious succession to an earlier book of mine, Simply Christian. However, there is simplicity and simplicity. Often, when I give a public lecture and then invite questions from the audience, someone will stand up and say, "I have a very simple question." Then out comes something like, "Who exactly is God?" or "What was there before creation?" or "If God is good, why is there evil?" As I always say to such people, the question may be simple, but the answer may well not be. In fact, if we try to give a "simple" answer, we may well oversimplify matters and end up just being quizzical. (When someone asked Augustine what God was doing before creation, he replied that God was making hell for people who ask silly questions.) Simplicity is a great virtue, but oversimplifi­cation can actually be a vice, a sign of laziness.