Tom Wright in Durham

I should have posted this last week: my notes taken at the evening with Tom Wright in Durham Cathedral where he gave an outline of his new book "Simply Christian". I record some of my responses at the end.

Tom Wright, Durham Cathedral, 03/05/2006

Simply Christian
commending Christian faith into the 21st century.

Making connctions between God and being human;
One of the main themes in the book is the idea of 'echoes of a [God's] voice': - the echoes that are found in longings for justice [which relates to an apparently innate sense of fairness, as seen in the dealings of children with one another]; the growing awareness of and desire for 'spirituality'; how relationships are part of us; and beauty... things that point beyond but are limited or even corrupted.

"Staring into the sun". A metaphor for relating to God: too bright but the light is needed.
Deism -probably the most common view of God 'in the street'. It's the reflex, default view that many in our society work with in practice and assume is the Christian view. But it is too remote and uninvolved a conception of God to do justice to Christian revelation.
In reaction to the shortcoming of deism, many others turn to pantheism. The problem is that it tends to elide evil as evil. If God is all then cancer is God, because cancer is god as much as love is. So our sense of things being wrong is undermined by this view.
Theism is the Christian option which combines the transcendence and yet the immanence of the other two without the grosser of their difficulties.

pt.3 Reflecting image of God. 'Image' is means to communicate presence of the imaged/signified. If human beings are made in God's image, do we indeed communicate God's presence?

"The Bible is what has happened as heaven and earth have overlapped." As opposed to being some kind of text book.

Jesus and the resurrection is a vision of the future. It is the launch pad moment of the new creation.

Ethics: not keeping the rules of a distant god, or simply being in tune with the universe. Rather living as citizens of the new world. The voices that echo in this creation echo the new creation..

My responses.
I was left pondering several things. Art, for example, is often not about new creation but critique of the old; I don't see that as a fatal objection rather something to be explored in relation to the eschatalogical ethics being endorsed. And in that respect, how does sex and marriage constitute living in the future state?

I felt that what +Tom presented is useful in identifying our culture's difficulty is in reacting against deism into the polar opposite of pantheism. I think, from the perspective of a parish and then university priest, it is a useful characterisation of what we keep finding in society at large. Theism is an option which avoids the downsides of the other two but it is hard to get it on people's maps. This could be a useful apologetics book for such people.

I found myself wondering whether the book was actually saying very much that 'Mere Christianity' didn't and whether it would stand comparison with that apologetic classic. There are a couple of useful metaphors developed and the eschatalogical dimension is a good addition.

However, I was left with an impression of a book that probably is more a last gasp of late-modern, late 20th century apologetics than truly 21st century. I think that we need to be doing a lot mor to explore issues of integralism, emergence, situating wrath and atonement in love more fully ...