Simply Good News

N. T. Wright

• Publisher: HarperOne
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9780062334374
• Topic: Théologie et religion
• Subtopic: Études bibliques

The bishop, Bible scholar, modern heir to C. S. Lewis, and revered author of Simply Christian and Simply Jesus offers a fresh look at the Gospel, explaining why Jesus' message is "good news" and why it is more timely and transforming today than we know.

The Gospel means good news. But if the message has been around for 2, 000 years, what makes it significant today? What's so "good" about stories involving damnation, violence, and a God who sacrifices his only son?

Noted Bible scholar N.T. Wright shows us how Christians today have lost sight of what the "good news" of the gospel really is. In Simply Good News, he takes us back in time to reveal how the people of the first-century—the gospel's original audience—would have received Jesus' message. He offer a clear and thoughtful analysis of what the "good news" really is, and applies it to our lives today, revealing its power to transform us.

1

What’s the News?

YOU ARE SITTING quietly in a café with a couple of friends when suddenly the door bursts open and in rushes a stranger with a wild, excited look on his face.

“Good news!” he shouts. “You’ll never guess! The greatest news you can imagine!”

What on earth can he be talking about? What could his good news be, and why does he think it justifies barging into a café and telling strangers about it?

Scenario 1: Perhaps the doctors just told him they had managed to cure his daughter of the disease that was killing her. That would be great news indeed, at least for his immediate family and friends, but it does not explain why he would announce it to strangers.

Scenario 2: Perhaps he heard that the local football team had won a great victory against their old rivals down the road. In some parts of my own country, people would indeed celebrate such a thing as good news, though most fans probably would have been at the pub watching the game with him. Why leave the celebration to tell the nonfans at the café?

Scenario 3: Perhaps, in a region with high unemployment and poverty, he just learned that people had discovered huge new reserves of coal, oil, or gas. Suddenly there would be thousands of new jobs and a new start for everyone. I know places where that would cause otherwise quiet people to burst into a room and shout the news to everybody. That might justify such a dramatic announcement.

I start with these scenarios because I think we have lost touch with a basic element of the Christian faith. The Christian faith, in its earliest forms, is presented as good news. That is the original meaning of the Old English word gospel. I am arguing that the idea of seeing the Christian faith as news that is good is itself, ironically, news to many people today. Even those who know in theory that this is what gospel means often fail to appreciate the significance of the fact. We need, I suggest, to ask afresh: What is the good news that Jesus himself announced and told his followers to announce as well?

Most people—including many Christians—never ask themselves this question. We assume we understand the gospel because it seems so familiar and so entrenched. So we skip over the significance of why Christianity comes to us in the form of an announcement of the best possible news. The word gospel now carries different meanings. We talk of “gospel truth” when we want to stress how reliable something is. In some churches, “preaching the gospel” means explaining how to become a Christian—a formula we use to make sure we arrive in heaven safe and sound. For others, “gospel” is simply a type of music—though, granted, gospel music does often give the impression that something exciting is happening.

But when Jesus and the early Christians spoke of good news—which they did a great deal—they meant much more than this. They really did see it as news, and they believed this news was so good that it was worth announcing as widely as possible. Many churches and many Christian preachers and teachers manage to ignore this. Usually people outside the Christian faith don’t realize that this is what Christianity is supposed to be about.

Let’s go back to the stranger in the café. Each of the options I suggested has a particular shape that helps us understand more deeply what is meant by good news.

First, the news in each case isn’t just something that has happened out of the blue. Each one of the announcements I mentioned assumes a larger context, as if it were a new and unexpected development within a much longer story. In the first case, the announcement comes amid the story of a sick and dying child. In the second, the longer running story is that of the well-known sporting rivalry between the teams. In the third case, the announcement comes in the context of the slow, sickening decline of a whole region into social deprivation. The news in question makes sense within that longer story. Only by knowing this backstory can we understand why the new announcement is good news.

Second, this news is about something that has happened, because of which everything will now be different. This news has significance; it makes an impact—it has consequences that alter lives. When you put good news within the longer story, it isn’t just a matter of “well, that was nice, but now we go back to how things were before.” (In the case of the football victory, it might feel like that after a few weeks, but at the time it always registers as a new beginning.) The child is going to get better! The whole region is going to recover! Life has been transformed!

Third, the news introduces an intermediate period of waiting. The child is still in the hospital—but instead of waiting anxiously and sorrowfully, we are now waiting with excitement and joy for her to get better and come home. Half the workforce is still unemployed, but now they will lift their aspirations and look forward to healthy activity and the resulting prosperity.

What good news regularly does, then, is to put a new event into an old story, point to a wonderful future hitherto out of reach, and so introduce a new period in which, instead of living a hopeless life, people are now waiting with excitement for what they know is on the way.

The Christian good news is supposed to be this kind of thing. The gospel of Jesus Christ comes as news within a larger story. It points to a wonderful new future. And it introduces a new period of waiting that changes our expectations. I am writing this book because I think many people, inside the church as well as outside, have seldom heard the gospel story told in this fashion. As a result, all sorts of things get muddled.

Good Advice, Wrong News

In many churches, the good news has subtly changed into good advice: Here’s how to live, they say. Here’s how to pray. Here are techniques for helping you become a better Christian, a better person, a better wife or husband. And in particular, here’s how to make sure you’re on the right track for what happens after death. Take this advice: say this prayer and you’ll be saved. You won’t go to hell; you’ll go to heaven. Here’s how to do it.

This is advice, not news.

The whole point of advice is to make you do something to get a desired result. Now, there’s nothing wrong with good advice. We all need it. But it isn’t the same thing as news. News is an announcement that something significant has happened. And good news is what Jesus and his first followers were all about.

At this point someone will object, “My church hasn’t forgotten the good news! We know that Jesus died for our sins! He took our punishment so that we could go to heaven! Isn’t that good news? If you thought you were destined for hell and suddenly someone told you God had done something about it, wouldn’t that be good news?”

Well, yes, it would. But—and this is the shocking and difficult thing for many people—that isn’t exactly the good news Jesus and the early church were talking about.

In other words, while some Christian teachers have exchanged good news for good advice, others have preserved the gospel as news, but they are telling a different story from what the New Testament authors meant by good news.

Yes, the good news is indeed about Jesus, and about his death and resurrection in particular. Yes, this good news does indeed open up a vision of an ultimate future beyond death, so that we live in hope and joy meanwhile. But the usual heaven-and-hell scheme, however popular, distorts the Bible’s good news. Over many centuries, Western churches have got the story wrong. They have forgotten what the backstory is (the larger story that gives meaning and context to the good news). As a result, the news that bursts in upon it means something significantly different, and the long-range vista opened up by this news means something different again.

This affects everything: how we understand our relationship to God, our future, our responsibilities as a church and as disciples, and much more.

My main point, then, is that the Christian message is about good news, not good advice. And one of the reasons we need to sort this out is that many people have lived with a distorted version of the good news.

Let me sharpen this with two memories, one very recent, the other from some years ago.

I received an e-mail the other day from a man I have never met (a frequent enough occurrence). He had read one of my books, though—or at least part of it. He had seen enough to make him want to confront me with a question that, I suspect, bothers a lot of people. He wrote, “For a start, the Christian faith isn’t ‘news.’ It’s two thousand years old. And we’ve learned a lot since then. For another thing, when I hear you people talk about it, I don’t think it’s very ‘good.’ All that stuff about a distant deity threatening us with hellfire and damnation and then—if you’re lucky—offering you a sneaky way out around the back. Calling it ‘good news’ seems a bit of a con, to put it mildly.”

Those are excellent questions. Indeed, how can something that happened two thousand years ago still be considered news, and why are we so convinced that it deserves the adjective good? As I mentioned above, good news can only be understood in the context of a larger or earlier story. And if the gospel’s backstory is that we’re all going to hell unless a new way opens up, then that message often comes across not in terms of news (an announcement of something that has happened) but in terms of advice (guidance on what we must do). The good advice sounds like this: “There is a heaven, and there is a hell, so if I were you I’d grab my chance to make the right choice.” If there is any news there—perhaps the suggestion that Jesus offers a way of making that choice successfully—then my correspondent would be right: that is quite old news, and it is only good for the lucky ones who heed the advice.

The problem with explaining the gospel this way is that Jesus himself didn’t actually say much about heaven in the sense we normally mean it. When he spoke of heaven’s kingdom, he wasn’t talking about a place called heaven to which people might or might not go after they die. He was talking about something that would become a reality “as in heaven, so on earth” (Matt. 6:10). So instead of suggesting that we could escape the earth to go to heaven, Jesus’s good news was about heaven coming to earth. And there are many people inside and outside the church who have never heard this news. It isn’t only the atheists who have got hold of the wrong end of the stick.

My other memory will serve as a parable that illustrates the problem with good news. Jesus and the early Christians faced this problem, and so do we.

On November 22, 2003, I woke up very early and immediately telephoned my daughter. She was at home in England; I was in a hotel in Atlanta, Georgia, attending the annual meeting of the Society of Biblical Literature. But the reason for my call was in Australia, where the English Rugby Union team was playing in the final of the game’s biggest challenge: the Rugby World Cup. Their opponent in the final was the host nation, Australia. That country, always crazy about sport—especially against England!—was on tiptoe with excitement, urging their team to victory. I had been following the contest through all the preliminary rounds. As England won game after game, getting through the early stages and then into the final, hope had been building. Could they make it all the way? Might it really be possible? I wanted to hear the news. Actually, wanted is far too weak a word. I was eager for it. Hungry.

The reason I phoned my daughter was that, though the television in my hotel room offered hundreds of channels, I couldn’t find the game on any of them. Rugby, it seemed, hadn’t made it onto the American radar. I knew, however, that my daughter would be glued to the relevant English television station. With a quiver in her voice, she told me the news: The game had reached full time, with the two sides exactly even at seventeen points each. Half an hour of extra time was being added. The players, having given their all, would now have to find yet more reserves of energy and determination. The atmosphere was electric. It was unbearably tense. This was as big as a sporting contest could get.

There was no question of going back to sleep. I got dressed and went down to the hotel lobby, where all was quiet, it being around five in the morning. Half an hour later I telephoned again. My daughter was shouting with joy. Jonny Wilkinson, the poster boy of English rugby, had won the game with a drop-goal in the final half minute. Australia was devastated; England was ecstatic. I was ecstatic. This was the best sporting news England had had for many a long day. If part of the definition of good news might be “something you want to shout across the street,” this certainly fell in that category. Americans often encourage one another to think positively, whatever the circumstances. But I didn’t need any encouragement that morning. Something had happened that made all the difference.

The trouble was, who could I tell? Who wanted to hear this good news? It was still early morning in Atlanta. I wanted to go to the reception desk in excitement and tell the clerks, “We just won the cup!” I wanted to hug the concierge and say, “Did you hear the news?” I wanted to shout it out to the sleepy joggers setting off on their morning run. I wanted to put up a big notice for everyone to see: “ENGLAND WON THE WORLD CUP!” I thought of trying to tell the night porters who were hanging around.

But I knew it was no good. None of the hotel staff was remotely likely to be interested. They didn’t even know who Jonny Wilkinson was. American football has recently become big news in England, but its transatlantic cousin hadn’t yet hit the headlines in America. What was good news for me, and for my whole country, wouldn’t register in the hotel lobby at 5 A.M. I might as well go out into the street in a Scottish town and announce that China had beaten Germany in the World Table Tennis Championships. All I would get is a shrug of the shoulders and a big yawn: “So what?”

Then the crowning irony. As the day dawned and the conference woke up, I went to join the line for breakfast. I was looking for someone, anyone, who even knew that a major sporting event had taken place—someone to whom I could tell my good news. And the first person I met who knew about the game was . . . an Australian. He, of course, was crestfallen. What was good news for me was bad news for him. The message about the World Cup was foolish to Americans and scandalous to Australians. But it kept me happy all week. And—this is the point of what news does—in bringing one story to its explosive climax, it opened up another one. English rugby entered a new era. Lots of little boys suddenly wanted to be Jonny Wilkinson when they grew up.

Sports provide us with dangerous metaphors. A sporting contest is a contest: a game of winners and losers. We love it when our team wins, and we hate it when they lose. The good news about Jesus isn’t supposed to be like that, though that’s the impression people often get. We will explore this further in due c...