Bishop Tom Wright's recent (2006) book 'Simply Christian' (SPCK) is aimed at thoughtful readers who want to know the fundamentals of the Christian faith - the sort of people who a generation ago read C S Lewis' 'Mere Christianity'.

I'll summarize the gist of the book in the next couple of articles, but here's a sample paragraph to whet your appetite:

'The whole point of the Christian story, at the climax of the Jewish story, is that the curtain has been pulled back, the door has been opened from the other side, and like Jacob we have glimpsed a ladder between heaven and earth with messengers going to and fro upon it. "The kingdom of heaven is at hand," says Jesus in Matthew's gospel: not that he is offering a new way of getting to heaven hereafter, but that he is announcing that the rule of heaven, the very *life* of heaven, is now overlapping with earth in a new way, a way which sweeps together all the moments from Jacob's ladder to Isaiah's vision, all the patriarchical insights and prophetic dreams, and turns them into a human form, a human voice, a human life, a human death. [With] Jesus... prayer has come of age. Heaven and earth have overlapped permanently where he stands, where he hung, where he rises, wherever the fresh wind of the Spirit now blows. Living as a Christian means living in the world as it has been reshaped by and around Jesus and his Spirit. And that means that Christian prayer is a different king of thing, different both from the pantheist, getting in touch with the inwardness of nature, and from the Deist, sending out messages across a lonely emptiness.' [p. 140]

[More... http://jmm.aaa.net.au/catalog/section/jc1.htm ]

Review copy obtained from Ridley Bookshop, Melbourne (http://bookshop.ridley.unimelb.edu.au/bookweb/ )

Shalom! Rowland Croucher