Simply Christian: Why Christianity Makes Sense

“Being a Christian in today’s world is, of course, anything but simple. But there is a time for trying to say, as simply as possible, what it’s all about, and this seems to me that sort of a time.”

Simply Christian is a work of apologetics that seeks to explain why Christianity makes sense. The author acknowledges the real and present difficulties that professing Christianity entails in the 21st century but claims that it remains a viable and attractive option. Wright’s approach, which begins not with an argument for the Christian God specifically but merely for some sort of transcendent reality reflects one of the particular obstacles to belief in contemporary Western societies: a shift away from religion and spirituality in general.

“[T]he Christian faith endorses the passion for justice which every human being knows, the longing to see things put to rights.”

One of the principal theses of the book is that the human desire for justice is an “echo” of the presence of God in the world. The author contends that this search for true justice serves as a marker and precondition for the search for the divine within the world. Christianity is the system that most satisfies the human thirst for things to be set right.

“Saying ‘It’s true for you' sounds fine and tolerant. But it only works because it’s twisting the word ‘true’ to mean, not ‘a true revelation of the way things are in the real world,’ but ‘something that is genuinely happening inside you.’”

Here the claim is that an absolute moral relativism is a descent into the absurd. Ultimately, there must be some common truths that are not simply unique and subjective. This common phrase is actually a claim that there is absolutely no way to really and truly know what is going on in the world around us at an objective level—a claim that Wright views as fundamentally irrational.