Simon Says ...

Review of Tom Wright, Simply Good News: Why the Gospel in News and What Makes it Good (SPCK, 2015). A new Tom Wright book is often a treat, but I confess to being a little under-inspired by the title of this one.   Perhaps it sounded like just another book on the Gospels and their historical basis.   I was wrong, this book has lots to say and is more than another history of Jesus. In fact this is a book about evangelism, about the practice of commending Christian faith to those who are outside the church.   What Wright does really well is to use his knowledge of history to explain what telling the gospel meant in the New Testament and what the implications of that are for today. He starts from the (hardly controversial) observation that the gospel is good news.   That is simply what the Greek work euangelion (gospel) means.   It was used to announce the births, successions and victories of Roman emperors.   Rather b...

Review of Brian D. McLaren, The Story we Find Ourselves in: Further Adventures of a New Kind ofChristian (Jossey-Bass, 2003). Over a cup of tea with a retired colleague, the question was raised ‘Where is liberal theology being done today?’  The former Bishop of Durham, David Jenkins, was often asked a similar question – ‘where will the next generation of liberal Christians come from?’  His reply was ‘Where they’ve always come from – the evangelicals!’  Over tea, I found myself reflecting that that was still the case, but that these days they didn’t have to stop being evangelicals when they embraced liberalism.  The evangelical tent, at least in the UK, has grown pretty large.  Much of the good liberal theology is being written by evangelicals and published by evangelical publishing houses. Brian McLaren is a case in point. An American pastor working with ‘emergent Christianity’, McLaren is an evangelical but his theology is d...