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    Broken Signposts: How Christianity Makes Sense of the World
    Broken Signposts: How Christianity Makes Sense of the World
    Broken Signposts: How Christianity Makes Sense of the World
    Ebook204 pages3 hours

    Broken Signposts: How Christianity Makes Sense of the World

    By Tom Wright

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    About this ebook

    Justice, Love, Spirituality, Beauty, Freedom, Truth and Power. These are ideals that we all strive for, yet so often we find ourselves falling short. Why is that?

    In this deeply insightful meditation, Tom Wright looks to the Gospel of John for answers. With his characteristic wisdom, he shows how John can help us to see not only why we strive for these ideals, or 'signposts', but also why we so often experience them as broken. He also shows how Christianity provides us with the vision and resources for engaging with the questions posed by each signpost, pointing to a clear and compelling explanation of the world, and of our role and responsibility within it. 

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherSPCK
    Release dateOct 6, 2020
    ISBN9780281080496
    Broken Signposts: How Christianity Makes Sense of the World
    Author

    Tom Wright

    Daitsu Tom Wright, who was born and raised in Wisconsin, has lived in Japan for over thirty years. He practiced and studied under Uchiyama Roshi from 1968 until the latter's death and was ordained as a priest in 1974. A graduate of the University of Wisconsin, he is currently a professor in the English Language and Culture Program at Ryukoku University in Kyoto. He was a teacher for the Kyoto Soto Zen Center until 1995, and since then he was been co-leading Zen groups with Rev. Doyu Takamine in Kyoto and Tamba. Rev. Wright has worked on the translation and editing of several works on Zen, as well as writing on Zen, the aftereffects of the Holocaust, and Japanese gardens.

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      Broken Signposts - Tom Wright

      "Broken Signposts is a rich and encouraging book. Aside from his great theological and interpretive erudition and his lively, accessible style, Tom Wright has a keen eye for the essential characteristics of our cultural moment. He brings all these gifts to bear on an important problem: the constant, despair-inducing frustration of our culture’s noblest ambitions. Wright shows through a compelling reading of John’s Gospel that our desire for goods such as justice, love, and truth is neither vain nor futile. These goods find their fulfillment in the coming kingdom of God, and even now, Christians can bear witness to the kingdom by living them out. Broken Signposts will deepen readers’ understanding of God’s kingship, the unity of Scripture, deep themes in the Gospel of John, and the nature of Christian engagement in the life of the world."

      James Davison Hunter, author of To Change the World

      Some writers are perceptive commentators on human affairs. Some are perceptive interpreters of Scripture. In this book, Tom Wright is both at once. With a wonderfully keen eye, he describes seven features of our existence that everyone recognizes as indispensable to making sense of our world but that we all experience as broken. He calls them ‘signposts’, pointers to a day when they are no longer broken and to the possibility of a God who created this world and still cares for it. And then, for each signpost, Wright shows how the story of Jesus, as presented in the Gospel of John, deepens our understanding of the signpost, of why it is broken, and how it can be repaired. Wright’s interweaving of these two strands is masterful; his exegesis is often amazing. This reader had no intimation of the richness, subtlety, and relevance of John’s Gospel that Wright brings to light.

      Nicholas Wolterstorff, Noah Porter Professor Emeritus of Philosophical Theology, Yale University, and Senior Fellow, Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture, University of Virginia

      Broken

      Signposts

      HOW CHRISTIANITY MAKES

      SENSE OF THE WORLD

      TOM

      WRIGHT

      Contents

      Preface

      Introduction: The Seven Signposts

      1. Justice

      Interlude: On Reading John

      2. Love

      Interlude: God’s Covenant Love in John’s Scriptural Imagination

      3. Spirituality

      Interlude: The Messiah in John

      4. Beauty

      Interlude: John and the Jewish Festivals

      5. Freedom

      Interlude: On Reading John and Listening for Jesus

      6. Truth

      Interlude: Who, Then, Is Jesus?

      7. Power

      Conclusion: Mending the Broken Signposts

      Search terms for Scripture Index

      Preface

      S

      ome years ago i wrote a primer on the christian

      faith called Simply Christian (HarperOne, SPCK, 2005), in which I used four great themes—justice, spirituality, relationships, and beauty—as the starting point. These four themes had crystallized in my mind, slowly and over some years, as I tried to think through the Christian message in relation to wider issues in human life and society.

      I was at the time working in various jobs that required me to live at the tricky intersection of church and state as well as with the perennial pastor’s and preacher’s challenge of relating the real gospel to the real world. In that book I described these four as echoes of a voice: when we ponder them, it’s as though we are hearing someone calling to us from just around the corner, out of sight. I suggested that, though these four do not themselves necessarily point to the truth of God or of Christian faith (many people appreciate their importance without finding themselves drawn into worshipping the God revealed in Jesus), when we think through the Christian story and its meaning with these questions in mind, there is a natural fit that is more than rough coincidence.

      I have reflected on these four themes a good deal since then, and as my thinking has developed, I have added three more items that we also experience as echoes of this voice: freedom, truth, and power. It now seems to me, though this would need to be argued more fully, that we need all seven to be in play if we want to work toward a wise, mature human life and society. And I have come to see these seven not simply as themes or questions, but as signposts. Signposts name a reality and point us in a direction. Likewise, these seven signposts name realities that all human cultures value as well as pointing beyond themselves to the meaning of life, to the meaning of the world. They indicate, in fact, how we ought to make sense of the world—how we ought to understand the way the world is and the challenge of being human within it. The fact that we care about them and are puzzled by them is itself telling us something about the deep sense of the world.

      But by themselves they may not tell us all we would like to know. That is why, in another more recent book, History and Eschatology: Jesus and the Promise of Natural Theology (Baylor University Press and SPCK, 2019), I describe them as broken signposts. The point there is that the seven themes do indeed appear to function as signposts that would enable us to make sense of the world—their constant appearance in different guises in everything from grand opera to newspaper editorials makes that clear enough—but that they all let us down. That brokenness, however, turns out to be crucial in discerning what they really mean.

      For that to make sense, though, we need to bring a different voice into the conversation. In my earlier treatment I discussed the seven broken signposts in relation to the Christian message in general. Here I want to do something quite different and invite the Gospel According to John to come on stage and address us on the topic. No doubt there are other parts of the Bible we could call on in the same way, but I have a hunch, which this book will explore, that John will provide fresh and often unexpected insight and show us the ways in which the seven themes really do function as signposts, albeit broken ones, while finally enabling us to make sense of the larger world within which they are such vital but difficult issues.

      I am, as in many times past, grateful for the encouragement and editorial help I have received from Mickey Maudlin at HarperOne, and on this occasion also from Jana Reiss.

      This book is dedicated to my old friend and colleague Carey C. Newman. For nearly thirty years now our paths have intertwined at both scholarly and personal levels. His friendship, encouragement, and taste in highland irrigation have been a consolation in difficult times and a delight in good ones. He would probably have wanted to edit the present book somewhat differently, but as in some other areas I presume we will continue to enjoy our disagreements as much as our many, and deep, agreements.

      tom wright

      Wycliffe Hall, Oxford

      Epiphany 2020

      Introduction

      The Seven Signposts

      T

      he french philosopher jean-paul sartre once

      suggested a definition of hell as other people. As an extrovert, I couldn’t possibly agree with that statement, but in any case I have my own alternative candidate. For me, hell is the incomprehensible instructions that come with flat-pack furniture. I get down awkwardly on the floor, trying not to kneel on the smaller elements of the puzzle I have done my best to spread out in a sensible pattern. I read the instructions again. Perhaps the manufacturers put in the wrong ones?

      Nothing seems to fit. Yes, here are the two sections of the wardrobe that correspond to the those in the picture on the box—we had to buy flat-pack because our old wardrobe wouldn’t go through the new bedroom door—but where is the joining bit? How on earth do these little metal gizmos work, and how can I possibly do what the instructions say, screw them in place, without growing a third hand to hold it all together while tightening it? How can I make sense of it all?

      The really annoying thing is that it looks as though it ought to work. I’ve done it often enough to know the sequence of emotions. I begin with such high hopes: the picture on the box tells me that this is exactly what we need against that bedroom wall. All we have to do is to put it together! But after half an hour of struggle I feel my confidence ebbing away. Robert M. Pirsig, in his 1970s classic Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, describes a moment like this when his hero tries, and fails, to fix something on the motorcycle. He calls it the hiss of escaping gumption. That is spot-on. We know it ought to make sense, but we can’t make it do so. And the moment we admit that, morale drops dramatically. We can’t understand why something that ought to fit together seems not to, and why we ourselves can’t fix it, can’t put it right, can’t get the wardrobe together, can’t (in that sense) make sense of it, literally making whatever it is into the sense that it ought to have. There may come a point when we want to throw the whole kit out the window.

      Which brings us back to Jean-Paul Sartre, and to the point of this book. Human beings regularly experience the world as a whole as something that ought to make sense. There are several signs, clues if you like, of the sort of sense it ought to make. But things don’t work out the way they seem to suggest.

      Take two obvious examples, which we shall explore further in due course. We all know that justice matters, but even in the best systems mistakes are made, innocent people are convicted, criminals get away with it, and we start to distrust judges, juries, and the whole system. Similarly, we all know that relationships matter, but we all manage, with depressing frequency, to misunderstand one another, to hurt each other, to damage even our most important relationships, sometimes forever. That is the point where Sartre suggested throwing the whole kit out the window: life, he said, is just a sick joke.

      The world promises so much, smiling alluringly, telling us how good things are going to be, but it never turns out like that, and even if it does for a while, there is a dark, mean truth to be faced soon enough that underlines Sartre’s skepticism. Some bold philosophers have suggested that, even if death means total annihilation, we can still make sense of the world. But for many people that seems like whistling in the dark.

      So what do we say about the signposts, the features of our world that, like the picture on the flat-pack box, seem to indicate that we can and should make sense of it—in both meanings: that we should be able not only to understand what life is all about (making sense of it as in understanding why things are as they are), but also to contribute creatively to it (making sense of it as in working toward fresh, creative ways forward)?

      In this book I approach this question along two quite different, but converging, pathways. On the one hand, I explore what I call seven broken signposts, the features of our world that, like the two I just mentioned, justice and relationships, appear to point to some real and lasting meaning, but that all too often let us down at the crucial moment. These seven signposts are recognized as such, I think, by more or less all societies at all times in history. Across very different cultures, human beings have known that these things are important and equally have wrestled with the fact that they usually couldn’t quite make sense of them.

      The great philosophers have written about these things in the abstract. Plato’s Republic, for example, addresses the question of justice, and his Symposium is a discussion of love. The great novelists and dramatists have done so too; and a host of lesser lights have filled in the details, so that even the most tawdry television sitcom still focuses on fairness, friendships, freedom, and the rest. This points to the fact that these things are central to our world, vital in our lives, and still deeply puzzling. That, then, is the first pathway: to look more closely at these seven signposts and to explore what their brokenness might tell us.

      The second pathway, on the other hand, offers a fresh way in by examining in some detail a text that the followers of Jesus of Nazareth have seen from very early on as central and life-giving. My main argument in this book is that when we understand the Christian message, we will see that it does indeed make sense of our world, because it helps us both to understand the world the way it is and to be able to contribute fresh sense through our own lives. But it would be a large task to try to set out the entire Christian message as a whole, and I have chosen here to focus on one text—the Gospel According to John—which I believe offers sharp and often surprising insights into these questions, which all humans in all societies have seen as vital.

      The Gospel According to John, the fourth gospel in the Christian New Testament, has been much loved for nearly two thousand years. People of great wisdom and spiritual insight have found it a never-ending source of inspiration. Learned thinkers have pondered it. Millions of sermons have been preached on it. Its opening line—In the beginning was the Word—rings out over the airwaves every December from a thousand Christmas Eve services. It is a sentence we instantly perceive as simple in itself but endlessly profound in its many possible implications.

      Some of John’s great set-piece scenes—the learned Nicodemus coming to Jesus by night, the raising of Lazarus from the dead, doubting Thomas reaching out his hand to touch Jesus’s wounds—have been painted by great artists and set to wonderful music by gifted composers, and so are etched into the world’s imagination. Yet this gospel, endlessly profound, a thing of beauty in its own right, is not usually where people go when they want to reflect on the seven signposts. I think it’s time we did just that.

      In putting together the challenge to make sense of the world and the invitation to take a fresh look at John’s gospel, I am taking a deliberately different stance from those who would see the whole point of the message of Jesus as providing an escape from the world. In many varieties of Christian faith and life people have by implication agreed, at least in part, with Sartre: life is unpleasant and meaningless and the best thing to do is to swap it for a better world, usually referred to as heaven. I well understand how, in a world where brutality and corruption often appear to be the norm and where sickness or natural disasters threaten whole communities, one might come to that conclusion—and how people facing such appalling threats might look at me, a comfortable Westerner, and think, You don’t know how tough it really is. I take the point.

      But part of the Christian faith from the start has always been the conviction that the God revealed in and through Jesus is precisely the creator of the world and that he has promised to put it right. That is the basis on which, even at the darkest times (which can strike us comfortable Westerners too in various ways), the answer is not to escape the world but, insofar as we can, to make sense of it in both of the ways I have indicated. That is the point of this book.

      So what are these seven signposts,

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