"After You Believe"

N.T. Wright's "After You Believe" is the third in his trilogy which started off with "Simply Christian." In "Simply Christian" he laid down, in layman's terms, the foundation of the Christian faith, as well as incorporating some apologetics. In the second book, "Surprised By Hope," Wright looked at Christian eschatology--a.k.a. "The End Times"--from a covenantal rather than dispensational angle, following an analysis of Christian life and mission in light of that eschatology. In this third book, everything he wrote before comes to a head in his discussion regarding Christian ethics and the Christian life. Ultimately the book is written two address two issues: "How ought a Christian behave?" and "How does a Christian get to that point?" It's the question of Christian ethics as well as the question of how to actually live by Christian ethics. 

Much of the book is his analysis of Aristotle's ethic reworked around Jesus. Aristotle's concept of virtue is taken up by the early Christians, who, in place of Aristotle's cardinal virtues, proclaimed the real virtues being faith, hope, love, and the ninefold fruit of the Spirit. Just as Aristotle had a means of getting to the virtues, so did the Christians--through diligence, hard work, and the prevalent presence and activity of the Spirit. And just as Aristotle had a goal--eudaimonia, the point of becoming a fully-flourishing human being--so Christians had a goal: it could be said to be eudaimonia, albeit reworked into the Imago Dei. With a reworked frame of ethics in the back of his mind, Wright then examines the virtues of faith, hope, and love (plus the ninefold fruit of the Spirit) and then how the person in Christ is to "put on" these virtues. He rails against the romanticists, who say that all of this will just spontaneously happen; and he rails against the existentialists, who say that what matters is that we live authentically. Living the Christian life--the resurrection life--is a matter of hard work: crucifying the Old Man and putting on the New Man. It is an individual as well as corporate pursuit, and he examines several key disciplines that help in the journey: Christian community, prayer, the scriptures, etc.

Surprisingly, Wright doesn't write much about the Spirit in this book. One could approach the book and interpret Wright's paradigm as being absent of the Spirit. It's surprising he doesn't write much about the Spirit because, in all his other works, the Spirit is a big deal. He takes the Spirit as seriously as most charismatics I know. I speculate that his off-hand references to the Spirit in this book are due to two facets: (a) having written extensively about the Spirit in the previous two books, he hopes that what he's said before isn't now forgotten; and (b) his aim is to get back to the Christian theory of virtue wherein a Christian actually works at it (he steers far from legalism and pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps mentalism, proclaiming grace on nearly every page), which may be what he perceives to be the biggest hurdle in a post-Enlightenment and post-modernist world where many Christians are romanticists and existentialists who scowl at the idea of character development as something one has to work at. Nevertheless, Wright does mention the Spirit from time-to-time, emphasizing the Spirit's role in the process, and making it clear that while Aristotle's framework provided the way to pride and vanity, the Spirit's work leads straight to humility, because we realize that it isn't us who are making all these changes but the Spirit working with us and within us.

My rating: four out of five stars. I would've liked to see the Spirit mentioned more. I would've liked to see discourses on many of the Christian virtues that Wright just skimmed over (keeping in mind that his words regarding love, patience, humility, and chastity are wonderful; but I'd like to see more!). As a companion to this book, I would recommend Dallas Willard's "The Spirit of the Disciplines" and "Renovation of the Heart" (though I think Willard has a pretty mechanistic view of the human organism, no doubt due to his modernistic roots)--as well as Richard Foster's "Celebration of Discipline." Next book on the list: "Postmillennialism: An Eschatology of Hope."