Simply nonsense

   There is no end to the number of books analyzing what Jesus meant or represented, and to plow through them all would require the time and leisure that the Christian eternity promises. One recent one, called Simply Jesus, asserts that Jesus was God’s agent and spokesperson here on Earth, which indicates that the Almighty had bigger fish to fry elsewhere.

   The Tennessean’s excellent religion columnist, Ray Waddle, wrote a review of Simply Jesus in last Saturday’s paper. Waddle calls the book’s author, N. T. (wonder if they call him New Testament?) Wright, “a leading British interpreter of Christian faith, a successor to C. S. Lewis.” And to judge from some of the excerpts Waddle includes, I see the resemblance: Wright seems to, as Lewis did, specialize in the tenuous argument presented as unassailable fact.

   “Jesus has all sorts of projects up his sleeve,” Wright declares. (Jesus, I presume, wears long sleeves to hide the nail marks.) First and foremost he’ll be getting around to, at long last, implementing the tenets he laid out in the Sermon on the Mount. “The meek will be taking over the earth, so gently that the powerful won’t notice it until it’s too late,” Wright says. But once the meek are in charge, how will anything get done? There’ll have to be someone un-meek enough to make a decision, won’t there? And if power inevitably corrupts, won’t the meek become the bold, engendering a new crop of meeks ready to supplant them in power – and on and on in a Marxian cycle?

   “The peacemakers will be putting the arms manufacturers out of business,” Wright writes. “Those who are hungry and thirsty for God’s justice will be analyzing government policy and legal rulings and speaking up on behalf of those at the bottom of the pile.” The passage is uncannily Lewisian: Fatuous speculation put forth as gospel.

   But Lewis, at least, was always lucid. When Wright says, “Heaven is God’s space, God’s dimension of present reality, it’s hard to either criticize or commend the statement, because it’s – simply meaningless.