Simply Christian; Part 1

Having read over a half dozen books of his, I'm a big N. T. Wright fan.  A few weeks ago, I finally read Simply Christian.  In Tom's words, his aim in this book is "to describe what Christianity is all about, both to commend it to those outside the faith and to explain it to those inside."  The book has three parts. The first deals with "echoes of a voice" (the longing for justice, the quest for spirituality, the hunger for relationships, and the delight in beauty) that point beyond themselves; that point to something more than a purely materialistic, naturalistic world.  The second part lays out the central Christian belief about God and the third describes what it looks like in practice to follow Jesus.  The book is considered to be the Mere Christianity for our generation.  Additionally, it spawned the sequel, Surprised by Hope, which is one of my favorite books ever written. I loved Simply Christian and highly recommend it to anyone.  As a result, I thought I'd share a few exerts I particularly liked in a series of blog posts.  This (long) one comes from the chapter "Made for Each Other" in part one:

"Recent generations in the West have seen huge efforts expended on the attempt to teach boys and girls that the differences between them are simply a matter of biological function.  We have been sternly warned against stereotyping people according to their gender.  More and more jobs have become, at least in theory, interchangeable between genders.  And yet today's parents, however impeccable their idealistic credentials, have discovered the most little boys like playing with toy guns and cars, and that a remarkable number of little girls like playing with dolls...Nor is it only children who stubbornly resist the new rules.  Those who target magazines at different groups in society have no difficulty in producing 'men's magazines' that very few women would buy, and 'women's magazines' that hardly any men would read...In most countries, of course, nobody bothers to try to pretend that men and women are identical and interchangeable.  Everyone knows that they are remarkably different.

It is, however, harder than normally imagined to plot exactly what these differences are, not least because different societies have different images of what men should do and what women should do, and are then puzzled when not everyone conforms to type.  I am not at all denying that there are many areas where we have gotten this wrong in the past.  I have argued strenuously in my own sphere of work for far more interchangeability than has traditionally been the case.  My point is simply this: that all human relationships involve an element of gender identity (I, as a man, relate to other men as man to man, to women as man to woman), and that though we all know this deep down, we become remarkably confused about it.  At one end of the scale, some people try to pretend that for all practical purposes their gender is irrelevant, as though they were in fact neuter.  At the other end, some people are always sizing others up as potential sexual partners, even if only in imagination.  And we know in our bones that both of these are distortions of reality.

Both responses, in fact, involve a form of denial.  The former (imaging ourselves to be neuter) involves denying something deeply important about who we are and how we are made.  We simply are gendered beings; and since this affects all kinds of attitudes and reactions, in numerous and subtle ways, we gain nothing by pretending that we're not and that it doesn't.  The latter response (seeing other people as potential sexual partners) involves denying something hugely important about the nature of erotic relationships--namely, that there is no such thing as 'casual sex.' Just as sexual identity--maleness and femaleness--goes near the heart of who we are as human beings, so sexual activity burns a pathway into the core of our human identity and self-awareness.  To deny this, whether in theory or in action, is to collude with the dehumanization of our relationships, to embrace a living death.  In short, we all know that sex and gender are hugely important to human living.  But in this area we discover something that's true of all aspects of human relationships: that things are far more complicated than we might have imagined, far more fraught with difficulty, puzzles, and paradoxes."