Simply Good News opens with a series of illustrations that contrast the gospel as news with the gospel as advice. Wright wants readers to embrace the gospel as news, good news. The modern gospel, Wright suggests, amounts to mere advice - "say a prayer and you'll be saved. You won't go to hell; you'll go to heaven. Here's how to do it"--a truncated (and ultimately misshapen) view of the real gospel. Wright pushes against the all too common practice of abstracting a collection of timeless truths (or advice) about salvation from Scripture and calling it "the gospel." The real gospel, Wright contends, comes as news about Jesus rooted in a history complete with a backstory and heralded as an event with important personal entailments and social implications--some immediate and others forthcoming.
Implicit in his distinction between news and advice, Wright wants Christians to rethink how they see (and explain) the gospel. For Wright, reducing the gospel to advice (such as "five steps to salvation") hardly does justice to the robust nature of the news about Jesus's life, death, resurrection and exaltation and boarders on misrepresenting the biblical emphasis. "For something to qualify as news," Wright says, "there has to be (1) an announcement of an event that has happened; (2) a larger context, a backstory, within which this makes sense; (3) a sudden unveiling of the new future that lies ahead; and (4) a transformation of the present moment, sitting between the event that has happened and the future event that therefore will happen." Echoing 1 Corinthians 15, Wright sums up the major touchstones of the gospel quite nicely: "The announcement of what has happened - Jesus's death and resurrection as the fulfillment of the ancient biblical promises and divine purposes - is matched by the assurance of what will happen in the future, when God is `all in all,' transforming the whole of creation and raising his people into new, transformed bodily life . . ." and "[b]ecause Jesus died and was raised, those who belong to him have died and been raised, and they must live accordingly. Because God is going to remake the whole world and raise his people from the dead, they must live in the present in accordance with that ultimate promised destiny." The rest of the book powerfully elaborates on the implications of embracing the gospel as good news in both proclamation and practice.
I found Wright's book both timely and refreshing. He offers an apt word to those evangelicals who conflate the gospel message into barely comprehensible sound bytes divorced from a much larger biblical and historical context. Following a similar trajectory to two other outstanding books with parallel concerns, Darrell Bock's Recovering the Real Lost Gospel and Scot McKnight's The King Jesus Gospel, Wright's Simply Good News is simply excellent. Highly recommended!
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