I’m always interested in (and frustrated by) the weird intersection between thought and action in the Christian faith.  The two should be hold well together, but we tend to focus one over the other, disparaging thoughtless deeds or deedless thought.  N. T. Wright acknowledges this early in The Day the Revolution Began.  It makes sense to how many books about the cross one might need to read (or write) in order to understand the implications of the event.

Theology, after all, was made for the sake of the church, not the church for theology . . . “The Word became flesh,” said St. John (1:14); and Paul described the “words of the cross” as “God’s power” (1 Cor. 1:18).  The flesh and the power are what matter in the end, rather than the pretty patterns of our words.  The point of trying to understand the cross better is not so that we can congratulate ourselves for having solved an intellectual crossword puzzle, but so that God’s power and wisdom may work in us, through us, and out into the world that still regards Jesus’s crucifixion as weakness and folly.  Yes, there are puzzles . . . But Jesus died for our sins not so that we could sort out abstract ideas, but so that we, having been put right, could become part of God’s plan to put his whole world right.  That is how the revolution works.  

A lot of it boils down to where you start and where you want to end.  Simple and complex, because starting and ending locations can be tricky at best and disastrous at worse.

I’m a little over halfway through The Day the Revolution Began.  It’s a great drawing-together of threads from other books by Wright.  His argument is convincing.  He’s trying to draw a better, wider horizon for how we think about the death and resurrection of Jesus.  And he does it by getting us to think as much like the early Jewish Christians as possible.