How God Became King

 

How God Became King – N.T. Wright

Sadly, this one was a bit of a disappointment.  I must first say that I may have been in the wrong mindset when I read this one.  I think I was expecting a much more revelatory book around God and Jesus.  This felt, sadly, more of a laborious slog.  As someone who gets immense joy from reading, I never read one book at a time (two is the minimum, three to four is the norm) and I really struggled coming back to this one while enjoying the other books I was reading at the time.  Often, I could only manage one chapter at a time when I got back to this one, and even that could be too much.

Now, I’ve read N.T. Wright before and have always managed to enjoy his offerings.  I must say, though, that I tend to enjoy listening to him as opposed to reading his written words.  He gets distracted too much and wanders.  This can be a bad thing when one does this when speaking, it’s worse when someone is writing.  Let me give you an analogy of how difficult it can be for Wright to stay focused.

Imagine you wanted to state the following:

“The boy woke up one Saturday and went to the store to buy an apple.”

This is how N.T. Wright would state this:

The boy (now, although we’re talking about a ‘boy’ in this story, it very well could have been a girl.  The old style of writing favored using the masculine when describing a hypothetical situation such as this, but modern readers shouldn’t be expected to place such literary restrictions when dictating) woke up one Saturday (it’s important that we keep the days of the week in focus. ‘Saturday’ denotes a weekend, and unlike the day ‘Sunday’, one can assume that the boy, or girl remember, doesn’t have any further obligations since they do not have school to attend)…….

Get it now?  The WHOLE book was like this.  The author allowed himself to go off on too many of these rabbit trails to try to enhance his narrative and it ended up being much more harmful than beneficial.  In fact, I can’t honestly give an honest summation of the book because my brain kept having to bounce back and forth with all of his wanderings.  If we’re honest, we’ve all probably felt this way at some point. We’ve all probably had to listen to a 30-minute graduation service that was so boring, we mentally tuned out after the first 90 seconds.  Upon conclusion, we can’t recall any substance of the speech. Sadly, this is the effect that this book at on me.

The book started out fairly promising. As an introduction, Wright explains that conservatives and liberals (theology, not politics) are both equally erroneous when it comes to understanding the scriptures, especially the gospels. Wright himself has been known to be left-of-center which (of course) upsets those on the other side of the line.  Sadly, once that distinction is made, I just lost interest.

It would be unfair for me to comment any further since, as I stated, I was too unfocused while reading.   I guess he made some good points, and I’ve read other works by him that I enjoyed more.  I would recommend starting with something else authored by N.T. Wright.  If you enjoy any of his other works, perhaps you can then come back to this one and give it a try.

I hope you like it better than I did.