In February 2011, I met a charming young man (spoiler alert: totally married him later) who shared, among other things, my deep Christian faith and interest in theology (the study of God). Casual hallway conversations at work led to long, profound email discourse on the subject, and we quickly arrived at the point (as in all great romances) when we started lending each other books. For our first exchange, I lent him Surprised by Joy – C. S. Lewis’s spiritual autobiography and my favorite of his nonfiction works – and he lent me N. T. Wright’s Surprised by Hope.
Before I try to describe how this book changed my life, you must understand that I grew up as a Christian.
Note that I do not say “I was raised as a Christian”, though I most certainly was – but that sounds too external. I knew from a very early age that this faith was not just my parents’ thing, nor something I did because they forced me, nor a weekly social outing. It was – and, I hope and pray, still is – the core of my identity and the root from which everything else grew. God is not “top of my priorities list”: He is the paper and ink with which the list gets written.
At the risk of slipping into hipster speak, God has always been everything – literally everything.
I read Surprised by Hope at the age of 26, which meant I’d been pursuing God personally and purposefully for nearly two decades. By the time I opened Hope, I’d begun to feel my theological head bumping up against a ceiling of some kind – like I’d reached the limits of my knowledge and wasn’t sure where to go next.
Surprised by Hope – combined with my life circumstances, other research, and many discussions with those closest to me (including future Hubs) – smashed that ceiling.
This book blew the lid off of everything I’d thought it possible to know about God. It was a lid I had unwittingly fashioned myself, and its removal was exhilarating and terrifying. None of Wright’s ideas were “new”, strictly speaking: they were ancient ideas, drawn from the very earliest church history and Christian thought.
Wright just gave me new lenses through which to see them and new language with which to discuss them.
This book inspired me to look back, beyond the past hundred years or so of theological discourse, and reconnect with my true Christian heritage. After all, people have been doing the Christianity thing – studying the Bible, meeting together to worship, serving the world, seeking to grow closer to and become more like Christ – for roughly two millennia, so . . . lots of riches to be found.
More importantly, the Surprised by Hope period of my life inspired me to see my theology – how I think about God – as a sculpture. Not only do I get to work on it daily – chip away a bit here, add a bit there, reshape/smooth out a few bits – but I also need to come to it with an attitude of humility. To avoid accidentally making an idol out of my own understanding, I need to present the whole thing before God daily in prayer.
“Here,” I need to say, handing God a hammer. “I know I’ve missed things, and got things wrong, and let large pieces of MY thought creep in here. Smash ’em, so we can rebuild better and closer to the truth.”
Surprised by Hope also reminded me that it’s ok not to understand. This is big stuff, and my hands are very small; but, I don’t to fret about “grasping” it.
For I – all of us – are grasped, held by the One from whom everything comes and about whom I’m still trying to learn.
A THUNDERCLAP Indeed! Thanks for sharing about this book, one that touched me deeply and needs to be read again.
Your thoughts are, once again, spot on!!! I loved the bit about handing God a hammer . . . Yielding control . . .asking “turn every which way but loose! “
Should read “ turn ME every . . .”
Okay, now I need to read THAT book. 😏
It’s definitely worth a read!