A review by ddejong
After You Believe: Why Christian Character Matters by N.T. Wright

4.0

This is an outstanding book. The fundamental question Wright seeks to answer is: what is God doing in and with our lives “after [we] believe”? What is the point of this difficult human existence in a broken world? Answering this question dovetails into his secondary or interrelated thesis that virtue matters (even with a strong bedrock of “by grace through faith” theology), and it is through virtue that we practice the habits of heart and mind that anticipate the future, fully realized kingdom of God that was inaugurated by Jesus during his time here. All of this was helpful and thought-provoking for me. What I didn’t anticipate was that Wright’s careful exploration of how virtue is formed in us would both reveal and start to erode a level of shame I have carried as an adult Christian that so many Christian virtues - the “fruit of the Spirit” that I am seemingly to produce by simply abiding in God - still feel so hard and so unnatural. Wright is insistent throughout the book- with strong scriptural support- that virtue, even for a Christian, is never our “first nature.” It always comes as “the result of work and cost”, and it is through a lifetime of this good, hard work to “keep in step with the Spirit” that we are steadily transformed so that acting in accordance with the heart of Jesus becomes “second nature” to us— we begin to make decisions and take action automatically according to the virtue that has formed within us, but that is the process of a lifetime. Meditating on this has been so encouraging and comforting for me. I also appreciated the time Wright spent putting into context how the virtue ethic of Jesus compared to that of Aristotle and the pagan culture of the day and how Jesus didn’t simply add to the cultural status quo but rather transformed it.

I only give this book 4 stars because I do believe it needed a more careful edit- it felt quite repetitive at times. I can appreciate the desire- especially with a complex line of argument- to circle back and summarize to ensure your reader is tracking with you, but it felt more repetitive than was necessary in some areas, and I got a little bogged down.