Tom Wright recently (2020) published a new popular text entitled, Broken Signposts: How Christianity Makes Sense of the World. Wright’s discusses seven innate longings of the human race which he sees as indicators (or ‘signposts’) pointing away from the world’s present brokenness to the eventual restoration of these indicators by God.
In some respects, this is an extension (a part 2) of his Simply Christian, though in Simply Christian there are only four signposts, and the emphasis is much more on how those four signposts suggest that their is a God — or, at the very least, that there is more than just this present world. There, Wright’s work consciously parallels C. S. Lewis’ Mere Christianity which begins with the innate moral sense of human beings, arguing that there must be some actual target for that.
In Broken Signposts, however, Wright chooses not to repeat Simply Christian with the three additional ‘signposts’ of Freedom, Truth, and Power; but instead presents a new question: how does the Gospel of John show Jesus as confronting these seven broken signposts, and in some sense presenting himself as the solution to the brokenness of the world.
The seven signposts are Justice, Love, Spirituality, Beauty, Freedom, Truth, and Power. A chapter is dedicated to each. They begin with the nature of the problem: we all long for Justice (or Love, etc.) in the world but Justice (or Love, etc.) itself remains elusive. Justice is not blind — it is often corrupted — but we ardently long for a just society to live in. Yet Jesus in John’s Gospel speaks of being the Just Judge, the one who will return to set things right and bring Justice for all.
Similarly, for all the broken signposts, we long for all of them to be in the world in their proper place. And yet we find them corrupted: shadows of their intended reality. Wright tries to show how Jesus confronts the corrupted form of these (e.g., Pilate’s ‘What is Truth?’ which has its own reverberations in the modern world) and offers something better.
In between each chapter dedicated to the ‘broken signposts’, Wright provides tantalizingly brief ‘interludes’ (I appreciate his love for musical analogies) to provide historical context or ‘tips’ in reading the Gospel of John. I briefly presented one of these interludes in a separate post on an approach to prayerfully reading John’s Gospel.
As with most of Wright’s popular works, it is certainly worth reading.