An Evening with Tom Wright on "Paul: A Biography"

we'll later gentlemen good evening my name is Robin Griffith Jones and I teach at King's College London and I am ground to call the Reverend and valiant master of the temple of the Temple Church just half a mile away and I am here really only in order to say hello to all of you to say what a real delight it is that so many people have come here this evening to enjoy and discuss and relish and learn from Tom's new book and of course above all and on behalf of all of us here to thank Tom himself I suspect almost all of us have been benefitting from Tom's work for decades now there is the rather serious NT right who me no well there is Tom Wright and the New Testament for everyone and now a third rora this rollicking read I mean it's a ripping yarn I hope some of you who have already read the book it's an absolute page-turner dan brown eat your heart out it really is it's it's completely gripping from beginning to end it introduces a new side to Paul's own writing and scholarship and as it were a new sight for all of us who have enjoyed Paul Tom's writing as we followed it through the years so Tommy in introducing this evening was I think all I need to say is from all of us who have or are enjoying or are going to enjoy the book many thanks and for all of us here this evening thank you for what is clearly going to be an absolutely fascinating session we're extremely grateful to you for being here [Applause] [Music] [Applause] thank you very much Robin and thank you also for your review in one of the Sunday papers a couple of months ago now I hadn't heard about this review but I met somebody through a mutual friend who said oh I just saw a review of you on your book and I said oh really was it a good review he said well I don't think the person actually likes Paul that much but he liked your book so I said that that's fine by me well whether that is a fair representation of the review or of Robin I leave others to judge and I'm very grateful to those who organized this amazing building for getting us this room tonight I'm specially grateful to SP CK who've done a lot of work behind the scenes to set it up I'm grateful to Robin I'm grateful to march in Basia who's going to be helping with asking some questions later on I'm specially grateful to those of you who intended to come in early March and were prevented like Paul himself was prevented from some of his travel plans I was booked on a train from Aberdeen where I was doing some lectures to London are straight through one and I got as far as Dundee and the snow came down I couldn't even get to Edinburgh and we were texting and emailing and going to and fro and eventually we just had to pull the whole event and so we decided that instead of being disrupted by snowflakes we'd be disrupted by sunshine and heat instead so I came down on the trail yesterday and you know how it is with us northerners the best building in London is Kings Cross station where you get on this train to go back up north but which I should be doing tomorrow so just a few things to put some markers down because it won't surprise you to know that just as Paul on occasion could actually preach people to death you know people fell out of windows and so on it went on and on and on so given world enough in time I'd be quite happy to talk about Paul to you until the bells have stopped ringing whenever that by the way thanks also to Westminster Abbey for arranging this splendid fusillade of I'm sure that was quite deliberate since I used to work there they probably got it in for me and so I want to just to ask a few basic questions and I've been doing some interviews with various podcasts and other things over the last few days and today particularly and these are the questions that people keep coming up with but the first one is is why a biography of Paul I mean anyone who's been to church anyone has started to read the Bible to read the New Testament knows a bit about Paul or thinks they do and is bumped their nose against him a bit but I really want to say and in this book I try to say Paul is one of the most important public intellectuals of all time one of the tragedies of the way we do things in the Western world today is that if somebody wants to study Paul they'll probably be sent to a department of religion wrong place Paul belongs in the world of politics of culture of economics of community life as well as what we call religion and theology and philosophy and we diminish Paul if we think of him simply as a quote unquote religious figure he is out there articulating a new vision of all reality and he's not only articulating it verbally and in writing he's articulating it through creating and forming and shivering and managing and wrestling with real communities who are experimenting with this remarkable new way of being human and as a result there are probably far more people today who wrestle with Paul than there are with the two great public intellectuals as it were either side of him Cicero and Seneca and others like him these are great people and Plutarch and epic teachers and those great figures but Paul nevertheless stands out and he stands at one of the great transition points there is a turning point in world history and he stands there holding together the Jewish world the Greek world with all its philosophy the Roman world with all its politics and its new roads and so on and he holds them in a new synthesis in a way that nobody had done before because though there were some books like the wisdom of Solomon that were doing a bit of that Paul by being grasped by the gospel of Jesus Israel's Messiah crucified and risen now the lord of the world poor has a new vantage point from which he holds all these things together so that he's absolutely insistent that what has happened and what he's doing is the fulfillment of Israel's purpose this is where it was all going even though we never saw it rather like the two on the road to Emmaus we had hoped that he would redeem Israel but now did not our hearts burn within us as he expanded the Scriptures this is how it had to be Paul has that in spades so it's fulfilling Israel's aspirations albeit in a shocking new way and that gives Paul as it were the theological and scriptural energy which carries him into all the tasks that he does and to face all the sufferings that he does but then Paul realizes that if Israel's God is the lord of the world and if Israel's God has revealed once for all the great truths about the way the world really is this means we must in his words take every thought captive to obey the Messiah so Paul can quite cheerfully outflank the Stoics outflank the Epicureans outflank the Academy the Platonists and sometimes he sounds a bit like a stoic sometimes he sounds a bit like a platanus and then the larger netted edifice reasserts itself and we see that in his exposition of Jesus as the meaning of the whole creation we find all these strands of truth of philosophy of human exploration and wisdom held together rushing together and then if it's Israel's traditions and the thought of the Greek world it's also the Roman world with its extraordinary Empire which was just doing its thing in spades in the middle of the first century and Paul comes along and talks about the good news that Jesus is kurios lord and sometimes even though Jesus is so tare Savior another thing that some of the Caesars like to say about themselves and Paul envisages I was gonna say a new kind of Empire the word Empire is very contested at the moment and part of the point of what Paul is doing just as you find in Jesus teaching in st. mark chapter 10 is that M has been stood on its head power itself has been stood on its head there is a new power new sort of power let loose in the world it's the power of suffering love which is one of the reasons why Paul himself realizes that if he is to be the vessel and the instrument of that love he himself will be called to suffer in all sorts of ways so why a biography of Paul because somebody who could think all this and try to do all this is far more than just a brain box on legs or even a praying heart on legs he's all of that but he's a whole rounded personality intersecting into engaging with whole rounded communities and trying to do something new so Paul is vital as the early interpreter of Jesus Jesus the one who announced and more particularly inaugurated God's kingdom something new has happened a victory has been won as a result of which the world is a different place it's hard for us to hear that because so much in the public world of today says no nothing actually changed it just all went on us had some new religious ideas and there were plenty of other new religious ideas and Paul would have said absolutely not when Jesus rose again from the dead something changed in the way the world is which opens a door the great rusty door of history has swung open and a voice says now come into God's new world and see what it looks like so when Paul is holding together Jewish Jesus believers and Gentile Jesus believers and insisting that they belong at the table together this isn't just about having slightly better table manners the fact that now Jew and Greek and slave and free and male and female belong at the same table is the sign as far as he's concerned that the powers that have ruled the world and have kept the world in its different compartments have been defeated and if you don't believe that he says to Peter at Antioch you're denying the truth of the gospel so why a biography of Paul that's for starters why a biography at all well without the biography we meet the letters in a vacuum one of the things that encouraged me as I was stimulated by my publisher into thinking that maybe I should try my hand at this as Robin said a new genre for me the biography biographical genre was Robert Harris's trilogy on Cicero attend if you've seen the play which is on in the West End at the moment Imperium I'm not sure if I'm going to be able to see it I'd really like to those three books I now recommend them to my undergraduates because they open up a sense of this is what it was actually like to be trying frantically to prepare a speech realizing you weren't going to have enough time and scribbling something else down Cicero's wife telling him off because he's being a wimp or whatever and then Cicero getting his bodyguards and heading off for the forum and there's so and so's men over there and then he has to make the speech you know so that by the time you get to the speech you are living it with him instead of you know when I studied Cicero at school here was Cicero's speech on this or that so we learnt a little bit of the background but with those books I felt I was actually living it with him and I wanted to try to write a book in which by the time we get Paul writing Galatians we are living it with him so that we know ahead of time of course he's got to say this or that and by the time he's in his huge depression which I'll come back to in a moment we understand why that would be and how maybe he's going to get so only a biography I think can really show the continuities of person and the continuities and the slippage --is of bits of thought and scriptural exposition and so on and particularly the person of the personal passion and then the dark sides into which it all fits so what's new what's new in this book I mean I've written other books about Paul as some of you will know as Robin kindly alluded to when I was writing this book there were several things which I found I had to say something about that I'd never really said much about before and the first one is the quiet decade after the initial flurry the Damascus event the trip to Arabia back to Damascus down to Jerusalem this man is too hot to handle send him back to Tarsus that's where he came from what happens then we know nothing for ten years however the fact that we know quite a lot after those ten years after Barnabas fetches him to Antioch and things go from there what we know about him from Antioch onwards tells us quite a lot about those ten years not least where Romans nine one two five comes from some of you will know that's where he says I have unceasing sorrow and anguish in my heart because I moved to tears constantly because of my kinfolk my brothers and sisters according to the flesh this is not a theoretical group called the Jews I think this is mum and dad I think this is brother and sister I think this is even possibly a one-time fiancee who knows that speculation but there is a sense that when he's talking about these people who he longs to see come to accept Jesus as Israel's Messiah these are real people he knows their faces he's got their voices in his head he remembers their tears and it's moved him to tears and then at the other end of his life I'd never written very much about whether Paul went to Spain or not I used to think that's a that's a bridge too far the more I looked at it and particularly at the letter of Clement who has bishop in Rome towards the end of the first century he says Paul got to the limits of east and west well he was there pretty soon afterwards I think it's more likely that Clement got it right than that I am getting it right by being a bit skeptical about that so it's possible that Paul did get through Spain one of the other things quite different sort of thing which I hadn't really put together before was Paul's prayer life we see Paul's prayer life bubbling up at certain points in the letters and when he says to people pray constantly it'll be very odd if he was giving that advice to everybody but he wasn't actually doing it himself and so when I then started to explore what it looked like for Paul to be a man of prayer starting to explore the Jewish prayer traditions and to see the way in which his invocation of Jesus and the spirit fits somehow within those Jewish narratives and prayers then I started to see all sorts of things in three dimensions but in particular and I think we may be talking about this later on when Martin is asking me some questions I found myself seeing the famous doctrine of justification by faith itself within that larger context of who Paul was as a whole so that you don't actually lose anything that the sixteenth century was so keen on about we are justified by faith not works but you see it in many dimensions and will maybe say more about those dimensions later on but one of the things which I found most compelling at the middle of all of this was the dark period to which Paul alludes at the start of second Corinthians and I described in the book the happy early days in Ephesus where he's going around and healings are happening and people are bringing handkerchiefs to touch him so that then sick people will be healed you imagine what that does I mean how did Paul sustain and and not not having an overinflated ego well maybe he didn't who knows but in the middle of that he made a painful visit to Corinth and suddenly it all went wrong and stuff he thought he could do he couldn't do anymore and they were rude to him and they told him go away and if you want to come back we'd like to have fresh letters of recommendation well any pastors among you will know what that would be like from the people with whom you've worked and who you've loved and prayed for and so on but I think then things are going on in Ephesus as well bad things which go horribly wrong after the great riot in the theatre I think it's after that's that's slightly tricky to bid to be quite sure but as I tried to describe it now I I find myself looking at what Paul says there where he says I was so crushed that I despaired of life itself now I as a pass to know that if somebody came into the room and said that to me I would be thinking this is above my paygrade I need to call in a professional counselor to help with this because that that is serious depression and you don't get out of that just by saying we'll go home and say your prayers and and don't drink so much coffee or whatever it is know that this this is a various a very serious thing and I think that we see something going on when he says this was to make me rely on the god who raises the dead if you know anything about depression you can't come through it simply by saying you know perfectly well you ought to rely on the God who raises the decimals how it happens I think what happens what we see then when we put the whole picture together is that if I can just read you a few lines here I think that like a plant in harsh winter Paul in prison was forced to put his roots down even deeper than he had yet gone into the biblical tradition and deeper again still within that tradition into the meaning of Jesus and his death and the roots slowly found moisture and from the depth of that dark soil way below previous consciousness he drew hope and new possibilities and the fruit of that labor remains to this day near the heart of Christian belief because as I've suggested in the book if he is writing Philippians Colossians Ephesians and Philemon from that prison in Ephesus then what we see in each of those letters except for Philemon which is the shorter one of course is a sense of Jewish prayer reshaped around Jesus turned into poetry I think actually the poetry of Ephesians 1 Philippians 2 Colossians 1 I think that poetry precedes the theology I don't think somebody had hammered out the theology and then Paul said let's write a poem about it I think he comes out of the darkness and like some other people one could think of our as Thomas or Jerrod Manley Hopkins emerging from the darkness with things that can only be said poetically which then the church realizes this is the heart of what we then call theology what's difficult for us about this well we still tend to reach for this category religion the word religion didn't mean in Paul's day what it means in our day and what Paul is doing doesn't fit religion in the ancient world or religion in the modern world as I said before it's really quite different it's a much bigger community experiment based in worship worship of the God in Jesus flowing out into every aspect of life and watch out for this category religion because our world tries to put us and Paul and Jesus into that for Paul what matters is he insists to his dying day that he is utterly loyal to the one God of Israel that's a contested statement in the first century who is a loyal Israelite is a big question in the first century there are many groups claiming it and Paul is right there in the middle among them but today it's controversial as well it's one of one of the reasons I was so thrilled when Rabbi Lord Sachs very generously put a commendation on the back of this book I sent it to him because I said to him I really don't want any Jewish interlocutor to pick up this book and say well this person doesn't understand Judaism so I thought let's send it to the chief rabbi and see what he thinks and bless him he was kind enough to write a commendation so summing it all up what was Paul trying to do what was his aim it would be easy to say and fifty years ago I would have said Paul was telling people about Jesus so that when they died they would go to heaven and I really want to say that's the wrong place to start now as some of you know if you read my book surprised by hope and other bits and pieces the New Testament doesn't say that the name of the game is how to get to heaven when you die if you go to the first century AD looking for somebody who talks about that the primary person I would go to is Plutarch who is a first-century middle Platonist who has a whole treatise on how our souls are exiled from their true home in heaven and we hope one day that they'll get back there that's not what Paul says Paul is looking forward to the day when God will renew heaven and earth and will raise his people from the dead to a new bodily life within that new integrated reality now how this plays out is full of all sorts of other questions but I want them to say so what what was Paul doing well he was founding and maintaining communities and I have a riff which I've been developing out of this book and so on what sort of communities well they're their worship based educational egalitarian philanthropic fictive kinship groups are said again their worship based educational egalitarian philanthropic fix of kinship groups are shorthand for that is churches but if we say churches then that will conjure up various images in our minds from which at least one or two of those words will probably be missing worship based because they exist in order to invoke Jesus as Lord to celebrate his presence and his healing power and his reconciling work in them and through them into the world because they are also educational what were people teaching in Paul's churches one of the things I think they were teaching was how to read a lot of people were functionally illiterate in the ancient world but Paul wanted them to be able to search the Scriptures for themselves that's part of Christian maturity so the church was in the vanguard of teaching people to read and to read scripture particularly and they were egalitarian neither Jew nor Greek slave nor free male nor female we struggle still to implement that for Paul that was an extraordinary unheard-of experiment a very dangerous one people would look on and see all these people very different people all going into a house on a Sunday morning who are they what are they doing and they talk about family and so on and they are philanthropic Paul says while we have time do good to all people and especially to those of the household of faith the churches were doing what the Jewish communities are done that is to say looking after people in their own community who needed help who needed money who needed healing medicine and whatever but now they were doing it as far as they could forever this is one of the main reasons why Christianity spread nobody had ever tried this experiment let's have a gelid egalitarian philanthropic communities who even if they're not doing all the stuff on the street worshipping the idols going on the processions etc even if they're not doing any of that so people think this is bad news they'll get us into trouble maybe there'll be an earthquake or a lightning strike or something we'll know who to blame no these are people who people regard as good neighbors Paul says rejoice with those who rejoice and weep with those who weep the people on your street who are having a party you go and be the life and soul of that party the people who are having a funeral you go and genuinely share their sorrow these are people who other people will enjoy having them around and there'll be a reason for that because they're reflecting the generous love of Jesus into that community and they are living as in the anthropologist fictive kinship groups that is to say living as family even though it's blindingly obvious that they're not and the ancient world family means that people who are down the street from you who help you out one of the nicest moments I had when I was Bishop of Durham was one night I was doing a confirmation in a very much below the tracks parish in Gateshead and the vicar asked one of the confirmation candidates a woman in her 30s he said what's it like since you've been coming to coming to this church and she blurted it out she said it's like having a great big second family and then she turned to me and said was I supposed to say that and I said yes that means this is a real Church she lived in a community where family meant precisely the people round the corner who would look out for you when bad things were happening or would celebrate with you and good and she had found the church to be that sort of community thank God that it never gets into the press of course but there are many many communities like that who are doing precisely what Paul said they should as a result Paul is bringing into being through his announcement of the gospel through his prayer his pastoral work and particularly his letters he's bringing into being a new cultural and social reality breaking with existing patterns and forms and yet demonstrating an attractive and compelling new way of being human it is as some people have described it Judaism for the masses Nietzsche's sneered at Christianity and said that Christianity was platonism for the masses well maybe some 19th century Christianity was that that's what he was mocking but really it is this Jewish vision of one God one people and it's for everybody and to that end what Paul was doing through his preaching teaching pastoral was aiming at renewed human lives he says be transformed by the renewing of your mind so that you may figure out and put into practice what God's will is what is good and acceptable and perfect renewed humans he says in Colossians 3 renewed in knowledge according to the image of the creator Paul has this vision of humans made in God's image and humans now renewed in God's image and humans therefore renewed in thought Paul says when it comes to evil just stay as ignorant little babies but when it comes to thinking be grown-ups the gospel for Paul is all about people discovering what it means to be genuine humans not least by learning how to think for Paul you see somebody asked me this in a radio interview earlier today why doesn't Paul refer more to Jesus teaching that's an interesting question but one of the answers not the only answer one of the answers is if in order to answer a question what you have to do is to look up something on a shelf oh yes that's it and then put the book back you don't grow you may that may see you around the next corner but what Paul does instead is not just to teach them what to think but to teach them how to think that's why he says in Philippians 2 you got to work out your own salvation with fear and trembling that doesn't mean good do good works to impress God it means you've got to figure out what this means here are the tools now you go to the job and actually that so for scripture as a whole but it's certainly part of Paul's ministry but it's never a look it up and put the book back on the shelf kind of thing it's all about every generation has to engage with this stuff in an increasing maturity of thought and reflection because only if we're doing that will we be the kind of communities and the kind of individuals that God wants us to be and if it's a renewed human community a renewed thinking human community it's a renewed thinking and loving human community a community which is founded on the basis as Paul says that the love of the Messiah drives us on or is he saying the Son of God loved me and gave himself for me and that love then has to reflect out into the because that's what does the trick that's what makes people think nothing else in my life looks like this this is where genuine life is to be found so what was Paul himself like I towards the end of the book I wrote a few pages on this and I shall do quote a few little bits from that the first thing coming at us through the story is his sheer energy we feel it pulsing through the letters we watch as he responds to violence in one city by going straight on to the next one and saying and doing the same things he's working all hours his hands hardened with tent making his back stiff from bending at the workbench but he's ready every moment for the visitor with a question for the distraught youngster whose parents have thrown him out for the local official worried what's going to happen if people discover he's following Jesus and so on and so on and so on but the second thing is his blunt upfront habit of telling it like he sees it he'll say boot every goose within earshot and to all the swans as well there is a reason why Saul of Tarsus is the one getting into trouble just as there is a reason why the Jerusalem apostles decided to pack him off to Tarsus he confronts Peter in Antioch and so on he's the kind of man you want on your side in a debate even if he may alienate some more sensitive Souls he still does that today he confronts the magistrates at Philippi he's itching to speak to the vast crowd at Ephesus he tries to explain himself to the Jerusalem mob that been trying to lynch him he rebukes the high priest he knows how to turn the factions in the Sanhedrin against one another he lectures the Roman governor himself about justice if you please he tells the ship owner where he should and shouldn't spend the winter and when he goes horribly wrong he says I told you so he spots the sailors trying to bolt and tells the Centurion to stop them doing it as a companion he must have been exhilarating worth when things were going well and exasperating when they weren't as an opponent he could cause some people to contemplate murder as their only recourse it's very interesting I've done various odd jobs in my time people write doctoral dissertations about how successful companies and not-for-profit organizations begin and in 99 cases out of a hundred there's someone like Paul hammering away getting things off the ground confronting local authorities raising money persuading co-workers what needs to be done never losing the vision taking the bull by the horns someone will go on insisting the whole time we've got to do this stuff but there's also something disarming about his vulnerable side which means that despite his relentless his people loved him and wanted to work with him and wept when he left when he says that his heart is open wide we believe him it rings true his honesty shines out with Paul what you see is what you get even if it isn't always what you wanted you know where you are you know he will do anything for you because he would say God has done everything for us in the Messiah Jesus and so it goes on that's what he was like so what where does this leave us I found as I was working on this book the letters were coming to life in a new way I've been studying Paul on and off all my life but they came up in three dimensions again and again as part of a fully rounded history a warts-and-all history a multicultural swirling multi-ethnic mix and for us now as then we struggle with the things he struggled with when I was writing my previous big book on Paul Paul and the faithfulness of God I was looking for what are the things that Paul wants to see which tells the world what sort of a community this is and the two things again and again our unity and holiness now any of you in church work you know as well as I do unity is easy if you don't care about holiness holiness is easy if you don't care about unity trust me I'm a bishop I know the trick the really difficult thing is to have them both together that is really and that's what Paul is working at that's why the pastoral side of him is wrestling in first Corinthians with what it means all this stuff about food offered to idols what does it mean to be holy in a pagan City to be monotheistic in a pagan city what does it mean to be United when in the church there are some people who think it's fine to eat any meat that sold in the market because God made it all and He loves us so that's okay and other people are still crushed with the burden of their pagan past and don't want to touch that meat in case it reminds them of the way they used to live Paul the pastor brings unity and holiness together confronting a confused and dangerous world with the challenge and the comfort of the unstoppable love of the Creator God that's why I love him that's why I want to go on studying and that's what this books about thank you very much have a seat I'm sure it wasn't lost on you that the bells rang throughout your talk and ceased the moment I came which is an indication of West at Westminster Abbey's view this is a remarkable but professor right it's historical and for Apple logical sociological theological but in addition to you being a professor you're also a pastor you referred to that just now you were a bishop and so I want to start by asking you about one of the things that you draw out in the book in relation to suffering you write this the visit to Rome ends with the start of Paul's new life that of a suffering apostle God's kingdom is indeed breaking in that new divine rule but it will mean undergoing suffering again you write the bodily marks of identification that mattered to Paul were not the signs of circumcision but the marks of Jesus in other words the signs of suffering how does the Apostle commend the Christian faith in the first century and how does that compare to things we often hear today in the church where people are promised health and wealth a triumphalism a God at your disposal how does Paul differ yeah that's very interesting I I personally don't usually attend churches that promise things like that and that's just that my back but you know that many people do I know that many people do absolutely and I mean we can't get round sayings of Jesus about I came that they might have life and have it more abundantly you know that that's that's absolutely comes with and when Paul talks about love and joy and peace that's all true but when Paul talks about those things he's either writing from prison or he's writing with the wounds still on him from the last time he was beaten up or stoned or whatever so there's a there's an odd rich mixture I think the crucial thing for Paul is that he really believes that he is living on the cusp of the new creation that the new creation has broken in but the old creation not only is rumbling on and it's deadly and it's corrupt and is decaying but the old creation resents the new creation breaking in and is doing its best to strike back and I think that's what Paul thinks was going on in his moment of terrible darkness in in in Ephesus which he talks about in 2 Corinthians 1 and by the way I had a letter just last week from a pastor I knew from a previous job who had been reading that book and I hadn't heard from him for some years but he said that that passage had reduced him to tears because he had just been through a period like that in his pastoral ministry and he thought oh my goodness Paul went through this to this this is my life and it was hugely encouraging to him so that I think the main thing is that Paul is telling people that God's new world is breaking in it has broken in in Jesus it is breaking in through the power of the Spirit but if you are on the leading edge of that and if you're committed to following Jesus and living in one of these extraordinary multivalent fictive kinship groups ie churches then stuff is gonna happen then the powers are gonna strike back and sometimes that's apparently rather trivial and sometimes it's very dark and very nasty but it often involves suffering of one sort or another I was reflecting I didn't know you were going to ask me that question but I was reflecting a couple of days ago quite a different reason I have a prayer list people I pray for every day some I pray for every week etc and I went right down a long list and I realized that all these people aren't old friends family members etc I know things about their lives where there are points of darkness and suffering and pain and grief and anxiety one after another after another you know what we think of as the school sort of normal happy healthy family actually is very very rare almost all of us have got sorrows and pains and difficulties and engst's here and there and for Paul that is multiplied by the fact of being on the leading edge of the new age break and he teaches his congregations this gonna happen so he teaches them about suffering but there's another thing that you draw out in the book and that is Paul's emphasis on what you call the absolute condemnation of sexual immorality now again I was reading a lecture by Professor Larry Hurtado at Edinburgh University and he writes Christianity effectively raised the double standard men were to practice the same kind of sexual discipline that was expected of women the moral quality of the Christian life for both men and women was to shine in the culture and yet again you seem to be suggesting here's the Apostle Paul commending Christianity and what are the two bulwarks he says you're going to suffer and there's to be no sexual immorality yeah yeah that's hardly a great marketing slogan no and although I think this may be one of the reasons why as Rodney stark argues in his book the rise of Christianity why a lot of women found Christianity very attractive because instead of being abused and exploited this was a new world in which they were valued and cherished and in which men behave themselves supposedly now of course the church had failings and then and now he sits in first Corinthians but it's part of the new creation the idea and you see this in mark 10 in Jesus teaching the idea that if God is remaking the world let's get Genesis 1 and 2 right this time and that means you know that the standards of marriage which which are there in the Jewish world and which are now an innovation in the pagan world I mean I forget to it was some classical writer some some modern writer about the classics I was reading who said that basically in the ancient pagan world for a man Larry's point you just had as much sex as you could and the only thing that was stopping you was kind of jealous husbands or whoever that you you know that otherwise it was open season and so for the early church to stand out this is truly remarkable that the great philosopher and doctor at the end of the second century Galen doesn't know much about the Christians but he knows two things about them on both both of which make him think that they're mad one they believe in the resurrection of the body and two they don't sleep around would it be nice if the church was known for that today that there's in both cases this is a valuation of the goodness of creation it's a celebration of what it means to be made in the image of God made with bodies that are to be redeemed and therefore are to be valued instead of being treated as trivial toys you were talking earlier about your motivations in writing and I know I've read before where you've said the problem has often been 19th century questions with sixteenth century answers which I guess is a polite way of dismissing the whole of a Reformation theology but we'll come to that not just missing it but renegotiating right but for those outside of the church perhaps Paul's moment on the road to Damascus is the single event in the Apostles life that people know about I'm talking about computing young church individuals what happened on the road to Damascus if we ask Paul that he would say Jesus revealed himself to me and all I met him I saw him for Paul this wasn't what we would mean by a vision in other words Paul is quite clear this isn't like the subjective visions that other people have is he differentiates his seeing of Jesus from any subsequent ones he says the last of all it's oh it's a resurrection appearance it's the risen Lord appearing personally and in order to make sense of that I think Paul would say to us in our late modern world you need to understand that in God's world heaven and earth are not far apart they are made to overlap and interlock that's very counterintuitive for us because our culture is deeply epicurean with a distant God in heaven and we're down here but in biblical thought heaven and earth are made for each other and Jesus stands at the intersection and so how did that happen I've argued in the book and this isn't original to me other people who said this as well but Paul was praying on the road he's a zealous Jew off to do God's business so of course you're praying that you will be in a state of holiness while you're doing this this terrible work and one of the ways that Jews devout Jews prays prayed was to use Ezekiel chapter one the the whirling wheels of the throne chariot and then the chariot itself and then your eyes go up to the figure on the chariot and I've argued in the book that maybe Paul was doing that and that when he got to see who was sitting on the divine throne chariot it was Jesus himself which is a moment of total fulfillment and total confusion and devastation it destroys everything and fulfills everything was that in the language of theologians the moment he was converted I wouldn't put it like that if I say someone was converted today the normal assumption would be this person has been an atheist or an agnostic or whatever and has come to faith had a spiritual experience well Paul was a deeply spiritual man deeply prayerful man who worshipped the God of Abraham Isaac and Jacob has the Creator God the God of Israel Paul never stopped worshipping the Creator God the God of Israel throughout his life what happened was that he came to realize that this God he'd always worshiped had acted in and as Jesus and then he quickly came to realize was active in and through his spirit so we have to be very careful in case we give the impression that Paul leaves something called Judaism and embraces something called Christianity the isms and the itches are a 19th century invention that's part of our problem but the reality is that the Apostle stops enforcing Jewish obedience to the law something he'd done with violence yes yeah yep but he said after that experience yeah this is where we need to subpoena the whole of Galatians chapter 3 because that's where he hammers that one out where he makes the very strong argument that God made promises to Abraham about how he was going to save the whole human race in principle I mean say people of all sorts if you like and that the law the Mosaic law was given as a good but temporary dispensation and that's that's a complicated bit of theology but it's necessary to say the law was good but its purpose is now fulfilled and Moses is kind of pointing on in Romans 8 he says what the law couldn't do God has now done that's the key and you've helpfully taken a song to something that Paul is theologically associated with perhaps more closely than any other and that is the doctrine of justification by faith towards the end of the book and I'm quoting you you pose this question if the word pissed is can mean loyalty as well as faith then might one express Paul's famous doctrine as justification by loyalty I have to confess that's a new one on me are you suggesting that the individual's justification before God according to Paul includes some kind of demonstration of loyalty I think part of the problem this is getting technical so forgive us but this word pissed is P is T is which we normally translate as faith as Martin says means loyalty trustworthiness trustfulness the whole range of things and I think in Romans itself we see Paul exploiting those different meanings when he says upfront that this is the gospel about Jesus the Son of David the son of God raised from the dead through whom we have received Grace and Apostleship to bring about the obedience of faith among all the nations that's another Caesar phrase Caesar wanted obedient loyalty thank you very much Jesus is the Lord who wants obedient loyalty the danger with that is if you're asking the question of justification in terms of what do I have to do in order that God will be pleased with me then it sounds as though I have to do something I have to be loyal instead of just believe and that's where we need to pan right back and say nope that's not what we're talking about that is where the sixteenth century and actually wasn't their fault got into a muddle because they were responding to the Middle Ages I've often said Luther and Calvin and the others who are among my great heroes were trying desperately to give biblical answers to late medieval questions that's much better than giving non biblical answers to late medieval questions but let's think about what the first century questions were and they weren't the same questions and that's where the slippage could of course but Thomas Cranmer speaking of this doctrine specifically writes this proposition that we be justified by faith only freely and without works is spoken in order to take away clearly all merit of our works as being insufficient to deserve our justification at God's hand absolutely do you embrace that as an assertion of what Paul's saying I embrace that as an assertion of what had to be said urgently in the middle of the 16th century and blessed Cranmer for saying that because that wasn't where he started but he went to the stake for that and associated doctrines but when we pan back and say that's what needed to be said to ward off the 15th century heresies what needs to be said by Paul is that God intends to put the whole world right point one God has dramatically launched and inaugurated this project by raising the crucified Jesus from the dead point to so that the world has in principle been put right and God now through grace through the gospel puts human beings right so that they can be part of his putting right project for the world and being part of that project does not require a demonstration by myself of good works of effort it does it doesn't require it but as Luther himself would say if it doesn't issue in something is wrong with the initial faith I mean that that's that's quite clear if you if you just I mean some of Luther's early treatises make this extremely clear that faith works through love according to Galatians and love and faith actually and Paul are really quite close they are both about trusting God and living a life shaped by the death of Jesus so this is part of a much larger conversation of course but I think if you start by saying how do I get to heaven do I have to do good works or not wrong question but if you ask that question the answer is no you simply believe and trust God reaches out and you say thank you and believe but if you start by saying articulate to Paul articulates that but the works which Paul rules out in which Cranmer is echoing there as in Galatians 3 as in Romans 3 as in Galatians 2 as well primarily for Paul these are the works of the law which mark out the Jewish people from their non-jewish neighbors circumcision Sabbath the food laws and going to the temple and so on Paul says don't have to do that anymore that was a good but temporary dispensation in terms of today's culture where some find their Christian face to be less than respected oftentimes marginalized people feel that holding to the position of the Christian faith can sometimes be derided and mocked what does the Apostle Paul tell us about holding to the faith in the midst of a demanding culture Wow yeah I think his his main answer to that question would be that this is what he is trying to model and sometimes he is modeling it at the heart of a vibrant loving happy community that he's helping steer often he is modeling it when he's in prison when he is just saying I am going to be loyal to Jesus quite literally even if they kill me and and the end of Philippians it's that 4th chapter of Philippians is perhaps one of the places where if that was all we'd read he sounds really quite like some of the stoic moralist he says I know how to be abased I know how to abound I can do all things in the one who gives me strength and and there he is I think actually upstaging the philosophers who were seeking to have a humanist they could be proud of and it's it's not in himself it's in the Messiah and so in the power of the Spirit and in union with the Messiah he says I can do all things planted you know my extraordinary and in that context the same just earlier in the same passage is the famous bed rejoice in the Lord always etc which is set to music and wonderfully sung here and there he says whatever is true whatever is noble whatever is lovely whatever is good reported any virtue I think about these things that's a mental discipline you know the world is bombarding us to think about all the opposite things everything that's bad that my phone just updated itself without my asking it a few days ago and it's produced a Google feed which is all sorts of things that I actually don't want to think about and telling me all sorts of stupid things and rather unfortunate things why do I need that I don't even I don't know how to get rid of it actually if anyone can tell me afterwards you happily reprogram it for me but your Paul is saying make sure that you positively put into your mind the things that are noble and lovely wherever they are and that's not just in the confines of the Christian community that's you know go to the art galleries celebrate human creativity look at the beauties of the world around you and then he says but whatever you've heard and received and seen and in me that's what you're to do in other words there's an embrace of the goodness of wherever it is and then there is an embrace of this way of life and those somehow are both affirmations of the goodness of God in creation and redemption I think that's really philippians 4 is his best answer that's a beautiful description a final question from me before we go on to some questions that have been submitted you talked earlier about the fact that if you were in a fight you'd probably want Paul on your side if you're in a debate you probably would but at the same time he'd probably irritate you and annoy you occasionally if you were to distill the Apostle Paul's singular strength would it be his tenacity his intellect his grasp and ability to process the culture his knowledge of Jewish Scripture what is the singular strength that do you think this man possesses it would be all of the above but I think I would go back ultimately to his prayer life that he is some parameter prayer life that he's a man clearly who when he talks about praying constantly this is what he does and when I find a passage like 1st Corinthians 8 where he's retooling the Jewish prayer the Shema hear o Israel the Lord our God the Lord is one with Jesus in the middle of it for us there is one God one Lord and when he's you know there's there are some Jews who pray that prayer like some Eastern Orthodox pray the Jesus Prayer with the rhythm of their breathing our Lord Jesus Christ son of the Living God have mercy on me a sinner I think it's quite possible that Paul prayed that and similar Jewish but now Jesus shaped prayers as the deep world that's what I was talking about when I talked about the plant and harsh winter when he's faced with that horrible horrible moment his prayer doesn't stop but it has to go down deeper and deeper and deeper and all the things you mentioned his intellect his tenacity his ferocity with people who you know getting it wrong whatever I think they are all rooted in that it that's that's where his security is so it's his prayer life well I want all the rest as well but I think I think that's right a lot of it wonderful okay well we have some far more intelligent questions now from the floor and the first one that's asked I'm afraid I don't have the names of anybody who's put these but I will just put them to you why is the church concentrated more on the teachings of Paul than the teachings of Jesus great question because is it true yes it is yes it is and the teachings of Jesus tend to be reduced to short snippets which are then recontextualized into a different framework because Jesus was announcing that this is what it looks like when God's kingdom is coming on earth as in heaven and much of the Western Church has forgotten that this is a gross overstatement because many happens but but many have and have imagined that the whole gospel is about how we leave earth and go to heaven and then Jesus teaching is reduced to fragments of how we know that and what happens on roots but when you actually understand the Gospels as the description of how Jesus launched the kingdom of God on earth is in heaven then you'll not only read the Gospels differently you read pour differently as well Paul is implementing what Jesus achieved friend of mine said that so many Western churches treat the Gospels like the chips and dips before you go you know in the sort of anteroom before you go through to the dining room to have the red meat of the poor line gospel and there's something deeply wrong about that and I think Paul himself would rebuke us for that okay what was the form into the flesh I have no idea sorry it's maybe the thorn in my flesh is that I don't know what the soil important but I mean there have been all sorts of ideas it might be a particular temptation that kept coming back it may be a recurring illness some people have suggested that it was his recurring nightmare of the fact that he had goodbye and held people's coats while there was stoning Stephen you know that that he just couldn't shake that there's no way of knowing people have tried to do some fancy footwork with collations for and so on about tear out your eyes and give them to me as though maybe he's got a problem with his eyes that might be so I just don't think we have enough information this may be surprising I sometimes get accused of over X reducing things but here I'm being cautious what does this book tell us the pool and the faithfulness of God doesn't cover everything obviously because we want people to buy the book but setting that aside is this repetitious there are of course overlaps but I was worried about that to begin with and then when I got going I thought I actually don't need to worry about this because I'm talking about Paul the man I'm trying to get inside his skin I'm trying to use the same sort of evidence of course because that's the evidence we've got but in order to ask different kinds of questions particularly about biographical development I mean obvious example I start the body of the book after a quite a long introduction with the story of Phineas Phineas in the Book of Numbers an ancient tale of sex and violence it was good way to start the book and it's Phineas who does the redemptive violence and becomes the model of zeal right through to rabbinic Judaism in first Maccabees Phineas is one of the models of zeal along with Elijah these are people who do violent things to stop Israel going to the bad and to stop the pagan nonsense happening Paul is role modeling Phineas and it's phineas of whom Psalm 106 says Phineas did that and it was reckoned to him as righteousness to all generations now every other passage he talks about Phineas that the Bible talks it's about God establishing a covenant with him that tells you what that phrase means it was reckoned to him as righteousness it's one of the key phrases for paul romans 4 galatians 3 abraham believed god and it was reckoned to him as righteousness I think Paul had that phrase in his head from early on I didn't explore this in Paul in the faithfulness of God but I make it front and center this is a driving force of them when the great thing happens Paul rereads his scriptures and lo and behold there is a different way of doing covenantal zeal another question that's asked how do we tell the difference between those parts of Paul's teaching which are timeless and those parts which are culturally specific and I imagine somebody for example may be referring to head coverings and women and men and so on yeah how do you distinguish between what Paul is asserting as something that modern or at any period of Christian living people should embrace and those things which were so culturally specific we can dismiss yeah yeah yeah it's a good question but there's there's a level underneath the question because people often used to say that some parts of the Bible are timeless the true and others are merely culturally conditioned and to that I want to say all the Bible is culturally conditioned all the New Testament is written in first century Greek the doctrine of justification means what it means within the world of second temple Judaism within the world of fourth Ezra within the world of the Red Sea Scrolls etc until you've thought your way through that you're not in a position to understand so justification is true but it's not timeless that the quest for timeless truths has an uncomfortably platonic sounds to it God's truth is incarnate truth I am NOT a timeless person nor are you what good were the timeless I want a a truth that'll come real in my life and you get that from stuff that was coming real in the first century even though Paul himself refers to God's Word being truthful itself yes he impute them that yes but true I mean but well this is a philosophical discussion we perhaps shouldn't get into but but take an obvious example of 1st Corinthians 8 at 8 through 10 it's about food offered to idols this is not a problem that most modern Christians have an actually the Galatian problem should you or shouldn't you get circumcised is not I've never ministered in a congregation where that's been an issue no and yet there are some you know if you were ministering to a mixed Jew and Gentile congregation say in the Middle East that might be an issue and you might have to do some work on that however the question of how to live as a faithful monotheistic Christian in a polytheistic society where there's all sorts of stuff which goes with idolatry and how to navigate that that is a huge and important question in our society even though it doesn't consist of people offering sacrifices of pagan altars where the meat that then gets old on into into the market down the road so that's something which there may be it may be areas where that still goes on and where you have to navigate it but for most of us we can I think make the translation reasonably easily for the for the woman's head covering it's interesting because the the arguments Paul uses are harder to understand than the command itself it seems to me clear that he wants women when leading in worship to look like women and not like fake men he doesn't want in other words a kind of androgynous sense of who they are we celebrate being female and in that society you were head covering now I grew up in churches where most of the women still wore hats which were not at all like the sort of head coverings Paul had in mind didn't fulfill the same function but be that as it may now that's more or less gone out of the window in most in most churches so we are navigating it again and part of our problem with that is that Western society at the moment has got very very confused about what male and female actually mean and what roles mean and do a stereotype or don't we so that we're not in a position to look back at Paul and say we've got it right and you didn't however it's important too I was going to use the word distill which is a difficult word because that implies this sort of boiling off of timeless truths which I'm a bit worried about you know I don't want to get into difficulties but what do you say to some writers some theologians even who would impute a form of appalling sexism to the Apostle Paul yep we would say that here is a man who is paternalistic macho and dismissive I would tell them to go and read Romans 16 of course the trouble with Romans 16 is if you ever go through a lecture course on Romans people get so excited about the first eight chapters that they barely get to 9 to 11 let alone 12 to 16 but chapter 16 begins by saying I commend to you Phoebe who's a deacon at the church in concret I Paul is giving this lady Phoebe who seems to be an independent businesswoman traveling he doesn't say I'm giving it to Phoebe's husband he is it giving it a Phoebe for goodness sake she's coming to Rome and the high probability is that Paul was expecting Phoebe to the world to be the one who would go around the different house churches in Rome reading this letter out and quite possibly explaining it now that's a hypothesis you can't prove it but that is one custom which seems likely in that world that means that it's quite probable that the first person ever to do a Bible exposition of Romans was a woman from who was a deacon in the church King Creon if you read on through Romans 16 there's lots of other women including jr. who's an apostle and so on who are in leadership roles in the church Paul accepts this as the norm and yet you know that Paul also says that women should be subject to their husbands in his written epistles in in explicit terms in first Timothy 2 and of course there is a debate as to whether first Timothy is Paul iron or not but even supposing it is two of the hardest verbs to translate in Paul are there where he says I do not allow a woman to our fantasy look up I went in in a Greek dictionary it includes all sorts of meanings including murder people can't mean that that what's going on I think it's user ping authority he's right it's one hypothesis this is only a hypothesis but it's not a bad one is that first Timothy has written to a church in Ephesus what do you know about Ephesus the main religion in Ephesus great is Artemis of the Ephesians is a female cult where you've got women only in authority it's possible that some in Ephesus were thinking that if we've got a new sort of religious expression we better have women running it so if there's any men in leadership here sorry you'll have to make make room now I don't know that I can't prove it I've explored that and some other options in other words it's not as easy as the King James Version would make it sound then it's been very interesting to me to see over the course of my lifetime the way in which people some people have clung to first Timothy too as though that's clear as day and enables us to override 1st Corinthians 11 and Romans 16 etc I'd rather do it the other way you talked earlier about Paul being concerned about holiness and unity and how combining those two is the challenge for every pastoral minister male or female everywhere in the world question is asked what would Paul say about the multi-denominational and fractious nature of the modern expression of church I think you would hang his head and say you know you need to go back to square one and start again I mean really after I wrote Paul on the faithfulness of God I was on the road doing various lectures and so on and again and again people said what's the big thing that Paul would say if he could see us today and I said not only that we are disunited but that we don't care about it well if we do we go to an ecumenical meeting once a month and kind of solve our conscience is that we've shaken hands with our Christian brothers and sisters down the road well that's better than not I mean a hundred years ago Anglican bishops are sending angry letters to any of their clergy who dared to preach in a Methodist Church and where are we now tonight you know that this would have been unthinkable we've come a long way and let's let's enjoy that but there's a long way still to go now I think the tragedy is this in the 16th century the Reformers rightly insisted on worship and scripture in their own language but once you say okay have it in your own language then you get the Germans worshiping in German and the Dutch in Dutch and the French in French and the English in English and then as theological divisions emerge those churches embrace different ways and then they say oh they're heretics down the road whereas in fact they were just speaking a different language and it may turn out they're a theological differences Pam I'm not saying theological differences aren't important believe me either hugely important but if we remain disunited and don't even care then the principalities and powers are still running the show Ephesians 3 Paul says that through the church the the multiplex wisdom of God there's a lovely phrase in Greek a Paulo porque los Sophia - Theo the many-colored many-splendored wisdom of God might be made known to the principalities and powers and this is the point Caesar would have loved to have had an empire in which people of all sorts were happy in one big family it never worked he tried to impose it as a Roman uniformity Paul is saying the glorious multicolored variety of the church is supposed to be united and when that happens Caesar will know that God has called time on his oppressive Empire what is the importance of Paul's citizenship his Roman citizenship we've talked earlier about Paul being saturated in the Jewish Scriptures but what about his citizenship does that play out yeah Paul's Roman citizenship enables him to do things and get out of jail free at one point in a way which wouldn't have been possible without and I think Paul kind of relishes that that he is a Roman citizen he is born into Roman citizenship we're not sure why possibly his father or grandfather had served in the army and and been given citizenship as or something but some scholars today have rather resented that because they want Paul to be so counter Imperial and so countercultural that he would never have had Romans I think that mistakes the complexity of Paul's mind and life I think he relishes the fact that when the time had fully come God sent forth his son so we've got splendid Road you can get about we've got a splendid postal system and he can do stuff with that we've got magistrates to whom he can appeal and he knows the law as well as they do he can tell them when they're getting it wrong and so Paul uses his citizenship that's why when he goes on his second missionary journey the person he chooses as his chief partner Silas the Sylvanus he's a Roman citizen as well and so they are both in this very interesting position so that you know when he's when he's beaten and thrown into jail in Philippi and the next day the magistrates say tell those men to get out of town Paul can play his trump card he says excuse me beaten without trial imprisoned without charge Roman citizens sounds like a public apology and he gets it because they've all heard about Cicero speech in varium and know perfectly well that actually they could be in deep trouble here and so Paul has got them of course one of the interesting things is how could he prove it because if you claim to be a citizen and couldn't prove it you'd be in deep trouble if they thought you were telling a lie Roman citizens had a thing called a diploma which was like a passport which they might keep on a string around their body or something like that and I'm not sure how Paul would have managed with that if he's being stripped and beaten and so on but that seems to be part of the deal and so then later on in Jerusalem he says to the Centurion who's about to have him tortured and think this is illegal don't you and oh my goodness yeah we nearly got into severe trouble here so I think he kind of rent and then of course the appeal to Caesar that that's that's a stroke of of great hutzpah and I think Paul knows it's heavily ironic but back of that he knows that he's fulfilling as I 52 verses 13 14 and 15 that Kings shall shut their mouths because of him you know that here is the servant preaching the gospel of the servant and he expects the nations of the world to be shocked even if it means they they kill him or rout well that's a great moment for me to shut my mouth ladies and gentlemen professor [Applause]

Channel: SPCK Publishing

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Keywords: SPCK, Tom Wright, Paul, Paul A Biography, NT Wright, Martin Bashir, Christianity, God, History, Religion, Book

Id: 6Dv2vewlFyI

Length: 72min 0sec (4320 seconds)

Published: Thu Aug 23 2018