Broken Signposts: A Conversation with N.T. Wright

[Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] hello very warm welcome to you as you join this event which is coming to you courtesy of the team at the world renowned regent college bookstore and a very very happy thanksgiving to all our friends in the us as well my name is ewan russell jones and we're talking today about a new book by tom wright professor tom wright called broken signposts how christianity makes sense of the world i've got the uh the the british edition here which is published by spck but in north america it's published by uh harpercollins and um i'm very happy to say that its author tom wright is here with us as well so welcome tom thanks so much for joining us thank you my pleasure professor wright is a top biblical scholar and theologian um closely associated with the university of san andreas in scotland and currently with wycliffe hall in oxford and of course he's also very much a church leader a prominent public figure who was at one time bishop of durham uh one of the great historic bishoprics of the church of england if you're watching this event live you're very welcome to put your own questions to tom about what we're discussing uh please email them to questions at regentcollege.edu and we'll try and deal with those as the conversation unfolds but in this fascinating new book tom wright explores seven themes which uh preoccupied human beings throughout history and um all over the planet really justice spirituality love beauty freedom truth power seven of them he describes these universal themes as signposts which point in a particular direction they reveal how we make sense of life and just what we want from it tom looks at these signposts one by one and brings them into conversation with important stories and passages from the gospel according to saint john and this is a really exciting aspect of the book that brings not only a fresh new perspective to bear on ancient and universal human concerns the ones that he identifies but that also helps to throw new light on some of the most well-known passages in the new testament so tom let's go to the title first uh these signposts that you deal with they're all instantly recognizable to us um why are they broken why are they broken signposts okay thanks for that um i see all of these as impulse's vocations if you like that all humans are aware of we all know we ought to do justice we ought to support the doing of justice both locally in our communities and globally etc we want the world to run properly but for some reason we find it very difficult we find it difficult in our own case if we're having anything to do with the court case we are very eager to put our elbows in the scale in favor of our own cause whatever it may be and if it's international justice well we sort of believe in international justice but if our own country is involved then we're not as unbiased as we should be and we watch other people being similarly unbiased and so then this pattern repeats with all these other things we know that love is really important and many people would see love and and relationships as a pointer a signpost pointing to the ultimate truths about life uh and about humans and god and so on but there too we always mess up our relationships we we have rows with people that we love dearly um and the very best of relationships in any case always end in death and so it goes on all through the signposts that these are things which look as if they're pointing to the ultimate truth about life but when we actually examine what happens they all let us down which results in some people like the french philosopher jean-paul satra saying that life is just a sick joke it promises so much but then it always lets you down and we might as well just forget the idea of any real meaning and just live as enjoyably as we can in such time as we've got for ourselves um and so the idea of the signposts is these are things which look as though they point to the ultimate meaning of life the brokenness is our bitter experience which is if you like a post-modern moment um you know we talk about freedom and truth and so on and then the post-modernist comes along and says your freedom is bought at the expense of someone else's slavery and the post-modernist says of truth exactly what pontius pilate said to jesus what is truth truth what's that we live in a world of fake news a post-truth world and we all kind of know that but we still want truth we still want freedom etc etc so that's why these signposts both matter and are deeply deeply puzzling and that's the question really which this book faces us with all the way through yep the american sociologist peter berger wrote in one of his books i think it's called the rumor of angels but things that are signals of transcendence in in a secular world so you're saying that these things are like that are they but they've also got this this quality that's disappointing as well yes exactly and and i mean yes transcendence is a way in which in a kind of a a secular culture you can talk about the generalized sense that there is something more going on than what the material universe seems to be offering you um i don't particularly like the word transcendence myself because it's so big and floppy and can mean different things to different people but i talk about spirituality which i think can get at something for many people in our world people who feel that religion is for the birds and i wouldn't know what transcendence is but spirituality and and people who love music or art or or a good walk in a quiet bit of countryside or whatever they'll say there's something more going on there and so we need to explore that something more but then of course this too lets us down because people embrace self-serving spiritualities like gnosticism and so on in their various modern forms and and often the people who seem to be most zealous for their form of spirituality or religion if it comes to that are then fighting one another or fighting into nissan wars amongst themselves and we look and we say if that's what spirituality gets you into it maybe we should prefer the secular world and so on so all these things too are yeah broken and then the question is what happens as a result yeah so we'll come back to talk about some of those specific signposts uh in a moment but um the other important dimension of this book is the gospel of john of course and uh john's gospel is often thought of maybe you know by the ignorant um but it's often thought of as the most spiritualized the most kind of abstract of all of the gospels what made you focus on this one this gospel um you know to bring this discussion about very earthy things very kind of human concerns what made you go there it was a curious chain of of events i was making some recordings for the online courses that i do at entityright online um some years ago and i was discussing with my producer various possibilities for other short courses we might do and i i had i was already working on these seven themes as part of the gifford lectures which i did in aberdeen a couple of years ago which is now published as a big academic book called history and eschatology and the seven themes were bubbling up in that book um and i said you know what if we took them and ran them as a thought experiment through one of the gospels that might be really interesting and at once i thought well justice comes at the front and john's gospel is among many many other things one big long trial narrative jesus is on trial he calls witnesses he is accused people come to defense the thing finally ends up in a court scene and many people don't look at john's gospel in that way but once you see it it's all the way through and it's all about god putting the world right with jesus as the sort of test case if you like in the middle and that's a way of reading john's gospel which as i say i don't think has occurred to many people but but it is there so i then thought well that would be really interesting to try it with justice of course it would be really interesting to do love because everybody knows john's gospel is about love what happens to the other great signposts i thought well freedom yes you bet that's a johannine theme truth well of course i already quoted pontius pilate so the idea went ping ping ping and wow let's run it so then when i got the chance which was i guess um 18 months or so ago now um i suddenly had a week when i'd finished other tasks and i was not quite starting the next loss and i thought you know what i'm going to clear the desk and see if i can write this out um as a first draft at least and i was really excited it just came together um with these little interludes which we might talk about as well because i realized you can't just drop people into john trump it's it's a bit too deep like that you need some steps to go down into this deep water so i do some little snippets here and there about different aspects of john it's really really interesting the way that you've done that because um one of the things about john of course is that is the book of signs isn't it i mean almost like the spine of the book but that's not actually what you're going for you know that's a sort of happy coincidence that that yes that there are the seven great signs in john starting with the turning of water into wine and then the healing of the nobleman's son and so on and different people count them differently but i think the sequence ends up with the crucifixion of jesus itself as the ultimate sign with then of course the resurrection as the the eighth one if you like um but so that john is a book of seven signs and this is a book of seven signs but they're not meant to be the same there's just a kind of a musical echo there if you like so let's let's go for the the the justice uh theme where where you begin and it is an incredibly universal i remember when i was working in um in the in the kind of broadcasting industry and a lot of colleagues were often that not christians they would um resort to the kind of idea of karma you know particularly where you're working with people who um are difficult you know or you know really not just difficult but unpleasant and they would you know use this karma idea and what goes around comes around um the christian idea is rather different to that is that it's it's an idea of justice but it's it's the christian notion is kind of removed from that why is that yes and the the christian notion goes back to the old testament which is that god is there is a god who is the creator and that the creator is utterly determined to put his world straight to put things right and you see this in the great new creation passages like isaiah chapter 11 or psalm 72 and often the task of putting things right in the old testament appears to devolve onto the the true king israel's true king the anointed one that the messiah if you like so that in the psalms and in isaiah again and other passages as well it's the role of the king to put things right and we're waiting for the true king who'll come and do that and then he'll have to sort the whole world out because the whole world's in a mess and so then when we come into the new testament and we see jesus we realize um that this person who's going around doing things we didn't expect like turning water into wine or healing somebody's son whatever it is um what he's doing is close up and personal putting things right not just putting them back the way they were but actually doing this sort of new creation that the way that god is going to put the world right is by bringing creation into a renewal through the other side of everything going wrong and then the story of jesus of course climaxing in his death and resurrection jesus is embodying that putting right so that by the time we get to the resurrection story we ought to be saying to ourselves oh my this is how god's putting the world right project finally got off the ground and it looks like we're called to be part of it which is of course part of the trick here we're not just spectators in this john's gospel by the way it's written draws us in and makes us think oh we are actually being summoned to a role here so that once we see justice not as this what goes around comes around thing to be sure there is a sense in scripture of you reap what you sow um and sometimes uh the bible says quite explicitly that god will allow people to experience the long-term results of what they have foolishly or wickedly done but far more than that kind of judgmentalism is the judgment in the old testament sense of things being put right and john's story is all about that as well of course as about a lot of other things so i mean although um the word doesn't really crop up in in john uh i mean when you when you talk about uh you know we think of john as a gospel of love we don't think of it as a gospel of justice actually what you're saying is that because this theme of the renewal of creation is there justice is there justice is there and as i said um so much of john hinges upon people accusing jesus and then jesus calling witnesses the father bears witness to me the works that i do bear witness john the baptist has borne witness to him uh it's as though the whole of creation is a big trial narrative with god himself on trial and now jesus is embodying that god having come to hear the case against him if you like and then calling witnesses and then astonishingly if we didn't know the story ahead of time we we should be astonished by it jesus being condemned by the secular authorities but then god overturning that verdict by raising him from the dead so there is a sense of a trial narrative which is how of course societies immemorial have done justice but but yes it is about god putting things right at the end so yes it's kind of interesting you would have thought that because the trial and the you know that part of the story looms so large in in john isn't it i mean it's more than is it half the gospel or um um well not not quite i mean because in a sense finally gets to jerusalem um because the the there's a meeting of the sanhedrin back at the back end of chapter 11 to say this man must be done away with and so we know this is going on but then the farewell discourses come in chapters 13 through 17 and then it's only with chapter 18 that we get the arrest and then the brief jewish hearing and then the elongated trial before pilate the second half of 18 and and all of 19 up to the crucifixion itself um which is the longest and fullest account of jesus trial before the roman governor of any of the gospels so this theme of of um the creation renewed uh that is for you tremendously important isn't it because because john won the prologue in the beginning was the word it's an echo of genesis 1 um but then the resurrection story in john 20 echoes the prologue in such a way as to say for those with their ears attuned this is the new creation and the point about the new creation is it's not let's scrap the old one and do something totally different it's let's redeem the old one and make it new just like at the end of the book of revelation where jesus says behold i'm making everything new that's exactly the message that comes through the gospel the paragraph that really struck me um when you're talking about what does this mean for for us is um where you talk about participatory justice and you describe this as one of the most beautiful aspects of of of of the the theme really uh and the christian notion of just what do you mean by that i i can't remember where i say that do you have a do you have a reference there well it's obviously in the chapter about uh i i'm intrigued um justice i think yeah um i'm not sure i can put my yeah it's it's it's uh here we are it's i think it's page 38 to 28 in my book one of the one of the beautiful things about the christian idea the risen jesus has won the victory over injustice and now sends his followers to work on multiple on the multiple projects of new creation justice itself restorative healing life-giving justice is central to that task yes yes yes um i i mean the way i've often put it when talking actually about paul but john as well is that god intends to put the whole world right at the end in the present time he puts human beings right through the gospel that's what we call justification being put right in order that we can become part of his putting right project in and for the world and here's one of the great protests that i've been launching for many years now that so many christians think that the gospel is simply all about how we leave this world and go to heaven they don't realize that actually the gospel is all about how god wants to come and dwell on and transform and heal his world his creation that's the story of genesis to revelation not about how we go to heaven but as revelation 21 says that how the dwelling of god will come to be with us and the thing about living between the resurrection of jesus and the final day is that we are supposed to be signpost makers for the kingdom in the present so that we are to be restorers of the broken signposts and by working for justice in the present we send a signal to the wider community that we are believers in the god who has put the world right in jesus and will finally put it right and that is an enormously powerful part of of the witness to the gospel so you would really actually be talking about to taking part in the multiple tasks of justice then i mean would you expect racial justice to be an impromptu all of us are thinking about racial justice i think at the moment because the the black lives matter movement of course yeah it seems to be kind of contested in christian circles you would think that i am i i know that there are worries there because the the blm movement itself very specifically has some links to marxist agendas etc etc but this this is really frustrating actually as a new testament theologian because the early church was the original multicultural project if you look at the church in antioch if you look at the church in greece if you look at the church in north africa it was multicolored and it was celebrating the fact that there is neither jew nor greek barbarian scythian slave or free all are one in christ that was the original christian vision this is a new way of doing the human project for the last few hundred years the western christian church particularly has forgotten that partly because accidentally at the time of the reformation we decided to have our scriptures and our liturgy in our own language well that's a wonderful really important thing but then we colluded because of that with the idea that you'd have in london say a french church a polish church a spanish church and plenty of english churches and pretty quickly we found that we've got churches often hold denominations which are designated by different ethnic groups and then because of the slavery issue in the states particularly you have black churches you have white churches and the astonishing thing is that no good bible christians were standing up and saying on the basis of galatians 3 or colossians 3 or or acts itself this is not how it ought to be the church by definition is multi-colored multi-ethnic multi-generational multi-everything and it's because we weren't doing that that then other people come in and say oh this is really important we have to do that and if at that point we say oh we don't like your ideologies well shame on us because we should have been doing it better in the first place sorry i get very agitated about this because i've observed this theologically culturally philosophically for some years and as a biblical theologian i want to say absolutely no wonder we find multiculturalism difficult in the secular world we're trying to do it without the gospel the gospel is the only way really to do the proper multicultural project so that is obviously one thing um the question of the role of women in the church and in the world is another the question of the place of children and very little children is another and but then particularly that the issues of justice in relation to the middle east in relation to uh uh east africa all sorts of issues which are on the table at the moment and and the gospel issues they've got their gospel issues because it is about god's world god's world needing to be put right okay i'll stop ranting now but it's good yes thanks for the rant but um i mean we haven't got a great track record i mean you've you're presenting wonderful vision but you know you mentioned um you know the slavery issue in the states but you know you think of britain and the empire but more than that in recent years i mean in in our lifetime actually um yours and mine at least if not some of our audience but we've seen in the uk people coming from the commonwealth from uh from the caribbean and christians and not being welcomed by british churches there's been enormous confusion there and they're actually there upon layer of confusion and i i would always want to say and i know you're in canada at the moment which is the second largest country in the world [Laughter] college obviously is part of this vast wonderful country and i love when i lived in montreal i love the fact that it was so huge that you could draw a line from where we lived north to the north pole without going through any other built up areas it was just this wonderful sense of expanse and there's plenty of room there okay half of it is frozen most of the year but it's still vast britain is a tiny country britain would fit into one corner of the province of quebec quite easily and you can't just go on filling up a country with more and more and more thousand people especially if you are committed to having a national health service which looks after everybody who is there you simply can't do that ad infinitum therefore you have to have some kind of wise immigration policy as canada has as australia has as america has you know as most modern uh supposedly civilized countries have some kind of immigration policy so you can't just have a free-for-all and then expect that that there's going to be no negative effects the problem is that that in the 60s and 70s got muddled up in britain with the very nasty race question of people coming particularly from the subcontinent from india pakistan bangladesh etc and settling in particular areas of britain and really transforming the culture in a way that people found very threatening and i understand that threat but we didn't handle it well and i would say it's partly because the churches weren't tuned in to working on these great issues which are which are there before us anyway we're probably getting way off topic on simply one chapter but uh i'm glad you are we're staying on topic and we were talking about justice and we're going to move on to talk about uh something else uh in a moment but if i can just remind our viewers that uh if you're watching live you can um uh put a question to to tom about something that uh he said or you something you fear he might have said or uh that you'd like him to say um and um that uh that if you address that to uh questions at regent hyphen college.edu um so tom the that that's that's the justice yeah you move on to love um we're not gonna go through all of your your signs uh apart from anything else we want people to read the book but um uh love obviously another kind of great um human desire aspiration but you start um with a story about faust in the um in the chapter and um so maybe not all of us are familiar with with the story of faust uh it's uh um perhaps you could you could say a little more about that and the way that this story is picked up by goethe and i'm not a better expert but um this is a tale for our times yeah it is it is i came to the fast legend through reading thomas mann's novel many years ago which is a huge and and scary novel but the faust legend which goes back to the middle ages is about a man who makes a pact with the devil or rather the devil makes a pact with him that the devil will give him whatever he wants riches rich and varied sex life fame fortune um success in his profession whatever on one condition well two conditions the ultimate condition is that at the end of the day when the devil calls time on this the devil will have his soul but he can have a great time in the at the moment but of course that's the end of the day but in the meantime he must not love he must not give his heart to anything and that comes out very clearly in in the different retellings of this goes back to to marlo shakespeare's contemporary but but then the goethe version is a bit different at the end of the 18th century but but um though very very interesting profound but then the thomas mann one is is quite is quite chilling and man uses it as a parable of uh 1930s and 40s germany um where where germany becomes by implication the man who has made a pact with the devil and who has enormous success and technological advance and amazing music and so on and so on and so on but in the end the devil requires its soul and it's it's a very chilling read for the sort of middle of the 20th century um but i've said i've suggested that it it functions as a parable of our time that we we've we've the post enlightenment western world has sought technological advance scientific advance medical advance etc etc we've done all that to great excess and we've colonized the world and we've built huge machines and we can put a man on the moon we can do this we can do that but the idea of love is the kind of soft squashy bit that mustn't get in the way um we we don't really know what to do about that and then of course it makes a comeback in dark and and and dangerous ways and so and i've explored this further again in the book i mentioned before that my giffords the history and eschatology book um where the idea of love being squeezed out or sucked out of the modern world and relegated then to the emotions that people have in private rather than thinking of how actually love is the oxygen which uh we ought to be breathing in whatever we're doing and so from there i segue into john who obviously as we all know is is about love but it's it's it's about the fragmentation of the modern western world um so that uh it's it's all the kind of left brain stuff which is organizing and getting things done and so on and the right brain stuff which is love and metaphor and music and joy and so on has been pushed off to the side as light entertainment and and and part of my argument would be that as christians as people who believe that the love of god has become incarnate and has died for us we are to be transformed in order to be ourselves people who can and should be transforming the world by the love of god in and through us and and that's really obviously how the chapter plays out yeah so in um in your your treatment of john you're looking at the incarnation of love in in jesus christ um but then you bring in this huge theme of the temple and um you know that's a kind of for many of us is that what why are we talking about an institution or a building here what's the link for you between the incarnation of love on this theme of the temple in john's gospel absolutely this is something which i like many biblical scholars have come to slowly over the years because as you say most um certainly protestant biblical scholars have seen the temple as well the jews had that great institution but of course we don't do that kind of thing and we happen to have church buildings but they're not so significant for us as the temple was for them and so we miss this great theme which is there from genesis right the way through that it is god's intention to come to live with his people and the tabernacle in the wilderness in the book of exodus and then the temple in jerusalem when solomon builds it in first kings these are small working models of god's intention to fill the whole creation with his presence and his love and then when john gives us in the prologue the ultimate hint he says the word became flesh and tabernacled in our midst the greek word he uses is very explicit it's escano sen which means he pitched his tent um we it sounds silly if you translate it like that in english because people think well what's this about god pitching a tent so we tend to say the word became flesh and dwelt among us or lived among us but that doesn't get the point the point is that this is the ultimate temple once you understand that the temple was there as a as a signpost as a broken side post guess what but has a forward-pointing signpost to god's intention to flood the whole creation with himself one of my favorite lines in the old testament you get it in isaiah 11 and habakkuk 2 and psalm 72 and numbers 14 and so on is is that the earth shall be the whole earth shall be full of the glory of the lord as the waters cover the sea and i've often said in lectures how do the waters cover the sea the waters are the sea god intends to flood the whole of creation and the temple where god fills this building with his presence is not an escape from the world it's a sign of what god intends to do in and for the world and the incarnation of jesus is the local close-up and personal version of that and then by the holy spirit promised in chapter 7 given in chapter 20 of john's gospel then we jesus followers are to be further instantiations outposts of that whole god-filling the world movement against the day when god will finally do what he says in isaiah 11. so for me the temple has come to be not a kind of a retrograde why are we going back to that funny institution thing but a hopeful forward-looking signpost once you see as john says in chapter 2 that jesus was speaking of the temple of his body jesus himself is where god has come to live and then by his spirit we are to be places where a means by which god comes to live in the world that's the really scary thing as again we're not spectators in this we are to be participants i've um i've got to ask you this tom because on the front of my copy this is the british copy uh there's a a tribute from jonathan sachs rabbi jonathan sex who simply died recently and he says that you're one of the the greatest theologians of our time and here's you kind of massively reinterpreting um you know entering into this uh incredible reinterpretation of the temple and all of these things are so close to the heart of judaism what kind of you were obviously a friend of his uh knew him how did that go i i didn't um know jonathan very well but we did meet a few times we first met during curiously during the lambeth conference in 2008 when he gave a wonderful address as rowan williams's guest it was one of the highlights of the three-week lamborgh conference it was an amazing occasion and and rowan kindly sat me next to jonathan at dinner which was kind of a huge privilege and i'd heard him on the radio many times and read one or two of his books but i never met him before and and we just hit it off we're almost exactly the same age he read philosophy at cambridge the same time i was reading philosophy in oxford um he had done a big pastoral job at the same time as i was doing a big pastoral job etc etc so we had a lot in common and he obviously had a huge understanding of early christianity and modern christianity and though obviously he was jewish to his fingertips and very much aware of the ways in which jews and christians had trodden on each other's toes over the years and we christians particularly made so many terrible mistakes but he was a man of enormous generosity of heart and spirit i actually dedicated a book to him but he asked me not to put his name in i dedicated it to a wise and generous friend and i got a lovely letter back from him um thanking me and saying may god continue to bless you so that you can continue to bless the rest of us i keep that letter in a special place that's a wonderful moment and and you know i thank god for people like that and i i sometimes wondered if he was in fact a closet lover of jesus but um i will never know well thanks thanks for that um we've got a couple of questions here um one is from danny ferguson danny ferguson uh who asks um or says i'm so thankful for the way in which you allowed jesus to form the narrative of our faith why is it that some christians feel threatened by a christocentric view interesting i'm not sure what danny means by a christocentric view i mean the whole bible is christocentric um i'm i'm a i'm a bible christian through and through that's what i learned when i was young and i've never seen any reason to stop and and the narrative of the bible sweeps through the old testament leaving a big question mark and the new testament says yes we hear that question mark and here's how it works out each of the four gospels picks up the story of the old testament in quite radically different ways if you think of how matthew mark luke and john will start but they're all saying it rushes together at this point and it makes sense at this point and then the early preaching of the gospel is the messiah died for our sins in accordance with the scriptures and he was buried and was raised from the dead in accordance with the scripture in other words the messiah jesus of nazareth um he is the focal point of it all so uh and then particularly and i'm not sure what the alternative would be to doing this um john says no one has ever seen god but the only begotten god who is in the bosom of the father he has explained him made him known that the greek word is exergetal he's he's unveiled unpacked um given an exegesis of god so you can't start with a big picture of god and then fit jesus in if you do that your picture of god will be warped and then jesus won't quite fit you have to start again and again and again with jesus not that you start cold because we all have ideas about who god might be but the new testament insists that you have to take those ideas and knock them into a fresh shape and the shape turns out to be the shape of the incarnate son there's a lot of discussion in theology about this at the moment but i think this is absolutely central and vital you can't um go back behind jesus back and say let's find out who god really is with jesus as a sort of footnote now it's got to be uh michael ramsey the great archbishop of canterbury 40 years ago and god is christ-like and in him is no unchrist-likeness at all amen and let's work on that we've got another question from uh this one from uh jason biasy um who is curious whether bishop right gets exasperated uh at the the fumbled reception of his work whether by liberals evangelicals or any other constituency and if so how do you keep on um i when i was an undergraduate here in oxford just down the road one of my best friends was an actor very fine actor who actually ended up as an opera singer um and still a very fine actor um and he used to smile and say um the actor doesn't mind whether he's playing the hero or the villain as long as it's his name that's on the board outside the theater so i wouldn't quite put it like that but there is a sense of when you're a writer you want your ideas to be discussed and it's better that they be discussed even if to begin with people don't always get it than that they just fall off the back of the second-hand shop shelf and nobody ever cares about them so of course as a writer one one wants things to be discussed and because the church is as it is and because christian teaching has been so varied over the years um and so muddled over the years and i'm not saying that i don't have muddled ideas as well we all do but we're trying to sort them out that it's no surprise that some people say how can you possibly say that because haven't you forgotten this bit of the bible and i want to hear those criticisms but again and again i then want to say yes and here's how that bit works and here's how it all fits in sometimes it takes me months or years to figure that out when somebody knocks me back with some criticism but often it's often it's just misunderstanding you know cardinal newman said 200 years ago that there are two sorts of disagreements there's disagreements about words where we're actually agreeing about what we're really thinking but we're just using different words to say the same thing and then we get into a tangle about it we can untangle that and then there's disagreements about things where when it really comes down to it we are disagreeing and there are some theological disagreements where i want to say at that point we are simply let's have this out let's look at the scriptures let's decide whether we really believe in the authority of scripture or not and if so how that's going to work so i have to carry on i love what i do um you see me surrounded by the tools of my trade by by books and scribbled notebooks and so on um that this is what's made life exciting for me in so many ways over many years now and it's a shame when not everyone gets it at first sight but then that's a challenge to me to say it a bit more clearly next time around great so let's let's move on to talk about another one of your themes which is spirituality one of these signposts and um you mentioned ian ramsey just now bishop ian ramsey michael michael ramsey michael oh michael i'm sorry there were there were there were two ramses yes ramsay stuck in my head i'm sorry uh ian ian ramsey uh you tell a story about in in in your chapter about spirituality about him coming to a uh a mission at um at oxford university in the 1960s when you were there and you this is kind of very um well another parable about what was happening in terms of the move from religion to spirituality yes i remember it well and it was the the scene that i have in my mind took place about 200 yards from where i'm sitting now um on the corner of hollywood street broad street and cat street if people who know oxford know where that is it's an open space in front of the great clarendon building the university administration building and uh ian ramsey who was then bishop of durham um was giving these addresses in the sheldonian i think four or five addresses each night of a week and ian was a philosopher and a very able man a very good speaker um and but he was he was producing a kind of a philosophical case for believing in god and for the openness and the possibility of divine disclosure etc etc which was fascinating intellectually fascinating but they had also invited archbishop anthony bloom to do a school of prayer which was happening in the chapel of exeter college which was my college um at lunch times well two things happened about that one was that that was so popular that they had to move it somewhere else there wasn't enough room for everybody but then the other thing was that anthony bloom who was this amazing russian emigrate bishop um sort of medium height but big beard cassock and these deep deep russian eyes he stood outside the sheltonian um outside the clarendon building the sheldon on that corner of the street in oxford at 11 o'clock when the students were coming and going between lectures and simply standing stock still started to talk about god and people stopped and listened and crowds gathered and people forgot their lectures and here was this man who sort of embodied a different kind of experience and that was spirituality and people recognized it and they knew that he had something which deep down they probably wanted even if they weren't sure what he would do to them over against the cheap and cheerful secular world that they were living in and and that that's always remained in my head as you tell as a parable of that shift towards a world where the secular world you know the richard dawkins and so on say you can't believe any of that stuff and it's just like believing in an invisible flying teapot right right flying around the world and so on and there's trivial stuff like that and then you get an anthony bloom who just stands there and talks about god and people know that this matters but then what do we do with it and what do they do with it and that's that's where the question really is at that point you're you're kind of quite critical of that move that the the move from kind of religion to spirituality can basically mean you want it to mean yeah it can and and then since then through the 70s and 80s i've noticed i mean i i love bookshops as you can imagine and i've noticed that bookshops started to have sections called things like mind body spirit and it will be things like discovering your personal goddess or or back to karma and whatever bits of eastern religions and sort of as though anything will do as long as it isn't that boring thing called christianity um and so people exploring um the possibility of reincarnation and discovering who i was in a former life and why that is affecting me now and all sorts of things which actually have no scientific basis at all and certainly no basis in the judeo-christian tradition at all but people want to know more about stuff which is beyond what the secular world gives them and the irony is they often don't think they're going to get that in christianity because christianity has often been quite rational and logic chopped and we need to get back to the holistic presentation which is of course one of the things i'm trying to hint at in this book and and so where do you see that kind of that sense of the spirituality of john's gospel offering something different to the gnostic that kind of just it's fascinating because of course as we all know john has these conversations between jesus and nicodemus between jesus and the woman of samaria jesus and the crowds after he's fed the five thousand et cetera and finally jesus and pontius pilate which is scary and these these personal questions are again and again probing where jesus doesn't quite answer the question that they were asking he and he asked he answers the question they should have been asking instead so it feels a bit jerky but actually as many many generations have found out if you live in those conversations you discover that jesus is gently opening up this person this nicodemus this woman of samaria and and saying can't you see there is a bigger truth here there is a bigger life here there is a bigger vision of god here which takes their sort of fumbling and stumbling towards something and then redirects it and ultimately directs it to himself and then through himself to the god who is beckoning them and i know obviously generations have found that john's gospel does this to them it will get inside you and as you read it prayerfully jesus will come and do the same to you if you let him which sometimes we aren't sure we necessarily want to there's another question here tom from um from joshua co how do we understand the new heavens and new earth as a place without sin and evil will we still have free choice will our choice to bow our knee before christ still be as meaningful if we cannot choose evil um it's a good good and interesting question but it actually comes down to some philosophical questions about the nature of freedom and the nature of choice that you know i i am because i am married i am free to love my wife and to go on loving her and so on if i wasn't married that freedom would be curtailed i would still have choices but they would be different sorts of choices once you decide that you are worshiping jesus then jesus releases within you all sorts of potentialities and possibilities which mean that you have ever more to offer him in worship and ever more to contribute to his kingdom and in terms of what the new heavens and new earth will be well we have picture language i've often said all our language about the ultimate future is a set of signposts there's the signposts again a set of signposts pointing into a fog they don't give us a photographic representation of what it'll be like when we get there but we know that as at the moment we sense heaven and earth are not far from at least we should and not far from one another unless we have been seduced by epicureanism to think that if there is a heaven it's miles away and doesn't concern us but no heaven and earth are very close separated by a narrow veil and and uh paul says the lord is near in philippians 4 and he he means he's near to us he's not far away and so when heaven and earth are transparent to one another when they become one whole creation which is what they were always intended to be then at the heart of that in the nature of the case there will be image-bearing human beings human beings who are adoring god and as a result becoming more and more genuinely human themselves and the idea that by worshiping the god in whose image we were made that that would shut down our human potential is is a kind of strange quirk it's almost like the the puzzle of the hair and the tortoise you know that the hair is chasing the tortoise and he can get to halfway between and then a quarter of the way but you can never actually overtake him because he's always going half and then quarter and then eighth and so on and we know that of course the hair overtakes the tortoise and in the same way when we talk about choice and will i be free to choose evil well if you're choosing evil you're not ultimately free if you're worshiping the god in whose image you're made then your freedom consists of becoming more and more genuinely god reflectingly human and the thought of choosing evil of that context would be a way of saying uh i don't like this freedom thing i want to go back into a horrid little box and just grab around at the bottom of it there so we need to take our ideas of freedom and choice and indeed of evil and rethink them in the light of what new creation as heaven and earth as a temple with an image in it back to the temple again humans are made to be the image within the temple the temple is the new heavens and new earth and when we are fully bearing god's image worshiping the one in whose image we're made we will be utterly free as jesus says if the son makes you free you'll be really free and you won't ask please can i go and do something else now because you'll be doing the thing you most want to do in your discussion of the of beauty as a signpost you um you i think you get a sense through the way you've written this kind of beautiful writing about this this this sense of a thin divide between heaven and earth uh you know you have a passage about being up before dawn and just the beauty of all of that um and these are moments of great yes they're spiritually charged moments aren't they um when the ones uh it presents itself in that beautiful way um but then you can trust that with a kind of movement in you know certain branches of contemporary art the brick the brick art movement um which seems to be obsessed with ugliness and yes brutality and then also alongside that you know people who who who say well you know can we can we create our after auschwitz after the holocaust after the the horrors that human beings have created um where it seems to be you seem to be kind of suggesting that we're just locked in a nihilism as far as art is concerned i mean do you really think that's the case i'm not a i'm not a historian of modern art um but i i see what's going on around me as it were and i talk to artists and musicians and and indeed actors and actresses and so on about what it is that they do um and the danger has been that art is in always in danger of of going in either direction because uh true art it seems to me is actually engaging with the world the way it is and trying to reflect it and uh explain a little bit more than the naked eye will get like when you read a poem and and you say uh that's exactly what i've felt and thought but i couldn't ever have said it like that it's that sort of moment when you see a painting and you think wow that is so true but i'd never seen it like that or whatever it is um the the trouble is that um because the world is full of ugliness some people shy away from that and then art moves towards sentimentalism and that's sort of sentimental things such as you buy in cheap and tacky shops and people will stick on the wall of a not very pleasant cafe you know as a cute little picture and actually it's got no depth it's got no power and then in reaction against that um people looking at the horrors of the 20th century look no further have said uh no we can't do that we've got to tell it like it is which means we've got to portray life as life in the raw and all the horror and terribleness of it and because guanica is doing that and in a sense benjamin britain's war requiem is doing that and so on and and of course the extraordinary thing as neil mcgregor found when he put on that exhibition called seeing salvation in the national gallery in 2000 is that the great paintings which bring all this together are paintings of jesus on the cross where the brutality of the world and the love of god are somehow met together and that actually could serve as a parable for the whole of this book that here are the things here is the the broken signpost of beauty but here is the love of god shining through and that's why people go to see paintings like that because it's tell they're telling them about things like uh in ways that nothing else will quite do so that um it seems to me art is bound to oscillate from one thing to another and there are different traditions and they do this in different ways and music which i know a bit more about than i know about art does the same it's there to enhance but if it becomes idolatrous or if it starts to over represent say the ugliness in the world then it can radically fail and and that's that's a real tragedy and this is why saint paul says in philippians chapter four that whatever is true and noble and honest and lovely and of good report there's any virtue any praise think about these things our world has been forcing us to think about ugliness and brutality and untruth or half truth and and injustice etc the newspapers are full of such things but the christian task is to think about the things which are really solid and big and true and wise and so on and to celebrate them and i love it when christian artists and musicians and poets do exactly that and and i'm kind of nodding at some of my friends in those worlds as i wrote this chapter so um solzhenitsyn when he accepted his nobel prize he actually used this quote beauty will save the world i think it's quote from dostoevsky actually but beauty will save the world do you do do you buy that um i wouldn't put it like that um just like when keats says beauty is truth truth beauty that's all you know and all you need to know um it's one of those is the glass half full or the glass half empty questions um there's a sense in which the glass is half full that the beauty of god in creation ought to be luring us forward to the actual beauty of god and the time when the the earth shall be full of the glory of god as the waters cover the sea all beauty is pointing towards that the danger is and here the glass could be half empty um that if people say oh well if beauty is what there is then i'll take the beauty that i like and i'll forget about god um and they may well find that then the beauty crumbles in their hand as i say beauty you know the loveliness of a smile on the face of a child but the child can grow up to become a bitter and angry older person and so on and we all know this um and the the the lovely canvas can be ripped by a vandal and the glorious sunset disappears into darkness and and so this is why beauty 2 is i would say still a broken signpost and if it's true that beauty will save the world it's only through the fact that jesus himself has portrayed in john's gospel draws that ideal of beauty onto himself the most beautiful object in the ancient world probably was the tabernacle in the wilderness and then the jerusalem temple they were exquisite amazing beautiful artworks and john in telling the story of jesus has he he doesn't say it was beautiful he's told the story particularly of the resurrection in such a way that if we stop and reflect we will say there is beauty and that will save the world and of course what john uses and you draw this out in the book is the word glory isn't it so yeah the moment of course glory is is the crucifixion isn't it um can we talk about the beauty of the cross do you think in this country it's ugly reality isn't it yes of course it is of course it is it's radically ugly but you know john starts the long sequence that ends up with the crucifixion at the beginning of chapter 13 when he says jesus having loved his own who were in the world he loved them east telos to the uttermost there was nothing that love could do for them that love didn't do for them and and that then stands as a kind of heading over every page of what is to follow so that when we're looking at jesus being mocked and beaten and then finally crucified is the most horrible thing that the romans knew how to do to somebody we have over the top of it that's what love will do and as we look at that we are supposed to look through the horror of the crucifixion at the beauty of the love of god and remind ourselves of the most famous verse probably in the whole new testament god so loved the world that he gave his only son so in a sense it's a redefinition of beauty in a sense that may be too hard for some people to see just yet but i would say go on reading that and go on looking at it until the beauty of the whole thing captivates you um and it's not a as i say it's not a sentimental beauty um but nor is it a a brutalist um negative thing it's something which goes through and out the other side in into a world where um i forget you said it where all is known and all is forgiven we've got another question and uh you know this this is yeah might be a bit unfair tom but um how would broken signposts relate to uh this is from leon liam marsh by the way how would broken signposts relate to rhino uh to well richard nieber's typology of christ and culture especially christ against culture since nebraska does put the johanna in literature in this camp yeah yeah yeah i was never happy with neba putting john in that camp it's a while some years since i read christ and culture i actually taught a course based on that when i was teaching at mcgill so i i worked with it quite closely but i always felt that niebuhr's categories were a bit artificial and it's as though he's got these typologies fine um and we can see how that's worked out in church history where i think i i think his thesis works much better in church history where we can see some cultures trying simply to subsume the gospel within their cultural life and then it all goes horribly wrong and some trying to live totally um against their culture and that often goes horribly wrong as well and so the question is how do you navigate and negotiate and i i think where neva went wrong was to try to label these with different biblical strands and that may have reflected some of the biblical scholarship of the mid-20th century i don't know but certainly i would say that john's gospel is radically world affirming the very opening lines the the the january prologue is all about um god creating the world in and through the word and the word himself becoming part of that creation and the light shining in the darkness and the darkness not quenching it and so on so i i would want to to say sorry neiba is not on the right track there there's a lot of wisdom in that book but not i think in the assigning of specific biblical strands to those different categories okay thank you um so we're gonna better move along here um i'm gonna skate over freedom there's a fine chapter uh on freedom and uh and that's obviously a really important kind of concern of of our world we'll want to to tr to truth because that is obviously um a key key theme uh in john's gospel key theme in our world and an obsession a real concern of ours at the moment isn't it you know when we think about um fake news and um people talking about a post-truth society and um conspiracy theories rife believed by many christians as well some of these things here um what do you make of all that and how do you how would you want to kind of put us right as it were yeah i mean you know it's like what they say about paranoia just because you're paranoid it doesn't mean they're not out to get you and just because there are such things as conspiracy theories it doesn't mean they're all wrong um and in many societies in the world um like hitler's germany like stalin's russia etc all sorts of rumors were deliberately started by authorities to get people thinking in the wrong direction etc and so sometimes people think in the modern western world oh this is a rumor started to make us think that this or that or the other and you can see this um at great moments of crisis i remember when the iraq war was looming up um in in the early 2000s and suddenly all the british newspapers were carrying big articles about how wicked saddam hussein was how terrible his sons were et cetera et cetera et cetera and the newspapers had been corralled by tony blair to go along for the ride to soften the british public up so that when he said it's time to go and drop bombs on these people everyone said oh well yes i guess we've got to do that and i remember being horrified at the thought of the newspapers just being used to massage public opinion and that alerted me to the fact that maybe that happens a lot more than we imagine and that's why a free press is really really important and to have different opinions and one of the real problems of our time is people who only ever read one newspaper or who only ever get their news from one particular radio or tv channel uh whether it's fox news on the one hand or the colbert report on the other or whatever it may be i'm thinking in north american terms obviously at the moment um but at the same time there has to be a way of discerning and discovering what actually is happening and of truth telling and that's harder than we might imagine i forget whether i quote him in this book but bernard williams the great philosopher who by the way was jonathan sax's tutor in cambridge um williams's last book before he died great secular philosophy was philosophy was on truth and truthfulness and he pointed out that in our world at the moment we we are more and more concerned to find out the truth of what actually happened but we may we've made it harder and harder for ourselves and we don't believe it when we get it and we fill our filing cabinets with forms that we've filled in um in order to make sure we've got the truth um in fact truth seems to recede from us so truth is a project and here the fascinating thing about john's gospel having had pontius pilate saying what is truth when he's actually standing talking to the one who says i am the way and the truth and the life because jesus says when pilate says are you a king jesus says i've come into the world to tell the truth truth is the thing that brings god's new creation into being and jesus truth telling is a way of new creational truth telling which takes up the truth of the old creation and turns it into god's new world it's an active force and the the vocation of the church to be the truth telling people in the power of the spirit is enormously important in public life as well as in private or in church circles because if the newspapers are getting it wrong this way and that the church ought to be the place where people are actually speaking the truth and as used to be said speak the truth and shame the devil and and nailing particular issues that are going on in the wider world it therefore beholds christians to be uh resourced in discerning what is actually happening in the larger issues of society to be able to say of a particular conspiracy theory this is a lie do not believe it i mean i would be quite happy to say that about the wearing of masks i haven't got one on my desk because it's through in the other room but we've all been wearing masks but somebody asked me the other day isn't that a restriction of our freedom to which my response is listen i have breaks in my car and if i if i'm driving down the road i i sometimes have to put them on is that a restriction of my freedom well yes it is because it stops me going at 90 miles an hour down the road but actually breaks in the car a pretty good idea both for my sake and for the sake of everybody else same thing with wearing a mask at a time of a pandemic and so it goes on we have to be able to tell the truth even if it's not what people want to hear you're very insistent on us the public nature of truth but of course truth is contested in our world isn't it yes in the gospel of john we we have this kind of um this expression about the father of lies and um you know the the source of of untruth uh as being the adversary the the the one um is it it's so easy to actually demonize people that we disagree with isn't it and to keep them of lying if you're in the public domain how do you keep yourself from that because we you know it's a contested master mata we have to kind of somehow navigate negotiate these things that's absolutely right and this has changed during your my lifetime in that i think when when i was growing up in the 1950s um still basically european modernism where scientific modernism said we will look at the evidence we will argue about what the evidence means we may have different interpretations but we will assume that if we argue it out we will arrive at at least the best solution that we can whether it's a political situation or a scientific investigation or whatever it may be but with the arrival of post-modernity we have been told again and again and again all truth is somebody's truth and all claims to truth are actually claims to power so oh you say that's true but that's only because you want me to step into your world and play the game your way and yes many people within modernism have used the claimed truth in precisely that way to make a power claim but once you've unmasked that and this is the point of what i and many others have called critical realism once you've unmasked that agenda that doesn't leave you wallowing around in a morass where you can't tell anything from anything else it now means that in a chastened way you can actually say from my perspective this is what i'm seeing and i'm telling you the truth now will you please tell me what it looks like from your perspective and you please tell me what it looks like from your perspective because when we get more perspectives on this then we are homing in on reality that's why as a historian i want to say when i do historical work it's a public discipline i look at all the evidence i can muster i say i think this is what's going on now please will you my critics come back at me and say well you've missed out this bit or actually so-and-so didn't quite say that and and i think there was another bit there that you you've missed out and i've had that critique and i welcome it i relish it because this is how we advance post-modernity at its worst says don't give us any of that stuff i'm just going to believe the virtual reality machine that i clag onto my head and that way lies all sorts of horror in terms of people turning in on themselves um martin luther's definition of sin was humans turned in on themselves and the kind of virtual reality where i'm only just manipulating the ideas the projections of the ideas in my brain and we all ought to know that if you try and live like that in the real world for five minutes with your family or your friends or the shopkeeper down the road or whatever you will come a cropper we need reality and if we if we embrace unreality reality has a nasty way of kicking back in at us and i think actually that's what's going on with this pandemic right now and then finally we you come to uh this this final signpost as you call it which is power and in many ways this um can concern that we have with power touching us on all the other signposts it seems to kind of bring them together and you say in fact that there's a sense in which the whole of the biblical narrative is really a story about power dominion um all of that um where i mean your stance here seems to be particularly radical partic you know we would go back to this christological emphasis because you you you say that jesus is is an inversion of all our concepts of you know previous concepts of power really actually if we want to understand divine what divine power is all about we've got to begin with jesus we can't have a notion of divine power that starts somewhere else it's got to begin with jesus what do you mean by that well um it's very easy to imagine an omnipotent god and people say well if god was really omnipotent then he wouldn't allow this or he would do that or whatever and so the fact that that isn't happening maybe god isn't omnipotent or whatever where do we get this idea of omnipotence from probably from some um early or medieval view of a great middle eastern potentate who could um decide exactly what he wanted to do and had slaves to carry out his bidding in all directions and do we really think that that the true god is like that only in divine mode i hope we don't actually but many people seem to especially with the deism of the 18th century which is still determined a great deal of our modern western discourse including in the church sadly people assume that oh well if god is in charge he's going to do this and this and that and that and then there was the huge crisis the lisbon earthquake in 1755 and voltaire saying so what's happened to your god being in charge now and so on and then in the middle of that you get this very different story of jesus coming and doing and saying things and people saying oh my goodness this is a different sort of authority something is going on here and then following the events of the gospel jesus death and resurrection paul discovering painfully in his correspondence with corinth that the authority which he has as an apostle is the authority of a suffering apostle and that as he says when i am weak then i am strong he says i will boast to my weaknesses so that the power of christ may work through me or may rest upon me and there's the paradox and it comes again and again and again it comes in the book of revelation where um the the the martyrs conquer the world by uh by their their their giving of their lives to death um and we say what's that about how how can that possibly be the case and it only makes sense within this strange narrative of creation and new creation but then at the heart of it is the power of love again comes back to love as everything does sooner or later that actually the power of love is that much greater than the love of power and it looks as though it's weak and looks as though it loses but like jesus washing his disciples feet it's one of the most powerful things he ever did but they never forgot it it transformed who they they didn't understand it at the beginning but it it it showed what real power is all about and for me the center of it all actually the the place where the quintessence is in mark's gospel chapter 10 where james and john say we want to sit at your right and your left when you come in your kingly power we're going to be um you know the first lord of the treasury or the secretary of state or whatever and jesus says you have no idea what you're talking about and he says listen the rulers of this age bully people and they harry them and they force their will upon people we're going to do it the other way let the one who wants to be great be your servant and the one who wants to be first be the slave of all because the son of man didn't come to be served but to serve and to give his life as a ransom for many and that's why he is the lord of the world i have just by the way summarized philippians 2 verses 6 to 11 one of the most amazing early christian poems therefore god has highly exalted him and given him the name above every name because this is truly godly power to give yourself because god's own very self is self giving love so if that's how god does it that's what we see in jesus and that's what guess what we're supposed to be doing and so often the church has said well jesus did that bit he saved us so now we will go back to running things in the worldly way and that's a very great temptation for those of us who've been church leaders and so on um and for for whole societies built on a dominant church which has told everybody what to do and has forgotten mark 10 and has forgotten the foot washing in john 13 and so on fantastic coming around in a completely different shape yeah it's a beautiful sermon by martin luther king which was actually played at his funeral of the drum major instinct which is all about that uh he really gets this i think uh that's of of the the kind of power of love in the world but fervent love come we're coming on to the end uh tom uh you say right at the end of the book that um these uh broken signposts lead us to the foot all of these different signposts they lead as you say to the foot of the cross and but then you say that the cross itself is the ultimate broken signpost what do you mean by that well first things first um it was a when i was working on the gifford lectures and and the seven signposts were part of the theme of chapter seven of of history and eschatology uh i was struggling with how to pull all that together and it suddenly dawned on me and i know the exact spot where i was standing when that happened that of course the story of jesus going to the cross is a story of justice denied of spirituality gone dark by god why did you abandon me of love failing of jesus friends betraying and denying him and running away and so on and so on of of pontius pilate squashing the jewish dreams of freedom of pilot mocking truth and of power being used to obliterate the one who was the light of the world so the story of the cross is precisely the story that whereas all these things justice spirituality relationships beauty etc they seem to be pointing up to god in fact when we look at the story god has come down to the place where all the broken signposts have collapsed in a heap and that's why the crucifixion is the ultimate broken signpost because the crucifixion in that world was a sign of roman power and dominance that a cross on a hill said we romans run this world and if you get in our way this is what will happen to you but actually already in the very early church people were talking about the cross as the sign not of roman brutal power though it was that as well but of the astonishing outpoured love of god so it's the broken signpost which mends all the others and which then generates the possibility through the resurrection and the spirit of a community which is committed to justice spirituality etc etc and to the proper use of power because we can't do human society without power and if we imagine that we can we end up with a with an anarchy which is worse than tyranny even but we need and the church needs to be the people who embrace this vision and then faithfully and prayerfully and wisely call the powers to account we haven't talked about that but that's really really important as part of the church's ongoing large-scale witness brilliant well there's so much more to talk about but of course there's your book thanks so much for writing it tom brooks this is and here's the americans here's the american position the world yeah hold it up again just uh so this is the american edition yeah thanks so much for watching and thanks to those of you who've joined in um thank you for your questions thank you for for listening and um i hope you'll join us again for another one of these conversations uh in the future but for now goodbye thank you very much and thanks to all my friends at regent it's good to be with you albeit in this mode bye-bye you

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Published: Thu Nov 26 2020