Does Christianity matter? Is religion good for society? Ask NT Wright Anything podcast

in John 14 Jesus says I am the way the truth and the life no one comes to the father but by me our whole Western Enlightenment story Rebels against that I think we all know today that that's a false antithesis what I see is a younger generation excitedly exploring the biblical Integrations which an older evangelicalism had actually missed out on I've always worried about Bon Herer but then I am not living under Hitler thank the Lord the reason people became Christians was because their neighbors were behaving differently and the way they were behaving was deeply attractive and they wanted to know why the ask ENT WR anything podcast we're trying to segment these up into different themes as they've come in with various questions and a number of the questions that came in uh were on Mission in evangelism that's the broad title I've given them um do you ever think of yourself as an evangelist yes in a sense yes um in a sense no let me explain both of those what I spend my life doing mostly is trying to explain the New Testament and what it's all about and particularly trying to present who Jesus was and is and the meaning of his death and resurrection and it seems to me that is to be talking about the gospel the good news and trying to present it to as wide a readership and audience I can however when I preach I haven't found it my main vocation as it were to be preaching to the rank Outsiders I've done a fair amount of that but I think my vocation has tended to concentrate on teaching Christians people already part of the faith community in whatever way how to understand their faith and how they can be living Witnesses and in particular I remember when I was quite young being disappointed because I heard a lot of sermons about how we should all be bringing our friends to the Lord and um explaining the faith to people so that they would become Christians and I've done a bit of that and I've prayed for many friends some of whom have become Christians and some of whom haven't often without me having anything to do with it other than praying and I know some people who are very gifted what we call personal evangelists and that's simply not been my vocation I've had all sorts of other things to do and I sometimes regret that but then I think well actually my life's been quite busy well it has um let's start with a very simple question from Dan in London who says what do you think is the best way to evangelize our friends and how can the church best re-evangelization and uh when I look at the early church I see them not simply as a bunch of people who were talking to people about Jesus though they were doing that but they were a community who are living in a radically different way it's hard for us to realize just how different it was in a world where everyone worshiped the gods and the goddesses in a world where everybody lived in the normal Pagan way then suddenly to have these people radically changing so that they no longer went to the festivals of the god Apollo or whatever ever it was they no longer did the the the the processions and the sacrifices this this is actually deeply socially disturbing but then people realized that this same Community were being kind to the poor and were looking after the sick and were um working hard in education and to teach people to read and and so on what on Earth is all this about and they seemed no longer to be angry and hostile and and so on but we're living in a totally and people would say don't know what you've got but it seems to be a new way of Being Human and in the middle of that when they talk about Jesus then oh this makes sense these stories about this Jesus no wonder you live like this now when the churches in the UK are visibly countercultural in that way and are living a cheerful radical new way of Being Human then talking about Jesus will make sense and in in surprised by hope I think I argue that um there are two things in particular the gospel is about God putting the world right if we don't care about putting the world right in other words if we don't care about Justice globally locally whatever then we can say all we like about Jesus but people won't hear that in the right resonance likewise the gospel is all about the God who made a stunningly beautiful world going to remake it so that its ugliness is stripped away and a new wonderful Beauty will emerge if we don't care about beauty about the Arts about music about um all the beauty of this world then no wonder if we present Jesus in an ugly way if people don't see the point so there's a larger context within which then we can actually talk and I think you're right that a lot of the church is has woken up in recent years to the fact we need to do this in a holistic way in a way that that represents the best in that way but is is there still a place at some point for presenting the quote unquote gospel message you know Billy grah was probably the archetype of the 20th century for doing that to large and that sort of I think has informed the way a lot of Christians see their duty to at some point present the challenge of the Gospel to an individual yes yes I mean the challenge has to come home to to individuals and and families and so on in all kinds of ways but Billy Graham in the 50s and 60s particularly was largely speaking to people who'd been to Sunday school speaking to a culture that still thought of itself as vaguely Christian certainly in Britain and America um in a way that simply radically isn't true anymore um most people today have not been to Sunday School uh uh most people today haven't ever darkened the doors of a church except possibly for a friend's funeral or something or maybe to get married or something like that and have only the minimal idea of what it might all be about and so in a sense you have to start further back where do you then have to start further back with rationalist apologetics you know arguing reasons why there might be a god well possibly that might work for some um but that is only one of many ways in and it seems to me actually the lived Community is one of the key things a church that is actually being the church on the street in in a sense the very first Christian communities also were reaching a culture that knew nothing of their claims and so on so we're in a sense in the same boat to some extent and and there's a heck of a lot we can learn from the first and second century church about this Rodney dark's book the rise of Christianity famous book is is really helpful on this because he makes the point you know that Christianity did not spread by the great brains passing ideas to other great brains who developed them and then there was a sort of trickle down effect that's going on that's part of the scaffolding the structure but the reason people became Christians was because their neighbors were behaving differently and the way they were behaving was deeply attractive and they wanted to know why I must ask some more questions from uh people who' have emailed in uh Colin in Gates head says um why do you think that the biblical message of repentance and remission of sins through the name of Christ has largely been replaced with a more visitor friendly version which doesn't spell out repentance taking up our cross and emits the place of baptism in the name of Jesus Christ for the remission of sins there's quite a lot involved in that question yes there is and I'm not sure you can generalize like that um part of our difficulty is that the word repent to us means you've been a very naughty little boy and you need to say sorry and and it's we sort of cower away from that and okay there are things that I've done that I know are wrong and I do need to hear that message and I hear it and I Repent that that is part of it but in scripture repent is much bigger than that it's a change of mind and a change of Direction and a change of Lifestyle um Josephus the Jewish historian talks about confronting some brigant leader in in this is in the mid-60s in Galilee he says I told him to repent and believe in me what does that mean it means I told him you're going about things in the wrong way I've got a better plan come with me um and when we hear the gospel like that then we still have all the you're a sinner and you need to stop sinning but you have it in a much larger framework and yes I do think that we have um often found baptism quite difficult to get our minds round partly because we still live in a culture which thinks of baptism as something that gets done to little kids who know nothing about it and then nothing seems to happen thereafter and I think we have to reclaim baptism most of the rest of the world interestingly knows perfectly well that baptism is a radical break with the old life and a radical entry into the new life I have had the privilege of baptizing people who have come from uh countries like Iran uh and come because they were finding their way into Christian faith and they know perfectly well that their family back home see their baptism as basically a death which is of course what the New Testament says it is so I I I would agree that there's a lot more we need to do but I don't think we can generalize I think there's a lot that is being done quite creatively uh Jean in Northeast Arash uh has a question um says uh I've had trouble answering this question from a friend to her satisfaction how can I know for sure that Jesus is the only way to God I think knowing for sure is something that our culture is so keen on doing um how can I know for sure that calus's seventh symphony is the greatest Symphony ever written I can't actually know that I in in my bones I affirm that um and other people will disagree and we can have the debate um but in terms of when say in John 14 Jesus says I am the way the truth and the life no one comes to the father but by me theologians have struggled with well what about people in other cultures who seem to be feeling their way towards this loving Creator God um and they've said well somehow Jesus is at work through the spirit in many different cultures now I have it as an absolute Maxim God can do whatever God wants to do the holy spirit is Sovereign the wind blows where it Wills we hear the sound but we have no idea where it's coming from and going to so that's basic I cannot control that I can't tell God what he can and can't do however when I see the great story of scripture I see the story of Creator and Cosmos converging onto the story of Israel and part of the question is do I really have to believe that the Jews were God's chosen people and the answer is well actually yes you do um so that there is something about the Israel Story coming down to the second temple Jewish story which as a faith statement is where God's story with the cosmos is going to land our whole wor Western Enlightenment story story Rebels against that we think it's undemocratic if God was going to reveal himself it should be exactly the same right across the board the answer is no this is what we call the scandal of particularity and then the Jewish story converges on Israel's Messiah and so in a sense for jeene and her friend there there is a sort of Scandal there there is I mean e even if her friend sees it as an arrogant claim if it's true then it's true if it's true then it's true although the word true itself is slippery as we know but I think the minute the claim feels arrogant we are falsifying it because the Jesus who we're talking about is the Jesus who died on the cross to reveal the generous love of God and as soon as it's oh well you know my Jesus so I'm I'm kind of special because I'm one of his one of his friends um a friended uh some years ago who at a conference somebody gave him a t-shirt to wear insisted he put it on before he KN knew what it said and it said God loves you but I'm his favorite and the answer is uh no as soon as you find yourself thinking that this is not a good place to be I mean it naturally does lead into that question what about other religions what about other cultures places that may never have heard of Christ and so on I mean a huge question that we could spend a whole other podcast debating but if that's the next question where might you go well it's a curious thing because when you look at the New Testament they knew perfectly well that the world was full of other faiths and in some cases then as Paul says in his speech on the areopagus in Athens God the Creator is not far from every one of us and wants all of us to feel after him and find him and Paul is saying yeah that's how things have been and now this very specific message about Jesus brings the inarticulate into articulation so it's that's perfectly okay to go that roote the interesting thing is this question of what about the other faiths people have grabbed onto it in the last 100 years or so as though oh my goodness this is something that might just rock up I said get used to it the early church knew perfectly well thatround belie system and not all other belief systems are benign a lot of belief systems have been and are extremely dehumanizing and damaging and if you look at the ideologies of the last 200 years then well excuse me and you're going to say that the hegelian or Marxist philosophies that drove Soviet Russia or Nazi Germany are we going to say well yes that's one way to God I want to say no those are idolatrous they are dehumanizing and the gospel confronts them and says no um inevitably there are some people that we speak to and have those kinds of conversations with who may believe that they have a revelation of of a particular view of God and Daniel interestingly in Beirut asks how would you explain the good news to a Muslim now he asks in 2 minutes I won't force force that particular time frame on you I think I think it depends there are great varieties of Islam and I am not at all an expert on that I have read the Quran and I have taken part in some Christian Muslim dialogue um so I know just a little bit about it but it's not where I have been called to work so I would be very very cautious and depending on whether this Muslim is somebody who is likely to be very hostile to the faith in which case we would have a very gentle opening conversation and maybe look at some passages in the Quran and the new testament which were similar but subtly different and discussed that that's a great way in by the way to to have scriptures open in front of us and to see the similarities and the differences but ultimately it is about Jesus because the Muslim reveres Isa as a prophet and Jesus himself talks of himself as a prophet but now it seems as though this Prophet is going a bit further than that what does that mean in what way is he more than a prophet and what would it mean if he were Israel's Messiah and then of course all sorts of other questions come in about Isaac and Ishmael and and all that which takes it way back but ultimately then it's about the message of the Cross and the message of this God who we see in Jesus is the god whose self-giving love takes him in the person of his son to die on the cross and that is something which the Muslim has by definition almost ruled out you said you've had the privilege of baptizing Iranians who have obviously become Christians and has there been in that sense a a kind of that kind of Journey they've gone on theologically it's extraordinary listening to their stories and I've heard this from several sources quite independent there are people in the Muslim World apparently who have vivid dreams of Isa without ever having read the New Testament without ever having been talked to by a Christian and I have no explanation for this but it does seem to happen and then they go looking I want to know more about because I had this dream who is he and then sometimes they get hold of a new testament which may itself be very risky and then sometimes they come to Faith and then sometimes they have to get out quickly and come to the West so um this is this is a toughy and I pray for the people who work in that area um and I observe that that God is on the Move in very strange and interesting ways turning to the White a question of uh peace and Justice and that sort of missional aspect of of the Christian church in the world um this one uh interestingly from Al Salvador Vic um writes in to say Archbishop and Martyr um Oscar Romero was just canonized by the Catholic church he had a strong stand against Injustice but nowadays Injustice is still prevalent in politics and there's severe gang problems uh where Vic comes from uh how can the church respond and what evidence is there in the Old and New Testament that violence is actually a consequence of the church's Disobedience uh and V goes on to say Catholics and Evangelical Protestants add up to about 90% of the population I presume he means in Al Salvador and yet these problems of violence and Injustice still exist well of course we've had it much closer to home than El Salvador from the British point of view in in Northern Ireland where uh the the two Waring sides in the troubles in Northern Ireland called themselves Catholic and Protestant now many Catholic leaders and many Protestant leaders would say not in our name we we are not blessing that violence however there are lots of gray areas and lots of people saw the British presence in Northern Ireland as oppressive and as itself unjust and hence needing to be resisted in the name of resisting tyrants and people will invoke dri Bon Her for whatever so part of it is a matter of how you read the signs of the times and and the situation you're in and along with Oscar Romero if I remember rightly um on the west RTO Westminster Abbey is Dri boner and Romero was advocating peace and clamoring for justice against violence and Bon Huer was prepared to join in a plot against Hitler so that's always been ambiguous um and yet both of them are seen well boner hasn't been canonized he wasn't wasn't a Catholic but um both of them has been seen as saintly in some ways as jesus-like in some ways and that represents something of the ambiguity of the whole Christian tradition I've always worried about bonera but then I am not living under Hitler thank the Lord and uh he agonized and prayed mightily and wrestled hard with the question of what to do when faced with utter utter destructive tyranny um do you just sit back and say well I'm keeping my hands clean and and I honor those who've had to struggle with that Romero obviously gunned down while celebrating Mass you know having having denounce the principalities powers for what they were doing that that is a much more obvious sort of sign of a Christian witness but um right from the beginning the question of violence was raised by early Christians for instance if you're an ordinary person in the second or third century and you your job is to be a soldier what do you do about that and some Christians said well actually have to give that up and others said no this is a job that one has to do and we can't help that and I think as with many callings there are ambiguities and we live with that ambiguity and there many people in scripture who we see living with ambiguity um but when it comes to Christians in the Name of Christ using violence then it seems to me a line has been crossed which probably means that a line was crossed some way earlier when people stopped realizing what the gospel was actually about God taking the force of the world's evil on himself in order to make a new creation and this is very interesting in some Jewish Traditions the Sabbath is SE seen as an anticipation of the age to come so that you don't kill even a fly on the Sabbath because in the age to come all species will live together right now Jesus inaugurated the great Sabbath that's what his sermon in Nazareth is is all about um does that mean that we Christians should live as Sabbath people as Isaiah 11 people and I have many friends who would say yeah absolutely I I've never been a pacifist myself maybe that's just cuz I'm a muddled Englishman who hasn't thought it through but I have have good friends who keep on saying actually Tom you need to sort this one out yeah same questions that were there for the first century Christians as well in a way absolutely um again this takes us into broader cultural issues um as to how we live Christianity in the modern world but sha in Gainesville Florida asks uh Christianity appears to be moving into a post Evangelical or even post Christendom era what comes next what effect will it have on society will it become impotent without a reliance upon biblical principles um such as the infallibility of scripture um biblical literacy is at an alltime low uh will the Bible even have a role in the new form of Christianity in a post Evangelical world is the way sha puts it which kind of comes back to that thing of that you said Billy Graham was speaking to people who essentially had knew their Bibles at least to some extent today we live in a very different kind of culture I would say that the culture Billy gra is addressing was a culture that had been to Sunday school but what they'd learned at Sunday school was often um how to behave yourself in the moment and pray that you'll get to heaven one day now better to behave yourself and pray for God to be kind to you after death than not um but it's still not the go it's still not adequate um and actually one of the things that postmodernism post evangelicalism post whatever has done is to shake things up so that we can see a bit more clearly where some of the biblical Integrations are you know I grew up in a world where either you were an Evangelical who believed that Jesus died so you go to heaven or you were a liberal who believed that Jesus was doing the kingdom of God so we had to have better housing and better food and and all the rest of it and never the twain shall meet now I think we all know today that that's a false antithesis that when we read the gospels it's about Jesus doing the kingdom and dying to bring about the ultimate victory over the powers that corrupt and deface um human life and all the rest of it and so what I see is a younger generation excitedly exploring the biblical Integrations which an older evangelicalism had actually missed out on and I know um and that was a questioner from Florida that um when I have been to Florida and when I know Christians from that part of the states there is still an older Evangelical World um in which the whole message is um here's the prayer that you pray so that you will one day go to heaven and don't mess with all that silly social Pol political stuff and I've had many many American an um say yeah that's that's where my church is um and then have asked me how do I help them on from there the good news is that the Bible itself will do that job when you let it free and I don't see a world of Christianity without a Bible I see a world in which all the new Bibles we got the new translations the new study guides whatever ought to be fueling the Next Generation who are not content to drift along with the way that Christian culture has been in the west perhaps you what you're saying to sha in a way is well what has been conceived as the way Christians can think of scripture and their relationship to God may be changing but that may not all be bad because opportunity exactly there's all sorts of things that we need to clear out sort of old baggage that we need to get rid of and see for me as a Biblical scholar my life has been one of constant surprises that every few years I find myself tripping over another idea which has been there scripture all along which I'd never really noticed before and that's been enormously exciting and I think we just have to work our way through that and find where God is taking us for the Next Generation hope that's been helpful Sean um thanks to all of those who asked questions on this edition of the podcast we got through quite a lot there actually we've done quite well for 25 minutes or so um but thank you so much Tom for being uh back on the show uh look forward to next time uh we're going to be talking Paul and justification in the next you know if think to about that so we [Music] hope

Channel: Premier Unbelievable?

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Keywords: unbelievable, justin brierley, premier christian radio, christianity, atheism, philosophy, faith, theology, God, apologetics, Jesus, debate, science, evidence, Bible, big conversation

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Length: 24min 26sec (1466 seconds)

Published: Sun Apr 21 2024