NT Wright & Douglas Murray • Identity, myth & miracles: How do we live in a post-Christian world?

well hello and welcome along to a very special edition of the big conversation from unbelievable i'm justin briley and i'm excited to bring you a conversation this evening between nt wright and douglas murray the big conversation is a video discussion series from unbelievable brought to you by premier in partnership with the john templeton foundation now we would love to know what you make of tonight's conversation so if you can please do click through to the survey link in the info with the video today and we'll make sure to release the the thoughts you've had on that in a future show for more updates bonus content and more big conversation shows do make sure to sign up at thebigconversation.com show we've got some wonderful conversations already in this third season of the show and if you want to continue the conversation why not join us this weekend at our online unbelievable conference it's saturday the 15th of may and one of our guests enti wright will be speaking and dialoguing actually with other guests including historian tom holland you can find out more at unbelievable.live all the links that i've mentioned are in the video info with today's show and today on the programme we're talking about identity myth and miracles and asking can we find a story to live by in a post-christian world we do live in a post-christian culture and many secularists have welcomed the fading of the west christian identity but the question is what is it being replaced by and how should we address what many believe is a growing meaning and identity crisis in the west um we're going to be asking can christianity still make sense of the modern world and to help us do that enti wright is a senior research fellow at wycliffe hall at the university of oxford he's the former bishop of durham and the author of numerous books including his latest broken signposts how christianity makes sense of the world our other guest is douglas murray he's associate editor of the spectator magazine and author of books including the madness of crowds gender race and identity and uh during the course of the conversation we're going to be making time for your questions as well so we'll have some of those towards the end of today's show if you've got a question whether you're watching via our youtube channel or on one of the many facebook pages who are sharing tonight's video then do feel free to put a question in the chat in the comments and we've got a team who are going to be looking out for those and sending them through and we hope to be able to ask as many of those as we can towards the end of the program today um well thank you so much douglas and tom for joining me on the show today um i think this is the first time we've had you both together for a conversation though i'm sure you're both aware of each other a little um douglas um have you bumped into tom's work before before coming on the show tonight i certainly have and um uh read parts of it over the years and actually have recently been reading at the recommendation of many people uh his excellent biography of paul which i've been immersed in and so yes very much so fantastic um i and and tom you're you you actually have both sort of had a little bit of a to and fro in the pages of the spectator actually in as much as i know that you recently responded to a an article by douglas didn't you yes yes um i i've read douglas in the spectator frequently and i've now read his book the madness of crowds as well with great enjoyment and rather scary interest because it's quite a dystopian vision but um the article in the spectator did to me what articles sometimes do which made me pace around the house for half the day thinking i really have to write something about this i'm thinking that obviously you haven't got time don't do it and eventually the worm in my head turned into um rather rather quick prose i was thinking of an article but it turned into a letter but i hope it was stimulating anyway well um i certainly did find it stimulating and we'll maybe come to that issue in a moment's time but before we get to that douglas um how are you have you been coping with with the past covered year how have things been uh like everyone you know it's um a bleak time in lots of ways and has things that are salvageable in it i've had far more time to read than i normally do um i've very much enjoyed that i've had the opportunity to um do a lot of thinking a lot of writing uh i i said at the beginning of the pandemic that in a way those who are writers rather well set up for it to be a writer is to be able to deal with solitude and indeed you you must have solitude uh so um we're rather practiced at it but nevertheless nothing can prepare you for something as as strange as the era we've been through and i suppose you know not maybe not leap straight in but i i do think that certainly my readings back over history and plagues in history seem to bear out one of the things i feel at the moment which is that they have a disorientating effect on civilizations across which they they roam uh all sorts of strange things come out of the woodwork strange beliefs strange fears things you didn't know were there and i think that's very much the case in our society and across the world in the last year as much as it has been in history yes and as justin justin knows i wrote a little book last year called god and the pandemic um the publishers put a subtitle something like the coronavirus and its aftermath hoping that the pandemic would be over in a month or two but that the book would still sell and now it's a bit well we're still waiting for the aftermath a year later but that was really in response precisely to what douglas has just said that particularly in america but also in other parts of the world um the the sudden arrival of this pandemic and all that it's meant has has produced all sorts of apocalyptic speculations and is this a sign of the end of the world and um or does this mean that god is punishing us for some specific wrongdoing or whatever and uh it came as a shock to many people that there have been pandemics and plagues and so on over history reasonably frequently and it's just that in the last century we in the west have been protected from major disease like this so we were kind of unprepared i see it as like a sort of wartime conditions in that everything is different and we just have to get through it and when we look back there will be all sorts of things where we say oh what a pity that had to happen or this this came about or whatever so i think there's a lot of navigation and negotiation still to be done i it does present an interesting context within which to be having today's conversation we're asking can we find a story to live by in a post-christian world and and i i wonder if we could start with your your own story douglas um for those who perhaps haven't come across you before or don't know this particular aspect of your life you you did make claim to a faith yourself at one time so tell us a little bit about that and what what happened along the way um well yeah i'm not like most people from britain i'm not that comfortable about speaking about myself i know we live in an era where everyone volunteers up their personal story first i i tend to always want to do it last if at all uh yes i mean it's not a it's not a secret that having been said i was born and brought up a christian the believing christian from i think most of my life including through my adult life and i'm now in um i suppose a self-confessedly um conflicted complex situation of being among other things um uh an uncomfortable agnostic who recognizes the values and the virtues that the christian faith has brought um i think i s i sort of laid out how i think our civilization our culture has got to the stage that it is at the moment and its current uncomfortable relationship with faith i tried to lay that out in the strange death of europe i i i still believe what i wrote there was was accurate as a diagnosis of the era um but it it's and it's a very uncomfortable as i say a position that somebody is in because i say you know there has been a period of rejection of of faith particularly from what in our lifetimes has been known as the new atheist movement uh which made claims that were self-confessively uh um wrong that for instance um actually i think as a late friend of both tom wright's and mine rabbi jonathan sachs once said you know that the claim that for instance morality was obvious was obviously wrong um they claimed that that basic ethics that we might share um are self-evident is self-evidently not the case um i don't have to be an emphasis to know that you just need to travel um you need to read look and listen and i know that's the case so there has in my view i think we spoke about this before justin that that has in my view been an interesting moment in recent years which uh i think tom holland you mentioned earlier certainly an example of people saying actually if we go back and look at this uh what we have and what we like does does have roots in this in the christian story um now that the following question from there i suppose is um or what do we do about it and i think that a great uh a great failing of our time has been the tendency to talk past each other on this the religious tend to say well it's easy you just have to believe if you if you uh recognize these virtues and values then then believe and it doesn't take into account the fact that very many people today it is it is harder than that uh for all sorts of reasons we could go into but i would just make one other observation which is that um even uh outside of faith uh i i have an added discomfort which is the discomfort of a non-believer who is disappointed by the behavior of the believing church um now many people think that that's paradoxical but it isn't at all i i i not only was brought up in but but afterwards sought uh the church um as it was as it has been in england and its jewels and gems of the king james bible book of common prayer and much more and it's been my experience as it has been for many other people brought up recent decades and last century and more that that one has observed the church giving up its jewels and and becoming something else and actually that that irritation i feel from the outside albeit from the outside at the moment that irritation i feel uh about the church hasn't gone away even whilst being outside it a fear it comes back to that article that provoked um tom wright's excellent letter uh my fear is is constantly the church is not doing what so many of us on the outside would like it to do which is to be preaching its gospel to be asserting its its truths and its claims and so when when one sees it falling into all of the latest tropes uh one just thinks well that's another thing gone it's just like absolutely everything else in the in the era everything in this boring monotone uh um ill-thought-out and shallow um dialectic and i am so as i say i'm i'm a disappointed non-adherent um i don't know if tom you can help it anyway here but but what i mean perhaps you could firstly some thoughts on what douglas has shared there about his own his own journey but also obviously his disappointment in a way as what he sees the church has become today i i i very much understand that i remember the late great bishop stephen neal who i knew um maybe 30 years ago he died in a great age around then um saying that every time he went to a modern anglican service he came away with this deep sense of loss because he had grown up like douglas with king james version and the book of common prayer and just felt that the contemporary liturgies just didn't cut it and i get that too i grew up similarly with very traditional words etc i i suppose for me that still remains um i have been able in many contexts to go on using traditional literatures as well as modern ones but for me the essence of it isn't so much the words and the culture and so on and obviously that's a very english british um actually english thing the book of common prayer and the king james bible um and i've been privileged to know christians from many many different backgrounds many different parts of the world and particularly when i was bishop of durham i was able to see we had what 250 parishes in the diocese very wide range from traditional to modern to this to that but i was able to see the church at work the church being the church on the street the church being the one group to whom the local council could turn to find out what on earth was going on on that terrible sink estate or whatever it was and to see the church actually caring for people being the family for the families etc not all churches do that but that that gave me this wonderful sense that all the theory that i as a theologian knew ought to be happening was happening on the street in some of the places that never hit the news and never hit the newspapers and uh never get quoted on the radio or whatever but there are many many many ordinary christians not that there are ordinary christians but you know what i mean who are simply doing christianity at ground level and that's the thing that is so exciting and i think when you see that you look across at the new atheists and it's rather like people who like douglas and me love classical music um overhearing a conversation between people who are tone deaf you just think well it's a great shame for you that you don't get it because actually this world of music is so rich and amazing and that's how i feel about the new atheists it's it's too bad and yes there are arguments but actually the arguments aren't necessarily the crucial thing what matters is something something else which many many people still have and we talk about post-christian britain or europe but actually there are many new christian movements uh confusing often um and often getting muddled and so on as we all do but there's a great deal to be encouraged by as well as and and as douglas knows i i share his frustration when it appears that the church is simply jumping on the latest trendy bandwagon i mean one quick example of the now shut up um about 10 years ago when the debate on women bishops was really getting going um david cameron in the house of commons said rather disdainfully about the church of england yes it's time they got on with it they should get with the program and i wrote a cross article for the times to say no we are i hope going to have women bishops not because it's the program that our society is moving in some sort of um spurious progressive idea but because right from the beginning the first person who jesus told to go and tell other people that he'd been raised from the dead was a woman that the foundation of the apostolic ministry comes with mary magdalene on the day on easter day and from there it's all downhill um and so i i totally agree the church shouldn't just be jumping on the agendas it should be exploring more what is in its own textbook just just before we get to that that spectator article that tom responded to um douglas just staying with the new atheism for a moment because in a sense arguably that has been part of the story of how we have you know ended up in a in an increasingly post-christian west but but i know that you were friends with one of the great new atheists christopher hitchens um uh so so did did you disagree with him when when you were you know having lunch as friends and that sort of thing what what was your relationship with the new atheist did you did you outgrow them i don't know i think i'm friends with all of them um some still i remember clearly everything i knew chris around the time that i started to lose my own faith and uh i had been asked that she was in a spectator we always have a christmas uh sort of um poll of writers politicians and others and ask them a question that yeah it must be about 2008 that year the question was um do you believe in the virgin birth and i think it was the last time i said certainly in print maybe the first is why i said yes of course and i remember i saw christopher in washington a little while later we've known each other for some years reviewed a number of my books and i remember he raised this over drinking his apartment he said i saw your answer in the spectator thinking oh gosh he said he could have knocked me over with a feather i didn't know you and he said something like i didn't know you were that way you know it was very sharp very very sharp and we agreed not to discuss it at the following lunch um uh yes i mean i i've i've spent my life surrounded by um people who have strong opinions and that includes very religious people um of many faiths and um and many secularists and atheists i i i think there has been that i just alluded to earlier there's been a i think a fruitful dialogue in recent years actually on this um i just throw one uh thing in if i may which is that um one of the things tom just said leads to something i find very interesting which is a retreat that can happen in faith from faith with assertions um ethical claims and much more into effectively a social action group now i know that's not what you were referring to but i'm very interested in the way that this has happened i've seen it in america i've seen it in jewish communities a lot as well there's actually a term i i would i would muck it up if i tried to do it in hebrew now but there's a there's a there's a term for effectively the doing of good works and you can see some effectively basically um non-believing uh no longer believing um sort of jewish communities falling into this saying well actually our judaism will be doing good works doing charity and um soup kitchens and and much more and i find that very interesting i find it noble and much more but i don't think of it as religion uh i i don't see it as a as that that but that is the problem with our word religion and religious isn't it that um the modern as in post-18th century view of religion is precisely something that is divorced from the rest of ordinary life and that's been reinforced by i think an overall misinterpretation of the idea of justification by faith apart from works as though okay if we believe in faith and that sort of religion you shouldn't be bothered about all that other stuff at all whereas in the new testament it's very clear paul says on two or three occasions if you're in this game be zealous for good works and he doesn't mean moral good works to earn your salvation or anything like that it's that from the very start the church was designed to be an outward facing what's going on in this community and how can we help kind of movement and they found that that was shocking to many people because there weren't too many other people in the ancient world who lived like that who were looking out for the poor not only their own poor but other peoples as well paul says while we have time do good to all people especially those of the household of faith but there's a sense that following from jesus himself there is that agenda that that we are about god's plan to put the world right and we're not we can't do it all ourselves because it's a much bigger thing than that but we can be people who are bringing about signs of god's restorative justice in the world and of course from the outside that can look like just people running super kitchens as well i'd rather people ran soup kitchens than didn't run soup kitchens and sure douglas would agree but um it's it's actually about a vision of the whole of life and if we think if that's why i worry about this word religion and religious because it didn't mean in the first century what it means now either so i would rather talk about god the creator and god the reconciler and redeemer of creation focused of course on jesus but with then the followers of jesus commissioned to do those things which say to the world there is a different way to be human and following jesus is the king to it yes you're slightly unusual or becoming slightly unusual in this regard in that you're a theologian a bishop of um um and a very prominent faith uh face in in the faith who does say these things and um this seems to me to be um uncommon uh at the moment and i i this what one hears from prominent bishops archbishops ethan is an attempt to slip into the the rhetoric of the era and indeed slip into the ethics and the ethical claims of the era without making those foundational assertions that as i say i think that many people are hungry for and this is where the the issue of the the article let's go to that and put you know name that elephant in the room but you douglas published an article which was highly critical of the church of england's um current approach to anti-racism and so on uh tom and feeling that they were essentially bowing to a sort of certain woke ideology essentially a and and not sort of doing what they should do as the church so what was your response to that and and how much truth is there in what in in douglas's concerns about the directions right having having since read douglas's book the madness of crowds i see more clearly than i did at the time where the energy for douglas's article was coming from because clearly douglass has mapped out in as i said before a rather disturbing way um the large movements often rooted in various forms of early 20th century marxism connected with fuco and people like that um that have then generated some of these great movements um and then to see the church getting on board with that you think hang on what's going on my initial response was this is actually a problem that jesus himself faced he says at one point that the kingdom of god is breaking in violently but the men of violence are trying to get in on the act in other words there were other people saying it's time for the kingdom of god at the same time as jesus was did that mean that jesus should give up talking about the kingdom of god no it meant he had to go on explaining what he reckoned it did mean as opposed to what the other people were saying and so there is bound to be a confusing convergence between a genuine jesus following desire to see for instance social justice it's written right across the new testament that there is neither jew nor greek slave nor free no male and female that god made all humans of a single stock and so on this this is basic and how that got forgotten in the last few hundred years is a shameful story in the west church so that i think the church needs to reclaim what was always part of its heritage a view of the renewal of the whole human race and a new sort of family in which identity that's one of our strap lines for tonight ident we've had a little pause on tom's video there uh hoping it'll come back in just a moment start we are live on our live stream tonight um but um but the the point being that tom was making that douglas that that uh we are looking you know the bible has always had and christianity specifically this idea of an identity sorry i think tom's back so tom do you want to finish your point you just got interrupted by the internet for a moment sorry i wasn't sure where we where we broke off it was just you were saying the the the in the bible it's always been about the neither june or greek male or female slave nor free one identity and and about the point from acts 17 where paul says on the areopagus hey god made all people from the same stuff from the same stock we belong together and rather than and of course then we get into the trap which douglas has written about as well of the modern idea that were all identical including there being no difference between male and female etc versus the postmodern idea which collapses into dozens of different competing identities each trying to claim the high ground of the victim etc etc and again i think douglas and i are on the same page on this one but then my point would be that the church in being true to itself and not simply relying on contemporary rather shallow ethical maxims but being true to its original gospel actually has the makings of doing what at its best some of the woke ideologies are seeking to do which is a genuine passion for justice and forget the fact that the marxists have come in on the act of course they have because if the church misses out half of its agenda it shouldn't be surprised if other people come rushing in from the side to fill it in so um that's that's where the issue i think has to lie but um i was grateful for what douglas said because it seems to me if an elderly theologian has anything to offer to the world it may be the reminder of some of the deeper richer stuff which is out there which is in the bible for goodness sake and which can refresh and renew a vision of what we all should be about go ahead douglas yes i think this is very important it gets to uh um another point i've written about fairmont in recent years which is i think you know just i think maybe when we spoke before we spoke about this that um sometimes people claim that the sort of public ethics of the time are uh sort of non-existent it's not quite true they're they're trying to dig down um in quite a forceful way at the moment uh what i was writing about in that article was just one example of that but um as i think i said to you when we spoke before what i think of as being the most striking failure of the time is the failure to embed any ethic that does not rely on the the christian ethic in regards to the equality of everyone in the eyes of god our age is struggling very badly with an attempt to replace that ethic or find another way to do it and there are various ways which it's tried to do that human rights ideology is one way fairly developed but i think not successful and another is effectively the landing on equity as as the answer when it can't be the answer but i see what i see what people are struggling to do which is to to try to maintain and hold on to this exceptionally important gift of the christian inheritance um without the idea of equality in the eyes of god and the value of every individual in the eyes of god you are left with these attempts to assert that for instance everyone is the same um or can be and and it's it's it's clear that we can't be and that we aren't that's one of the greatest things if you take if you take away the worry about the loss of the foundation then it's it's it's fine we can live with it i i very much see douglas's point from from where i sit the only way really to get this sorted is um to use a tried phrase to go back to jesus because in the jesus of the gospels as opposed to the jesus of popular much popular imagination you find a rigorous reinhabiting of the entire jewish tradition and a redirection of this vision of what would it look like if god was in charge that's the question of the kingdom of god just supposing god was in charge how would it look well it might look like a man who had two sons and one did this and what it might look like and then he heals somebody in the crowd whatever it is it's a renewal of human beings not in order to be identical overall equal now but in order to be certainly equally valued and equally though uniquely in themselves part of an ongoing program that god has launched not human beings at this point and so when i then come forward into the 20th and 21st centuries with that i find myself saying when i was young we watched traditional morality go out of the window it was sex in the 60s it was money in the 80s you know we don't need to obey the old rules we're going to do it differently we're the modern world now and then what's happened is the invention of and i think douglas and i agree on this the invention of neo-moralisms which is what the woke ideology is really all about and it reminds me sometimes of i think it was caligula the roman emperor might have been nero i'm getting this wrong it's late at night um who put new laws um up so high that nobody could read them and then um blamed or punished people for not obeying these new laws that he just invented and that's that's very much what's going on at the moment it's as though society can't live without morality but if you've banished all the older moralities you've got to invent some more from the ground up and we're doing it on a very very base very flimsy basis it seems to be it also goes back to what you what you mentioned the the cameron comment which is um what exactly is the project because there's an added cruelty isn't there to this to to as we're writing the laws in a place where they cannot be read there's an added cruelty if you haven't even finished writing them yet and you tell people to get with them quite quite the the one the questions underneath the r era is is what exactly are the laws what are the rules here uh the christian ethic has uh a set of rules it's it's they can be debated around endlessly and so everyone present knows but but there are foundations that you cannot deny they're not wholly abstract the area with the goodness of sorry we don't know yeah yeah but the the the christian morality it seems to me is to do with the goodness of creation but the need for recreation for redemption recreation but a recreation which doesn't say forget the old ways we'll do it totally differently i mean which is what we've got in a lot of society at the moment oh just don't worry about what everyone used to think we're going to do it totally differently we're going to change the meaning of words um as well as as well as the meaning of behavior but rather to say no try seeing the world from the perspective of a good and wise creator who is revealed in a thousand ways whether it's music or beauty or whatever it is as well as the structures of reality but this world is out of joint and the great jewish vision and again i i knew and i'm grieving about jonathan sachs bless him he saw this so clearly the great jewish vision of god's passion for the world to restore the world and the vocation of the people of god to be somehow modeling that and showing it forth and saying this is a self-evidently good way to be human and so it isn't just thinking through ethical theory it's about how the community actually lives and for me again this is all about following and worshiping jesus and fr that i know that's that was folly to the greeks and scandalous to the jews in the first century and it still is today but if you put that as the coping stone in the middle everything else will actually fall into place coming back to you then douglas um given that you to some extent you're both in agreement on the fact that to lose chris the christian story uh and the moral underpinnings of that's given culture leaves everyone scrabbling to kind of essentially invent their own morality and everyone gets very confused and angry with each other in the process um i mean where do we go from here i suppose is the question and um is is is there a way back even to to you know what now it is it's the genie's sort of out of the bottle though isn't it i mean can we go back to that once christian age where apparently everyone more or less agreed on things yes i say that in the strange death of europe you can't you can't wish things you know and wish them unknown um or wish them unlearned and this is something i think is uh is very important in all dialogue between believers and non-believers um i just wanted to say i i wouldn't like it to be um anyone to take away from this that that i i simply think the church has a pr problem it isn't just that i think that the presentation is is wrong or there's a mistake in for instance falling into the religion of anti-racism or anything else it's that i do believe that doing that means that the church fails to tell its own story um we had an article in the spectator i think last week from my friend uh former bishop michael nazir ali he made a very powerful point about the figures in the church for instance uh who were profoundly anti-slavery um and not just uh you know um wilberforce uh charlemagne and others who you know saints in the 7th century christian saints in the 7th century um who were martyred and um objected to the slavery in their own time there is what i'm trying to say is that it's not just there's a pr misunderstanding it seems to me within the church and it's missing a trick it is that this is not a fair summary of the christian story it isn't a fair summary of the story of the church and what it is is the adoption of a facile and pro profoundly hostile analysis of the church which sees the church for instance as being a um i don't know a white enterprise but it clearly isn't like uh tom wright has seen congregations across the world they've been at services throughout the middle east across africa the beleaguered communities sometimes show absolutely extraordinary and inspiring levels of faith and i don't recognize the negative interpretation of the church which i see from some people trying to force a different ethic on the church today but as i say it's not just in the history of the church but in the story that the church has to tell about itself today that i think that there is an error being made because for instance to go back to something which as tom wright knows i wrote about in in the minds of crowds if you look at the great um era of the ideology which is trying to embed today it is that it has spent no time bothering itself over the question of forgiveness now it's not just that i think that the church is missing a pr trick in not addressing this i think that the church does everybody in society the most enormous disservice if it doesn't say this is what our faith is built upon we have been thinking about this and trying to practice it at least for millennia so at least give us your ear for a moment and that that's that's really important i was talking to a good friend just this morning on email who has been writing a short article about wokeness and he wanted me to comment and i said the one thing you need to point out is that all the woke morality is simply about you guys are wrong and you guys are wrong and you're full of hate and you're this and you're that and there is no sense that if you repent we'll forgive you um you just have to grovel and and and it's it's a a morality of um i hate to use the word pharisaism because actually that's a slur on the first century pharisees but that's what in the popular discourse it's about it's about we've got this right and uh we're making up new laws as we go along as douglas has said and you lot are wrong and you're staying wrong and we're glad you're wrong and we're going to rub your noses in the dirt and it seems to me that's rather like certain revolutions i mean revolutions that eat their own children where some i mean the french revolution notoriously ended up decapitating quite a lot of people who had been among the leaders of the early movement it strikes me that in in everything you've said there that the in the sense that just even if we are in a quote-unquote post-christian world we're not in a less religious world in the sense that these ideologies become quite religious but but not in a very grace-filled kind of religion and you've spoken about that yourself douglas that there's that kind of aspect to the way people then grasp certain identities and certain causes and ideologies and that becomes their sort of their their identity their religion and and i suppose this is the problem isn't it we we we are meaning seeking story-driven creatures and if it's not going to be the story of christianity it's going to be another story um and the question is can we live together with these very different stories which often bump up against each other yes sorry sorry douglas go ahead and then tom respond oh okay um i think this is this is true i i've often um thought i'd hesitate to say this in front of such a distinguished theologian but i've often thought that one of the interesting um points about what jesus teaches is that much of it as i said tom wright well knows much of it you can find in some of the contemporary greek thought um some of the thought is is is around the roman world um but nothing nothing uh prepares for the demand to love your enemy um it seems to be so completely revolutionary and so completely counterintuitive that it has um that and i think we recognize it i think we recognize in our era as well with all when we see this being practiced that's why i come back to it that it's it's not just about missing missing a trigger it's missing um an opportunity to display your faith when when people see actual forgiveness it is i think among the most humbling most moving things you can ever witness as a human being there was an example a couple of years ago when at the church in the south of america that was very unusual but appalling the crime when a young white uh crazed there's a white supremacist of some kind walked into a church and shot the some of the worshipers and the next day there was an interview with it was a black congregation and the next day there was an interview with one of the families and the mother of somebody who just lost her son said that she forgave the killer of her son i thought this a couple years ago i was doing a tour with um somebody who became a friend cornell west professor cornell west of harvard who by his own definition is a revolutionary christian socialist um so we have a lot to disagree about i was very strong cornell always refers to people as brother brother this brother that some people think it's an annoying tick of his i rather like it um but i was actually bowled over one day when he referred to this shooting and he said that brother who went into that church and shot up that congregation and i was so so moved and so amazed that that he would refer even to this person who had done this unforgivable thing by any analysis an unforgivable thing would still refer to this man as his brother it seemed and it seems to me this is an example of living and displaying a christian ethic which if it was just seen a bit more it would have a profound impression in the world i i totally agree with douglas there and again i want to stress that the problem with that is that you can't just do it by you and me saying and anyone else who's listening by the way you should be going out and getting on with it though we all should and it is difficult but yes but it can only ultimately become uh instantiated in the community and in the settled habits of somebody's life when you have at the heart of the faith the story of jesus going to the cross to defeat the powers of evil because without that then forgiveness is a lovely idea for other people to practice but too hard for me as it were but if jesus has actually dealt with evil in his death whatever that means and you have to have lots of discussions about how that plays out of course then who am i to go on actually holding it against this person or that person and that's why forgiveness then has as its positive side reconciliation forgiveness shouldn't just leave you with uh as it were a zero bank balance it ought then to open the way for reconciliation that's of course what archbishop desmond tutu has done so spectacularly and i know south africa is still a very difficult and dangerous place but when i was young we were all talking about the coming bloodbath in south africa and the fact that there wasn't a bloodbath and that there was a peaceful transition of power was largely due to the fact that tutu and a lot of others were going and praying with leading politicians reading the bible with them and then when the transition happened having that amazing commission of truth and reconciliation with white thugs and black thugs confessing their sins seeking reconciliation that should still be sending a shockwave around the world both in northern ireland and in the middle east heaven help us what's going on at the moment um and so on and so on this is the only way to live ultimately but you can only even glimpse a chance of doing it if you've got jesus himself in the middle i'm sorry to sound like a crack record but perhaps you would expect a thing option always to become important about jesus it's if i say it it it's the most important thing to do as a theologian and and as a christian and it is as i say it is an enormous relief to hear it i i mean you say it's an enormous relief there douglas in a sense for you obviously you you came to the point where you couldn't believe that this story was literally true but you miss it you even describe yourself as a christian atheist i mean the culture at large there's probably a lot of other douglas murrays out there and people perhaps whom christianity has never figured in their life but if if christianity is the story that that did work and and the stories that we're now telling aren't working and putting us out of joint can you see any way in which the christian story even as a non-christian could could start to make inroads again is it is it simply about the church standing up again and being a bit more confident um i i'm not sure is it only his confidence um i i've said many years that i i see um an enormous opportunity for people of faith to be speaking into perhaps a more receptive crowd than before um i do see that i i do think to perhaps rather hack need reference to um to matthew arnold but um i i do always think that the interesting thing about the sea of faith is there's no reason why it can't come back in c doesn't only withdraw you know it's it's the point of tithes and and but but for that to happen what would be on offer would have to be radically different from everything else in the society that's on offer that's one reason why i've been very interested i can't remember we talked about this with justin ford i've been very interested in recent years watching um contemporaries of mine who have seen throughs looked at stared at the same some of the same problems that i have and have come to conclusions of their own in the religious sense i've been very struck for instance by not a large number of people relatively small number of people but people i think i was being very intelligent thinking people who have for instance converted to catholicism and i see i can think of one person who is an angry from one person who was born and brought up a muslim and somebody else i know who was an atheist throughout and i i i don't think this is typical by any means i'm not trying to say that i'm just saying that among people i know who are very thoughtful who thought these things have come from a wide range of different directions they have they have gone towards that and what has struck me most is they have gone to the most traditional form of that faith i'm talking about people who've gone into tridentine uh mass attending catholicism they don't go to uh the the weaker forms of it because they want to drink as directly from the well as they can yes and and that seems that seems to me to be as i say why why it saddens me to put it no stronger that um that a religion with this inheritance with all of this to offer would offer the most watered-down version of itself to the extent that it is a version that is indistinguishable from everything else on offer in society yes i i very much understand that um i think at the same time um there is a sense which is deeply rooted in jesus himself um going and eating with sinners doing things that nobody was expecting a messiah a prophet to do breaking the social taboos in order to be on all fours with the people who really needed him there was the shock that went through the system with that but that's happened again and again throughout christian history that christianity has is a missionary religion and missionaries find that they they do their work better when they're actually on all fours with the people that they're trying to get to know not as it was saying here is this amazing unattainable ideal and i'm up there somewhere and maybe you could find your way up if you're lucky because that's how it sometimes comes across to people and so there's this tension the whole time between um that wonderful rich thing as you say drinking from the well itself which of course for me is what i think both reading the bible saying my prayers going to ordinary worship services that's what it's all about um it's absolutely central but uh there is a two and a throw and again it's because of a belief in the goodness of god's creation that uh that actually these people out there are created by god god loves them and i am called to love them as well and to get alongside them and not as it would appear to some hold myself away from them by going to something so recondite that the average mortal would never even have the slightest idea what it was all about there is i think that tension is always going to be there well if i say just very quickly on this um i completely agree but a very interesting thing that's happening at the moment is that the the the abstract um not getting involved in uh the nitty gritty of your era is actually what is happening mistakenly we ran a piece uh just this week i don't keep plugging the spectator but we ran the eastern the new edition out this week by very intelligent young clergyman um talking about the just just saying look the latest um again i also don't spend hold on bashing the church of england but um he said the latest thing this week is an edict on church memorials and there is going to be an expectation of um that that memorials in churches across england are connected with for instance obviously slavery will have to be reconsidered and this clergyman just says i i was so moved by it he said he said i have four churches that i i i oversee if i am to spend my time going through this he said first of all no one has ever complained about a memorial ever jimmy said if i'm to spend my time doing this i will not be able to spend my time ministering to the people in my parishes so it is as straightforward as that and i say what strikes me is that there is a drive for what is mistakenly thought to be a drive that will satisfy and impress people in the era when in fact it will take the church precisely away from its activities yes it seems to me an example of a massive misunderstanding of where the church's priorities ought to be in order to impress the rest yeah of the country fascinating conversation time is slipping by so fast though and i did promise those who are watching on youtube and facebook uh some opportunity to ask questions we had a lot of them coming in uh keep them coming by the way if you'd like to ask a question uh you can do so uh in the chat on uh wherever you're watching on facebook or on youtube and just before we come to some of these questions um just a reminder that if you'd like to take part in our survey tell us what you thought of today's show uh you can find the link in the info with today's video we'd love you to click through to that tell us what you think of today's program uh you can find more from the big conversation by going to the big conversation dot show if you sign up you'll get updates bonus content and more videos from this series and previous ones and uh if you want to continue the conversation nt wright one of our guests today will be speaking at unbelievable the conference this saturday the 15th of may it's all online you can attend from anywhere in the world unbelievable.live our theme is how to tell the greatest story ever told very much links to what we've been talking today about how do we rediscover the story that has shaped previous generations can that story be told afresh for a new generation in a world where many people don't know what their story is anymore um let's put this first question to you first of all douglas and i'll invite you both to be brief if you can because there's a lot of questions you would like to get through so maybe just a couple of a couple of minutes each on each of these but um dylan asks um douglas and anti-right agree on the importance of the christian story but does it matter if it's not true uh douglas how about you start on this one well obviously it matters [Music] it matters a huge amount [Music] there is an um a complex corner which i'm obviously at which is um whether you can uh whether it is possible and i'm not dogmatic on this question but whether it is possible to keep what you need without holding on to the idea of it being true um now of course what we mean by true in this context is very confident let's just park that for the moment um i i think there is an enormous uh um temptation which sits at the moment it's it's many people have written about it i mean the person i think often is clearly schopenhauer sharpened in the dialogue on religion who who writes in a fascinating way about the the possibility that it is as it were the philosophy for the masses um i think this is um temptation to follow this idea um i also think obviously for any believers it's a great error because it's the whole thing is a form of shadow play um and i think myself that the answer isn't clear uh how could it be perhaps but um the question that i think it was the german juris uh bockenforder who put the dilemma out i first came across this in the writings of a rat singer pope benedict uh rock and ford's dilemma is can we uh can we maintain uh um an ethical and more structure without the roots that gave it birth and many people think that the conclusion is already in on that and that the answer is no um i don't know because i think that we're currently living through an attempt to that experiment um it it's it's it's like the question of you know exactly where the fire stops and where the heat begins and when you know where you're living in the embers and whether you know whether you can get them going again it's exceptionally hard to know because you're living through it yeah you would expect me to you would expect me probably to quote saint paul um if the messiah is not raised your faith is futile and we're still in our sins you know it's pretty basic uh the the there is stuff that happened that was unexpected that was dramatic um that you couldn't actually have made up anyone 30 years 60 years later than jesus wouldn't have made it up like that we know a lot about the sort of stories that they lived on and this kind of breaks the boundaries um that doesn't in itself mean that it's true but it does mean that if you put that in the middle you can see how everything else makes the sense it makes around it i mean i was just thinking as douglas was talking saying could we have all the benefits as it were without it being true it's rather like saying all the things that i most value about having been married for nearly 50 years now supposing my wife didn't exist but i could still have a lovely home and well-cooked meals etc etc would that be all right the answer is of course not because it's all about her and being with her and together with and christianity is all about jesus it isn't jesus uh so that we can have something else a nice system of how to live it's we have jesus and because we have jesus then all the other things make sense so if you take jesus away and that means jesus being crucified and raised from the dead then i'm sorry it's just not going to work theologians and others have tried to do without the resurrection in the last century and their systems basically fail in my view and the churches that follow those i think have often proved that point as well so yeah nice try no cigar would be my sense yes but this is the bit where where you end up feeling embarrassed in front of christopher hitchens isn't it um if if if you're required to believe in these these things like miracles and specifically the the core miracle at the heart of christianity and you know well here's another question and uh see what you think of this douglas um bensonia asks um when it comes to douglas losing his faith was it those intellectual difficulties in miracles the virgin birth or something else and i suppose i could ask about the resurrection as well i mean tom obviously feels if christianity is ultimately going to be helpful it's helpful on the basis that something really happened that changes the world changes people and then works out from there i mean yes what's your take on that if if you're not really sure that you can go down that resurrection route well let me just argue something slightly counter to what i just said but it doesn't completely counter it but it might complement it um i remember some years ago reading a very interesting uh a book by george steiner in which he relayed um uh a conversation he said was one of the most important conversations he had in his life which was actually in south africa which tom just referred to um i i hope i didn't get it wrong this in one of his later books but steiner says that late one night over dinner he's talking with uh some uh activism having to be black activists and i suppose this must be still an apartheid time and one of them says to him suddenly designer was obviously jewish but you don't understand we don't have a book and steiner said it was one of the most flawing and distressing things he had ever heard we don't have a book now obviously these people were not christian um but they what they noticed was they did not have anything to draw upon in the same way that for instance steiner although he wasn't exactly believing a jew i think i had the torah um there's a similar point made by alan bloom in one of his books in the 1980s i can't remember which one where he says he says if you if you're not going to have the bible you would need to have a book of equivalent seriousness to base it all on and i i've i've always thought this is a very important challenge um because there are books that people might put forward to try to base it on but they are never of equivalent seriousness and it's it's actually quite hard to think of a book of equivalent seriousness in the bible um but i do think this is uh a challenge um what would you base it all on exam and and it's fascinating because um ac grayling um maybe 10 years ago produced that thing called the good book which was his attempt to do a sort of secular bible and it fell flat on its face yeah it was it was a very it was a very shallow and rather distressing production um but the the christian the point of the christian bible is yes it's a book which does this that and the other it's a great story but the the christian bible the climax of the story is of course jesus the the four gospels bring the story of israel to an unexpected and very shocking climax as a result of which all sorts of other things happen so it isn't that the bible is just full of abstract teachings and ethics etc and oh yeah we've got this book which tells us what to do it's a story and you're invited to get on board with the story and to be part of the onward movement that takes it forward from there and in a sense the jewish bible does the same thing but in a much more wistful way because it's telling a story but the story sort of well does it peter out or does it turn into something abstract that's a question which jews wrestle with to this day but the christian bible has that climax on jesus and if you take that away well it's a lovely idea but why should we credit it yeah i mean douglas just coming back on that and there's a question that maps ties into this a bit um from alex who asks you douglas would you consider yourself a moral realist i suppose the question i want to ask along with that is do you consider there is a story that we're supposed to be living by i is there something that transcends us is there a purpose um is there a morality is there a something to which we are beholden because in a sense that that idea has gone away in a postmodern world in a new atheist world you know life is whatever you make it there really is no overarching purpose no matter narrative christianity obviously gave people that and continues to give many people that a story as tom says to live into but we don't seem to have those kinds of stories anymore so where do you find yourself and and are you worried at the lack of this kind of a story now well i i've said before i kind of aware that i am we're clearly as i think let's be mentioned we're meaning seeking beings we're storytelling beings um that that having been agreed the question then is is are we just meaning seeking beings or are we meaning seeking beings and there's meaning um now i i happen to fall incline more to the the latter um position i don't know exactly what it is uh but my inclination goes that way and it's partly because i think that i don't to get too abstract here but there are things that you can you can read even in non-religious texts which which strike you as true um i was reading brothers karamazov recently and uh of course dostoevsky's seat in in christian uh religion but there are two two moments at least in that book where uh you gasp because what dostoevsky is doing is suddenly taking the story into an entirely other realm that you'll know if you read it that that there's a moment when you realize that one of the characters believes he is being visited by the devil and the moment in which he says his brother how did you know he visits me is unbelievably powerful it knocked me over when i read it because dostoevsky is doing something it seems to me is uh um accurate in our understanding of our lives which is that we go through them we we act in them as if uh um as if that is all and we stumble at strange moments on things that suggest to us that it's not all and this is an intimation i i say that i mean this is why aesthetics is important to me it's why music is important to me why poetry and art is important to me because i don't think it's doing something just on its own i think it's giving us a sign of something i think that it's what's so extraordinarily important about music is that music tells us something that exists in the language we cannot completely speak but which we know is inviting us towards something which we understand to be true um i could go on all day about this but yes that's my ensure it's it sounds very similar to what you've been talking about in your latest book broken signpost tom that all of these things that speak somehow to our soul are a as you say broken signpost towards uh something beyond them yes the the the language of beauty and for me music particularly um is enormously powerful and it's pointing towards something but then the music stops or the sunset fades or the the beautiful friend is killed in a car crash or whatever and it looks as though then we're back with jean-paul sartre and say life is just a sick joke um and that's where so much of our culture has been yeah yeah it was nice stuff but it doesn't actually mean anything and for me it's only again cracked record coming up it's only when you put the story of jesus in the middle of that and discover that jesus and his crucifixion are the kind of ultimate broken signpost because that's where we see justice denied beauty trampled on freedom obliterated etc all those things which were our great dreams which we have lost are actually true of the story of jesus going to the cross and i would urge anyone to reread the story of jesus going to the cross thinking of it like that not just then this happened then that happened but those great things that we love love beauty freedom spirituality um all of these great uh ennobling things they're all there in that story and jesus himself as god incarnate comes to the place where our dreams let us down in order to be there with us and then to do the new creation thing out the other side uh that's a a summary of a of a much more complicated argument but that's where it's going by the way so there's one other there's one other point worth throwing out though which is that there is another signpost as it were which is that it is actually exceptionally hard to live as a nihilist um to live as a to live as a nihilist um it's it's a very interesting thing nihilism is spoken about a lot people quite often describe particular ages as being nihilistic but in fact it is very rare to come across an actual nihilist yes um almost nobody lives in that state i can think of in the modern era i can think of probably only one person who pretty much approximates it which is mikhail welbeck uh the french novelist who certainly writes as a nihilist but even he you get the sense and sorry justin i've said this before i can't remember you get the sense he's is not completely capable of living as a nihilist either if i'm giving a quick example there's extraordinarily disturbing sorry i know we said we'd do two minutes with each question right it's fine go ahead go ahead there's an extraordinary moment uh in a book by one of the surviving uh journalists from the charlevoix offices who wrote a book called disturbance a couple years ago very very upsetting book but he described bumping into mikhail welbeck at a party after some time after the massacre and he recognized him and michael well back and never met him before they both got body guards at his party and welbeck sees the still very very visibly um wounded journalists come in and and they stand opposite each other for a moment in this terrible moment of recognition and michael welbeck quotes i believe the gospel of saint matthew he says in french to uh the journalists he says um he says men of violence take it by force and then leaves um it suggests to me that in welbeck's head it isn't entirely nihilism either and who knows where that came from a bit of memory of french catholicism or whatever phrases phrases that did actually give meaning um yeah that's it that's that's jesus christ it's it's it's like um that i my favorite novel by the jewish novelist haim potok is my name is ashalev where the young rabbinic student who discovers he's got an amazing gift for for painting which is not something that his rabbinic community wants to know about at all um is trying to find models for the pain of being a jew in the modern world and he travels from new york to europe and he goes around the galleries and he comes back and he paints crucifixions and obviously there's a lot of kind of chagall and so on in the background of that but part of the the grasp of that is the sense of even in a an ultra-orthodox community where the idea of a cross on the corner uh outside a church in a street somewhere would mean those are the people who think that we're god killers or whatever so there's a real fear nevertheless nothing but the crucifixion would do to express what he needed to express and it's almost as though it's now woven in not just a culture but the way that the human race is but at the very moment when it tries to get away from um all that traditional christianity stuff the best model with which to do it turns out to be something pretty central to what the christian gospel was all about i've got an interesting question here from carla um we'll start with you tom um as she asked this specifically of you in a postmodern world are you concerned that our use of the word story has a worldview confusion with myth instead of truth in post-modernism everything is story slash myth uh do we need to distinguish christian truth from story slash myth what do you say yeah this this is obviously a much more complicated thing that we've got time to address because there's at least four or five different senses of the word myth which have been out there in the popular discourse it just means um a story about something which we know didn't happen that that's a very low grade meaning of myth so we can we can park that but i would say it's one of the strengths of post-modernity that it has highlighted the uh inerratical nature of story within human life there was a kind of a modernist rationalism which imagined you could reduce everything to propositions and that stories were just kids stuff to entertain the masses while the real philosophers got on with the hard-age propositions and i think we now all know and this is one of the say one of the good things about post-modernity that yes we live on stories but the fact that it is a story then does raise the question but did it happen it's the question which comes up in the court of law the whole time it's no good standing there as a witness and saying let me tell you a story once upon a time because the judge wants to know the jury wants to know but did it happen um and you can rank stories according to the uh apparent intention of the storyteller is this a story which was designed i mean take jesus parables it makes no sense to say of the parable of the particle son ah but what was the father's name or what did the mother say when they came back or which bit of the farm did he then own that that misses the point as a matter of genre but if you take matthew mark luke and john actually it would miss the point of those stories to say oh they were just spinning these fantasy narratives like sort of pilgrimage progress or something out of thin air no they luke is very particular about this let me give you the dates it was in the reign of so-and-so and so and so was the high priest and this that and the other this is stuff that happened and the point is the happenedness of it has changed the world and i'm back to something douglas said half an hour ago we have sold ourselves short in western christianity because we don't know the true story of church history and all the great stuff that has happened and we have believed the enlightenment lie that christianity was just part of the problem rather than part of the solution all along that's a whole other topic but so i want to say yes beware of story collapsing into myth know what the different kinds of stories are and how they work i mean we don't have time to pursue it douglas today but maybe another conversation to have at some point would be the fact that i think part of your the conversion for want of a better word was to do with coming to doubt the reliability of the bible and whether it was actually based on historical facts and obviously the miraculous nature of it as well but do you feel like if if you could be shown sort of the factuality of it as well as the way it makes sense of our culture and and everything else that that would i guess be the missing piece for you that would take you back in some sense maybe even two it's too complex to say what the missing piece would be or could be and i'd it'd be presumptuous of me to try to try to explain it or suggest it let alone know it actually um i i just ducked that by by making an observation one thing that just came up which is um of all the different understandings of myth even even the the least deep understanding of myth it still irritates me when you hear the phrase only a myth exactly um it is an extraordinarily facile phrase she's in far too commonly used um the metamorphosis of ovid are not history but they are they're not only a story yeah but this was the point that grasped cs lewis wasn't it that he had thought that all this stuff was just myth and then he turned a corner and realized oh my goodness looks like this great myth actually happened once yeah either diagonalizing corn king or whatever it was and and and made that discovery in the in the company of a great storyteller himself jrr tolkien yes um yes and in that sense there there is this this idea that these great myth stories you know they they are you know lord of the rings is is arguably drenched in a kind of christological overtones and that that these are the stories that seem to compel us and grab us and so on um and in that sense as as time is drawing to a close douglas i i suppose you know you've been so very gracious because a lot of these have been very personal sort of questions about faith and that kind of thing but do do you do you wish for it to be true do you wish that there was that as lewis said this is the true myth is that something that you could see making sense of the world if if there was a really a true story that everything sort of came of course i mean i don't i don't really understand people who are don't wish it to be true i don't really understand those people i do have known some we mentioned one earlier who who don't wish it didn't wish it to be true um no of course i do i i um i suppose that um one thing that i've always found extremely powerful in that regard is is whenever i've been in the holy land in israel surrounding area um i never forget one of the first times i was there i think during a 2006 conflict in lebanon and i was speaking to i happened to stop one day and there was a church that was being built it's quite unusual to need a need a new church in that neck of the woods um but one was being built for various reasons and i asked the the uh the person who was in charge that day i said by the way what what's the name of the church and he said it's the church of the transfiguration and i said uh beautiful how did you um decide to do that and he said well well here we we name churches after the nearest site and the transfiguration happened there and he pointed to the mountain beside us and i you know i mean wherever in the world you're brought up as a christian it makes an enormous impact on when you see the um uh the physical sides i've i've traveled around a lot and i i i don't think for me anything quite equals that in terms of making an impact on me um but i i i think you know what we aren't transparent to ourselves and i'm not transparent myself and i i have no idea how to answer that question well you've answered a great many questions very helpfully and as honestly as you can douglas thank you very much for the time this evening thanks for all the questions that have come in as well on on facebook and youtube as well any any final thoughts tom that you'd like to leave us with as we close out our discussion i was fascinated by what douglas just said about the transfiguration um i have been on one or two mountains which claim to be the site of the transfiguration hermann mount table etc um for me one of the most moving moments in my life was on good friday 1989 when for the first time i went into the church of the holy sepulchre in jerusalem and spent most of the day there just contemplating this is where it happened and when you're actually there it doesn't seem odd that the the hopes and fears of all the years or if you like the pain and tears of all the years should be focused on one place and i i intuited that i felt it and i thought it theologically and in a sense that was you know it didn't teach me anything i didn't sort of vaguely know already but the concreteness of it is so striking there it's not just an idea in people's heads going around the world this is stuff that actually happened as a result of which the world is a different place the world is claimed by god in his kingdom as a result of those facts as we close it reminds me of something you said the last time you came on the show douglas that you had a an experience at galilee where it made you feel something happened here was the way you put it yes i think that's right yes yeah i think it's i think it's very hard to come away from that without thinking about it thank you so much for tonight's conversation it's been a real joy and a pleasure i wish we could have gone on longer but uh our time is over perhaps we can do it again at some point in the future but for now uh thank you very much uh douglas murray and nt wright for being my guest on tonight's big conversation um by the way we'd love you to tell us what you thought of tonight's show we've got a survey which you can find in the info with today's video just click on it multi-choice very quick and we'd love to hear what you made of the show do make sure to follow the big conversation at the bigconversation.show sign up there for bonus content updates and of course all the rest of the shows that are coming as well in this season and if you want more from nt wright and indeed he'll be in dialogue on these kinds of issues with tom holland among other people then do get along to our unbelievable conference this saturday the 15th of may you don't have to leave your home though to do that unbelievable.live it's all online and it's going to be a wonderful day of thinking through some of these big ideas that's unbelievable.live and all of the links are in the show notes today for now uh all that remains for me to say is thank you douglas and thank you tom and uh hope we'll see each other again at some point thank you very much thank you very much [Music] [Music] you

Channel: Unbelievable?

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Keywords: unbelievable, justin brierley, premier christian radio, christianity, atheism, philosophy, faith, theology, God, apologetics, Jesus, debate, NT Wright, Tom Wright, Douglas Murray, Big conversation, identity politics, atheist

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Length: 81min 2sec (4862 seconds)

Published: Thu May 13 2021

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[u/sv6fiddy]

That was really good, hadn’t listened to NT Wright in a while and he sounded sharp here. Never heard of Douglas Murray before but he was equally fascinating to listen to. Thanks for sharing. ‘Unbelievable?’ is such a great podcast.

[u/Repentant_Revenant]

Some background to this conversation: Douglas Murray wrote this article in The Spectator criticizing what he's seen in the Church of England's handling of "woke" ideologies. N.T. Wright, a former bishop in the Church of England, wrote this letter in response.

Douglas Murray considers himself a "Christian Atheist," who believes powerfully that the story of Christianity is what is needed in the world today, but he can't bring himself to literally believe it. N.T. Wright is one of the leading theologians and biblical historians in the world today.