NT Wright - Paul and the Faithfulness of God; The Paul Debate - WTCLive

welcome to WTC live this month with Professor NT right former bishop of Durham and now research professor of New Testament and early Christianity at the University of st. Andrews Wright has authored numerous books I've found about it according to Goodreads about 131 listed there but at the heart of his publishing is his multi-volume Christian origins and the question of God series which includes the books the New Testament and the people of God Jesus and the victory of God the resurrection of the Son of God and now more recently Paul and the faithfulness of God the focus of our discussion today is his recent Paul on the faithfulness of God and as well as his book of his short book the Paul debate in which Wright responds to criticisms of his big book on Paul so professor Wright thank you for taking the time to join us today thank you it's good to be with you I should just say since we are both sitting in the UK right now that both of those books are published by s vck in London fortress fortress pick up the s bt k one but then the baylor one was commissioned by baylor and spca has picked it up but i think my publishers in london would not be happy if i didn't mentioned i also just want to mention the book paul and his recent interpreters also published in the UK by SP CK that you can also access to find out about recent scholarship on paul so as we begin this interview I'd like to just start out with a word of Prayer Lord Bert grateful for the opportunity to discuss your sermon Paul and his relevant relevance for the church and as we reflect and discuss today I pray that our discussion would be an act of prayer to and worship of you amen so the the first question is is quite a serious question and that is you have these these heavy hitting academic books published you know under the name NT right and I'm just curious if if you've ever read a Tom rut and so too and if you're comfortable with the extent to which he seemed to draw from your work this is an old chestnut and indeed in America it's more confusing because several of the books which in Britain are under the name Tom Wright are in America under the name NT right but some of them leak across the Atlantic the Americans prefer the initials that SP CK when I first started publishing a little paperbacks with them they said no NT is far too formal we want to be more chatty so you have to eat Tom so yeah there's been an ongoing dialogue about that and indeed I have had people say to me well I read that book because I thought it was going to be easy because it had Tom on the cover but in fact it's an NT right cook really so it's more difficult or something like that I've also had people in America trying to discern the theological difference between the two which would be intriguing if anyone could actually come up with it but hopefully they won't fun yeah oh you've consistently described your work in particularly your academic work as that of a historian and which is very clear from from the way that you do your scholarship but am i interested here at the start up in some of the other influences on your work and in particular maybe some defining spiritual experiences and how those have shaped your work and scholarship yeah I mean one can go into a lot of autobiographical detail and that's probably inappropriate but I grew up in a Christian Church going family an ordinary middle Anglican family in the middle of Northumberland in the 1950s and so church once or twice every Sunday prayers at bedtime that sort of thing and it was within that context and knowing a lot of hymns and singing the church choir and so on who's in that within that context that I started to have an experience a personal experience of the presence and love of God from quite an early age so that from quite an early age I goes about maybe seven I actually believed that I was called to the ordained ministry which I I knew quite a bit about because there were some of my mother's relatives who were ordained including my mother's father who I was close to so it was a natural thing and then through my teens I used to go very frequently to strip Union boys camps in Scotland and which I loved because of the activities climbing and sailing and canoeing and all that sort of thing but also because morning and evening we had simple Bible talks explaining some basic things getting us to open the Bible and look at particular passages and what did this mean and happy to supply to us and so I was really nurtured through my teens on on that and other kinds of other influences as well and and the quiet undemonstrative context of home which was basically supportive even though in the use of a sort of 1950s English way one didn't talk too much about one's own private spirituality it was too too full on too emotional one that one didn't do that but then gradually through my twenties and through when I was ordained and so on I've worked in a number of different contexts and because I was to my surprise apparently gifted academically which I had not expected I didn't know when I was younger there was such a thickness as an academic world never never occurred to me and but I became more and more attracted into the serious study of both philosophy and ancient history which I first degree and thence into theology and so all these things flowed together with the sense of vocation of putting together a vocation to love God and serve Him and know him better a vocation to public ministry in the church and a vocation to historical in theological scholarship so the New Testament has always been a natural focus maybe the natural so then as you moved into the academic study of the New Testament how is it that you specifically landed on Paul as the the recurrent focus of your scholarly work well I it's curious I was attending the lectures of George Caird in Oxford care was one of the great lecturers in office the privilege to sit under and I remember thinking wow you know that's just an amazing thing to be able to do to stand up there and hold forth and explain whole chunks of the Bible and who big-picture stuff as well as some of the little detail and hold all that together and it's quite dramatic but I decided if I was going to do research I wanted to do something which would keep me focused on old as well as New Testaments which means I was looking at the use of the Old Testament in the new I'd actually like that phrase but it's a phrase we often use because I think there's a more organic connection rather than just use in a sort of pragmatic way but still so I thought well where are you going to start with that and I thought well the obvious places are either John or Paul and I went and talked to George cared rather nervously and said I'd really like to do research I want to do something on Old Testament in new I'm thinking of John I'm taking you all and he strongly put me off John he said at the moment there's a lot of stuff being done on hypothetical Jewish lectionaries which may lie behind use the Old Testament of John he said the trouble is that nobody really knows that much about that stuff and so you sink in a morass of speculation and you could spend an entire doctoral dissertation just going around those loops and never really get anywhere and so I said well okay Paul them and and so the rest is a sense history I'm still struggling to get back to John that I loved you on dearly and I write about dr. time to time I've not done major work but so then naturally the focus for me was Romans which is the highest concentration of the Old Testament and particularly Romans nine to eleven where Paul is actually wrestling with the question of what then do we say about his real scriptures what do you say about the air-ground story the law and so on so that's always been where the thing is focused from so then as you got into the the study upon in particular Romans then what were the what were some of the questions that when you started in study in academic study of Romans were unanswered at the time and we're really driving and motivating you in your investigation of Paul well there's all sorts of things which came out of my experience in the students Christian work in the Christian Union in Oxford which has very much involvement where for instance there was a lot of discussion about how you read Romans six seven late and whether in fact Romans seven describes the normal Christian life or whether that is a sort of second-rate in life and want to escape from that and get into Romans 8 instead and if so how and people were reading old writers like Watchmen knees and saying that there was okay you had to be justified by faith we all knew that but now you had to be sanctified by faith and that this was a kind of a second step so there was a lot of that theology which was also around with some of the early charismatic movements in the 60s and where people were saying that now that you have spoken in tongues or something this has lifted you to a different spiritual plane now but I didn't think the Paul was talking about any of that stuff but these were questions which forced me to look at Romans 6 7 and 8 and to ask difficult questions about what was he talking about how did it work and only gradually over the years I realized that we have to read Paul in terms of first century questions and not 19th or 20th century questions but that takes a lot of work to get there at the same time there were all the questions in the Calvinism of the time about predestination and election and naturally those focused on Romans 9 in particular and I got more and more puzzled about that and gradually gradually gradually the question for me that emerged was okay to do as justification to do with Abraham in Romans 4 it's to do with Abraham in Galatians 3 and then it was to do with the interplay between Galatians and Romans on that the business of the law and here's one of the big questions which was driving before I always disagreed with George cared and by the time he died I think we had got much closer together bless him but to begin with he was taking what I would see as a more robustly Lutheran view interesting because he was himself in the reformed tradition but the Lutheran view which very broadly and broad-brush says well the law was there in the Old Testament and that was to drive you to the gospel because you can't keep the law so now Christ is the end of the law Romans 10:4 became B central text really what do you do with telus car Norma Christoph's in Romans 10 Paul and so I saw that as actually related to a lot of other issues because I would hear people in sermons quickly my church back home if you quoted the Old Testament back then they would say our God Christ has come since then and Christ is the end of the law in other words we are more or less masculine now that wasn't thought at all but there was a sense of a abolition of the law or fulfillment at war and it was if you like the replay of luthor verses couchguy and field's work so enormously helpful a positive view of the law which then led me back into the Calvinist tradition where you have a much more a much stronger view of the positivity of the call of Israel of the election of Israel of the law and then the question comes what then do you do with Galatians because Galatians seems to be very negative about the law and so that question of the of the integration had did Paul just change his mind was a development those became the big questions and then it became the question of how actually Romans itself integrates what is the sequence of thought within the four main sections of Romans itself and so that was how I got into it and inevitably we also the stumble in sideways and find ourselves dealing with texts which are saying things that we weren't expecting them to say and that's when the question of being a historian really matters that the historian is trying to find out what was going on in the first century made for life like this he wasn't writing a first century version of a 20th century handbook of dogmatix he was addressing issues of Esau and so that then drove me back into the first century Jewish world to Josephus to the Scrolls to the pseudepigrapha and so on to try to discern what was the matrix of thought within which all this make sense but that Jewish world of course within the greco-roman world returning from my classical studies and which I've never really left behind so that that really tells you that what was the way into me all through so of course then that Jewish context in the greco-roman context art are sort of the focus of the first of all the first half of your Paul in the faithfulness of God book I'm just wondering if for our listeners and viewers you could outline for us the the major aims of Paul and the faithfulness of God what is it that you were what were the driving questions there and what is it that you hope to accomplish goodness the main aim of fall in the faithless of God is to articulate the center of Paul's theology how did his theology work and the main way I was doing that and it's a thought experiment but it's one which I think I still think has worked the way of doing that was to say let's put to one side the categories of how we organize a systematic theology of chicken from the 16th century onwards where you have God with humans in salvation etc etc and you have some ethics in the church way down the back somewhere and let's say supposing all as a first century Jew really does believe that Israel's God has revealed himself fully and finally in and as Jesus Nazareth that seems to be basic but in that case his theology is much more likely to be oriented round the way the first century Jews would think then if you go to Jewish books on what we basically not the Jews do theology in the way the Christians do and that's part of the point that theology is something that is one of the theses of the book the poor in events because it's only as you're thinking prayerfully scripturally about who God is who God's people are etc that the church will be the church so part of my argument is that Paul invents this new discipline this new exercise spiritual and mental exercise because only when the church is wrestling with these questions will it be United and holy which is what again and again and again in his letters he insists on the unity of those we have pushed that to one side in the first Reformation debate before exactly is central every letter is dealing with that in one way or another so then I was saying okay if this is what he's doing here's the thought experiment supposing you take monotheism election and eschatology the three main things of Judaism one God one people have got one future for God's world and supposing you see each one of those rethought around Jesus as Israel's Messiah and around the gift of the Spirit what then does it look like how then does it fall out how then do we approach our normal topics in a whole new light but at the same time I wanted to say Paul is doing this not in a bubble not in a vacuum but within this very complex is horrible world news Roman citizen he was fluent in Greek and had lived in Tarsus one of the major centers of ancient philosophy a lot of what he was doing was resonating with his Roman world his Greek for the Safa chol world and in a sense he never left behind his Jewish world there are some people today who talk about Paul within Judaism as a way of saying Paul is just another way of being Jewish and that's that I think that's misleading philosopher Paul the idea that Israel's Messiah was crucified and raised from the dead had shattering scandalous as he knew implications for what it meant to be the - but anyway so I decided the only way of getting at this because they've been so many misunderstandings was to do some serious math work we've talked about Paul's Jewish world history Roman world and so on in the first quarter of the book actually and then to look through the world view model at the stories and symbols of praxis and the questions which enabled Paul's worldview to be mapped in the way that I've talked about in my other and only then to say so what is the heart of this theology and then to come back and say if that must leave for Paul thank you I'm tracking the core theology is not just an exercise in which we sort out our ideas and then we feel good because we've got a nice coherent package theology has to be in the service of the mission of God for the world and hence I wanted to come back to that wall of Rome of Greece the world of ancient religion the world of ancient Israel and say if this is what Paul's theology looked like what impact did he believe it was having and then I engage with current debates which are going on in those so that's about as short a summary as I think I can do of what is the longest book I have ever written and please go along this go better with that's a really helpful overview one of the things that I saw you wrestling with in that book is this the tension between saying that Paul is seized something radically new that's happened in in Christ on the one hand but on the other hand that this is something that is either expected or in continuity with the story of God's people in Israel is that a fair assessment of that tension and how do you how do you how did you maintain that that balance and what happens if you tip off too much to one side either continuity or discontinuity it's very very difficult for me and I think I'm tracking Paul here the heart of it is the death and resurrection of Jesus as Israel's Messiah who represents Israel whose epoch represents the whole world that chain of representation by the way is absolutely vital Israel is called according to Isaiah according to the psalms according to Genesis Israel is called to a role within the created God's purposes for the whole world and Jesus as the king as the Messiah is called to sum up Israel's destiny in himself for me everything hinges around that sequence of thoughts then the continuity and discontinuity comes with the shock that Israel's Messiah was crucified by the pagans this was not a noble death this was a shameful death this was the most shocking thing that possibly happened and of course it said to anyone watching well he was a failed Messiah because everybody knows it's failed messiahs are in the home process but then God raised him from the dead and the resurrection and the continuity of the body of Jesus between death and resurrection continuity yet transformation it's a transformed body though it is still known by the mark of the nails all of that is really really important and I think that's what's going on in the Gospels as well it's a way of saying that what is now born with the resurrection is new creation but it's not a crayon see of ex nihilo creation out of nothing it's a creative exadata rage it's the new creation born out of the old Romans 8 says this in terms of the metaphor of birth where the creation is groaning in travail and then will give birth and he describes it in 15 as a great battle in which the enemies sin and death are destroyed and when death is destroyed that means that the thing that death was itself trying to destroy is liberated from that so there is continuity even though there is the radical discontinuity and you can see that working out for instance in terms of what you might call too tricky word Falls ethics that for Paul there are some things which for a Jew you just don't do like eating walk order and Paul says as in mark 7 mark 7 jesus said but actually now all foods are clean God is the God of all people Jew and Gentile alike so the Jews specific aspects of Torah are now set aside but at the same time that doesn't mean Paul is saying oh well the law was the first attempt and it didn't work so let's forget that because he says no bazoer is the marker which says this is what genuine humaneness looks like so for instance Paul's sexual ethics are very much consonant with ancient Israel's sexual ethics the cause or believes in new creation he believes that the new humanity has come to earth and therefore there are some things which are enhanced particularly the identity of male and female and so on and so people get in a huge puzzle about this today but actually before there is a coherence to it which so much contemporary Christian teaching of whatever sort really hasn't grasped but is not enough to say oh well the Bible says this therefore because actually Galatians 3 Hebrews etc there is huge transformation with the death and resurrection of Jesus and get the spirit and there's some things which are appropriate under the Old Covenant which are not appropriate under the new other things which are intensified and brought out so whatever sphere you're looking at whether it's justification for astrology whatever that continuity and discontinuity is always there yeah that's good so along the lines of continuity one of the things that you're wanting to say in your work is that Paul is writing these letters addressing specific needs in Rome Galatia etc but that underneath and and driving and sustaining these letters there is a big story of Exodus covenant land than exile and so on so for some reviewers of your book Paul in the faithfulness of God they've had trouble seeing a consistent big story in Paul and specifically exile on return supporting his arguments what in your mind is the strongest case for seeing a storied world you at work and Paul and what's at stake in losing that storied worldview okay this is a long and complex argument you never to do when I first set it out about 20 years ago I thought it was compared to be simple then I started getting feedback from people and realized the layer upon layer upon layer of misunderstanding this understanding what I was saying misunderstanding as I see it of what the Bible is say a lot of this goes back to Daniel 9 and the use of Daniel 9 in the Second Temple period in Daniel 9 it says that the Exile will not only last for 70 years as Jeremiah said but it will be seventy times seven years which is like a kind of mega Jubilee and that means there's a 490 year exile and whenever you think Daniel was written if it's being edited or put together under the Maccabean prices in the second century BC then the assumption is and you can see this in Jubilees you can see it in Qumran you can see it in several different texts and all the way on to Josephus that people are calculating when will this 490 year period because until that time then the Messiah won't come then the pagans will still be ruling over us so you have as Rene a Maya both saying we are in our own land but we are slaves in our own life and this is the point that the time after some Jews return from Babylon they did return time after that return was an ambiguous time from some points of view they had returned they were rebuilding the temple but if you read zechariah if you read happy.i if you read Malachi it is a deeply ambiguous time and Zachariah and Malachi pick up the prophecies of Isaiah and Ezekiel which say that Israel's God will return to the temple and they say that that hasn't happened yet we're still waiting for that that's why the priests are bored in Malachi because why are we bothering doing this stuff just bring any old chief it doesn't matter and Malachi says no the Lord whom you seek will suddenly come to his temple in other words there is this strong sense of waiting for the final fulfillment of Isaiah and Jeremiah and Ezekiel and the whole of the second temple theories like that the resistance to this comes I think from those who grew up as I grew up believing in a great the Old Testament is sort of back there and is full of promises and types and shadows and then some in totally new happens with Jesus whereas you only have to read the first page of Matthew or the first two pages of Luke or the first page of John to see that all the Gospels in their own way are saying this is where the great story of Israel was going and for Matthew it's very clear a brand David exile Messiah that's how to tell the story the key thing is then the end of Deuteronomy Deuteronomy from 26 through to the end but particularly 28 29 30 and then 32 and we know the Deuteronomy is being read this way in the first century from all sorts of different bits of evidence not these Josephus and then the fusion of Deuteronomy with Daniel 9 in many readings is to say that the Deuteronomic scheme is that Israel will sin will commit idolatry will be sent into exile and then one day you draw me 30 God will circumcise their hearts that they will love him and return to him and he who returned to them and then Deuteronomy 32 is a kind of advance warning of the whole history of Israel and Josephus very interestingly as well as saying that the Jews were incited to war in the middle of the first century by a book he refers to which I'm pretty sure must be Daniel he also says the Deuteronomy 32 is the story that we're still living in he says this is a prophecy of events which are being fulfilled in our own time and the early Christians do not say no no no let's not think about historical fulfillment let's think about God breaking in the dream time take the youth they plug into that Deuteronomic and Daniel shaped expectation that's the simplest most basic way I can say it but in chapter 2 of the FG I've set it out as fully as I have ever dared do some people grumble about the length of the book and the answer to that I'm afraid is if you see the kind of flack that I've had with previous attempts the only way to get the case on the table is to go through text after text after text one things I found frustrating about some of the reviewers is that they actually aren't critiquing that book they're critiquing earlier first attempts where I was summarizing so the debate continues yeah one of the things that that also came up in a review by Larry Hurtado was that in your book you've you've you've said on a number of occasions that you've repeatedly accounted for Paul's reworking of Israel by ascribing to the Jewish people a failure to be a light to the nation to the nation's a selfish grasping after that elect status for themselves but then Hurtado says that but to my knowledge Paul's only expression of disappointment with this Jewish kinfolk have to do with their unbelief in or opposition to Jesus in the gospel so for him it seems that for Paul it was Jesus and the gospel that produced a question of whether Israel had fallen you're apparently a not a fugitive prior failure of Israel as the elect people so what would you say to that that that as one would expect from Larry hat out of that shrewd and interesting criticism however I would go back to Romans 2 and in Romans 2 and I have a very particular take on rooms too as as my readers will know and there's a whole long essay on it in the book fräulein perspectives and what one of them causing God's name to be eaten disrepute as it then what exactly but that the point then is that when Paul is critiquing his Jewish kinsmen in Romans 2 he isn't saying this as a new criticism he is actually quoting from Isaiah and also an allusion to the Ezekiel because what he has said in 2:17 following this is really really critical for understanding the whole sequence aborted Rome is that the Jew believes himself caused to be a teacher of the teacher of babes having the form of knowledge and truth in the law the one who is supposed to be teaching the world in other words the Jews vocation is to be as in Isaiah 49 a light to the nation's but as in Isaiah again and that's the whole point why he whining quotes this line in chapter 2 verse 20 for the name of God is actually steamed among the nation's because of you in other words the the prophets themselves said that Israel's vocation to be the royal priesthood to be the light of the nation's has gone horribly wrong and that's etched into all the prophets but particularly Isaiah and Jeremiah and Ezekiel Israel is ashamed among the nation's support is not there saying and he isn't saying in Romans 9 either anything which the average well-educated Jews would disagree with they would say yet the prophets did say that but somehow we still have this calling and Paul finds himself held between theirs now it's perfectly true but what then happens is the Paul sees the prophetic pretty of the people of God building to a height in the rejection of Jesus but you can see in Romans 9 and 10 layer upon layer their unbelief in Jesus as the quintessential moment of their turning away from vocation and the end of romans 2 of the beginning of romans three passages which are often glossed over in christian readings which just say well romans 1:18 to 3:20 it's just saying all of sin and the rest of that is just some detail no it isn't paul is picking off the idea that god made a covenant with israel and that that was god's chosen way of rescuing the world so that the key passage then in romans 3 21 to 26 about the death of jesus is not simply everyone sinned God had to punish somebody happened to be Jesus oh now it's all right no it's God chose to promise to save the world through Israel Israel as a whole has let him down Jesus was offered the faithful obedience culminating in his death as influence to through which God has been faithful to his promise now there is justification available for Jew and Gentile alike that is absolutely central and I think what Larry may be doing I may need to reset the argument yet again but he is he is quite right to draw attention to all screwy to the fact they haven't believed in Jesus but it goes back behind that to the prophetic critique which is focused there but also which you can see I think in in Galatians as well yeah that's good one of the other themes that that comes up in your book and I think has has gained momentum in recent scholarship on Paul is the idea of participation and you said in your Paul's recent interpreters book that Protestant interpretations basically fall into either following Calvin which stresses continuity between the Old Testament the New Testament or Luther which highlights discontinuity and so one of the one of the things that that comes up in thinking about like participation then as a as a theme that Protestants are coming into now why do you think that that Protestants have had such a hard time grappling with participation in Paul and could you briefly define what that is well a brief definition is difficult because it's so much under discussion and basically we don't have good language for it and Sanders said this in his big work on Paul in 1977 is absolutely right where he said that it looks as though this what what I would call participation is pretty central to what Paul is saying but that we today don't have very good categories and if we try and force Paul into categories that make sense to us then that is really problematic I would rather go back to the whole of Israel Scriptures and to look at the way in which the world narrative gets focused onto this one family and then from time to time the narrative of this one family gets focused on two specific people whether it's a Moses or Joshua or then certain prophets with them particularly the kings and then particularly in the Psalms and in Isaiah when you get this focus of the servant who somehow is Israel but also stands in for Israel who does for Israel what Israel can't do for itself and so on and I think a great deal goes back to that sort of insight which some people have tried to talk about in terms of corporate personality and others have come back and said no no no that's a rather dodgy astrological category we don't really think that works but these are modern attempts to put a label on a phenomenon which is there and won't go away and which emerges of course in for and in John in terms of the fall in terms of Crysta in the Messiah in the Lord and in John very much in John 17 the high priestly passage I and them and thou in me and so on now a lot of this of course then turns out this complexify the whole issue to the temple language in the temple heaven and earth come together God and humans come together God and Israel come together and the early Christians reach for the temple category to understand who Jesus is that he's somebody very much in John this in whom heaven and earth come together at last Paul says much the same thing from different angles and then the Spirit is the one who affects that in Jesus people so it isn't that you can set up a participating category and just make it do everything you have to say this is a label for narratives within the Jewish world narratives about the king and the people and about the destiny of the people being fulfilled in the King narratives also about God in Israel and then what we find in Paul is that the king in Israel story and the God in the world story somehow come rushing together so that for instance one of the meanings of that blessed word Hillis tyrion famous word with paul uses in romans 3 which we sometimes translators as means of attainment or place of atonement or something it's the mercy seat and the mercy seat in the old Tabernacle was where God met with the people and it looks to me as though in Romans 3 which many think is the art of Paul I'm not sure about that but there Paul is telling the story of God he's telling the story of Israel and they come together in the Messiah and that phrase there in the Messiah the redemption which is an Christo which is in the Messiah is a Redemption which God is accomplishing by his presence in the Messiah but also in the Messiah all those who are his people are summed up so that what is true of him is true of them as in Romans 6 7 and 8 now I could go on but this is a way of saying these labels need to be cashed out in terms of the narratives we need to remind ourselves what those narratives are of God narrative the Israel narrative the human narrative and they're all coming together so another question that they came up from reading both the Paul debate and your your big book and Paul's recent interpreters is is this whole well that there are new iterations of it but the apocalyptic Paul movement and that and this is something that's clearly caught your attention and of all the various kinds of theories about Paul out there would why has this become a focus for you of critique what do you think's at stake in that discussion this is a very complicated one if anyone's interested in it I would urge them to read part two of four on these reasons interpreters because I found that in order to get at what's really going on here I had to track it back to like 19th century German use of apocalyptic where apocalyptic in late nineteenth century German and a new British theology was this dark nasty thing that some Jews have got into which thankfully the gospel freed is from then Albert rights have turned all that around it it never elliptic is where it's at and that's what Jesus is about and that's what all is about and already the thing was getting this shaken because people were not actually studying first Enoch or fourth Ezra or some of the great apocalyptic so-called writings of the period and I want to stress apocalyptic is that word apocalyptic is best used as a label for a literary genre which is to do with revelations of heavenly truths being revealed of future truths being revealed and and all of that and it goes with ancient Jewish mysticism we're at a time when many were puzzled because God didn't seem to have done what he was going to do and the idea that through prayer and fasting you might be given a vision or a strange angelic revelation was a way of getting some idea at least of what was going on ahead of the time when everything would be finally revealed now so the word apocalyptic then went from being the bad bit of Judaism which we didn't really like and were trying to avoid and then you know the little apocalypse in Martha that's very dodgy because that stuff of the text of mama see Jesus on that it's switched suddenly through the events of the first half of the 20th century in which the whole world seemed to be exploding through two world wars and the Holocaust it suddenly went to being the good thing this is about God breaking in and doing a new thing that's what we need we're giving up on the idea of progressive continuity of the thing helium or Marx's visions you have to track it back to water Benjamin in the 1930s and 1940s Benjamin as quintessential German Jewish character of the time who had believed in some sort of the Gillian Marxism that the world was actually getting where it ought to be going and then he saw that dream collapsing because of the pact between Hitler and Stalin and suddenly the only hope would be that all of these ideas of progress would be done away with them something totally new would happen that was a secular Jewish idea in Germany and that is imported what then happened was that that was seized on by German scholars like a specimen to say yeah apocalyptic is the mother of Christian theologians is God putting the world right doing a new thing what they are reacting against however is not ancient Jewish views of God working in history but 19th century the Gillian views of a progress progressive revelation for steady-state a lot of the pushback against my reading of all in the Gospels has come from people who are actually reacting against her Gillian schemes and assuming that that's what I'm talking about that this is complicated because some people who tried to do salvation history in the 19th century were basically seeing a sort of progressive revelation a smooth progress upwards towards the light I have never said anything like that and it's a mistake to critique me as I was saying that what then is going on a quite different movement is that in modern American scholarship with Lou Martin who died recently sadly as a center of it but with particularly one of his students Beverly Aventa another of his students Marty de Bourgh and then in quite different register but also part of the same team as it worked out this Campbell not usually do and they are basically saying if we take this apocalyptic reading of all then not only do we not need salvation history and all of that we don't even according to Campbell need the traditional doctrine of justification indeed Campbell says you've got to choose between the two now it seems to me at this point what we desperately need is again a historical understanding of what apocalyptic literature apocalyptic both forms if there were such things actually were like in the first century and unless we enter it back there we're stuck there's a book about to come out by Jamie Davis who's now teaching in Bristol on the affiliative context of Paul because he's saying hey look if if we a calling for an apocalyptic then he's a first century Christian apocalypses we know others like that what about the book of Revelation that's the first century Christian apocalypse of enemies let's see how that works and he's showing that the more you put Paul's apocalyptic gospel into its first century apocalyptic context it doesn't mean what people mean when they wave that flag around and that flag is being way in the service of some ideologies right now in the service of some ecclesiology Zinn which all you have to do is use the word of Bach elliptic and then you are cut free from history you don't have to do history Paul doesn't have to belong in history and you don't have to worry about history now because just God doing a new thing now of course many people are much more sophisticated than that but that's where battle is joined right now and again we need history that's the answer otherwise it's all speculation up in there yes it sounds like we're back at that sort of continuity just can't do any question so I'd like to step back from some of the technical discussion about your books and and ask if you could just offer for those who are you know working in the church or in business what are some of the kind of key connections for you between what you're doing in your scholarship and the life of the church and let's say the life in the marketplace as well yeah well again huge question obviously as you go into my own books but a little book of mine which came out last year called surprised by Scripture has several reflections on how this meaning of the New Testament impacts on our culture today a couple of years before that there was a book called creation power and truth in which I set out by briefly some reflections on that and then I've got another book which I've just on the proofs for which will be in a month or two that's called God in public and that is doing exactly what you're asked trying to relate what I'm seeing in the New Testament to a vision of real public life today and I think the danger is that we assume that we can leave the structures of the way we look at the world intact and simply get some ideas from Paul about how to be a slightly better Christian in the workplace or whatever it may be now much better to do that than not to do that but it seems to me that Western society at the moment is in a major crisis and we are I've been reading some the some of the stuff recently about the courses a third world war and people who are writing about that are saying that 100 years ago so many of people in European society we're just wandering along they were sleepwalking into that amazing crisis they have no idea what they were getting into they assumed that their world was basically all right and all they had to do was tinker with a few things and have the orbital warp here and there and that would sort it out and things could go on but we're doing that today and this is particularly for instance and that when the so-called Arab Spring happened four years ago the Western politicians journalists all said oh isn't that nice the ads are growing up and they're all going to be nice questions Democrats like us so we just have to help them topple a few tolerance and there's a lot we all right but it's just amazingly naive the trouble is that what you find in the New Testament is a robust Christian political theology which would critique all our various ways of going about things which we just assumed because we're modern Westerners will write and what we need to do is to inhabit the story of the Gospels and fall and revelations or in such a way that we realize that the Enlightenment which gave us our modern settlement with all its creaking acidic sweetness the Enlightenment is a parody of Christian truth the Enlightenment says world history rumbles along in darkness and superstition and now suddenly we have a great light and as long as we all get on board with this everything will be okay and the answer is look at the refugees washing up literally on our shores right now everything is not okay the reason we can't solve those problems is that we had no narrative within which those problems would even occur let alone needs to be addressed and in a sense we've been living in a bubble in Europe and America and the bubble is now bursting and we do not know what to do about that and we urgently need to get back to some biblical rootedness which is of asking God which is about God's purpose to run the world through wise humans but to run the world through wise humans who he will call to account and here's a whole Christian political theology waiting to be recovered people like Oliver a Donovan have been banging about on about this for years but people tend not to listen because either it just goes over their head they're not into that or they think well that may be very nice to think about for a minute but let's just go back to doing things the way we normally do and so I want to say we've got to think big we've got to think of those large issues but at the same time we've got to think small and local because the New Testaments again and again remember what Peter said to fall in Galatians - the one thing he said was remember the poor and when you see in the Gospels as well again and again Jesus talking about the poor and remembering the poor and poor in acts the last thing he says in his address to the elders at Ephesus is remember the words of the Lord Jesus remember the floor because Jesus said it's more blessed to give than to receive and this comes through again and again in the New Testament and most Christians today in the Western world think yeah that's okay we'll do our business we'll make lots of money and then we'll give some handouts here and there but actually no society needs to be reordered around the needs of the weakest in the early church the Roman emperors didn't know very much about what the prophetic movement was the news and nuisance because among other things the bishops kept on banging on about the needs of the poor I wish today's bishops were known to the same thing many of them are so I think we've got to think big about our big structures and think about the meaning of the kingdom of God for Western society as a whole and we've got to think local and small about what the actual needs are of the forests of the poor not least the people are washing up on our shoes I think for a lot of people when you talk about inhabiting a narrative inhabiting a different worldview that's that's an unusual way of talking about their engagement with Scripture because a lot of people I say my classes a lot they've they've grown up with a life lessons approach to scripture which is that you go to scripture and it has a series of life lessons how how does one go about engaging Scripture as a narrative and then what does it mean to live out of a narrative yeah that's a great question and sorry I'm going to refer to another of my books which is scripture and the authority of God where I go into exactly this question because I believe the Bible is authoritative but it is authoritative as what it is not as what we can turn it into and as what it is is a great narrative Genesis to Revelation presents itself as the store of God and creation the story which then focuses on Israel's and focuses on Jesus which then opens up by the spirit to include God's people and when you look at the end of the narrative you see that's where we should be Amy the danger with the life lesson let me say I would much much rather people looked at the Bible every day for life lessons them that they looked at the thoughts of Chairman Mao or The Times newspaper or whatever for life lessons and with them the Bible is a little bit of commentary on the site much better to go to the Bible you know some years ago when teenagers are wearing the WWJD bracelet what would Jesus do I was in a conversation with some folks saying oh you know this is so bad because this is just moralism and how can my teenagers learn everything if they're just thinking what would you and I said I had I had four teenagers at the time I said I wish my teenagers would ask at least once a week Jesus do I think they're asking what were their fears do what work other people do but at least that's and so I'm not knocking that it's if the glass is half-full that's fine but if the narrative you're living in implicitly says the point is to keep your nose clean more or less while you're going on at the moment because one day we'll die and then our souls will go to a disembodied heaven the answer is no you're living in the wrong story or he will distort your humanists in the present and destroy what you ought to be doing in God's world Ephesians 1:10 tells you the answer simply God's plan is to sum up in the Messiah all things in heaven and on earth in him and we are working towards that the coming together of heaven and earth not their separation and it's like being an actor in a play improvising in a play where the actors have to know what the end is that they're improvising towards and if they think of the wrong ending then they're going to be saying the wrong stuff and doing the wrong stuff in the process and it seems like you've been sort of doing some improvising recently I've seen some of your debates that are not debates but discussions you've been having in places like Google and talking with Peter Thiel the founder of PayPal and in other businesses so what interests you about that space right now and what is it that it how has your study of Scripture resource to you to engage with a tech company like Google well it's fascinating I didn't expect that invitation but I was in San Francisco for some other reasons last May made you memory was and I got this call would you come and talk to Hoover's actives and then somebody who knew Peter Thiel said he would really like to debate you we he and I actually had debated before a year or two before and we'd really got on well but hadn't had time to explore all the issues because the question really is what should we be doing and how can these high tech industries or any other industries help what we should be doing at least in America including in California lots of people really do want to say does the church have anything to say about this and it seems to me that if one is asked that question one must to use the American did you step up to the plate otherwise shame on us if we say no no no we're just going to teach you to say your prayers then you know well letting the case go by default so it for when I was asked that question which was a surprise to me but well I do believe in new creation and I do believe that what we do in the present can in the mercy of God and in the power of the Spirit actually be part of course new creation I believe that excuse that noise that's an email coming in I believe that when when Jesus came out of the tomb on Easter morning new creation actually began new creation was launched then and there and that what Jesus followers do in the power of the Spirit isn't simply to build the kingdom of God by their own efforts no God builds God's kingdom but we do start here and now which will count or the kingdom which will bring justice and mercy and wisdom and peace and love into God's world so that when God finally does what is going to what he's going to do it probably seemed that all that we have done in the present is actually part of that even that we didn't see how and that has to apply to technology and Peter Thiel has all sorts of other things as well about how to cope with the rise of population medicine advances then we'll cure lots of diseases and we may even cure old age he's thinking what sort of a world might might we be looking at and I want to say unless the church is prepared to wrestle with those questions with the people who are asking them and who maybe have the financial clout to work on them then again shame on us do we just want to go back and live in the 1950s or 1960s if God is doing new things and if our world is addressing new questions I really believe that the gospel of new creation in Christ and by the spirit has to be out there matching them stride for stride in wrestling in business so just I'd like to wrap up the discussion but just as a final follow-up to that how how would you suggest then that people prepare themselves and to engage with those kinds of heart questions what sort of steps that they can take to - to begin to inhabit have it a narrative biblical worldview that would allow them to address the future questions I often when I speak particular I speak gatherings where there's lots of young people people come up with me offers I I see all these things where do I start what can I do and I want to say vocation is a strange thing and God has given you gifts and if you pray and give your whole personality to God Romans Beaumont present your whole selves to God then God will shape you God will take bits and pieces of gifts that maybe you were any heart for where you had and will develop them and they'll be in quite different ways and some people have great gifts in the engineering sphere that wouldn't be me for once but seconds other people have great gifts in the artistic sphere I dabble in music but I'm not an artist at all it's wonderful when people develop under the power of the Spirit the gifts that they've been given knowing that larger narrative so the thing is to be soaked in the larger narrative read the Bible be read in Genesis to Revelation read it fast read it as if it was talking walk or something like that or Harry Potter you know just zoom through it get the big picture you can go back and study the details but think of it as a narrative a narrative climaxing in Jesus a narrative by the spirit including you you are caught up on stage to be an actor in this play which is going to this go now then wisely with help from maybe a spiritual director or wise friends or people who know you well try to discern what gifts you have which will then be useful perhaps within that narrative and vocation is always a perhaps it Attili the beginning of your life maybe I'm supposed to do this perhaps I'm called in this direction and there will be lots of false starts because our own pride gets muddled up and we make mistakes God is God God is gracious and God will use people's talents in ways the perhaps they would never imagine and often half the stuff that we do for the kingdom of God we will never know in this life anyway it'll only be later we will discover but I would say last thing I would say go back to the beginning of the Sermon on the Mount and read it like this it's not better to the poor but is the meat best for the mourners because they have good people and God is going to be nice too it's these are the people through whom God is blessing the world that the the hungry for justice people the people who are not content with the way things are and grieve over it but people who are determined to be peacemakers and then it's the business of the royal priesthood we are called to be the royal priesthood to sum up the worship of creation and to be God's agents in the world the attitudes like that and pray for wisdom to see where you belong on that map I think that's a good note to end on and professor writing 1 just 1 thank you for taking the time and I want to remind everyone who's who's watching to check out the books that we've discussed the Paul debate by Baylor University Press also available through s vck and of course Paul in the faithfulness of God and Paul's recent interpreters through fortress and s vck offices available on her website WTC theology that work that you pay right yeah could I just add one more thing because the people with whom I'm working on this project wouldn't forgive me if I didn't there's a set of online courses which are now available coming and that's at www.mptv.org and they're available now and there's more coming and if anyone for whatever reason can't actually afford because they're run by an American company that has to discover its cost etc then there are coupons available and there's a way to write into that so if we could if people could join in with that as well okay perfect thanks so much for your time and we appreciate you joining us thank you xxx good to be with you thank you you

Channel: WTC Theology

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Keywords: Bible, NT Wright, Tom Wright, WTC Theology, Paul and the Faithfulness of God, The Paul Debate, Theology, Study, Books, Author

Id: Ww84s1B7K9k

Length: 56min 31sec (3391 seconds)

Published: Fri Feb 05 2016