Panel | N. T. Wright, Marianne Meye Thompson, and Tommy Givens

[Music] [Music] what we're going to do is have a conversation i want to introduce two of fuller's faculty who are going to take a few minutes just to briefly respond to what thomas shared then they're we're going to share in some conversation together and then we will eventually also include an opportunity to interact with your questions which you can text and which will ultimately be questions that will appear up on the screen so let me first introduce mary and mai thompson she's the george eldon lad professor of new testament at fuller she's been a part of our faculty since 1985. a very uh respected and beloved person and a person whose scholarship in the new testament especially in the gospel of john has been uh very very significant tommy givens a much newer part of our faculty professor assistant professor of new testament also someone who in a very short period of time has left a very significant mark on the lives of students that he's touched and his work is likewise in the new testament so we have an opportunity first to just hear briefly from them as they respond and interact a little bit with what tom has just shared and then we'll have some conversation together so marianne let me ask you if you would please go first uh let me just begin by saying thank you for being with us and uh you will probably not remember this but in 2001 i wrote you an email thanking you for two different books on jesus one was the book you had co-written with marcus borg which i was using in a master's class and one was jesus and the victory of god which i was using in a doctoral seminar and and and just to say thank you for the ways that your historically sensitive work had made it possible for many of us to read the gospels anew with passion and it was a great contribution and and i feel much the same way tonight about the way you have helped us to read paula fresh so thank you first a story and then a kind of a question about well a few years ago when i was in college my first uh uh professor of new testament was gordon fee and gordon once said in class in the context of a class on paul i think or new testament theology if i could only have two epistles from paul or maybe the new testament i would take galatians and philemon galatians because it shows you what the gospel is and philemon because it shows you it works and i have always remembered this but it dawned on me recently i remembered it without actually having any idea of what he probably meant when he said that and in my mind i probably thought he meant something like the gospel tells us how we get saved and philemon tells us you know what that that we that we were reconciled to each other but it had never occurred to me i think to see the connection so closely or to think that galatians also told us both aspects of the story the way philemon told us both aspects of the story and you highlight that well in your book when you talk about philemon i think what what i am interested to maybe get you to talk a little bit more about is the idea that you say paul effectively invented christian theology and i think we could probably add um to characterize your position for for community formation for community stability for the life of the community now invented as a what a deliberately provocative word i suspect that's a strong claim you're staking as is the the use of the term theology itself that what he invents is theology because i think a number of times we read in books on paul you know he's not a systematic theologian sure he did some pastoral theology and so on so i wonder i'm thinking of a couple of things one is how much it matters or could you talk a little bit more about the idea that paul invented this and i'm thinking for example of you talk about monotheism election and eschatology in many ways you could argue that jesus himself addresses each of those issues in ways that get him in trouble and that could seem to be dangerous nonsense when he talks about ways in which the people of god is reconfigured or when paul talks about monotheism um you yourself build on the work of uh richard bockham and larry hurtado and martin hengel and others who say you know before paul ever wrote a word there had been an explosion in christological thought so that they were already rethinking categories of monotheism and then i think about letters like hebrews which is doing something not unlike what paul is doing um or even first peter which is telling a story about uh the way what it means to live in christ and so i'm thinking of both the before and the after paul and even into the apostolic fathers you know did they forget everything paul said did how do they remember it how does that shape them but it's just a way of of asking the question when you say invented christian theology or the first christian theologian where are you sort of willing to let that bleed you know into the past and into the future and and gather up some strands of what other christians were already struggling to do did paul just do it better you know you talk about paul in his jewish and his pagan context and no one was doing this but were christians doing it you know and and how does paul fit into that scenario so maybe we can get some chance to get you to talk about that invent it and then exactly what it is that he invented when he invented theology nice question you always respond to the phrase i couldn't remember how he does yeah thank you mary ann that that's that's um i confess i had completely forgotten that email from 2001 but it's nice with all kinds of warnings from westminster abbey i think about how this wasn't official or anything yeah yeah yeah quite likely um when i read paul and read other writers both before him and after him um and it may just be because i've studied paul intensively and i haven't studied say first peter as intensively as i've started to say romans um but even hebrews which i think is a brilliant piece of writing an extraordinary piece of writing i think paul is a towering intellect on a par with i would say plato or aristotle um in that he's pulling to that was a good squeal that was exactly what we needed just then um yeah yeah let's hear it from um the the the um uh the sense of the range and the depth and the and the subtlety of his biblical use etc etc is just massive and i don't think intellects like that come along very often and i i don't think it would be plausible to say that there were unknown figures prior to paul who were doing exactly this kind of thing um yes jesus of course is in his parables in his teachings in what he's doing he is addressing those issues of what's got up to now what is the kingdom of god looking like but i don't think he is in the same way um urging people to a particular task in the way that paul is urging his community it's like you know jesus never addressed the issue of circumcision that's just one example but but um it you don't need to until you're out there in the in the gentile world and and paul is faced with a new challenge of holding together and sanctifying this very different community that though i believe jesus envisaged that there would be such a community jesus wasn't doing that yet he was doing something very bound in his into his own particular agenda so in terms of paul's immediate predecessors yes it's perfectly possible because actually one of the interesting things and i don't think i've said this tonight and anything i'll say tomorrow necessarily is that when paul is talking about his very high christology it doesn't seem to be controversial he never has to sort of argue it or make a fuss about it or say now some of you haven't quite grasped this it seems to be common coin one god one lord etc and that means yes there had been an explosion already what i think he invented and are sick by that word at least tonight for the sake of argument keep you awake um is um the theology as a as a task as an activity this challenge to a community um to be renewed in mind so that thus and only thus could they grasp this so i mean he is then gathering up stuff that was already going on exegesis that was going on at least from jesus on the road to emmaus you know in interpreting all the scriptures concerning himself so in a sense paul is the heir of that but he's drawing it together and shaping it as an agenda as a task as a way of life for a community and i really do think that as far as we know is new um so that his interlocutors in antioch in the incident recorded in galatians i think he would say their real problem is they haven't started to think christianly they're just winging it with bits and pieces of this and that in terms of his successors um i mean yes hebrews yes first peter yes revelation in a very different mode but very rich theology but um i think they are continuing a work which paul is the pioneer for um one of the sort of disappointments that i have when i read say ignatius of antioch i have a huge respect for ignatius of antioch but but you know he's intellectually he's just not on the not in the same league at all he's a wonderful faithful wise interesting guy but but he's not doing the same kind of multi-layered subtle stuff and i think the other thing is in terms of the engagement that paul seems to be modeling and taking forward um something which is hugely interesting in terms of as he says taking every thought captive to obey christ i i just don't think that's as far as we can tell going on before and it's because he's earthing this community in this task that he's able actually to look and paul knew the world of ancient philosophy he lived in tarsus which is one of its main centers um so he's able to engage with stoic ideas he's able to engage with what's going on on the street and with political and cultural ideas as well i don't know that anyone before paul is really articulating the gospel in such a way that it is absolutely in your face to caesar in the way that i think it is in a subtle way not not in a kind of a low grade way but but in in a sort of outflanking way and that jesus is lord um and caesar isn't you know i i not i say not in a cheap and cheerful way but in quite a subtle and interesting way and i think these are all part of what paul would see as the theological task when people say he isn't a systematic theologian that's a kind of a mantra by the way in new testament studies it's one of the entry tickets that you have to say when you sign on as a member of sbl paul was not a systematic okay you're in you'll do um and and what that what that means is we learned some theology in sunday school and it was very neat and packaged and then we started to study paul in college and it was much more interesting than that so it's basically a way of saying we've escaped from the little box before but actually paul is a huge massive sprawling thinker but when you get into his world the stuff joins up in the most amazing way and it seems to me some of the greatest systematic theologians um in many traditions have done what paul did lots and lots of occasional pieces which nevertheless bear witness to i was talking about leslie knew again with somebody today at lunchtime and leslie never wrote a systematic theology but leslie was a coherent thinker on many fronts i think paul is doing that kind of thing tommy let's have an opportunity to hear from you thank you and uh similar thanks for being with us and the presentation tonight and in my case i feel like i owe a special uh word of thanks because i've grown up in some ways as a christian under your influence so i was exposed to you relatively early in seminary and it's been life-giving it's also caused me a hell of a lot of trouble me too so i'm still picking up some of the pieces i want to direct your attention to two subjects that you touched on in various ways in your presentation judaism and politics and my intent here is to offer little critical pushback but anticipating because i know where you're coming from how you might elaborate what you've said first judaism uh as you know well and you mentioned bart several times carl bart in your presentation uh christians have made a life out of building their account of god and their life together on the backs of jews and you've given us various gestures towards the ways in which paul remains a jew in which paul is appealing to the jewish past to the fulfillment of the jewish prophets and yet at the same time there is an abiding concern to distinguish what paul is doing from judaism and you've acknowledged that there's a variety of judaisms going on and whatnot but the reason i think this is so significant is that and this is going to flow into the politics question uh this uh sort of we are the new people of god and everything that we have gained we gained at the loss of the jews or so it has been and so much of the christian reception of paul has generated a massive massive political fallout not only against jews in particular but also giving whole societies a sense of being the new israel this is part of our own history here in north america your own from great britain and a sense that we somehow embody exclusively the people of god having disinherited the jews from that and as a result uh possessing a sort of knowledge of god that allows us to police the world to conform it to our image because we are now the one people of god so how do we read paul so as to subvert this kind of violent political legacy that's a question that i'd love for you to respond to it flows into the politics question because as you probably know we're in the midst of a significant immigration debate uh here in the u.s and some of us advocating strongly for a change in law that would provide much more favorable conditions for people who have migrated to this country from various parts of the world but especially from latin america and part of the reason that has been so difficult is that it seems that the society here in the u.s has come to believe itself entitled to a set of goods that we should protect against those who are coming from without and so it has made life in many ways living hell for immigrants who are not a part of the one nation under god here in the u.s so politically speaking you talked about how unlike much of what we have been saying about paul since the 16th century and before there is a strong political edge to what paul is saying relative to roman imperial authority and there's also a political nature to the sort of community that he's in the business of forming by the power of this gospel that he is claiming it's very popular today we're all uh very quick to be anti-empire you know we're anti-us empire we're enlightened this sort of thing but i think that's much too easy and paul is in the business of a very subtle kind of politics it seems to me so you talk about how this gospel of paul's has political ramifications at all levels and i wonder if you might elaborate a little bit on that so that we wouldn't find ourselves playing into a sort of political gospel that simply reinforces the existing structures of society today and claims them for christ paul it seems to me to be is much more subversive than that and this is where maybe you could say a little bit about how the cross of jesus and what that means for how we relate to those who threaten us lies at the very heart of the politics of paul's gospel wow thank you great questions and at the the super questions thank you very much and the the i'm afraid the short answer and as you will know is um the chapter 12 of the book is all about the political issue and chapter i mean the reason i say that is this that it'll be impossible in the next two or three minutes for me to nuance exactly as i would wish to all the fine-tuning that would really be required for those splendid questions and in chapter 15 i've struggled as best i can with the first of your questions the question about paul and um his jewish world and how all that plays out and obviously again the short poor line answer to that one is romans 9 to 11. and um it does seem to me i mean let's put it like this if paul had not believed that the community that believed in jesus was the single family that god promised to abraham then he really made a big blunder in the way that he wrote galatians 3 or romans 4 or whatever if he believed that actually yeah the jews were doing their own thing and we were doing something quite different he should just have said then why you guys are talking about abraham because that's irrelevant and some people would have liked him to have said that and here's the oddity about the whole sort of church and the jews thing if you talk about fulfillment from some points of view you actually affirming the goodness and god-givenness of the jewish traditions and then you're saying and god has brought these to this surprising fulfillment and we are grateful for that if you don't do that and you say um no we are doing something completely different then what you're effectively doing is inventing a non-jewish sort of religion which quickly history shows non-jewish sorts of religion become anti-jewish sorts of religion um so you're kind of damned if you and damned if you don't um the the the critical move which i think is much easier for us to see now because we have the dead sea scrolls is to say that throughout the second temple period there were many jewish movements who were claiming explicitly or implicitly that god was renewing the covenant with them and not elsewhere um when we had the discussion at the international spl meeting last year and we we hit this point with discussion between marty deboer and marcus bockmuel with myself sort of in between the two marcus bocknell said remarkably he said well qumran was super sessionist he said um you know the the the balcony revolt was supersessionist because it's claiming that bark fire is the messiah and unless you follow him you're not being a true jew and then he even said the mishna is super sessionist because it's saying this is what judaism is now to look like and anyone who thinks it looks differently you know mishnah sanhedrin 10 1 you've got all israel has a share in the age to come except accept accept except people who say this do that you know so john levenson says at one point i think i quote him in the book that the most jewish thing about early christianity is its supersessionism um and i think that that's an important paradox to grasp onto because at that time lots of people are saying god is renewing the covenant with us and that means that well either he is or he isn't and if we're right then that means this is where it's all happening and we we are worried about other jews who aren't in and we wish they would come and join us and i think that's exactly where paul is starting in romans 9. if this isn't the case why his tears in romans 9 why his heart's desire and prayer for them in romans 10. he could have said but i realized i shouldn't pray that prayer because it's silly or something so you have to wrestle with that now here's the problem the the the the situation you describe i think came out well partly under constantine i know it's fashionable in america to not constant time but as you said yourself about other things that's just too cheap and cheerful history is more complicated you know face it if you've been persecuted out of your skulls for 250 years and then the emperor comes and says to you actually there's rather a lot of you maybe we better allow you to be an official religion or something you're not going to say oh no please go on persecuting this because it's so much more authentic for us to be a beleaguered minority you know you know you're gonna say okay this is gonna be difficult we're not sure we're gonna manage it we'll make some mistakes but we'll give it a go and that's what they did now but ever since then um that question of if we're right then the jews are wrong so let's get rid of them um that got traction because the church forgot romans 9 to 11 and i think if you go back through the exegetical tradition you will see that romans 9 11 was either forgotten or misused as a bit of dogma about um election or something rather than actually wrestling with the issue paul's wrestling with and then the situation you describe in terms of nations considering themselves to be the chosen people arises particularly with 17th and 18th century post-millennialism it seems to me and it's actually a peculiarly modern phenomenon it may have happened before but i think it was particularly in the modern period and then it gets special traction from the enlightenment and the nations that are founded on enlightenment i.e america and france particularly modern germany to a lesser extent they actually say we are now the enlightened ones and you put together the post-millennial sense of we are the new israel with the enlightenment sense of we are the superior ones because we're enlightened and then you have big trouble and that does play out in precisely into the political issues you're talking about but as we unpick that and see all the strands by which we've got into the models that we've got to it seems to me that's when we have to go back to the first century and say there isn't a genealogy that goes straight from paul into this stuff yes we have to take responsibility for where we've got to but that doesn't mean we have to play fast and loose with what paul is actually saying in order to fiddle those books to correct our current mistakes they need correcting some are quite quite else last remark but this conversation will be on a long time obviously but this is an important remark in the so-called new perspective on paul since the 70s we have learned that paul was addressing first century questions not 16th century ones and that's very hard for some people to get hold of now that we've discovered that paul is relevant politically as well there's a real danger we will make the same mistake and hence some of the easy cheap and cheerful anti-empire things of imagining that if paul is writing about politics he's writing about our politics he isn't paul was innocent of the left right spectrum that we think about paul paul was you know he just they just didn't live in that world and we need to examine much more closely how their political structures and power structures worked in order to see what purchase paul's critique had there and there i fully agree with you that for paul to put the cross in the middle of the picture is just explosive the cross was a weapon of imperial oppression um and to take that and to say that actually it's the sign of the kingdom of god um that goes on and on and on into all kinds of other issues we could go on but that's probably yeah we want to save some time for the audience to be able to ask some questions but let me just be sure that we've got another little piece of what you've said tonight clear before we go on because it seems so foundational to what you're going to continue to say you've talked about paul as the inventor of christian theology and you've talked at a number of points about the significance of mind of the transformation of our mind like uh the re-reading of history through the 16th century rather than the first century i want to be sure that we're hearing your use of mind not through the 18th century but through the first century so when you say paul is calling us to the transformation of our minds what does that mean especially i'm thinking of how easy it is in a context in which in a post-modern world the critique of mind and of the emptiness and and limitations of reason are so much at stake it seems particularly important that we understand what it is that's actually happening is your uh call or paul's call to us an intellectual call of reason or is it something more and if it's something more than in what way is it more is it both end probably but how would you respond yeah of course it's a both and i'm an anglican that's what we do this is hugely complex of course because the words paul uses like noose and so on and phronesis um and similar words which he plays around with and does different things especially as i said in philippians very interestingly why there that's a good question um these have their resonances within the world of plato and aristotle within the world of stoicism etc um and they have to be studied carefully within that context but again and again precisely because he's talking about the renewing of the mind like the whole virtual reborn thing um it's it's about paul seeing that this is part of what it means to be a god-given human being and that being transformed or being grown up in your thinking um as in first corinthians 14 um he seems to be reaching after and i think i think what he's saying is in the resurrection god has launched his new creation a new world has come into being and there must be new modes of knowing appropriate for that it's like when when the astronomers speculate that there may be some object out there zillions of miles away and they haven't got telescopes that can see it yet but they will invent new forms of observation appropriate for the new stuff which i think is out there in the same way it seems to me the new world it's like jesus saying unless one is born again one cannot see the kingdom of god it seems to me it has something to do with a new form of knowing which is appropriate for the new world that is beginning now that form of knowing then takes up the existing forms of knowing and transcends and transforms them in the same way that jesus dead body after the crucifixion was taken up and transformed into being now a non-corrupting body that was equally at home in heaven and on earth and it seems to me what paul is talking about is is that the whole human being including the mind whatever precisely we mean by that can be taken up in that way now of course we are the heirs of 18th century rationalism if we're not careful or um postmodern anti-rationalism and i think um the danger there was that rationalism exalted one form of knowing a sort of calculating form of knowing and made it the be-all and end-all in a way which was incredibly destructive and reductive and negative one of the great advantages of postmodernity it seems to me is that we've thrown all the cards in the air and now at last we've actually said to ourselves as some of us were saying last night that things like imagination and music and art go together with thinking it's not that we do that stuff over there and then we do the thinking over here there is a much bigger and i think that's to do with new creation and so despite the negativity of post-modernity i see all sorts of possibilities um and i see christian theology as taking its place cheerfully within that larger mix of of music of imagination of culture and and so on and of the whole of society we know things in a wide variety of ways and i think we know that we know things in a wide variety of ways it's just that philosophers often have talked as though it's just this little thing called reason so i think the transformed mind is to do with taking up those god-given faculties and praying that we will be enabled to love god with our minds and the fact that it's odd for in the rationalistic world to think about love and mind in the same sentence shows what is required for this transformation um all i've really done is stir the pot about three times in different directions but i hope that's enough so just to keep it cooking i do want to push it on a bit more because you've given it to us as the central call of the church to do this work of theology so let me just ask this are you saying then that the work of doing theology is this integrated act of of how we perceive ourselves our neighbor and god and integrate it into our life and our actions that and it happens for different people in different capacities i'm just thinking of the range of intellect you're certainly not saying this is for the most elite in the lecture you actually specifically said it was not that so help us understand that i'm saying it's a task for the whole church and and the task of theology is i think paul conceives it is scriptural it's prayerful it's communal it's it's engaged with the world but it's to do with the reflection uh which again comes into and out of worship reflection of who exactly god is and that's you might think that that's a given we say the creeds we know who god is well actually no we don't because john says um no one has ever seen god it's the only begotten son who's in the bosom of the father he's made him known and paul says he is the image of the invisible god and so the quest to know god is the quest to find out more about who jesus is and we will never get to the end of that i mean it's just a constant thing and and it's one of those things again to use the telescope and astronomy metaphor that as we mature as christians the telescope gets either cleaned or gets better lenses or something and we are able to perceive more of who god is but we that's not an individual thing we can't we need one another to do it and so teachers within the church and the body of christ together in local things in a local bible study or in a church synod or whatever this is the task that we must always be doing the danger that i mean what i'm pushing against is the idea that you can get unity or church organization by committee by decision whatever without the prayerful scripture based wrestling with these big questions um you know when the big questions come as they do in every generation to the church the answer is not let's have a committee to sort this one out interesting point when john says euless came to the church of england general synod once and he saw us debating all manner of things then some of us had lunch with him and his point was as a greek orthodox he said this is very interesting but it is not a synod because for him a synod would have been about prayer and worship and so on and wrestling with the issues much more overtly and explicitly within that context i just wonder if there would be a way of sharpening our sense of the task of theology and so far as it involves the mind in relation to paul with the very texts that have figured so prominently in your presentation romans 12 philippians 2 we have the use of noose there for mind in romans 12 in philippians 2. and in both cases the argument does not turn after there is this imperative about the transformation of the mind or the adoption of the mentality of christ to an activity that is happening behind a desk it very quickly moves to the way that we treat one another how will you regard yourselves in relation to one another don't regard yourselves higher than you ought and then in romans 12 flowing very quickly into this vision of the community as a united body and then in philippians 2 a mentality of self-giving that is able to be hospitable in the face of great difficulty so that sense of intellectual formation that is actually uh dependent forged in a certain kind of social interaction and dynamic i think is a notion of intellectual formation that's quite alien to what counts as theology in most of our minds and so to talk about mind in those more explicitly social terms i think could help sharpen what we mean by theology as transformation of the mind absolutely thank you very much that's very helpful and and actually um i think it's tomorrow morning's lecture i do go to philippians 2 with that exactly in mind in mind um and but you could also go to romans eight where it's the mind of the flesh and the mind of the spirit and and the philippians passage is about unity and the romans passage is about holiness and again and again these two themes just keep coming up and if you're not thinking in this renewed way unity and holiness just not going to happen but i mean just as an example i have found in my own life that as a pastor i will sometimes say i'm preparing three or four people for confirmation or something some of the issues that they raise and that i'm wrestling with or talking some with someone pastorally it draws out of me stuff that i didn't know was there and which i will then think oh my goodness maybe that's what this passage of scripture means whatever then you go back you look at the commentaries and in other words the life of the community forces you to think harder than you might have done if you were simply being a detached academic brain as it were we've captured a number of comments uh and questions that people have raised in the audience and so we're going to take a couple of those tonight before we close so i think they're going to be flashed up on the screen if we want to receive our first question [Music] dr wright rightly emphasizes the need to think theologically in order to move toward unity and holiness what also is the role of the holy spirit in establishing our unity and holiness thank you submitting questions we're advised to do we'll save them until tomorrow yeah i mean so many areas of christian life thought practice sometimes in the new testament it can be said entirely in terms of the spirit sometimes it can be said in terms entirely of of what people do and when you get those passages which draw them together you get strange passages like romans 8 where the spirit bears witness with our spirit and we're never quite sure sometimes whether to put a capital s or not and and that i think tells us something very important that when the holy spirit is at work this doesn't rule out or cancel human thinking agency etc and the spirit can do whatever the spirit wants to do sometimes the spirit can blast through and force an issue on us but it seems that in the new testament itself and certainly in the long experience of the church the signs of the spirit being at work are not that people just float along and ideas happen and whatever but that they do the hard work and this happens at every level of church life i once worked with somebody who's absolutely brilliant man but who had no strategic thinking at all about him and it's actually very difficult to work with somebody like that because his answer to every problem was you go and pray about it and then bang this would happen and believed in the holy spirit and i i would say well actually i find that often the spirit seems to work when i sit down with a pencil and paper and say you're supposed to do this and suppose it works like that it's got i think it's got to be a both hand um it's it is difficult because i want to emphasize the sovereignty of the spirit but but precisely because of who the spirit is and who we are as human beings the spirit sovereign work enhances our humanness rather than destroying it and part of that enhancing is the work of transformed thinking tommy or marianne my initial uh thought was why wouldn't we say more about economy about economy in relation to the spirit so often when paul invokes the spirit it seems to me it is about how people are being empowered to share with one another uh the gifts that they are as a body of people but also the material possessions that they have some limited control over and so i think these days we get away with talking about unity in a very cheap manner because it doesn't actually involve any kind of rigorous commitment to economic sharing with one another and so i wonder if here our christian rhetoric might be disciplined by paul so that we're forced to say when we mean one community we mean this kind of coming to the aid of one another economically materially sharing of possessions that cuts very hard against the grain of our social and economic formations i i just two very quick comments on that first yeah in first thessalonians um when paul says i know that you already love one another but i want you to do it more and more as i've often said to students he doesn't mean i know you have warm fuzzy feelings for one another i want you to have even warmer and fuzzier feelings of one another he means i know you're already doing this practical sharing please will you work at developing that so much so that you then run in the thessalonian correspondence into the difficulties of people who think good and we get a free lunch here and let's just sign on and already right in the very beginning of the church that wouldn't the danger of freeloading wouldn't happen unless the church was that sort of community the second thing to say is that had i wanted to make the book just a little bit longer because it was after all rather short um there could have been a whole chapter on economics but happily bruce longnecker's book remember the poor plug for a great recent book bruce longnecker now teaching at baylor remember the poor which is about basically the economics of paul's gospel and that's something as you say we've completely screened it out and i probably should have included stuff in the book on that a little bit in chapter 16 but nothing much marianne did you want to add i don't know that i have uh a lot that i was thinking of the phrase uh you know to set the mind on the spirit is and then if that's the right translation it will okay if it's the right well it's so tough you would get much the same thing in other words there's a there's a an orientation of self to the spirit so that the spirit affects the things that we've set our minds on and so when you ask the question where does the spirit enter in the complexity of it that the spirit is what works in us to affect the things that we also set our minds on yeah yeah that's important i mean but but the very the very fact that it's difficult to translate what paul is saying there is an indication that something is uh very close up for him which our natural thought patterns um resist and and and kind of pushing back against it but that's partly what you mean by theology as well that living and and how one how how the spirit changes our minds not just our minds but how it affects our living are working out our fellowship and those things as well right i mean by theology you mean the whole thing yeah yeah and i mean first corinthians 13 would be an example of doing theology absolutely absolutely and i mean here i am i suppose very much on all fours with some of the greek orthodox writings and going right back to the pagistic period for whom theologia is is the task of prayer it's the task of the whole church um and it includes um the very hard-nosed intellectual explorations and expositions but that's not something other than the life of prayer and and i i was determined and finally i found the way to do it to bring the book to a close by showing that paul is a man of prayer and for him prayer and theology are very much same thing i mean let me just say this because it's it's directly related to that we've mentioned romans 9 to 11 romans 9 to 11 begins and ends with prayer and those prayers are very much in the jewish prayer mode you begin with lament and you end with praise and halfway between those at the beginning of romans 10 is intercession so that's one of the greatest theological set pieces anywhere in paul and it is framed as and structured as one whole prayer and you know we forget that at our peril i think let's take just one more question tonight if paul was writing a letter to the church in america today what warnings and admonitions encouragements and affirmations do you think he'd give let's hear the affirmations tom well yeah i mean the affirmations are um you know there's this great college in pasadena and i'm so glad you're people are doing this stuff i think come to fuller yeah exactly exactly that's what i meant yes yes um i mean i i've said it last night and i've said i'll say it again i think our easy collusion with disunity would not just dismay him he would just be unable to comprehend how the christian church had got to the point where it really didn't matter that people drove off on sundays past this church because they wanted to go to that one and so on but for him being church is being part of a community and you know he just wouldn't see that going on in many places you wouldn't would in some places obviously and and do i say in america okay but we do this in britain as well it's just that america is so much larger and everything is expanded um i i think as well we mentioned the enlightenment um there's a huge swathe of what i see as a bread coming to america quite frequently of enlightenment subculture um the split-level world of the enlightenment the epicurean world which sees gods as a long way away and we're just doing stuff down here which then plays out in church state discussions etc um i think and again we and britain are partly guilty of this but not as much as some of the enlightenment nations like america or france it's been so much part of the american culture that it is taken for granted and there are so many other things which go with that culture which um i think he would just be unable to comprehend how christians couldn't make a priority of say the care of the poor that's so basic in the new testament and i know many many churches in america do actually make the poor a priority but structurally and in terms of how you order society i think you would say we've all got a long way to go and and we in britain have as well i'm very careful to say that because it's not we're getting it right tell me your marriage yeah i tom i asked you this earlier and so i raised it again for the sake of discussion um paul would show up in america and uh be dismayed at the unity of the church dis unity what what do you think he would need to see concretely small big what would it look like for him not to be dismayed in other words presumably not you know either one giant church or in other words what would it be that would constitute for him an adequate expression a faithful expression of the one body of christ i i think paul would want to see eventually or want to see people aiming at i mean the idea of one giant church sounds monolithic megalithic a bit totalitarian people often think that unity you know well yes at the same time um that sort of unity has its dangers but disunity is far far more dangerous i mean in my country and i suspect here one of the reasons that politicians in the media can take very little notice of the churches because we're not speaking with one voice so at least if the churches such as they are were able to try to speak with one voice on major issues and i know how difficult that would be um on the other hand there are some issues which we we could try to do that i mean where we are at the moment is not one step away from where we ought to be it's probably about 20 or 200 steps away from where we ought to be and the real question is if we were to think prayerfully about supposing there were to be a new richer kind of multi-layered unity 100 years from now what steps would we have had to take in the year of grace 2014 in order that by 2114 if the lord has not returned by then there would be a much richer unity and i have to say the good news is we've taken a lot of those steps already in my lifetime 50 years ago it was unthinkable that we would have the kind of easy commerce between denominations we have today thank god for the progress we've made the trouble is at the moment as we make progress in my own denomination we've done wonderful work with roman catholic dialogue for instance but as we do that we're hamstrung because stuff in our own communion is going badly wrong on other fronts and so unity and holiness these two pull against one another it seems um but shared bible study locally is possible desirable why aren't we doing it you know even as a lenten course okay you may be able to to to make it last for six weeks go for it you know do it plan it for next year um with the other churches in your locality actually say could we get together in groups and do shared buy why not um you know that can only be good shared eucharistic fellowship as much as is absolutely possible and probably a bit more push the boundaries a bit because i think galatians tells you you should um and uh and so do together everything you can do together and then see what grows out of that prayerfully that would be my my plea just on this trying to stay on this question uh it seems to me that here in the u.s we're very drunk on a certain kind of power and sometimes the way that paul is read feeds that and i worried a little bit as i was hearing you say over and over again about how paul outflanks every existing philosophy every existing idea takes aristotle captive and it seems to engender this sort of hubris i think in the u.s in particular we think well we can read paul and we don't really need to read aristotle anymore he sort of overtook aristotle and we get all of that in paul that doesn't seem to me to be really in keeping with the central place of the cross and the fact that we should always expect to meet god as a kind of scandal in our life that will never leave us uh steady where we are but always invite us to learn from what exceeds us that seems to me to also be in keeping with the spirit of the jewish exile as well so i wonder if we might be able to speak to this tendency by paying a little bit more attention to the rhetorical nature of paul's writings uh i remember one time i was told by a professor at duke that when i was studying there that romans 9 to 11 was an utter anomaly at cross purposes it seemed with everything else that paul was writing and it seemed to me like that could only be said because the rhetoric for example of galatians so spicy was being flattened out into some kind of easy overarching statement about everything um so how to pay attention with that was was that professor saying that romans 9 11 was an easy overarching statement uh no he the this professor seemed to think that if we didn't have romans 9 to 11 uh you know we would have no resistance whatsoever in paul to christian supersessionism and it seemed to me like that was just an underestimation of the rhetorical nature of paul's writing elsewhere about abraham about the law these kinds of things but my point going to the questioner here is i wonder if the way that we have ignored the sort of rhetorical nature of paul's writings and the nature of the cross and even self-effacement in that rhetoric uh plays into a problem that we have uh in the u.s where he might say to us what he says for the corinthians that's not what i was telling you in the letter that's not what i meant you to do i wasn't talking about getting rid of everyone but only one who is a so-called brother among you and behaving in this way among you so you see what i'm saying yeah i think it's rather like the point you made earlier it's very very helpful um that i think what's happened you know with the prison letters say colossians um that in christ are hidden all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge now paul is writing this from prison um you know and when he talks about in ephesians the the great cosmic vision that he has again he's writing this from prison and we have to put ephesians 1 2 and 3 together with ephesians 6 that this is the battle that we're in right now um and and so it's much more complicated and if we just take a few verses from ephesians 1 or from colossians or indeed from some of the other letters and then if we filter them through our natural tendency in our culture whether in my british culture or your american culture to say okay we've got it we're right um the rest of the world's wrong then of course that's immediately going to fall foul and trip over its own feet the danger is that in reacting against that abuse we want to tone down or flatten out the extraordinary cosmic statements that paul is making i i think an antidote for this could be philippians 4 where paul says whatever is true lovely honorable beautiful noble good report any virtue any praise think about this stuff and he doesn't mean if that's in the church he's looking out at the wider world he wants them to be good citizens good neighbors to celebrate all the good that is there the next sentence though he says what you are to do is what you've learned and received and heard and seen in me in other words there's a generous celebration of all the goodness of god in culture not to imagine we've got it all in our little huddle but at the same time that shouldn't lead to a moral relativism so well if it's all good out there let's just go and do what they do and that that's a very interesting balance right there but philippians has that wonderful generosity of spirit about it even though that too is written from prison this is bringing our conversation tonight to a close so uh we have an opportunity to stand and join together in one final song i want to say thank you very much tom for your lecture tonight and to marianne and tommy thank you please join me [Music] you

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Published: Mon Oct 12 2020