Paul and the Faithfulness of God (Full Video)

[MUSIC PLAYING] So welcome, everyone. I'm David Hempton, Dean of the Harvard Divinity School. It's a pleasure to welcome so many people here on a Friday afternoon. It's wonderful and a special pleasure for me to welcome Professor NT Wright to our campus. When I was appointed to a chair at Harvard in 2006, the first duty I had was to introduce NT Wright, then Bishop of Durham, who gave the Nobel Lectures here at Harvard in October 2006, which were also a wonderful occasion. Professor Wright also has the dubious distinction, I think, of being one of the first occupants of the chair that I hold at Harvard. He was a visiting professor here in the [? McDonnell ?] Chair '99, I think. And so Nicholas Thomas Wright is currently Research Professor of New Testament at Saint Mary's College, University of St Andrews. That's where I did my doctorate many years ago. He's a graduate of Exeter and Merton Colleges, Oxford and in the past has held positions as Professor of New Testament at McGill University in Canada and as Fellow and Tutor at Worcester College, Oxford. He's also the retired Anglican Bishop of Durham, a seat in which he has been from 2003 to 2010. Before that, he'd been dean of Lichfield Cathedral and Canon Theologian of Westminster Abbey. In these positions, he has been a significant public voice in both the Church of England and the Anglican Communion around the ecclesiological developments of that body over the past decade. His academic work on the New Testament is extensive and focused mostly on the quest for the historical Jesus and the interpretation of Paul. He has been an advocate of the placement of Jesus and Paul within the context of Second Temple Judaism. As a consequence, Professor Wright is numbered among the most prominent proponents of the so-called New Perspective on Paul. Some of his most significant scholarly titles are Jesus and the Victory of God, published in 1996, The Resurrection of the Son of God in 2003, Surprised by Hope-- Rethinking Heaven, the Resurrection, and the Mission of the Church in 2008, Justification-- God's Plan & Paul's Vision, and How God Became King-- the Forgotten Story of the Gospels, and now Paul and the Faithfulness of God. Besides his more academic production, Professor Wright, as many of you know, has been very effective in popularizing the results of a scholarly engagement for a much wider readership, for instance, through the publication of widely read dialogues with notable liberal scholars such as John Dominic Crossan and Marcus Borg, and his bestselling books, such as Simply Christian and Simply Jesus. He has also recently completed the publication of a popular commentary on the entire New Testament in the For Everyone series. So it's my pleasure to welcome Professor Wright to speak to us about Paul and the faithfulness of God. And following his talk will be three responses from professors Giovanni Bazzana and Matthew Potts, both from the Harvard Divinity School, and Professor Katherine Shaner, now at Wake Forest University but an alum of our school. So thanks for coming up for this. It's great to have you. So without further ado, it's my pleasure to welcome Professor NT Wright to present this topic for us. Thank you, and welcome. Thanks, David. [APPLAUSE] Thank you very much, Dean Hempton. And thank you all very much for being here. This room has happy memories for me because in 1999 when I was, as Dean Hempton said, teaching here, I taught an undergraduate class on the Resurrection in this room. And it was that course-- I think I did maybe 24 lectures that autumn-- which then gradually turned over the next two years into the book The Resurrection of the Son of God, which I know some of you have here. I've already signed one this afternoon. [LAUGHTER] I'm just getting a slight echo on this. Is this audio OK? Are you happy with it? Right. Good. I won't worry about it then. Yeah, and even then, I was hoping that I was going to be able to finish my big project on Paul within the next two or three years. Those of you who are seasoned academics will know how those hopes sort of work out and don't work out. And finally, quite a long time later-- like 14 years later-- here it finally is. And the size bears witness to the gestation, like a sort of uber elephant growing in the womb for a very long time and then finally appearing, trumpeting and splashing itself as it does so. [FAINT LAUGHTER] Given half an hour or a bit more to say something about this book is actually a bit daunting, even for me, let alone for my respondents. And I have to say, I'm extremely grateful to HDS for hosting this. When the publisher said, we want you to go around and do things here and there, where would you like to go, I said, well, I have actually taught at Harvard. And I've got friends there, and it would be really good. And I thought that would be the jewel in the crown for me, really. And so I'm delighted and very grateful that respondents have been prepared out of their own very busy "shed-ules"-- sorry, schedules. I'm on this side of the Atlantic now-- [LAUGHTER] --to take time to look at the book and come back at me on it. I'm looking forward to that very much. So I just want to say a very brief bit about what I think the book is really about. You could easily get lost in the details. And I try in the book to prevent that happening, both by the shape of the book and by certain way markers. And I'd just like to introduce you to it as a sort of encouragement that maybe you might like to try this great long journey yourself. It's a bit like crawling on your bare hands from Land's End to John o' Groats or even from New York to Los Angeles. But the journey is worth it, I think. The book falls in four parts. And quite accidentally-- and it was a late accident, actually, in the production of the book-- there are 16 chapters, which go 1 to 5, 6 to 8, 9 to 11, and 12 to 16, which for those of you who know Paul's Letter to the Romans might sound vaguely familiar, except we normally do 1 to 4 and 5 to 8. That was a complete accident because there was one new chapter which got stuck in the beginning quite late on in the process-- very late on in the process-- which then bumped everything along, just in case you thought I was being a bit cute by doing that. [LAUGHTER] But there is a shape. There is a kind of chiastic shape to the book. And this was a great relief when I realized that it would work like this because the basic problem that I'm trying to address is the-- I was going to say bifurcation-- multifurcation of Pauline interpretation in our day. The older questions about Paul used to be, was Paul basically a Jewish thinker or a Hellenistic thinker? Did he, in fact, root himself as many, including Albert Schweitzer, used to say, in the world of Jewish thought, addressing the Gentile world but still as a Jew? Or had he given all that up because after all Judaism was the religion of "works righteousness"? So as with a great deal of German liberal Protestantism, one saw Judaism as the wrong sort of thing. And therefore, it was assumed that Paul would have got all his ideas from some other source, e.g., Hellenism, whether it was the Kyrios cults or agnosticism or whatever. Those older debates about Paul as a Jewish or Gentile thinker have been radically redefined anyway by all that we've learned in the last 60 years about the nature of Second Temple Judaism and even where the word "Judaism" is itself contested and carries certain 19th-century baggage, which we have to beware of, et cetera, et cetera. But largely today, those debates have been, I think, relativized. But they still rumble on underneath the other debates which are taking place. And those debates-- Dean Hempton mentioned the debates between so-called old perspective and so-called new perspective. In case any of you are worried about all that stuff, let me say there are as many new perspectives as there are people writing under that broad title. And mine is only one of several positions which loosely could be thus described. And actually, a lot of the infighting goes on between new-perspective proponents and not the other way. Likewise, there are many different old perspectives. I see Stephen Westerholm has a new book representing his own position on justification. I was hoping I could've read it before today. But I've been on the road, and it's hard when you're ordering things from Amazon not being quite sure which hotel you want them to land in. So I hope it's going to be waiting for me in New York tomorrow. But it's not only old perspective versus new perspective. The big debate in America over recent years has been between broadly apocalyptic and salvation history. And I'm here to tell you that both those labels are highly misleading and probably ought to be abandoned. But I don't see, sadly, any chance of that soon because it seems to me if we're talking about earthing Paul in the actual world of the first century, which is what I've constantly try to do, then we need to be very sure about what our technical terms are actually doing and how they may be skewing the evidence of that first century. So there's not only old and new perspective. There's been apocalyptic-- was Paul a theologian who said that God has broken into the world-- "invaded" is the word that Louis Martyn uses again and again in his Galatians commentary? Or was Paul a thinker who saw the long plan of God coming at last to fruition? The pushback against that has been largely because of 20th-century pushback against all kinds of Hegelian developmental schemes as applied to theology. And Karl Barth's famous "no" stands behind Louis Martyn's famous so-called apocalyptic. So there's that debate. But there are also the other debates which are coming it alongside. These debates don't map onto one another neatly. And it's very confusing, particularly if you're a young exegete thinking you knew what the questions were and then reading commentaries in which the questions aren't actually quite that. And it may take you halfway through the book before you realize what they were because the debate that Schweitzer was addressing-- and which is still very much on the table-- is is Paul's basic theology juristic-- that's law-court categories-- or participationist-- being in Christ? Schweitzer made that the either/or, which enabled him to categorize different types of Pauline scholarship before his day. Sanders, two generations after Schweitzer, picks up more or less the exact same categories and reached more or less the exact same conclusion as Schweitzer that Paul is about participation fundamentally and that the juristic stuff-- the law-court stuff-- is secondary. Some of you will know that Douglas Campbell, now at Duke, has written I was going to say the largest book to be written on Paul for some while. But sadly, I hoped mine will be a few pages shorter than his so that we could still accuse him of producing this monster. But sadly, that didn't work out. But Douglas has basically gone even further than Schweitzer and Sanders and said, Paul is basically about what you find in Romans 5:2-8 about being in Christ and that the law-court stuff really isn't what Paul wants to say at all. And there's all sorts of debates about that. So there are several debates already, which as I say, don't map on to one another but jostle for position within the Pauline studies world. And then on top of that, there are at least two other very significant debates which have happened, or areas of discussion. One is Paul and philosophy, both ancient and modern. What was the relationship between Paul and stoicism, particularly, which was obviously the main worldview paradigm for most people in Paul's wider non-Jewish world? I tell the students again and again the default mode in our Western society is basically epicureanism. The default mode in Paul's society is basically stoicism. It's one of those moments-- you know how it is in class-- when suddenly, you see the students go [GASPS] and grab their pens and write it down-- something I can latch onto. And if we assume that Paul is addressing the questions of a late modern either deist or epicurean world, we just won't get it right. But let's park that for the moment because there's been lot of study of Paul and stoicism but also modern philosophy, fascinatingly, in our day-- people like Giorgio Agamben, Zizek, Taubes, Badiou and recently a book edited by John Milbank. And other things have come out in which modern secular philosophers-- often atheistic philosophers, often old Marxist philosophers-- who've been almost in despair at the collapse of the dream that they thought they had in the late '80s, that Eastern European communism-- that experiment just has failed. Where are you going to go to find resources to think about how to be a wise community in the world? And some of them are turning to Paul and saying, well, never mind the God bit. Never mind the Resurrection bit. There's actually some good stuff here. And there's some very exciting debates going on there. So Paul and philosophy is one. Paul and politics is the other one, which wasn't on the radar of most people at all 25 years ago and now is enormous all over the place that when Paul says, Jesus is Lord, one of the main things many people hear is that Caesar isn't. The other course I taught when I was here in 1999 was a graduate course on Paul and Caesar, looking at some of the stuff that was coming out then. And I and others have been pushing that agenda. And there's been some pushback against it, predictably-- fair enough. It can get faddish, particularly-- excuse me for saying this-- but particularly here in America, as people, first in the Reagan era and then in the Bush era, discovered that there might be a critique of empire in the New Testament. And so people have grabbed it and-- [LAUGHTER] --raided the New Testament. And of course, the trouble with that-- this is a very serious point. The trouble with that, just as with the old and new perspectives, where the problem was that people were assuming that Paul was addressing 16th-century questions. So with the Paul and politics thing, people have assumed that Paul is addressing 20th- or 21st-century political questions. And he really wasn't. The spectrum of political opinion-- there wasn't actually a spectrum in that sense at all in Paul's day. And we who live with this very sharp left-right polarization-- it's a different left-right in your country from mine, but we still live with that sense. I think that's an 18th-century sense. I defer to Dean Hempton, who knows about the 18th century, and I don't. But my sense is that that really came in particularly with the French Revolution and that we've looked at politics that way ever since. And if we go on doing that, we just won't understand how first-century Jews saw the world of the polis, the city, the wider world, the empire-- whatever. So what I decided to do was to do some initial groundwork, which would set this all up, and then explore Paul within that and see what he seemed to be saying and how it made sense within this very confused world of the first century in order then to try to reconcile or adjudicate some of those debates in the 21st century. And so the book has four parts. And that's chiastic, as I said, the first part after an introduction takes you up the step ladder, as it were, through Paul's Jewish world, Paul's philosophical world, Paul's religious world, and Paul's political or imperial world. That then sets up the two middle parts, which are Paul's world view in the sense in which I sketched that in some earlier volumes in this series, and then particularly part three, which is the longest and bit in the heart of the book, Paul's theology. And then coming back down, if that is what we think we think about Paul-- what I think I think about Paul-- then what would Paul say about the world of empire, the world of religion, the world of philosophy, and particularly not least the first-century Jewish world. And then in the conclusion, naturally, I try to draw it all together and make a match with the opening. So that's how the book works, and I hope that sort of sense that there is a shape to it will sustain you as you read it. And I hope you will. But let me say briefly then where the heart of the book is for me. And this is one of those things which grew in the writing. You know how it is with a project. You map it out. You think you have the topics. And as you're working on it, you're aware of an idea or a possibility looming up in the background which you start by ignoring because it'll be a darn nuisance. I mean, you have to reorder the whole thing. But eventually, you give in and you say, oh, I see. Maybe that is what we're talking about. And then it actually becomes rather exciting. What happened in that with me when I was drafting all this-- I was in the Center of Theological Inquiry in Princeton four years ago when all this was happening-- was a sense of why Paul's theology had to be Paul's theology at all? Why do theology? And the central thesis of the book is that Paul basically invented what with long hindsight we now can call something called Christian theology to do a very particular purpose in relation to his worldview because Paul was not simply organizing theological ideas into a pattern for their own sake, nor was he simply an ad hoc pragmatist faced with difficult problems in his church and shooting off some interesting theological and exegetical ideas just to try to solve the immediate crises. The Letters, to be sure, have a flavor of that. But my case as I go on becomes increasingly that there is a rich coherence to Paul which most of the little schemes I mentioned before tend to pull apart. But rather, that Paul's world view-- his symbols, his story, his praxis, the things which he took for granted himself and wanted his congregations to take for granted-- this worldview needed something to keep it in place because the worldview no longer had the symbols of the Jewish world. Paul's converts did not have to be circumcised. They didn't keep Shabbat. They didn't keep the food laws. They didn't marry within an ethnic family but were to marry within the Christian family now, according to a couple of passages. They didn't have an allegiance to the Temple in Jerusalem. They didn't have the Torah as such as their book in the same way that the first-century Jews had it. So how is Paul's worldview going to stand up? Because the question I started by asking on worldview was granted that Paul didn't have those symbols, what was the central symbol of his own worldview which he wanted his hearers to have as their worldview? And just to check you're on the same page here, a worldview, like spectacles, is what you look through rather than what you look at. But if somebody else's vision is out of focus, may need to say, you will probably need some spectacles like this to help you understand the world. So though for yourself the worldview is something you try to take for granted and do other stuff with it, for your hearers, if they are still unable to see the point, you may have to help. And I think that's what Paul is doing. The heart of chapter six, where part two begins, is the argument that Paul's central symbol is the church itself. That is the united single holy community-- united across Jew, Gentile, slave, free, male, female lines. And this is an unheard-of thing. At least insofar as the idea of a single community out there in the Greco-Roman world existed, it was the kind of dream in the mind of certain emperors, that this is what the Roman Empire wanted to do was to create a united community with allegiance to Caesar. Paul believes that the gospel which he proclaims generates and sustains a united community with allegiance to Jesus. But how is that going to be united, granted the enormous cultural sociopolitical personal differences between its members? My thesis at the center of the book is that Paul fundamentally invents something which with hindsight we can call Christian theology-- that is the wise, prayerful, scriptural reflection on who God is, who God's people are, and what God's future plans are for the world-- and that he picks up those three which are the central Jewish themes-- monotheism, election, and eschatology. And I say the central Jewish themes. Jews don't do systematic theology characteristically. But if you ask Jewish folk-- ancient or modern-- what do you basically believe, it is about God, about Gold's people, about Gold's future. And my case is that Paul needs to re-inhabit and teach his people to re-inhabit these great fundamentally Jewish axioms in quite a new way because of the events concerning Jesus and the spirit in order that this theology will be the thing which will enable the church to be the church. And so there's a kind of negative corollary of this that if you try to get a united and holy community without something like Pauline Christian theology or some version of Christian theology, you may find it extremely difficult. And there are some current examples which would prove the point rather. So that when I come to the heart of the book, I'm not simply analyzing Paul's theology for the sake of it as a syllabus of stuff that we might want to teach in church. I'm trying to see how does this actually work? And particularly, how do these three topics fit together? Because one of the fascinating things is that they really do fit together. They're not just discrete topics. They mesh in all sorts of ways. One recent online review which a friend sent me-- I try not to look at blog sites, and I counsel you all to take that line, as well, let alone take part in them-- what a waste of time. But-- [LAUGHTER] --somebody did send me one recently, which said, Wright has a very unusual way of approaching the subject. Well, yes, because the usual way has been to take 16th-century Protestant dogmatics-- God, man, sin, salvation, Christ, et cetera, et cetera-- with little things at the end on ethics in the church and so on-- because ethics, because otherwise if you put it too far up, it may infect the whole thing with works' righteousness and the church because obviously in Protestant dogmatics, we're rather cautious about that for other reasons. And I've actually just thrown that into the air and said, no. If Paul is a Jewish thinker-- that's my hypothesis-- he's taking these three topics, rethinking them around Jesus and the Spirit-- what does it look like? What happens-- you don't lose anything. But you get everything in quite a different perspective. Let me just say very briefly about those three chapters-- monotheism, a buzzy word at the moment. Did monotheism exist? What is it? Do we know that Jews really were monotheists in our sense or what? There's all sorts of debate. By monotheism, I mean what you get in, say, First and Second Maccabees where people faced with pagan invasion, cultural assimilation, say, no, we owe allegiance to the one God, and we're prepared to die for that. And there's a line from that to Akiva being tortured to death at the failure of the Bar Kokhba revolt in 1:3-5, praying the Shema as he goes to his death. That's the sort of monotheism that I'm talking about. And what I tried to show in chapter nine is this again and again and again, Paul has actually taken that Jewish monotheism. And he hasn't bolted Jesus on at the outside or the Spirit. He has discovered them within-- a fresh reading of the scriptural basis of Jewish monotheism. So the Shema itself in Deuteronomy 6-- Paul takes that in 1 Corinthians 8 and discovers Jesus inside it, not added on from the outside. Likewise, Paul comes back again and again to the exodus narrative-- to the story of the rescue of the people of God from slavery in Egypt, when the pillar of cloud by day and fire by night lead the people through the wilderness to the promised land. And Paul tells that story about the presence of Israel's God with the people of God on that journey to their inheritance. But this time, it is Messiah who rescues them and the Spirit who leads them. I think that is a very high, very Jewish, very early Christology and primatology within the basic meaning of first-century Jewish monotheism or a basic-- no doubt there are many different meanings. We always go around this loop. It's basically a Plato versus Aristotle thing. Somebody uses the word in the singular, "Judaism," and somebody else says, no, there are Judaisms, plural-- an Aristotle move. And then Plato comes back and says, but if there's plurality, there must be something of which it is the plurality. So now that we've played that little game, let's just park that for the moment. So then one of the other things that goes on with monotheism is the problem of evil. Ever since Ed Sanders, there's been a buzzy little problem in Pauline studies. Did Paul start with a plight and see Jesus as the solution? Or was he confronted with a solution on the Damascus road and scratched his head and said, I guess I must have had a plight then. That's the view Sanders takes. I take the nuanced view, which is the same one as quite a lot of others-- but I hope I've worked it out more fully-- that of course any first-century Jew had a plight. It was the apparent failure of the promises of return from exile, of the return of Yahweh to Zion, et cetera. This hasn't happened yet, and so the Romans are beating us up. Pagans are taxing us and doing all sorts of horrible things to us. Paul, I suggest, starts with that problem and then discovers that in Jesus and the Spirit, there is something which Israel's God seems to have done but which doesn't exactly correspond to that problem in the way he'd imagined it so that we move from plight one to solution to plight two, which is visibly a redefinition of the original plight but a redefinition in the light of the Gospel events. And I think that works. And I'm waiting for comment from folk. The central chapter of part three is chapter 10, which is on election. That is, who are the people of God? And it is in chapter 10 that we find the discussion of the well-known topic of justification and justification and the law. And by doing it like this, I hope I have created or observed-- I hope I haven't created it out of thin air. I hope I have observed a context which enables the very difficult debates about justification to be held together and to make the sense that they should. And the way it goes, very briefly-- extremely briefly; this chapter is long enough to be a young monograph in itself-- goes like this. The purpose of Israel as seen by Paul, drawing on Exodus, Deuteronomy, going all the way back to Abraham, is that in and through Abraham's family, all the families of the earth will be blessed. In other words, the reason why God has a special people is not simply to have a special people but for a purpose. This is not instrumentalizing them, as people have often suggested rather negatively. But it is a vocation. And it's a vocation which is very explicit in many texts in Israel's scriptures. Paul sees that that vocation has in fact been fulfilled in the Messiah. One of the biggest arguments I've had to make in this chapter is that when Paul says Cristos, he really does mean Messiah. It isn't a proper name. There's some interesting recent scholarship on this. I think of Matthew Novenson's recent monograph. But I think the case can and must be made because for Paul, the Messiah is the one who sums up the purposes for the purposes of Israel, purposes of God for Israel and accomplishes them through his faithfulness so that the first thing to say about Paul and election is that Paul takes his view of the purpose of Israel and says, that has been accomplished in the Messiah and in his death and his Resurrection as his act of pistus-- of faithfulness. If that is so, then at once that forms the ground plan, the basis, the foundation for everything else you want to say. So anyone who's worried about questions of 17th-century theories of grace, et cetera, the Messiah is the foundation of the whole thing, as Paul himself says. But then what happens is that the Gospel and the Spirit go to work-- the Spirit through the preaching of the Gospel, the Gospel invoking the Spirit. And when people believe-- when they have pistus-- this is not an arbitrary sort of religious experience which happens to be the kind of thing God wants. It is precisely the thing which has the fingerprints of the Messiah on it, which is why Paul can talk about being justified in Christ. Romans 3:24, Philippians 3:9, Galatians 2:17-- three of the most crucial passages about justification-- he talks about justification in Christ. At a stroke, the division which Schweitzer and Sanders and Campbell and many others have exploited between juristic and participation is overcome once we see this is basically covenantal language. I use the word "covenant" in relation to Paul like Sanders does in relation to Judaism not because Paul regularly says the word-- because he doesn't-- but as Sanders says about the rabbis, they don't say it that often because it is everywhere presupposed. But you can see it all over the place in Paul. What, then, happens is that justification is rooted not only in the foundational work of the Messiah but in the work of the Spirit. A great deal of Protestant dogmatics has tried to do justification without the Spirit, primarily for a false exegetical reason that Romans 1 to 4, usually taken as the primary source on justification, doesn't mention the Spirit. So people have constructed justification theologies as though the Spirit didn't exist and then have wondered why it doesn't quite work. Can't do that with Galatians. The Spirit's there all through Chapter Three-- the basic chapter. So that I'm saying, once you see election redefined through Messiah and Spirit, justification means what it needs to mean. And I have a long, rather careful statement on that, as you might suppose. We talk about that in Q&A if you want. But at the end of chapter 10, I show in a preliminary way how this draws together salvation history and apocalyptic, old and new perspective, participatory and juristic, et cetera, and I hope generate some new larger, coherent, albeit complex, categories which it would be wonderful to explore further. Then very briefly-- I'm nearly done-- chapter 11, God's future for the world freshly imagined. I show-- and it's not actually difficult to show-- that however you talk about Second Temple Jewish eschatology, all the different themes of that, whether it's the rebuilding of the Temple, the return of Yahweh to Zion, the political liberation, the possibility of a Messiah, et cetera, not forgetting Resurrection, all of these Paul sees both as having happened en Cristo and as still future. And we can plot the ways in which he's taken those Jewish eschatological motifs and has reworked them, too, around Messiah and Spirit, leading of course to the great climax in Romans 8 and 1 Corinthians 15, which is the Isaianic vision of the renewal of all creation. Paul is not a theologian who is interested in escaping from the world and going somewhere else. He is interested in the rescue and renewal of the whole creation that in Romans 8, the whole creation will have its exodus corresponding to Jesus' Resurrection. But this raises two particular questions, which I could have dealt with almost anywhere in the book. But the more I worked at it, the more it seemed that this was the right place for them. One is ethics, and the other is, if you like, ethnics-- how to behave and the people of God-- because if you say with Paul that all the promises of God find their yes in the Messiah-- 2 Corinthians, 1-- then you're at once faced with the two big problems. If that is so, why are those who are in the Messiah not now morally perfect, which you only have to glance at any of Paul's letters to see that that certainly isn't the case, never mind today's church whatever? [FAINT LAUGHTER] And so ethics I locate as part of Paul's eschatology, where we can discern ethics not as now that you're a Christian, here are some rules to observe, and watch out you don't think that they're [INAUDIBLE] while you're doing it, but rather ethics as the calling-- the vocation-- to a genuine humanness in which something like Aristotle's virtue theory only thoroughly transmuted by the Gospel actually comes into play so that the intentionality-- the thought-throughness of ethics, of habits of life-- becomes something which helps us explain why we don't all become suddenly sinlessly perfect, either with Jesus' Resurrection or at baptism, that there is actually a humanizing process which is going on. And likewise, with Romans 9 to 11 and the cognate passages elsewhere, if the Messiah has come, why have so many Jews not believed in him? And that's obviously the big one for Paul. I've written about it in many other places. One of the exciting things that happened to me in Princeton four years ago was that when I came to Romans 9 to 11 again, which I was dreading because it's so massive, I discovered a way in which I had not perceived before-- again, actually a chiastic structure. I'm always a bit suspicious of chiasms. I tell the students, watch out because people fudge them and force them. But I think this one has a lot of mileage. And the key thing is this. People often talk about Romans 9 to 11, and indeed many other bits of Paul, as though Paul was just making it up-- winging it as he went along. Now he may have done that sometimes. There may be some passages in some letters where he's just on the fly. But he'd been asked this question more than once before-- the question of Romans 9 to 11. And I think as we study that passage, what we see is a very careful rhetorically structured, quite sophisticated argument where the appearance of shall we go this way, shall we go that way is a deliberate rhetorical ploy to bring his readers along with him, but where he knows the end from the beginning. And I work that out. So that's the center of the book. And now just to wrap up last two minutes-- those last chapters, Paul and empire, Paul and religion, Paul and philosophy, Paul and his Jewish world, and then the conclusion. What happens when we put this Paul in this Jewish world? I do think first that there is a lot of mileage in saying that for Paul, if Jesus is Lord, Caesar isn't. But we cannot simply put that huge wind into the small bottles of our late-enlightenment political philosophies. It just doesn't work. So I've tried to map that out a bit and suggest ways forward. Paul and religion-- the word "religion" did not mean the same in Paul's world as it does in ours. Now this is a major, major problem. Since the 18th century, the word "religion" has been defined by antithesis from politics, real life, society, et cetera, et cetera. That's completely wrong for the first century, which is why it's so ironic that in America, particularly, Paul is often taught in departments of "religion." Paul would have looked at the post-18th-century meaning of religion and said, well, whatever it is I'm doing, it's not that. It were better to teach Paul in, I don't know, philosophy, politics, Jewish studies-- anything rather than a post-Enlightenment religion. And I'm deliberately giving some hostages to fortune to keep you awake at this time of the afternoon. But that's my view anyway. So I then put Paul into that world that people in his world wouldn't have recognized much of what he was doing as religious. But then there were some things which they might come around at. And after all, religion in the ancient world went like this. The gods live in this city along with us. They are the senior citizens of our city. And it's important that they're kept happy. And so if bad things happen, we go to the soothsayers. And they look at the ancient books, or they inspect entrails, or whatever. Oh, well, we didn't do this. We didn't get that right. Quick, go and offer the sacrifice. Go and do whatever this particular god wants. This keeps the city-- the community-- together and safe and whole. Paul believes that there are certain things which keep the polis of the people of God together and safe and wise and whole. And is that a religion? Well, maybe it is. But if so, it's very, very subversive. It goes with the political challenge. Philosophy-- I do some work with Engberg-Pedersen's work on stoicism. And I push back quite hard, both at his analysis of stoicism and at his analysis of how Paul sits in relation to it. The Jewish world-- that's another challenge again. Huge issues, controversial and complex at the moment, and I've tried to navigate through that, not least in terms of Paul's use of scripture, which remains a very interesting topic. And then it all comes back to reconciliation, really. I've tried to reconcile the different warring factions in the Pauline guild-- that's a pipe dream; that's not going to happen, but it's nice to glimpse it at least-- but also to show that the heart of so much of what Paul is doing-- this is about the unity of the Church-- is to bring, literally and metaphorically, the Philemons and the Onesimuses together. I start the book there. I end the book there, that this is what Paul thinks he's all about. He calls it the [SPEAKING FOREIGN LANGUAGE]-- the Ministry of Reconciliation-- in 2, Corinthians, 5. And at the heart of all that, is of course-- and hence the title-- Paul's sense that what he is doing is not only talking about but embodying the faithfulness of Israel's God. Thank you. [APPLAUSE] So thank you very much to Professor Wright for this very thorough presentation for such a long book. So we'll have three very brief-- two brief responses to this, and actually ideally to the entire book, if it's possible. And then we will have also a response from Professor Wright and then some questions if you have. And surely, you will have many of them. So first of all, I want to thank the dean, David Hempton, for putting this up. It's great in the new Sperry Room. It's wonderful, actually. And then I have to thank my fellow respondents, Matt Potts and Katherine Shaner for accepting to do this. And I have to thank, actually, Chris [? Okalatupi, ?] one of our doctoral student who did a lot of the practical work-- the most important work. And obviously, my thanks to Professor Wright because it is really a distinct pleasure and an honor, I have to say, to have the opportunity to comment, even if briefly, on Professor Wright's new and massive in any sense of the word, book on Paul and the faithfulness of God. I have little doubt that these volumes-- these two volumes-- will leave a significant and enduring mark in Pauline scholarship, and not just because this is the longest book on Paul ever written. [LAUGHTER] I do not hesitate to say that no response could ever give a sufficient representation of the multitude of insights illuminating readings of minute passages or learn references that I found in these two volumes. This is due both to the prodigious scholarship of the author and to the objective complexity of the thought of Paul of Tarsus. It might sound preposterous to say that some arguments could not be fully examined in a book that tallies almost 1,700 pages. And Professor Wright actually says it is exactly this in quite a few places. However, after reading such a thorough treatment, one is compelled to agree and actually is left with hunger for more. Naturally, I know that Professor Wright is writing another book on this. So-- [LAUGHTER] --it's going to be coming out next year. For these reason, my response today will only address a small but hopefully significant part of the many important things Professor Wright have to say about Pauline theology. Hopefully, the response will also serve as a stimulus for a wider conversation. I must open these considerations by remarking on a couple of aspects of Professor Wright's work that are highly commendable, in my opinion, in particular since they propose a new mythological path that might provide interesting fuel for future explorations. First of all, I find very promising that such an established figure in our field would state so clearly that historical and theological inquires do not need necessarily to agree. That's in treating the complex issue of Paul's monotheism and Christology, Professor Wright is remarkably uncompromising on the fact that even though one doctrine might be demonstrated to be earlier than others, this does not also make it necessarily truer from a theological point of view. Unfortunately, the opposite opinion is one of the most problematic, and in my opinion, problematic and long-lasting legacies of the 19th century positivistic and historicistic approach to the study of early Christianity. Even in recent times, this legacy has spurred harsh and frankly often inconclusive fights on topics such as the historical Jesus or the establishment of the earliest Christology. Confronted with this state of affairs, it is quite encouraging to hear such sure statements from a scholar who has spent so much time of his work and life in the midst of the discussions around the elusive historical Jesus. Hopefully, by following his example, we will reach a stage in which historical research on topics like Paul's Christology will no longer be used to assess the validity of theological opinions and doctrines. The second methodological feature that I would like to highlight here is connected to the aspect of Paul's theology that I personally find most interesting and at the same time most controversial. Since many books on Jesus, Professor Wright has always exhibited a marked interest in the concept of the Kingdom of God, which indeed plays a fundamental role in the formative stages of Christian literature. Professor Wright is quite right to emphasize throughout the entire book-- this book, Paul and the Faithfulness of God-- that even though the exact phrase "Kingdom of God" ubiquitous as it is in the synoptics, of course, rarely in the Pauline corpus, the notion of God's sovereignty is a foundational block in Paul's thinking even beyond the boundaries of this eschatology. Wright considers the royal rule of God and of Christ so important that he tweaks his translations of a few significant Pauline passages in order to stress the implicit references to kingship and royal sovereignty. For instance, Professor Wright contends that when Paul uses the designation Jesus Christ, Jesus Cristos, his audiences would have been able not only to grasp the Messianic meaning of the Greek Cristos, but also to understand that it implied a royal status for the character to whom the title was attributed. Hence, the resulting translation in many cases for Jesus Cristos is King Jesus. Whatever one might think of this translational choice, it is important to heed Wright's call for a more precise understanding of the stakes involved in studying Pauline eschatology or apocalyptic [INAUDIBLE]. Professor Wright very correctly emphasizes that debates around some of these fundamental texts have been again bogged down and sidetracked by the modern insistence in approaching these passages primarily, or even exclusively, as building blocks for the construction of historical doctrinal systems. Instead, Professor Wright emphatically maintains that their primary historical significance must be assessed in the context of lived and very concrete political and social issues. This is heavy, then, for instance in the central verses of 1 Corinthians 15:23-28, which is a key text for the entire reconstruction of Paul in this book, a famous passage in which Paul gives the clearest illustration of how we conceive the apocalyptic manifestation of the Kingdom of God and of Christ. This is naturally a key text in Wright's reconstruction of Paul's eschatological imagination and also of his monotheism, but enlarged and refashioned to include Jesus as God. Frequent readers of Pauline scholarship will be perhaps surprised that Professor Wright sees here strong evidence of Paul's beliefs in Jesus' fully divine status, as he is surprised that others see in it the evidence of Jesus' subordination to the father. I think I could safely predict that while Larry Hurtado's review of Professor Wright's book will be published, we may have the chance of enjoying a very interesting discussion around Jesus handing over of the Kingdom to the Father. But be this as it may, anyone should recognize the appropriateness of Professor Wright's call not to be completely absorbed by this type of discussion. Indeed, it would be a terrible loss to forget that the thought of Paul in this passage has profound and powerful sociopolitical implications. The language itself, which the apostle adopts in these verses, supports such conclusion through its insistence on Basileia and its derivatives that for all Greek-speaking readers and hearers who would have certainly evoked the titles of Hellenistic kings. One might have a few more doubts on the possibility-- strongly advanced by Wright-- that the Roman emperors might have been implicated, too. Since the later Roman emperors never used the Basileia language in the first century CE and actually tried to avoid it following the example of Augustus. However, it is this very problem of the lived and concrete realities underline Paul's eschatology that challenges any concerned reader. Professor Wright acknowledges this state of affairs more forthrightly than many other Pauline interpreters and suggests that Paul himself try to deal systematically with the consequences of his realization that eschatological salvation had come from God through the death and resurrection of the historical man, Jesus of Nazareth. In Wright's language, this problematic and very concrete consequences can be categorized under two labels that he has already introduced-- ethic and ethnic. The ethnic issues, obviously, are related to the complex situation of God's promise to Israel and of Israel's election in the aftermath of the apocalyptic event transpired in Jesus. Professor Wright naturally sees the most purposeful attempt to deal with these issues in the famous section of Romans 9 to 11. However, for the sake of brevity, I will not discuss the ethnic side of the problem here, even though it is very much worthy of consideration. Instead, I will like to draw your attention to the ways in which Professor Wright thinks that Paul tackled the ethic problems. These were generated by the observation that despite the apocalyptic event of Jesus' resurrection, the state of the word remains ostensibly unchanged. And as I say, he has already talked about that quite clearly. I feel that this lack of sociopolitical change was as much a problem for Paul as it is for Wright's reading of Paul. This must be expected, since Professor Wright correctly wants to understand Paul's apocalyptic world view and the apocalyptic world view of any Second Temple Jew as unavoidably cosmic and national while sidestepping the problem of individualizing and spiritualizing all these expectation as seen as a modern misunderstanding of the apostle. The problem generated by Paul's rethinking of apocalyptic expectations is epic in as much as it involves the moral stance that believers have to take in this interim state before the complete realization of the Kingdom of God. But it also considers theodicy, as he has said, in as much as the continuing presence of evil in creation needs to be reconciled with the saving plan of the Creator. While I definitely appreciate the magnitude of the problem, I struggle to see how this might be unique to Paul or to apocalyptic Second Temple Judaism, for that matter, as Professor Wright maintains. I feel that this might partly due to the exceptional nature of the Jewish and consequently Pauline apocalyptic world view that Professor Wright seems to maintain throughout the central chapters of the book. I'm worried that this move might unduly portray the apocalyptic world view of other Mediterranean cultures as lacking the cosmic and national dimension that runs throughout the Jewish scriptures. In fact, it seems to me that we have plenty of evidence showing that other cultures had similar apocalyptic expectations that did their eschatology was not merely focused on the fate of the individuals. It should suffice to mention here many [INAUDIBLE] apocalyptical oracles surviving-- the Greek or Egyptian oracle of the potter, for instance, or even Virgil's poetry that I still find echoed in Roman 8, even if Professor Wright disagrees with this. Obviously, these apocalyptic imaginations are different from the Second Temple Jewish one since they do not take obviously the exodus narrative or other Biblical accounts as their foundational myths. However, their fundamental focus on an end-time reversal of sociopolitical stations and fortunes is functionally identical. The tricky part is to see how different traditions and cultures deal with the interim situation in which the expectation awards rule is not yet fulfilled. This obviously does not apply to the Romans since they are the exception here because for them, the promise or mastery has already come true-- [MILD LAUGHTER] --at least in the first-century CE. As far as Paul is concerned, Professor Wright points beyond the cardinal texts of Romans 8 to the great hymn of Philippians 2 in which it is made clear that a final exultation for those who are in the Messiah can come about only after the painful passage of the cross. Thus, Paul is envisaging the interim time before the Second Coming as a difficult but necessary transition designed to prove the character of the elects. If Professor Wright allows me to use this word, this is shaped as a sort of pedagogical stage to prove that followers can imitate Jesus' actions and attitude as they are described in Philippians 2 and has the required step before in being entrusted with the responsibility [INAUDIBLE] and, as he said just now, achieving genuine humanness. This might be the reason why the scriptural models that Professor Wright most frequently invokes are Joseph and Daniel. He just mentions Maccabees and Rabbi Akiva. But frequently in the book-- he will probably agree-- he refers to Joseph and Daniel, a couple of two heroes who most certainly endure sufferings and persecutions because of their faithfulness to God, but also two characters that eventually took up powerful positions in the empirical hierarchies without any deep refreshening of the sociopolitical structures. In this respect, Romans 13 becomes some more the natural way for Paul to solve the ethic part of these apocalyptic problem. I'm sure that Professor Wright does not think this. I mean, actually I'm sure because surely he opposes this in chapter 12 of the book. But I am worried that if pursued to its logical ends, this response of Paul's might provide the blueprint through which once the cross is put on the banners in one way or another, the Kingdom of God may turn out to coincide with the Kingdom of Constantine. Thank you very much. Yeah, good. Real good. [APPLAUSE] So thanks. So I'm introducing Katherine Shaner, who is now assistant professor of New Testament at Wake Forest School of Divinity and a position that she took over last year. Her research interests include constructions of race, class, and gender in the New Testament, household religions in the ancient Mediterranean, and feminist-womanist hermeneutics. She is currently working on a book, which is actually the result of the dissertation she wrote and discussed and defended here at HDS about slavery in early Christianity using archaeological, literary, and epigraphic materials located in and around the city of Ephesus. Thanks, Kathy. [APPLAUSE] It's wonderful to be on this end of the microphone here in this very room. I've spent much time on that end. First and foremost, I want to thank Dean Hempton, Giovanni for the invitation to come and for others who made it possible. Professor Wright, congratulations on the culmination of many years-- in fact, a lifetime of study. I love the image of you and your sister as small children rushing to the bedroom to read Philemon. [LAUGHTER] My students at Wake Forest University School of Divinity were starstruck when they heard about this event. One even asked to be smuggled in my suitcase. [LAUGHS] Your work has indeed been very influential. And I will rely on Giovanni's praise, which was so well delivered. And given the afternoon hour, we'll jump right in. One of the strengths of this work is the fact that you insist on understanding both the historical and theological modes of interpretation as necessary for fully grasping Paul's thought. You write at one point that the particularities of the historical situation connect the dots between theology and history, a point that you show with many, many particularities of historical situation throughout the book. This connection puts you in an interesting position in terms of interlocutors. Evangelical context in the United States in particular have tended to look at historical critical studies of Paul with much suspicion as a project that denies the plain meaning of the text for contemporary individual believers. On the other side of the equation, some academic circles eschew theological inquiry as doctrinaire and confessional. Indeed, the historical turn in religious studies and, to some extent, theological education has been disconcerting and alienating to some in more conservative and even US mainline denominations. I confess here only a cursory knowledge of UK religious landscape and only through experience among Anglo-Catholic Episcopal communities here in the US. Your goal, however, is to find a middle ground-- to put theology and history into relationship with each other for the sake of better understanding Paul, the great apostle. You do this through a category you work out called Paul's worldview. And you spoke about this in your lecture this afternoon. You write, quote, "By studying Paul within worldview categories, we acquire a new way of seeing not only what was really important within his full-blown theology but also why theology as a whole has become important for him. This category of worldview is a combination of symbol, narrative and praxis, culture, and worship-- Paul's everyday life built on his theological commitments." While the political is decidedly missing from this definition early in the book, later you draw it in as you detail Roman Imperial influences. You're very cautious and careful to distance Paul and with Paul your interpretive stance from involvement in the political, particularly the imperial political world. Paul, you argue, was neither the great subversive anti-imperialist, nor was unaware of Roman reach and influence. He inhabited a middle ground. Certainly, your sharp critique of those who paint Paul as an anti-imperial hero is, in fact, well taken. At the same time, I wonder if you have dismissed too quickly some of the feminist contributions that might be had to your work. Your corrective methodological framing around the relationship between historical studies of Paul and theological studies of Paul as necessary integrated is one that is welcomed, as much fun as a rousing discussion of first-century history would be. My questions, however, arise not from the need to separate history from theology. In fact, feminist interpreters-- and this is where I think they could be helpful for you-- have been insisting that such a project is impossible and undesirable for decades now. So rather, my question comes in the framing of historical studies and theological studies apart from structures of power, both in the first century and in the current one. Feminists' early insistence that all theological and historical Biblical study is inherently political, both for its power to liberate, edify, and unify and in its power to exclude, marginalize, and oppress. In fact, the dichotomy between liberation, oppression, unifying and marginalizing-- here, that dichotomy doesn't really help. Interpreting Paul or any other Biblical text is a messy business, as we all well know. Particularly in the argument that Paul's theological perspective or perhaps transformation informs, permeates, and signifies in his everyday life, the question of ethics of interpretation arises. How do we understand not only Paul's theological world but what are the power implications for the way that world is constructed? So in correcting others' corrective lenses, how much do Paul's own lenses assume a certain power dynamic? And to what end is that ethic, particularly for contemporary churches? So I want to frame this with two examples. One, Giovanni has already mentioned. Sometimes you translate the word "Cristos" as King and sometimes as Messiah, both of which you argue are political terms in keeping with Jewish expectations of a political messiah who then paradoxically found his way to the cross. Is there any room in the Pauline tradition to critique kingship and sovereignty Cristologies and imperial-victory theologies? If Paul is indeed completely transformed by his Damascus Road experience, why does the Christ image in that transformation tend to look like the victorious emperor-- the not-Augustus-- or the beloved king, depending on whether you read Augustus or David as an allusion in Messiah language? Particularly when images, theologies, and worldviews that imagine egalitarian ethos do in fact exist in the first century, I think Galatians 3:28 acts to Paul's own clothed in Christ illustration. Another example where an analysis of power dynamics as part of Paul's worldview comes is in your interpretation of Philemon. As someone who works on slavery in early Christianity, of course Philemon is a key text. I found it fascinating that you framed the whole volume with this tiniest of books. I can't tell you how many times I've been asked, so why is this in the canon anyway-- from students, from colleagues, from churchgoers alike. Your reading gave me much to savor in contemplating that fresh question in a new way. Of course, the difficulty of this text is precisely the methodological problem you flag. The rhetorical situation in the text, its historical content, even theological allusions all need to be drawn from seemingly vague references and exceedingly brief bits about the lives at stake in the text. For historical interpreters, the hundreds of different historical judgments needed in order to interpret the letter begin to swirl around until the decisions outnumber the words of the text. Some of these decisions you've shown us. Is Onesimus a brother or a slave? Is Onesimus a runaway or a slave who has run on the wrong side of his master? Is Paul returning a runaway or begging for mercy? Or is Paul appealing as an amicus domini with the comparison that Pliny's letter would suggest? There's also Albert Harrill's theory that Onesimus is in fact an apprentice to Paul. Ephesus or Rome-- where was it written? Where was Paul staying? Where was Paul imprisoned? Does Paul advocate manumission or obedience? Does Paul want Onesimus to stay with Philemon or make the trip back to work with him? [EXHALES] Some of your historical decisions you've outlined, and rightly so. There are, of course, many others. Is Philemon Onesimus' owner, or Archippus or Apfia? For theological interpreters looking for classic signs of Christology, eschatology, and even ecclesiology, the letter falls far short. Seeing the connections between the historical decisions one needs to make and the theological implications is a significant contribution to the scholarly discussion. For example, the line in Philemon 15 of Philemon having Onesimus back forever being connected with Levitical laws on slavery and jubilee was incredibly fascinating to me. I hadn't made that connection. Yet it strikes me that, along with Lloyd Lewis, that Paul discusses another human being's fate with Philemon without any sense that Onesimus could intervene. In other words, Onesimus is an object in the discussion, not a person. Now I'm not naive, and I have read your introduction. So I know your objection to some of these questions of Paul's ethics. We can't expect Paul to have our ethics, nor to be an abolitionist. And I wholeheartedly agree with that. But in any framework in which we read the text, the power differential between Onesimus, Philemon, and Paul nearly always puts Paul on top. That means that Paul's worldview cannot take into account the totalizing power that both he and Philemon hold over Onesimus as a slave. Onesimus has no way to break against that totalizing power-- a totalizing power that Paul ascribes to Christ as Lord elsewhere in his correspondence. Even if this power is wielded for the sake of reconciliation, Paul as the broker of that reconciliation is still more powerful. And that we cannot ignore. Given that Paul's worldview does so strongly articulate in other places, an ethic of egalitarian sensibility in Christ-- and once again, I flag Galatians 3:28, 1 Corinthians 12:13-- in addition to the power of God's faithfulness, what resources might we draw upon to account for the very real power dynamics that were present, both in the historical situations in which Paul wrote to churches throughout the Mediterranean and in the theological underpinnings of his messages? Once again, I thank you for the opportunity to interact with your work and with you in this forum. Thank you, Professor Wright. Thank you. [APPLAUSE] Thanks to Kathy. And our last responser is Matthew Potts, who joined the faculty of HDS this year as an assistant professor of ministry studies. And he's an ordained priest in the Episcopal Church. He studies the practices of Christian communities with a focus on the relationship between liturgy and ethics. He particularly seeks to analyze and interpret Christian sacramental practices while employing the resources of literature, literary theory, and contemporary theologies. So thanks a lot, Matt. [APPLAUSE] Thank you. It is truly an honor to share this podium with this panel. To be honest, it's a bit of a fright also. [LAUGHTER] Six months ago, I was a student. I would have been sitting where you are. And now you have to listen to me talk to you. But also because I'm not a scholar of Paul. I'm not a scholar of the New Testament. I'm not a scholar of early Christianity. And it is highly likely that I will wander into some of those debates that Professor Wright warned us about when he gave his talk. And also, as Giovanni said-- I'm just saying this off the cuff. As Giovanni said, I am an Episcopal priest. And so I can feel the Episcopal oversight-- [LAUGHTER] --from my left. My response to Professor Wright will try to engage his work where it intersects my own. I'm going to take up the account of religion that he spoke about in chapter 13 of his work and talk a bit about how he sees Paul relating to the Roman concept of religion. And then I'm going to offer two reactions of my own-- the first theological, coming out of my own theological training in modern Protestant theology but then the other pastoral or maybe ministerial or ecclesiological or something. Briefly put, Professor Wright argues that most modern Protestant readings of Paul are indebted to an anachronistic and incorrect and probably Barthian distinction between something called religion on the one hand and something called revelation on the other and that while the latter-- revelation-- is true and truly Christian, the former-- religion-- is precisely what Christianity supersedes. This is the false construct of a latter-days 18th-century understanding. These readings, according to Bishop Wright, fundamentally misconstrue Paul's rhetorical redeployment and re-imagining of Roman sacrifice. And although Professor Wright is no doubt correct that this division too lazily divides much Protestant thought, and while he shows in his work how we might read Paul's Jewish appropriation of Roman and religion is troubling this lazy sort of Protestant divide, I believe that the manner in which Professor Wright reads Paul's religio in fact accords with the best of modern Protestant-- even modern Barthian-- thought and that the implications of this Pauline and Barthian thinking are crucial for our understanding of how the churches formed, or better, for who forms the church. So first, let me briefly recount what I believe Professor Wright is saying in this 13th chapter. And I'll count on his oversight in the follow-on to correct me if I'm wrong. He writes that in the Roman world, religion was not a way of teaching people how to behave. For that, you might go to the philosophers. It was not in itself a way of deciding actual policy, except for the occasional intervention from augury or oracles. It was innately conservative in that emphasized the ultimate good of civic peace and harmony and offered the means by which that could be maintained, since the gods were themselves deemed to be part of the overall social fabric. This is just a different version of what he said in his remarks. Religion, and religious sacrifice in particular, were means of binding gods and peoples together, of drawing the divine and the human into a single cohesive sociality, thus, the ancient accusation that Christians were atheists for the refusal to offer the customary sacrifices since, in his words, "atheists were, by definition, people who were not playing their part in keeping the gods and the city together." At our first glance then, it seems that the Ancient Romans will agree with modern Protestants. Christians were irreligious, at least in this sense. But here, Professor Wright I think reads more deeply and discovers that the word "religion," or "religio," is entirely appropriate to and for Paul because if religion is about the binding together of gods and peoples, then in his words, "there clearly were various things that Paul and his followers did which he regarded as binding them closely, not only to one another but to the one God, the one Lord whom they worshipped. If a religion in the ancient world was the system of signs, including myths and rights by which people were bound together as a civic unity, then it is evident that Paul says, the common life of those en Cristo was precisely that-- a united community whose complex unity was both expressed in and powerfully reinforced by this radically new kind of sacrifice, and particularly the special and symbolic rites of baptism and Eucharist," end quote. If this is the case, then modern Protestant conceptualizations of religion which enfold additional pursuits, like philosophy and theology and ethics and various cultural patterns of behavior-- those ideas of religion, as well as other ideas-- evangelical ideas of religion, which set a living relationship with God against the moribund outward form of ritual-- these conceptions of religion on Professor Wright's account are just not so helpful in reading Paul. In his words again, "Paul's religio was the means by which he believed that the one God who had made himself known in and through the one Lord and was active by the one spirit was binding the single community to himself, much as the religio of Rome was supposed to bind gods and mortals together in a single theopolitical harmony." Whatever modern Protestantism might make of religion for Paul, it was crucial, at least rhetorically crucial. And it was in appropriating this Roman sacrificial trope through Jewish faith and around Jesus Christ-- reworking it around Jesus Christ-- that Paul described the unified life of the Christian community with one another and with God. Professor Wright reads passages from the Pauline Letters concerning baptism and Eucharist, especially from 1 Corinthians at length and with detail that I do not have time here to recount. But since my field is the sacraments, I can't resist just a brief summary of what his reading is. According to Professor Wright, for Paul, the Messiah's people "are the new exodus people"-- these are his words-- "formed, as was Ancient Israel, into a people by the redeeming the action of the one God on their behalf and by the sovereign and holy presence of the one God in their midst. When in passages like 1 Corinthians 10 Paul writes that our fathers and mothers were all under the cloud and all went into the sea, they were all baptized into Moses in the cloud and in the sea, it becomes clear to us that baptism is indeed the outward and visible sign of entry into the Messiah's people, defining them just as surely as the crossing of the Red Sea defined the people of Abraham's god brought out of Egypt," end quote. On this view, according to Professor Wright, the religious act of baptism, resonating with the ancient myth of Exodus, now reworked around Jesus and the Spirit, binds the baptized to the one God and constitutes them as an actual-- not merely a theoretical or an invisible-- community. In Professor Wright's words, "Any intelligent Roman hearing all of this would say, this is religio." All right. The religio of Eucharistic sacrifice follows much the same logic insofar as for Paul, Eucharistic practice establishes the cohesion of the Christian community with Christ. Insofar as it binds God and humans together, it matches the basic Roman religious understanding however much it resists actual Roman practice. Once again, latter-day reformation anxieties over terms like "sacrifice"-- which read in that word a troubling sort of theurgy-- these are entirely beside the point for Paul. For Paul, religious sacrifice is a festive binding of God to humans through ritual, a ritual, quote, "Paul sees fulfilled and transformed in and through Jesus." The Eucharist is thus the prime locus of that binding and transformation. Here, again, is Professor Wright interpreting 1 Corinthians 11 in view of Eucharist. "The Eucharist thus clearly functions for Paul as a rite, complete with traditional words, as a rite in which a founding myth was rehearsed, though in this case the founding myth was an actual event. It occurred not long ago. As a rite in which the worshippers share the life of the divinity being worshipped, though the divinity in question is a human being of recent memory. As a rite dependent on a prior sacrifice, albeit the very strange one of the crucifixion of that same human being. As a rite which should bind the community together so that the signs of disunity during the rite are a contradiction of its inner meaning. As a rite which if thus performed wrong will have bad consequences for that community." Once again, in Professor Wright's words, "Any pagan who heard and grasped what Paul was saying here could conclude from each of these components that this was indeed part of a religio-- part of a religion-- even though it was quite unlike anything else they had seen before." So that's from my summary. It's clear from the above, I think, that the basic structure of Roman religion, of the ritual binding together of humans to one another and to God is preserved in Paul's discussion of ritual acts such as baptism and Eucharist, however much they are reformed and reworked by Paul around Christ. It's also clear that certain Protestant rejections of the religious, certain Protestant interpretations of the New Testament and the Pauline writing, certain Protestant anxieties over things like sacrifice are quite anachronistic to this literature. But I want to return to this idea of reworking religion in and through Christ because though I think Professor Wright is correct in his reading of Paul. I read something very similar in the figures of the Protestant Reformation. And among advocates for revelation against so-called religion, such as Karl Barth, for all their Protestant anxieties, they too, I think, regard religion as reformed around, not rejected in lieu of, Jesus Christ. I don't have a lot of time, so I'm going to lean heavily upon the scholarship of my predecessor in this appointment as Professor of Worship here at Harvard, Matthew Myer Boulton. It's true, of course, that a figure like Karl Barth can be very easily read-- perhaps must be read-- against religion. Indeed, there is perhaps no better reader of Barth than Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who himself wrote from Tegel Prison that Barth, quote, "called the God of Jesus Christ into the lists against religion. This was, and is, his greatest service." Indeed, Bonhoeffer's own and well-known religionless Christianity perhaps inherits some of this sentiment. But Matthew Myer Boulton, my predecessor here, has cogently and persuasively argued that what Barth is up to is in fact much more creative than a simple opposition between something called revelation and something called religion. Indeed, what Boulton sees Barth doing looks a lot more like the reworking at play in Professor Wright's Paul. For Barth, quoting Boulton now, "there is no religionless way of life and certainly no religionless Christianity. Any simple and apparently radical war against religion," as Barth puts it in the Epistle to the Romans, "is only a pseudo-radicalism, only a sideways step into another religious form. For as soon as we begin to specify the protocols, values, and regulations of such religionlessness, we thereby take up again a religious project, formulating and following a particular way of life-- a program for righteousness, and therefore, another perfectly religious form of Christianity," end quote. There is no escaping religion for Barth. According to Boulton, Barth is therefore against religion not by annihilating it but by transforming it from within. This, to me, echoes the strategy Professor Wright reads in Paul-- Paul's worldview refreshed and reworked in Christ. Paul sees religio fulfilled and transformed in and through Jesus, and so does Karl Barth. What's crucial for Barth and for Paul both is the binding of Christ to the worshiping community. We humans, with our religion, as with so many other things, turn against God. But for Barth, God meets us in that very turning. On Barth's view, the incarnation joins Jesus' voice to ours in worship. For Barth, God the Father hears our prayers and praise in worship, hears our religious speech, quote, "because as he hears us, our weak and dissonant voices are sustained by the strong voice of the one by whose Eucharist the inadequacy of ours is covered and glorified in advance. In our doubtful praise, he hears his own voice. In our voices with all our false notes, the Father hears His own pure voice." As Matt Boulton explains, human religious speech, unsound is it may be, is not obliterated but sustained, strengthened, accompanied by divine speech. Human beings do take their stand but only by standing with God the Son, participating in His calling upon His Father. Or to use the words of John Calvin, "We pray by His mouth." The grace of God binds humans to Jesus Christ so much so that our own human religion gets taken up by Christ-- reformed, refreshed, reworked, to use some of Professor Wright's lovely language, by him. What's crucial for Barth is Jesus Christ, as also for Bonhoeffer, whose own religionless Christianity was only so to the degree that it was conformed to Christ. We might then use Professor Wright's own words about Paul to describe Karl Barth. This religion is the means by which Barth believes that the one God who has made Himself known in through the one Lord and is active by the one Spirit is binding this single community to Himself. If, as Professor Wright claims, any intelligent Roman would have recognized Paul's religion, then we might be surprised at how familiar Karl Barth's liturgical theology might have looked to that Roman, too. [LAUGHS] It is the peculiar luxury of respondents like myself that when eminent scholars publish 1,700-page books and visit our institutions that we get to share a stage with them, single out a passing reference to Karl Barth, and then pursue our own intellectual purpose for a few minutes. [LAUGHTER] And it's possible, as he warned, it's possible that I've gotten too deep into the details and missed the larger picture. As I noted from my beginning, my own field is sacramental theology. So I was naturally drawn to these very interesting and compelling words about baptism and Eucharist and their relation to, quote, unquote, so-called "religion." I think Professor Wright's reading of Paul and of Paul's interpreters is sound. But I also think it loudly resounds in the best of the Protestant tradition, too. For Paul, Barth, and I, and Professor Wright all believe, I think, that baptism and Eucharist are the means by which the Christian community is bound to one another and to God, which leads me then, in closing, to the pastoral question that I promised you at the beginning of my remarks. If Christian religious actions, and in particular the sacramental acts of baptism and Eucharist, are activities taken up by God to bind us to God, then what does this say about the Constitution of the Church? Baptism and Eucharist, on these accounts, are not rights or signs which express the prior unity of the people of God. They are rights and signs which themselves enact that unity, which make it real. They do not merely signify the religious ties that bind us together. They, themselves, bind those very ties. We aren't first united and then decide to sup together to show the world are unity. Rather, we come together with all our discordant, unsound, weakly dissonant human voices, and backgrounds, and practices and in supping together, Christ makes us one in Him. The right does not reveal or refer to a prior oneness. It makes real that oneness in the ritual. It is a sacrament, not a sign-- or not just a sign-- but the real thing itself. Or in other words, religio. For Paul, neither teachings nor behaviors nor doctrines finally bind us to God and to one another. But religion reworked, reimagined, refreshed in and by and through Jesus Christ does. Allow me then to close with a peculiarly though not exclusively Anglican question. If teachings and behaviors and doctrines and policies are not in the end what bind us together in Christ, then why should disagreements over teachings and behaviors and doctrines and policies so thoroughly rent us asunder? Thank you. [APPLAUSE] So we'll have a brief response to this. I'm enormously grateful for the serious attention that my book has achieved in such a short time. I have no idea how the three of you in the middle of your busy time have managed to do this. Thank you very, very much. And you've been very kind. I always warm to the famous quote from a bishop who said, everywhere Saint Paul went, there was a riot. Everywhere I go, they serve tea. [LAUGHTER] We have managed to avoid the riot. There may be some tea later on. I don't know. Just a few very quick comments, and I'd love to take longer. But I want some Q&A from the floor. Both of you mentioned at the beginning of your respective remarks the question of history and theology and how they work together. There's things there that would be fun to tease out. I'm not sure I've quite even understood the full import of what you're both saying. And I want to try and get back to that. But just park that for the moment. To Giovanni, on apocalyptic worldview, yes, of course in other cultures, as well. The one to which I drew attention in chapter five, particularly-- I got fascinated by this, and you mentioned Virgil-- that Virgil, but also Levi and Horace and Ovid all tell, mutatis mutandis, the story of Rome as a republic suddenly reaching an almost apocalyptic climax in the rise of Augustus and his bringing of peace and glory and salvation and justice to the world. And it's an extraordinary heilsgeschichte that they do. We wish we had the whole of Levi so we can see how it played out. But particularly Virgil's Iliad-- of course, that is what it's doing. And of course, it is in the service of Augustus and their court poets and friends of the big man, et cetera. I'd love to see the Seleucid, et cetera, material that you mentioned, as well, because, yes, I have no interest in saying that this idea of a great coming new age is a purely Jewish idea. You have the Golden Age or the different ages that rotate, which goes back, I think, to ancient Persian worlds and so on. And you rightly say that for Second Temple Judaism and for Paul, their particular way of doing this is to reinhabit the exodus narrative and say, we want that again, only more so, and all sorts of other things. And particularly, I'm interested in Daniel 9. And I highlight this in chapter two-- Daniel 9, which says that the exile won't last for 70 years but for 490 years-- 70 times 7. And the way in which we can see Jewish groups and writers calculating when that was going to happen-- I'm not sure we get that anywhere else. Maybe we do. I'm not aware of that. And so it seems to me that, yes, there are parallels. But the notion-- I think it's hard to say this. The specifically Jewish way of doing hope-- when I was writing chapter 11, I looked in the Oxford Classical Dictionary to see if there was an article on either hope or eschatology and there wasn't. And I made a little bit of a quip on page one of that chapter to say, it's unthinkable to have a dictionary of Ancient Judaism which doesn't have eschatology or hope. But you somehow manage to do it in the classical world. Now of course, there were themes of hope. Hope is what is left in Pandora's box when everything else is flown out, et cetera. But it doesn't seem to me to be the same as if you're a creational monotheistic looking at a world in disarray and saying, we believe in a God who absolutely must do something about that, rather than this just being a process. So there's lots of stuff there. And I say I'm particularly interested-- and I've asked lots of classics friends, has anyone done very much on this imperial heilsgeschichte and where that comes from and whether there are parallels. And I get shrugs of the shoulders. No, we haven't really thought about it that way. But it's very interesting that that's happening with Augustus just at the same time that the Jewish re-reading of Daniel 9 is boiling to its full height. So that's a brief response there. To Katherine, yeah, thank you very much. Obviously, the question of power is enormous. I did come close to this and then from time to time step away and bracket it out. And I just thought, this is going to be a bottomless pit if I-- as I thought with lots of issues, actually. I think I want to say-- and it actually applies to both of you-- if Paul thinks Jesus is in some sense or other the Jewish messiah-- the Israel's messiah-- then Psalm 2, Psalm 72, Isaiah 11-- lots and lots of passages-- come in which say, this is why [? Busa ?], et cetera, were just wrong to say that Paul has a mission to the world. Therefore, he stepped away from Judaism. No. It is from the heart of Judaism that we find when Israel's messiah comes, he is going to be the Lord of the world because that's how the logic of it works. But what Paul then does, I think, is radically to deconstruct, say, the "dashing in pieces like a potter's vessel" that you find in Psalm 2 so that when Psalm 2 is used in the New Testament, as it is frequently, you don't get the violent stuff which you get in other Second Temple re-readings of Psalm 2, for instance, in Psalms of Solomon 17 and so on. And the trouble with this is that it's not quite clear to me how Paul could say what he wants to say without somebody accusing him of either manipulation, or power, or whatever. And obviously, that's happened. People have read 2 Corinthians like that, particularly. I'm thinking of Graham Shaw, the Cost of Authority, and others. And it seems to me in Philippians 2 there is always a danger of parody. I think in Philippians 2-- this is building on Peter Oaks and other readers of that passage-- that Paul has told the story of Jesus in such a way as to say, this is the real story, and Caesar is a parody of that. But of course, if you do that, in order to have parody, you have to create parallel. That's how the literary thing works. But if you create parallel, yes, it's always then possible-- this is response to your line about Constantine, as well-- for somebody in another generation to say, oh, Jesus is in charge of the world. Isn't that good? We know how that ought to work. We'll send in the tanks, and we'll be doing Jesus' business. And I think Paul would be saying, excuse me. You haven't actually read the heart of that poem, which is [NON-ENGLISH] Philippians 2:6B, the death of the cross. That is the thing. And so I think Paul would respond that all power is radically redefined through the cross. But it is still power. I mean, it seems to me in Paul, in the New Testament, in the Jewish world, there's nothing wrong with power. The wrong thing is in the abuse of power-- to manipulate, to force, to harm, et cetera. And my key point with Philemon-- and I'm really glad for the to-and-fro there-- was the difference between Paul's letter to Philemon and Pliny's letter to Sabinianus. And those differences are absolutely fascinating. And certainly in Pliny, Pliny remains on the top of the pile. He's giving orders, and the unnamed freedman is still just a blob at the end of the line. And I think I would push back against you saying Onesimus is an object not a person. He is a beloved brother. He is my own heart, my own splankna, my deepest emotions. He is my son whom I have begotten in my bones. Sounds to me like he's a person. I mean, OK. He's being discussed. But that is in the nature of the case if you're going to write to a second person about a third person. And Onesimus, it seems, is taking the letter. So I think there's a very interesting thing going on there. And yeah, there is a sort of egalitarianism. But we have to beware when we say that word lest we import obviously contemporary ideas of what egalitarianism might mean because the passages you cite from Galatians 3 and Acts 2 are, of course, directly dependent on messianic eschatology that's going on in Galatians 3 and particularly in Acts 2, where precisely Psalm 2 comes up again and again. So there's big questions there. But it's exactly this sort of engagement which I was hoping for. So I'm very, very glad of it. Very briefly, Matthew, thank you. Yes. Funny, when I have seminars at St. Andrews, somebody usually-- Alan Torrance-- will tell me that I'm sounding more like Karl Barth than I thought I would. [LAUGHTER] And that may be. Sooner or later, I intend to read Barth. You know, Lesslie Newbigin read Karl Barth's Church Dogmatics when he was on his way back overland from India to England-- took months over it and had volumes of the Dogmatics shipped out to where he was going to be. And it was sitting on buses and trains and so on. Maybe in my retirement, that's what I'll do. But I-- yeah, that may be. [LAUGHTER] I mean, there are two different antitheses. And I may have confused them in what I said. There's the enlightenment antithesis where religion concerns a upstairs deist world, and politics and real society is down here. And that's a different antithesis from the religion versus revelation thing, which in some Barthian scholarship is what you find. And I quote at the beginning of that chapter. Lots to go on with there. But your last question's a very good one, obviously. If this stuff binds us together, why should doctrine divide us, to put it crudely? You had it more nuanced than that. But I think that's it. And I think Paul would say that actually, there are things which we can hold onto as allowable variations. But for us, there is one God the Father from whom are all things and we too to him and one Lord Jesus Christ, et cetera. And these are not abstract formulations which then create a intellectualized discourse which people can play games with. These actually go to the heart of the praying life of the church. And actually, it is about prayer, as I say right at the end of the book. And so I don't think it's either sacraments or doctrine. I think it's a much more creative and interesting fusion of the two, which I've pointed to but no doubt not articulated fully. So lots more I could say. But we need some time for Q&A. Thank you. Thank you very much. We are having questions if you-- Sure. Yeah. I have a microphone. OK. So you're-- It's on the side, so we can help. So whoever wants to ask a question, raise your hands. There's someone there, Chris. This is just a question of clarification. We're throwing around Paul as a sort of a single name, a monolithic figure whose thought is easily characterizable across this time and across these letters. What are you using when you say Paul? What are you referring to, and which letters? And perhaps why? OK. Huge question, and this book is not trying to be about that. There's a line in Robert Morgan's book from a generation ago, The Nature of New Testament Theology, where he says that from time to time, people playing chess need to say, OK, that's that game. Now we put the pieces back on the board and we start over. Of course, scholarship hasn't done that because scholarship is generated through institutions like this where students doing PhDs are very much aware that there is a tradition. And if they step outside it, they're not going to get tenure or whatever it is. And that's a very real fear. And I understand that. I've worked in that world all my life. The trouble is that then the world of scholarship tells its own heilsgeschichte, which is a smooth Hegelian development, as it were, with strands coming in and as though it's just everything building upon everything else. Richard Bauckham has a new article in the present issue of Theology, I think, in which he says, actually, the more you look at Biblical scholarship, the less it actually looks like that. There are major changes and major shifts. But the trouble is that even though today there are, I think, no 19th-century German liberal Protestants still left alive, nevertheless, people still except Ferdinand Christian Baur's analysis-- well not to core but in substantial measure. And so they say-- and you see it in the forewords to book after book-- I am taking the seven letters commonly held to be authentic. And the trouble is that that always-- talk about power games-- that is a particular construct from a particular tradition. So I compromised in this book. And I say, the basic arguments that I'm making here are all rooted in those seven letters. But I will constantly show that actually if I'm right, guess what, if you wanted to summarize what I've just said, there is this neat passage in a little book called Ephesians, which does it really rather well. And are we then compelled to reject that? Because let's make no mistake, of course there are stylistic differences. The biggest stylistic difference in Paul, I think, is that between 1 Corinthians and 2 Corinthians. And we normally think they're both by the same chap not long apart. He just had a nervous breakdown in between, as he says. [LAUGHTER] And he had. It's a serious point. Read 2 Corinthians 1. And it feels like that. The style has changed. Now if that's possible, then why should we say when he's writing to communities in Western Turkey, which had a culture of a more florid style, often known as the Asiatic style, why shouldn't he actually slip into that a bit more and write a long thing like Ephesians 1, 1 to 14? We need to back off, I think, from judgments which actually were rooted in the deep basically anti-ecclesial, anti-Christological world of German liberal Protestantism and say, well, let's throw the chips in the air, see what happens. I still have a major problem about 1 Timothy. Just when I read it through, this feels so radically different in so many ways. I'm perfectly prepared to say Paul might well have written it. But it sure looks different to everything else, including 2 Timothy and Titus. But that's just my judgment on when I read through Paul year by year. So probably says enough to show you where I'm coming from. Thank you so much for your wonderful resume. I come from patristics. And so I always stay a little bit away from New Testament. But I'm of a generation who was a student of Professor Sevenster in Amsterdam. He was a student here at the Divinity School in 1922. But any-- Professor Sevenster wrote a book on Paul and the stoa. Yeah. And of course, Middle Platonism and stoicism is very important in first- and second-century Christianity. So I would like to ask you how you see this relationship. I haven't read the book yet. No, no, no. Thank you. It's a great question. And it is very much back on the agenda at the moment from various different angles. And I suggest as a sort of jeu d'esprit at the beginning of chapter 14, I think it is, that somebody ought to write a novel imagining a conversation between Paul and Seneca. They're both in Rome in the early 60s, both expecting not to live long because of the bully up the road who's going to have them both killed. And I think they would have a lot to say to one another. And what I've tried to do in mapping out Paul's philosophical world in chapter three of the book and then in the possible dialogue in chapter 14 is to imagine Paul facing the big questions that ancient philosophy does face, i.e., physics, ethics, and logic, and to see what we can glean from Paul, sometimes reading between the lines-- but you always have to do that-- as to what he would have said about that, how his creational monotheism would've sat alongside stoic pantheism. Stoic pantheism is quite a subtle thing, as you know. And it's not just [? topan ?] is divine. There's all sorts of forces and so on. And how Paul's language about the pneuma, the fiery substance which inhabits all things, fits with stoic language about the pneuma. Some people have tried to say, for instance, that Paul's eschatology in Romans 8 where he sees the whole cosmos being renewed is like the stoic conflagration. And actually, I think that reveals some of the basic misunderstandings which are going on there because for the stoic, the point about the conflagration is that the pneuma is this fire inside. And the fire will eventually triumph so that the conflagration is a good thing. It's the cosmos becoming truly all of fire. And then it all starts up again. For Paul, we are not in that sort of world at all. The pneuma is central to his vision of cosmic renewal. But it's not because the pneuma is a fire that must consume all the rubbish. But the Spirit is the means by which the creator God, who is other than the world, will remake the world. So there are surface parallels but then underneath, quite a lot of quite sharp distinctions. And it seems to me also-- skipping ethics, because we did talk a bit about that, though it's very important, obviously-- logic, the stoic is very concerned about how we know things. Paul is very concerned about how we know things. But for Paul, this is just a fascinating thing. And this is one place where I think Lou Martyn's material on apocalyptic epistemology, I think, it's the right question. But I don't think he quite chases it through right. For the stoic, there are ways by which we know we're knowing things. For Paul, the idea of new creation already in Christ means that there is a new world and a new sort of knowledge which ultimately comes down to agape-- love. And he says that two or three times-- 1 Corinthians 8, Galatians 4, et cetera. So I think for him, he could take those stoic questions on board. But then there would be other dimensions. And so that it isn't that they're completely poles apart-- far from it. I think he would say, yeah, that's interesting. We're talking about that, as well. But the way we do it is this. And that would be the really interesting conversation to have. So I've just sketched it there and critiqued some present versions. So you were talking about how Paul is rooted as a Second Temple Jewish thinker. And obviously, one of the big differences between Paul's writings and the Synoptics is the destruction of the Temple and the Jewish Roman War. And I was just looking for maybe some commentary about Romans 13 and allegiance to power but then also having this war-- this cataclysmic war. In Pauline's worldview, if you're a Jewish Second Temple thinker in Judea during this war but you're following Paul's worldview-- put on his glasses-- like, what is that like? Great question. It's one of those questions we need probably about five different preliminary surveys of different bits of what you just put on the table to clean them up in order to put them together. Let me first say, I mean, the so-called little apocalypse Mark 13 and parallels, yes, that clearly is referring to the destruction of the Temple. I take it as a completely open question as to whether that reached the form we have it in before 70 or after 70. But it's certainly apocalyptic prophetic-style literature looking ahead at the inevitability of the Temple's destruction. I've written about that, obviously, extensively in the book on Jesus and elsewhere. For Paul, I see hints of that. I see the possible hint in 1 Thessalonians 2, that very difficult passage where he says, the wrath has come upon them. The [NON-ENGLISH] has come upon [NON-ENGLISH]. The wrath has come upon them to the uttermost. I see possible hints of it in 2 Thessalonians, which by the way, is another letter which is often ditched. But the reason it was ditched is basically because as Klaus Koch said a generation ago, the scholarship of the time had no idea what to do with apocalyptic. And it particularly didn't want Paul to be an apocalyptic thinker. One of the paradoxes of the post-Louis Martyn "apocalyptic Paul" is that they haven't rehabilitated 2 Thessalonians, which you'd have thought would've come with a bang right into the middle of the picture. But granted that, Romans 13 is, of course, regularly misunderstood as, oh well, if he's saying that, he's a status quo chap. He's center right. Keep quiet. Let things take their course. That's absolutely not the case. And I've tried to show here and in my Romans commentary why it's not the case, that Paul is actually severely demoting Caesar. Caesar doesn't think he has authority from God. He thinks he possesses divine authority himself. What Paul is doing is warning people against, exactly as I think Jesus did, the kind of revolt which was the common coin at the time, which is simply the violent power game of this group over against the violent power game of that group. But this isn't a quietistic thing. And this goes back to something that you were both talking about and coming out in Matt's comments, as well, that the founding of communities which do not worship the local civic gods do not join in with the local cults but which do their own thing and which sing songs about this person Jesus being Kyrios, this is actually hugely subverse. I mean, in Pliny, we discover that some cities, the fire brigade was suspected because they used to meet behind closed doors. They were suspected of being politically subversive just because they were a little group that got together on their own and did their own thing. How much more a group of whom it could be said that they do these things to bind themselves together and worship Jesus as Kyrios. So I think there is a deep political subversion. But it must not get bundled up with the coming conflagration in 66 to 70. And I think Paul sees that as clearly as anyone. He'd been in Jerusalem on and off in the 40s and 50s. He knew what was boiling up. He knew that the Romans sent these inept procurators who just didn't know which way was up. And it was bound to explode. And I think he is saying, yeah, that's going to happen. But you must not be involved in that. This is not your fight. And Jesus doesn't do that sort of fight anyway. I think that's what he would say. But at the same time, it's exactly like-- see, this is why I say our left-right spectrum is so damaging to us. When you read the book of Daniel, which is the fons et origo of subsequent apocalyptic thinking-- when you read Daniel, we say, here are Daniel's three friends who refused to worship the idol. And boy, aren't they great heroes there? And they get put in the fiery furnace. And then here's Daniel, who refuses to pray to the king but goes on praying to-- he gets put into the den of lions. He becomes our good revolutionary hero. Then when they get out, what happens? They resume their top jobs in the civil service. And we say, hey guys, you just sold out. How did that happen? And the answer is in creational monotheism, God wants his world to be well run-- to be ordered. My side of the Atlantic as well as yours, we know-- because we've had a century of tyrannies-- that good order can easily go bad. But creational monotheism, as part of its rejection of political, as with other dualisms, says, no. God wants good authorities to do their job. But he will hold them to account. And the holding to account is absolutely vital. And that's precisely what you have, I think, in Romans 13, a mixture of Galatians 1 and 2, Revelation, et cetera. So the fact that Jesus is Lord doesn't mean that he doesn't want other authorities as well. The crunch, of course, is John 19, where Pilot says, don't you know I have the authority to kill you. And Jesus says, the reason you have that is it been given you from above. Now if Jesus says that and then goes to his death, that deconstructs and reconstructs the whole notion of what power is and how we navigate it. Question in the middle there. And then there and then one at the front, I think. I have just a brief follow-up. I-- I don't know. Hand him the mic. I think they need a mic so that people in the other room can hear it. Just a follow-up question to that. I would instead ask you if you would prefer the word a "political transcendent" rather than "political subversive" to describe Paul, as well as Jesus when he said that to Pilate. Pilate. I'm not sure what transcendence would mean in that context. It's out and beyond. Oh. Oh, I see. Instead of being in, we're out and beyond. He's out there injecting himself into this rather than us being into this and changing-- It's a different sort of thing. I mean, I'm thinking of Mark 10 when Jesus says to James and John, listen, the rulers of this world do things one way. We're going to do it the other way. In other words, they bully and boss people around. My way is the way of the cross. But the point is, and Mark knows this very well, the cross is still the place where Jesus is enthroned as King of the Jews. And hence, Caesar's henchman, the centurion, says, [NON-ENGLISH], Son of God, which is a Caesar title. So there's all sorts of stuff going on. The danger with the word "transcendence" is just a linguistic problem, I think, is that some people would think that this is purely spiritual, Heavenly, supernatural-- heard those words within an epicurean framework, where that means it's a way up there somewhere. And it has no purchase on reality here. Whereas my point is it jolly well does have very significant purchase but in a different mode. We just need a better word to describe it. Yeah. Professor Wright, I'm a student at Gordon-Conwell. And I was looking around in the crowd, and I see tons of students from Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary from Hamilton. And I wondered what your work-- this newest work-- might have to contribute to the life of the Evangelical Church in America. What your thoughts would that be? One of the golden rules that English people have when they come here is that the word "evangelical" means so many different things, both here and on both sides of the Atlantic. I mean, classically, evangelicalism has done two things. It's highlighted the primacy of scripture, and it's highlighted the centrality of the cross. I hope anyone reading this book will see both of those in spades. And actually, my agenda has always been to try to take scripture even more seriously than the various traditions to which I have belonged have done. Say, no, we've missed this bit out. We haven't factored this bit in, et cetera, et cetera. And there is a sense in which-- and when you look at the book, whenever you physically look at the book, you'll see this-- there is a way in which the cross is determinedly physically structurally central to the whole argument, as well as ever-- so I mean, as far as that is concerned, I would say, here is a way in which you can not only inhabit that tradition but enhance it. But of course, in the enhancing of it, as happens in all traditions, there is going to be critique from within. And I do think that most evangelical traditions, including the ones I know in the UK, have actually routinely marginalized a huge amount of Paul, ironically, because Paul is usually the hero figure, or often the hero figure. But we've picked and chosen. And you see this with readings of Romans. One of the most important passages in Romans is Romans 2:25-29. Most people skip over that because they've been taught somewhere that Romans 1:18 to 3:20 is simply an argument that everyone's sinned. And any other funny bits, well, it's all just contributing to that, so don't worry about it. And that's just not good enough. So a fresh reading of central texts, where you take off one set of spectacles for the moment and try putting on another one, if there's to be renewal in any tradition, it seems to me those are among the primary ways that it comes, by the fresh study of otherwise well-known texts and by determinedly putting the cross back in the center of the argument and seeing what happens on either side. One, two. Can you just briefly speak to how you inject faith into your scholarship, and how you go about presenting what you've researched while maintaining a distance but not denying your personal convictions? It can just be some brief advice. There's a lot of scholars in this room. And there are a lot of people who hold to faith, as well. And I see both present when you speak. But can you maybe give us some advice about how to do that effectively? It's odd. I do get asked questions like this quite frequently. And it's not a British thing. We don't like looking in the mirror that much. I do what I do. And if you observe it, fine. But I'm not-- [LAUGHTER] I'm not great at analyzing it. It's the sort of question you really should ask my wife, actually. She would have some things to say about it. You get up in the morning. You say your prayers. You do your scholarship. You say your prayers again. You go to bed. There's a kind of a matter-of-factness which has to be there, but of course, all the time. And having been in pastoral work for half my working life-- much of it overlapping with scholarship-- again and again, when I've been preparing a sermon for a village congregation in an old pit village in County Durham or wherever, suddenly I'll see the germ of something. And I think, actually, that probably belongs in that article I was supposed to be writing, and vice versa, that something I'm working on at the scholarly level will set off a train of thought. And then the next week or the next month, I'll be making a speech somewhere or preaching a sermon or pastorally counseling somebody, and I will be drawing on that. So there is a regular commerce between the two. And some people might say that's dangerous. And it might be. But I think it's a lot more dangerous to split them up. And I mean, hence my whole agenda in this book is to try to take the disparate ways in which Paul has been split up-- juristic versus participationist, whatever-- see if there aren't larger categories within which all that is contained. And I suppose in a sense, now that you asked me that question, in a sense, that's what I'm trying to model. And I know that in America-- and this is a very peculiar American phenomenon which we do not have-- that ever since Thomas Jefferson, et cetera, you have basically had a culture which is very wary of bringing faith and public life together. That, I think, is breaking down now. But the rhetoric of it is still there, whether it's prayer in schools or In God We Trust on the bank notes or whatever. I mean, you also have Virgil on the bank notes, don't you? Novus ordo seclorum? Why did Thomas Jefferson-- it wasn't Thomas Jefferson. It was somebody else. I forget who. Why did they put that on the bank notes? That's an eschatological claim right there in the late 18th century, excuse me. [LAUGHTER] It is, seriously. This is the new Jerusalem, or the new Rome, both. So it seems to me we all are actually faced with that, even if structurally, societally, we tried to deny it. I have occupied peculiar places within that spectrum. It's been quite fun, actually. And you get shot at from all sides. And that's part of it. Yeah. Professor Wright, I'm a graduate student at Boston College. And I'm interested in comparative theology and theology of religions. And one of the stumbling blocks, to use a Pauline phrase, of comparative theology, especially between Christians and Jews has been supersessionism. And I was wondering if your move towards covenantal, to talk about one of the larger categories you just mentioned, away from the participation and juristic, does that allow for perhaps some sort of advancement in this field? Or could that be useful in this field? Thank you. I hope it'll be useful. But the trouble is that the S word, supersession, is deeply unuseful because it is bandied around and thrown about and means different things to different people. There is even now a movement calling itself post-supersessionism, which it seems to me to build one problem on top of another. [LAUGHTER] The real answer to this is read chapter 15 because chapter 15 is really all about precisely Paul and his Jewish world. It used to be said 100 years ago by the mainstream German religians [? Kashikly ?], [? Kashula, ?] et cetera, that Paul had rejected Judaism and had got a basically Hellenistic religion and faith. And as I said, Albert Schweitzer resisted that. But that was the main line. Now that strikes me as being radical supersessionism. Paul has rejected Judaism. Nope. That's not what God wants. Now here's something totally different. We've got a new religion-- a new something or other-- which happens to have started in Judaism but, thankfully, it's got away from that. That is precisely what Paul's arguing against in Romans 11. The trouble then is when you say, no, we celebrate our Jewish roots-- and Paul is very emphatically drawing on scriptures, not just as abstract proof texts but to say, this is where the story has really gone-- people then say, oh, that means you're setting yourself up over against Judaism. And no, sorry, this is how it is. The key is this-- well, two things. First, this is where the categories really are difficult. For Paul, it isn't about an assessment of a religion and how good it is at being a religion. That's irrelevant. It's about eschatology. Either the God who is the creator God, who is Israel's God, has acted in Jesus to raise him from the dead and to demonstrate that he's the Messiah, or he hasn't. If the Messiahship of Jesus is the center, then this cannot be other than a radically Jewish movement. I was having this discussion after the international SBL meeting in St. Andrews this summer-- happened to be in Saint Andrews. And somebody raised this question. And Markus Bockmuehl, who was one of my respondents, as we've had three today, he said, face it. Qumran is supersessionist. The missionary is supersessionist. And Jon Levenson, who is a name to conjure with in these parts, says at one point, the most Jewish thing about early Christianity is its supersessionism. Now that's a way of taking the fight to the enemy, as it were. And I discuss this in this book. I don't like myself to go that route because it sounds-- and maybe that's something a Jewish scholar can say which a Christian scholar can't. However, take Akiva. If you believe that Bar Kokhba is the Messiah, then being a loyal Jew means lining up behind him, raising the flag, stamping the coins with the year one, which they did in 132. And if you say, no, he isn't, then are you going to accuse Akiva and Bar Kokhba of supersessionism because they're taking over the Jewish? No. If this is God's messiah, then this is where the action is. Now that's not supersessionism. And all the words are tainted-- fulfillment, et cetera. But we somehow have to find a way of saying it's eschatological and not about a comparison of a good religion with a bad one. This is where Ed Sanders, by doing comparison of patterns of religion let the whole New Perspective thing down with a bump before she'd even started. I think we're done. I think we're running out of time. I think we are. Thank you very much for the speech and for the generosity in answering all these question. And thank you to all. And have a good afternoon. Thank you. [APPLAUSE] Thank you very much. Thank you very much. It was great. Thank you. Thank you very much. Great. Thank you. [MUSIC PLAYING]

Channel: Harvard Divinity School

Views: 22,991

Rating: 4.7350993 out of 5

Keywords: N.T. Wright, Paul and the Faithfulness of God, St. Andrews University, Harvard Divinity School, New Testament

Id: GpPMNVg0zww

Length: 119min 28sec (7168 seconds)

Published: Mon Jan 13 2014