Revd Professor Keith Ward in discussion with Blogging Theology

okay so we are now live and um this is uh blogging theology obviously and i'm immensely uh privileged to um have professor rev professor keith ward as a guest on blogging theology today to talk about his work um and we were just discussing that um his incredibly voluminous work but also very long career in teaching and theology and writing and oh i don't know where to begin but um he uh as is well known he is a priest in the church of england um and amongst his many distinctions is uh uh he was regis professor of divinity at the university of oxford and for my purposes he is an incredibly productive writer of excellent books um not just on christianity per se but also on the relationship between christianity and science and modern issues that affect belief believing people for example he's written an excellent book called in defense of the soul and this is against uh materialist attacks on the very notion of a spirit or a soul in it that human beings possess that's very very good um he's also a great debunker if that's a not too rude a word what the bible really teaches um a challenge for fundamentalists uh and uh be right as a believer of course as a born-again christian as he calls himself um and another um interesting work is rethinking christianity which i found particularly fascinating um we'll just touch on that briefly in a second one of my favorites though is god chance and necessity again this is uh discussing the relationship between science and faith and critiquing the idea that the two are incompatible um and for a more kind of uh general he's written the big questions in science and religion book this is i didn't find this terribly easy reading i mean this is a serious tome um it's uh doesn't give easy answers but it gives very um compelling answers to many questions i think but the the book that really got my goat many years ago is this um book a vision to pursue beyond the crisis in christianity and um it's a little bit background to this uh uh professor ward was so if my memory serves me right you are associated with the c.s lewis center um in london which um one of its remits was to defend classical christian orthodoxy against modernist um attacks and then after your involvement that this book came out which uh shocked me and maybe other people as well uh because it seems to do precisely what the opposite nevertheless it seems to promote uh criticisms of traditional tradition certain forms of traditional belief anyway inerrancy of the bible for example um perhaps a rigid adherence to creeds a lack of awareness of critical thinking in in biblical scholarship and so on and um this really um shook me uh um and this ju have i is that a fair uh if crude assessment or that's very fair for indeed yes okay i'm relieved to hear that um and a little jumping straight away really with um a vision to pursue and i'm looking at my copy here this was uh written my name october 1991 is when i got hold of that copy just a few years ago um on page 16 of vision to pursue you say that you felt compelled to reject the traditional christian doctrine of the inerrancy and infallibility of the bible because of what you saw as a glaring error so serious that was impossible to deny its existence in the bible this is to be found you say in just one sentence in the gospel of matthew chapter 24 verse 34. now obviously there's a long chapter there i'm just looking at one verse but the verse itself says truly this is jesus speaking apparently truly i say to you this generation will not pass away till all these things take place this generation that's the generation of the heroes of jesus the first century christians will not pass away until all these things take place what are all these things well it re if you read the whole chapter which we're not going to read in folks it's very long um it refers in part to the second coming of jesus and also preceded by the destruction of the temple which took place in 1870 the romans came to judea and destroyed the jewish temple there so i mean we're 2000 years later the second coming obviously did not occur within the generation of those living uh so keith will mentions either that the gospel writer was in error in attributing this saying to jesus or jesus himself was mistaken and these are incredibly serious choices to make logically those seems to be the only two choices given the premise that he is talking about the second coming um and and he identifies much wriggling and squirming that he did to evade the point and i must confess to also much wriggling and squirming myself in fact it's more serious than that it's almost psychological um suffering actually i thought this is such an awful thing to have to wrestle with and i anyway so in the light of this searing honesty and this is my question if i may how can christians today still hold to the doctrine of the trinity and believe in the incarnation of god in jesus after all i would suggest god does not make mistakes okay right a simple question well um i don't actually think inerrancy is a very is necessary to orthodoxy uh a lot of people say it and sometimes people say god wrote the bible uh but i do think that that's a very misleading thing to say because the bible is written in many different languages mostly in hebrew and greek and in many different styles and some of the greek in the new testament like especially the gospel of mark is rather ungrammatical and i think if you say god doesn't make mistakes so i think he doesn't make grammatical mistakes i haven't really so i say what you've got in the bible is a record of how people saw jesus and how people thought of god and they put their thoughts down and those thoughts were not inerrant and there's a little um piece that comes out of the roman catholic view and that's a very conservative view as you'd expect but notice not quite as conservative as you might think uh in vatican 2 when it's talking about the authority of the bible it says the bible is inerrant in all of those things which god wished us to be to see us necessary for salvation well that's a very sort of uh statement really which things that god think were necessary for salvation but it's a view that i myself would accept that that if you say did jesus say all the things that you quoted one in matthew attributed to jesus did he say exactly all those things i think anyone would have to reply honestly no because it's generally accepted that jesus spoke aramaic and the records of jesus words in the new testament are in greek so you've already got a problem that they're not the actual words of jesus i think that's just a fact uh undeniable fact that we do not have in the new testament in the earliest versions of the new testament even the actual words of jesus and then if you compare the different gospels uh even the first three called the synoptic gospels because they all tell more or less the same story in the same pattern of events you'll get slightly different ways of putting things different different words um and if it comes to the gospel of john that's a totally different approach it's clearly about the same person jesus many of the things are the same but many of the things are not the most obvious thing is in the first three gospels jesus peace is short very cryptic i think parables uh in john's gospel there aren't any parables but he speaks in long speeches yeah so i think the conclusion of this is uh not the totally radical conclusion that jesus never said anything like that at all but simply the the conclusion which is more reasonable in dealing with any work of ancient literature but probably jesus said things which were very like that but not exactly like that and which are difficult to interpret uh now you've got that as your background you say looking at religious teachers throughout the world their sayings tend to be cryptic and difficult to interpret i'm not very straightforward they have a mystical spiritual but hidden to many people edge and of course the gospels say that about themselves in mark's gospel it says the reason jesus spoke in parables was that so that people wouldn't understand right when i went to say why would you teach in a way that people wouldn't understand it's just paradoxical to me right it does not and some people can't believe that some people say parables are so to make things easy they're not they're they're they'll prove that it's just that uh i think religious teachers are trying to teach truths which are very difficult to express and they do it in metaphor and in by using various figures of speech um which people um can't take in a literal sense so that's a that's an important part were the sayings of jesus exactly exactly precisely what they say in the new testament and said no because they're in a different language for us and they're different detail in the different gospels not not in the important things but in little details and then the next question is well um are they easy to understand well no they're not because jesus spoke in in ways which are filled with metaphor and symbolism which are very difficult to understand yeah i think that's the way to take the bible so if you say an errant what this leads a lot of people to think is well they actually literally true you know if it says the last supper of jesus happened after the passover supper or that it happened the night before the passover and the different customers say different things they must be true so there were two stuff as presumably i don't know how people get around that new cleansings of a temple as well apparently because they happened at the beginning at the end of the industry yeah but this is just what you'd expect i mean if you if you're talking about people's memories if you take it that jesus had a fantastic impact on people so much that they proclaimed him as their lord and their savior they undoubtedly did this all the gospel writers thought that but then if you pass this down orally in different little groups for 20 or 30 years say and then somebody collects them all together and puts them down but leaves that slightly differing accounts both there that's what exactly what you'd expect do you expect to get slight differences of emphasis people are interested in different things when we're talking to each other now some people perhaps are listening to what we're saying but they might interpret what we're saying in very different ways and then if another person comes along and writes down what they had heard everybody's account would be slightly different so once you accept that that's just human life that's the way it is that's what you'd really expect from the problem so i i would say this they're not inherent they're not literally true in fact um them parables are not literally true at all uh and that doesn't mean they're totally false you know that's the alternative you might be given either god said it or nothing is true and that's really a silly thing sir you're saying that this shows the immense impact of a hugely charismatic personality on different on very different people matthew is very different from luke i mean you can tell a person's character from which gospel they like best right so i won't tell you which one i like but but matthew and luke are very different people um so they see different things in jesus so i i think the orthodox view really is that the bible is not a set of literal truths it is largely a set of cryptic um sayings with great spiritual significance which have been received by people in different ways and then interpreters in the chris early christian communities and collected together by somebody with their own insight into jesus to support their insight and so we have the best evidence of the sort of thing that jesus said and quite a clear view that he was not a seeker after political preeminence but he was somebody who taught about the kingdom of and it's going to be difficult to work out exactly what that means i hope it makes sense why an orthodox christian like me wouldn't say inheritance i believe that's very reasonable i i think and possibly within the spirit of vatican too and it's interesting you mentioned that because that teaching because i understand there was an earlier draft that was proposed or prepared by the vatican um bureaucracy um which was rejected by the pope at that time which did the earlier draft affirm the literal uh factual accuracy of everything in the bible and that was rejected by the pope he said no no go away rewrite that this is not uh what we want here now so in fact that that view was explicitly rejected by the pope himself that older view i mean yes yes that's true and i think uh a huge number of uh roman catholic uh theologians uh would be quite happy and have written books uh saying the sort of thing i've just said that what you get is a pretty clear view of the sort of person jesus was and his insights into the spiritual life but you don't get uh exact remembrances of what day something happened on or even in what order they happened that's true but then coming back to the second coming of jesus which uh matthew 24 uh speaks of and just taking the text at face value without going into questions of authenticity or authorship or anything like that um so you say uh rightly say either jesus was it was mistaken or the gospel writer was in error in attributing the saying about all things happening within that generation to jesus now on page 18 of your book you conclude that jesus was probably mistaken quote unquote and and that's fair enough but i i wanted to uh in the light of that uh honest assessment how does that impact then on the belief in the incarnation this is more of a theological question than a question about nature and interpretation of scripture because uh if the premise is and i think every christian liberal conservative any denomination would agree that god does not make mistakes uh and if jesus in some sense god in some way and of course that's a big you know caveat there um then we have a problem you see well yes but it's a false problem really paul because you're moving from saying um god wouldn't make mistakes just saying and we know what god said right but that doesn't follow at all really um so of course god wouldn't make mistakes but did god say this uh what we've got is an account of what somebody thought that jesus had said that's we've got and i would say uh well jesus must have said something like this but uh i'm pretty sure i mean i there are thousands maybe millions of christians today who think jesus might be coming on the clouds at any moment so you'd have to say them well they're all wrong i mean i would anyway said they're all wrong he's not coming at any moment that's definitely the case so lots of christians are mistaken could jesus have been mistaken well when they uh i'm true i'm really i see harvey was quite orthodox in many ways anyway and this is how how it is that the official definition of the incarnation of jesus being two as a two natures in one person that is a divine and human the important part about that is he's probably divine let's put that on one side on the other side who's fully human now if somebody is fully human they're not like superman they're not superhuman um they have all the limitations humans have so their brains can't contain a lot of information like jesus couldn't possibly have known the theory of relativity for example though that he had you know he could have made life a lot easier for physicists so uh he wasn't ambitious and that's the mistake that people make if jesus was god would come to that no doubt in the moment but if she's if she was in some sense divine i accept that he was if you say that was does that mean he is omniscient and omnipotent no because a human being if he's fully human cannot by definition be omniscient and omnipotent so in the human nature of jesus his knowledge was limited to that which he would have learned from his parents and his peers of what life was like and what was liable to happen in the future so uh if he made a mistake about uh the world coming to an end if he if he did really think that which i doubt but if if he did that is accountable by saying he was fully human so his beliefs would be shaped by those of people around him he wasn't uh infallibility is not uh a mark of humanity in my view anyway um so yeah i wouldn't expect jesus to know everything about the whole universe you know if you say he was omnipotent omniscient he must have known there are galaxies beyond the milky way why didn't he tell somebody about that um so he was a good jew who uh had he was a unique human being i agree but not a super human being so then the question you have to ask is well what difference did it make that he was divine what would that mean let me put it in a nutshell okay if i can put anything in a nutshell a person would be accounted as one with the divine if he or she had privileged intimate knowledge of the divine nature that has had a a close relationship to god more than anybody else i wouldn't say i had a very close one for example but there are people who have a closer relation to god than i do perhaps someone had a uniquely closer relationship that'd be part of it and also secondly if what they did was exactly what god wanted them to do so the thing healing reconciling criticizing hypocritical religious authorities those things show the sort of love which is part of the nature of the divine so in jesus actions he showed what god is and in his experience he knew and loved god in a unique way very much because of his jewish tradition but also because of his purely human but um quite exceptional insights into spiritual reality and some jewish rabbis have sometimes said that anyone who lives purely according to torah the law of god is an embodiment of torah so this person embodies the rule of god he embodies the love of god and embodies is my word for incarnation right jesus incarnates the divine by embodying the divine nature in his experience and his actions that might not be i wouldn't say it's fully adequate but that's what i understand by encouragement yeah that's uh let's help i i just in response to that if i may your first point about the incarnation or jesus nature being as a human who is especially intimate with god and especially close to god yeah strike me that philosophically or ontologically we're still doing with that language expresses two persons two separate beings you have you have god and then you have jesus who approaches in a perhaps uniquely intimate way so that's not incarnation in the traditional sense of god being god himself on to not metaphysically becoming embodied in the human jesus no are the accounts of nicer homoresion for example and cowsiden as well and then um in in this so that language is uh possible for other humans as well to uh also go down that path um in other religions for example you mentioned the the language of the uh the rabbis have used of the torah being incense incarnate or embodied rather and this is a metaphor of course it's not meant as a hard metaphysical statement of literally an embodiment is a metaphor i would argue so he's made making dogmatic skins that's my that's my sense of what's going on now i should say um and so um this language is quite slippery because it can be used to express a seemingly orthodox christian view but also really it's a metaphorical uh way of putting things which in terms of the metaphysics and the ontology of what's going on we're talking about really a single person and i wanted to stress the personhood of jesus here orthodox christology and yourself of course believe that jesus was a single person he wasn't a multiple personality he wasn't disordered mentally but also metaphysically he was one person and so to separate out the beings in the way you did so you say that jesus didn't know about quantum mechanics or the universe of course but if he was god in the traditional sense i i would submit then he would have done by definition because god is omniscient unless we go into kind of a radical kenosis theory of self-emptying which leaves me wondering well what is left of this god person anyway if you empty all his divine nature what's left i mean what is this bit of god left that you can still call him god uh having emptied him of the very attributes of god which define him as god in the first place it always trusts me as a slightly bizarre theory so sorry yeah so um i i think what you're trying to express is is is jesus as a human being a unique human being who is especially intimate and close to god who did as you say in your second point did the will of god um perfectly in an amazing way that's not too different actually from the islamic understanding interestingly of jesus as a as a purely human being who as a prophet of god um like all the prophets like muhammad and moses and abraham and so on was a a righteous man especially close to god who did god's will perfectly on earth and so on so that strikes me you're more close if i may just put it in this slightly um provocative way uh more closer to an islamic christology than you are to a christian one and i put that slightly provocatively when i say that yes it's provocative but it's not far from the truth uh but actually the trouble is that what you call the traditional view of the incarnation is very untraditional indeed although it's a popular understanding of the tradition it's not actually what the tradition says i've already pointed out that the council of calcedon in 351 said jesus was fully human and later on at the council of constantinople it was eden asserted jesus has a fully human will right yes it's not just god's will jesus has a human will you need it very seriously but the the really important point that i think a lot of people miss is that according to that traditional orthodox view god is both changeless timeless and impossible that is incapable of being changed by anything that happens in space and time and that is the traditional orthodox view let me say straight away i reject it completely uh but supposing you accept it and you say this is the only true god is beyond time has done time god there is no time in god god is not related to time in a temporal way at all that's really what it means you read saint augustine it's quite clear he means that because god has he has plato and aristotle as well yeah and that this is what god is right now you say so jesus was god right so on the traditional view what can this possibly mean it has to be metaphor on the most traditional view you can think of because you're not saying there are two persons and you're right jesus one person but god is not a person i mean if if you you read thomas aquinas and he's he was a great philosopher and a great theologian i disagreed totally well not totally i disagree 50 with he says because he says that god is incapable of change there's no there's no potentiality there's nothing in god which god could be which god isn't and so no possibilities in god at all and then you say well how then can you possibly talk as the most traditional person you try to be of god becoming man indeed you've got to say the beginning of john's gospel the word became flesh is a metaphor it can't possibly be literally true because god cannot become there's no change in god and now good theologians know this and so what you say is well god is beyond description god is uh not um like anything that we can describe at all so you can't say you've got a an omniscient omnipotent mind connected to a human finite mind you can't say that you can say no i i can't say what god is to use a qantas term god is being itself essay serum subsistence god is being existent of itself without having any properties which are distinguishable i mean i know this sounds even weird but i mean that is the truth is the traditional view god has no distinguishing of properties god is pure being without potentiality so if you say this this reality is identical with some special temporal reality you do not say you've got two things of the same sort combined you do not say that so the traditional view is not the way you put it paul it's although most people think it is i'm sure but the traditional view is not that some great mind got connected with some little mind so you've got two different minds next to each other the traditional views that's not true at all you've got a fully human mind which is in some sense a speciotemporal expression of something indescribable beyond all description changeless undertone the source of everything that is so what sort of identity is that and here's the true question for traditionalists what sort of identity could that be due to human mind spatiotemporal finite uh and the inexpressible beyond hidden in a cloud of unknowing reality it's brilliantly put there is still a niggling thought that the council of nicaea 325 a.d that the definition of the sun's nature his substance his homo usion his constantiality is as of god the father so they are they share the same something i'm aware this is you know language greek philosophical language and i don't pretend to understand what substance means but nevertheless it does seem to be an ide an ontological if i can put it this way an ontological identity between the son who is jesus and god the father who is god uh if you like the creator and does that not uh um is that not in tension with your description i'm not saying you have to defend nicaea but at least nicer is saying that and so it's not wrong to characterize jesus as being fully god in the same sense that god the father is given the homurusion statement at nicaea well my point is that all these statements they are in greek uh language they it's nothing from the bible at all absolutely they're using a plato and then later on in the qantas they're using aristotle basically yeah yeah they're terms so i would put a query against the whole tradition actually straight away but let's continue with what the tradition could possibly be saying yes it's just much more metaphorical and mysterious then you might think it's so they're not thinking that god uh be changed into a human being or added a human being to himself and so that uh actually the divine nature itself suffered on the cross for example that is explicitly denied the divine nature cannot suffer so the divine nature didn't and then you say if you're a learned theologian you say out but you can say god suffered because jesus was identical with the divine but you'll see something almost impossible in fact i think it is impossible to understand and say so yeah what i mean if you did believe this it wouldn't mean that you had two things stuck together it would mean that you're using and i quote augustine here i only speak about three persons in one substance their trinity because i can't think of any way other way to put what i mean but i don't really know what this means three persons in one substance is a technical term just drawn and pull out of the air because nobody knew what word to use three somethings now so i think it's a question of terminology largely because what what the most orthodox christians are really trying to say is that the infinite ground of all being was somehow authentically expressed in something in space and time and that's it and you mentioned islam and of course the analogy i would suggest i'm not telling muslims what to think at all but i'm i was just the analogy to jesus including is the existence of the holy quran and you say here's something in words arabic words in space and time which authentically expresses the very nature of the infinite and inexpressible god and so it's the same problem how could the father express the infinite it doesn't mean god became the koran no no no does that literally mean god spoke those words now this is where i leave it to a muslim theologian to say but it's going to be a mysterious whatever they say it's not it's not the ordinary arabic that just um but these words express truly what god is in human terms so for the incarnation i'd want to use that sort of analogy that for christians jesus is a living person who expressed in space and time what could be expressed authentically of the divine nature uh and that's it that that's that's the uh i understand i think i understand what you're saying as much as one can understand these deep mysteries um okay just to clarify one point i think the the orthodox muslim belief is not that god expresses himself uh in the quran but the the quran is the actual speech of allah himself it's the words of this so it's not um in any way an incarnation or in liberate the incarnation in liberation you know the uh it is the actual speech of god in the very words of the quran itself that's the traditional muslim uh than view i should say um so um thank you for i thank you for that explanation we'll move on to the next uh point there's just three points uh uh to touch on uh as springboards really in your later work rethinking uh christianity which i do recommend to people to read uh of all sorts of reasons but you say and you make this extraordinary claim you say on page nine quote at the very start of christian history there was a radical change in christian beliefs and expectations far from being a changeless faith once delivered to the saints it changed sharply and unexpectedly uh during its earliest years in the very first generation end quote now i've also said the book i know what you mean but could you just briefly elaborate further what you mean by that extraordinary statement well uh it is connected with the fact that all the first generation of christians were jews all the disciples of jesus and the apostles were jews and they were orthodox jews they went to the temple and they continued in prayer in the temple and the argument that occurred in the early years church was whether gentiles uh should become jews to be to become followers of jesus now we know who won i mean um uh paul won and and said well um no you don't need to become jewish first but the fact is that there was an argument so that's deeply significant that is all paul had never known jesus he never met jesus didn't know firsthand what jesus said all the apostles uh had met jesus and walked with jesus and they opposed paul and they said no you must become jewish and even peter said that peter said that he was the chief of the apostles you say one of the chiefs and he wouldn't even eat with gentiles until he had a specific revelation from god so what he heard from jesus wasn't anything that you needn't be jewish right he he hadn't heard that at all that was new that was news and that's the big change the big change came with a vision to peter not the words of jesus but a vision saying you you eat eat food that's unclean that's all right acts chapter 10 yes not in the gospels obviously and then in acts chapter 15 which is the key text actually i think if i've got that remember that right uh you have the first council of jerusalem as it's called when there was a big argument but the point about it is the jerusalem church headed later on by the person described as the brother of jesus james um the jewish history was always in favor and james sent out apostles to tell paul's followers that they ought to become jewish and they ought to keep the jewish torah so the big change was from thinking what all it is thought jesus had said that you have to keep the law completely and matthew's gospel records they said you know even though it's probably not the exact words of jesus but certainly not the exact words but that anybody who recommends that you break even the least important of the 613 commandments of the jewish law is the least in the kingdom of heaven well goodness yes so that's the big change i mean the the evidence is there it's in acts that all the people who've known jesus thought that you should keep the jewish law completely yeah and now if you ask any christian what the jewish law was they haven't got the slightest idea they don't even care so so that's the change that happened in the first generation it was poor it was the vision to peter and it became generally accepted that gentiles could enter but it but it's a jewish faith originally christianity is is following an orthodox jew jesus and so that was a huge change you see it in the gospels john's gospel clearly is beyond the change i mean uh but jesus has become the light of the world and the embodiment as i would still put it of the divine wisdom the divine wisdom of god um and that's how i think of the incarnation you see this person uh as an embodiment of the divine wisdom within the jewish tradition really but breaking or extending that tradition to the gentile world no that that's that's a good song if i could just press this further it seems to me um in my very limited knowledge if you look at the earliest sources of the jesus edition i the synoptic gospels yeah jesus is saying in luke and in matthew particularly jesus is portrayed as not calling for a new religion to be created called christianity which is what people commonly call their faith today he was preaching quite often um a message of uh spiritual renewal spiritual earnestness um in terms of renewed commitment to the torah as understood by jesus himself say in the sermon on the mount for example with a great antithesis you know if you see this written but i say unto you it's not abolishing the law he's giving a radical interiorization a spiritual uh thrust to it rather than just mere externality he's preaching this mysterious thing called the kingdom of god um which is variously emphasized in different gospels perhaps that's a a huge area perhaps we let's not get into what that really means but the point is i'm trying to make is that jesus didn't found a new religion he he was within judaism as a jew as a rabbi a prophet a teacher even a messiah whatever that may mean um but later on as you say with paul particularly he's identified with this change particularly is that instead of the gospel of jesus that jesus preached as it says in mark chapter one jesus went into galilee to preach the gospel the good news the gospel then with paul becomes a gospel about jesus and this switch has been noted by many biblical scholars over the last century or so the shift from the gospel of jesus to the gospel about jesus now this is no mere verbal trick that this is a fundamental orientation away from the religion of jesus as proclaimed by jesus in the synoptics to a religion about jesus with him as the center of the message rather than the kingdom of god that was the message of jesus's own ministry would you go along with that or was that too simple well i appreciate what you're saying uh but again i i'd see it in a slightly different light um it was a big change but i think it was a change that was already embryonic in the ministry of jesus that is to say um he did preach about the kingdom of god that where the kingdom is basilia in greek the rule of god in the hearts men and women really so he did i think that's important i mean it wasn't a kingdom in the sense of a nation uh or or a particular ethnic group uh it it was the rule of god and how it would come about and he did preach the kingdom but he also in the synoptics themselves quite clearly really was understood to be saying that he was the king so there was a kingdom that jesus was the king i mean you know things like he forgave sins and he had authority over evil spirits and over the forces of nature so this wasn't just somebody who was like moses really he he had an authority greater than that he said that greater than moses is here is one of the statements in this synoptics so uh he was a prophet but there was something about the person of jesus which is somehow important to the community he did found a community they were of jews i agree i agree with you entirely he wanted to reform judaism that's what he wanted and i read his message in the synopsis trying to bring jews to a uh an ex i acknowledgement of the rule of god in in their hearts and to say that the the priestly hierarchy had somehow aligned themselves with roman dominance and things like that which were not truly of the torah so he wanted to reform toronto but he was also pretty clear he called his term by himself which has not remained in christianity it's dropped out of altogether but he called himself the son of man yeah exactly that again is one of those mysteries what on earth does something mean but i i'm still pretty sure that it refers back to daniel who who talks about the beasts uh the three great beasts who symbolize the imperial oppressive powers of the political realm who were succeeded by one like a son of man one like a human being but called the son of man who would bring peace shalom um and uh fulfillment to human society and if jesus i think that shows jesus did see himself or at least he was seen by his followers as key to the new community of the rule of god so you're right there was a change but i it's like the change from the synoptics to john's gospel it was a change which was embryonic in the syllogism but never thought out because how could monotheists say this man was divine you know there was a problem there so you always get jesus and god as it were but by the time of john you were saying something slightly different that this jesus was a finite expression of god and i think what's needed is to get a grasp of the metaphorical nature of all religious language to say what could it be for something finite to express the infinite i mean even if you say when it's words in arabic those words have to be interpreted somebody has to interpret them so there's a mystery there there's lots of things i'm sure in the quran that people would say learned scholars would say we don't know what this means there are different interpretations of this but it's certainly still expressing what god wants to express well i think the same is true of the person of jesus so that so yes there was this change but i don't quite accept that jesus only taught about god uh and then this was changed by paul into teaching about jesus i think jesus always assumed complete authority he said follow me to people and they followed him i mean he's really making a claim to some authoritative position in this so i i it's a development which is natural i think i think yeah that that's good i think that there are alternative strands say in the gospel of matthew which do suggest um a king a a a this worldly kingdom a davidic kingdom where for example in matthew where he talks about the disciples sitting on twelve thrones to judge israel and that's a very much of this worldly terrestrial kingdom-like nation-like reality rather than just a spiritual reality in people's hearts now that characterization is found in luke of course would suggest there are hints of uh a more traditional messianic role as jesus as a king as son of david as he was hailed uh you know on palm sunday and um and also i think um the the the embryonic question um particularly about the law again you know i don't think if matthew's gospel is written towards the end of the say the last quarter of the first century um that's matthew's understanding of jesus message and that contains for example not just on the sermon on the mount but matthew 23 verses 1 to 4 a clear affirmation from jesus uh of the abiding validity of the torah and if that if then later on his um his claimed followers uh paul but particularly later on you know ignatius of antioch towards the end of the first century and so on where judaism is clearly rejected as a separate religion and torah observance becomes uh absolutely you know prohibited especially later on the second and third centuries um you don't just have an embryonic kind of uh you know earlier and later stages i would suggest you have a complete break and a radical rejection of the the earlier by the later so it's much more a discontinuity a metaphor than a continuity metaphor with the embryonic work that you used so i i would say what is more seriously of a crisis or break and a new religion emerging uh which had little to do with the religion of jesus in its rejection of torah observance which for a jew an orthodox jew like jesus would have been absolutely central to his spiritual expression of his life as a jew well again i agree about the facts my interpretation is not quite the same as yours um i think the early judge did in many ways depart from the teaching of jesus but um it's clear again it's a an indisputable fact that if you ask what is the messiah in judaism there are a thousand different possibilities for that indeed so it's not a defined term and if and again it's metaphor if if um god in the psalms king david uh is the subject of a statement uh by god uh you are my son this day i have forgotten you yeah and that was used but what sun is clearly a metaphor i mean it is no chromosomal genuine distinction there no indeed so to say david was the son of god was declared son of god by god it's just to say you're my chosen servant you and i think that this is one of the things which islam and christianity have unfortunately tragically disagreed about but saying jesus is the son of god it says he's the faithful servant of god that's what it means in jewish tradition yeah to be a davidic king in the same way is a metaphor you say he's a king but what sort of king what's the kingdom now if the kingdom is the rule of the spirit in the lives of human beings then the king is the one who is who brings about this rule and fulfills it in the lives of human beings so this is a spiritual role and i think that's all metaphor i mean when you when you think about life after death as it's described in the gospels it's a great feast with abraham and all the patriarchs there and but is that true but i mean how big was the table i mean how many people were going to be having this feast and where did the food come from what were they eating anyway uh these questions don't apply it's it wasn't really a it's not a feast that's a symbol that's that's just a metaphor um it's like the gardens in islam if i'm you know paralyzed just say well is it really a garden and what sort of plants live there well there might be people who want to know that but i would say it's irrelevant it's a story about a wonderful uh life and the presence of god where things will be beautiful and glorious and that's the jewish way of putting it this will be feasting with abraham but you're not you know when um the story of lazarus and the rich man lazarus went to rest on abraham's bosom well i can't think of anything more unhealthy than resting on somebody's bosom but this was just uh i've never thought that way before i must say yes it's just not they're not literal truths so i would say jesus never had is never represented as happening in the cosmos any political inclinations whatsoever in fact you could take this as a criticism perhaps he should have had but he didn't uh he turned down all all implications that you shouldn't uh pay taxes or you shouldn't obey the authorities he didn't have any revolutionary thoughts there's never the imputation of a revolutionary politically revolutionary thought to jesus and that's very i i would disagree that but i don't think the the language of the son of david he was acclaimed as such you know on palm sunday when he entered into jerusalem fulfilling that prophecy zechariah david david's kingship is not metaphorical david was you know according to the belief was an actual king of israel the great israel who ruled and uh greg exemplars so to to be one so you're right and saying there are a thousand different messianic expectation you're absolutely right well i was about to say a thousand i would say probably three or four that we know of maybe but one of them a clear a clear uh favorite and not the only one but a clear favor is one like a son of david who would sit on the throne of david that's there in the in the jewish scriptures um and he would be anointed and that's what messiah means so i don't think i don't see that as a metaphorical at all i i i see what because david was a three-dimensional human being who really did live and if you're going to fulfill that role uh then that's not a metaphor that is a a type that you embody uh a forward and i think in matthew's gospel again we come there are hints of this terrestrial role one like a son of david uh in appointing the 12 uh disciples is to judge israel but i i mean i don't have an answer to this i'm not saying you should have this view of the messiah i'm saying that i don't think it's all metaphor i think like the gardens are paradise what does that mean i think there are this worldly um types that the mass the messiah was expected to uh uh a role he was expected to live out um which were quite clear and you see that you know you see it later on in jewish history with the bakba revolt in the early second century it was held as the messiah tragically failed ultimately to defeat the romans who crushed him so i know that's not the only understanding of messiah there was a heavenly messiah there were several messiahs and the dead sea scrolls there was this there's that but nevertheless the one i'm talking about is is a dominant motif it seems to me in jewish expectation in the second temple period uh later this is a this is not uh i i i certainly respect what you say i i i see there's more discontinuity actually just to end this point um between the teaching of jesus particularly as is expressed in matthew's gospel which i think is not only the most jewish but the most authentic in terms of the likely historical rootings of that in a rabbi orthodox jew type person rather than in mark for example in chapter seven which has jesus abrogating the law the food laws uh which of course is anachronistic given it took another revelation in acts 10 to actually make that point this is a retrospective uh interpretation um so i i i well maybe maybe we agree on the facts but we as you as you say we disagree on the interpretation of those facts yes i mean i think one has to do here is to say if you're trying to be honest to the christian tradition and its earliest developments you really have to say in the end we don't know and there is a range of possible interpretations and yours is one of them that there was an element of political hope i think my interpretation of that would be yes some of the disciples did have a political hope but they were wrong and they misunderstood jesus completely on that so i think the important thing to say is there's a range of possible interpretations and they can all be included in the understanding of a person who wants to uh commit their lives to jesus as a person who embodies the love and wisdom of god in a human life and that's the important thing that we worship god through jesus as the image as a final image of god right um yeah yeah yeah so my job should be more metaphorical i suppose and more stressing the inability of words in their literal application to apply to anything about god um but there are other interpretations and i think one has to allow that parts of the rich diversity of christianity which is four or five different religions all coming together under the name of jesus really i like that four or five different i know what you mean by having read your stuff i know you're getting it okay the last question then if we may um what do you as a christian theologian make of the prophethood of muhammad um do you have any thoughts about that yes i do think that muhammad was a genuine prophet of god and that he was raised up by god and that the quran is uh in some way an expression of god's uh revelation so i do uh think that um i i am a christian i'm a follower of jesus so that i do i clearly i'm not a muslim but i would i think i'm totally opposed to people who misunderstand islam as a rejection of christianity i think that is not true i think islam would it as i see it and muhammad i i don't think he knew much about christianity i would have thought he he was opposed to some of the views of christians that he knew about and i think that's true but i don't hold any of those views in fact and none of my colleagues do other so um there are differences i mean there are clear differences but i i i i think he was a gen mohammed was a genuine prophet uh of one god who who stand against uh a sort of popularized christian version of that being three gods or let's see three different things in god was correct he was justified in this uh so i look for an increase i see the difference between a school of islam and a school of christianity as about the same sort of difference as a difference between me and conservative evangelical christians that there are differences i can live with those i can respect those who differ from me uh and i think uh we have to say i i'm not infallible so i'm not saying that i know that i'm right to use an expression from the quran god will decide who is right but you have to go along with your own feelings so so i i follow jesus because i think he was a human expression of the wisdom and love of god and the main message of that is that god loves without exception everyone there are christians who don't believe that there are muslims who do believe that right but wouldn't use words like incarnation or the trinity etc some certain forbidden terms but if you accept that religious language is fluid and that all of us are unable to comprehend the nature of god precisely i think islam and christianity shouldn't really be regarded as two different religions i think they're two different ways of approaching god and i'm nearer to many muslims than i am to many christians so that's a very interesting answer can i ask this question it's really really on behalf of i know some of the muslim viewers audience will want me to ask this um muslims also have a very high regard for jesus clearly and see him as a an incredibly wonderful human being who expressed the love of god to the outcast and the sinners and so on and and that's all wonderful so your admiration for uh jesus is shared by muslims too or they may be expressed slightly differently of course um he's not seen as an icon into god that we pray through of course um but um they would wonder the question would be why aren't you a muslim if you accept it in that mindset if you accept that muhammad is a prophet of god and you believe in one god god sent jesus that is virtually a definition of what a muslim believes anyway um so they would ask why aren't you a muslim and and saying you're a christian is not an answer because for the reasons you mentioned muslims can already encompass that understanding as well that he is someone who expresses the love of god to you you know and in the wisdom of god in a very special way you know many sufi muslims could say yeah absolutely we agree with you but we're muslims um so the question is what you're a muslim that's the question well it's like asking me why i'm an anglican or an episcopalian rather than a methodist because that's the way of thinking of god which has i feel demanded my loyalty uh so it's a bit like saying why do you prefer one view of philosophy to another viewer philosophy and you say well because that that's the way that seems right to me that attracts me to demands my loyalty and once your loyalty is demanded well i said this for a muslim too of course you stay true to what has revealed god to you so i say all right the end why i'm a christian is because i have personally experienced i believe that i have personally experienced the presence of jesus christ actually um [Music] affecting what i feel and think and do uh so i have no alternative you know this is this is the this is the person who has revealed god to me personally but i so i'm not denying that muslims can uh have god revealed to them in a different way and i honor that way but it's not my way that's not i would like to try to understand it more that's true and be be much more um in affinity with the muslim word thought but um it's it's just not the way that it's happened for me it's not my it's not my not part of my autobiography so i think yeah supplementary question to that it just occurred to me uh you you acknowledge that muhammad is a prophet of god in your in your knowledge of your colleagues in in christian theology globally um how widespread is that view do you think um that mohammed was a prophet of god um amongst your academic colleagues who are christian theologians i think it's almost universally accepted i mean as you know uh even i suppose roman catholics are on the whole more conservative than i would be as an episcopalian um but they uh now officially believe that uh islam is a revelation of god and that that's vatican to official electoration so i think it was my colleagues would undoubtedly say that i mean a lot i know lots of christians wouldn't but no well that's why i meant theologians particularly those who know but you know that yeah well if you're asking the question how influential are theologians on most christians the answer is not in the statistic yeah no i i there's some of you input yeah anyway but that's interesting that that will come as quite a a revelation um and a quite a shocking thing to say that uh in your experience most of your academic christian theological colleagues who are not catholics would actually see muhammad as a prophet of god yes yes i think that's true that's remarkable that i didn't know actually it was a genuine question of mine um that's interesting so that that suggests a certain openness to other faiths and and overcoming these cultural barriers and looking beyond our own comfort zones and and recognizing patterns of commonality and similar spiritual dynamics and spiritual realities across the boundaries between religions and theologians today are well equipped to do that in our world in our global village perhaps i know you will know the work of cantwell smith who was uh the founder of the harvard center for the study of world religions uh and he was an expert on islam that was his scholarly field uh and he he actually recommended that we should stop using the word religion as though there were different blocks of huge beliefs which everybody who's a christian has this block and everybody who's a muslim has that block and we just should talk about ways of faith and ways of approaching god and um i mean sympathy with that i think talking about a religion you know some of my some of the christians i know don't believe anything that i believe except they use the word jesus but they're talking about somebody else [Music] i think that this speaks of a yawning chasm shall we say between your world in that sense of the academic theologians and certainly many in the pew say in the united states and and um africa and other parts of the world where that they are exclusivists to the absolute you know only i hate this all the time only jesus will will lead you to god and i say well okay so moses didn't know jesus is he damned because you've got to believe in jesus to be saved well what about all the prophets they didn't know and i'm not quite sure what the answer they give to that but it's a very uh binary absolutist exclusive world view which is a million miles from your own of course and it's a million miles away from uh saying that jesus is the savior of the world not of one little group within the world uh and of course people like me and again most most of my academic colleagues would in general agree with this uh we would say that the savior of the world is of course god and it's only insofar as jesus mediates god that jesus is the savior of the world and we believe he does mediate god so we can say that but we're not excluding everybody else because god wants to save the whole world and i'm very clear about that and i think some of my muslim friends and i have been have a close association with the oxford islamic center and i think most of them i think believe that too yeah okay well my last question is what are you uh what are you working on at the moment in terms of your literary work uh i'm trying to stop i'm trying to stop i've written all these books really and um i think i should just stop because um enough is enough so i'm not working on anything except i'm talking to people and you know just sort of well trying to i think i've said the main things i want to say in my life i've been very lucky i mean uh approaching christianity and my main aim has been to uh think of christianity not as a dogmatic religion but as as a way of worshiping the creator of the world uh along a certain path and showed that it makes sense and that is morally estimable and to me that's most important and i have no doubt that there are many muslims who want to do that exact thing to say well certainly miss you indeed the vision to pursue to quote your book um yeah well thank you you're reading my books i mean i'm just um impressed that anybody has done no but um there i'm sure that they must be uh very well uh uh read because your publisher wouldn't can you publish that spck one world and others uh one word uh the great publisher but um i just want to say thank you very much indeed um for your time and um it was really really fascinating and i know uh many muslims um will be very interested in what you've said uh but in clarifying because we're often used to uh fundamentalist christians having a go um and to hear an alternative voice of which your voice is certainly um more uh more representative of christian christianity i think than the harsh extremism that we hear of um it's good that muslims hear this uh and you're more openness to uh islam as well to be frank so um yeah thank you so much i actually think paul that until um all the the major developed spiritual faces of the world i include india and buddhism and forms of hinduism in this too until they come to a greater understanding of their own historical perspective and development and shared goals and their differences as well and but have a sympathetic appreciation of that until that happens uh we're not going to adequately perceive the truth of our own tradition that we belong to yes excellent well thank you very much and uh i'm gonna end the discussion now and uh and um thank you everyone for listening in and please leave your comments and your thoughts as well until next time thank you

Channel: Blogging Theology

Views: 28,531

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Keywords: Blogging Theology, Christianity, Revd Professor Keith Ward, Islam, Jesus, Bible, Muhammad, Early Church, Theology

Id: ftRsC_2sjg8

Length: 71min 30sec (4290 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 30 2021