Simply Good News | NT Wright | Talks at Google

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MALE SPEAKER: We are glad to have here Professor N. T. Wright. He is the former bishop of Durham, which, if I am correct, that makes you the House of Lords, currently, but most well known for being a Biblical scholar and the author of numerous texts. I believe it's 50 different books you have [INAUDIBLE] all on New Testament scholarship and religious studies. So I won't exhaust this. He is, for many, does not need an introduction, so yes, we're excited to have you here. So welcome, Professor Wright. [APPLAUSE] N. T. WRIGHT: Thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you very much. It's a surprise and a delight to be here. Google for me is something that comes up on the screen, and actually thinking of it as a place, never mind a campus, never mind people, is kind of blowing my mind right now, and I'm very happy about that. I'm also happy about the fact that whereas in my previous job when I was Bishop of Durham, almost every church meeting I went to, I significantly reduced the average age of those present, I think now I'm significantly increasing the average age of those. I suspect I'm at least twice as old as most of you here in this room, and I'm very happy about that. It reminds me that I'm on my way to retirement, and listening to music, and playing on the golf course, and so on. But at the moment, I'm still bouncing around, talking about God, and Jesus, and the Bible, and church, and the world, and culture, and what we should be doing in our culture. And since you people are part of the people who are shaping the way that people-- not only what people think about, but the way people think, what I want to try to do today is to put out some parameters to do with how I think the gospel, the Christian good news, actually works, and then to reflect just a little on what being human within that good news might look like and what, as humans, we ought to be doing in order to engage with the wider world in a way which is wise, and honest, and actually deeply Christian. The idea of Christians engaging with the world at all has often been at a discount. People think, well, I don't really belong in this world. I have a spiritual identity. I'm off someplace else. And actually, that is deeply un-Biblical, deeply untrue to the Jewish and Christian vision. I'll explain in a moment. But let me say one or two things about good news. I have a book coming out, which has just come out, called "Simply Good News." I'm not sure it's actually as simple as some people think, but I'm trying to make it simple. But the main message of that book is that contrary to popular imagination, the Christian message is good news, not good advice, and there is all sorts of difference between news and advice. And news is a funny sort of thing. Many people think you go to church in order to get good advice about how to live. Well, maybe you do, but that's not the main point-- or good advice about how to reorder your private spirituality. Well, that, again, may happen, but that's not the whole point of it-- or even good advice about which technique to be sure you plug into so that after your death, you go to the right destination. Well, again, that seems pretty important, but that sounds like advice rather than news. News is about something that happens, as a result of which the world is a different place, often in ways that people don't expect, sometimes in ways that they don't want. You all know where you were on September the 11th, 2001. I bet you don't know where you were on November the 22nd, 2003. I know exactly where I. I was in a hotel room in Atlanta, Georgia, and I phoned home at 5:00 in the morning because the television screens were not showing the event that I wanted to see, which was the final of the Rugby World Cup because England were playing Australia in Australia, and nothing Australians like more than to beat the British at one of their sports. So I was naturally-- England had made it to the final, astonishingly, so I was on pins to find out. And I knew my daughter would be glued to the television, so I phoned her at the appointed hour. Oh, Dad, it's terrible. It's gone to full time, and the score is 17-all, and they have to play another half-hour, and it's all very tense, and-- so I got up, and I paced around, and I waited for half an hour, and I phoned her again, and hey, yay, we won on the last kick of the match. Jonny Wilkinson, who was the poster boy of English rugby, had done a drop goal. And as a result, England had won, and Australia were decimated. And then I had a dilemma. I was in a semi-dark hall in a hotel in Atlanta, Georgia, and I wanted to go up and hug the hall porter and say did you hear we won the World Cup? And I went, he probably doesn't know what rugby is. He may not even know where Australia is, let alone anything else. So I wanted to tell the check-in clerks, did you hear the news? And I realized this means nothing to them whatever, and I was waiting for somebody to come downstairs to the conference who knew that there had been a game going on. And finally, somebody did, and it was an Australian. So I had this good news, which was foolishness to the Americans, scandalous to the Australians, but for those of us who believed, it made us happy all year. And one of the effects was hundreds, thousands of little English boys, and at least hundreds of little English girls, wanted to be Jonny Wilkinson when they grew up and would be practicing drop goals in the schoolyard. Something had happened, as a result of which, everything looked different. Now, of course, in sport, that doesn't last. We haven't been to-- one of my Australian friends who read this book and saw that I used that story upfront sent me a rude email saying you wait. You won't be using too many more of those stories. We'll get you. I did actually send-- when it happened, I sent him an email congratulating the Australians on being such good losers, and he sent one straight back saying, yeah, considering how little practice we have at it-- at losing, that is. But you see, news is about something that's happened, as a result of which the world is a different place, and as a result of which things kind of fracture. Some people say this doesn't make any sense in our world. Other people say this makes all the wrong kind of sense in my world. But some people find that it transforms their lives. And in the early Christian world, that's what happened. How did it transform their lives? What was going on? Well, the gospel, the good news, is a message about Jesus, but so many people have put that message within an implicit back story, which makes it different from how the early Christians saw it. You see, my back story was that I'd been following English rugby since the days when, believe it or not, I played rugby myself as a teenager. I've been interested in what they're doing, following them. I knew the back story. The Australians knew their back story, and those two were going to clash. The Americans in Atlanta had no back story at all, no interest-- didn't mean a thing. I might as well go out on the street in St. Andrews and say that, I don't know, Duke have beaten Caltech at basketball or something. People just aren't terribly interested in [INAUDIBLE]. I'm sorry about that. What's the back story? The back story for so many people, both inside the church and outside, goes like this, that there is this dangerous God somewhere up in the sky, maybe. We're not sure. But if there is, he's dangerous. He's made a very high moral bar, which he wants us all to jump over. We've all failed to jump over that moral bar, so he's out to get us. But then, at the last minute, fortunately, somebody else steps in the way, takes a hit in our place. Phew, so it's all right. And it happens to be his own son. So somehow, that's OK. Now, I have not yet found a preacher who admits to having preached the gospel like that, but I know many, many people in many, many churches for whom that is what they've actually heard. That's what they think more or less the message is about. The back story, actually, is very different to that. The back story is about a good world, a good God who made a good world and who made human beings to be within his good world as people who would bring wisdom, and order, and flourishing, and possibility to that world to develop his creation. He says be fruitful and multiply and look after the world. Name the animals. Tend the garden. And who would sum up the praises of the world, the praises of the trees, and the season, the animals, and so on, and present them in articulate speech before God. This is the vocation of being human, and that vocation remains-- come back to that in a moment. But when humans mess up and say, no, we don't want to do that. We've got our own way of doing this, and we're going to manipulate the world in our own way, thank you very much. And, well, God, if there is a God, you can do your own thing. The results of that is not that you have a big, bad, angry God with a big stick about to beat us over the head, but that the project for the creation as a whole is out of joint. You see that in 100, maybe 1,000 different ways, both in the Bible and, of course, in our world. Now, there are many, many mysteries about this. I'm not saying that human rebellion causes, say, earthquakes. A tectonic plate does what a tectonic plate does, and so on. However, many, many things have gone radically wrong in the world as a result of human brokenness. And the plan, the back story, is about God dealing with the human brokenness in order to put the world right. In other words, God the creator promises and intends to put the world right, and so He puts us right in the present in order that we can be part of his putting-right project for the world. That's how the story works. And within that, you get, if you're a traditional Christian with theories of atonement, incarnation, resurrection, et cetera, et cetera, you get all of that. In fact, you get it enhanced. It makes more sense of your traditional frameworks and texts, not less. But what this leaves us with is a vision of a world with the creator putting it right, doing so through Jesus, and then promising that what He did through Jesus-- uniquely one-off-- that's the news about the event that actually happened. What he did with Jesus, He will do in the future for the whole creation. Hence, the death and resurrection of Jesus point forward to the ultimate event, which is God putting the whole world right, and we are held in between the one event and the other. This is where the rugby story doesn't work quite so well. Another story which I use in the book, and which I developed, is the ancient historical story of what happened after Julius Caesar's assassination in 44 BC. His heir and putative successor, Octavian, ended up in a civil war against Antony, who'd been one of Caesar's best friends, because they could tell the big prize was out there. Only one of them would be the big dog in this great superpower that was the early Roman Empire. And finally-- and all the Roman world was on tiptoe waiting to see what would happen because half of them were with one and half of them were with the other, and half of them hated them both, and it was all very confusing. Finally, Octavian defeated Antony at the Battle of Actium, and Antony and Cleopatra went back to Egypt, where they died not long afterwards. And then, Octavian had to go around all the bits that needed mopping up and sorting out before coming back to Rome. But the word would get back to Rome-- and this is the point of my telling the story. Something has happened, as a result of which the world is a different place. Octavian has won. He's now going to be in charge. You better get your head round that one and your allegiance sorted out. Something will happen. He's coming back to Rome when he's sorted out all the other stuff. And anyone living in Rome between the victory at Actium in 31 and Octavian's return three years later would know that they had to order their lives in accordance with the fact that now there was a different system obtaining. Something has happened, as a result of which the world is a different place. Something will happen, which will complete that, and we live in between the two. So when as a Christian I say, well, something has happened. This is the death and resurrection of Jesus, and the gift of this strange, mysterious, sometimes intimate, sometimes frightening force that we call the Holy Spirit-- the interval between those gifts and the final putting right of all things is where we live, and that's where the human vocation gets restored. And the human vocation in the New Testament will be, again, to be image bearers. The image-- by the way, many of you may have heard this language about being in the image of God, and there are all sorts of theories about what that means. Biblical scholars now are increasingly convinced that what it means is that humans are designed to be a kind of angled mirror so that you reflect God out into the world-- think of the angled mirror-- and you reflect the world back to God. And when humans go wrong, it's when they turn the mirror so that it reflects the world back to the world, and then you go around in a fairly deadly cycle because the world does not have life in itself. It's a God-given life. So the human task is to bring God's wisdom and flourishing to the world to make the-- there's an old joke in my country about a clergyman who's walking down the street, and he sees somebody digging the garden. And he says, isn't it wonderful what can happen when providence and the hand of man get together and work on something? And the gardener says, you should have seen this garden when providence had it all to itself, because of course, what's sad about-- and actually, it's a silly joke. It's a well-known joke, but it's a silly joke because in a Christian or Jewish doctrine of providence, the way God wanted to work in the world, large scale and small scale, is in so many cases through human beings. Of course, you and I didn't make the sunrise or the moonrise last night or this morning. You and I don't do an awful lot of things which nevertheless happen in the world. But the way God wants this world to flourish is by wise human beings taking responsibility, doing things which will bring that flourishing to the world, which is where you guys come in because of course, the world needs information. Thank you. We get much more of it as a result of what you do, actually much more than we can possibly cope with. It's like drinking from a fire hydrant. And whereas when I was a young scholar, I would trudge off to the library, and I would get a heavy, dusty volume out, and I would look up something and take half the morning and then go and have a cup of coffee to think about it, I now just go brrmph, and there it is on the screen, although, of course, sometimes I get conflicting information, even from you guys, so that's something one has to be careful about. But information generally, obviously, is a very, very, very good thing. And information-- the gathering, collecting, and disseminating of information seems to me always has been actually a vital part of the human task. That's why education is something which the Jewish and Christian traditions have always insisted on as being paramount, not just for the elite, but for everyone within reach, that actually giving people the information about the world, about themselves, about life is enabling. It's part of human flourishing. And suddenly, something's happened in this last generation as a result of everything here and in this surrounding area, as a result of which, the world as a whole is far better informed than it's ever been. I suppose the question that I have about that-- well, I have many questions about it, one of which is, what changes when, instead of walking to the library, thinking about something, looking it up, going and having a coffee and thinking about, then going back to work-- instead of that, it takes me three seconds to find it through Google or whatever. Something's changed about the way we do research, and I'm not sure that any of us have really come to terms with that yet. Whether we have the time to reflect that we used to, or whether this just does create more time to reflect because there's less walking around and sitting drinking coffee, whatever-- well, maybe. We still walk around and drink coffee. But in the middle of that, there's a difference-- obviously, as you know as well as I do, but I want to draw it out-- between information and wisdom. And what we find in the Bible very interestingly is this famous character called Solomon, one of the early great kings of Israel. Well, he had problems at a certain point, but basically, a really extraordinary human being in the tradition. And Solomon, we are told, collected information like nobody had ever done before. He knew all about the trees, and the flowers, and the birds, and the animals. He knew all about what we would call the encyclopedia of information known to humans, and he collected this. He had folk who went out and gathered information. All sorts of stuff he knew, and he could teach it, and he could inform people. But interestingly, none of that stuff is in the Bible. I would love to have Solomon's lists of trees and animals. That would be brilliant. But we don't. What we have instead is a book called Proverbs, some of which may go back to Solomon, but it's the Solomonic tradition. And Proverbs has a certain amount of information, but it's actually-- how do you steer through this minefield of information? How do you navigate a wise course? How do you know which to choose? When all this information is out there, how do you know what you should do now in this human situation? And of course, if I Google for advice on something, I'm sure there'll be all sorts of websites that'll come up telling me exactly how to do everything from planting a tree to fixing a card to whatever it may be I want to do-- cooking a meal. I'm told there are now people whose entire repertoire of cookery is what they find online, recipes and so on. Fortunately, I'm not a cook. I say fortunately for the sake of my family so that I don't do that, but I can see how useful that is. But the point is that the book of Proverbs and the whole wisdom tradition, which comes through into the New Testament and beyond, is not simply about information. It's about wisdom, and at the heart of it is that rather strange old line which says, "The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom." And I need to say quickly in brackets that the word "fear" doesn't mean a panicky, cringing fear. It means reverence. It means recognizing that God is God and that I'm not God. And it seems to be the danger with so many aspects of our culture-- and this isn't a cheap shot at you and what you do because actually, it affects all of us in one sort or another-- is that we think by gathering information, we're in charge. We are controlling this. The equivalent I see in my culture, interestingly, over the 1990s and then on into the early years of the present century is that whenever there was a problem in my society, at least, and I think this happened in America too, somebody in government and in the civil service thought it was a good idea to get us to fill in forms, often in triplicate, and to sign off on them so that everything you did had a paper trail which ended up in somebody's office files somewhere. And we all used to grumble and say, are we going to be given extra secretaries to do this? And the answer was no, can't afford that. So everyone's workload just secretly expands into more and more paperwork, as though by the gathering of information, we will make sure that we're all behaving properly and doing things right. And I have to tell you, I don't think our behavior has changed at all. We just have a lot of very bulging filing cabinets because the collection of information does not necessarily produce wisdom, but the collection of information can give you the illusion that actually, you can play God. Now that you've got all this information, you're in charge. And of course, if you've got information, that does give you power. It gives you a lot of power over anyone who doesn't have information. But the real secret is, how do you select, arrange the information, and how do you do so wisely? In the New Testament, that whole idea of wisdom, like so many other things in the Old Testament, comes forward and emerges, not just as an abstract ideal, but as a person, because one of the big categories that swirls around in the New Testament is the idea that Jesus himself is the embodiment of wisdom. Saint Paul says, "In him are hidden all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge," which is like-- how does that work? How does that cash out? Well, it doesn't mean that if you know Jesus, that if you're a Christian, you will suddenly become a walking encyclopedia. It does mean, however, that if you get to know Jesus and let him reshape your life, then there is at least a chance that in some ways at least to begin with, and hopefully more as you go on, you will be making wise choices about what from that world of information to harvest, to deploy, to do things with, and in particular, how to use the information wisely for the benefit of the whole world, because that's the other thing. If you're just gathering information, it can be so that you can simply do whatever you want to do and let the rest of the world be as ill-informed as it wants. But the whole point of wisdom in the Biblical tradition is about new creation, that through wisdom, God wants to work through wise human beings in every walk of life in order to bring about healing, repair, flourishing, wise human societies, wise ecologies, wise ways of being in the creation. So the vision of good news, of what happened in Jesus and what will happen at the end, catches us in between it. When Jesus came out of the tomb on Easter morning, that was the beginning of new creation. So many Christians think, well, he rose again three days later. That's fine, so there is a life after death, so we're going to heaven. That's not the point. The point is that when Jesus rose on the third day, this was the launch of the new creation, with Jesus himself as its first example and as its active agent, and God will do finally for the whole creation what happened then at Easter with Jesus' resurrection. That's the Christian good news, and I've suggested that as we think about what it means to be genuinely human within that vision, what we find is a vision of Jesus himself as the embodiment of wisdom giving us the human vocation, the Solomonic vocation, if you like-- yes, to have as much information as we can. That's wonderful-- but then, also to know how to use, deploy, navigate it wisely for the benefit not just of ourselves, but of God's whole creation, of his whole world. Now, I've probably said enough to start a few hairs running. My watch says it's nearly half-past, so we've got about half an hour before I think some of you have to disperse. So what I normally do at this point, which might be a good idea, is just to take a minute and everyone turn to their neighbor and buzz and say what you found puzzling, or exciting, or dangerous, or heretical, or whatever it may be. Before I do that, one other thing, because if I didn't say this, I have a colleague who would be cross with me for not saying it. I am working in partnership with the Wisconsin Center for Christian Studies, and they have set up some mass online courses with me as the speaker, they they're doing all the actual work, preparing the course materials and all of that. And if you are interested in following this up, the first one is now out on the "Letter to the Galatians." And then there are a couple of others coming, one of which is based on "Simply Good News." And then, God willing, there will be more in the months that follow. And the key for this is www.ntwright.org. So you all know about mass online courses and how all that works. I don't actually know anything about how it works. All I do is sit in my room at home and talk to a camera, and then somebody else does the work. But I told him that I would tell you, so I've now done it. There it is. So now, turn to your neighbor and buzz about what you just heard, and then we'll take some questions in just one minute. AUDIENCE: Hey. I would like to ask your opinion on something. So in the beginning of your talk, you were saying that humans act through God, or Got acts through them to create a good world, and sometimes they get rebellious, and we mess things up. So do you think that in history, there have been occasions where when humans get rebellious or when they challenge a status quo that it actually led to a good thing? I just moved here recently from Ireland, and Ireland, as you probably know, had a referendum last week on same-sex marriage. So some people would call that quite rebellious. It challenges a lot of things in the Bible, so I was wondering-- N. T. WRIGHT: Oh, OK. Yeah, I think we're using rebellious in different ways. I was meaning rebelling against God's will for humans, not rebelling against our societies or whatever. AUDIENCE: But that's rebelling against what's written in the Bible, isn't it? N. T. WRIGHT: Oh, well, that's a whole other issue, which I'd be quite happy not to get into today because that's just-- [LAUGHTER] We could spend the whole day on it, and it is one of the buzzy issues right now. But there are differences there as to how a civil society organizes itself in relation to what it deems to be wise. And from a Christian point of view, many Christian teachers, including most of the Christian leaders in Ireland itself, were saying actually, no, here's the way we should go. And then, 60% of the society of voted the other way. Now, if you live in a modern, secular democracy, that's just likely to happen, but that's just one of 1,000 things. For years, centuries, governments often would be Christian governments-- have legislated in favor of, say, slavery, or in favor of not giving women the vote, or whatever. And yeah, I think bad things have happened as a result of that, but it takes a long time. That wasn't what I meant by rebellious. Obviously, there might be specific examples, but I meant in the much bigger, more general sense-- yeah, it'll work out in the particular ones as well. In the bigger, more general sense, that there are broadly pretty obvious ways of human flourishing. Start with the Ten Commandments, for start, that if you don't steal and don't commit adultery and don't murder et cetera and honor your parents and don't tell lies, especially on oath, then this will be a better place to live in than if you go about doing those things. And so as I often say to people when they say, oh, I don't like the idea of law. It's so restrictive, as though God has given us these laws to cramp our style. So when you're driving down the highway, actually, it's a very good thing that we know that-- of course, here you all drive on the right, but at home, we drive-- at least we have this law, and unless somebody forgets, we can now all drive at a reasonable speed-- maybe not here, because there's so much traffic, but you know what I mean-- because we know which-- if there was no law about which side to drive on, we wouldn't be able to drive more than about five miles an hour because everyone would be trying to navigate between everyone else. So when we rebel against the broad law which God has given, as in the Ten Commandments, et cetera, then yes, society fractures and deconstructs, and bad things happen, and this has spin-off effects. But not being Irish, apart from [INAUDIBLE], I couldn't possibly comment, though I'd like to-- but maybe we could have a quick chat afterwards. I'd like to know about that. Next question. AUDIENCE: You had mentioned the purpose of the resurrection wasn't primarily yay, now we all get eternal life, but to launch this new creation, of which Jesus is the, I think you said the acting agent and the first example of. N. T. WRIGHT: Put it close to the mic [INAUDIBLE]. AUDIENCE: Oh, sure, yeah. From a Biblical theology perspective, usually, people consider the cross the center of history. Would you say that instead, the cross is typological of this greater thing that's actually the center, or it's-- N. T. WRIGHT: Thank you. That's good. I knew in talking for 25 minutes that I was bound to give hostages to fortune, and you just picked one of them up, and that's fine. The cross and resurrection go absolutely together. The resurrection means what it means because it is the resurrection of the Jesus who was crucified. If somebody had just happened to die and three days later be found to be alive again, that wouldn't have meant anything like the same thing. Likewise, the cross means what it means in relation to the resurrection. Nobody at 6:00 PM on Good Friday was saying, well, we've always believed that someone is going to die for the sins of the world. So he's done it, and yeah, it was messy, but it's OK because he'll be-- no, they just weren't thinking like that at all. They were absolutely devastated and distraught, and the resurrection compelled a total reevaluation of the meaning of what just happened. There are 1,000 ways you can say this, but pretty essential is that they came to believe that if Jesus had been raised from the dead, this meant that Death itself-- Death with a capital D, If you like-- had somehow strangely been overcome, been beaten, been defeated. And then they said, wait a minute. All those strange things Jesus had said and done about his own forthcoming death, which we didn't understand at the time-- maybe that was about that on the cross, he was going to do that somehow defeating of death and of the evil which causes death. And so you get growing up very early in Christianity theories about how the cross means what it means in relation to the resurrection. And so because the cross has defeated the power of evil and of death, then Jesus is raised from the dead, which wouldn't have happened otherwise, and then a new world is opened, in which humans can be rescued from evil, and sin, and death, and ultimately, the whole creation. So that's broadly how it works, though it takes large volumes of theology to spell all that out and exegesis. Does that-- do you see what I'm saying? AUDIENCE: Yes, thanks. N. T. WRIGHT: Good, thanks. OK, next question. AUDIENCE: This is picking up a little bit off the woman from Ireland. We live in Silicon Valley in 2015, which is very different from the Greco-Roman world of the first century, so if we take the scriptures as authoritative, how do we go beyond the scriptures to seek to live wisely in a very different world today? N. T. WRIGHT: Great question. Yes, we do live in a very different world, and actually, people in the third and fourth century lived in a very different world from that of Jesus because the Jewish bits of Jesus' world had more or less gone forever, with AD 70, when Jerusalem was destroyed, and AD 135, when the last great Jewish rebellion was put down by the Romans. Everything changed. And actually, as a result, a lot of early Christians didn't understand some things in the New Testament in the way that we can do up to a point because we've got so much better information, ironically, about early Judaism than they had. And the world has changed again and again. It changed in the Middle Ages. It changed with the Renaissance. It changed with the invention of printing. And obviously, what's happened in Silicon Valley and elsewhere now is a communications revolution of at least the same magnitude as the invention of printing, and probably a different magnitude entirely as well. However, what you find in the New Testament is a sketch of pictures and stories about ultimate new creation, about the ultimate coming together of heaven and Earth, and these are not meant as culture-bound blueprints for what's going to happen but as universal narratives, just like some of the best poems are universal narratives, pointing forwards. And I've often said all our language about the future, whether Jewish or Christian, is a set of signposts pointing into a fog. They may be true signposts, but they don't give you a photographic-- they're not trying to give you a photographic reproduction of what you should expect to find. What they are saying is that there will come a time when heaven and Earth will be joined together completely forever, and that within that, there will be a new world, which will be like the present one, only much more so, much more flourishing, much more real, so that the world itself, and us in particular-- we are at the present just a shadow of our future selves. There's a real you that God will make you and give you at the end that will be recognizably you and just like you, but so much more so. And that's what resurrection is all about. So it seems to me that though the culture's changed radically, and though today's culture here is very different from what you'd find, say, in many other parts of the world today, India, or China, or wherever, the vision of the New Testament is about the whole creation and heaven and Earth not being miles apart from one another but kind of overlapping and interlocking, and of that being finally brought together. Within that, there is this vision of human flourishing, which I think does translate cross-culturally. And here's the point. Most of the Bible is our back story, and it gives us little hints as to where we're going. And as I've argued in one of my books, "Scripture and the Authority of God," the Bible is like an unfinished five-act play with little hints, little sketches, as to what the last act, what the last scene, looks like. But most of the fifth act is missing, and our task, if we want to be Biblical, is so to know the previous four acts and the beginning of the fifth one that we can improvise wisely to get to the fifth one. And that involves a lot of translating out into different cultural and historical situations. Does that scratch where your question was itching? Yeah, good. Thank you. Question halfway back there. Yeah? AUDIENCE: I'm just curious if I understand you correctly. If wisdom is personified in Jesus, and if it's actually the wise usage of information, does artificial intelligence ultimately bring together information and wisdom? And what would the Bible or spirituality have to say about artificial intelligence? N. T. WRIGHT: Yeah, that's a great question, and I'd like to know what you think of it-- you all, plural-- think about that, because it seems to me artificial intelligence is likely to stay as good or as bad as the people who are setting it up artificially. Now, I know that there's a big debate as to whether ultimately computers will take over the world and computers will do everything that we do and be as smart as us and smarter and so on. And it's interesting. There was a novel by the British novelist David Lodge, who is kind of on the edge of the Catholic faith, called "Thinks." This was maybe 10, 15 years ago. And the real subject to that novel is this question, as to whether computers can actually replicate every aspect of human experience. And as the novel-- I won't do a spoiler for you on how it works out, but what eventually the characters in the novel discover is that computers can't forgive, and they can't weep. They can't cry. And though-- it's very profound. I mean, there are probably other things as well, like love and things. But the computer cannot forgive, and it cannot weep. And I think Lodge is saying these are actually things which humans do and humans need to do, and which are part of what it means to be genuinely human, and which we-- maybe we just can't imagine it yet. Maybe somebody here is inventing a machine that will weep and forgive. But you know what I'm saying, that yeah, artificial intelligence is hugely important, no doubt hugely useful. There are many things-- and at every stage of the technological advances of the last 300 years, people have said, oh, dear, are we making a Frankenstein, or are we doing a big monster? And I want to say, yeah, that is often the problem. Some of the greatest historians of the 20th century-- I'm thinking for instance of Herbert Butterfield in Cambridge-- were mightily exercised after 1945 at the thought that the science and technology that they had put their trust in, that they believed in, that they thanked God for, had been used to make atom bombs, which were then dropped on two Japanese cities, and now, a force, as it were, let loose in the world that nobody knew what-- that's a Frankenstein moment. And how did we get there? In other words, just because the scientists and techies can, doesn't mean they should. And hence, the wisdom to know what to do with the possibilities that we have in front of us-- that's the difference between information and wisdom, I think. AUDIENCE: What steps would you recommend in order to navigate through all this information in the new creation? N. T. WRIGHT: Wow. Oh goodness. There's no one-size-fits-all answer for that. Somebody was asking me at lunch about particular vocational issues, and vocation is a fascinating thing. Sooner or later, if we put ourselves in the way of finding out what we're supposed to do, we may well discover. Often, it's difficult, dangerous, complicated. We can none of us do more than a tiny fraction of the things which ought to be done in the world. That's why we need one another in a global community. In New Testament language, it's about the body of Christ, that we have different bits and pieces, all gifted differently, but all aiming at the same ultimate goal, which is the flourishing of God's creation and the enabling of humans to be rescued from everything that is preventing them from doing that flourishing, and to rediscover what it means to be genuinely human. In the Old Testament, this again and again comes down-- think of Psalm 72, where you have this grand vision of the king who is going to come, and he's going to bring God's justice to the world. And again and again, it says the main thing that he's going to do is the priority number one, is to look after the poor, to listen for the cry of the needy, and to make sure that they get sorted out. Other things will grow out of that. There are many other things he has to do, many wonderful things of culture and beauty and so on, but that's got to be at the center of it. So I would say if you're wondering how to do this, or you and your friends are wondering how to do this, there are 1,000 different things which God needs people to do wisely, but there are certain priorities, and justice and beauty are pretty central to those. And the danger with a kind of technology just doing what it wants to do is that both justice and beauty can get squeezed out, and you end up having something which is super efficient, but which actually squelches genuine humanness over on one side and does not produce anything other than brutalist boxes on the other. So some agendas there. AUDIENCE: Chapter Five of Ephesians-- the apostle Paul describes a relationship between Christ and the church as a profound mystery. What are your thoughts or views on this profound mystery? [CHUCKLING] N. T. WRIGHT: Wow. The way Ephesians works is that in Ephesians Chapter One, Paul says that's God's plan was to sum up everything in heaven and on Earth in the Messiah, in Jesus the Messiah. That's Ephesians 1:10. 110 That's the sense that the whole of creation, which is sort of bifocal-- heaven and Earth, God's bit and our bit, if you like-- they were meant for each other. So much of Western cultures assume that heaven and Earth are radically different. Your country was built on that principle, on the Epicurean principle of the total separation of church and state, of everything that-- this is private, that's public, and so on. That's simply not the Judeo Christian vision. I'm sorry to be so rude about your Constitution, but that's just how it is. We have our problems as well because we don't have a written constitution, so we're just muddled, and that's the usual British way of going about things, to muddle on and hope it'll all work out. But Ephesians One says God's plan is to unite everything in heaven and Earth in Christ. Ephesians Two says that by rescuing people from all that was corrupting their humanness-- sin, death, evil, wickedness, whatever-- God has brought together Jew and Gentile into a single family, which constitutes the temple. That's the biggest image you could have as a first-century Jew. The temple is where heaven and Earth come together. So if Ephesians One and Two are about heaven and Earth, Jew and Gentile. As a result, Chapter Three, the principalities and powers take notice because the Roman Empire, Greek philosophers would love to find a system, a way of bringing together everything in creation into one great hall. That's the imperial dream. And Paul says that through the church being this people, the manifold wisdom of God is now made known to the principalities and powers in the heavenly places. That's Ephesians 3:10. Therefore, Chapter Four, which is about unity and holiness within the church, leads into this vision, as you say, in Chapter Five, where that unity, which is the messiah and his people, which is Jew and Gentile, which is there in the face of the world-- that uniting is then seen also in the uniting of husband and wife because Paul has Genesis One and Two in mind all along, so that these different complementaries, these different unities, are all pointing in the same direction. And ultimately, the messiah and his people-- that image picks up from the Old Testament image of God and Israel, with Israel as God's bride or God's wife. And it's all about covenant. It's all about faithfulness. And the point of the covenants and the faithfulness is precisely new creation, and hence, the fruitfulness of the man and the woman being to do with the Genesis One mandate, being fruitful and multiplying. So then, surprise, surprise, Ephesians Chapter Six is about spiritual warfare because when heaven and Earth come together, when Jew and Gentile come together, when male and female come together, then there is a sign set up in the cosmos which says Jesus is Lord, and that is a sign which is deeply contested and often deeply unpopular, and people get into trouble for saying it. So that's basically both within Ephesians as a whole and, I would say, hinting within Biblical theology as a whole. Sorry. Huge question, and a huge answer, but there we are. AUDIENCE: Yeah, just going off a couple of the things that that gentleman over there asked and a couple other things, I sometimes think when I'm in my vocation as a follower of Jesus that especially growing up here, being born and raised in Silicon Valley-- and my father was in this industry, and I'm in this industry, and my wife works in it, et cetera-- that I get the economy of God confused sometimes. And sometimes, when I'm at work, I'm given a task. I just want to get your comment on this thought. I'm given a task that's very specific to work on something very specific. But sometimes, I think the reason I'm there is to serve those around me, like God did with-- or like Christ did with the woman at the well or those examples, the woman caught in adultery. Both those stories are just so intriguing to me, and I just want to get that thought from you. What would you think about that? When I'm at work, yeah, I'm supposed to be doing this work, but sometimes I'm conflicted. I feel like I'm really supposed to be serving those around me. N. T. WRIGHT: Yeah, human life is deliciously complicated. I mean, humans simply are all sorts of different related things, and if you stop and think about music, and food, and love, and travel, and beauty, and so on, you realize that just to be an ordinary human is already to be someone in which all these different enormous things come together, and often, they knock sparks off each other. That's why poetry, and plays, and music, and theater, and cinema, and so on are what they are. They're bringing together of different aspects of our life and suddenly showing us that there are connections, and it's very, very exciting. Now, because we want to get stuff done for our vocations, for our job to earn a living, we have to focus. If my task is to dig ditches, then I've just got to get on and dig this ditch. Now, there may well be also things going on in my mind. I may be singing a song to myself. I may be thinking about the book I was reading in bed last night, whatever it is. And then, if the person digging the ditch next to me starts singing a different song, telling a different story, or starts weeping because of something that's happened in their life, then OK, we still have to dig the ditch. That's got to be done. But we have to figure out how then to say hey, let's go and get a beer at halftime and see what's going on. And in my experience, I've done some silly jobs where I've tried to combine different things-- pastoral responsibilities, academic responsibilities, teaching, administrative things-- and you just bounce to and fro as best you can. Now, it's easy for me because I'm a seven on the Enneagram, and Enneagram sevens love bouncing to and fro. Some of you will know. So that that's OK, but some people find it really difficult to change gear, and sometimes I found it difficult to change gear. However, I found again and again, if one is attuned to where human need around you is-- this relates to the remembering the poor business-- then interestingly, often, when there is a need suddenly present to you that maybe you should be meeting, there will be a way of coming to that and of doing something-- when I was Bishop of Durham, I would often find that my diary was absolutely full wall to wall, and then I would get a phone call saying that, say, one of the clergy-- a child had just been killed in a road accident or something. I'd think, oh, I need to go and see them. But look, I've got-- and then the secretary would say, oh, by the way, I just had a call that your 3 o'clock appointment's just canceled. Right. Get in the car. We're going to see them. And that happened so often in the seven years I was doing that job that I thought that this actually-- I'm being looked after here. I need to be there, and so a space opens up. Now, I'm not saying that I live a charmed life, because I don't. I'm not saying I'm always well organized, because I'm not. I actually need my wife in the front row to stare at me as though to say you telling these nice stories about how it works out. You know perfectly well it doesn't. [LAUGHTER] I have a lovely cartoon framed in my room, which is of a bishop and his wife driving away from church, and the bishop is saying to his wife, "Have you considered how much more effective my sermon would have been if you haven't yelled, 'ha!'" [LAUGHTER] So there. AUDIENCE: You mentioned in Ephesians at the very end, Chapter Six, about the spiritual battle and the idea of principalities and powers. And in Silicon Valley and information and technique and everything, between information and wisdom, what is the battle in terms of our relationship to principalities and powers as it relates to this context? N. T. WRIGHT: That's a great question, and I'm not sure that I'm the right person to answer it because I don't live and work here, and I really don't know. I would guess, however, that there are enormous forces in economics, in technology, in America, in the Western world in general, where you do want to ask the question. We all have to ask this question. I, as an academic teaching students and writing books, have to answer the question. Are we actually going to work to build the Tower of Babel? Is that what we're doing? An all-human work is always in danger of arrogance. That's why when you think about the problem in the world, don't just look at Genesis Three. Look at Genesis 3 through to Genesis 11 because here's the thing. The human task in the beginning is about community. It's about replenishing the Earth, about doing community, about family, about land, about getting this stuff sorted out. After Adam and Eve rebel, whatever that means, picture language, et cetera, one of the first things that happened is the first murder-- Cain murdering Abel. But then, when Cain goes off, what does he do? He builds a city. He still knows that doing human community is the thing you're supposed to do. But what happens to the city-- not his city, but later on-- is that the city becomes arrogant. Let's build a tower. The top reaches to heaven. And then, we will be it. We will be the people. And God comes down and spoils it all, of course. And so there's a sense that all human projects have the capacity to turn into the Tower of Babel. And if somebody sees that going on and says, hey, wait a minute. We're just doing this because we want to be powerful. We want to be rich. We want to be arrogant and rule the world. Then if somebody is calling time on that, blowing the whistle on that, that's a very dangerous place to be because when-- OK, here's the thing. When humans worship that which is not God, whether it's power, or money, or sex, or whatever it is, humans give to that dark force, which we loosely label like that, the power which we ought to have, but which in fact we're giving to these forces. We call them forces. We don't have good language. They didn't have good language for it in the ancient world. We don't in today's world because it's actually not really nameable. And then, these forces rule over us. And if we get in their way, they will crush us. But that doesn't absolve us from the responsibility of naming the problems that we're up against. So I'm not saying that Silicon Valley is the Tower of Babel. It isn't. There's so many good things that happen as a result of what you guys do. But every human enterprise, including the one that I work in, has the capacity to become self-idolatrous, Babel-like, and we have to name that and deal with it as best we can, preferably wisely. OK, time for probably just one more question. I'm sorry. I'm seeing lots of hands over there. I'm not running away immediately afterwards, so well, OK. You got it. AUDIENCE: Oh, thank you. Your story-- you said about the background of the gospel and your-- N. T. WRIGHT: Hold the microphone up. AUDIENCE: --your example of the background story of the gospel, and you talked about your story of rugby, and that's such a great example for us here to realize that if you don't understand the culture and the passion that's behind that, it's hard to really understand it coming from you. But those of us who've experienced it of course can relate better. I've been trying to understand the New Testament more accurately and studying Hebrew idioms of the first century within Judaism. It's really unified the New Testament and connected it to the old. Even better, I'm wondering about your studies of Hebrew idioms within first century Judaism. Paul uses them throughout his Epistles. You find it through the Book of Acts, and it's clarified a lot for me. I'm wonder about your studies in that. N. T. WRIGHT: Yeah, this is a technical question, so let me just give a brief answer. Every generation in the church, at its best, has known that you need to understand the Bible in its original context. Now, of course, you then need to live it in your own context, and there's always a dialogue between those two. I am one of the lucky ones who's been able to spend my lifestyle studying-- I was trained as an ancient historian before I was a theologian, so I love going back into the first century and trying to make sense of what's going on there, and that means the languages, the texts, et cetera. Particularly-- I'll just give you one example of that, because then we must stop-- the way that other first century Jews, or the ways that other first century Jews were reading their scriptures, are absolutely fascinating and help us to see how the early Christians then were reading the same scriptures in the light of what had just happened to Jesus. And there's all sorts of overlap and interplay. Take the Dead Sea Scrolls. The Dead Sea Scrolls-- you have a lot of scrolls which are simply exegesis of scripture. They take [INAUDIBLE], one of the other prophets or the psalms, and they do exegesis, and they apply it to their own day. And we can see the early Christians doing the same thing, except in the light of Jesus. And that's a fascinating exercise, which sometimes comes very, very close, so close that you'd think they're just looking over each other's shoulders, and sometimes it's quite different. One of the key things, of course, being that many, many Jews-- not all-- in the first century believed that when God was going to do what God was going to do for Israel and the world, it would involve an actual battle, a real bloodbath, a fight, and that God would lead them in victory against the pagan hordes. It had happened before in 164 with the Maccabean Revolt, and they hoped it would happen again. One of the most important things about the early Christian vision is that because they knew Jesus, the crucified and risen one, when they talk about the battle which is going to come, it's not one which humans will fight in the ordinary way, hence the sermon on the mount. When God becomes king, he doesn't send in the tanks. He sends in the meek, and the mourners, and the brokenhearted, and the hungry-for-justice people, and the peacemakers. That's how God's kingdom comes on Earth as in heaven. And we still have quite a lot to do to learn about that stuff. MALE SPEAKER: [INAUDIBLE]. N. T. WRIGHT: I think we're done. [APPLAUSE]
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Channel: Talks at Google
Views: 145,045
Rating: 4.8646364 out of 5
Keywords: talks at google, ted talks, inspirational talks, educational talks, Simply Good News, NT Wright, nt wright resurrection, nt wright debate, nt wright women, jesus
Id: cEIjaHOcGFc
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Length: 54min 18sec (3258 seconds)
Published: Fri Jun 12 2015
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