Theology of Joy: N. T. Wright with Miroslav Volf

yes I'm here with anti right professor of New Testament and ancient Christianity at the University of st. Andrews we have been just together this morning discussing joy joy in the Christian tradition joy in Jewish tradition and you were saying earlier that Christian joy has everything to do with God rescuing God's people with change of circumstances with there being a new king around ruling that there is in a sense what a political significance to joy so what's the connection between joy and God's deliverance yeah I think in the Jewish tradition going back into the Hebrew Scriptures the Old Testament joy again and again is what happens when God finally does something that people have been waiting for the obvious examples being the Exodus and then the return from exile and then people celebrate because it's a new day something new has happened we've been in a mess something's happened everything's changed and wow this is fantastic or we're going home or the temple is built or whatever it is and that sense of joy because of something that God has done continues on through and is given quite a sort of a new birth in early Christianity because the first Christians believed that God had raised Jesus from the dead and that this wasn't just a kind of a bizarre miracle because God happened to like Jesus so he let him off death or something silly like that this was about Jesus somehow carrying on his shoulders the fate of the whole world and bringing it through death and out the other side so this is the beginning of new creation and it doesn't look what like what we see so we are no longer waiting so that there's a sense well then of course what happens is that all the early Christians were Jews who as far as we can tell would have been most likely in some rather vague way been waiting for the new age to dawn but mostly that looks like the old age is going on and then the new age will start and everything will be totally different whereas in fact what they then experienced was that the two ages sort of overlap so that yeah the new has begun but the oldest sort of going on as well and people are still dying and people are persecuting us and so on so that they have to navigate this quite unprecedented sense of what in the trade we tend to call the now and the not yet you know that something has definite the joy is caused by the now and the joy generates a new shape to the hope for what is still to come and very often not yet seems like far away at least experience what happens to joy yeah and that's that's a question which it's interesting because in the scholarship of the last two generations people have said oh the early Christians were so worried because Jesus hadn't come back after generations on I regard that as mostly a projection of the failure of European hopes in the middle of the 20th century and you can see this in philosophical cultural writing people I Valtor Benjamin and so on that then that works its way through into New Testament scholarship and people say oh yeah it was like that in the early church as well their their hopes were dashed and they didn't know what to do next and I'm looking at the text and apart from one little flicker in second Peter actually they're not saying oh dear what's gone wrong they're saying yeah he'll come back he will make absolutely everything new but in the meantime we have the spirit we have God's presence with us we are celebrating God's kingdom as a now as well as a not yet and so let's get on and do it and and see where we're going next but as folks are about celebrating the presence of God's kingdom as they're waiting also many of them are suffering many of them are persecuted so what's the relationship between joy and suffering yeah it's a it's a tough one and you see it in the Acts of the Apostles one of my favorite sort of examples of this is in Acts chapter 12 which begins with James being killed some early by by Herod's men and we think oh dear that's terrible then later on in the chapter Peter is about to be killed and the church is praying for him as presumably they had been for James as well and Peter gets out of jail free and used to look at the chapter and they fight with James his mother I wouldn't be terribly happy about this you know because you can celebrate Peter getting out of jail but what about James and that's typical of the now on the not yet but the only church quickly learned to see that as a sign the suffering was a sign that they were actually at the leading edge of the kingdom and that they interpreted the suffering not just as miscellaneous oh dear it's all gone wrong but rather well we are now the representatives of Jesus who is the Lord against the principalities and powers and so it's no surprise that the principalities and powers recognize that and they're coming to get us so it means means we really are the servants of the king the suffering is a is a badge of the fact that we are sharing the Messianic sufferings of Jesus so so the kind of suffering that one sees say in the book of Job somebody who had roughly everything we might had Warren Buffett of his time or something of that sort reputation money everything else and then suddenly everything is gone wiped out are you saying that such suffering might not be even possible given the conditions of no certainly not no or no I mean the whole category of so it may be that we need to differentiate several different types of suffering and I've not sort of thought through that typology but the early Christians see their very specific suffering and Paul says this again and again Jesus in the farewell discourses in John says it again again don't be surprised if the world hates you because we are now swimming against the tide now if in the course of that all sorts of other job like things happen which they do then I think that's the sort of moment when the New Testament just holds on to this painfully in the presence of God and that's when I go personally to Romans chapter 8 which speaks about the whole creation groaning like a woman about to give birth and the point of that is that the world doesn't know what's going on it's just in pain and turmoil and then the church is in the midst of the world but also groaning because it's still waiting and then Paul says when that happens the spirit is within the church groaning and this is God's Spirit and God the Father the SIRT the the searcher of hearts knows what is the mind of the Spirit that's very powerful that means that precisely in the meaninglessness the apparent meaninglessness of suffering then the the prayer which can't even come into words Paul says the Spirit groans within us with inarticulate groanings and I think that's the Jobe thing that we don't even know what to say there is no logical explanation for what's going on anymore but we have to trust that then the Spirit is groaning within us so suffering or the hopeful suffering is hopeful not necessarily at the time and not necessarily in itself when Paul talks about suffering in 2 corinthians chapters 4 5 and 6 he talks about as dying and behold we live as sorrowful yet always rejoicing there's this to and fro the whole time and he says it felt as though I had received the sentence of death but this was to make me rely on the God who raises the dead and it seems as though these are not absolutely at the same moment these are this is the narrative that the normal Christian life involves because at the time it felt as though one was being crushed as though one was being completely destroyed and it's only with hindsight that one looks back and says yet build here I am and I think Paul for Paul the the mature knowledge that that is the nature of the narrative means that then the next time it happens you can just begin to say to yourself I have no idea what's going on or why but I believe that actually this too will turn out in the right way so that's what happens when the child dies when the father dies yes in your particular case error whose funeral you presided yeah yeah well every every case is different in my father's case he was 91 he'd had a good long life he had been a prisoner of war for five years and had come through that with integrity and with faith and with hope and lived the rest of his long life up his children working hard doing what a good father should do and being a wonderful friend to us you know in his retirement years he was terrific it's still incredibly painful I mean you don't know how painful a bereavement is going to be till it happens but at least with a parent there is a sense of a parent of that age there's a sense of completeness there's a sense of thanking God for a life well-lived and commending that person and their faith and hope and love to God and that for me taking my father's funeral was an extraordinary experience it was like as a bishop this is one of the most important things that you get to do it was just a huge privilege to be able to commend him publicly to God and to thank God for him and to pray with joy that in the resurrection he and we will share in God's new world you know and that's that's the Christian hope in a sense it's a good death right yeah yeah well it's a life that has been completed rather than cut off what exactly on that I can trust that with the funeral I did maybe 20 years ago now when I was working in campus ministry when a graduate couple in the College where I was working had their first child and the child was born with a heart defect but lived long enough for them to come very quickly to love that child and then the child died and that funeral was just incredibly hard because the whole graduate community kind of many of them young parents themselves sharing this suffering this meaningless there's why this what's that all about and there isn't to give an easy answer at that point I think is just very bad news to try to say oh well it's all right because that there's there's no all right because it's just this is part of the groaning of creation and all we can do is groan and weep and somehow hope and pray that God the Spirit is groaning within us and will through that groaning bring God's new world to birth so maybe a kind of quiet flame deep down of joy in the view of how well it is I'm not sure I would even put it like that I think I think the joy is in the larger narrative and I think to try to say in the middle of that funeral that actually I've got this flame inside so it's not so bad I think that's actually denying some because it is bad it tears us apart and there are many things in life which which one just has to say this this is terrible and you notes at the same time you talk about joy is not simply emotive response to a situation you don't talk about it as a virtue Apostle Paul commands yeah yeah emotions yeah and become not commanded but there's something more involved yes I than just simply you're right and the analogy there would be with love when Paul tells the Thessalonians that he knows that they love each other anyway but he wants them to do so more and more he doesn't mean I know you have warm fluffy feelings about each other I want you to have even warmer and fluffier feelings in the early church love agape is something you do practically and looking after people and it involves money and food and shelter and those sorts of things and in the same way but of course if you were doing that love with a surly look and oh well I've got to do this but I don't want to then that's not love at all in the same way Paul can command joy which i think is to celebrate and so in even in a funeral you are celebrating the resurrection of Jesus and his victory over death and so to that extent yes you may begin to feel that but you can't control your feelings the objective celebration of what is true then your feelings just have to catch up as best they can and what if you don't understand Joyce as simply as feelings as yeah it has a kind of emotive dimension variously but it's also a way of looking at the world world way of perceiving and that would tie into a loose on your very beginning yeah I mean the whole world has changed with the coming of Jesus Christ and therefore you see the world in a different different way HM how what kind of seeing is involved in rejoice yeah I think I think there it's a matter it is a matter of seeing and of and of hearing and understanding of learning to live within a narrative which doesn't appear to people around to be true ie the narrative that Jesus really is Lord already at the end of Matthew's Gospel the Risen Jesus says all authority in heaven and earth has been given to me and most Christians find that hard to believe today because the world doesn't look like that but actually when you read Matthew's Gospel you see the redefinition of authority which is around the suffering and death of Jesus that that's how the victory of love is won over the world and so it's a matter of then thinking in and this is where the virtue thing comes it's a matter of thinking into that world in which the divine authority over the world is constituted by self giving love and realizing that actually I can live in that world and the Holy Spirit is enabling me to live in that world and it goes in fits and starts and I'll get it wrong and I'll make mistakes doesn't mean I'm perfect from day one but it is it is like it's like learning a new language or learning a new musical instrument or something and discovering that actually it is possible to play this stuff and it's working it's making sense at the time when Christianity merged time of Jesus and the Apostles the public celebrations of Caesar as as the Lord and in your comments you have encouraged something analogous to take place kind of public rejoicing and you mentioned even perhaps as a kind of protest against what Caesar railing here today he said it's only interesting some people have speculated that when Jesus rode into Jerusalem on a donkey that he had timed this so that he was coming in on a donkey from one end of the city at the same time that Pontius Pilate who normally resided in Caesarea would be arriving for Passover on his warhorse with his soldiers the other side of the city even if I mean we don't know that yeah I love that idea it's a great idea but even if that wasn't in fact time to coincide it's still making a statement this is how we do power I mean okay it's an echo of Zecharia but it's also a statement about the redefinition of power and authority and my sense is that in Philippians where Paul talks more about joy than he does anywhere else he's also writing to a Roman colony and some of the people he's writing to will be Roman citizens probably not all but in fact probably rather few of them but some would and on the street week by week month by month they will have these great classic Civic festivities which everybody is supposed to join in with and see that the early Christians wouldn't join in and that's why they would lose jobs they would you know lose customers for their shops or whatever or they'd be beaten up because they're not joining in and in ancient religion religion is what you do to keep the fabric of society together and if people aren't joining in that's deeply antisocial in quite a strong strict sense and so but Paul is saying I think not only must you not join in the pagan celebrations and all that goes on with it but there's lots of things in the society you can rejoice everything that's Noble and true and right and good and pure you must celebrate that but also celebrate in the Lord Jesus and I think he doesn't just want them to have festive meals behind closed doors they'll do that as well no doubt but I think he may well say that when it's Easter or when it's one of these great festivals why shouldn't you have your parade down the street as well and as long as everybody knows you're doing it in the right way em the right motives let all people know your forbearance this is not an excuse to go wild and behave like they do nevertheless this is the way in which you know we in in my hometown growing up the churches would do things around Easter which would be in public and on the street that's rather died down a bit in the UK now I don't know about other parts of Europe or America but maybe we haven't done enough of that we've treated Christianity as a private thing a celebration in our hearts or our homes at most and then is it any surprise that people don't take the Easter message seriously some people think that there's not much joy in the world today there's maybe fun there is maybe certain forms of happiness emotional kind of satisfaction but not a kind of real joy I think that may well be true you'd have to do a major sort of sociological analysis of what you meant by it and then examine different societies and the trouble is when you ask people questions you raise something to their consciousness which might not actually be there normally and I think yes having worked as a pastor in many different communities in the UK particularly I think there is a serious lack of joy I think you do see it on great festive events we in Britain still with a strong sense of irony but we still celebrate for instance the Queen's Diamond Jubilee whatever it was here two ago then there's a great sense of yeah let's have a party that's good we like our Queen that there's been a good 60 years well done ma'am and and that's that's fantastic and you know the Olympics and all of that and so and I think that did bring real joy but then there's always a morning after there's always a what now which which follows on but for the most part I think we live in a confused world because people have believed the lie of modernity which says that now that we have the electric light and modern medicine and western-style democracy utopia is about to break out and if only we elect the right person next time then we really have utopia and we keep on electing people and it keeps on not happening and in fact things get worse so I think the failure of the modernist dream which then drives obviously the postmodern deconstruction has led to a world in which people would like to have a bit of joy but they gravitate with with music or with sport or with sex or whatever it is and then it slips through their fingers and I think that's that's a sign that people know there is something for which they are made and they're not quite getting there and that was of course the point that CS Lewis was making in his book surprised by joy well CS Lewis did it in a very personal way you've developed it in the almost political way thank you for your politics of thank you very much thank you

Channel: Yale Center for Faith and Culture

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Keywords: Miroslav Volf (Author), N. T. Wright (Author), Theology, Joy, Yale Center for Faith and Culture, Yale Divinity School (College/University), Yale University (College/University), Theology of Joy

Id: 2u3PGZc8VsU

Length: 19min 49sec (1189 seconds)

Published: Wed Sep 24 2014