Undermining Racism - NT Wright

[Music] you [Music] hello this is Tom right speaking to you from Holly Wall Street in Oxford with some reflections on undermining racism in the light of the crisis over the black lives matter movement three memories crowd in upon me as I contemplate the horror both of George Floyd's callous murder and of the rage of angry mobs in America and elsewhere when Martin Luther King was assassinated in April 1968 I was in Toronto and the next day I stood with tens of thousands in a big downtown square singing we shall overcome that had become the anthem of those who like King desperately wanted to end racial discrimination but desperately wanted it to happen peacefully we all really believed that King's death would stir consciences and that lasting change would come about half a century later it seems we were wrong seven years after that I was a delegate at the World Council of Churches Assembly in Nairobi we sat in the vast hall in alphabetical order of countries so the UK was immediately in front of the USA and we got used to one American after another getting up to tell the world at length how guilty they were of racism imperialism and lots of other isms we didn't use the phrase virtues signaling back then but that's what was going on well that was 45 years ago all that confession but no amendment of life and I hasten to add I've seen the same thing in Britain over the years grand resolutions and no real change much more recently third I was in a conference in America talking about Paul's vision for the church in which there would be neither Jew nor Greek slave nor free no male and female and I was stopped in my tracks by a sympathetic but sharp minded critic an african-american woman theologian whose own book on Paul I had much appreciated she said to me you need to remember that when you talk about being all one in Christ Jesus what people like me here whether you mean it like that or not is that you are all now welcome to become on white males ouch so where do we start how do we read the Bible at this time how do we put it into practice let me be blunt it simply won't do merely to say racism is sinful and we must get rid of it the churches worldwide have known that for a long time and it's had little effect nor will it do of course to say oh those protesting mobs they're mostly communists or anarchists yes of course as with other protest movements there will be a diversity of political ideologies and some factions will take advantage of the situation to pursue their own often violent agendas Jesus faced exactly the same problem he said God's new world is breaking in and the men of violence are trying to break in on the act Matthew 11 in the 1960s the black power leaders said that Martin Luther King was just a wimp with all this talk of non-violence even as the white supremacists were trying to say that King was just a communist agitator the presence of violent revolutionaries trying to get in on the act didn't mean that Jesus or King were wrong just that life is always more complicated than the shallow either-or analyses would suggest but my point is it will not be enough for us to go on saying solemnly how wicked racism is and how we won't tolerate it see there's a double danger in just repeating the ethical imperative not to be racist first it makes it sound as though we are taking our ethical instructions from the more radical so-called woke fractions in our society and that we're just scrambling to get on board with a prevailing secular agenda when the church tries to be politically correct it just looks pathetic like those wet clothes e in the 1960s who were trying to be with it by quoting The Beatles all the time woe betide us if we go that route all sorts of other things will come down that channel at least half of which we ought to reject some will even say that if the church wants to be relevant or indeed missional in today's world we must fall into line with where that world is going that was of course the argue of the Deutsche Christian the German Christians in the 1930s have we learned nothing but second what we now call racism is not simply for Christians a failure to obey one or other moral standard eg that we should love our neighbors as ourselves it's deeper even than that it's a failure of vocation the Church of the anointed Jesus the world's true Lord was designed from the start to be a worldwide family God's new model of human life the church in our own generation has struggled not very successfully to reimagine and sometimes to put into practice something that always was in Christian DNA but which we have all but forgotten the point of being part of Jesus people was never that we as individuals could get to heaven perhaps associating with other slightly different people on the way or perhaps not the point was that we were and are supposed to be in our personal and in our corporate lives small working models of the ultimate new creation which God has promised to make and has launched decisively in raising Jesus The Anointed One from the dead that has always been our glorious vocation so rejecting racism and embracing the diversity of Jesus family ought to be as obvious as praying the Lord's Prayer or celebrating the Eucharist or reading the four Gospels it isn't just an extra rule that we're supposed to keep it is constitutive of who we are so the irony of the present situation is this the churches have by and large forgotten that this was their vocation and that racism was a denial of that vocation so that the phrase Christian racist ought to be heard as a devastating oxymoron Paul in Colossians 3:11 insists that in the Jesus following family there is neither Jew nor Greek circumcised or not barbarian Scythian slave or free that's what it means he says to put on the new humanity which is being renewed in knowledge according to the image of the Creator the stream was regularly ignored in Western churches in the modern period but it was then picked up on in the secular enlightenment today's secular vision of a multicultural global society is at its best a Christian ideal detached from its Christian roots the Christian Church is by and large left out a big element in the understanding and application of their own central faith and the secular world has picked it up that's typical of various cultural moves has been made in the last two or three hundred years God one might reflect doesn't lack witnesses if the church doesn't speak up others may do it instead sometimes as Jesus warned the children of this age are wiser than the children of light so as Pope Benedict said when speaking prophetically to the United Nations in April 2008 the human rights discourse has become a way of trying to get the fruits of the judeo-christian tradition while detaching itself from the roots and if you do that your discourse will collapse into a shrill shouting match of competing special interests and that to return to an earlier point is where we are now with one side saying you're already stand the other side saying you're all communists and unless we and the church is dig down deeper below the shrill moralism to our foundational vocation to be the new model of human life pointing forwards to God's eventual setting right of all things we will simply go around the track of saying oh dear we're all guilty but without seeing why it's like if someone goes to confession or to a pastoral counselor to confess that they regularly get drunk and neither the Confessor nor the counselor nor the penitent faces up to the fact that living in an apartment over the pub may not be the smartest way to address the problem so what is this new Humanity of vocation I've been alluding to and how come we've drifted so far away from it we now see it only as a detached ethical imperative Paul's vision of the church shines out in every letter he writes but perhaps particularly in Ephesians actually his famous doctrine of justification by grace through faith is expounded properly only in two letters Romans and Galatians it's mentioned briefly in the odd verses here and they're particularly Philippians 3 but his vision of the United Church across all traditional boundary lines particularly ethnic ones with Jew and Greek as the central paradigm is laid out emphatically in every single letter even in little Philemon where the slave or free question is pushed home with powerful pastoral gentleness actually the theological and practical climax of Romans in chapters 14 and 15 is precisely on what we might call fellowship by faith Koinonia tejpur steers which follows directly as the necessary fleshing out of justification by faith Paul insists on the radical mutual welcome that must take place between Jesus of different ethnic backgrounds and different cultural practices that go with those backgrounds the whole point chapter 15 verse 6 is that you may with one heart and voice glorify the God and father of our Lord Jesus The Anointed One this is the large scale application of the point Paul makes sharply and briefly in Galatians 2 Paul insists to Peter that uncircumcised Gentiles who have come to faith in Jesus crucified and risen are equal members of Jesus people along with believing Jews they don't need to get circumcised since their previous status as Gentile sinners idolaters has been erased by Jesus death which rescues all his people from the present evil age but it's in Ephesians as I said where the picture is spelt out most fully the privileges of Romans and Galatians over Ephesians in the Protestant tradition is actually a symptom of the whole problem in Chapter one poor declares that God's purpose always was to sum up all things in heaven and on earth in the Messiah please note this stands solidly over against the normal Western Christian assumption that God's purpose is to snatch believers away from earth so that they can live with him in heaven something the New Testament never says the last scene in the Bible revelation 21 and 22 is not about saved souls going up to heaven it's about the New Jerusalem coming down from heaven to earth God's plan always was to renew the whole creation Romans 8 first Corinthians 15 and fair for himself for God himself to come and dwell with humans in that new world part of the intricacy of biblical theology is the installation within the present world of advance signposts of that delighted longing which God has for his ultimate future the Tabernacle in the wilderness Exodus 14 and then the Temple in Jerusalem first Kings 8 they were to be advanced signs of that reality places where heaven and earth would come together and where God would dwell in the midst and then with Jesus death and resurrection and with the gift of the Spirit that plan has left forwards to the point where Jesus people all of them together without differentiation along ethnic lines or any other constitute the new temple in which God already lives by his Spirit the church itself is supposed to be the new advanced signpost that is why in the second chapter of Ephesians the grand statement of sinners being justified by grace through faith chapter 2 verses 1 to 10 leads directly into the statement of what this means in practice in verses 11 to 22 God justifies sinners by grace through faith so that they made together constitute advance sign of his ultimate new creation or if you like God is going to put all things right at the end and in the present he puts sinners like us right that's justification so that the company of justified sinners can become both a sign of and an active agent within those future purposes and that's why in Ephesians 3 Paul then declares that through the church the many-splendored wisdom of God might be made known to the principalities and powers in the heavenly places in other words the very existence of this polychrome but United Church that by the way is a phenomenon which Caesar would love to have been able to bring about but never could that very existence of the church is the sign to the watching world and particularly to the watching powers of the world who love to divide things up that Jesus is Lord and Caesar is not that is basic New Testament ecclesiology so the church then is not simply a loose Association of people who have all had similar spiritual experiences and so get together from time to time to encourage one another as they escape this world and look forward to going off somewhere else no the church is the new family of Jesus followers those who have died with him to their old spiritual allegiances notice how Paul says to the Corinthians when you were pavers in other words which they are no longer and discovered their new identity as anointed people as Messiah people their present flesh and blood existence as this extraordinary even miraculous single family is precisely the point the sign and foretaste of God's coming together purpose for the whole world this family in fact is called to be a worship based spiritually renewed multi-ethnic gender-blind in leadership polychrome mutually supportive outward facing culturally creative socially responsible fictive kinship group a good brief definition of the church the question of who your parents were or the color of your skin not that skin color mattered much actually in the already polychrome Mediterranean world of Paul's day that's been our problem not is this family is to be assigned the world that there is a different way to be human not as a faint and fading aspiration but as a strong and subversive signal of the way in which God's new creation is a reality in Waiting challenging the world's ways of organizing human life so living in this way is not an optional extra for the followers of Jesus a kind of added hobby for those who want something different on top of their regular Bible studies or pre meetings it is part of the deal now all this is obvious I reckon in the New Testament and early Christianity as a whole it chimes completely with Jesus own emphases particularly of course his high priestly prayer in John chapter 17 shortly before his betrayal that all might be one so that the world might believe that was his prayer and it should be ours as well think what that means Jesus is implying that if we fail here we are handing to unbelievers apparently good grounds for denying that he had been sent by God or think of Pentecost many languages a single message that's the point not the collapse of all languages into one hegemonic tongue Allah the Tower of Babel but the multiple outflowing z' of the spirit into all the world creating a single polychrome polyglot family of course that wasn't easy the first real dispute in the early church was between two different groups of widows the fact that the earliest church took caring for widows seriously is itself a sign of what sort of a community it was but they reckoned that there was inequality in the way that food was being distributed between the Hebrews is the Aramaic speaking widows and the Helenus the Greek speaking one's ethnic and linguistic distinctions were already proving a tricky point no surprises but the Apostles took decisive action prayerfully appointing a group of appropriate people to sort it out and that's what we should expect if the church is really doing its job acting as a signpost to the new creation from within the recalcitrant old world we should expect challenges to the ideal of a single family and we should expect to have to address them with wise prayerful and decisive action to ensure continuing unity that's what Paul was so anxious about all the way from Galatians 2 to Romans 15 with plenty in between this is why we find in the second century the apologists having to explain to the Roman authorities that the family of Jesus followers are at home everywhere and nowhere they are the advance guard of God's new creation by the way this affects everything from economics to medicine to sexual behavior to education to worship styles you can't pick and choose new creation means new creation across the board so why do we get it so wrong how has it got to the point where in the last few hundred years the apparently best educated Christian groups in the world think of learning Germans in the 19th century or devout afrikaners in the 20th think of Britain and France with their rich cultural Heritage's think of America how has it come about that this imperative towards a polychrome unity has been so far sidelined that the great majority of would be practicing Christians instead of taking it for granted flout it and regard anyone who argues for it as a dangerous subversive how did we slide into racism without even noticing no doubt there are many answers to this but I want to highlight two the first one is a matter of the unintended consequences of right and proper actions the second is more insidious first then after the homogeneity of medieval that in Christianity where you could go right across Europe and you always have the same liturgy wherever you went one of the great watchwords of the Protestant Reformation was getting the scriptures and the liturgy into one's own language Wynnum Tyndale has always been one of my heroes on exactly that school ordinary Christians need to be able to read the Bible for themselves rather than relying on what is supposedly learn it hierarchy tell them it really means and people need to be able to talk to God individually and together in their own native tongue not in an ecclesial mumbo-jumbo which again may mean something to the priests but which washes over everybody else and turns prayer into mere spell mumbling magic so in the 16th century the aim was to get Bible translations and new liturgies into all the major European languages and that has been extended worldwide ever since hallelujah up to a point because nobody seems to have noticed but that was creating almost at once ethnically based churches so that in a city like Tudor London there would be a Polish Church of German Church of French Church a Portuguese Church and so on and that has continued to this day emigrants have gone to the other side of the world and quite naturally have set up ecclesial structures and practices to remind them of home without saying to themselves now who else is worshipping Jesus in this city and how can we make sure that we're on the same page and together praying for our neighborhood this by the way seems to have been part of the problem in Rome which Paul is addressing in Romans 14 and 15 different house churches with different customs probably being very suspicious of one another but in our case the ethnic groups have quickly hardened into doctrinal divisions we have German Lutheran's and Dutch Calvinists and Scottish Presbyterians and so and as usual muddled English Anglican somewhere in the middle trying to pretend they didn't really have any doctrine of their own but just believed whatever happened to be true and then far more insidious because usually visually identifiable white churches and black churches just as in some parts of the UK there were in the 19th century middle-class Methodist churches and working-class Methodist churches the whole Protestant project in fact split into so many fragments that we can't now keep track of them all and nobody seems to have noticed that despite their regular appeal to Scripture they were thereby ignoring one of scriptures central injunctions the racism both casual and institutional that we so deplore today is but one outworking of the much deeper failure of Western Protestantism and that by the way doesn't mean that we should simply shrug our shoulders and go back to Latin liturgies for all with God the way is always forward not back when this acceptance of division became the new norm we have even given it a fancy new name denomination which ends in Asian and so sounds quite respectable like justification or sanctification it's been easy for visibly ethnic divisions just to fit into that pattern and thus at the very point where the church should have been a shining light of polychrome unity the churches themselves were every bit as compromised as the surrounding culture and then when the secular human rights project of the Enlightenment reached its present levels it appears that the world around us was trying to achieve without the benefit of the gospel or the spirit what we should have been doing all along whether or not we as individuals Harbor secret racial prejudice our structures have colluded with it and meanwhile the Enlightenment has tried to engineer a new world of liberty equality and fraternity and the failure of that project does not make our situation any less ironic I think as I say this splitting into different ethnic groups was an accident an unintended consequence of something that should have been going on anyway namely the communication of Scripture and liturgy in local languages but the second factor we have to note is deeper and I think more disastrous and this is the almost universal assumption in Western churches that the whole point of Christianity was to go to heaven when you die so that how things get organized in church life becomes essentially secondary this is the almost total victory of Platonism Plato as many of you know it's a fourth century BC Greek philosopher who taught that the ultimate reality was the ideal non material world rather than this boring old physical one and as I've said many times there were people in the first century who thought that we humans have souls which are in exile from our true home in heaven and that we want to go back there as soon as we can but those people were metal plate Ernests people like Plutarch not Christians like Paul or John the trouble is that the great Paul Hine emphasis on grace and faith rather than works of the law has been heard over and again within the Platonic echo chamber many Protestants including many evangelicals have come to believe implicitly that God is far more interested in the non material world in the invisible inner life of the individual than in the material world and the actual and visible life of the church in its members and what's more Platonism has always gone hand in hand with an implicit cosmological hierarchy in which for instance men are ontologically superior to women and many Christians in former generations really did believe for various reasons that black and indigenous peoples were actually less fully human than white people and all this has allowed many devout Christians to dismiss social concerns including the proper proper of racism as a secondary distraction oh they say that's the social gospel we don't want that so we easily tolerate problems at that level well yes there was something called the social gospel a hundred and more years ago it was mostly led by theologians who were fed up with the prevailing and socially irresponsible platonism and sadly that movement did sometimes reduce Christian faith simply to a social agenda that was understandable in terms of redressing a balance but not in terms of finding the full biblical vision of the church so in our present day many scholars myself included have been insisting that Paul's doctrine of justification by faith apart from works of the Jewish law was both about what we call ultimate salvation in the new creation mind not in our going to heaven thing and about the coming together of Jews and Gentiles into the single family of Abraham and that these two belonged tightly together read Romans and Galatians and you'll see the reaction from nervous traditionalists in various quarters has been to say that oh this is to water down the gospel to replace a glorious doctrine of salvation with mere instructions about table manners and this is then encouraged and solidified what is basically the secular retrieval of ancient Epicureanism a spiritual or divine world up there completely divorced from our world down here and if you're a plagiarist as many evangelicals are you can leap across this gulf you can then say the present world is not my concern this world is not my home I'm just a passing through but this is not biblical theology or spirituality all this by the way makes a lot more sense as did ancient epicureanism and Platonism if you are well-off so that you live an untroubled life down here perhaps with obedient slaves to look after you so that you can think philosophically about spiritual realities but without them challenging your daily life however it's noticeable that as soon as people for whatever reason become poor or disadvantaged themselves they suddenly discover all those bits of the Bible which have to do with justice and unity here and now not just with a distant heavenly hope Paul would have been horrified by our modern distortions read Romans 14 and 15 one more time the mutual welcome across ethnic and cultural boundaries is not a mere distant implication of the gospel it is the physical tangible visible sign of justification by faith itself and the result has been the creation and the maintenance over many generations in some cases of church fellowships where everyone looks pretty much the same in some parts of some countries this is of course inevitable I grew up in a town in the far north of England whether simply weren't any people who looked different though there were other divisions less visible I suspect that the demographic division between the Anglican congregation to which I belonged and the Roman Catholic congregation at the other end of the town would have been clearer to sociologists but in today's increasingly polychrome world it simply won't do to shelter inside look-alike fellowships read Ephesians 3 or Colossians 3 again and think how impoverished we have become in our self enclosed enclaves Luther's definition of sin humans turned in on themselves how many evils we have allowed to escape our notice the result of all this is that the Enlightenment project of an increasingly egalitarian society homogeneous in its aspirations and values despite its radical individualism has simply stolen what should have been the Christian agenda and has tried to implement it but with none of the foundations that the gospel would have provided bringing together people from radically different backgrounds into a single society is very difficult as we found out it's hard enough even if together you believe that Jesus has defeated the powers of evil that keep people apart and that his Spirit is given to every believer for the profit of all it's impossible frankly if you don't believe that and the failure of the Enlightenment ambition in the two great Enlightenment projects France in America is clear evidence of that so we are now in the situation where we all feel guilty because of racial tension and violence and the further violence which is unleashed when as in war one evil opens the door to many others rioting and mindless violence and so on but we do not have as a society the spiritual or indeed the philosophical means to handle it we in the church do in theory but we've forgotten how to apply it in practice the situation is made more confusing because the Enlightenment project though in some ways still in full swing and generating this idea of a multicultural unity has itself been challenged from within by what we loosely call post modernity over against that homogeneous solidarity post-modernism has insisted on the difference between all identities that has generated an identity politics which we all know well and which produces aspirations and then grievances when those aspirations are not met this syndrome now bubbles up in every point of human life that you can think of and some you probably can't and all this then highlights racism from the other end as it were Enlightenment modernism has wanted to eliminate racism because all people should be basically identical post-modernism wants to eliminate racism because all people are basically different and should be valued and respected as such these two conflicting analyses are of course lost to sight when slogans are shouted and streets filled with violence the ideological confusion seems to fuel the anger rather than checking it and those who get hurt are often of course the most vulnerable all this needs to be thought through much more carefully in the light of what's been happening a first Christian response might be that the poor line vision of the church offers what neither modernism nor post-modernism can achieve the differentiated unity in which the multiple human differences refracted through the prism of the new life in the anointed Jesus form the coherent unity of the body of Christ with its many members that invites further exploration of course for which there is no space here but it is enough for me to repeat the main thesis of this paper it won't do simply to wring our hands over racism say how wicked it is we must understand why it has emerged in the form it has and how the biblical gospel of Jesus when allowed free reign in the construction of the family of Jesus followers radically undermines it let me just say three things in confusion these I think are urgent words for a difficult time first the Christian identity is to be a messiah pass to be in Christ this means that one one's basic life stance is of one who has died to the past and come alive in the new world if anyone is in the Messiah rights Paul new creation and this is where the warning I mentioned earlier comes into play how easy it is for a white male to tell everyone else that they must die to their previous identities when that of the white male still appears privileged and how easy it is when I and others recognize that to indulge in more fruitless virtue signaling but there is no way back from this and the new identity the identity of being in Christ is the basis of the true ecclesial fellowship which ought to be putting the whole world to shame I through the law died to the law rights Paul the man that lived to God I am crucified with the Messiah nevertheless I am Alive yet not i but the Messiah lives in me that is who we are and that's what makes us the genuine god-given bra sisters of all others of whom that same thing is true and this is the reality which the Enlightenment secular project was trying to attain but without the means to do so like a moth trying to fly to the moon again the irony Christians ought to have seen racism coming and denounced it at an early stage both modernity and postmodernity want to eliminate it for opposite reasons but they're shouting louder doesn't get it done second concluding point the present crisis highlights the need at every level for church leaders and ministers to get together across traditional boundaries especially where ethnic difference is visible and obvious it is vital to get to know one another to pray together to read scripture together to find ways of doing together everything we possibly can including sharing in worship swapping pulpits and so on the present crisis ought to drive a new wave of genuine and urgent ecumenical effort not my little committees discussing technicalities but by real communities sharing a common life with the people down the street of who may have vaguely aware but whom they don't seem to have much in common with I know how hard this is but the gospel and the Scriptures leave us no choice third church leaders must find ways of getting together with community leaders again at every level and from every background and finding out where there are real grievances to be addressed and where people are using those real grievances as a cover for advancing other agendas including various forms of anarchy in this process that will of course be penitence but the penitence of Christians of all sorts will not be because we have failed to keep one of the dictates of the secular morality of our time penitence that we have been insufficiently woke or whatever no our penitence will be that we have failed to live out our calling in the gospel as members of the messiah's body as the community that ought to be functioning as a sign to the world by its glad coming together of different classes and groups a sign that Jesus is Lord and that in him and by God's Spirit new creation has been launched with the church as its advanced signpost the church is of course a company of sinners we pray every day forgive us our trespasses and there's a good reason for that and God's forgiveness is so often mediated to us not least through the mutual welcome which we offer one another the truly extraordinary thing here is the way in which black Christians still gladly have fellowship with white Christians despite everything so ok we won't get it right we will make mistakes as we have in the past some of those mistakes will be deep in our systems and our cultures and they must be rooted out and even then we will accidentally offend others and we will ourselves sometimes feel offended Jesus anticipated that forgive your brother or sister he said 70 times 7 no he didn't mean you should keep score be counting it up 490 sounds like a jubilee to me that's what we need right now a glorious amnesty of mutual forgiveness not sweeping is given us what's needed is clear-eyed recognition of the evil that has happened and tearful eyed repentance both for that evil and for the resentment which it is caused and then forgiveness wiping the slate clean all the virtues signaling in the world can't achieve that but the gospel of Jesus can it can pave the way to a fresh start a sign to the world that the crucified and risen Jesus the one who forgives the one who puts things right at last is its rightful [Music] you

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Length: 40min 26sec (2426 seconds)

Published: Sat Jun 13 2020