Theology in the Raw - New Creation, Resurrection, and God's Ultimate Homecoming: N.T. Wright

Episode Date: April 7, 2025

Dr. Prof. NT Wright is a biblical scholar, professor, former bishop of Durham, and an author who’s written 30 billion books. Over the last 25 years, he’s been one of the most influential and inspiring NT scholars in my life and in the lives of many others. Click HERE to gain FREE access to the course “Simply Good News” by NT Wright. -- If you've enjoyed this content, please subscribe to my channel! Support Theology in the Raw through Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/theologyintheraw Or you can support me directly through Venmo: @Preston-Sprinkle-1 Visit my personal website: https://www.prestonsprinkle.com For questions about faith, sexuality & gender: https://www.centerforfaith.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hey friends, welcome back to another episode of Theology around. My guest today is N. T. Wright, who is a biblical scholar, professor, former bishop of Durham, and an author who's written Lord knows how many books. Over the last 25 years, he's become one of the most influential and inspiring New Testament scholars in my own life and in the lives of many others. Before I forget, I want to let you know that we're offering a free course free access to a course produced by NT, right? It's called simply good news. Okay, this is a free course. It's over at it in my rato.org that's a d m i r a to.org if you scroll down, and just find the simply good news course by NT right and

enter the promo code. Preston at checkout, you'll get it for free. Okay, or the easiest way to course by NT Wright and enter the promo code, Preston at checkout, you'll get it for free. Okay, or the easiest way to do is just go down and do the show notes on your iPhone or computer or whatever and just click on the link in the show notes. It'll take you right to this free course. Okay, so go check it out. It's an awesome course.

Everything that NT Wright produces is super engaging and challenging. All right, buckle up, buttercups. We're gonna go on a ride through scripture with NT Ride. Tom Wright, welcome back to Theology in the Raw. How are you doing? Thank you very much. Good to see you again. Hope all is well. Yeah. We've, I feel like every six or eight months, you know, we end up on a, yeah, either my podcast or somebody else's platform.

So yeah, I'm excited to hear how things are going. How many interviews do you do a month on average? It depends. Not that many because they are quite tiring and they're quite time consuming, not necessarily in the on air time, but in getting ready and so on. So it sort of takes up half a day thinking about it and planning. You've written, I can't even, you probably lost track of how much you've written, but you continue to write and learn. And I mean, in some ways, when I look on from a distance

at you, you're almost like a still like an excited seminary student that just can't keep, can't stop learning and writing and thinking and rethinking. It's funny, I said to somebody yesterday, it's as though every four or five years throughout my adult life, there's been another turn in the road and something else has caught my attention, usually in the Bible, sometimes as a result of what I've been doing in ministry or preaching, but often just in my miscellaneous reading around, I suddenly think, oh, well, in that case, this would follow and that would go

like that and so on. And then that's exciting. You know, I'm an extrovert. I like sharing things with people. I like explaining things. So. I like explaining things. So yeah, it's extraordinary. I didn't expect necessarily that I'd still be doing this in my mid-70s, but here I still am.

Where does that spirit come from? I mean, is this built into your personality to have this never stop learning drive? Because a lot of people, once they get done with school, they write a couple of books and they're thinking kind of just settles and they just keep confirming everything they've already said. I mean, I've hung out with academics in other fields for quite a bit of my life in different jobs. And I've noticed that some people, they do kind of get to a point

in their maybe mid-40s or early 50s where they've basically done all the exploration they want to do and there may be a few articles to write and book reviews to do and they're editing a journal or going into university administration or whatever, but there's no real hunger to be advancing their subject anymore. Indeed, some of them are a bit bored with it. I feel really sorry for them because, you know, I'm one of the lucky ones.

The more I've gone on, the more things have opened up and made me think, why didn't we see that before? That's why one of the projects I've got lined up, which has a silly title, something like 50 Things I Wish I'd Known 50 Years Ago, because, you know, when I think back to my time in seminary, which is over 50 years ago now, we thought we basically knew the way the world was.

I was one of a group of bright, young, late 60s, early 70s, basically Anglican evangelicals here in Oxford, and we had got a lot of things pretty well-susked. But most of the things that I now regard as really significant in the Bible were not things that we even talked about really significant in the Bible were not things that we even talked about, let alone wondered how they would fit into an overall pattern. And so it's been a constant process of discovery and of unlearning as well as learning.

I mean, the other book that I'm supposed to be writing sooner or later, God willing, is a kind of academic autobiography, a kind of, why did I get into Paul like this and why did I do historical Jesus like that, et cetera. But I just realized the last two or three years that the kind of leitmotif that runs through that, particularly, and I think this will interest you, particularly the new perspective on Paul, is what's been happening is a rejection of Plato. It's really all about saying Western Christianity has been enthralled to Plato, so the debates between Protestants and Catholics and so on

have been inner Platonic debates. And that actually, the more I've read the New Testament, the more I've thought, no, there is a biblical way of thinking which is neither Plato nor Aristotle, though if I had to choose between those two, much as I revere Plato, I would have to go with Aristotle as being, this is boots on the ground stuff, this is let's look at the realia that is actually going on rather than escaping into the ideal world which is only tangentially related to the world we really live in. The biblical world is the world we really live in. The biblical world is the world we really live in. It's this stuff of matter, and God loves matter.

He made a lot of it, and He's going to remake it. And let's live in that world, and that's certainly where the New Testament's coming from. Anyway, you hear I'm… So I'm now seeing that kind of larger picture of what's been going on in New Testament studies and in my own work over the last 50 years. And I think the sooner we get Plato out of our systems, the better. Now, of course, at the same time, a lot of our Systematics colleagues are writing books like Hans Bursma did not long ago saying that if you don't have Plato, you won't understand the Bible. And I think,

no, that's a problem, guys. Don't let go there. So then battle is joined. And we're not having an easy time with that right now. I agree with all that from the little I know about Plato and Aristotle, but I'm reading a book on the concept of women by Sister Prudence Allen, who's surveyed the entire history of philosophical thinking on women. And when it comes to their view on women, I think I would take Plato over Aristotle, wouldn't you? No, no, well, that might well be so. I mean, the Aristotelian rejection of Plato's theory of the forms, I think is basically fine. But what Aristotle then goes on to do, I mean, in several areas is not to be dis… And this is, of course, the trouble that if you have the polarization, here are these two great

thinkers from the middle of the last millennium BC. If we say, well, you've got to choose between them, I want to say absolutely not. What we need is a biblical worldview into which they have insights, not into the Bible because they didn't know the Bible, but into reality and they're trying to make sense of it. The Bible gives us a larger story. One of the things I've discovered is that so many systematic theologians don't actually think that the Bible has got a worldview of its own, the ancient Israelite and Judaic

worldview. They just see the Bible as the authoritative source for the bits and pieces to fit into their own schemes. Now, they might say that's a trivialization, but I've seen it again and again. And I'm doing my best, especially in the big new book, which, God willing, will be on the shelves in just over a year from now. That's what I've been trying to produce over the last five years through the COVID years and so on, which has been quite difficult for me health-wise. But finally we have it. I printed out the contents page from this book so that I could remind myself what's in it.

Pete Slauson So, that one of your autobiography will come out next about a year from now? John McHenry No, no, no. no. The autobiography is all still in here and in various notebooks lying around the place. This is this book called God's Homecoming. Oh, right. Now, is this related to Surprise by Hope? Yeah. I say in the preface to this that it's like a sequel to Surprise by Hope. Surprise by Hope is very, very much emphasizing that the Christian hope in the New Testament is not heaven or hell, it's new heavens and new earth, and we will be raised from the dead to share that, and we anticipate that in the present. This book

is going on beyond that to say, actually, most Western Christians, whether Catholic or Protestant, liberal or conservative, whatever, think that the aim of the game is for our souls to go to heaven when we die. Whereas, in fact, the name of the game, Old and New Testaments alike, is for God the Creator to come and live with his people. God's kingdom come on earth as in heaven. So that the strapline at the end of the book of Revelation is not now the dwelling of humans is with God, but

the dwelling of God is with humans. And then I chase that through the Old Testament promises that this is going to happen. And then the New Testament retrieval of those promises, that's the point at which so many Christians make a break and say, well, the Old Testament's concerned with land and family and a temple and a city and all that sort of this worldly stuff. Then along comes Jesus and says, no, no, no, it's all about the kingdom of heaven. And they totally misunderstand. Kingdom of heaven doesn't mean forget all that land and family because we're off somewhere else, thank you Plato, it means the rule of heaven, in other words the rule of God, becoming a reality on earth as in heaven and that Jesus and his followers in the power of the Spirit are to be the pilot project for this great aim. So then instead of saying you've got the Old Testament here,

then there's a big gap and then the New Testament is all about spiritual life, and that's where we're now going. What I'm seeing is, Old and New Testament alike, and on as far as at least Araneas, Tertullian, and Cyprian in the second and third centuries, you have new heavens and new earth and resurrection into that. Now, of course, the early fathers know perfectly well that resurrection of the body is part of the deal. Augustine and as far as Aquinas, they're still well aware of that, as are the Reformers. But because of the arrival of the neoplatonic strain into Christian theology, really from origin onwards in the third century, then there's always this kind

of hybrid of, well, yeah, we affirm resurrection, but really the important thing is for ourselves to have the beatific vision to go to heaven. This world is not my home. I'm just a passing through. And that has spawned all sorts of theological and practical nonsense. And I'm doing my best to dig it out and to plant some biblical insights instead. So that's really what this book is all about.

And then I have three or four chapters of sort of so what at the end, one which is not worship, evangelism, and prayer. I mean, it's a really odd thing here. When I was young, one of the great texts in evangelistic sermons was Revelation 3 20. You know, behold, I stand at the door and knock if anyone hears my voice, opens the door, I will come in and dwell with him and sup with him and he with me or they with me. And Christians have used that text to say there you are, Jesus will come in and then he will take you away somewhere else. But actually that text is all about God himself in the person of Jesus coming to live with us. Exactly as in John 14, if anyone hears my word, my father will love him.

We will come and make our home with that person. So I've got a whole chapter on that. Then I've got a chapter on the sacraments, because actually sacramental theology looks very different if the whole point of the biblical story is for God to dwell with us. Imagine what that does to the Eucharistic debates for a start. Then I have a chapter on the polychrome church as the sign to the powers, that what we've done in our Platonic West is to collude with separate churches as though that really doesn't matter. Whereas in fact, it's part of the sign of hope in Romans 15, that the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace in believing.

Paul is echoing Isaiah 11, where the earth shall be full of the knowledge of the Lord as the waters cover the sea." The church getting together across the traditional barriers is the sign in the present of the Isaiah 11 vision of the wolf and the lamb lying down together, etc., all of which is a pointer to God's future of the filling of all creation. The filling of the church has the advance promise of the filling of all creation. The filling of the church has the advanced promise of the filling of all creation. And then I have a final chapter on how we therefore think about the otherwise puzzling gap between bodily death and bodily resurrection. And I have this is a whole new area that I

haven't seen anyone else writing about in this way. And I've only just been exploring it in the last four or five years, that instead of trying to say, well, we have this soul, which is the carrier of continuity between bodily death and bodily resurrection, the New Testament doesn't say that. Instead, it says that when the spirit comes to dwell within somebody, then after their death, that spirit remains in charge, as it were, so that the fusion between our spirit and God's spirit continues until the day when the spirit will give us new bodies, as in Romans 8, etc. So that's what the book's about.

Rather a lot just to spurt out all like that, but I can see from your face that you're sitting there and taking it like a man. This is, no, because you're pulling together so many different important biblical themes and things that I've heard you speak on, but it sounds like you're pulling it together in a way that's really fresh and will make a fantastic contribution. Your phrase, polychrome, the polychrome church, are you talking about ethnic diversity, socioeconomic age, or all of the above? All of the above. I mean, Paul obviously cut his teeth as a church teacher in the church

in Antioch, which is right there on the trade routes. You had people from Eastern, Western, North and South, people of all skin pigmentation. And of course, skin color wasn't a big issue in the Mediterranean world because travelers and tradespeople were all different shapes and sorts and sizes. But for Paul, I mean, the mantra in Galatians 3 remains neither Jew nor Greek slave nor free, no male and female, you're all one. And it's extraordinary to me now that the western Church has just colluded with divisions on the basis of social class, particularly on ethnic divisions. That it seems to me is the quite accidental result of the Reformation's desire to have

Scripture and liturgy in your own language. Therefore, you go to churches where people speak your language. And then quite quickly that becomes, you know, there's a Portuguese church over there, there's a French church over there, there's a Spanish church over there, and nobody seems to notice, even though the Reformers are supposedly living with Paul and the Bible, nobody seems to notice that this is exactly against Paul's insistence, welcome one another therefore as the Messiah welcomed you. So Paul sees the coming together of Jew and Gentile in the gospel and in the church, Romans 15, Ephesians 2, etc., as the sign to the powers that God is doing a new thing and that

this is how new creation is happening. I mean, I did a lecture a couple of nights ago in one of the big churches here in Oxford, and I said, the church is the original multicultural project. That's the whole point of the church, is new creation, which is transcending the barriers that we put up. The problem with our contemporary multiculturalism, like so much about post-Enlightenment projects, is that it's trying to get the results of the Christian gospel without paying any attention to the Lord of the gospel. You can only do multiculturalism if you've got Jesus. Otherwise it's going to fall apart, which is precisely what's happening in our world

right now. It makes me think of one of my favorite passages in Ephesians. I mean, the whole book of Ephesians, you're basically, everything you're saying, I'm just thinking Ephesians, Ephesians, Ephesians, but like that climactic... Yeah, I was picturing on Ephesians this last year. That climactic statement in Ephesians 3.10, following up from Paul's, you know, aside, where he's talking about his mission to the Gentiles, which I think is built into the narrative flow of Ephesians, but he climaxes that statement in 310 with that, you know, so that the manifold wisdom of God might be manifest to the powers to be. Like it's that

climactic display to the powers built on this whole project of bringing Jew and Gentile together. I would imagine you have a bit of Ephesians in your book. Oh, there's a lot of Ephesians in the book. And in fact, I've got a little book on Ephesians coming out this autumn or fall in your language, but based on the lectures I did on Ephesians last year, both here in Oxford and then in an intensive thing in Houston in Texas. And that's been really exciting

because precisely 310 is so important that through the church, God is making a statement to the principalities and powers that this is what new creation looks like. And then in the light of that, the second half of Ephesians, oh my goodness, chapters four, five, and six, you know, holiness and unity going together, these are the sign to the watching world that something new is going on.

What have we got at the moment? A church that either doesn't care too much about holiness or over-exaggerates it in order then to divide the church up into people who think like this and people who think like that. So no care for unity, or if there is, it's just stuff that some church people talk about from time to time. We're not actually doing it. And no real deep sense of what holiness might be and how they would work together. But without those, the watching world simply looks on and says, oh, there's these funny things called religions. And you know, in the newspapers, where is religion?

It's in a column on a Saturday newspaper about some things some funny people do at the weekend, like playing bridge or golf or whatever. Or some people go to church. Instead of this being actually world transforming and community transforming, trailing my political coat and looking across the Atlantic, one of the great ironies a week or two ago was when your vice president was presuming

to quote from some medieval theologians about the order amoris, the order of love, in order to justify basically xenophobia. And I'm thinking, well, how wonderful to bring back theological ideas into the public discourse, but please could we actually get it right? The mission of the church has been precisely to say we belong together as one family. And along with that, the mission of the King in the Old Testament coming through to Jesus in the new is precisely to look after the orphan and the widow and the stranger and the outcast and all the rest of it. Now, if we're going to talk biblical theology, let's talk biblical theology and let's actually see what that's going to look like on the ground.

Pete We shouldn't look to politicians for our theological leadership. Pete Well, no. To be nice if they looked to us, wouldn't it be nice if the politicians came knocking on the door of the theologians and said, we're in a mess here, can you help us? If you're loving what you're hearing from NT Wright and want to learn more, then you need to visit emirato.org. That's A-D-M-I-R-A-T-O.org. This is the home for online self-paced theology courses from NT Right. They have over 30 courses on a range of biblical and theological topics, all of which include video lectures, robust curricula designed to help you discover the possibilities of

engaging theology wherever you're at in your faith journey. And right now, the team at Meyer Auto wants to offer listeners of Theology in a Raw, one of Tom's most popular courses, absolutely for free. Okay. It's called Simply Good News, which is an exploration of Jesus's gospel as powerful, world-changing news. Let's move beyond the truncated picture of Jesus's message and examine the gospel for what it's really about.

With Easter just around the corner, what better time to really dig into the meaning of the Christian message? So just click on the link in the show notes and it'll take you right there. It'll take you right to the free course. Or if you go to admireauto.org, you can scroll down, find the course, Simply Good News, and use the coupon code PRESTON and you'll get the course for absolutely free. I'm curious, going back to Ephesians, where does the household code fit into your project? Or not into your project, but your understanding of Ephesians, because that seems to play a

significant role in the themes that have already been developed. Yeah, yeah. I think it's clearest in Ephesians. Obviously, the household code is expanded in Ephesians with the lengthy passage about husbands and wives. The way I see it is, to put it crudely, in chapter one, you have heaven and earth coming together in the Messiah. By the way, I've often said that if the Reformers had made Ephesians rather than Galatians,

their main go-to text, the entire history of the Western world would have been different because instead of being able to interpret salvation as leaving this world and going to heaven, which was how they read Galatians, you can't do that with Ephesians because it's about the coming together of heaven and earth in Christ. So that's already stated in chapter one. But then in chapter two, this is demonstrated and modeled and lived out in the coming together of Jew and Gentile in the gospel, in the new temple where God dwells by the Spirit.

Fast forward to chapter five, this is lived out in the coming together of man and woman in marriage, which as Paul says, this is a great mystery, but I take it to refer to Christ and the church. You have this sense of Paul with Genesis in mind, no doubt, thinking heaven and earth, male and female, and in the middle of that, Jew and Gentile, thank you very much. So Paul's vision of unity and the church as being called to model that is so much more than just a few little rules Oh, by the way, I'm a bit of a chauvinist at heart. So I think husbands should take the lead or whatever That's not what it's about at all. Paul is is

Exploring I think very sensitively the the the biblical The trouble is all the best words have been taken already. I was about to say complementarity, and I know that that means something different in America now. So I want to say the unity and difference, if you like, of heaven and earth, of Jew and Gentile, of male and female. And Paul doesn't dissolve those identities. I mean, Paul himself is a Judean, and he's Jewish,

and he is able to write about that and see things from that point of view. And he sometimes can say, I'm speaking to you Gentiles, he has a message for you. But all this is in the service of the larger unity in which the individual identities are not crushed or forgotten, but made to take their appropriate joyful place within the new and larger whole. And that's a project that I think we're only just coming back to really. So the household code is part of that great ethical section from Ephesians 4.17 through till 6.9 really,

which is all about the church before the watching world. And Paul knows very well that when the church's reputation is there are these funny people who get together on the first day of the week very early in the morning while the rest of us are just getting up and getting ready for work, who are they? What's going on? I saw women as well as men going into that meeting, and I saw some slaves going in. And then when they came out, I heard them talking about loving one another, and excuse me, just what's going on here? And so Paul is saying, before the watching world,

your domestic life must be a model of the gospel, and here's how it plays out. So, I mean, even though obviously that stuff is quite unpopular in some courses at the moment, for obvious reasons. This is, I think, it goes with the general ethical drift from 417 all the way through. That's okay. If I can linger on this a bit, because this is really helpful. I've been thinking through the household code for a while, especially when it comes to male-female relations. You know, some scholars see it as, ah, Paul's basically agreeing with Aristotle and the, you know, hierarchical view of the household. And I'm like, I just, when you read Aristotle and Paul together, they're using similar categories, but he is not presenting an

Aristotelian household code there at all. No, no, it's totally different. I mean, his vision of the role of the husband in marriage is obviously modeled on Christ and the church, where Christ has given himself up for the church. And that's a huge difference. Instead of this bossy male who's basically the patofamiliast and runs everything and the women just have to sit down, shut up and do what they're told. Anything but for Paul, there's a much richer harmony and engagement. And I suppose, I should say, having been married for 54 years, it's always a challenge living that out because it's easy to collapse back into the Western visions or the Western revisionist

visions of how the relationships might work. And as with all our other political and social polarizations just now, we are presented with false either-ors. And part of the point of the gospel is to say yes, but and no, but, and to find a way through, which is neither of the political right and left that we've got at the moment. And I say that very much aware of some of the extraordinary things going on in geopolitics right now. Yeah.

Yeah. We live in interesting times. That was our last conversation on politics last fall. So would you say that like the Paul's household code reflects the same kind of language, but is ultimately deconstructing these hierarchies while embracing difference, but still pushing towards unity without erasing difference or something like that? Yeah, that's a way of saying it. And I think that's right. And of course, that's tricky when it comes, for instance, to slavery. And there's huge debates, of course that's tricky when it comes for instance to slavery and there's huge debates of course about that. Although as I've often said to

people, if Paul were to say by the way slavery is wrong so you've all got to give up your slaves, well excuse me that's like you or me getting up into the pulpit and saying we know that these things we drive around in called motor cars they're polluting the planet that cannot be right therefore you're all gonna leave your cars in the parking lot, we'll have somebody come and pick them up and we're all going to walk home or catch a ride on somebody's horse or whatever. Well I'm sorry, that's just not going to work. In the ancient world, everything that we today do by electricity or gasoline or natural gas or hydroelectric power, all of that stuff was done by slaves.

And you might as well tell people that they shouldn't use electricity and gasoline, et cetera. The real world of Paul's day, slavery is how it happens. And then the important thing is to humanize the institution. And as we see him wrestling with in 1 Corinthians 7, to say what happens if you're offered the chance of freedom, etc. Although we today think of slavery so much in terms of 19th century America or early 20th century South Africa, whatever, and that is simply not a fair representation of slavery in the ancient world, which ran the whole

gamut from extreme brutality, oppression, exploitation, etc., all the way through to slaves being much valued members of the household. I mean, think of Cicero with his secretary, who was a slave and who invented the art of shorthand, and Cicero relied on him totally for his speeches and all the rest of it. And there's different stages. So it's a much more complicated issue than our rather truncated modernist rhetoric has made it out to be. Adam Lickman Man, I'm excited.

Is this book God's Homecoming? Where on the popular level academic spectrum would you place it? Would it be similar to Surprised by Hope? I thought it was at the same level as Surprised by Hope. My editors both in SBCK and at Harper have said it's maybe a notch above Surprised by Hope, but I hope not that much more. I've tried to write it in an accessible way, and quite a lot of the first half is simply exposition of significant chunks of the Bible, chunks that we don't normally put together in that way.

I mean, for instance, a reading of Acts chapter 2 in terms of the homecoming of God by the Spirit, with Acts 2 being the New Testament equivalent of Exodus 40 or 1 Kings 8, where the divine glory comes to fill the tabernacle or the house. Acts 2 is written in such a way as to say, that's what's going on here, which is why then the rest of Acts is all about controversies over temples, or at least partly about that. And so on. So I'm doing a lot of scriptural exposition and then saying on the basis of this, here are some key areas where this might help. I've kept the footnotes, they're actually going

to be end notes, I've kept them to a bare minimum. I don't think at the moment they're even planning a bibliography for the book. So they're trying to, trying not to turn it into a big academic book. It's designed for a general readership. And I hope, as I say, that it will be accessible to that mythical creature, the general reader. End notes. That's always been a difficult decision for me. I don't like it. I'm sure you don't like end notes, but the average reader doesn't necessarily want to see cluttery footnotes.

The ones I've talked to say I don't mind them there. I don't know. I keep going back and forth on Endnotes footnotes. No, as a reader, I really don't like Endnotes. It means you've got to keep a finger in the page unless you can be sure that all you're getting is in end notes is purely reference and no extra sentences at all. Publishers worry about them because publishers know that a potential purchaser opening the book and seeing lots of scrambled egg at the bottom of the page thinks, no, no, no, that's not for me. So, I understand that. I want to go back to this video course, the 50 Facts of the Bible I Wish I Knew. It's a video course, right? You're producing?

It's not a book? Well, at the moment, it's the first half of, or rather, a video course, part one. I think when we recorded that, we did 22 things that I wanted to say, here's how I've learned. And I've actually got a sheet of paper here with about another 30 plus, which is I'm gonna home in on 50 and try to turn it into a book. And I'm hoping that it won't just be facts about the Bible,

but a lot of it is about things in the Bible that I never noticed before. But I'd love to include an extra bit, maybe even in terms of one-liners about, oh, I don't know, music and things like that. But that's a whole lot. Are you allowed to give us a window into what some of these 50 facts are? Oh, well, sure. I mean, one of the very early ones that I remember stumbling across when I was a graduate student, but it wasn't something that had ever been mentioned in Sunday school or in church or in undergraduate work, was the nexus between Adam and Abraham, that the promises to Abraham echo the commands to Adam. I found that in

Casuto's commentary on Genesis and immediately it made me realize this is how the story works. And then when I started to say this in seminars or write it in papers, and people would sort of scratch their heads and say, did you just make that up? And I said, no, I got it in papers and people would sort of scratch their heads and say, did you just make that up? And I said, no, I got it in Kasuto. And then as more people pushed back at it, Ed Sanders didn't like it at all. For instance, I had to go back to the rabbis and back to all sorts of other texts and show again and again and again. This is how the story of the Bible works. God says to Adam, be fruitful and multiply and look after the garden. God says to Abraham, I will make you fruitful and multiply you and I'll give you this land to look after. And the two are very closely aligned and in a world where there weren't many books and

the intelligent reader of the Israel world or the Judean world knew the books that they had pretty darn well. Those verbal echoes would be very powerful so that the land is the New Eden. Or if you like, when they're reading about Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, they're actually reading a foretaste of Abraham and Sarah and their highly dysfunctional family trying to take possession of this land. And then, of course, what happens is Adam and Eve disobey and they get kicked out of the garden. What happens is that Abraham's family eventually disobey and get kicked out of the land.

Anyone in the Babylonian exile and thereafter reading Genesis 1, 2, and 3 would say, yep, that's our story. And guess what? We have inhabited the larger human story. So all sorts of things follow from that. But again, that was not something any of us were told when we were small. And the other thing which then goes with that in my mind, which again took me ages to work around to, though it stares you in the face, is that the promises to David are the universalization of the promises to Abraham.

This is the nexus between, say, Genesis 12 on the one hand and Psalm 2 on the other, that God says to Abraham, here you will have this land as your inheritance. And God says to David, I will give you the nations as your inheritance, the uttermost parts of the world for your possession. So that the land is then seen as an advance metaphor for the creator God's claim on the whole planet. Fast forward to Romans 8, the whole world is now God's holy land. Why were we not taught that? Why has there been so much fuss about holy land this way and that? Because people haven't actually read the text that was in front of

them. And so the early Christians use Psalm 2 and Psalm 8 and other similar texts as ways of saying, this is how they conceive mission. Mission is not, oh dear, those people out there aren't going to heaven, so we've got to go and tell them about Jesus so they'll come to faith and then they will go to heaven. There's a whole question about how God looks after people after their death and resurrection and so on. Fine, okay, that's important. But the point of the mission is that if Jesus is raised from the dead and is the Lord of the world, then all those psalms and things now kick in. If he is the Lord of the world, the world needs to know. So Paul comes into a new city and he doesn't say, how would you like to go to heaven when you die? He says the world has a new Lord.

By the way, he's a crucified Jew called Jesus, and by the way, God raised him from the dead. At which point people say, what is this guy smoking? Because I've never heard any rubbish like this before. But some of them discover that this message, Jesus is Lord, goes down inside them like a hot drink on a cold day and makes them think, oh my goodness. And Paul says the Spirit is at work calling you to faith, leading you to become part of the family who are the pilot project for his global plan.

So all of that for me follows from the Adam, Abraham, David link and the way that lands with Jesus. And all of it, as I say, wasn't anything any of us were talking about 50 years ago. And I was a keen Christian as an undergrad, when I was in my early 20s, I was up there studying the Bible, hearing people like John Stott and Martin Lloyd Jones and Jim Packer, relishing it, discussing it,

getting books about it, but none of this was on the radar. And this now seems to be enormously important. Lloyd-Jones and Jim Packer relishing it, discussing it, getting books about it. But none of this was on the radar. And this now seems to be enormously important. Hence the 50 things that I wish somebody had told me. And that's just the first three or three of the first ones. I stumbled across this land creation theme when I was teaching a class years ago. I think it was the first year teaching undergrad.

I taught an upper level class on Ezekiel. And when I got to 40 to 48, you know, lots of questions about this, is there a third temple and sacrifice, like what's going on here? But then I went to Revelation 21 and 22, and I saw that clearly John is making all kinds of allusions to this very land-centric, temple-centric, you know, section in Ezekiel, but he's applying it to the new creation as a whole, you know, where there is no temple. Like, he clearly says whatever physical temple you think is going on there, that is not the case. Because now the whole world is the temple. This is something that Greg Beale in his commentary on Revelation brings out, and I think, I don't know Greg well, but I think it's the case that he hadn't really

put this together until he wrote that commentary on Revelation, where it becomes clear that the whole new creation is like the new temple, and then the holy city is like the holy of holies within. Because the holy of Holies, which is a perfect cube in the temple, now the Holy City in Revelation 21 and 22 is a perfect cube. And so the city is like the Holy of Holies within this whole new creation. And of course, it's wonderfully deeply symbolic. We shouldn't imagine that there's going to be an architect somewhere saying, how do we make a perfect cube and how is that going to work?

And it's got to be so many miles tall as well as broad. Like in Revelation 4 and 5, we shouldn't imagine that Jesus will literally be looking like a lamb who has been slain, who is also a lion and has a sword coming out of his mouth and so on. Do not try this at home written above all of this. The symbolic language is the only way you can really say everything we know about land, temple, holy of holies. That's all forward-looking signposts.

And you may remember I say in Surprise by Hope, all our language about the future is a set of signposts pointing into a fog. The true signposts, but they don't give you a photographic reproduction of what you get when you get there. There's a sign just up the road here pointing to the Sheldonian Theatre in Oxford.

Because it's a theatre sign, it has those happy face, sad face signs, which are kind of universal symbol for a theatre going back to ancient Greece. Now, the Sheldonian Theatre in Oxford doesn't put on plays. That's not what it's there for. It's where the university does its convocations and sometimes big symphony concerts and so on. But nobody is deceived by the fact that it's got an old-fashioned theatre symbol. We just know, yeah, that's the theatre.

So if that's what you want, there it is. So in the same way, these are true symbols, not because they're photographic reproductions, but because they point in the right direction. And for anyone who knows the symbols, they're not deceptive. And that's just how Jewish apocalyptic literature works, right? Like nobody in the first century would have had an eye. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So you've covered a couple of facts. What are some others that, facts you wish

you knew that you now know? Well, I mean, just sticking with the temple theme, I think it was John Walton's work that first alerted me to this about, oh, I don't know, 15 or more years ago. And I wish I'd come to it sooner because there in John Levinson, it's there in, well, Greg Beale himself, but several others. Old Testament scholars have known this a long time. Genesis 1 describes the creation of a temple. It's a heaven plus earth plus earth structure with an image in the middle of it. And so then the image is another of the things because when I was young we were taught, oh

well, this church father thought that the image was our intellect or our imagination or this or that. No, that's simply not what the image was our intellect or our imagination or this or that. No, that's simply not what the image is all about. The image, like the image in a temple, is that into this temple, which is a heaven plus earth reality, that's what an ancient temple was, God puts an image of himself, as I say many, many times to students, it's like an angled mirror reflecting God into the world and reflecting the world back to God. And that is the human vocation, which is summed up in Scripture, Exodus 19 all the way through to Revelation, as the royal priesthood. The

royal bit is reflecting God's stewardship into the world. The priesthood bit is reflecting God's stewardship into the world, the priesthood bit is reflecting the worship of all creation back to God with the humans articulating in speech what the rest of creation is doing anyway by being itself. You know, springtime just about here and the magnolia tree next door is about to go into flower. It's praising God. It's saying hallelujah, look, this is who I'm supposed to be. Now, we humans have to put that into speech. So, the image is about this human vocation. So, when you get it in Revelation 5, the lamb who was slain ransoms people for God, not so that they can then go to heaven and sit on a cloud playing a harp, but so that they can be the royal priesthood sharing in God's rule over creation and in the praises of creation back to God. Now, again, this is part of something which was a well-guarded secret when I was young,

which is the vocation of being human. That actually, and you see, this goes all the way back, John Calvin knew that the risen Jesus, and the risen Jesus in his present existence was human, was still human, but that his humanity plays no role for Calvin. Whereas in, say, Romans 8, Paul is drawing precisely on passages like Psalm 8, which are, what is man that you are mindful of him, you've made him little loath than the angels, to crown him with glory and honor, putting all things in subjection under his feet. We see that in 1 Corinthians 15, we see it in Romans 8, we see it in Ephesians 1, where

the humanity of Jesus is absolutely vital to what New Testament theology is all about. And hence, our humanity, as indwelt by Jesus' Spirit, becomes enormously important. So instead of seeing this humanity as just a floppy, fuzzy old thing which is going to get old and wear out and die, and thank goodness we'll be rid of it and we can go and be something else instead, absolutely not. Our human vocation matters vitally. And the more Christian we are, the more indwelt by the spirit we are, the more human we should

be becoming in the biblical sense. So all of that is rumbling along in the background and then comes rushing together with the picture of Jesus, Son of God, Son of Man, Messiah, etc., suffering servants in the Gospels. Can you… let's… I want to bring it down to a more playful area. As you reflect on the new creation, our eternal life with God in creation with resurrected real human bodies, what is that life going to be like? I know we're dealing with not a lot of specificity to text, but I just, when a lot of us, when we think of like the eternal life, it's just this foggy kind of image in our mind. Yeah, we're kind of floating

around, walking through walls, but it just doesn't feel very human, it feels like whatever it is, it's going to be so vastly different than this earthly life. Is that true? Or are we going to be working and sleeping and bumping our knees? I think there will be new projects. I think we've been given skills to develop. We've been given, as in the parable, talents to pursue. I don't think this is a sort of a temporary thing, just God giving us a workout and then we're just going to forget it all afterwards. I think there'll be all sorts of new projects. I mean, just take the gift of music. I would find

it impossible to suppose that music is going to play no part in the new creation. It's one of the great signposts in the present time of the fact that the world of space, time and matter is much more than what you can put into a bank balance or into a test tube etc etc. Now the image that comes to my mind is the two disciples on the road to Emmaus. They are not expecting what's just happened but are not expecting what's just happened. But once they realize what's just happened, there's a kind of, oh, yeah, how did we miss it? Jesus says, foolish ones and slow of heart to understand. This is how it had to be. And so I'm not saying

I can describe what the new creation will be like, but I just believe that when the new creation happens, we will all say, well, of course, of course, we will be like, but I just believe that when the new creation happens, we will all say, well, of course, of course, we will be doing this, we will be doing that, and of course, we won't be doing this, we won't have any doctors or nurses anymore because there won't be any more death or pain or crying or mourning anymore. But the skills to love one another, to look after one another, I'm sure will be deployed in all sorts of appropriate ways. the skills to love one another, to look after one another, I'm sure will be deployed in all sorts of appropriate ways.

So it's not a matter of saying that it's completely incomprehensible and completely unknowable. No doubt there is an appropriate eschatological reticence and we ought to be careful of saying this or that. You know, when I used to go around lecturing on the surprise by hope themes, people would look very puzzled and would ask questions like, but will there be shops in heaven? And I would say, heaven is not the point. It's new heaven, new earth. Or will we have pets in heaven? And I would say, I think when God made animals, I think he was absolutely thrilled with what he'd done. According to the Psalms, he takes time out every day in order to play with Leviathan. So I think

it's quite natural that God will want a multi-creaturely new heavens and new earth in which there will be delight and celebration of one another's gifts and shared projects and so on. C.S. Lewis tries to get at this here and there in The Great Divorce or in The Last Battle, although there's always a bit too much Platonism in Lewis. And that's one of the things I actually thought of putting in as one of my 50 things I wish I'd known that for all Lewis was a good resurrection theologian when Push came to Shav, he remained a Platonist. You know, there's a line at the end of one of the children's stories where the old professor says, oh, it's all in Plato, it's all in Plato, what did they teach them in these schools? And I want to say to Lewis, no, no, no, that's going to lead us in the wrong direction.

But you see, this is another of the more general points that I really, really do want to make in this little book. Okay, I met it first, I think, in Lewis's book, Miracles, where I don't know how familiar you are with that book, but it was one of my favorite Lewis books when I was in my late teens because he plays off naturalism versus supernaturalism and then has the Christian gospel as the kind of quintessence of supernaturalism. Now what he's actually doing is playing off epicureanism against Platonism and then having Christianity

as a subset of Platonism. Now, eventually his Christianity through the resurrection of Jesus bursts out of its platonic shell, I think, in that book. But I think that's precisely what happened in the 19th century, that the rise of what we call secularism, which actually is Epicureanism in one shape or form

or another, or deism or something like that, generated a Christian reaction which was, oh my goodness, they're saying there is no other spiritual world, we've got to go back to Plato and he will help us. It's why I inherited J.B. Lightfoot's library when I became Bishop of Durham. There is this whole shelf full of Plutarch. I would glance at Plutarch and I would think,

why did J.B. Lightfoot have Plutarch so prominently on his shelf? The answer is because we go to the Platonists to understand the alternative to the secularism which is sweeping the Western world. And I want to say, better to go there than back to Epicureanism, probably better to go to Plato than simply naked Stoicism, but, though some did that too, but why not go back to the Bible and find a much better way than either? So those are the huge issues that I've been wrestling with. I can't believe you have JB Lightfoot's library.

Yeah, well, I was privileged. I had Bishop Butler's books. I had Handley Mole. I remember a friend of mine who was a great Handley Mole fan visiting once, and I had to go out and do something. And I said, can I leave you for an hour or two? He said, I am sitting in Handley Mole's library reading Handley Mole's own copy of Handley Mole's commentary on Romans. He said, I am in heaven. But the audience probably won't even recognize these names.

Would it be fair to say JB Lightfoot is to New Testament scholarship that Karl Barth may have been to systematic theology in the 20th century? I mean, it's hard to underestimate. Lightfoot was the extraordinary, I mean, Lightfoot was one of the very few British scholars in the late 19th century who was respected right across Germany, France, Italy, etc. They all knew he was the man. He was quite extraordinarily brilliant. He died quite young. By the time he would have been my age, he'd already been dead maybe 10 years.

He was a friend and colleague of B.F. Westcott, and together, Lightfoot and Westcott, together with their Cambridge friend, F.J. Hort, they did all that fresh work on the texts and divided up the New Testament, wrote commentaries on it between them, so Westcott on John, Westcott on Hebrews, that's parallel to Lightfoot on Philippians or Colossians, and so on. So yeah, Lightfoot was one of the biggest names in scholarship worldwide in the late 19th century. And there's a sense in which everything that we do is to a footnote.

And without a computer, without Bible software, without search engines and stuff, I mean, all that data is just in his head from just reading texts and it's just unbelievable. Well, I mean, I remember ages ago visiting a private school in Minneapolis. I had to go and do a commencement address for various reasons. And I talked to the students in their great books class. And these were students aged 16, 17, that sort of age. And I remember saying to one or two of them, so you've read these great books, which are your favorites? And one of these, a girl, age, I think 17, unhesitatingly and without a smile, gave me Dostoevsky, Aristotle, a couple of others. And I was thinking, I don't know many 17 year olds in my country who are reading Dostoevsky and Aristotle. And she

knew them. I mean, the thing is, if you're introduced to the great stuff early enough, and if you get the taste for it, then there's no reason why, age 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, you shouldn't be reading the big stuff and discussing it. You know, in the ancient world, people grew up much quicker than we do. There wasn't a teenager time in the ancient world. They didn't have time for that. Life expectancy wasn't long enough. So you jolly well got on and learned stuff.

And people like Lightfoot and Westcott, having done Greek and Hebrew and Latin from an early age, they were memorizing Homer when they were probably 10. And if you read the books about Lewis and Tolkien and people like that, Tolkien and his friends, his teenage friends in Birmingham where he lived, one of their fun things was to go to a coffee bar and improvise Greek hexameters around the room.

So I say a line, you say the next line, and he has to say the next line. And so, you know, having grown up playing a lot of music, it's not actually that different from learning to play piano or the guitar or something. If you work at it, it's there, you can do it. The brain is hardwired to do this stuff. We've messed around, you know, with software and smartphones and so on. We've ruined our brains and particularly our children's brains. That's a whole other story. Sorry, you're leading me off topic, but I take that.

Well, in the last minute or so here, we're offering, I've already mentioned it, we're offering a free course because you've recorded many video courses, but the one called Simply Good News, it's completely free. People can go. The link is in the show notes. Can you just give us a twenty-second pitch for that course and why people should go check it out? Simply Good News, that course is based on the book of that same title, which goes back to my conviction, and again, this is one of the fifty things I maybe should say in that book, that so many people hear the good news of the gospel as good advice.

And there's all the difference in the world between good advice, here's how you might want to reorder your life, or here's if you want to go to heaven, here's how to do it. But good news is about something that's happened as a result of which the world is a different place. Most Western Christians don't realize that Christianity isn't primarily advice, it's news,

and it's good news. And so that's what this course is all about. Can't wait to check it out. Tom, thanks so much for your time. Always a pleasure to have you on Theology of Naraa. And many blessings to you, your ministry, your many projects, and of course, your family. Thank you very, very much. All the very best to you. I hope we'll be in touch before too long. This show is part of the Converge Podcast Network. Hey friends, Rachel Grohl here from the Hearing Jesus Podcast. Do you ever wonder if you're truly hearing from God? Are you tired of trying to figure it all out on your own?

The Hearing Jesus Podcast is here to help you live out your faith every single day. And together we will break down these walls by digging deeply into God's word in a way that you can really understand it. If this sounds like the kind of journey you want to go on, please join us on the Hearing Jesus podcast on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

Hi, I'm Haven, and as long as I can remember, I have had different curiosities and thoughts and ideas that I like to explore, usually with a girlfriend over a matcha latte. But then when I had kids, I just didn't have the same time that I did before for the one-on-ones that I crave. So I started Haven the Podcast.

It's a safe space for curiosity and conversation. And we talk about everything from relationships to parenting to friendships to even your view of yourself. And we don't have answers or solutions, but I think the power is actually in the questions. So I'd love for you to join me, Haven the Podcast.