Theology in the Raw - NT Wright and The Vision of Ephesians

Episode Date: November 13, 2025

Join my Patreon to watch our Extra Innings on Atonement for FREE. Watch it now! N.T. Wright is...N.T. Wright. If you don't know who he is, Google it. Wright's latest book is The Vision of Ephesians: The Task of the Church and the Glory of God, which is a must read! In this converstion, Wright walks us through the grand story of the Bible, which is captured in Paul's letter to the Ephesians.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Multiculturalism is a bad word in many circles in my country because people see it as a revolutionary ultra-leftist sort of thing. And then I go around saying, sorry, this is the original Christian vision, but it only works if you put Jesus and the Spirit in the middle of it. If you try to get the fruits without the root, don't be surprised if the fruits turn sour on it. Hey, friends, welcome back to another episode of Theology Rah. My guest today is once again, the one and only N.T. Wright, who has written a recent book called The Vision of Ephesians, the task of the church and the glory of God. And what we do in this episode is basically sit down for a little Bible time, a little Bible time with N.T. Wright. We just walk through Ephesians, talk about some of the issues. And then at the end of the

episode, we do have an extra innings conversation about NT rights thoughts on penal substitutionary atonement. So you're not going to want to miss that. However, you will need to go to patreon.com forward slash theology to raw and create a free account. You don't have to actually become a paid member of Patreon. You can just create a free account to access the extra innings conversation with NTRIE about penal substitutionary income. So without further ado, please welcome back to the show the one and only NTRI. Okay, I'm back here with Tom Wright again, who has written yet another book. This one is on the book of the Ephesians.

What's the title of your book, Tom, again? It's called The Vision of Ephesians. I've got the UK edition here, which just hit my shelf the other day. I think the American one will look a little different from that, but that's the same book inside. Awesome. Sweet. Well, you have been studying the Ephesians longer. alive and yet you still seem to find new nuggets and bits and twists and turns. So I don't know

how you do it. But what I would love to do for this episode is just let's just do a Bible study with Tom Wright in the book of Ephesians. I don't know if you could do all five chapters or six chapters in less than an hour, but let's give it a go. How does that sound? Well, sure. If you've got specific questions, that might help. I mean, I could do, to start up with the overview, which I've often given to students. if that would help. I mean, I think the thing that I really want to say is that if the Protestant reformers and others in the 16th century had made Ephesians rather than Romans or Galatians, their main set

texts, the entire history of the Western world would have been different because they were able to read Romans and Galatians in a way which made them give answers to the medieval questions about how my soul gets to heaven, which is not in fact the question that either Romans or Galatians was written to address. Whereas if you start with Ephesians, right in the first main opening salvo, Paul says that God's plan from the beginning was to unite all things in the Messiah in heaven and on earth. And right from the start then, any attempt to read Ephesians as here's a book about how you get to heaven and what to do en route or whatever is simply wrong. And when I started to think that through, spurred on by chapter 1, verse 10 particularly, I realized that all sorts of things in the

book as a whole really fit with this vision of the integrated cosmos of God's plan for heaven plus earth being fulfilled in Christ. It's part of what we mean. I think when we say that Christ is both human and divine, that those are loose labels to say he is the one who unites all things in heaven and earth in himself. And then the point of being a Christian is not to escape earth and go to heaven. And people have often misread the passages in Ephesians 1 and 2 about already seated in heavenly places in Christ as though we have basically left earth and we're just upstairs somewhere, I'm just sloshing around down here, but never mind, it's not important. And then they wonder why, in the last chapter of the book, Paul talks about

joining in the spiritual warfare in heavenly places. And the answer is, heaven is where the real warfare is taking place. Christians from that day to this have found it easy to imagine that the real warfare is me versus my enemies, my political enemies, my social enemies, or whatever. And just like Jesus, who says, don't be afraid of this lot. afraid of the one who can do this and that. So Paul says the real battle is the one going on in the heavenly places. This is cognate with what you find in First Corinthians 15, where Paul says he must reign, that's Christ must reign, till he's put all his enemies under his feet. In other words, we are living in a period of history between the initial victory of Jesus

over sin and death in the cross and resurrection and ascension and the final victory when he comes again and, as Paul says, God will be all in all. And Ephesians addresses the situation of people who are in the middle of that sequence. And so what you have in chapter one is the coming together of all things in heaven and earth. And then in chapter two, once he's explained, just in case anyone was unsure, about how all people are sinful and all need to be redeemed in Christ, then the real punch of Chapter 2 is that the unity of believing Judean and believing Gentile in Christ is the kind of instantiation in the present world of that unity of heaven and earth, because the coming together of heaven and earth is the temple theme in the Old and

New Testaments. And at the end of chapter 2, with a glorious climax, Paul says, Therefore, you believers, whether Jew or Gentile, you are united by the spirit indwelling you to become a holy temple in the Lord. And so the indwelling of the spirit in the church is the new temple motif with the glory of God coming to dwell in the church. Now, again, most of us never heard any of this growing up. We kind of assumed that the real message was, Ephesians 2, 1 to 10, by grace, you were saved through faith and you know you've got to do some good works en route but that the main thing is grace and faith well of course the main thing is grace and faith but the results of that is the creation of a people who are called to be the small working model of new creation and that's really the theme tune of my whole exposition here that the church is is called to live as the people in whom the unity of heaven and earth is becoming shakily and no doubt fitfully visible so that chapter 3, verse 10, the principalities and powers are called to account because Caesar would love to have created an empire in which all nations

and races came together. Caesar could never do it. There was always the elite and the others and the slaves and the women and blah, blah, blah, blah. And for Paul, it's very clear, in Christ, you are all one. And so then in chapter four and five, it's very clear, if this is so, you've got to live as a single body. And the unity of the church and the holiness of the church are the absolutely vital elements in chapters four and five. Most Protestant Christians haven't bothered about unity because they've already split off from something and liable to make more splits and more splits because that's what we've done. and we're not so bothered about holiness because we believe in justification by grace through faith so holiness doesn't really matter that much, does it?

And Paul would say, too right it does. And so holiness and unity are ways in which the church is called to live as the heaven plus earth people. And then this plays out in terms of different societal roles and gloriously, climactically in Chapter 5, in the coming together of husband and wife in marriage. And obviously there's all sorts of issues around that, and that's become a hot topic for various often wrong reasons in our own day.

But for Paul, the coming together of heaven and earth, the coming together of Judean and Gentile, the coming together of male and female, boy, this is all about God's purpose in creation and for new creation. And therefore, that explains why there's a battle and why we're in the middle of it in chapter six. Now, how long did that take about seven minutes? I think it's probably as quick as I could do.

I would love to go back. I would love to go, that's a great summary. And I mean, it sounds like you're saying Ephesians is basically like summing up the meta-narrative of scripture. I mean, if you were going to pick one book of the Bible to teach the whole Bible, the whole grand story, Ephesians seems to be a one-stop shop for that. Ephesians, Ephesians would help. I mean, obviously there's all sorts of things which are elsewhere in the New Testament,

which are not in Ephesians. It's a comparatively short letter, not nearly as long as Romans or the Corinthian letters, for instance, or even as not quite as long as Galatians yet. But it is a summary like that. And I think there's a reason for that, which is that it's a circular, which is why there's a little bit of textual oddity at the start, where the words in Ephesus has been added in later manuscripts. And I think that's because somebody found a copy of it in the church library at Ephesus and thought, oh, this seems to have been. addressed to us here, so we'll put that in there. But actually, I think it's a circular when Paul is in prison in Ephesus itself, writing to the different church groups in the locality, and also in the hinterland in places like Colossi and Laodicea, which are upcountry

from Ephesus. And we see Paul refers to circular letters elsewhere in the same correspondence, in Colossians and so on. Make sure you read the other letter and so on. So that's a reasonable assumption. So in a circular, there's no particular heresy which he's addressing. There's no particular warning he's issuing about this group or that group. It's basically this is the way the creation and new creation works. And so if you're in Christ, get on board. Here's how it works. I've got a few specific questions. And these, not sure how long each one will take but um your your way of framing uh 310 was fascinating last time we talked this verse came up it's been one of my favorite verses because it it's it's kind of at this climactic moment of

a conversation around multi-ethnic church jew and gentile coming together and it's it has this uh it's a hina clause right like it's so that like yes this is like the grand moment yeah and God wants to broadcast his multifaceted manifold wisdom to the principalities and powers, rulers and authorities in the air. Are you suggesting that there is a bit of an imperial critique here that Paul is saying Caesar and the empire is trying to do this, but they're failing. They're on the side of the demonic forces, and Jesus is the one who did what the empire couldn't do.

Is that the sense? Basically, yes. I mean, Paul, like most Judean thinkers, ancient and modern, is a creational monotheist who believes that it is God's will that society and the world should be wisely ordered under appropriate, wise, human leadership. In other words, Paul does believe, as in Romans 13, that it's for the good of society that there are human leaders to whom we pay taxes and give allegiance, etc. But that doesn't mean that every single thing they do or think is right. Far from it, they have to be called to account. It's like Jesus says to Pontius Pilate, you could have no authority over me unless it was given you from above, and therefore he immediately adds, so the one who delivered me over to you has the greater sin. In other words, it is God's will that there should be rulers and authorities, but it is also God's will that the church, by its very existence, never mind what it says, should call them to account, should remind them of the creator God's ultimate purpose for the world. And I think that's what we see going on here. Y'all know how much I love my dog tank. Oh my goodness. We go on runs together. We watch baseball games together.

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Or you can use code TITR 50 at checkout. Okay, that's 50% off your first order at SundaysforDogs.com forward slash TITR or use code T. ITR 50 at checkout. Can you tease this out on a pastoral practical level? Because I'm just, my mind just connecting so many dots in how the church should do that today, you know, embody and pursue the very vision that the nations are trying to do, you know?

Yeah, yeah. And even when it comes like multi-ethnicity, like in America, you know, there's a big push, on one side of the aisle for, you know, diversity and bringing people together. And I look at it and I say, man, the heart is good. There's a lot of good things there. But it just doesn't, it just doesn't feel right. Doesn't feel, you know, Jesus centered, obviously. Think of the church in Antioch or Ephesus or somewhere like that in the first century. These were polyglot, polychrome communities. They were at the center of the trade routes. People came from east and west, from north and south. There were marketing.

There were bazaars. There was all sorts of things going on. There were slaves. There were free. There were men, women, whatever. And plenty of Jewish communities and plenty of other, what we would call other philosophies, other religions, et cetera. And when the church gets set up in places like Antioch and Ephesus, there isn't one church for the Skivians and another church for any Egyptians who happen to be around. And another church for any people from, from Western Greece and so on. Of course not. It's a single family. And we can see in Romans where there is a problem in Rome, which Paul is addressing, namely that different church communities are isolated from one another because they're suspicious that that lot don't keep Shabbat or do keep Shabbat and we think they shouldn't, or that they don't keep kosher, or they do keep kosher and we think they And so in Romans 14, Paul is navigating and saying, no, before their own master, they stand or fall. Therefore, what I want is for you to worship God with one heart and voice. That's Paul's vision of the church in Romans 14 and 15.

And again, just like Ephesians has been ignored. So Romans 12 to 16 has been written off. I mean, you and I have lectured on Romans, at least I have many times. I guess you have too. And you know how it is? you spend so long on the first eight chapters and then you're aware that 9 to 11 is kind of important so you try to give them a bit of a whack as well

and by the time you get to 12 to 16 it's nearly the end of term the students are getting tired they've got to write their exams and we don't bother with it but actually that's where so much of this lands that learning how to be the polychrome church is not an extra option for those with nothing else to do on a wet Thursday night

You know, this is stuff that we all ought to be involved with. And I don't know if I've said this to you before, Preston, but my analysis of how we got there is that when the reformers quite rightly said they wanted to have liturgy and Bible in their own tongue, nobody noticed that this was accidentally creating ethnic churches. So that by the end of the 17th century in London, you'd have a Portuguese church, a Polish church, an Italian church, a Spanish church.

et cetera, et cetera. And then they got exported to the new world, to your part of the world. And then they became different churches, often with subtly different theologies, although in fact they probably mostly agree on most things when push comes to shove. And Paul would say, you're missing the whole point. The whole point is that God is creating one new people, one new family, in Christo. Look at, look at Ephesians 4, 1 to 16. It's all about how all these diverse gifts and callings are there to serve the unity of the body of the whole. And if we pull apart from one another, don't be surprised if the world doesn't take any notice of us. And that's really the emphasis here that if the church is to have the impact on the world that it's supposed to, by

what it is as well as what it says, by what it is even more than what it says, then it has to be united. And I know that's difficult. It's, you know, I live in a very awkward situation called the Anglican Communion, where we struggle over many issues. My wife and I now also live part of our year in Scotland, where there are many different free churches that are broken off from one another. From what I see, they all basically believe the same stuff.

They sing the same Psalms. They have very similar sermons. But, oh, no, well, back in 1836, they decided to do this, so we broke off. And I said, come on, guys. You know, there's a world out there that needs to see who Jesus is, basically. It sounds so, like unity within diversity seems to be a thread throughout the whole book. I mean, you have like heaven and earth kind of coming together in Ephesian Swan. You have God and humans in the first part of two, Jew Gentile, latter part of two, Jew Gentile, basically

all of three, chapter four, diversity of gifts, one body. And that leads into the household code beginning in where we want to divide it 521, 522, which goes all the way to 6.9. So from 1-1 to 6-9, And unity within diversity is, captures everything. Absolutely. And the problem is that the original multicultural experiment in the history of the world was the early church in places like Antioch. You know, other people just weren't doing that. And the church was doing it. What's happened is that in the last few hundred years, the Western world, not least, having broken off from Rome, the Protestant.

Western world particularly, there's been Fisiparous and has lost that vision. And so now when groups come along and say, hey, we ought to be diverse and we have a diversity agenda and people say, oh, that's terrible because that comes out of Marxism and da-da-da-da-d-d-d-dum. And the answer is, sorry, guys, it was a Christian idea in the beginning. If you forgot that, don't be surprised if other people with other agendas come to put that rack in. That's how so many extraneous views take off. I mean, without wishing to get into any detail, the Jehovah's Witnesses and the Mormons are both aware of gaps in the traditional Western Protestant world, and they are majoring on the bits that the rest of the church is missing

out, and then they're expanding that into a whole system. And it's because if the church leaves gaps, don't be surprised if other people fill them in. And the, the, The multicultural thing right now, multiculturalism is a bad word in many circles in my country because people see it as a revolutionary ultra-leftist sort of thing. And then I go around saying, sorry, this is the original Christian vision, but it only works if you put Jesus and the Spirit in the middle of it. If you try to get the fruits without the root, don't be surprised if the fruits turn sour on you. I've been paying attention a little bit to some of the debates over in the UK.

This is a bit of a maybe a detour, but can you kind of sum up the state of what's going on and how does the church fit into all that? The church is muddled in all sorts of ways, and we've had difficulties of various sorts so that the last Archbishop of Canterbury resigned early, Justin Welby, because he was being accused of having failed to, follow-up cases of sexual abuse, etc., etc. And I think there were some people who got the bit between their teeth and really went after him and made life uncomfortable for him. And I feel desperately sorry for him. I know the backstory there, and that was just all a mess. But while we're

without an Archbishop of Canterbury, we don't have the voice of leadership there that we really should. And it makes it harder for all the others, the Archbishop of York, etc. And this is just the Anglican communion. Rome has had its own particular problems because of various scandals, etc. The free churches, on the one hand, the traditional free churches have not been hugely successful in the last generation, but the newer free churches, the charismatic, so-called house churches, the beginnings of mega-churches insofar as we have them here, and they tend to be very independent, doing their own thing, planting new things this way and that. And I'm not sure how that yet maps onto some of the social and cultural issues. Because now people are trying to do bits of

what we've seen going on in America, which is to fasten some Christian labels or symbols onto some bits of social protest, just happened a week or two ago, anti-immigration protest, and people trying to use Christian symbols as a way of saying, we're a Christian country, we don't want all these weird people coming from elsewhere, thank you very much. And this is part of a much, much larger issue with, on the one hand, the biblical imperative to welcome the stranger, to look after the orphan and widow and outcast and people who come in from outside. And I know it's not that easy because if suddenly you get 10,000 people coming in from outside, all trying to claim social benefits, you know, we've got a major problem. I'm speaking as a

British taxpayer here, there's only so much you can do in a small island. So I'm not naive. I know that there are huge problems there. However, playing, as they say, playing the race card isn't the way to go. And of course, quite apart from anything else, we have to remind ourselves, and this has been true for a generation and more, that most Westerners in the world today are not Christians, and most Christians in the world today are not Westerners. You know, the average Anglican today is black and does not speak English as her mother tongue. And so actually, we are in a very confused situation where a lot of people in Britain are nervous about social, cultural, political issues. We don't know what's going on. We look across the Atlantic

and we see a lot of bizarre things happening in America right now, and you will know much more about that than I do. But at the heart of it, I do not see church leaders re-articulating the vision of Jesus and Paul, Jesus in John's Gospel, Paul in Ephesians and elsewhere, for a single community, multicultural, multi-ethnic, polychrome, etc. And I know you've interviewed Eastall McCauley, my former student. Esau is a great poster child really for all this, and partly because, of course, he and his wife

are themselves what we used to call a mixed marriage and gloriously so, that actually we are all one in Christ Jesus. And if we can demonstrate that to the world, say, you want multiculturalism, well, actually, here it is. This is what it looks like. But it only works if you submit to Jesus as Lord. Now, I could go on, and I often do, but that's the answer to the question. I want to know why Tom Wright isn't in the running for the new Archbishop.

Is that something that, do you volunteer? Do you get voted on? Is that part of the discussion? Happily, the retiring age for Archbishops, I think it's either 70 or 73, and I'm going to turn 77 next birthday, so I would

be way out of it anyway. But in any I know what being an archbishop involves, and I do not have all that skill set. I have some of the skills, maybe a third of the skills required, but there's all sorts of administrative leadership and related things, which somebody needs to do, and the system needs to be organized so that it's going to work for somebody, but I'm not good at that. I'm not a good manager. Justin was a very good manager, is a very good manager, but you've got to be a manager, you've got to be a pastor, you've got to be a prayerful, wise person, and I'm only a little bit

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order thanks to wild alaskan company for sponsoring this episode all right let's go back to ephesians let's talk about the household code um this is something uh you may know i i i just finished a book on probably one of the biggest projects I've worked on in the last 10 years on women in leadership coming at it from a undecided position and I'm not going to reveal my position

even though I know it and the Lord knows it my wife knows it but try to keep that under wraps but I spent a lot of time in the household code yeah I mean so I have so many questions but can you I guess just give us an introduction to the household code the cultural context

what is Paul doing here How does this fit? Yeah. I mean, one of the first things to say is that the household codes are not about leadership in the church. The issue of whether women can be church leaders, whether they can preach, whether they can teach, that is an entirely separate issue which is not addressed in Ephesians 5. My own position is very clear. I've written it up in various places, but right from the moment when Jesus commissions Mary Magdalene

to go and tell the others that he's been raised from the dead, He's ascending to my father and your father, my God and your God, you know, just to lay that down very clearly, the announcement that the crucified Jesus has been raised from the dead and is the Lord of the world is the foundation of all gospel proclamation. And Jesus does not say to Mary, Mary, there's an important announcement to be made. Obviously, you can't do it, so please will you go and get Peter or John or one of the others, because I need to tell them, they need to make this announcement. No, Jesus. Jesus says to Mary Magdalene, you go and tell them. And from that moment, everything is different. And you can say, oh, well, Jesus only chose 12 male apostles. Yeah. But in the resurrection, everything looks different. And now women are given by Jesus himself, this leadership role. And the more conservative somebody is, the more they ought to say that John 20 really means what it says. And then I would draw in Romans 16 and various other passages as well. but that's where I'd start. So let's just clear that off. Then in Ephesians chapter 5, the main thing is the mutuality of marriage, the mutual submission,

submit to one another out of reverence for the Lord. So it's a kind of a triangular thing that men, the husband and the wife are both to submit to the Lord and then in the Lord to submit one to another. That's difficult, Speaking of somebody who's been married for 54 years, that is difficult, and it's something has to be negotiated and navigated again and again, because personalities change, circumstances

change, sickness happens, children come along, whatever. It's not easy. It's a lifetime struggle, just like church unity in general is a lifetime struggle. But the richness of that male-female mutual submission, under-submission to the law. Lordship of Jesus, is modeling something about creation and new creation, the goodness of creation and the possibility and vocation of new creation. Now, I know only too well that many marriages in the language we usually use, many marriages fail.

Probably every family I've ever known. There's somebody somewhere where a marriage has come apart at the seams. So I'm not speaking from a high and lofty position and saying, oh no, this only happens to other lesser mortals. No, this happens to all of us to a lesser or greater extent. So it's not about moralizing. It's about the vocation of Jesus' followers insofar as in them lies to be people who are part of that small working model of new creation we call the church. And I think Paul would be the first to say, you know, Paul Paul had lived in small houses on the street in Corinth,

and Ephesus and places like this, he knew perfectly well the pressures and pains and difficulties of no doubt the multiplicity of ambiguous relationships that would go on. And he says, nevertheless, we are called in Christ to model this new way of being human. And okay, if we fail or if we can't do it, then there may be other ways that we can do equivalent things. But this is the thing that we ought to aim at and we shouldn't go soft on this. Does that make sense? Yeah, absolutely does. Yeah, I would love to hear your thoughts on how the household code is situated within its Greco-Roman context and what Paul is doing there. Because, you know, if you go back to Aristotle, even Plato, but mainly Aristotle and other authors since then,

you know, they kind of came up with this household code, you know, husbands, wives, children, parents, master slaves. Yeah. And so there's some similarities between, Paul's code and these Greco-Rubman codes, but there's some stark differences there. So why are their similarities? Why are their differences? What is Paul doing here? Yeah, I mean, as with everything else that Paul does, and you will know the chapter on philosophy in my big book, Paul and the faithfulness of God. Paul describes his task in 2nd Corinthians 10 as being to take every thought captive to obey the Messiah. And so I think Paul is able to look around at the world of Stoicism, Epicureanism, Aristotle, Plato, whoever, and say, actually, that's not a bad way of

organizing something that needs to be said. However, coming at it from this Judean-stroke, messianic viewpoint, we're going to tweak it and more than tweak it, because if Aristotle says that a woman is a lesser form of a human being than a male is, then Paul is going to to say absolutely not. In Christ, there is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free. No male and female, you are all one. Aristotle would have been shocked at that so that the framework has all sorts of similarities. And if Paul is writing to people, some of whom would be reasonably well educated within the Hellenistic educational world, and would know that at a certain point there are key questions need to ask. I mean, if you just look, I don't know if you can see up on the shelf behind me,

but all the essays by Plutarch and people like that on every subject under the Thun, on islands, on marriage, on warfare, on this, on that. Okay, let's address these issues. And some of them are really crucial because the male-female thing is pretty darned important in Genesis 1 when Genesis is talking about creation and how it works. And the rotation of humans to be image-bearing humans is not a little topic out on the side, it's a pretty central topic. And so Paul is addressing those, but he is infusing them with, I would say, a scripturally nourished, that's an Old Testament scripturally nourished

vision of men and women, both being responsible agents and responsible to God, responsible to one another, and responsible for carrying forward God's project for creation and new creation. So no surprises that there's all sorts of places where there are overlaps in terms of framework and outline and so on. Fine. I'm intrigued to explore that more and more if I had world enough and time. But within that, Paul is insisting on taking that thought captive, turning it around and saying, you're coming with me now. We are going to follow Jesus and this is what it's going to look like. This is a loaded question because I know the answer.

I know what you're going to say, and I would say the same thing. But just to explain it for our audience, how essential is sex difference for marriage? In other words, in Ephesians 5, could this marriage passage work? Because it's so deeply theological, it's situating marriage within the grand story of the gospel, all the way back to Genesis, so it's not just a random, you know, here's some marriage advice. This is one of the most profound theological statements about marriage. Could a same-sex marriage work with this passage? Or how would you respond to?

I mean, it's a loaded question, the way you've asked it, as you well know, because could something work? Well, the answer is, in terms of building a relationship, a stable relationship, yeah, you might be able to, and may be able, people do have stable relationships which would reflect some aspects of what Paul is talking about. But Paul would say that precisely doesn't send the signal into the wider community of the coming together of radically different people and radically different strands. You know, it's like saying, instead of saying Jew plus Gentile, together makes a church, saying, well, we'll have a Gentile plus a Gentile over here, we'll have a Jew plus a Jew over there. And that will work, won't it? Well, better to have united communities that can then talk to each other than not to have united communities. But that's not the point of the gospel, certainly not in Ephesians. And so it's, when we say work, you could hear that in terms of, could such a relationship function on a day-to-day or year-by-year basis. The answer is, yeah, it could, and in many cases it does after a fashion, just as male plus female marriages both work and don't work after a fashion because we are all sinful, selfish

human beings and we get things wrong and we upset our partners, et cetera, et cetera, et So at that level of work, yeah, it's always something you're going to have to work at. Could it work as a signal to the principalities and powers that the God who made heaven and earth and male and female has in Jesus Christ redeemed, rescued and reconstituted heaven and earth male and female? No, it couldn't do that because that is something which would be, it's something which is supposed to be reflecting and embodying. Genesis 1 and 2, and saying, we are getting this back on track. And let me say, exactly like Jesus does in Mark chapter 10, when they ask Jesus about divorce, and he says, yeah, I know Moses gave you that permission because you're hard-hearted. But from the beginning, God made them male and female and said, therefore, you leave and you

cleave, et cetera. In other words, Jesus is saying, A, his movement, his kingdom of God movement, was designed to get back to the original design. And B, God has a cure for hardness of heart. That's a toughy. Speaking to somebody who sometimes has had to counsel people with marriage difficulties, saying blandly, God is a cure for hardness of heart, could sound very arrogant whatever, because it's, again, something that has to be worked at, prayed through,

wept through, et cetera, et cetera. But that is the vision which Jesus offers and which Paul then articulates. Yeah. One more question about the household code. It does, okay, so husbands, wives, children, parents, and then masters and slaves. How do we think through the whole slavery question? Paul, you know, slaves obey your masters. That's a startling statement from a modern perspective.

Obviously, in the first century that, you know, whatever, that it was just a norm, the air they breathe. But how should we, in our context, think through what Paul is doing with slavery? Well, I mean, several things to say. It's very easy for us to adopt a superior attitude. Hey, guys, we abolished slavery 150 years ago whenever it was. Well, yeah, we didn't, we didn't. There's still plenty of slavery in today's world. There's some in my own country.

And there's all sorts of gangs and movements and stuff which happens. And we have to be vigilant constantly about that. But more importantly, in any society, you have people running businesses, people running whatever they're doing, who need people to work for them. There have to be rules about how that works. There have to be rules about if a worker runs off the job, taking a lot of the master's money, how does that work, what's going on. So we have to have an ordered society. And some of that order, when somebody is just starting out or whatever, they might well say, I feel like a wage slave. And we have that phrase, a wage slave, where all I have to do is turn up for work, sweat my guts out, go home at night and collect my pay packet at the end of the week.

So it's a kind of a gradation. It's not either slavery, what a wicked, horrible thing, glad we got rid of it, or we're all free and we're all doing jobs that we love and we're having a great time. society is happy and healthy. It's just not like that. There is a continuum. That's the first thing to say. Second thing to say, in the ancient world, as you well know, slavery had nothing to do with skin pigmentation or with what we would call rapes or ethnicity. Anyone could become a slave. All you had to do was to lose a battle or a business or something like that. Just get to the bottom of the pile and then you sell yourself to somebody to say, well, if you feed me, I'll just work for you. I'll be your slave. And plenty of people did that. Likewise,

many slaves were able to earn a little bit and buy their own freedom, or sometimes if their master like them, they could be given their freedom. In other words, it's not a fixed thing. It's not because you're this color of skin, you're automatically a slave class. Actually, in the ancient Mediterranean world, skin pigmentation was all over the place. There were some people who were very black skin from down further south in Africa, some who were very fair skin from some of the far north, but most people in the Mediterranean world were a rich mixture of those and everything else, and it wasn't the big deal. And so, and nor was there a sense, as we've had, obviously, over the last two or three hundred years, of certain countries

specifically enslaving people from certain other countries and sending ships and guns to take whole populations, transport them to the other side of the world, to make them do menial jobs and to kill them if they disobey us, etc. You know, the slave trade in the 17th, 80th, 19th century was just one of the most horrible things. And the thought that a lot of the people who did that were people who would be reading the New Testament, but imagining that the New Testament was about how their souls might one day go to heaven because they believed in something called the god that they called the gospel you know that is just mind-boggling and so the other thing the third thing to say is in the ancient world slavery was how an awful lot of stuff got done that today

we have machines to do as people have pointed out this one of the reasons it was easier to abolish slavery because with the industrial revolution people invented machines to do all sorts of things that up until then were much easier to be done by a gang of people with somebody with literally cracking the whip over them and whether building huge buildings or whatever from the pyramids of Egypt right on right on through and so the fact that we look at slavery and see it as abhorrent and think how wicked they should have protested against it for Paul to say slavery is wicked and you all ought to give up your slaves worth with is about as useful as you going into the pulpit on a Sunday morning and saying,

now look, I've done the research. Carbon and monoxide is poisoning the planet. All of you drove cars here to church. I want you to leave them in the parking lot. We'll get somebody to take them away and crush them and we'll pay you $100 each. And I've arranged for a fleet of horses and carts to take you all back home. So that's what we're going to do from now on. I just don't think you're going to get much mileage out of that. I mean, literally a metaphor. In other words, this is how everything got done. It makes no sense to say you must stop slavery at once. It does make sense to say what Paul says in Philemon, which is to say Philemon, this man Onesimus is a fellow human being. He is a brother in Christ. And I want you to accept him as such. And I want you both to treat one another in that way.

to re-humanize an institution with then the hint that sooner or later there may be further steps to be taken. Now, that's a much wiser way to go than simply the moral grandstanding that so many people in our own day want to do and say, you know, this is wrong, should be abolished tomorrow, end of conversation. So, sorry, that's a wrong answer,

but one needs to say it all. That's incredibly helpful. Yeah, so helpful. I mean, just the thought, So, yes, Paul didn't seek to abolish slavery, but there were some statements he made, right, that would have been just profoundly startling in the first century. Even you have a, say, a non-believer, Greco-Roman person, you know, walking into a house church and seeing a master and a slave eating the same food at the same table at the same time,

that would have been revolutionary, right? Absolutely, absolutely. But just as it was for a devout Judean, saying they have to share a table with a Gentile because Gentiles are sinners. They're idolaters. They worship idols and so they're unclean, aren't they? And Paul says, no, they were Gentile sinners, Hamartoloi, but if you believe in the cross and if you believe that they are in Christ,

their sin, their idolatry has been dealt with. This, by the way, this is a side issue, but a really, really important one. this is part of the point of the so-called new perspective on Paul, that people have said, oh, you say that justification by faith is about the inclusion of Gentiles. Well, yes, it is, of course it is, because the reason Gentiles can be included is because their sins have been dealt with on the cross. This is what Galatians is all about. So we have divided sociology over there, satirology over there.

Thanks, Plato, that's what we've been doing. We've all been in Hock to Plato for hundreds and hundreds of years. It's just time we gave it up. Thanks so much for listening or watching. And don't forget to head over to patreon.com forward slash theology in the raw for our extra innings conversation about penal substitutionary atonement. It's absolutely free. Don't need to join a paid plan. You just need to sign up for a free Patreon account.

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