Theology in the Raw - S2 Ep1128: A Deep-Dive into the Book of Romans: Dr. N.T. Wright

Episode Date: November 13, 2023

N.T. Wright has held a variety of both academic and chaplaincy posts at Oxford, Cambridge, and McGill University, Montreal. He was Canon of Westminster in 2000, before serving as Bishop of Durham between 2003-2010. He is currently Research Professor Emeritus of New Testament and Early Christianity at St Mary’s College in the University of St Andrews and Senior Research Fellow at Wycliffe Hall, Oxford. Professor Wright has written over 80 books including his recently released:Into the Heart of Romans: A Deep Dive into Paul's Greatest Letter, which forms the basis for our conversation. Support Theology in the Raw through Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/theologyintheraw

Hey friends, the Exiles in Babylon conference is happening again, April 18th through the 20th in 2024 in Boise, Idaho. We're talking about deconstruction of the gospel, women, power, and abuse in the church, LGBTQ inclusion in the church, and three Christian views on politics and the gospel. We've got a loaded lineup of speakers, including Joshua Harris, Abigail Favali, Amin Hudson, Evan Wickham, Julie Slattery, Tiffany Bloom, Sandy Richter, Lori Krieg, Greg Coles, Art Perea, Brenna Blaine, Kat LaPriere, Chris Butler, Carol Swain, Brian Zahn, plus a live podcast with hip-hop all-star KB and Amin Hudson of the Southside Rabbi Podcast. Street hymns will be performing throughout the

conference. Worship by Evan Wickham and Tanika Wyatt, and also Max Licato is going to be there. All the information is at theologyintheraw.com. Again, if you want to attend live in person, I would register sooner than later. We're also going to live stream the conference, so that option is there as well. Again, Exiles in Babylon, 2024, April 18th through the 20th. Hello, friends. Welcome back to another episode of Theology in Iran. My guest is the one and only Dr. N.T. Wright, who has held posts at Oxford University, Cambridge University, McGill University. He was the former Bishop of Durham between 2003 to 2010, is currently Research Professor Emeritus of New Testament at St. Andrews University and Senior Research Fellow at Wycliffe Hall, Oxford.

The author of over 80 books, including his most recent book, I'll hold it up here for those of you watching this, Into the Heart of Romans, a deep dive into Paul's greatest letter, which focuses largely on Romans chapter 8. It is an absolutely fantastic book. I had the privilege of endorsing it, and I'm excited for you to get a bird's eye view of both the book of Romans and especially Romans chapter 8. Please welcome back to the show, the one and only Dr. N.T. Wright. Hey, Tom, welcome back to Theology in the Raw. I feel like it was just a few months ago.

I think it was less than a year since you were on last, but I'm excited to have you back on. It's good to see you again. Thank you. Yeah. So you have a new book out. First of all, what number book is this for you? Do you, do you keep track anymore? I keep a rough track, but it depends whether you count second editions and whether you count, uh, collaborations and so on. I think in terms of books by me solo solo, it's somewhere between 85 and 90. Um, I'm not actually sure. Um, but it's that it's up around there somewhere. Well, and that number is a little arbitrary because some authors who have books in those

numbers, they're writing Christian living books that they spin out in a month. I mean, the number of books you've written includes books like Jesus and the Victory of God, a 600-plus page book with more footnotes than... By the way, I think I told you this last time, that's still my favorite, Jesus and the Victory of God. I will never read the Gospels the same. Interesting. I've had quite a few people say that to me. Indeed, I find it very moving. There's one or two people who've said the reason they are in New Testament as a professional field is because they read Jesus and the Victory of God. I'm thinking,

oh my goodness, that's quite a responsibility. But for me, obviously, that book was published in 96, and it really was the fruit of about 20 years of reading books, historical Jesus books, all the way back to Ben Meyer and Skillebakes and people like that, over against all the stuff that I'd read when I was a student, whether it was Bultmann or others, and realizing that the more you understand the Jewish context, the more Jesus comes up in three dimensions. And then let's go and see where we end up. And I ended up in several places, which I had not expected to end up, but it was very exciting. And it still is very exciting right now. Yeah. Well, the book that put me into scholarship was what St. Paul really said. That was the first book I read by you. I had hardly even, I had known of the name N.T. Wright just from a distance. I'm like, oh yeah, some British scholar

or whatever. And somebody was actually Tim Gombis, who I think you know, said, I was a second year seminary student. He's like, you should go read this book and went and read it. And it turned my desire to go into scholarship from, this is kind of a drudgery path. I feel like God is calling me to, to this is the most exciting career I could possibly think of. So yeah, that's fantastic. I'd like to do it.

Speaking of what St. Paul really said, we are talking about Paul in this episode. So, so that your, your most recent book is into the heart of Romans, a deep dive into Paul's greatest letter. That's a bold statement. Romans eight, you would say is Paul's, well, Paul's great. Okay. So, I actually misinterpreted

I was thinking you're going to say Romans 8 is the greatest chapter in Paul. You might say that. You might say that. And I know some people have said, and I think one or two of the people who've been kind enough like you to write blurbs for the book have said well the general consensus is that romans is paul's greatest letter and if you have to choose romans 8 is the greatest chapter in that letter now i wouldn't like to play off different chapters against each other but there is something climactic about it i mean as as i've said often enough, and I think I say in the book, Romans is, you know, I was trained as a musician and not to a high degree, but music is really important to me. And Romans is like a symphony. There are four movements in it. And like a symphony,

a classical symphony, a Beethoven or a Tchaikovsky or whatever, the four movements are significantly different, but they go with one another and they lead into one another. And there are themes which recur in a different mode or whatever. And so Romans 8 is at the end of the second of those four movements. So it's right in the center. And in a way, it's the heart of Romans. And when you think about the great themes that occupy Paul, whether it's Jesus, whether it's sin and salvation, whether it's who is God anyway, whether it's suffering and hope, resurrection,

new creation, and much more besides, they're all in Romans 8. Most of the letters, like you can say 1 Corinthians, there's this chapter on love and 1 Corinthians, there's a chapter on There's a, you know, like you could say 1 Corinthians, there's this chapter on love. And 1 Corinthians, there's a chapter on factionalism in the church. And Philippians, there's a chapter of Paul telling his own story and so on. But Romans 8 is a place where actually you've got the Trinity, you've got salvation, you've got death and resurrection. What more do you want? death and resurrection, what more do you want? But also lots of surprises, and this is part of the point of the book, that the older I've got, and not least through teaching some bright graduate students over the years, I've realized that the way we read Romans from early days and the way

that most people still read Romans is very significantly flawed in terms of what Paul is actually saying. And part of the point of this book is to go to the heart and say, now, if this is what's going on here, and the fun of doing this book was it isn't just a commentary on Romans, but because it's a commentary on one chapter, I'm able to take it line by line and word by word, then all sorts of things open up which make you read Romans as a whole, Paul as a whole, maybe the gospel as a whole, interestingly differently, shall we say. Yeah. Can we step back and let's pretend you're talking to, who's our audience? Let's just say it's a first year, maybe seminary or university student. They've been a Christian for a number of years. They've read Romans several times.

They maybe have read a book or two on Paul. But they might be stuck with maybe some old, this is no knock on Lutheranism, but some old Lutheran categories, the Romans road, leading people to individual salvation. Can you step back and just give us an overview? How does Romans work? And then I ultimately want to see you just do a deep dive into how Romans 18 functions within that larger overview. Right. Well, it's always tricky.

If I was lecturing to, as you say, a bunch of second-year students who'd come from that kind of background. And I often do talk to people from very similar backgrounds. Indeed, our new students at Wycliffe Hall this year, here in Oxford, where I'm part-time teaching, may well be a lot of them from that background. But I'm always a little cautious, because I never want to come into a class and say, everything you've ever thought is wrong, let me give you something totally different. Because in all sorts of ways, I'd much rather people believe the old-fashioned Roman's road than that they were out on the street being atheists or whatever. In other words, anything that makes people say there are big problems out there and I'm part of it and maybe Jesus is the answer. Well, great. That's a good place to start. Now let's actually work at that and see. So it's a yes, but rather

than a forget it and here's something else. At the same time, most people who read Romans in a traditional way assume that the big question which Paul is asking is how do we sinful humans get to go to heaven when we die? It's assumed that that's what it's about. And people assume that the word salvation means going to heaven when you die. It's assumed that people, that the word glorification or glory itself is all about going to heaven when you die. And this is where I kind of rip the mask off and say, sorry, guys, that's not what the story is all about. Actually, it's not what the Bible story is all about in Romans, but the whole of the Bible is not about how saved souls go up and live with God. It's about how God comes to dwell with humans. The strapline in

Revelation 21 is not the dwelling of humans is with God, it's the dwelling of God is with humans. That shouldn't be a surprise to anyone who's followed the entire biblical narrative through, because Old and New Testaments are absolutely welded together. And this is where, for me, one of the great surprises in my recent reading of Romans has been the way in which some of those Old Testament themes about God coming and living with his people in the tabernacle in the wilderness, then in the temple, they come back with a bang. But just to say it out loud, the word heaven hardly occurs in Romans at all. And when it does, it is not talking about the place where God's people go when they die. So what is the story about? It's about new creation. And the new

creation is God's original design from where his first creation was supposed to be going to eventually, which was thwarted because of human sin. So God has to deal with human sin in order to enable the project of new creation. And then the end of Romans, rather than being, well, now here's a few instructions for how to live, is that Paul believes that the church is called to be the small working model of new creation. And we'll get back to that. But so once you start to look at the letter like that, it kind of shakes you up a bit because the first four chapters are not about you're all sinners, but Jesus died, therefore you're going to heaven. It's God's world, God's beautiful creation is spoiled because the humans who should have been

looking after it on God's behalf have messed up. And when humans mess up, it's not just that the humans themselves are losing out, it's that God's project for creation is not going to its desired and intended goal. Now, if you say that to a first century Jew, many wise first century Jews will say that's precisely why God called us. Abraham and his family are God's answer to the problem of the human race. So God called Abraham, he gave him a family, he gave him a land, and the land was the kind of sign that in you and in your seed, all the families of the earth shall be blessed. And the problem then intensifies because Paul says, I'm sorry, your own scriptures, what Christians call the Old Testament, the Hebrew scriptures, make it clear all the way through.

As soon as Abraham is called, he starts to mess up and go off to Egypt when he shouldn't have done. And Abraham is a man of great faith and great failings. And those two march side by side. And the whole story of the Old Testament is about how the people who are called to be the solution to the world are also the bearers of the problem. And the great prophetic narratives and first kings and goodness knows what, it's all about how that intention of God to rescue the world through the family of Abraham seems itself to fail. But here's the clue which takes you all

the way through Romans, that when humans fail, when the people who God has called to be his partners in his work, when they fail, God doesn't give up on the plan. When humans sin, God doesn't say, okay, we're not going to do this human project anymore. He could have done. Noah was the exception. He could have just said, I'm just going to blot out the whole world. Likewise, and this is the problem, so many Christians, when they think about the Old Testament, they think, well, God had a first shot saving people. He thought that if he gave them a law, maybe they would become better. But sadly, it didn't work. So he gave up that purpose and sent Jesus instead.

And Paul says no to that way of mistelling the narrative. Jesus comes as the fulfillment of, and if you like, the corrective fulfillment of the whole Abraham and Israel project. corrective fulfillment of the whole Abraham and Israel project. He is the Messiah, the faithful Israelite, who at last is able to carry that project forwards so that the rescue of humans from sin is done through the fulfillment of the covenant with Abraham. That is basically Romans 1 to 4, but it leaves all sorts of questions, and those questions are then addressed in 5 to 8, 9 to 11, 12 to 16. Those are the four movements of the symphony we call Romans, and particularly with 5 to 8, which is a wonderful piece of writing in itself. As I say, that movement

of the symphony, you can play it just on its own. You need the rest fully to understand it, but you could do it like that. But this is about the human story and the human story with the Israel story woven into it. But the point of being human was never that the present world is a training ground or an exam room to see who's fit to go to heaven. world is a training ground or an exam room to see who's fit to go to heaven. The point of the human story is that God wanted his humans to be his image bearers, to reflect his stewardship and love into his creation. So that then one of the key verses in Romans 5 is 5.17, where he says that those who receive the gift of covenant membership of righteousness will reign in life. That's something which we don't think enough about, and people sometimes hear it as just another synonym for going to heaven. But actually, when we get to Romans 8,

we see what it's all about. But in Psalm 8, which is one of the back texts there, it says, what are humans? You've made them little lower than the angels to crown them with glory and honor, putting all things in subjection under their feet. So God rescues humans so that his redeemed humans will be the people through whom he puts his world right. And then we'll come back to the dark heart of Romans because the present stage of this rescue operation is very dark because the world is still in a mess. So what are we saved humans doing about it right now? We are lamenting, we are groaning, and the spirit is groaning within us. This is God using his people as the place where he can groan at the heart of his creation. That's a very profound thing.

We'll come back to it as I say. Then inevitably it raises the question, what are we then saying about Israel? Has God been faithful or not to his promises? 9 to 11 expounds, particularly the Pentateuch, Genesis to Deuteronomy, Romans 9 and 10, walk you through Genesis to Deuteronomy, particularly Deuteronomy 30 at the end there, very powerful, 13 and 32. And then with chapter 11 saying, so what is God about to do? And Paul is very open-ended at that point. He's saying to the Gentile Christians in Rome, don't write the Jews off because God hasn't finished with them, so nor should you. But he's not saying exactly what's going to happen except that God will finally save all Israel, which then leaves all sorts of questions. But then 12 to 16, I got really excited about 12 to 16 recently. Who knows maybe one day I'll write another book on that. But as I say, the whole point about being Christian

is not we better try to keep our noses clean so that we will eventually make it to heaven or whatever. No, the church is to be the small working model of new creation. The world had never seen people living in this way. In particular, the world had never imagined people of different ethnicities and men and women and slaves and free, all sorts, worshipping together, praying together, loving one another as family. And that in the climax of the letter, Romans 15 verses 7 to 13, that is the sign to the world of the new creation, which is why Paul says, may the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace in

believing, that by the power of the Spirit you may abound in hope. This is the idea that in the Old Testament, the earth shall be full of the knowledge of the glory of the Lord as the waters cover the sea. How can the world possibly believe that? Answer, when there is a community living like this in their midst, that is a sign in the present time of what God intends to do for the whole creation. And I think that's how Romans hangs together. It's about learning how to be the people of the Messiah, worshipping from all possible backgrounds, and so being the sign to the world that Jesus is Lord and that God is going to renew all creation and it will be glorious. So there's Romans in a nutshell with Romans 8 at its heart.

Did I do all right? How long? You've been giving Romans in a nutshell talks, I think, since the late 70s. And I love that you are just as excited about it as ever. I mean, that alone is, is, uh, it's amazing. I mean, it's an amazing letter and every, every year or two, I see something else and I think, Oh my goodness, I wish somebody had told me that 50 years ago. I have so many questions. Um, okay. Which one do I, let me, let me start with this one. You didn't quite mention, you didn't say the word is like the new perspective on Paul or really draw... I mean, you touched 70s, you know, the Jew-Gentile kind of issue was kind of just lingering there in the background in the early parts of Romans or all of Romans, really.

It's just kind of there, but I think people didn't really understand the theological significance of what Paul's dealing with there. But in the late 70s and then on through the 80s and 90s, there was kind of a, I don't know how to describe it. It's debated whether we should even use this term, but the new perspective on Paul was kind of showing a much greater appreciation or awareness of the Jew-Gentile issue to the point to where people almost were really rethinking the whole idea of justification by faith. We might've gotten this all wrong, and you've written plenty on this. Can you give your own summary of maybe that different emphasis in Romans? Yeah. It's a very interesting thing that so much New Testament scholarship was dominated for generations by people within the Lutheran tradition. Now, there are many great things about the Lutheran tradition. It's easy to knock it for certain reasons, but it's a noble tradition.

Use the cliche, some of my best friends are Lutherans. Well, maybe not quite, but sort of. But had it been the Reformed traditions that have been leading the way, there would have been no need for the new perspective. Because if you look at a great reformed scholar like, say, Herman Riddibos from the previous generation, an awful lot of new perspective stuff actually is bubbling along in his work as well. Because the difference there is basically, to put it in its crudest terms, that within the great wave of Lutheranism and much modern British and American evangelicalism has that as its root, then you say, well, we can't get to heaven by doing our own good works. Fortunately, God has said that the law, all that is irrelevant and that the Jews were barking up the wrong tree

and he's done something totally different and all you have to do now is believe. And so what then do we say about Torah? We say it's abolished. What do we say about Israel? We say, well, it's irrelevant or possibly even abolished. And we know, of course, part of the reason for the new perspective is that after the Second World War, people all over the place said, hang on, what are we saying if we're saying that the Jews should have been abolished? That's basically what Adolf Hitler was saying. And whatever is the right answer, we know that that's the wrong answer. But the reformed people, I mean, and Karl Barth was saying this from way back when. Barth in his church dogmatics makes it quite clear that Luther was reading his own situation back into Paul and imagining that Paul's

opponents, the so-called Judaizers, that's misleading as well, were really like medieval Roman Catholics who Luther was opposing because they were all about doing good things in order to please God. So Luther imagined that the Jews were all about doing good things to please God. I was fortunate in that almost by providential accident, if you like, before I'd really started studying Paul in postgraduate mode, somebody put me onto a commentary on Genesis by the Jewish scholar Umberto Casuto. and Casuto points out as you work through Genesis that the promises to Abraham echo the commands to Adam and Casuto is very clear and this comes through in the rabbis again and again and again that the way that Genesis is written has God calling Abraham to reverse and undo the sin of Adam. God says to Adam, be fruitful and multiply and look after the garden. God says to Abraham, I will make you fruitful and I'll give you this land. So the land is the new Eden and so on. And from when I first saw that, it's one of the things you can't

then unsee because it helps you to read the whole of the Bible, actually. But then particularly, when you get to Romans, and I was already grubbing around in Romans before I even started my doctoral work on it, it used to be thought that Romans 4, where Abraham comes in, was just an example of somebody in the Old Testament who was justified by faith. Here we are, Genesis 15, Abraham believed God and it was reckoned to him as righteousness. In other words, okay, we know the Old Testament is all about justification by works, but there are one or two people back there who are justified by faith. And that's complete rubbish. Genesis 15 is the covenant chapter where God makes the covenant with Abraham. And the covenant, as Paul says, has in mind the whole world.

God's promise to Abraham was that he should inherit the world. And suddenly you see so many things differently. So I was messing around with that stuff before the New Perspective was launched by Ed Sanders. And then Jimmy Dunn, who was my doctoral examiner, started writing about it in the early 1980s. And so that was all going on. But it was a way of saying, when we read Paul, let's not imagine that he's got it in for the Jews, and he's just being a kind of a self-hating ex-Jew who says, no, no, that was all wrong. Now, there's a problem here, because there are some, I'm thinking of, to name names, a scholar like Paula Fredrickson, who's a very fine scholar in all sorts of ways. But she, from the beginning, was following Christa Stendahl, who is a great Harvard teacher

and himself a Swedish Lutheran bishop, who pioneered a version of the new perspective, which was a kind of a two-track salvation, that actually God wants Jews just to go on being good Jews. And Christianity is a wonderful way for Gentiles to come in on something similar. And that now has turned itself into a whole movement calling itself the radical new perspective. And I have to say, to be honest and blunt, I think it's complete rubbish. It just doesn't work with the text. Galatians 2, I through Torah died to Torah that I might live to God. You know, that's very dramatic. And in 1 Corinthians 9, to the Jews I became as a Jew to

win the Jews, you know, and other texts as well. So, but the whole point of the new perspective is let's not imagine that Israel was a first shot on God's part at saving people, which didn't work, so he gave it up. Rather, we have to be into some sort of fulfillment, transformation, enlargement, whatever. And this isn't anti-Jewish. It's actually deeply pro-Jewish in the sense that it's affirming God's call to Abraham as a good thing. It's affirming Torah as a good thing. It's affirming the tabernacle and the temple as good things. But in the Old Testament themselves, as the New Testament writers are aware, they're all pointing forwards with a big question mark. What's it going to look like when all this stuff comes together? And Paul says, it looks like Jesus, who is Israel

Messiah according to the flesh, which gets you as far as Romans 1.3 and Romans 9.5. But one of the verses that first alerted me to kind of just, again, a different shade of reading was Romans 3.28 and the question that follows in 3.29. So in 3.28, famous verse, Paul says, for we maintain that a person is justified by faith apart from works of the law. And for so many years, we've all assumed that works of the law was simply works righteousness, almost detached from its Jewishness. Well, if that's true, then why would Paul raise a question in 29? Or is God the God of the Jews only? Is he not the God of the Gentiles? It's like, that's an odd question to raise about your statement if works of the law is some abstract works righteousness. Here there's an intrinsic Jewishness that he's kind of responding to here.

And then that really leads into the whole of chapter four where he's saying Abraham was not just the father of Jews but Gentiles also. Very interesting. Nearly 20 years ago, I had to go and do some lectures on Paul in somewhere in Alabama I think or Louisiana somewhere down there and the other main speaker was Richard Gaffin from Westminster Seminary and I took that verse as my intro because I said my model throughout my academic life has been William Tyndale who said that I call God to witness that I did not alter one syllable of God's word against his meaning or whatever. And the little word at the beginning of verse 29, which you, when you read it there, it translates as all. It's the Greek word a, which is simply the letter eta. It's a single letter word.

Now, if you look at English translations, sadly, including Tyndale's own translation, it's missed out. It's as though there's a break. And, you know, you have we're justified by faith, not works of the law, and then is God the God of Jews only? But the little word or means that if justification were by works of Torah, then God would be primarily the God of the Jews. And so suddenly the whole thing turns. And so for me, part of the difficulty is a lot of people from conservative Christian backgrounds in America and Britain imagine that anyone who disagrees with the interpretation they were taught is a liberal who is denying some part of the Bible. And of course, there are many people who would answer to that description who want to say, oh, at this point,

Paul just had hiccups or whatever. And I've gone the other route. I've said, no, we have to pay more attention to every last syllable of what's going on. And when we do that, we find that Paul himself will challenge our traditions of interpretation. Yeah, no, that's good. Yeah. Yeah. In my conservative evangelical environment, I remember when I first heard your name. Yeah, it was like, oh, isn't that that liberal British scholar? I'm like, oh, man, well, I don't know if I should read him. So I had to kind of, you know, go to the coffee shop, put in your books in a brown paper bag so no one would see me. And then I was like, I don't know, he seems to be really into this Bible thing. I don't know if

we should call him a letter club. I mean, anecdotally, I once, several years ago, lectured in Sydney, Australia. And Sydney is a place where it's very conservative evangelical Anglicanism. And after I'd lectured at Moore College one morning and just about escaped with my life, a good friend who was in Sydney, he said, it's so funny because after you left, all the chat on social media was people saying, it's funny, N.T. Wright seems to know the Bible quite well. And I'm thinking, excuse me, read my lips. I've been soaking myself in this stuff day and night, quite literally, for the last 40 years. What do you expect?

All right. Well, let's go to Romans 8. And I'm happy for you. I want to hear two things, really. I'd love for you to kind of walk through it. One of the secondary questions I have is, I mean, you've been studying Romans for decades, written a commentary on it. I would love to know what kind of fresh, newer insights you have more recently come to with regard to this chapter. So, yeah, however you want to approach those two angles.

Right. One which has come very recently, and I'm ashamed of this because I should have seen it years ago, I mean decades ago, is at the end of Romans 7, but leading into it, where Paul talks about Romans 7.23, that I see another law at war in my members, taking me captive. Now the word Paul uses for taking me captive, eikmelotidzonta. If you look up that root, eikmelotidzo or whatever, or eikmelotos, in the Septuagint, the Greek Old Testament, again and again and again, that's a clear reference to exile. It's there in the Psalms, it's there in the Prophets, it regularly means exile. And when you realize that Romans 7, among many other things, is telling the story of Israel receiving Torah, but Torah saying, if you do this and this and this, the answer is exile.

You realize that Paul is tracking with the story of Adam and the story of Israel, the Old Testament story of Israel. And then Romans 8, 1 to 11 is saying, and here's God's answer to that problem. And now here's the thing, one of the two big things which I've been really excited about just in the last decade or so in reading the New Testament in general and not least Romans. The first is about the theme of the tabernacle and the temple, that in the tabernacle and the temple, God comes to dwell in the midst of his people, not just because he wants to hang out with them, but because the tabernacle and the temple are the signs of his people, not just because he wants to hang out with them, but because the tabernacle and the temple are the signs of new creation. The tabernacle is a small microcosm of

the new creation, so that the line from Genesis 3 to Exodus 40 is humans mess up, they get booted out of the garden, there are thorns and thistles, but God intends to make new creation, and he calls Israel to be the people in whose midst he comes to dwell in this tent, which is a little small model of new creation. Then when Solomon makes the temple, it too is designed and built as a sign of new creation. It's a forward-looking symbol towards new creation. That is a hugely important insight. So when in Romans 8, 1 to 11, Paul talks about the Messiah being in you, and if the spirit of him who raised Jesus from the dead dwells in you, we ought to say, hang on, this idea of somebody dwelling in something, that language again and again and again is Old Testament language for God coming into the tabernacle or the temple.

And the point about that is that after the exile, the temple gets rebuilt. That's the great promise, the end of Ezekiel, for instance, and Isaiah about the watchman lifting up their voices because in plain sight they see Yahweh returning to Zion and it's all going to be all right again. And then of course the New Testament translates that into the language about Jesus and the Spirit, that the coming of Jesus is emphatically the word became flesh and dwelt in our midst and we beheld his glory, John 1, 14. That is temple language, that's Exodus 40 language. And Pentecost in Acts 2 is just like Exodus 40 or Isaiah 6 or 1 Kings 8. This is the rushing mighty wind coming into the house and indwelling now people. Jesus and the church are themselves the new temple. And what is the new temple? The

sign and the means of new creation. So that you've got that in Romans 8, 1 to 11, lots more going on there as well, of course. This is how God is putting the whole thing right. And then Romans 8, 12 to 30 is, okay, if that's who you now are, you have a vocation. This is one of the key things that Romans 8, 12 to 30 isn't about salvation. That's kind of given. It's about vocation. What does it mean to be one of these God-bearing new temple humans. It means to share the sufferings of the Messiah, but you may also share his glory. And his glory is his sovereignty over the world, through which the world is being put right. And then, the end of the chapter 31 to 39,

this can then be celebrated. What shall we say if God is for us, who is against us? this can then be celebrated what should we say if god is for us who is against us and it's written obviously to a church facing great persecution paul whether he knew it or not uh the people he was writing to were about to face the neronian persecution where the christians were you know daubed with pitch and set alight to to lighten nero's garden parties and that sort of thing. So that key central passage, verses 12 to 30, is about the vocation which comes from being new temple people within that long narrative. And just if I can sum this up aphoristically, when I now lecture about justification, what I say is this, God is going to put the whole world right in the end. That's promised in the Old Testament again and again. In the present time, through the gospel and the spirit, God puts human beings right,

justification, so that they may be part of his putting right project for the world, rather than so that they may escape the world and go and be in heaven. That is not the name of the game. It's about the vocation of humans to be genuine, image-bearing, glorified, putting the world right humans. And from there, of course, all sorts of vocations. I had an email the other day from a lady I don't know, somewhere in Britain, she didn't tell me where, and she'd be reading some of my stuff, but she goes to a church where they teach that the only thing that matters is getting souls into heaven, and that anything else, feeding the hungry or caring about justice in the world, that's irrelevant. Leave that to

the politicians. And so she is saying, how do I explain to my church leaders that the Bible is actually about God putting the world right and putting us right to be part of that? So please, God, help her and help so many who are trying to do that. Like you, my friend. I know that you agree with that. Even going back to how the Jew-Gentile issue is so significant for Paul's understanding of justification by faith, I mean, that gives us a pretty profound and I would say very clear and provocative paradigm for ethnic reconciliation in the church today. That you can't divorce this thing called the gospel from ethnic tensions and ethnic reconciliation that needs to be embodied first in the church before we can expect the world to kind of do it, you know. This is why the tragedy of the last two or three hundred years is so appalling. I was thinking the other day, think of apartheid in South Africa. You know, when I was young, South Africa was completely divided black and white,

and that was being justified by Christians in one particular branch of the reformed tradition who had forgotten what some of the reformed tradition was about all along. But you see, I track this back, sadly, to the Reformation, because at the Reformation, they were all insisting on having the Bible and the liturgy in their own languages. And so, in London, by the end of the 16th century, you have a French church and a Portuguese church and a Polish church and this and that and the other. And then they all got exported to the New World, guess what? And the different ethnic groups all made their own churches and developed theologically within their own ways. And then when you get on top of that,

all the terrible horror of the slave trade, etc, etc, etc, which we know all about how that went. So you then get churches variously in terms of skin pigmentation, black churches and white churches. And the idea that you and I are white, I mean, that itself is ridiculous. I'll show you what white is. That's white. Now, if I looked like that, you'd say, hey, Tom, you need to go see the doctor. And I'm not white. I'm variously pink and brown and so on. The only reason we called ourselves white was to differentiate ourselves from blacks, but to do so with a word which said, we are the real article. We like the white chess pieces instead of the black chess pieces. We are the true lot and they are kind of a mutation or something. And we taught ourselves in the 18th and 19th century, these developmental theories.

Social Darwinism was alive and well long before Charles Darwin. And he just gave it an extra pseudoscientific validation to enable people to say, you know, they're actually different. We shouldn't be mixing with them. We certainly shouldn't be intermarrying. We shouldn't do this, that, the other. them. We certainly shouldn't be intermarrying. We shouldn't do this, that, the other. Instead of which, the book of Revelation, and especially the letter to the Romans, says one people, one family, Jew, Gentile, slave, free from every nation and kidrib and tribe and tongue, worshipping together. That is the sign to the world that Jesus is Lord. And, you know, I hope and pray that in our

generation, that message is coming through because it is central to the New Testament. I have to preach on Ephesians in 10 days time for a big service for my brother-in-law, bless him, is celebrating the 50th anniversary of his ordination, asked me to come and preach for the special service. And I'm going to take Ephesians 4, 1 to 16. There is one body and take Ephesians 4, 1-16. There is one body and one spirit, one hope, one Lord, one faith, one baptism, and all ministries are given to further that unity. And that's what we ought to be about. So I could expand this all over again.

Well, even that's interesting that Ephesians 4, 1 to 6 flows right from Ephesians 3, which flows right out of Ephesians 2, which is all about ethnic reconciliation. It's all linked together so that the profound unity in Ephesians 4, Paul has not left behind Jew, Gentile. Exactly. And I'm hoping to make exactly that point in the sermon that Ephesians 1, verse 10, God's plan is to join all things in heaven and earth together. What if the reformers had taken Ephesians rather than Romans and Galatians as their set text, the entire history of the Western world might've been different because with Romans and Galatians, they were able to read Romans and Galatians in the light of the medieval question of how does my soul get to heaven? Whereas had they been reading Ephesians properly, they would have said,

hang on, we're not supposed to be going to heaven. We're supposed to be the people in whom heaven and earth are joined. And then the joining of Jew and Greek, Ephesians chapter two, is the outworking of that. And then in chapter three, the church is to be the sign to the principalities and powers of the polychrome wisdom of God, in order that you may be filled with all the fullness of God. It's back to that Isaiah line about the whole earth being full of the knowledge of the glory of the Lord as the waters cover the sea. The church is filled with that in the present to be the sign to the world. I just find that so powerful. And I grieve that so many churches, supposedly Bible churches, simply ignore that. Well, I want to go back to, and we'll get back to Romans in just one second, but

I had a friend of mine, actually it's Tim Gamas again, Tim, I got to make sure he listens to this episode. He's going to keep coming up, but you know, he did his PhD on Ephesians and, and he, he, he told me this is probably 20 years ago, maybe. And he's like, you know, I know we always think Romans captures kind of the heart of Paul and, and, and, you know, it's a, it's an amazing letter, but Ephesians is the only letter of Paul, or it's the one letter of Paul that has the least contextual kind of like orientation. It is the, if of Paul, or it's the one letter of Paul that has the least contextual kind of like orientation. If there is Paul sitting back in his chair, reflecting on just theology apart from a local church context, it is Ephesians. It's designed to be a circular letter.

There's some contextual stuff going on, but it is the most kind of just Paul sitting back and painting this grand picture. Whereas even Romans has some real contextual stuff that's driving the letter. If we're going to take, I mean, could there be a case to be made that if we're going to have one letter that captures kind of Paul's grand sweep of salvation, of history, of the world, it would be Ephesians? That's what F.F. Bruce said in his book on Paul a generation ago. He described it as the quintessence of Paulinism, which I think was a phrase that he got from somebody back in the 30s or somewhere. And actually, when I was being interviewed for my first real job, one of the questions was, to what extent is Romans the real systematic theology? And I said, rationally, I said,

if anything, that's Ephesians. And I remember saying that in an interview in 1975. And the chap who was interviewing me said, there would be some gaps, wouldn't there? And I quickly thought, yeah, okay. He says nothing about the Eucharist, for instance. He says quite a bit about baptism, but there's nothing about the Eucharist. And no doubt there's plenty of other things that aren't touched. In other words, it's not a systematics

in the sense of covering all possible topics, but it is liturgical. Ephesians 1 to 3 is one great shout of praise with teaching woven in. But yes, and I think what you said before is exactly right. It's a circular. I think Paul is in prison in Ephesus and is writing this so that it can go around to all the different churches. I suspect that it is the letter to Laodicea, to which he refers in Colossians. as Ben Witherington points out, is more what we now call Asiatic. It's the florid style of Western Turkey in those days, Ephesians and Colossians both, which explains a lot over against Romans and Galatians. That's a whole other question. But so yes, I'm basically agreeing. Ephesians actually pulls it together in quite a coherent, systematic way. And it's Ephesians that then says, okay, the two key things are unity and holiness. And if you're struggling after both unity and holiness, guess what?

You'll end up in spiritual warfare. And that's basically Ephesians 4, 5, and 6 with the holiness, including not least the marital holiness of chapter 5. with the holiness, including not least the marital holiness of chapter 5. Well, I think our view of the atonement would include a much greater appreciation for what we now call Christus Victor models, where it's conquering the powers of the dark, rather than just justification by faith. I think it would balance out our view of the atonement a bit more. To be sure. And as I've argued in my book, The Day the Revolution Began, it isn't Christus victor or substitutionary atonement. It's victory through substitution, and you need both to go together. Otherwise, they don't work or don't work the way they should. Well, we left off in Romans 8, I believe, 17. For the remaining few minutes we have,

do you want to pick it up in verse 18 and take us to a deep dive there? Do you want to pick it up in verse 18 and take us to a deep dive there? For me, this was an extraordinary turning around because I had a student, Haley Goranson-Jacob, who's now teaching in Whitworth College up in the far northwest of the States. And she pointed out the way in which Psalm 8 has influenced what Paul is doing here, as well as the other Psalms, Psalm 44, not least. But that the vocation to be the people who are carrying forward God's purpose for the world means that when we look at creation, we are seeing creation as a whole longing for God's redeemed humans to be raised from the dead so that creation can then be put back properly the way it should be. It's not going back to Eden, it's going on towards the new creation that Eden was supposed to be the pilot project for. But at the heart of that, and you know, this still gives

me goosebumps after all these years, the little bit about prayer in verses 26 and 27, if you look at the average commentary on Romans, that's treated as a separate paragraph, almost as an aside, as though in the middle of this rather difficult and complex passage, Paul just drops in this little bit about, by the way, the Spirit helps us because when we don't know what to pray for, the Spirit enables us to pray or something. But that misses the point entirely. Paul is building this up and building this up, that creation is groaning in travel, and the groaning is like the children of Israel groaning in Egypt, waiting, and God listens and hears and comes and acts. And so now

the Spirit is groaning, and where are we, the church? Are we sitting on the sidelines saying, sorry, creation is groaning. Are we sitting on the sidelines saying, sorry, creation is groaning. Are we sitting on the sidelines saying, pity that creation can't get its act together because, of course, we're all right because we're going to heaven. So that's OK. No, not at all. The church is groaning at the heart of the groaning of creation. And I've often preached about this and said, you know, the world is in a mess at the moment

on issues of sex and gender. The church is in a mess on issues of sex and gender. The church is in a mess on issues of sex and gender. That may be sad, but it's not surprising because we are called to be the people who stand at the place where the world is in pain. And I know that you and your work, you've done more than most on that. But then where is God in the middle of this? And the answer is God by the Spirit comes to dwell at the place where the world is in pain by dwelling in the hearts of his faithful people so that when they are most aware of the pain and horror of the world and when there's nothing to say except, my God, why did you abandon me? Then at that very

point, the Spirit is groaning within us with stenagmos eleleitos, with groanings that cannot even come into speech. And when you realize what Paul is saying, he's saying that there are some situations which are so bad that even the third person of the Trinity has no words to say what's really going on. That is enormously powerful. That's why I see this as the pneumatological equivalent of the cry of dereliction from the cross in Matthew 27 and Mark 15, when Jesus cries out, my God, why did you abandon me? And the idea is that the church, this is part of the present glorification of the church, is that the church, this is part of the present glorification of the church, is that the church is privileged to be the people who lament and bear the lament of the Spirit

within their lament in order to be the people of lament at the places where the world is groaning in travel right now. And there's a lot of people out there, whether it's in Syria or Ukraine or now. And there's a lot of people out there, whether it's in Syria or Ukraine or Yemen or wherever, and many, many places of our own world. I always say to the students, when you look down from the pulpit, every face that you see is hiding some secret sorrow and lament with them and teach them how to lament. And so it's not just the really obvious places. It's everywhere in all of us. But in the middle of that, that is our vocation. And so the idea that from verse 12, we are debtors to God. God has done all this for us.

He's given us this promise of resurrection so that we can now be the people who are formed according to the pattern of the sun. That's verse 29, the image of the Son, that he might be the firstborn among a large family. Jesus came to the place where the world is in pain to take that pain upon himself. We, in the Spirit, are called to be at the place where the world is in pain, so that in our intercession and lament, especially when we run out of words because the situation is so bad, then and there, God will be groaning and knowing what's going on. And so that Trinitarian prayer, there are theologians today who say, well, the New Testament sort of points vaguely at the

doctrine of the Trinity, but thank goodness by the time of the fourth and fifth century, they'd really got it together and then they'd sorted it all out. So that's where we need to be. And I say, absolutely not. The doctrine of the Trinity is emphatically, dramatically in Romans 8 and John's Gospel and all over the place. And all that the father is they find some neat formulae and some slogans to put it into. But the real heart of the matter is right here. Well, these few paragraphs, I mean, 26 through 28, 29, it really does. I mean, and you've written on this, I don't know what you haven't written on, but on the problem of evil. I just had this conversation with somebody about the problem

of evil, and I'm not totally satisfied with all the solutions to that, but at least the one thing that, not one, but one of many things that the Christian worldview contributes is it talks about a God that's participating in the suffering that we are bemoaning. And this is, I don't know any other kind of religious or non-religious perspective or quote-unquote attempted solution of the problem of evil that has something like this at the end of Romans. That's exactly right. And here's the thing. When I did the Gifford Lectures in Aberdeen, which is, I guess, five years ago now, my goodness, I don't know if you know that book, History and Eschatology, which that was such an exciting book to write. But David Ferguson,

who was then professor in Edinburgh and is now professor in Cambridge, made the point to me in one of the discussion groups when he said, you know, when they were looking at the problem of evil in the 17th and 18th and 19th century, they tended to come at it as deists. In other words, there is evil, there is God up there, he's supposed to be in charge, so there's a problem, isn't there? And he said, that's because they were factoring Jesus out of the equation and the Spirit out of the equation, as though you could first solve the problem of God and the world. And then once you'd said, okay, so we can believe in God after all, then you can say, well, guess what? Now you need to find out about Jesus. And I would say, in fact, it can't be done. The New Testament is very clear. You want to know about God, look at Jesus and invoke the Spirit.

So I'm totally with you. And that leads, you see, to the revisionist interpretation of 828, because we all grew up, it was one of the verses we learned, school children, if we were learning verses, all things work together for good for those who love God or to those who love God. And that's the wrong translation. It's because, particularly in the Reformation traditions, people were frightened of the word synergi because it sounded like synergism. It sounded as though we contribute to our salvation.

But it isn't contributing to our salvation. It's contributing to our vocation. contributing to our salvation. It's contributing to our vocation. We know that to those who love God, which is a reference back to that spirit groaning within us in the inarticulate prayer, that's the loving God bit, is being caught up in the loving Trinitarian purposes. We know that through those who love God, God works all things together for good. So it isn't that we sit back like sort of stoics and say, well, it'll all pan out. God's at work somewhere. There's the pastoral theologian Kate Bowler in Duke Divinity School who has this thing about everything happens for a reason. And she says, don't give me that. That's completely wrong, you know, that's not the Christian point of view, that all things, that God works all things through those who love

him. In other words, the agency of Christian prayer, not least the spirit-led, wordless lament of which Paul is speaking, is part of the means by which God is working his purpose out. That's what it means, Romans 5.17, to be ruling, to be royal, to be the royal priesthood. At the present time, that's the vocation we have. So, real quick, the ones who, and we might need to get, you know, I'm just looking at the Greek here, so the date of plural, the ones who love God, it's by means of the ones who love God, they are

agents in God working all things together for good. That's the point there. I think I spell this out in the book, but yes, Paul uses the word a couple of other times when he's talking about his fellow workers, and one of the obvious ones is the beginning of 2 Corinthians 6, where he says, therefore,

working together with him, we beseech you not to receive the grace of God in vain. And if you look at that and the other passages, it's clear that Paul sees the human vocation, and the other passages, it's clear that Paul sees the human vocation, the apostolic vocation, as being to be working with God, and the verb takes the dative. But of course, like so often in Paul, it's crunched together. That's why I say the Toi Sacripos in Tontheon, the ones who love God, is in the dative. It refers back to the people in whose hearts the Spirit is working. creative it refers back to the people in whose hearts the spirit is working and uh it's that's god is i think god is the subject of the verb sunagi god works all things for good through he work you work through or with the sun takes uh takes the toy sagapose in there with with those who love god let's say i've've spelled this out in the book. Yeah, yeah.

And if somebody wants to chase it up, it's all there. I kind of wish Paul would have said dia with a genitive, right? I mean, you know Greek a thousand times better now. Well, yeah. There may be a reason for that as well. Just see if I've got, say, page 159, where Paul uses this verb elsewhere. It means two agencies collaborating with one another on a shared task. And that the person or people with whom the subject is collaborating are regularly placed in the dative.

So here, the Greek dative, tois agapostantontheon, tells us who it is that God is co-working with. God is collaborating with those who love him. God is the subject with those who love him, which is a reference back to the previous couple of verses, etc. And so much more, so much more. And not least, one of the things, one of the last bits of the jigsaw that fell into place when I was doing the lectures on which this book was based was looking at 830, which, of course, has been a central text for a Calvinistic doctrine of predestination. But if you look at the Old Testament, and it's very interesting that in my cross-references in the Nestle-Allen Greek New Testament, Isaiah 40 to 55 does not feature by those verses. But as I say in the book, in Isaiah 45, you've got in the Lord, all the offspring of Israel will triumph and glory. They will all be dikaios and have doxa. And Paul is tracking very closely with the servant theme,

where the servant is the one through whom God accomplishes his purpose. So to say it again, verses 12 to 30 is not about salvation, which is a given throughout the larger picture. It is about vocation, vocation to be the spirit-indwelt messianic people for the sake of a world in pain. Well, Tom, we're just butting up against an hour here. And I mean, you've given us about three hours with the content. Those who are prone to listen to a podcast at double speed will hopefully not do that with this one. And I'm sure many will go back and re-listen to this. Any final words of, I guess, somebody, I'm sure they'll be excited to go back and read Romans 8. In 30 seconds, what would you want a Christian to walk away with after reading Romans 8 in a nutshell?

Well, I would want them to walk away with the general point that here am I, I'm in my mid-70s, I am still stumbling across things which I wish somebody had told me 50 years ago, and there will be more. There will be lots more. And I go on finding new things, which, as you said before, still exciting me. And why wouldn't you be excited about this stuff? So that's the general point. Just stick at it. Say your prayers, read the text, study it for all it's worth. Don't take no for an answer when somebody says, oh, we know what that means already. There is always going to be more. But then more specifically for me, this theme of vocation is so powerful. The vocation to be in ourselves individually, which is a huge moral challenge, but also in ourselves as a church,

the small working models of new creation. And that's something you could kind of pin up on the mirror that you look into every morning when you get up. That's what we are called to be. What's that going to look like on the street? Because unless the people out there see these small working models, they won't believe that there could be such a thing as new creation. And particularly, a word to the wise, you won't get any of this if you say, as some are doing today, the only way to read the Bible is by studying Plato. That's a total red herring. The idea of souls escaping upstairs to see God is the antithesis of what Paul is saying here. And it is the antithesis of the whole biblical narrative.

The book is Into the Heart of Romans, a deep dive into Paul's greatest letter. It has, I mean, the book is a beautiful combination of very in-depth exegesis in biblical theology, but it's highly, highly readable. So whether you're a scholar or a student or a homeschool mom, whatever, I mean, if you're a Christian and love Romans, you're going to absolutely love this book. So thanks so much, Tom, for coming back on Theology in a Row. Hey, Preston, it's really good to talk to you as always. God bless you and all the work you're doing. Thank you very much. This show is part of the Converge Podcast Network.