Theology in the Raw - S9 Ep949: The Gospel, New Creation, Re-reading Paul, Heaven, and American Christianity: Dr. N.T. Wright

Episode Date: February 24, 2022

Tom Wright is 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. Prior to serving at Oxford, Tom 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’s the author of over 10 million books, or something like that.  In the episode, we talk about many things related to New Testament theology including the meaning of the term “gospel,” understanding Paul’s letters in their historical and biblical context, the importance of resurrection (over the significance of “going to heaven when you die”), the meaning of “hell,” and other personal things about his spiritual and theological journey. We also talk about the polarization in American Christianity and other contemporary issues. Theology in the Raw Conference - Exiles in Babylon  At the Theology in the Raw conference, we will be challenged to think like exiles about race, sexuality, gender, critical race theory, hell, transgender identities, climate change, creation care, American politics, and what it means to love your democratic or republican neighbor as yourself. Different views will be presented. No question is off limits. No political party will be praised. Everyone will be challenged to think. And Jesus will be upheld as supreme. Register here Support Preston Support Preston by going to patreon.com Venmo: @Preston-Sprinkle-1 Connect with Preston Twitter | @PrestonSprinkle Instagram | @preston.sprinkle Youtube | Preston Sprinkle Check out Dr. Sprinkle’s website prestonsprinkle.com Stay Up to Date with the Podcast Twitter | @RawTheology Instagram | @TheologyintheRaw If you enjoy the podcast, be sure to leave a review.

All right, friends, I am so excited about this episode. And I'm doing something that I normally don't do. I'm pre-recording this intro before I actually call NT, right? Which, you know, usually I talk to the person first and then I pre-record. Then I pre-record an intro that kind of, you know, I'm already aware of what we talked about. So I can explain that a little bit. But here, I'm doing it ahead of time. So I have no clue what we're going to talk about. I'm just so giddy and nervous right now. I've been trying to get Tom. He told me to call him Tom. So I'm going to call him Tom. I tried to get Tom on the podcast for many years. Been a huge, huge theological hero of mine going all the way back, I would say almost just about 20 years ago when I first came across NT Wright.

I'll tell the story when Tom comes on the show here in a second. But yeah, just been a huge, huge voice in my life, influence, a model of what it means to be a biblical scholar. And I'm super nervous right now. What are we going to talk about? Oh my gosh. I actually comb my hair too. Usually I just wear a hat and I put on a nice shirt

because I feel like, I don't know, I don't want to look too stupid around Tom or N.T. or Dr. Wright or whatever. So if you don't know who NT Wright is, is there anybody out there that doesn't know? So he's the author of over 70 books. He is an Anglican bishop, was the Bishop of Durham from 2003 to 2010. He is currently a research professor of, or no, he was former research professor of New Testament early Christianity at University of St. Andrews. He's taught at Oxford. He's taught in Canada. He, yeah, the dude just, he's given interviews on all kinds of news channels and on and on it goes. More than that, I had one opportunity to have lunch with him a few years ago. And I might have been more impressed with

how down to earth he is. I mean, I was already super impressed with what a scholar he was. But sometimes you meet scholars and you're like, eh. Personality-wise, like, yeah, you've been in the ivory tower a little too long. If you met me in person, you'd be like, eh. I like the podcast a little better. This guy's kind of a joke. But when I hung out with him for an hour over lunch, he was the most down to earth dude I have hung out in a long time. He's just such a genuine Christian. So anyway, I'm going to leave it at that. If you haven't signed up for the Theology in Raw conference, I got to squeeze that in before I talk to Tom. Theology in Raw conference coming up here in just a few weeks, March 31st to April 2nd. Tom will not be there.

Maybe I'll invite him next year. That'd be awesome. Actually, that's a great idea. So yeah, all the info is in the show notes. Press the sprinkle.com to check out Theology in Raw Conference. Attend live or via your computer. Okay, let's get to know the one and only. Here we go, folks.

Oh my gosh. The one and only Tom Wright. Well, thanks so much for coming on the podcast. I know this has been a few years waiting. You've been a busy man for the last probably 40 plus years. Yes, life has not been dull. I want to start. I don't think I've told you this story. But years ago, you know Tim Gombis, the name Tim Gombis. Yes, not as well, but I do. So we went to the same seminary. It's a very, very conservative seminary in California. And I was halfway through seminary and really was getting this itch to want to study Paul, do a PhD.

And he's like, well, have you read anything by N.T. Wright? And I said, N.T. who? You know, we're reading people. We were reading different authors at the seminary I was attending. So he says, well, pick up this Paul, St. Paul, what St. Paul really said and go read it. It's a short book, you know, and, and let me know what you think. So I stole away one Saturday morning at a coffee shop, spent four or five hours reading this book. And my, I don't want to be overly dramatic, but my, my and I'm sure you get this a lot, so I'll keep this short. But my life was, my scholarly journey was turned upside down.

I wanted to be a scholar because I love the study of the Bible. But after reading this book, I was just in awe of how exciting and fresh scholarship was. I mean, here I was, I had done four years of Bible college. I was two years in the seminary. And you were talking about things like the gospel and God and the Bible in ways that I'm like, how come I have never heard this? And yet it makes so much sense, even having a holistic understanding of the gospel, that's just the gospel. Like I should have known this, you know? And I was just like, I want to be a New Testament scholar from that day on. And so my journey in life is largely due to you and that book and many others that I've read since then.

So thank you. Oh, my. Oh, my. Well, thank you. I mean, it's always both worrying sort of a sense of responsibility when people say this kind of thing, but also very exciting. You know, I found myself thinking outside the box that I'd grown up with, simply because I wanted to understand Paul. And I had this text in front of me. And what I was reading in the commentaries didn't quite fit. It fitted some bits, but other bits, they had to kind of slide around. And I was just never satisfied with that. I thought that we need to work away at that. Can you take us back to the earliest days when you can remember when that was starting to happen?

Was this as like a teenager? Was it in your early 20s and PhD? I think it was early 20s. Yeah, I mean, I was a straight down the line conservative evangelical Anglican through my teens and late teens, early 20s. my teens and late teens, early twenties. And it was when I was a student that we had huge debates about Romans. But it was then all very much to do with things like we were reading Martin Lloyd Jones on Romans six and seven and eight. We were reading Watchman Nee, who was quite a classic in those days. And we were arguing about whether Romans 7 describes the normal Christian life, or whether you have to leave Romans 7 behind and get into Romans 8, which is the real thing, and whether you slide back to the law or whatever it is. And those were the sort of questions that we were wrestling with, which I would now say are the wrong questions. I would say those are

projections of modern readings of Paul back onto the text. And not surprisingly, they don't quite fit. And then particularly Romans 9 to 11, we assumed that this was about predestination and how did predestination work. And we had sort of Calvinist and Arminian and different views. And in fact, one of my professors said

that Romans 9 gives you the Calvinist view, Romans 10 gives you the Arminian view, and Romans 11 gives you the universal view. And Paul tries them all and says, kind of, you know, go figure, which looking back now is a kind of extraordinary jeu d'esprit. But I just wasn't satisfied with that. And when I was accepted into the doctoral program here in Oxford, I decided what I really wanted to do was to grapple with the question of the role of Romans 9 to 11 within the letter as a whole. When I look back, it's extraordinary. Nobody really was asking that question much in the early 1970s.

Now it's one of the issues and many, many opinions about it. But for me, there were two things which happened quite early on in my study. One was that I realized that the questions which dominate Romans 9 are the same questions that Paul has raised at the beginning of Romans 3. And I realized that the commentators that had bracketed out Romans 9 to 11 had also bracketed out Romans 3, 1 to 9, C.H. Dodd being the classic English example, actually Welsh example, but he taught in England. And that was cognate with the fact that he hadn't really dealt with the back end of Romans 2. So I knew that there was stuff going on in Romans 2, which precipitated those questions at the beginning of Romans 3, and that it wasn't enough simply to say,

oh, it's all saying all have sin. There's something more going on, which was, of course, the place of Israel. And then Paul parks those questions. And those are the questions he comes back to in Romans 9. And so this was like, oh, my goodness. And I remember my supervisor, George Caird, saying, you know, there's something going on here. But you now need to fill in these gaps and look at this and check that out, et cetera. So he was sort of cautiously encouraging that this looks fruitful. The other thing that happened was that I started getting fascinated by the way in which scholars refuse to take Romans 1, 3, and 4 seriously, which when you just read

the letter straight, it looks as though this is Paul's description of his gospel. But of course, most modern commentators, certainly in the Lutheran tradition, certainly in the evangelical tradition, did not want Paul to be talking about a Davidic Messiah as a key part of the gospel. It smelt too political. Rather, the gospel was supposed to be justification by faith, and that was supposed to be what Romans 1, 16, and 17 was about. But I couldn't get around the fact that he says, I'm not ashamed of the gospel because in it, the righteousness of God is revealed. So the revelation of the righteousness of God was not the gospel. It was what is revealed when you preach

the gospel, which is Jesus descended from the seed of David, according to the flesh designated son of God in power, according to the spirit of holiness, Jesus Christ our Lord, Lord of the whole world. So I started to think, oh my goodness, something is going on here which my tradition has not prepared me for. And really everything I've done since follows from that. As I say this, I have a mental picture of myself sitting in a study about half a mile south of here in the early 1970s, maybe 75, 6, something like that, wrestling with people like Martin Hengel and Charlie Mole, and particularly diving deep, as deep as I could, into the world of Second Temple Judaism to see what it might mean to talk about a messianic gospel, and what it then might mean to say that when you get

this messianic gospel, God's righteousness is revealed. And I started reading, guess what, Isaiah and the Psalms and rather obvious things like that and discovered that God's righteousness is not this 16th century or medieval thing of equality which he ascribes to us or whatever. It's about God's covenant faithfulness to creation and to Israel. And that, of course, most Protestants didn't want to hear about God's faithfulness to creation or his faithfulness to Israel. Those were off limits. The first would lead you in a sort of universalistic or natural theology direction. The second would lead you into the Jewish world, which was again off limits. And I began to realize

that the reformed tradition, for all its mistakes, was on the right track in talking about God's covenant with Abraham. And that's when the story then got underway, when I started to put the Davidic stuff in Romans 1 with the Abraham stuff in Romans 4. Simultaneously, Galatians was constantly saying, hang on, something different is going on here is it different has Paul's thought developed between Galatians and Romans how come he uses Leviticus differently something you've worked on of course um in in the in Galatians 3 and Romans 10 I think I finally solved that in my new Galatians commentary by the way these were the these were the things that were really, literally keeping me

awake at night and making me fill notebooks with scribbles and maybe this and what about that and so on. So you can tell I'm still fired up about this stuff. This is like mid-70s when this is all kind of happening and you're still very excited about it. It was 45 years ago, and this is the way life really began. So for somebody who might be just not too familiar, maybe vaguely familiar with some of the categories you're working within, how about we begin with this? I mean, if someone said, hey, Tom, what is the gospel in one minute or less? How would you, and not like in a witnessing opportunity where you need to know the person's story and what aspect, but if they just said, just give us the abstract, you know, like what is the gospel in a 30 seconds? The crucified Jesus has been raised from the dead,

launching God's new creation of which he is the Lord. That's pretty much it. The cross has dealt with all the things that clog our wheels to stop us being genuine human beings. The resurrection then launches God's new creation. Jesus is now exalted as Lord of the whole world, and he is recruiting human beings to become genuine human beings at last by accepting what he did on the cross as the defeat of the power of evil on their behalf and becoming part of his new creation by his spirit. Now, how long was that? About 50 seconds? I think you nailed it with time to spare for a footnote or two. You know, one of the things that I learned, I remember coming across this in your book, you wrote this in 1997, what St. Paul really

said, that, you know, the roots of the term gospel. I think in that book, you know, you go back to the second part of Isaiah, sometimes called Deutero-Isaiah, where in the Septuagint, I think it's used four times. It's the only time, I think, in the Septuagint where we have the actual term gospel in verb form used as to, and correct me, if anything comes out of my mouth, Tom, you have free reign to correct me, something about the announcement while they're in exile, the announcement of God's coming lordship over all the, I mean, it's everything you're saying, but the very term gospel is connected to that. Yeah, it's the word euvangelizomenos, it's Isaiah 40, verse 9. I've just checked it out here. Lift up your voice in strength. Euvangelizomenos, Zion, euvangelizomenos, Jerusalem,

the one who tells the good news to Zion, to Jerusalem. And then it comes back dramatically in 52, just before what we call the fourth servant song, which is about the servant who suffers on behalf of his people. So 52 verses 7 to 12, how lovely are upon the mountains are the feet of the one who evangelize the message of peace. And then it's repeated, who Evangelid Zomenos Agatha, who announces good things as good news. And there it's all about, and this came later in my study, but

it's very much there, about the return of Yahweh to Zion. And this is such a major theme, which gradually crept up on me through the 80s and 90s, and that I knew in my bones that something about Israel's exile really mattered in terms of the sweep of biblical theology as a whole. But that didn't click into place. I would read the beginning of Matthew and think, hang on, Matthew starts with Abraham, then we have the focus on David, then we have the focus on the end when we get to Jesus. Was that just a convenient halfway point, or is there something going on there? And again, I know exactly where I was and when it was. It was the late summer of 1986.

We had just moved back to Oxford from Canada, and I read Michael Nibb's commentary on the Qumran scrolls where he says that for many people, including the Qumran sect, the exile was not yet really over. And I thought, ah, that's it. And I scurried away and found all sorts of other evidence, which I've since written up at length in various places, as you will know. But then the good news of Isaiah 42 to 55 is that the exile is really over and Yahweh, having abandoned the temple, is finally coming back. And it's good news about God's coming back, which, again, this was not a category that I as a young Christian had ever thought of. What do you mean God's coming back? Where's he gone to? Well, it's a good question. It was a good question for Jews in the second temple period. We've rebuilt the temple, but look at Malachi, the priests are bored because God doesn't seem to care. Maybe he's not even really returned

yet. Zechariah says he'll come back, and Malachi says, watch out because the Lord whom you seek will suddenly come to his temple. So we're talking about the second temple period, waiting for God to come back, and this is the good news. So then you've got, bring that across to Paul, and he's saying, this is how that has happened. The arrival of Jesus, his death and resurrection, ascension, the gift of the Spirit, this is the good news that the prophets were talking about, which means you have to think differently about the whole story of the Bible, and that's been really exciting to me over the last, well, 20 years particularly. Because all of this, if you're familiar with these texts and the themes,

it just pulls everything together so that the Bible is not a bunch of disparate, you know, wonderful things about how to live a good life. But it is a very coherent story, a very exciting story with twists and turns and, you know, surprises and endings. And how do you translate this into modern times? Like what, what does, when you take this idea of, you know, this crucified Lord, crucified and risen Lord as the, you know, the, the, the King of Israel, the announcement and, and the, and the, now the Lordship of God over all things. When you translate that into the 21st century, what does this look like? Well, I was asking somebody this just yesterday. Here we are faced geopolitically with one of the

biggest crises since the Second World War. I mean, the two Gulf Wars were crises in a way, but actually the result was never in doubt. The Falklands war, Britain versus Argentina, was bizarre. The Vietnam war was horrible, but they were none of them crises of the sort that we might be facing now with China's saber rattling and now, of course, with Russia encircling Ukraine. And I was asking quite a senior churchman yesterday, when are church leaders going to give us not just a sort of, oh, we hope there'll be peace. Oh, let's pray that it'll be soon over or whatever, but actually a steer on what it means that Jesus is the Lord of the world right now. How does that translate into the message for our political leaders?

Because if it doesn't, then the New Testament is being falsified right there. And here's my thing, which I don't know if you've had a chance to read my Gifford lectures, but you'll have seen that increasingly I am critical of the whole Platonic Western tradition, because it is assumed that what really matters is getting our souls into heaven. And so, though it would be nice if earth was a bit more peaceful and well-organized, basically that's not the problem. The important thing is that we want to see God in heaven. We want the beatific vision. So let's be good Neoplatonists, and that's where we're going to get to. And people like Hans Bersma are writing about that at the moment. And Hans is one

of the nicest people you could meet, but I just think he's going in the totally, totally wrong direction on that. And here's the thing, which I'm supposed to be writing a sequel to Surprised by Hope right now, and it's called Surprised by the God of Hope. And I'm finding myself saying more and more, we have got the Bible story upside down. We have read the Bible as though we assume it's a story about how human beings get to go and live with god whereas the bible itself insists it's a story about how god comes to live with us and the revelation 21 the dwelling of god is with humans that's the qed and that that's what it's all about but But once you say that, it's not just a minor adjustment. It makes a huge difference to everything. Everything from spirituality and sacramental

theology through to justification and salvation and so on and so on. Anyway, you hear what I'm saying? Yeah. Here's what's shocking to me, Tom, and I'd love to get your thoughts on this. I mean, when I started entering into more of a scholarly, you know, reading scholarly works and works by you and others and seminary and then my PhD, what you just said about the gospel is not trying to get to heaven when you die and we're going to live forever in some eternal disembodied bliss. Like I was like, oh yeah, of course not. Yeah. That's, that's, that's a distortion. And I started to see a lot more popular level books come out about this. Yours, one of several. And I'm like, okay, about this. Yours, one of several. And I'm like, okay, so we're good. We're done. We fixed that.

But it's not fit. It's still very pervasive. It's still embedded in our language. Do you find that as well? And what does it take? Absolutely. I was at a funeral just three days ago of a pastor of a church where Maggie and I had worshiped about 30 years ago. And he was 89 and he's had a good life and he preached the gospel and he's had a good life and he preached the gospel and he died. And I went to support his widow, really, because she's a sweet lady and we knew her quite well. And the funeral made no mention of resurrection. It was all about, you know, being in bliss with Jesus now. And I want to say, yes, to depart and be with the Messiah, which is far better. That's what Paul says in Philippians 1.

But that's not the end of the story. And at a funeral, one ought to be saying something at least about the hope of resurrection. But when push comes to shove, the Western tradition simply sinks back into the going to heaven narrative. And when I say that's not what the Bible is about, people look at me as though I'm kind of weird, because we have read Matthew's gospel, which says, do this and that so that you may enter the kingdom of heaven. And people assume because we live in modern West, that that means going to heaven when you die. I assumed that for the first maybe 25 years of my life. So there's a lot of deconstruction to do.

And I wrote Surprised by Hope in 2007, I think it was. So that's 14 years ago now. And I often meet people who say, oh, I loved your book, Surprised by Hope, and then listen to them talk or preach. And they may have loved the book, but it hasn't actually changed the way they tell the story. That's just, well, you know, a good little test case is when I tell people, I say, you know, Jesus never said there's no marriage in heaven. Jesus never said that. And they're like, well, no, he did. In Matthew 22, I read it. He says, there's no marriage in heaven.

I says, Jesus, those words never came out of his mouth. He said, there's no marriage in the resurrection. It's just, are we just gloss? We interpret resurrection as heaven. It's so, it's crazy. The word, one of the basic things, I emailed somebody earlier today who's just read a big new book by a liberalist scholar on the resurrection and who's basically saying it's like Jesus living in the world of the angels. And I said, sorry, just look at the word resurrection.

Angels don't die. They don't need resurrection. Resurrection is about human beings who have thoroughly died, being thoroughly alive again. That's what the word meant in the first century. And if you'd had a sort of angelic vision, who you thought was Jesus, you wouldn't say he'd been raised from the dead, because angels don't get resurrected. In Jewish tradition, that doesn't happen. That's not what the thing's about. So I think we have allowed the word resurrection to float free of its true meaning and to be a sort of vague, wafty phrase for, guess what, going to heaven when you die. So I'm just riding my charger here against the entire Platonic tradition, which I think,

here's the thing, I think that really took over, well, Aristotle and Plato, that's a long and difficult story, but through from Augustine, very Platonic, through Aquinas, very Aristotelian, but the two are traveling together through the Middle Ages. And what the reformers do in the 16th century is they change the mechanism, but it's a mechanism for arriving at the same end. And as Karl Barth rightly said, the reformers never sorted out their eschatology. They never figured out how resurrection, new creation actually works. I'm not sure Karl Barth completely did either, but that's another story. And so that's unfinished business. But for me,

when you finish that business by allowing the New Testament to tell you its own proper story, which when you see it is the intended completion of the entire biblical story, the Hebrew Bible flows straight through when you read it like this, then you see, oh my goodness, all our theological categories, they're all true, but they mean what they mean within the new heavens and the new earth. In fact, I've got a book which, no, it's not sitting here because I just gave it to my granddaughter, called On Earth as in Heaven, which is a collection of more or less a page-long extracts from my various works. My younger son, who is a theologian in training, went through my popular books and culled extracts, and it's coming out next month in time for Easter because it's a

year's book of readings from Easter to Easter. So I'm shamelessly doing some advertising here. On Earth as in Heaven to be published by Harper within the next month or so. Advertise whatever. I'm sure there's going to be a lot of books that people are going to have to buy after this episode. Not to shift gears too much, but I would love to have you speak just briefly into your heart both for the Academy and the church. And I remember hearing you tell a story that early on in your study, somebody kind of told you, well, Tom, which direction do you want to go? You can't do both. And you said, no, I want to do both. Can you just share your heart a little bit for both the academy and the church? Sure, sure. When I was an undergraduate here in Oxford,

and I was reading philosophy and ancient history, the two subjects which go together here in Oxford, and I was loving that. And I knew that I was going to be ordained. I knew that I wanted to study theology, and I was getting excited by some of the questions. But I knew that I was going to be ordained. I knew that I wanted to study theology. And I was getting excited by some of the questions. But, of course, I didn't really have much idea of what that would involve. But I wanted to do it. And I heard a talk by the late, great John Wenham. Some people will know him as the author of a Greek grammar that all that many of us were actually I did classical Greek at school. But people who didn't use his grammar anyway. John was lovely, a devout man and a good theologian. And he gave a talk. And on the side, he said, do you know, those of us who really believe in the

Lord and believe in the Bible, we've been playing catch up. The liberal scholars have been doing all their hard work and coming up with some bizarre conclusions. And we've been having to push back at them. He said, what we need is to do it the other way. We need people who love the Lord and love the scripture to get out there on the front foot and be leading the way and exploring things which have not yet been explored. And we need the liberals to be the ones playing catch up. And I remember thinking, yeah, that's a great vision. That's what I would like to do. And it was one of those electric shock moments when I was maybe 21, something like that, where I thought, ah, if I get the chance to do that. Then I went to seminary here in Oxford and my Old Testament tutor, Peter Southwell, who was also my in-college tutor, supposed to be responsible for my studies, was discussing with

me, well, you want to be ordained, that's why you've come here to train, but you're now telling me you also want to maybe be a teaching theologian, and you will find it's very difficult to do those two. In fact, it's probably incompatible. And I was very young. I mean, I was only just starting in seminary, and I remember keeping my lip zipped. I didn't say, sorry, I think you're wrong. But I thought, sorry, I think you're wrong. And I thought, no, I think I just have to do those two. Now, if my wife was listening to this conversation, which happily she isn't, she would say, yeah, and the rest of us have had to put up with the fact that you've been trying to do the two of them all this time. And we've been bouncing around the world and from job to job and place to place. However, two years ago, I found myself at a lunch here in Oxford where one

of the other guests was Peter Southwell, the tutor who'd said that to me. And I said, Peter, do you remember that 50 or so years ago, he didn't remember. I just, okay, we'll let it drop. didn't remember but i just okay we'll let it drop i always told myself in probably around the same time i want to say well maybe yeah maybe 20 years old when i just absolutely fell in love with studying the bible couldn't stop and i fell in love with reading scholarly articles like articles that nobody else is reading i was like i was enjoying this i was like man if i can do that someday that would be amazing to read an article that nobody reads. That's what I want to do.

But I also love the church and I would get annoyed when sermons weren't precise or they'd say, even if they got like the date of Nehemiah wrong by two years, I'd be like,

hey, you got that wrong. You're a teacher. You're standing in the gap. You should have done your homework. Yeah. And I'm like, man, why can't evangelicals, and it was another professor who said evangelicals kind of aren't known for doing good scholarship. All the liberals are doing good scholarship. I said, that's a problem. Like, why shouldn't pastors be doing the best scholarship? So, yeah, I just. first married, where one of the clergy would regularly preach against theologians. And of

course, there were liberal theologians around Oxford. There were also some very good Orthodox ones. But so whenever the scribes and the Pharisees and the Sadducees and people came up in the reading, this was applied to the theological establishment. And that drove me nuts. And I remember saying once myself, when I got to preach in the same pulpit, the problem is not theology versus no theology, but bad theology versus good theology. And I've often said to people that when I became Dean of Litchfield, and so it was a big pastoral job and running a cathedral, et cetera. And somebody said, why are you as a theologian coming to do this? Part of the answer was, I'm kind of bumping my head on the ceiling where I am, and this looks like a good opportunity to broaden my horizons.

But what I actually said was that theology is like the scaffolding around the cathedral tower. The cathedral was actually having some repairs done on the north tower, and so there was the scaffolding. And I said, sometimes the church gets into trouble because it's forgetting some of its basic theology or getting it twisted, and then bad things are going to happen. And so the theology, you may not, when all things are going well, you may not have the need to go and do all that detailed grubbing around with the theology. But there are times when the church needs to pay attention. And that's like thebing around with the theology, but there are times when the church needs to pay attention, and that's like the scaffolding around the building, which enables it to get repaired,

cleaned, sorted up, sorted out, and be in shape for its mission. And it must serve the mission of the church, or it becomes self-serving and becomes a kind of a selfish game. Why, again, the last chapter of my Gifford Lectures, History and Eschatology, it's all about this is driving forward towards the mission of the church, which is the anticipation in the present of the ultimate new creation. And I see that much more clearly now than I did even 30 years ago. Wow. That's the one big difference that I noticed, you know, being American, studying in the UK for three or four years, and then coming back to America. Just the different way, generally speaking, of course, there's exceptions, but the different way, rich theology and then pulpit kind of ministry. In the UK, it was just, I feel like half the pastors I knew had PhDs, or at least they were very thoughtful, even if they didn't have a formal degree, you know, they were

very thoughtful. They were reading really high-level stuff. And in America, it's more odd than normal to see that. I know. I know. And I think it's partly, well, there's several cultural things there, including the American separation of church and state, which is cognate with, it's not the same thing, but kind of in my mind goes with it, and I see it. But then it's the distinction as

well between divinity schools and departments of religion, and whether this is really a university subject or not, and da-da-da-da. And so, yeah, in America, people often said to me, it's so wonderful that you do this. And I think, well, I had great role models. My own teacher, George Caird, was a leader in the United Reformed Church in Britain. In fact, one year, he took a sabbatical from his professorship, and he was the moderator of the United Reformed Church, and went around preaching all around Britain to URC congregations and was very active ecumenically. And he was one of the observers at the Second Vatican Council and so on, very keen on church union. And this just seemed natural that he would be a New Testament scholar who was doing this. And one of my other mentors, sort of secondary

mentors, Charlie Mole, CFD Mole, great professor in Cambridge, was a devout churchman who would love to go and talk to groups of clergy and lead Bible studies with them and so on, and saw that as just the natural outflow. And here in Oxford, and this is my analogy for this, there are many colleges, including one right over the street from where I'm sitting called New College, new because it was only in the 14th century rather than the 13th century, you understand, that New College has a wonderful chapel with world-class music, a first-class choir, and a wonderful organ. And the guy who is conducting the choir is also a lecturer in music in the Faculty of Music. Now, what more natural thing? Would you rather be taught music by somebody who

was tone deaf or didn't care to listen to music, or by somebody who was about to go off and conduct a performance of Bach's Magnificat? I know which I prefer. Now, in the same way, would you rather be taught theology by somebody who was an agnostic and didn't really care too much about that subject matter, or somebody who was going to get up in the pulpit on Sunday and preach, or by somebody who had a prison ministry on the side, or by somebody who regularly went and prayed with children in the children's hospice, or whatever. I know which theologian would get my vote. I think some of it has to do too with consumerism and celebrity culture. It's everywhere, but it's more widespread in America. I remember being shocked when I was at Aberdeen, you know, my, my advisor, Simon Gathricole would walk like two miles to work rain or snow. I remember seeing Francis Watson on

his, on his bike and his helmet and the snow right into, you know, and like somebody of that height of that caliber, they would be taking limos to seminary here. And like there just wasn't, I don't know, like you go to a conference and you hang out at the pub with these high named people. Nobody thinks that highly of themselves, it seems like in the UK as much as America. That may well be the case. And certainly there is British understatedness. I mean, I think when I was young, some of the great and the good, people like Henry Chadwick, I was in awe of Henry Chadwick. I can remember several conversations that I, as a young man, had with him. And I'd be thinking,

oh my goodness, this is Henry Chadwick I'm talking to, but he was gracious and winsome and would spend time and little teases and jokes and so on. And, you know, he was an Olympian. He'd read the entire corpus of the Greek and Latin fathers, and he just knew all his stuff. And there's a sort of sense of there are not many of those around. But there was still a sense that we're all part of a community together. And I remember one time I invited him to preach for me when I was a college chaplain here. And he said, my boy, let me give you a piece of advice as a father to a son. And I thought, oh, good Lord, what's coming now? He had just retired from the chair in Cambridge.

He said, never retire. You have twice as much work and no secretary. And you see, I can remember those. I can remember those lines. And there was a kind of an easiness about that relationship. Here's another question I wanted to ask you, and it's kind of related to the previous one, but I would love to get your, how do I say it, just your honest thoughts. It could be critique and encouragement, challenge, whatever, of just American Christianity. I mean, you have loved getting the perspective of people who have been here. They spent time here.

They know lots of leaders here. And yet they do have a view from the outside. Because my inside perspective is we're a bit of a mess right now, especially. Any words of advice for Christians? A lot of Christian leaders have been struggling in the last few years, especially. How can we move forward to embody the kind of gospel that you articulated earlier? It's very difficult for this reason that in America, I find as a Brit, if I say things which some people construe as critical, this is not well received. It's like, you know, we got rid of you Brits in the 1770s and we don't want you coming over telling us what to do. Thank you very much. And I understand that. And it would be very easy for me to pontificate.

At the same time, I've been going to and fro to America for at least 40 years now until the pandemic. I was coming maybe four or five times a year. I've lived in America. I've worked in America. I've taught in America. five times a year. I've lived in America. I've worked in America. I've taught in America. So this is not just a kind of fly-by-night thing. I have observed the culture wars getting sharper and shriller over the last 20, 30 years particularly. And I grieve over that because I have friends right across the spectrum, and I believe in making and keeping friends across party lines wherever possible. It's not always possible, but I've done my best. I think I don't always get it right. And and so when I see people painting, as it seems to me, painting themselves into corners politically, I mean, the whole question about how we cope with the pandemic and do we wear masks and do we get vaccinated and so on.

pandemic and do we wear masks and do we get vaccinated and so on. The thought that that would be a question that people would bundle up along with other left-right issues and then bring a heavy Christian spin to bear on it. This seems to me and most people in Britain utterly bizarre. I mean, just totally bizarre. And it tells me that this isn't so much about American Christianity. It's about a deeply American ideology. And the left-right thing is these are two different ways of being American, which have become more shrill. And I've watched them divide families. I've watched them divide churches. And it seems to me that is tragic. And Christians, I think, have an obligation to try to be bridge builders. You know, the unity of, I've said this so often, the unity of the church, Paul is passionate about

that in every letter he writes. He expounds justification by faith in two letters, Romans and Galatians, with tiny little flickers in the two Corinthian letters. But every letter he writes is about unity, one where even Philemon, it's about the unity of master and slave. And the climax of Romans is Romans 15, 1 to 13, that you may with one heart and voice glorify God and the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. And Christians ought always to be finding out ways in which they can worship together with people who are not like them and figuring out, as in Romans 14, how to tell the difference between the differences that make a difference and the differences that don't make a difference. I've been saying that in church circles in Britain for a long time now, as you probably know, not least with the questions about

so-called gay rights, and you've written much more about that than me, of course. But on the one hand, you have people who want to make differences all the time. We are right about this and you're wrong. Therefore, no, keep away. And on the other hand, you have people who say, oh, let a thousand flowers bloom. It doesn't matter. We've just got to be tolerant and accept everybody. whatever is, is good, etc. And this is, this itself, structurally, it's so wrong, that there is a difference between things that really do make a difference and things that don't. The difference, if you like, between 1 Corinthians 5 and 6 on the one hand, and 1 Corinthians 8, 9, and 10 on the other. And Paul is insistent on church unity, but unity must not be at the cost of holiness

holiness and unity belong together and that's the real when I was a bishop I discovered you know we have a mandate to holiness and unity holiness is easy if you don't care about unity you just separate and unity is easy if you don't care about holiness it's just all embrace everybody and that'll be all right the trick is to get both together. It was tough for Paul and it's tough for us. But I see those imperatives as at the heart of what we in Britain need to do in our way, but particularly in America. And let's name the problem. I mean, the whole Trump phenomenon, we observing it from a distance, have been absolutely horrified by the way in which that man has captured the imagination, so it seems, of a lot of would-be evangelicals. And I think

it's a weakness in evangelical theology going way back which has allowed that to take over, and partly because people have been so concerned about going to heaven that they haven't thought wisely and deeply about God's will being done on earth as in heaven and what it would look like to be followers of Jesus on earth as in heaven. So that's good. Yeah, you could go on, but I had to preach at a big church in New York the day after Trump's inauguration in, whenever that was, 2016, was it? Yeah. And they gave me 2 Corinthians 11, which they were doing a series on 2 Corinthians. And I said, now Paul's opponents here have a slogan, and it goes like this, make apostleship great again. And I expounded that in terms of 2 Corinthians 11. And we need to embrace these passages and say,

wow, what are we doing culturally if we ignore what Paul is doing here? And it's just so you know, my audience is largely going to be on the same page with you. I have a very kind of apolitical, or at least an audience that's very much sick of that. We have some people on maybe the farther left or right, but most of us are. There is a growing, quiet number of Christians who are tired of that polarization. I think if you just watch the news, it sounds like it's so, you know, and it is in many places, but it's been the most difficult thing from pastors I talked to. They said this has been the most difficult season of pastoring, and it has nothing to do with

theology. All this division. I can well believe that. And you may know that I have a former student of mine who is now quite well-known in the States, Esau McCauley, who writes op-eds in the New York Times. And Esau is an African-American. He's an Anglican priest. He's teaching at Wheaton College. And he and I just launched a course as part of my NT Right Online courses where we're talking about ethnicity, justice, and the people of God. And apparently we've got some pushback already. I don't see that. My colleagues keep it from me. it seems to me, in the post-George Floyd world, the thought that we might be criticized for raising these issues in a very carefully biblical way is really worrying.

And I wonder, Preston, whether part of the pushback against the so-called new perspective on Paul has been because it's quite clear in the different varieties of the new perspective, and there are many varieties, one of the main imperatives is to say that justification by faith is about the different ethnicities coming together in faith, Jew plus Gentile in Christ. And if Jew plus Gentile, barbarian, Scythian, slave, free, male, female, Galatians 3, Colossians 3, etc. And this has not been the way we've done it in post-Reformation Western Christianity. Because we've wanted worship, liturgy, Bible in our own languages, what we've done is to create culture-specific churches instead of saying, watch out, that's a temptation, because we're

supposed to be of every nation and kindred and tribe and tongue worshipping together. It says so in Revelation. That's where we should be. We've paid no attention to that in the last 400 years. And so we've allowed ethnic differences to determine separate cultures. And that is a tragedy for the gospel. And we've got to work at that. And so if somebody says, oh, no, no, you're being too political, or, oh, you're just in the pay of the Black Lives Matter people, or you're really a crypto communist, say, no, sorry, just read Paul, read the New Testament. Many will come from East and West and sit down with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. That's happening now. We have to celebrate it and not resist it.

You're talking about Esau, right? Esau Macaulay? Esau, you know Esau, do you? Yeah, I found him on the podcast. Yeah, he's great. Oh, good, good, good, good. Esau's a great guy and it was a privilege to teach him.

And we had a great time when he was my student in St. Andrews. Yeah. I mean, I've just recently kind of thought about that, that the new perspective on Paul, you know, that's kind of, I don't know, my view seems to have kind of waned a little bit in the last 10 years. People have kind of exhausted their exegetical teeth on it. But man, that could have really paved the way for the race conversations we're having now. It set up a thick exegetical

foundation for having these conversations. I just wish it would have happened more robustly. Yeah. I mean, for me, working through Galatians again for the new commentary, which just came out, as you will know, from Erdmann's about a year or so ago, not quite a year ago, absolutely fascinating that the questions on the table in Galatians are precisely questions about how Jews and Gentiles believing in Jesus can be one family. If you are the Messiah's people, you are the one seed of Abraham. That's the punchline at the end of Galatians 3. I know you know this, but it's fascinating how many churches in the broad Reformation tradition really haven't paid attention to the way the argument of Galatians 3 works, to what it's all about, and to why it's important for these Christians in Galatia to know that they are all part of this single family. And we have imagined that there were these people coming into

Galatia like sort of wicked legalistic Roman Catholics in the Protestant imagination in the 16th century, saying you've got to do good works, you've got to do good works so you won't get into heaven. That is not what Galatians is about. The question is, here's a community that is not worshipping the pagan gods, like the Jews didn't worship the pagan gods. They had permission from Rome not to. Here's all these other people not worshipping the pagan gods. Oh, my goodness, who are they? The local officials are getting worried. Why aren't you turning up for the ordinary sacrifices and processions? We are children of Abraham because we are part of the messianic family around this man, Jesus.

So they go to the local synagogue. Who are these people? Well, we don't know. There was somebody called Paul in town, and we didn't trust his message. So then the pressure is get them circumcised or we're all dead meat. You know, that's what's going on in Galatians. And if anyone says to me, this is, you've turned it into a political rather than a theological message, I will theologically speaking, punch them on the nose. That is just not the right. Of course, it's political because it's about God's kingdom on earth as in heaven.

Galatians is not about how to go to heaven when you die. It's about how to be the people of God right here. Romans is about salvation, not going to heaven, but resurrection. Galatians is not basically about salvation. It assumes that horizon and now deals with the issue on the ground. I could go on, obviously. You can. And so we've just got a few more minutes.

I want to be true to the ground. I could go on, obviously. You can. And so we just got a few more minutes. I want to be true to the time. I did the obnoxious thing of asking on Twitter right before we started, does anybody have any questions for NT, right? And I got about a hundred questions here, which we can't get to, but I want to give honor to the people that did take time to respond. I'm loving that one of them was, what does he think about evangelicalism and its obsession with Trump and far-right politics? I think you've already anticipated and answered that. Let's see. One of them was your favorite fiction author, like favorite literary author or top view. Yeah, I come and go. I tend only to read fiction when I'm on vacation, and we haven't had enough vacations recently. And I find it difficult to give my mind to a work of fiction. For light reading on a holiday,

there's a British novelist called David Lodge, who's an old man now, but he wrote several splendid and very clever novels in the 80s and 90s, and I've always enjoyed him. He's quite scurrilous, and that's all right. I'm old enough not to be bothered by that. I read poetry. I read, I mean, the classics like George Herbert or Gerard Manley Hopkins,

and particularly the great contemporary Irish poet Michail O'Shiel, O apostrophe S-I-A-D-H-A-I-L, pronounced Shiel. He's a friend of David Ford's, a theologian. And Michail is a wonderful poet, whose, if people don't know it, his quite large book, The Five Quintets, think T.S. Eliot Four Quartets only now, The Five Quintets, and in a totally different mode and manner from Eliot. But it's a kind of a history of Western culture with art and music and politics and drama and all the rest of it in these vignettes of all the different people who've shaped our world. Brilliant poetry, Michal O'Shield, the Quintets, published by Baylor University Press, interestingly. So, I mean, these are the sort of things I might curl up with and just relax. And so that's for a start. Here's a related one. And I'm going to expand this question out with my

own spin on it. You're on a desert island. You could take all the works of one of these three authors. Who would you pick? Chesterton, Lewis, or Tolkien? Oh, goodness. Oh, goodness. Oh, goodness. It would probably have to be Lewis. And there's odd bits of Lewis's

literary criticism that I've never read and I would like to. But at the same time, I haven't read enough Chesterton. What I've read, I've loved. He's crazy, of time, I haven't read enough Chesterton. What I've read, I've loved. He's crazy, of course, in all sorts of ways, as no doubt we all are. But there is more of him that I would like to do business with. You know, on vacation a few years ago,

I took The Lord of the Rings with me because I hadn't read it for about 25 years. And I thought, it's time I did it again. I simply couldn't get into it. I found the first 150 pages. I just thought, oh, come on. What's going on here? And for whatever reason, my head and my heart weren't there. And I still have enormous admiration for him, of course. And he has shaped our world in all sorts of ways. My oldest son grew up reading Tolkien. He knows it incredibly well. We tease him about it. So probably Lewis, but maybe one day I'd like to read more Chester. How about your theory of, I guess, hell? You've asked him about his theory that instead of eternal conscious torment or annihilation, that people become subhuman and lose the image of God. Well, it's very interesting. So much of the hell imagery in the Bible,

when you say, what did first century Jews mean when they used that imagery? It certainly isn't like the medieval heaven and hell. And I mean, there are many people who use the phrase heaven or heaven and hell as almost an automatic litmus test of orthodoxy. Do you believe in heaven and hell? And the answer is, that's the wrong question. If we're talking about new creation, new heavens and new earth, then in the picture in Revelation 21 and 22, here is the great city coming down from heaven. But there are those who are outside and who, it seems by their own choice, have decided to remain outside, those who love and make lies. That's a chilling thought, oh my goodness, and various other categories as well, because God's world, God's new creation is about truth, and those who've distorted and pulled it

apart, there is no place for them. What will they become? Who will they be? Images like the lake of fire, like everything else in Revelation, this is vivid imagery. And to take it literally is simply to miss, is it like the lion who is also the lamb with the sword coming out of his mouth and so on. When we meet Jesus, I really don't think he will look like that. You know, that we have to be able to understand how the imagery works. So I have developed very cautiously this view that when you worship the God in whose image you are made, you become more like God. Paul talks about being renewed in knowledge according to the image of the Creator, Colossians 3. When people don't worship God, and we are all constantly pulled away towards idolatry of one sort or another, it's the daily battle we all face.

Idolatry is the root of everything else. But if we're not worshiping God, what are we becoming like? We are becoming subhuman. We're becoming less than fully human. And it seems to me if somebody spends their life doing that, saying, I don't want to worship this God in whose image I'm made, the God we know in Jesus and by the Spirit, then we can extrapolate from what bearing God's image means to say such a creature could become a non-image bearing and hence, as it were, ex-human. Lewis writes about that, interestingly, in one of his science fiction trilogies. The door, it says, and this is my last thing, I'll let you go, the gate is always open. I mean,

I know the universalists tap into that, but that would play in, that would give room for some kind of universalism. It could, it could, but in order to get to the universalist position, you'd have to imply that post-mortem, people are offered the gospel again and again and again and again, as it were, until finally they give in and say, all right, we have absolutely no biblical warrant for saying any such thing. And when you see as a pastor, somebody who has rejected the gospel, then rejected it again, and who's crafted their life to be a rejection of it, etc. Then often it really appears they do not seem to be moving towards a position where they might. Some may be, but people do. The biblical language is being hardened, as in Pharaoh, etc. In Romans 9. That's a scary thing.

I really don't think that the Bible easily lets us become universalists. And I remember my colleague and friend Alan Torrance in St. Andrews saying, we all ought to want to be universalists. And I know why he said that. I know why he meant that. Because the minute that you start to think, oh, so-and-so is going to hell, well, they really had it coming. So, yeah, let's rub our hands about that. I know why he meant that. Because the minute that you start to think, oh, so-and-so is going to hell, well, they really had it coming. So, yeah, let's rub our hands about that. Then you have become a hater and possibly even a murderer. And John says no murderer has eternal life abiding. And so we have to watch out for that. And then it's a matter of grief. Think of Paul's grief in Romans 9. If Paul had been a universalist, there would have been no need for the tears in Romans 9, 1 to 5.

There would have been no need for the urgent prayer in Romans 10. And he tells you in Romans 10 what the answer to the prayer is. If you confess with your lips that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved. He is expounding Deuteronomy 30, which is the passage at the end of Torah, which says, this is how God's people, Israel, get restored. And Paul says, here it is. You've got the Messiah. There's nothing, you can't have an extra Messiah to sort of do a double play on what's just happened in Jesus. Jesus is the messiah. Don't expect anyone else. So I think that's really very clear. The trouble is, of course, in some cultures, British as well as American, hell has played

such a large role that anyone who says, well, maybe it's not quite like that, is instantly suspect of being some kind of a liberal. Well, I hope it's pretty clear that I'm committed to this old book we call the New Testament, well, the whole Bible. And there are difficulties in it, but I don't think we solve those difficulties by simply taking a pair of scissors and slicing out the bits that don't quite fit. Tom, I've taken you a couple of minutes over. You got a family to attend to. I can't thank you enough for your time. And I'm going to be chewing on this conversation for a while.

I know my audience is too. Thank you for giving us an hour of your day, Tom. Thank you very much. It's very good to see you again. I hope our paths will cross before too long. Maybe at some conference somewhere now that the pandemic may be easing off. Anyway, God bless you

and keep you in all your own work.