(This is the transcript of a 2018 recording. This piece was previously only available in print form. Photo is from 2018)
N.T. Wright is among the world’s leading New Testament scholars, specializing in Pauline studies. He flew from Scotland to spend a week on Gordon’s campus. Wright said that he does not come to America to slack off, and indeed, during his week at Gordon he spoke twice at chapel, gave a Symposium lecture, spoke at a CFI event in Boston, visited over six classes, and sat down for an interview with the Tartan. The Tartan asked Wright many questions, ranging from the nature of hell to the “correctness” of Western Christian orthodoxy. With decades of esteemed scholarship under his belt, Wright was well-equipped to give fresh perspectives on difficult issues.
(Answers have been edited for length)
Tartan: What are the biggest needs within the church that young, academically minded Christians can fill?
N.T. Wright: We can't assume that the next generation is just going to be automatically Christian or whatever; it’s something that has to be retrieved with every generation. But I think one particular agenda is I've been banging on about quite a lot: I read to people from Paul some years ago, and people have often asked me, what would Paul say if he could come and see our modern North American Church now? And my my strong answer is, Paul would be shocked not only that we are not united as Christians, but that we don't care.
And I would love to see a new generation of Christians who actually devoted themselves to the very difficult question of how you can bring Christians from different traditions together. Because at the moment people hardly know each other exist, or they're suspicious or whatever.
And we found in the north of England when I was Bishop, was that actually sharing in Bible studies, sharing in local social projects -kind of low key things that you can do together- can really help in bringing people to realize these are our brothers and sisters; we should be part of the same team and not just content to ignore them for real purposes.
The real point of this, and again, this is another thing which is really an answer to your question, unless we are in some sense or other able to do things together and to speak together into the world, then the principalities and powers that run the world won't take a blind bit of notice of us. It's only when the church can speak with one voice that the movers and shakers in society will say: ‘something's going on here’ whereas if it's just one or two lone voices then this gets dismissed.
The Tartan: What does unity mean?
N.T. Wright: It's a good question. Unity certainly ought to mean being able to read the Bible together. Ideally that unity ought to mean being able to share the Lord's table, to go to the Eucharist, the bread breaking whatever you call it. We all know historically that the latter is actually harder than the former but everybody from the Catholics to the Greek Orthodox, to the Salvation Army in principle ought to be able to read the Bible together, and particularly we ought to be able to sit down in however informal a setting with Christians from whichever tradition and say: What are the big urgent needs in this town, city or neighborhood, Or whatever it is. And how could we gather to meet those needs? Whether it's a housing problem, whether it's an unemployment problem, or whatever it is. How can we, together, be addressing that because then, if you're going to do that, you might want to pray together.
Guess what. How are you going to do that? Well anything, to get Christians even saying the Lord's Prayer together. We all use the Lord's prayer, why not do it together? You've got to start small. It's no good saying ‘we want to merge all our ministries at once. We want to merge all our properties at once.’ That's not going to happen, but little steps like reading the Bible together in local, in small local groups down the street, or identifying one or two key needs in the area and seeing how the church can help meet them—particularly in relation to poverty.
So then when you do that if you do it for a week, a month for a year you get to know these folk and you want to pray with them and you want to do more with them and then you start to say, maybe if we had a word with our pastors maybe we could have a pulpit exchange for a week and see how we get on with that and all sorts of things happen.
And actually, this last century has been a very ecumenically-minded century. Things are now possible which were not. You know relations between Catholics and Anglicans for instance are very very good right now. The tragedy is that within some of the mainline churches just as that is happening other splits have emerged which as you know is just distressing and frustrating. But we've got to work at what we can work at.
The Tartan: You talk about how ‘the Hell question’ is something that people think about more in the West than other places. How does one find joy in his own salvation if the reality is that most or many others won't enjoy the same thing?
N.T. Wright: It is an important question. Whenever we find ourselves needing to discuss this question and I suspect we don't need to quite as often as we do, but still we ought to be thinking about people that we know and love who might well be the subject of this inquiry. In other words: people who are at the present time who have no particular faith in Jesus, etc, etc. And so according to most traditional theologies would not be expecting to enjoy salvation.
And I am not a universalist. I've never been a universalist. I think the warnings in the New Testament are very clear and I don't think they're just scare tactics. The trouble of course is that in the Middle Ages people constructed a vision of heaven and hell as equal and opposite -- the two great destinations. This is what C.S. Lewis was trying to deconstruct in his book “The Great Divorce,” when he envisages heaven as this place which is wonderfully real and vibrant and more real than the world we currently live in, makes the world we currently live in look like a place of shadows and so on.
But then Hell is a slight insubstantial grey place—tiny, down a little crack in the earth somewhere. It feels real enough to the people who are in it but actually it has no real existence such as would be able to blackmail heaven, which the equal and opposite thing does: How can you be enjoying yourself and these people are miserable?
And the first time I went to Middle East I was struck by the way in which close by you get very smart Western style suburbs and then sometimes within sight of a refugee camp where people have been living for 50 years with minimal sanitation and poor housing and food, etc. That is actually the traditional picture of traditional Western picture of heaven. You have this heaven and right there there's this horrible concentration camp where people are being tortured -- and you know that is such an ugly , horrendous picture to collude with it would really be a slap in the face for the God of grace and love.
However, because God is the God of grace and love and because humans are made in God's image, anyone who says consistently and solidly and intentionally: 'I do not want to worship this God. I want to worship this idol or that idol or the other idol because they give me a quick shot of this or that’—then ultimately they are choosing a path which is dehumanizing, which is a path which will not reflect God's image, which will collude with its own dehumanization.
It's hard to say that, but I think you have to say something like that. Otherwise you're saying that all the things that God says in and through Jesus in the New Testament, etc., is really just setting up terms of a Monopoly game and if you lose, well never mind because you're putting away the board down it's time for supper.
Tartan: You talk about how in America that’s a huge misconception (regarding the polemic views of heaven and hell), and how that misconception almost seems to strike at the heart of Christianity itself, but if so many people believe that, how much of mainstream orthodox Christianity in the West is misinformed, and how much does that matter for the layperson? How does the layperson parse it out?
N.T. Wright: Part of the question is: which key things do we have to agree on in order to be in some sort of fellowship with one another? In my church the Church of England, we've never had a particularly detailed eschatology. If you ask a good Anglican what they believe, they will say Jesus will come again in glory to judge the living and the dead and of His kingdom there will be no end.
I remember a friend of mine once being asked by a Baptist what he believes and that's what he said and the Baptist said: "that's all?" And my friends said no, "that's enough."
Because of course there are different ways in which people have construed it but in the same way with the notion of the Trinity, we can't know. Nobody really totally understands the doctrine of the Trinity, but if you try and finagle, to fine tune it too much, you'll find disagreements which shouldn't be church dividing disagreements. We ought to be able to say Father, Son, and Spirit.
And so the key thing we have to figure out for unity, again I've said this again and again over the last 20 years: How do you tell the difference between the differences that make a difference and the differences that don't make a difference?
So for instance if somebody says 'I believe that we should use gluten free bread for our communion services' and 'somebody else says ‘no we'll have a bit of that on the side if you want, but we don't need to do it.' This is not something you divide the church over. You have a parish council discussion about it and reach some compromise or whatever. But if somebody says ‘instead of singing those hymns about Jesus we're going to sing the hymns about Buddha or Krishna’ or something instead then we say: 'sorry, you can't do that and still be a Christian church.'
You know there are church dividing things and it's very clear in the New Testament there are some things which are, to use the current jargon, red lines. Paul gives a whole string of them in 1 Corinthians five and six. There are other things which some people think are red lines but which aren't. And Paul addresses those in 1 Corinthians eight, nine, and ten about food offered to idols. And then if people think they are red lines but Paul saying they're not, he has a pastoral strategy for how you cope with that. This is this is real serious pastoral wisdom written within thirty years of Jesus’ death and resurrection. It's been thought out and we've completely forgotten about it because our modern western theology thinks you believe, so you get saved. Then he has rules about how you're to pay and that's that's Christianity. No it's not.
It's not like that. This is about a real community that faces that question of how to be united and what could break that unity. And Paul is very clear about it. But in the modern Western church, all the categories are wrong, which is why it's hard for us then to retrieve some of these things, which is why again and again reading the Bible together is essential. You know you won't get very far without doing that.
Tartan: Is human sexuality one of those things that is worth splitting the church over?
N.T. Wright: This is, this is obviously one of the presenting issues and has been now for many years. Part of the trouble is that the Anglican Church worldwide never had a structure of authority that was sufficient to handle the big issues when they came up in the 1980s and 90s, because the question of ‘how can you tell where the red lines are’ is also a question of ‘how do you tell at what level this can be decided?’
You know when the church decided to ordain women, it was the Lambeth Conference that basically said ‘we've thrashed this one out and we're saying it's okay for Anglicans to ordain women.’ If some parish or diocese had just gone ahead and done it without everyone being on board, that would have been church dividing. In other words, the question of how do you know things different and not goes with subsidiarity. How can you tell at what level in the structure of this has to be done now?
Of course, there are many churches like the Baptist churches where the only authority is the local church, and they're part of a loose federation. But every decision is taken locally, and within the Anglican Church we are halfway as it were because the Catholics would say ultimately every decision is taken at the Vatican.
We in the Anglican church, we don't have a pope. The Vatican Archbishop of Canterbury is not a pope and he doesn't want to be. He shouldn't be. But that demands that we have a nuanced governance which we've not really figured out, because the Church the Anglican Communion grew around the world millions and has millions of people today.
I'm sure you know the average Anglican today is black and does not speak English as a mother tongue. There are more Anglicans in church on a Sunday in Nigeria than the whole of Europe and America put together by some large factor. So if we are trying to be a fellowship of, koinonia, a communion, then this doesn't just mean a loose federation where anything goes. It means we have to have some pretty clear ground rules so that we really can share fellowship in good conscience with one another and that's what we've been struggling with for the last 20 years.
… I believe that with God all things are possible. I have no idea how that would happen. Bishop Lesslie Newbigin was once asked, I'm sure you know this quote: ‘Are you an optimist or a pessimist?’ And he said, ‘I am neither an optimist nor a pessimist. Jesus Christ is risen from the dead.’ So granted that new creation: happens, has happened, will happen. How that'll work out and what pain and sorrow and frustration have to be gone through before that is worked out, I happily have no idea.
Tartan: Where do you see the trajectory of the American Evangelical church versus the UK Evangelicals
N.T. Wright: Yeah, yeah, it's always been quite different. In Britain the average person who calls themselves an Evangelical is probably middle to upper middle class and politically left of center which is significantly different from what you find in many parts of America.
If the white working class have any Christian allegiance at all it's likely to be either old Catholic or one of the Free Churches. There are some noble glorious exceptions to that but that tends to be the way it is. And so the word evangelical sociologically means something quite different. The other thing is that the word evangelical still in Britain. To most people refers to doctrinal commandments rather than social or cultural beliefs. And another thing again. In Britain the word evangelical hardly has any connotations of a particular eschatology like millennialism or the rapture or whatever whereas in America I know that some massive filament...
And for me being evangelical primarily means in terms of taking the authority of scripture extremely seriously. But for me taking, the authority of scripture extremely seriously means raising the questions rather than deciding. Of course it means deciding a lot of questions. The Bible is full of questions which forced themselves upon us. It's not a book that you can go to and just look up the right answers then put it back on the shelf.
You have to live with it and think about its story and pray your way into the narrative and see where you belong and what you should be doing. As you do that, you will find sadly that many people who say they believe in the authority of Scripture do not want to accompany you on that journey…
They learned what they believe; they learned what the Bible said five years ago, ten years ago, fifty years ago and they do not want that to be shaken in any way. That's why they get a lot of letters and emails about my book, “Surprised By Hope,” and people say ‘oh I started to read this! I was really scared because you were saying so many different different things but now actually it makes so much sense to me! But I'm not sure what my past is going to say I now believe this.’ I said well tell your pastor to search the scriptures.
I do not want to say something it isn't in the Scriptures but I think what I've said surprised by hope is an exposition of New Testament eschatology. And if anyone says they believe the Bible then they ought at least to be prepared to read the text and think about it. Feel free to disagree but please let's have to have the text on the table…
Tartan: What five books do you tell the young, bright Christian college student to read?
N.T. Wright: I love to suggest that people read C.S. Lewis's “The Great Divorce.” I think it's a brilliant short book. Quite an extraordinary piece, really. It does depend where you're starting. I urge young Christians to read poetry, to read Christian poetry. There's a new “Oxford Book of Christian Verse” which as well as having all the great traditional things like Milton Donne and so on has a lot of up to date poems, including a lot by women poets.
And I would just be so thrilled to think that individual Christians would just sit down every night and read another poem from that book and just mull it over and meditate on it because there's an awful lot of things you can say in poetry that you can't necessarily say in prose, which is one of the reasons Lewis was such a great writer because he was really a poet at heart.
I'm kind of quirky with my with my reading. I read all sorts of odd things just to find my way around. So I'm not necessarily going to recommend the right things. One of the greatest books of theology that I've read in the last 30 years is Miroslav Volf’s “Exclusion and Embrace.”