N.T. Wright Speaks at Peachtree

Well, I said, since you guys stopped talking, you want to start? Good evening and welcome to Peachtree Church. We're so glad that you're with us tonight, um, for our Pence Speaker Series. The Penn St Speaker Series was established in 2016 in honor of Vic and Becky Pence, who are with us tonight. Can we give them a hand for being with us?

So, one of the things that the Pence Speaker Series stands for is the opportunity to have thoughtful, faithful, compelling voices of the Christian life to come specifically to the Atlanta area. So, we are so honored tonight to have Tom Wright to be with us. I know that you're in for a special treat this evening. One of my pet peeves is giving long introduction speeches about a speaker when the speaker is in the room, when what you really care about is hearing from that speaker. So, there is a biography in your bulletin and there's a couple of housekeeping things that I would love to go over with you before we dive in tonight.

So, we're going to begin with me interviewing Tom, and at any time, you can text a question in. So, you don't have to wait until we get to the open Q&A. Feel free to text to that number right there. And in fact, we'd love for everybody to go ahead and pull out their phone, which is kind of unusual. Usually at church, I'm telling you to put away your phones. I actually want you to go ahead and pull out your phones because we have a special treat for you tonight. You may have noticed in your bulletin that there is a gift from NT Wright Online to everybody here tonight for a free course. So, if you actually text to the number 44222, which is in the bulletin, 44222, if you do that, you'll receive a free course from NT Wright Online from that. So, we'd love for you to pull out your phone. You don't have to wait. You can just do that if you want to.

And at the same time, I'd love to tell you just a little bit about NT Wright Online. It's in courses are being taken in 180 different countries. There's roughly fifty thousand students who are enrolled in NT Wright courses, and there's roughly about 30 courses that you can choose from. So, tonight, if this wets your appetite in any way, you have the opportunity to not only get books that are going to be available downstairs and to check those out and to meet Tom when we are finished with the evening, but also for an opportunity for you to be able to dig deeper into the direct teaching of Tom. It's a wonderful technological gift for us to be able to have access to that.

David, you are raising your hand. You're either charismatic right now or there's a detail you want me to lift up. Peachtree to 44222. All right, that detail is important. So, um, and Peachtree is one word, just in case you're wondering. All right. The other thing we'd love for you to do while your phones are out is silence them. You can leave them on, but we have a rule at Peachtree that if your phone goes off at an event in the sanctuary or worship service, you have to give a hundred dollars to the work of the Lord in the mission of the church, and I'll be glad to collect that when we're done if we hear that go off. That's, uh, that's part of our stewardship plan. Those are all of the announcements that we have. So, can you give a big, rousing Peachtree welcome to NT Wright?

Thank you, Tom. So glad for you to be with us tonight. Is this your first time to Atlanta?

No, I've been to Atlanta a few times. Um, I can't remember the last time, three, four years ago maybe, but it's great to be back.

Any impressions of Atlanta from somebody from the other side of the pond?

It's a city that seems to work, unlike some other cities I could mention. Um, you know, uh, you can actually, we're recording this. Go ahead and mention that. You, you could actually get to and from the airport and get about the city quite easily. That was my impression. Maybe I was just lucky.

We only let him fly in at a particular time so he would meet us before he would meet the gridlock of the traffic. Tom, you're, you've been such a remarkable biblical scholar and such a gift to me and to so many people in the room. And I guess I'd love to just begin by asking the question, how does a biblical scholar first get into, how did you first start reading the Bible?

Um, a long time ago, on June the second, 1953. Um, it's very specific. It was, most of you don't know what happened on June the second, 1950s. It was the day the Queen got crowned, Queen Elizabeth II got crowned that day. I've seen the Netflix show, so I know exactly what you're talking about. I'll tell you a funny story about that sometime. Um, it was also my mother's 30th birthday, and my sister and I, aged six and five, were given coronation Bibles with a little coronation stamp on it. I still got that Bible. It was a chunky little book, um, King James. And my sister and I, astonished to own this thing, went through and and sat down somewhere and flicked through, looking to see if there was a book that we might be able to tackle. And we read Philemon. Oh, that's a good one. Very sure. Exactly. We found what we thought looked like the shortest book there was. We, we read that together. I don't, you just learned to read, but it was, uh, yeah. So that's really what it is. And we were a church-going family. We weren't a particularly zealous Bible reading family, though my parents did make sure that we learned and could recite the books of the Bible by the time we were, I don't know, nine or ten. And then when I was about 12, somebody told me that would be a good idea to read the Bible every day and gave me some Scripture Union notes to help me do that.

There's the first hundred. That is the first hundred dollars. Thank you. Thank you so much for your generosity to the, to the church. Praise the Lord. Go ahead, Tom. And, and, uh, I started then, and, and I've never seen any reason to stop. It's so, for me, and I think this is true for a great many Bible scholars, that the reason you get into it is because you've been hooked quite early on. And even though by the time you're in your late teens, you're seeing things in the Bible which you certainly didn't see at age 12, and you're coming up with puzzles and problems, it's something that's got into the bloodstream. And that certainly happened with me. And as I think I say in one of my books somewhere, a teenage rebellion takes many forms, but in my case, hanging out with friends and drinking coffee and reading some Paul's epistles was a form of rebellion against whatever else I was supposed to be doing at the time. And, and I, I would find it was a kind of a secret hobby that I would sneak time from other, um, proper pursuits, classes that I was supposed to be doing, and do Bible studies of various sorts. And then I was lucky enough to study classics, um, as an undergraduate. And that was partly chosen deliberately because I knew already that I was called to be ordained. Um, but then plunging into the worlds of philosophy and theology, I just felt I couldn't get enough of Saint Paul, particularly. And so worked as hard as I could to make sure I got the qualifications to do a doctorate. And that goes from there, really.

A lot of people don't find the Bible to be reliable anymore today. When questions of the reliability of scripture come to you, how do you respond?

Well, this isn't a new question, of course. There was a big push in the 17th and 18th century by many people in Western culture to say, we've grown up with this stuff, but now we know it's all rubbish. In other words, this isn't something that just started happening in the 1960s or whatever. And actually, what you find is recycled versions of much older controversies. And I want to say, the question of reliability, it's really about the reliability of God. And, uh, it isn't that the Bible is apart from God. There's a danger in sort of over-rationalizing and thinking we've got to prove the Bible by some abstract standard because only then can we know about anything the Bible tells us. And it's actually more interesting and complex than that. That as you get to know God, and as you get, there's another one, as you get to know, um, that God is revealed in and through Jesus, and as you realize that the entire biblical story homes in on Jesus, so that as the, uh, early confession says, the Messiah died for our sins in accordance with the scriptures and was raised on the third day in accordance. You know, the accordance thing is like a huge river of scripture. And this great story of God and creation in Israel, which comes rushing together, very dangerously and, and scarily, with Jesus. And the reliability of that whole story is what matters. And the, and when I talk about something being reliable, like you buy a new car, and is it reliable? Or you, um, what, what, whatever it is, that some gardening implement, is it reliable? Will it do the job? The job that the Bible is supposed to do is to enfold us into that great story of God and creation in Israel, and focused on Jesus. And then by drawing us in, to make us part of the story, by equipping us and sharpening us up and shaping us for the mission of the church in the world. And I have to say, anyone who takes the Bible as that will find it utterly reliable. And it's when critics don't like what they see coming at them from Christianity as a whole that they start to try to pull holes in it and say, oh, this bit didn't happen, or Luke got the dating of the census wrong, or whatever it is. He didn't, by the way, but that's another story. I mean, there are, but there are, there are standard things which the critics have sneered at. And usually, they're not actually terribly interested in that detail. They're just trying to say that, um, Christianity is a bit too demanding, it's based on mistakes, and so let's not take it seriously. And I want to say, for the last 2000 years, people of the people who have been taking this story seriously have found it utterly reliable.

There's been a lot of debates, particularly in American history, not just on the reliability of the Bible, but on the authority of the Bible. And so when discussions about what authority the Bible has, isn't an errant, all of those types of questions, well, what, what's your short answer to that question?

Okay, well, you know me too well already. Um, the, um, I am, I'm very suspicious of of words beginning with the letters I N, um, because the inerrant, in this, in that, because so many of them mean what they mean today as a result of a kind of 19th century rationalism, a rationalist apologetic trying to oppose a rationalist skepticism. And the trouble is, even if you do that quite well, it's still rationalism that wins. And I want to say, the Bible is the book God wanted us to have, and warts and all. So the ending of Mark is missing, so what? So this or that prophet has been edited in some, some such way, that's not a big deal. Did you really think that inspiration was simply about, um, prophets or apostles being a hotline to heaven, um, and just being human typewriters? That's certainly not what inspiration is all about. The point about authority of the Bible is that that phrase is a shorthand for the authority of God in Christ, by the Spirit, for the world, through scripture. And only when we cash it out like that will the phrase authority of the Bible mean what it should. And I think you've heard me say before, in Matthew 28, Jesus does not say, "All authority in heaven and earth is given to the books, you chaps are going to go off and write." He says, "All authority is given to me." So if we use the phrase authority of scripture, that must be a kind of local shorthand for saying Jesus' authority is mediated through scripture, which it is. But that then complexifies the issue, and that takes quite a bit of spelling out to see how that works in practice.

At your heart, you're a biblical scholar, that's a historian, and you're kind of your origin of expertise, uh, it takes us to what we refer to as Second Temple Judaism, or kind of the original setting in which Jesus came and did his earthly ministry. What is it that you think that's important for Christians to know about the context in which Jesus' ministry took place?

Yeah, yeah, that's, that's a great question because so many Christians simply haven't been taught this stuff. And I think particularly that it's the narrative that they were living in. And the idea of living in a narrative, um, may be familiar to some of us, but to many people in the modern Western world, that sounds quite strange. Um, there are many countries in Europe where because of wars and rumors of wars going back hundreds of years, many people in Central Europe have in their heads a narrative that they, the next door country took that bit of territory from us in 1635 or whatever it is, and one day we're going to get it back. And many people live with those narratives, and they may not take them very seriously, but they're there. Now, the Jewish people of Jesus' day have this massive narrative, call it scripture, if you like, which focuses on certain key points, like Isaiah 40 to 55, I'm sorry, Isaiah 40 to 55, and America now, or Daniel chapter 9, which are about God's long-term promise to rescue Israel, to return himself in triumph, to defeat all powers of evil, and to become king. It's very clear in Isaiah 40 to 55, and in Daniel 9, there's even a chronology on it that this is going to be from the exile, 70 times seven years. And we know from texts of the period, texts like Jubilees, and from Josephus himself, great Jewish historian, that people were calculating. They couldn't get it absolutely right, but around the time of Jesus, there were a great many people. And Josephus says at one point in his book, great book, the Jewish War, by the way, I say to my students, you want to catch up with Second Temple Judaism, get yourself the Penguin Classic translation of Josephus's Jewish War. Make sure it's a nice day when the sun's shining, because it's one of the most miserable stories ever told about the Roman destruction of Jerusalem. But the thing is, Josephus is an odd guy, but he was there. He knew what was going on. He knew the people. He knew what the smell of the place was like. And the point is this, he says there was an oracle in the Jewish scriptures which foretold that at that time a world ruler would arise from Judea. And Josephus then deconstructs it and says, this is actually a prophecy about Vespasian, the Roman emperor, who was besieging Jerusalem and went from there to be emperor in Rome. The reason he says that is that Vespasian's son, Titus, is paying Josephus's pension at the time. Um, so naturally, he would say. But, but, you know, when you, this is, this is called doing history, by the way, taking the sources, seeing around them, seeing what the motivations are, but saying, nevertheless, here we have a narrative that everybody knew that around now, it's time for God to become king. And this may well be through a Messiah, a king. And that this will be what it looks like when God returns to do what he's promised to do. So if we come to that period thinking they're all walking around thinking, "Oh dear, I'm a sinner, how am I going to get to heaven?" Then we will just read the stuff wrong. Because they are not sitting around in Jerusalem discussing, "Do we have to do some works, or is it just faith?" Or whatever. That that's just not the issue. The issue is, when is God going to do what he's promised to do? And what will it look like when he does it? And who will turn out to have been his true loyal people when all that happens? Once you get those questions, you're ready to read the New Testament, if I can say so.

Absolutely. My, my first, uh, connection with your research had to do with your material on the resurrection. And it was shocking for me to learn that we have this misperception. And critics will often say that, of course, they said that Jesus was raised from the dead because this is what they were expecting him to do. What, what does resurrection mean to that context in that first century of history?

Okay, the first thing to say is that the word resurrection, anastasis in Greek, is about dead bodies. Bodies that have been dead coming, in some sense, back to life. It's not about souls going to heaven. It's not about a super-spiritual post-mortem future, leaving a body in the grave. They've got lots of language to do that. Lots of people believe that. Lots of people didn't believe in anastasis resurrection because they said, blindingly obvious, dead people don't get raised. However, many Jews, Jewish people at the time of Jesus, probably most Jewish people at the time of Jesus, and we can tell this from their burial customs and the changes in the burial customs, did believe that when God finally did what he said he was going to do, and the great turnaround in cosmic history happened, then all God's people would be raised from the dead to share in that new world. Because quite simply, the Jews believe two things about God: one, he is the good creator; two, he is the God of justice. And if you put creation and justice together, you get resurrection. Figure it out. If God has made this world, and he doesn't make junk, and he's made us to have human bodies, and that was a good thing, not a bad thing, as Platonic philosophy might have imagined, then if God is going to put the world right, those who have been faithful and loyal to him in this life, he's not going to leave them out of that future great moment. So he will raise them from the dead. And this is there in Daniel 12 and other texts. Clearly, Jesus himself believed that. But what they didn't believe was that one person would be raised from the dead ahead of everybody else to start this process. You know, Jesus raised, um, Jairus' daughter, Lazarus, and others from the dead, but they would die again. He brought them back into this same life. But when Jesus was raised from the dead, this was the beginning of a different sort of bodily life, a transformed and now immortal bodily life. Our whole culture rebels against the idea of immortal physicality, but that's precisely what we have with the resurrection of Jesus.

You and I earlier today were talking about that, your most popular book in terms of your correspondence and feedback has been "Surprised by Hope." And that's the book where you tried to help to distill for a popular audience the idea of how we really misunderstand and misinterpret the Bible because the primary lens that we often look at it with, modern kind of particularly American Christian eyes, is we're looking at it through the lens of every time we see the word glory or heaven, it's all about going to heaven after you die. Yeah. Why, why is that such a terrible mistake for us in understanding the text in its own terms?

Yeah, yeah. I wrote a short little version of that a few years before "Surprised by Hope," called "For All the Saints," because in the Anglican Church, of which I am a member, um, we do All Saints' Day, but many churches also do All Souls' Day, and there's a distinction being made between All Saints and All. And I wrote this book to say what I then say at more length in "Surprised by Hope" that actually, the Bible isn't about souls going to heaven. It's about God's new creation, new heavens and new earth, and about us being raised from the dead. The London Times ran a nice little feature on it, a couple of paragraphs by their religion correspondent, and she basically got it right. And then along came the headline writer, and it was in 2003, when I'd just become Bishop of Durham, and the headline said, "New Bishop Abolishes Heaven and the Soul." And I just thought, "Oh, for goodness sake." And this is one of the very few stories that the newspapers know is that from time to time, there is with these wicked bishops who deny everything. And I had to phone up my parents and say, "No, no, read the article, not the headline." Um, because the Bible does talk about soul, but it doesn't mean it in the Platonic sense of the secret thing inside us which really belongs upstairs and we're looking forward to leaving here and going up there one day. That is Platonism, particularly Middle Platonism, which is the Platonism of the first century, actually. But the Christian view from the beginning is, as I said, that God loves us as whole human beings. And when he does what he's going to do and makes the new heavens and the earth, he'll raise us from the dead. Now, the story of how we got into the present Western misconception is long and involved, but the short version goes like this: that in the 14th and 15th century in Europe, the doctrine of purgatory basically took over the popular imagination. That is, that after you die, virtually all of us would have to go through a longer or shorter period of purgation in order to be fit for heaven. And all kinds of stuff grew up around this with people giving money and building new shrines and praying for Uncle Joe to get out of purgatory and so on. And the reformers, Luther and Calvin and all the others, they said, "No, this is unbiblical. It leads to abuses." And as a result, they then said, because this is the doctrine of assurance and justification, particularly coming through, "If you have faith in Jesus Christ right now, then those he justified, he also glorified." So they cut out purgatory, but they kept the framework. And the framework of the late medieval eschatology was not about new heavens and new earth. It was about how to get to heaven. And so that, with all the philosophical problems that accrue from that, becomes the norm for Western Christianity, for Western Protestantism, ever since. The East, by the way, the Eastern Orthodox, they do the whole thing quite differently. That's another story again. But as Karl Barth said about Luther and Calvin, they sorted out many things, but they never figured out their eschatology properly. And it's because of that that there's been this other thing that has happened in Ireland and Britain and America over the last 200 years, which is the whole Rapture business. And I know that's massive in many parts of America, and actually the, the philosophy and the politics that goes with it, I regard as deeply damaging and ultimately radically unbiblical. Because when you get the right picture, it's not about how do we get up to heaven. The whole biblical story is about God making a world in which he wants to come and live with humans in a recreated heaven and earth. So we got the direction of travel wrong, basically.

So, so let's assume that you were in a church and you preached a sermon that was kind of the thesis of "Surprised by Hope," and there was a young woman who comes up to you and says, "I understand what you're telling me, and she's disturbed because there's this whole idea of, I thought I was going to go to heaven after I die, and now that's maybe that's not what's supposed to happen." How would you comfort that young woman in that situation?

I would take her to Philippians chapter one, where Paul says, "My desire is to depart and be with the Messiah, which is far better." In other words, and, and this is not resurrection yet, this is an interim stage. That what we're talking about in the New Testament is a two-stage post-mortem reality. And because the reformers are frightened of purgatory, they didn't want a two-stage thing. But actually, that's what, if you believe in resurrection as the Jews of Jesus' day knew, you've got to have some account of what happens in between. The interesting thing to me is that we in the modern West, that is the question we want to know. I take a funeral, and people say, "Where are they now? What am I supposed to believe about this dear person who's died?" And the answer is, the New Testament's not terribly interested in that. And the New Testament doesn't use the word heaven specifically to describe that reality. Being with the Messiah for Paul is good enough. And that implies to me a conscious, joyful fellowship with Jesus until the day when, by the power of the Holy Spirit, we are given new bodies to share in God's new world. There are other passages which go the same way, like John 14, when Jesus says, "In my Father's house there are many rooms," or many dwelling places. And the word for dwelling places isn't a word you'd use for a place where you'd like a retirement house where you go and live for the forever, as it were. It's, it's the word for a place you live when you're on a journey. You stay there for a short while and then you resume your journey. So, and there's another very different image in Revelation chapter 6 about the souls under the altar. And, and what does that mean? In the picture language of Revelation, these are people who are longing for God's justice to be done and are praying for God's justice to be done because it hasn't happened yet. The great renewal hasn't happened yet. So the New Testament has a few pictures like this. And some of you will be saying, "What about Luke 23, the dying brigand? Jesus says, 'Today you will be with me in paradise.'" Yes, paradise again is an interim place. And of course, Jesus doesn't stay there very long because a couple of days later, he's back and, and bodily alive. So, what I would say is this, the time to teach people about this stuff is not at the funeral. Funerals, and funerals are not a good moment to explain new ideas to people. This is, this is, I mean, quite seriously, do you know that from experience? Did you try that once and it didn't actually? Actually, no, I'm one of the odd clergy who's done fewer funerals than most because of the strange ways my ministry has taken. I've, I've worked in universities and so on, and I haven't, haven't done as many funerals probably as you have. Um, but no, I would say this is, this should be part of the church's core teaching in general curriculum, so that then when you have a funeral, and the liturgy can be devised in such a way that it makes biblical sense, wouldn't that be nice?

Offline, you and I were talking at one point, and I said, "What's one of the biggest correctives or mistakes that American Christians need to know?" And you said, "It's the Kingdom of God." Oh, yeah. Yeah. What is the Kingdom of God?

The Kingdom of God is the fact that in and through Jesus, God became king in a whole new way. When you say, people say, "Wasn't God always king?" Well, yes, God is the creator, but God is alive and active, and his world was in rebellion, and humans were rebelling. And C.S. Lewis catches this in the Narnia stories sometimes, where he uses, and it's, it's an old image in Christian folklore, the idea of a country that's been taken over by a usurping false king, and then the true king comes back in disguise, and gradually there's a great victory, and the false king is driven out. That is the narrative of the Gospels. Um, that this is about God doing what in Isaiah 52, he said he would do, "Your watchmen lift up their voices and shout for joy, because in plain sight they see Yahweh returning to Zion." And the shout goes up, "Your God reigns!" And what's the very next passage in Isaiah? That's 52:7 to 12. The very next passage, 52:13 on into 53, is the fourth servant song about how he was despised and rejected and all the rest of it, and wounded for our transgressions. In other words, the New Testament retrieves that whole. We in the Western church have tended to take the servant song and forget the kingdom. We've dislocated the cross and the kingdom. For the Gospels, the kingdom is what is achieved when, on the cross, Jesus defeats the dark power of evil in order that now new creation can be launched in his resurrection. Which is why at the end of Matthew 28, I've already quoted it, Jesus is now Lord of the world. And if people say, "Oh, it doesn't look as if he's the Lord of the world," you're mistaking what true lordship is about. Jesus has spelled it out in the Sermon on the Mount. This is how God's kingdom is being implemented. Beginning of the Acts of the Apostles, the disciples say, "Lord, will you at this time restore the kingdom to Israel?" And some people have thought that because the disciples then go out and get persecuted and killed, and it's all a bit messy, Jesus must mean, "No, no, it's not the time yet, and that'll come later." But actually, Acts 1 is saying, "Yes, there are other things to happen, but you will receive power, and you will be my witnesses." In other words, Jesus is king, and they are the heralds going out into his rightful domains to tell surprised, unready subjects that they have a new king. And that's the gospel message.

While we're on the subject of when God became king, I was privileged to be at Princeton when you gave some lectures on that topic. And one of the correctives that you provided is that we as Christians tend to today to look at the Gospels primarily as proof texts to the divinity of Jesus. And you gave a wonderful musical analogy. I wonder if you'd give that to us.

Um, this again comes, like so many of our questions, from the 18th century when the skeptics and the Deists were saying, "We maybe believe in God, but we don't think that Jesus was anything other than a great Jewish teacher." And so at that point, many Christians in the Western world started to say, "Oh no, no, look, look at the Gospels, he did all those miracles, he must be divine." Which is a non-sequitur, because miracles like that were done by Elijah and Elisha and Moses and people. And so people were trying to prove the divinity of Jesus as though that's what the Gospels were trying to do. Rather like the reformers reacting to the Middle Ages, the 18th century people are reacting to the Deists. And many people in my country, and quite possibly this country as well, are still thinking that those are the battles we've got to fight. The danger with that is that by the end of the 18th century, we'd all taken our eyes off the ball and we're thinking, "As long as we prove the divinity of Jesus, that's okay." And then with the secular Enlightenment, the Enlightenment said, "We will run the world now, and you Christians can teach people how to go to heaven instead." And we colluded with that, and we still do collude with that. Here's the key: the divinity of Jesus is the key in which the music is set, but it isn't the tune that's being played. The tune that's being played says, "This is what it looks like when God becomes king." And you are invited to come and share in that work. And the key in which the music is being played is, of course, Jesus is himself the living embodiment of the return of Yahweh to Zion.

Do people, in response to that book, ever say, "Then do you not believe in the Trinity?"

The difficulty, people, people get the most odd ideas. Um, yeah, you should see the sort of things I get on email. And no doubt there are people trolling me on websites, but I happily don't look at websites, usually. Um, so I don't. But, but yes, people do get very puzzled. Um, because if, if you really believe that the battle to fight is the 18th century one, and then it looks as though I'm doing something else, they get puzzled. And especially if I say, "Hey, the Kingdom of God is a present reality, and this is what we ought to be about." One distinguished American reviewer said on that book, "How God Became King," it's "how, not when," by the way. Um, but he said, "I will take that gentle review, that's fine." He said, "He said, the, the real problem with this book is that if right is right, we ought to be having a theocracy." And this is, this is a quite a conservative American theologian said this. I thought, "Well, of course we have a theocracy. If, if God is king, that means theocracy." The problem with theocracy is, which they are. So we're talking about which God is holding. And if it's the God who is revealed in Jesus, the Jesus who wins the battle through his crucifixion, then we have a cruciform theocracy, which is totally different from the kind of bullying, top-down, arrogant theocracy that people often imagine when they hear that word.

Pastor Vic and I have talked about how we think that one of your most beautifully written books is a genre that you haven't dabbled in before. It was a biography. You recently wrote a biography on the Apostle Paul. What do you think the Apostle Paul was like?

I think he was tremendously exciting and tremendously annoying. Because people who are that motivated and that skilled and that multitasking and that energetic, you know, they make you want to say, "Can we just take two or three weeks off and sort of stay here in Corinth and have something nice to drink?" And Paul is saying, "No, we've got to do this and this and this and this." And, and he knew so much. I mean, he was one of those brilliant young Jews who had swallowed the Bible whole in Hebrew and in Greek and just knew the traditions like the back of his hand. And he must have been very annoying to be with. And I think I say in the book, a very high-maintenance friend. Because, you know, you, um, you worry about having him next to you at a party when you just want to relax and get on with people, because he's going to be, he's relentless. But, "Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am a sounding brass or a tinkling cymbal. Love is patient, and kind, not jealous or boastful." That's a self-description as well, because if it hadn't been, Paul couldn't have written it, or they would have laughed in his face. Paul was passionate and compassionate. He wept with people. He prayed with people. You know, he would stay up all night agonizing over people. And as a pastor, I, I wish I could emulate even a little bit of that. But pastors among you will know when you spend time with people, and you love them, and pray with them, and even if you may be a bit annoying, or they don't like your sermons, they will love you because you're with them, and you're for them. And that's one of the great gifts about, as you're preaching about this morning, about mentoring and guiding and being guided and so on. And, and Paul was like that. But, but he was also, I say, you know, this was a guy who could preach people to death. I mean, you know, people fell out of windows. And, and his friends must have, as we see in Acts, he wanted to go into the theater in Ephesus when there was the riot. He wanted to speak to the people, and his friends had to hold him back like Odysseus being strapped to the masts, you know, and all that. So, yeah, life would not be dull when Paul was around, let's put it like that.

Some of your sharpest critics have come on your material with Paul, particularly over the subject of justification. Put the cookies on a lower shelf for us. What is justification?

Justification is God putting people right so that they can be part of his putting right project for the world. We have heard justification over the last four or five hundred years, particularly actually six or eight hundred years, in terms of the "How do I get to heaven?" gospel, not in terms of the "How does God come and dwell with us and transform the world?" gospel. That's the real problem. This presents exegetically, in that when you read the key passages about justification, for ease of reference, Romans 3, Galatians 3, Philippians 3, there's other little bits and pieces, but those are the three key bits. They are all not just about "How do I get saved?" whatever saved means, but "How do Jews and Gentiles come together into the same family?" And when people started to notice this in the scholarly world, which was in the 60s and 70s, which was when I was coming through as a student, then some people said, "Oh no, it can't be about that because that's just a bit of sociological application, and justification is really all about how we get to heaven and so on." And this is a false either/or. And the false either/or has been perpetuated from both sides, quite often, because there are some who have wanted to turn the gospel into just a bit of sociology. And obviously, that's never been my aim. But here's the point: in Galatians, which is the first exposition of justification written within 20 years of the crucifixion of Jesus, justification by faith in Galatians is the doctrine that all those who believe in Jesus Christ belong at the same table, no matter what their ethnic background, no matter what their gender, no matter what their social status. And I just fear that sometimes that implication is not what people want to hear. And so sometimes the resistance comes at a kind of subliminal level. And this has to be worked out.

Why did Jesus have to die?

Right from the beginning, when God made the world, God made the world in such a way that it would run wisely through humans. That's what the image thing is all about in Genesis 1. God, in other words, reveals himself in Genesis 1 as the God who wants to work in the world through. Why does God do that? I want to say because the Triune God from the very beginning intended to make a world in which the one we now call the second person of the Trinity would be able to come totally appropriately and be the steward of creation by becoming human. Now, God knew from the start that if that was so, then if these human creatures rebelled and went wrong, what that would draw out of him would be more of the same, namely self-giving love. So God then calls a people, the family of Abraham, to be the people through whom he will rescue the world. So that just as God creates humans in his own image so that he can appropriately come and become part of his own creation by becoming human, God calls Israel to be the for the world rescuing people so that their destiny can be fulfilled in their Messiah, so that God can appropriately come and take the weight of the world's evil upon himself. So that there is, the victory of the cross comes about through the substitution of the cross. That when Jesus takes, and it's very close up and personal in the Gospels, Jesus takes the place of Barabbas. It's very specific. He dies and he goes free. And Luke intends us to see, "Oh my goodness, that's how it works all through." But the way that works, if I can put it like that, is that evil has its grip on us because when we sin, we are worshiping idols. And the idols say, "Thank you very much, you're now in our power. You will do whatever we tell you." And we all still do that, even Christians among us. But if our sin is then dealt with by Jesus dying in our place, the grip of the idols is broken. So it isn't a matter of either Christus Victor, Christ wins the victory, or penal substitution. It's victory through substitution. And that is there all through the Old Testament in hints and guesses, with climaxes like Isaiah 53, etc. And this is the plan for how God would reclaim his kingship through the saving, substitutionary death of Jesus. Is that reasonably clear?

Wow. In your popular book on the crucifixion, you describe it as "The Day the Revolution Began." Why do you refer to it as a revolution?

Because once evil is defeated, then all kinds of stuff can happen, starting with the resurrection of Jesus. This is the point of the Gentile mission. Now, people think, reading a book at the moment, an older book on, on missionary strategy in the church and that sort of thing, and the guys writing as though the real thing is we just want to persuade more people to believe in Jesus. Well, we do want to persuade more people to believe in Jesus. But when Paul goes out into the Gentile world, what he's doing as a devout Jew is saying, "The Gentile world has been enthralled to idols of all sorts. It's been enslaved." Until the death of Jesus, there would be no point in going and telling them to believe in Jesus and follow him, because they wouldn't be able to. You see exactly that in John 12, when the Greeks come to the feast, and you expect that Jesus is going to say, "Okay, we'll meet at Starbucks tomorrow and we'll have a chat about this and that." He doesn't. He goes into a whole riff about, "Now the ruler of this world is cast out. Now is the judgment of this world. And if I am lifted up from the earth, I will draw all people to myself." In other words, no point talking to the Greeks just yet. But fairly soon, something is going to happen. Something's going to happen to me as a result of which the age-long slavery of the Gentile world will in principle be broken, so that they will then have nothing to lose but their chains. And the Gentile mission consists of going to say joyfully, "The crucified and risen Jesus is the Lord of the world, and he invites you to submit to his just and gentle rule and find your way into a totally new way of being human." And this is now possible because on the cross, he defeated the powers that have hit the two enslaved you. So that's, that's as it were, how it works. I think that's why, and sorry to answer your question therefore, this is the revolution that all sorts of new things can happen, resulting in new social structures, new ways of being human, new patterns of marriage and family, new this, new that, new the other. This, this is a revolution. And actually, yeah, okay, this is an important point. I hope this is all important, but this is especially important. We in the Western world have been bombarded for the last 200 years at least by people saying that Christianity has been part of the problem, not part of the solution. Most recent example in your country, Steven Pinker, who's made a career out of writing that book two or three times, I think now. And he's, it's basically saying, "Let's get rid of all that Christianity because all the really good things in the world have come to us through the Enlightenment: freedom and truth and democracy." And what he's saying is, "I really like all those things." Which we should know, those are the direct results of the revolution that began when Jesus came out of the tomb on Easter morning. If you know anything about the ancient Greco-Roman world, most of what we now cherish as some of our so-called Western ideals have their roots not in the Roman world, as Edward Gibbon tried to argue in the 1850s, but at the 1750s, but in the Judeo-Christian message coming to full flower in the Christian gospel. So don't be brow-beaten by that Enlightenment rhetoric. Know your church history and see the ways in which the revolutionary message of Jesus really did transform the ancient Roman world, and please God, can go on doing that transformation today.

In John chapter 11, when Lazarus has died, you and I were having a conversation about this the other day. There was that question of, "Lord, if you would have been here, this wouldn't have happened." When you come to the issue of theodicy, of suffering in God, how, how do you think that as Christians, we're to respond to those?

Yeah, Jesus responds with tears. It's a famous verse, like the shortest verse in the New Testament: Jesus wept. And it's something I've been thinking about a lot recently for various reasons, both personal reasons and academic reasons. I've had a student who's been working on the lament psalms and has produced some very moving material about.

That and through that and other reflections, I've come to try to explore. It's a difficult theme and one that I don't think we usually grapple with: the lament of God. That in Romans 8, Paul says that the creation is groaning in travail, waiting for the new day to dawn. We ourselves, who have the first fruits of the Spirit, we groan and we don't know what we should pray for as we ought, and the Spirit is groaning within us.

Now, Paul is a richly Trinitarian theologian. He's talking about the groaning of the Spirit, in other words, the lament of God himself. And he says, "The one who searches the hearts," that's God the Father, "knows the mind of the Spirit." And I link this up all the way back to Genesis 6, where it says that the world had gone so horribly wrong, it grieved God to his heart. And I've been pondering the idea of the grief of God. Jesus in John 12 again, saying, "Now is my soul troubled," and and obviously the tomb of Lazarus. And the idea that part of the vocation of the people of God, the ancient Israelite people of God, and the Christian people of God, is to be the people in whom God's own lament can find appropriate voice. We don't usually think of God like that because we like to think of God as the big guy sitting upstairs, and he's just, you know, he's calm and placid. And classical theology has this very Aristotelian notion of God, um, as though God couldn't possibly be have feelings or whatever. Everything we know about God in the New Testament is that God is passionate and compassionate and is, uh, is lamenting with the laments of the world. There is, of course, also perpetual joy in God. Um, that's why Paul says we're to rejoice with those who rejoice and weep with those who weep. And those kinds of go together. Reflecting God's image into the world involves both. So, yeah, when there are people grieving, we grieve with them. And we hope and pray, ah, Romans 8, that God is right there grieving with us. You know, we have a, there's a little bit of liturgy that we use in some parts of the Anglican world, based on a line from the Book of Wisdom, the Wisdom of Solomon, which is in the Apocrypha, which says, "The Spirit of God fills the whole world." And some in my tradition have turned that into a little liturgical jingle, which on the day of Pentecost, you say every so often during the service, "The Spirit of God fills the whole world. Alleluia, Alleluia." And the first time I ran into that, I was preaching in Durham Cathedral on Pentecost, and I saw this in the service paper, and I thought, you know, this just isn't scratching where I'm itching right now because it was at the time of some of the Middle East crisis and horrible things happening in, in, wherever it was, parts of Europe and North Africa and so on. And I began my sermon by saying, "We've been saying this in this service, but you know what? If the Spirit of God fills the whole world right now, then what the Spirit of God is basically doing is grieving." And that's where we start with the pain of the world, and the fact that God wants to be at the heart of the world. And if the world is in pain, then God is grieving with the pain of the world. And of course, the Father is rejoicing because he is the creator. But we then go to Lazarus, we go to Jesus in Gethsemane. And actually, I think that makes a lot of sense.

I'm going to shift emotional gears on you and also remind people, if you want to text in your questions in a little while, we're going to get, um, to those. And so we're going to have a, a Tom Wright lightning round. Cricket or rugby? Oh, depends on the time of the year. Um, ultimately, cricket. It goes on longer. Guinness or Bass? Goodness, you didn't have to pray about that one, did you? I'll tell you a true story. I had a great uncle by marriage who worked in the Guinness brewery in Dublin. And one, he was an executive. And one day, an employee, uh, got overcome by the fumes. And he went in to try to rescue him, and they both drowned. Wow. The, the apocryphal version of the story is they got out twice to go to the bathroom. Let's close in prayer, everybody. Oxford or Cambridge? Oxford, of course. Manchester or Liverpool? Newcastle. [Applause] Fish and chips or shepherd's pie? Oh, probably shepherd's pie. Yeah. Luther or Calvin? Calvin, every day. You're in a Presbyterian church. That is playing to the home crowd. I love that. Uh, your favorite golf course? Oh, Crail, which is about 12 miles southeast of St. Andrews. Okay. Why do adults eat mushy peas in Britain? But you know, I've been wanting an answer to that question all my life. Explain Brexit. Oh, easy, easy. The European project is high modernism. Let's put everything together and call it solidarity. The politicians hadn't noticed that there is this thing called postmodernism, which says, "A plague on all your big structures. We want our local identities." That's why not only Brexit, but certain other things have happened. What's your next writing project? Oh, um, my next writing project is a, a reference for a student who is applying for a further point in that. No, um, my next writing project is probably finishing off a little book on John, which I wrote most of back in February, but which needs to be re-jigged. And I'm having lunch with my editor in San Diego a week today, or possibly breakfast, I forget, to talk about that. But then the next big thing is a commentary on Galatians. Well, let me know if you need help with either one of those. Thank you very much. Yes, yes. It might take you up on that.

When, when, when we talk about scripture, there have been certain controversies that have, uh, have plagued the church. One of them is the question of women in leadership. As a biblical scholar, what's your perspective on that? It's so funny because I do get asked this question a lot in America. Um, we kind of mostly dealt with it in Britain, which is odd because usually you Americans deal with things about a generation before we do. But on this one, for some reason, it hasn't happened like that. I go very simply to two texts in John 20. The most important thing that any Christian minister can do is to make the announcement that Jesus, the crucified one, has been raised from the dead and is the Lord of the world. Jesus commissions Mary Magdalene to do that foundational activity of Christian mission. And I was talking earlier this evening with somebody about this, um, somebody who is anxious about what it says in 2 Timothy, Timothy 2, about women and men in, in teaching structures and so on. I said, "Who does Jesus tell Mary to go and tell this to?" And the answer is, "My brothers." Those men. He doesn't say to Mary, "I've got a really important message, but I need to tell it to Peter, and then Peter will tell you and others." He, Mary has to tell Peter and the others. Now, from there, I would rest my case. But I would also draw in Romans 16, where Paul talks about several of his female co-workers, including Junia, who is an apostle. But he gives the letter to the Romans to a lady called Phoebe, who is a deacon in the church in Cenchreae, Roman 16, verse 1. And from all we know about ancient letter writing, it's highly likely that Phoebe was the one who would read that letter out in the little assemblies in Rome. It's also quite likely that she would be the one to explain what Paul meant. Figure, quite likely that the first exegesis of Romans ever was done by a Christian businesswoman from eastern Corinth. Now, again, what more do we need to say?

A lot of people want to discredit, uh, the Bible in general, but the Gospels in particular, because they say that science and faith are incompatible because there are these miracles. When you're confronted with that line of reasoning, how do you typically respond? I respond by putting my head in my hands and saying, "Oh, not that stuff again." Um, you know, this is, um, there's a, there's a philosopher, an atheist philosopher in Britain called John Gray, who's written some remarkable books. He's very, very insightful about the present state of our culture. He recently wrote a book called Seven Types of Atheism. It's a very, very interesting book, and I commend it to you for a study of, because we think of atheism as though it's a monolithic thing, and it really isn't. There are different movements and types. And the first one he just dismisses with the wave of the hand, and it's this idea that, "Oh, science has disproved Christianity or whatever." He said, "That's a lame re-run of a 19th-century misunderstanding, and it's largely useful for entertainment purposes only." And I just think, yep, that that's that's about right. The trouble is that in some parts of the world, and sadly in America, you had a thing called the Scopes Trial, which brought an apparent science-faith conflict into the public domain in a big way. But what was actually going on there, as I think is the case, I've checked this out with American cultural historians, was a kind of quasi-religious re-run of certain aspects of the Civil War, of a North versus South thing, of a liberals versus fundamentalist thing. And so the science and faith thing exploded. And thereafter, you, if you wanted to say you were a Christian in certain contexts, you had to be rude about science, and vice versa. If you wanted to say you were a scientist, you had to show you weren't a Christian. So the people like my good friend Francis Collins, one of the greatest scientists of this last generation, has had real difficulty being in public life and being known as a Christian. That to me is just a travesty, both of genuine science, which has deep roots in the Christian tradition, and of, uh, of the Christian faith. And I was thinking about this last night because we did mention this yesterday, and it dawned on me in a way it hadn't quite clicked before, that in general, you know, Genesis 1 has been one of the great battlegrounds. So miracles in the Gospels, yes, but Genesis 1 as well. Genesis 1 focuses, as I said 10 minutes ago, on the creation of humans in God's image, in order that God will reflect his wise ordering of the world through human activity. And then in Genesis 2, this human activity includes naming the animals, which is kind of the first scientific classificatory act. And it is as though, so far from it being the case that science is opposed to Genesis, Genesis actually is the charter for science. Is God saying, "Here is my wonderful world, this heaven and earth creation, and I want you to find your way around in it, to name the animals, to speak words of wisdom which bring my order into the world." That sounds part like prophecy and part like science. The problem with miracles is that in the 18th century, a guy called David Hume, a Scottish philosopher of the Enlightenment, whose statue is right there outside, um, St. Giles' Church in Edinburgh, um, David Hume argued that in any case where a miracle is claimed, there must be a better explanation somewhere. That's a pure a priori. That's just saying, "We think now, we clever people in the 18th century, that the world runs itself, and that God is out of the process and has nothing to do with it." And it's basically a corollary of contemporary Epicureanism. I'm sorry, I know it's eight o'clock on a Sunday night, and I shouldn't overload you with words like that, but this is basically the philosophy that says, as, as a leap of faith, that if there is a God, or if there are gods, they're a long way away. They're upstairs somewhere, and they don't interfere with us, and we can't influence them. And that's an ancient philosophy that was then embraced by many people in the Enlightenment period for political and social reasons, that they wanted to do away with the divine right of kings and with the church telling them what to do. And so they retrieved this ancient philosophy which got rid of God and clergy and all that, so that they could then run the world better downstairs. Think Voltaire, Rousseau, Thomas Jefferson, etc., etc., etc. In the middle of that, obviously, then miracles become this distant God doing this illogical thing of reaching in and stirring the pot and then going away again. That's not what miracles are about. And actually, there are many Greek words for miracle in the Gospels, but they, none of them mean exactly that sort of thing. They are all about a God who is always present and always active, and sometimes does stuff that we didn't expect. But here's the thing with the resurrection of Jesus, which C.S. Lewis says in his brilliant book *Miracles*, is the great miracle of new creation. The point with the resurrection is that it is, of course, a very strange, odd, unexpected, unanticipated event within the old creation. But it is the paradigmatic and launching event within the new creation. And, and here's the thing, the new creation then retrospectively makes sense of the old, like nothing else would. The problem with miracles as conceived by Hume is that they're nonsense. Things like making pigs fly or whatever, just doing crazy things to show how powerful God is. That's not what the biblical miracles are about. They're signs of new creation breaking into the old. And since most of them involve healing, they're signs of the love of the creator, even for his old, wounded world, and of his desire to recreate it by acting with love and grief from within it.

I'm getting now to the questions that many people have sent in. And there are several questions here that have to do with the rise of Islam and Islamism, and what do you think the Christian response needs to be to that today? Yeah, that's a great question. And this is quite, quite a new thing. I mean, I don't think any of us saw this coming, even 20 or 30 years ago. We have to remember that, of course, in the Middle Ages, this was a major problem for the Christian West. And there are many parts of the world which were Christian until the original rise of Islam. North Africa was one of the great cradles of Christianity. Turkey was where some of the greatest saints and scholars and, and Christian teachers were in the early centuries. And, and Islam just wiped all that out. And the, the Muslims got as far as almost the gates of Vienna. And then, I don't know that history too well, but that must have been a really scary moment. The first thing, of course, is to recognize that this is not new. People sometimes say, "Oh, you know, we've had this Christian world, and now we discover there are these other movements out there. What are we to make of it?" And Christianity was born into a religiously plural world. This is not a problem. Um, so, so that's kind of, let's lighten up with this. And let's, as well, acknowledge that Islamism is a particularly hard-edged and actually probably late modern or even postmodern form of Islam. And that most Muslims in the world today are not militant, certainly don't want to line up with ISIS or Al-Qaeda or any of those, are horrified by that. And that there are major divisions within the Muslim world, as between, for instance, Iran and Saudi, and different classical types of Islam, just as divisive, if not more, as the old Catholic-Protestant divides in, in Western Christianity, or the, um, East-West divide in Christianity. And so it's, it's a complex, it's a complex phenomenon. There are many different interpretations of the Quran out there. But of course, the main imperative for Christians is to pray, is to celebrate the Lordship of Jesus, is to discover what it means to follow the crucified and risen Jesus, which does not mean crusades. And any time we use the word crusade in relation to anything that Christians do in the Middle East, then we are making a rod for our own backs. And, and, yeah, it seems to me we, Britain and America particularly, made matters enormously worse in 2002, '03, '04, um, by thinking that we could solve the problem of 9/11 by going and bombing Iraq and Afghanistan and so on. We have created a whole new generation of people who really do believe that the West is the great Satan, and the most devout thing they can do is to find ways of getting back at us. And a lot of us saw that coming. A lot of it wasn't rocket science, you know. This is, this is fairly obvious. But we have, we have not had a good narrative to help us navigate how we work out from where we are. One of the other things we should do, if there's any chance, I have no idea what sort of Islamic population you've got here in Atlanta, but is for Christian local leaders to get to know Muslim local leaders and to try to engage in conversation. Maybe to sit down with the Bible and the Quran. Maybe if there are Jewish interlocutors, to bring them into the conversation as well. That great project called Scriptural Reasoning has been doing this for some while, and I've taken part in that. And this is not syncretism. This is not, "Let's discover that we're all saying the same things," because it's manifestly obvious that we're not. But there is often an enormous amount of goodwill. And ideally, we would be doing that as best we can. I've done a little bit only, I wish I could have done more, partly as a safety mechanism, in order that if something else horrible happens, which please God it won't, then Christians and Muslims and Jews and lots of other people of goodwill might be able literally to link arms on the street and say, "We are not going to let this disrupt our community." Because if we don't know each other, then it might. And that could have even worse effects. So, prayer, celebrating the Lordship of Jesus, and also recognizing many, many Muslims are coming to faith in our own time, not even because of evangelism by Christians, but because they are having dreams about Jesus. I have baptized and confirmed people who came to Britain because they had to get out of Iran because they had had dreams about Jesus, had found a Bible, had read the Gospels, and got converted with no visible Christian input, and so had come to Britain. So this is happening. But, you know, that's just a phenomenon. Who knows what God is doing in that? But we have to pray, and we have to be loyal, and we have to make friends. That's the key thing.

There's a very practical question that's come in and says, "How would you advise a business leader or a CEO to leverage their influence, their role, for the Kingdom of God?" There's all sorts of issues there, aren't there? Because, um, we live in such a, a difficult world for business. Where friends of mine in business, you know, things are very tight. And since the financial crash, some businesses have done better, but a lot have been absolutely on the line. And it's very difficult if somebody says, "I want to do things differently." They may actually find themselves out of business in six months. And, and that's, I appreciate that that's not for me to be idealistic and look down from a great theological height and tell people how to do stuff. I would say for people in any level of business to get together with other Christians who are working at the same level, and to find wise pastoral help to think into the real issues, whether it's about interest rates, whether it's about modern methods of banking, whether it's about two-thirds world debt, whether it's about industrial methods, whether it's about pollution and climate change, and so on. All of this stuff is going on. And we cannot ignore it. But most of us, and most people as individuals in business, are not equipped to meet all those challenges. And you need to be, are you? I'm sure there's some of you here. You need to be together with four or five or a dozen others in a regular group where you pray for one another, and where you invite wise people who've been in that world, maybe, but, uh, Christian leaders as well, to come and say, "How do we wrestle with these issues?" Because I, I haven't got the answers. My dad was a businessman, but, bless him, he just got on with that and didn't trouble us with what was going on, happily. Um, so I, I really don't know nearly as much about that world as I should.

This question says, "In your opinion, what's the biggest challenge facing the church today?" That's a cognate question for me with one I'm often asked about Paul. If Paul could come back today, what would he be most startled or surprised at? And I unhesitatingly say, not just that we are not united, but that we don't care for. Paul. Every letter Paul writes is about unity. Whether it's about the unity of slave and free in Philemon, whether it's about the unity of Jew and Gentile in Galatians, whether it's about the unity of different factions in the church in Romans, whatever it is. We have elevated justification by faith, ironically, to the point where we've split over justification by faith. Justification by faith, as I said before, is the doctrine that if we believe in Jesus, we belong together, and together we face the world. And my friends, if the church is disunited, Caesar takes no notice. And the church is there, according to Ephesians chapter 3, to be the sign to the principalities and powers of the world that Jesus is Lord and they are not. But as long as we're disunited, and the media love it when we're disunited, because then the media can be the critics of society rather than us. So that would be the first one. The second one would be that we are going soft on the doctrine of creation. We kind of Christians take it for granted, or they think that the doctrine of creation is all about defending the the literal truth of Genesis 1 or something like that. The goodness of creation stands behind most of the major debates that we're having in church today. Harold Bloom argued a generation ago that the the automatic religion of many Americans was Gnosticism. Gnosticism is the religion that says creation is rather a funny old thing. What really matters is the hidden spark within me which tells me who I really am and gives me the agenda to which I have to be obedient. That's a kind of a modern reading of it, but that's what's going on in the second and third centuries. That is very characteristic of much Western Christianity now. Let's not bother about the way that creation actually is. Let's look deep inside ourselves and see what spark of this all that is going on. And that's my real, and I think Paul and Jesus would nail that as being a denial of the first article of the creed.

There's a pointed question here of, "Can you lose your salvation?" That's, that's a great. I don't think they were saying you personally. I think that was just wanted to make sure I didn't think it was an accusation the way it was written. No, I, I, but you'd be quite justified in doing so. Paul says in First Corinthians 9, he says, "I pummel my body and I bring it into subjection, lest having preached to others, I myself should be a castaway." Those of us who are preachers, I think, should read that passage quite frequently, because it is possible to be horribly self-deceived. And there have been fine Christian leaders, apparently, who have been horribly self-deceived. I know that's a way that Calvinists then get off the hook, that if somebody does actually go totally off the rails and deny everything, etc., you either say, "Well, they've just gone mad, and God will save them anyway," which might be the case, or you say, "They were never really saved in the first place." And those are the two sort of get-out clauses. It seems to me that there's always the danger with any doctrine of assurance that assurance can spill over into being casual. And I fear for that with young people who are told that because they have said a prayer, they are now saved, and nothing they can do can stop that. And that if they try to do any sort of good works, they are merely adding to their salvation by their own efforts, and that's wrong. And I think that's a recipe for moral shipwreck in the next generation. But I say to myself, you know, as a 70-year-old preacher, yeah, I got to watch out, lest having preached to others, I myself should be a castaway. I take that very seriously, not because I don't believe in the doctrine of assurance, but because I know my own heart.

Here's a question from an 18-year-old senior female: "What is the relationship between emotion and faith?" Oh, wonderful question, wonderful question. Jesus taught us to love God with our heart and mind and soul and strength. We humans are all quite different. We have various mapping exercises which we all have now played with for the last generation, the Myers-Briggs pattern, the Enneagram, various other things, which you've no doubt all done. And you've probably all now figured out where I am on those scales, and Rich will tell you afterwards. Many people come into Christian faith along the line that their particular personality is leading them. And in some cases, that may well be emotion. I know people who are Christians today because they heard Handel's Messiah or Bach's Matthew Passion or something, and the sheer power of the music drew them into the narrative. But you can't stay with that forever. You need to move around the heart and the mind and the soul and strength. Of, I know many other people who become Christians because they read the Gospel and they see Jesus going around rebuking the rich and looking after the poor and doing healing and taking care of old ladies and small children and stray dogs and everybody else and think, "This is the Kingdom of God, and I'm going to get involved with that." This is the strength bit. And only when they then bump their noses against some of the harsher realities of the world, they realize there's got to be the heart and the mind and the soul as well for this to make sense. But I'd rather people got started wherever they get started, and then go round the circle, than say, "Oh dear, we've got to be careful about muddling up our emotions with faith." Um, so that, yeah, you know, if on the Myers-Briggs, you're you're an NFP, then chances are your faith and your emotions will have quite a lot to do with each other. If you're an SGJ, you're probably very worried about your emotions and keep them in a little box somewhere. Um, and if I was your pastor to either of those, I would say, "You guys need to learn from each other." Does that make sense? It does. Personally, it makes a lot of sense.

One of your newest projects has been, um, something that you're celebrating is kind of the reason that you're in the States, has been, uh, this New Testament survey and overview. And it's, it's humbling to probably see your life's work pulled together in kind of a condensed format and the partnership. Tell us about that project that you've been working on. That was great fun. About eight or ten years ago, a young Australian scholar called Michael Bird approached one of our publishers, I forget which one, possibly Zondervan or SPCK or both, and said, "Wouldn't it be great if somebody could take all these great splodgy books that N.T. Wright has been writing and actually make it more accessible for a student course all in one?" And whichever publisher it was, thought about it and said, "Actually, yeah, great idea. And you might are the person to do that." So they approached me and said, "How would it be if Mike Bird took your work and turned the whole thing into a one-volume introduction to the New Testament aimed at students and so on?" So I said, "Fine, okay." I thought I wasn't going to have to do any work. In fact, of course, when somebody, especially an Australian, a rather cheeky but brilliant Australian, um, does that with your work, then I worked through it inch by inch and edited it and in some cases rewrote whole chunks, including some of the stuff which he was quoting from me. I thought, "I won't do it differently this time." So the book is a rewrite, um, and in some cases a rewrite, but it's an attempt to woo people into the word. The book is called *The New Testament in Its World* because most modern Christians don't know the world of the New Testament very well. And, you know, I've said two or three times this weekend already, God is not limited by our ignorances. The fact that we don't know stuff doesn't mean that God can't speak to us through scripture. But my goodness, the more we learn, especially if you're in any form of church leadership, the more you learn about that world, the more the stuff is coming up in three dimensions and it makes so much sense. And, and stories that you vaguely knew, you suddenly see, "Oh yeah, that's what's going on." And the more we know about the New Testament in its world, the more relevant it becomes to our world. And that's the point of this book. I should say it's quite a fat book, it's quite a brick, it's quite heavy, but it's full of charts and maps and pictures and photographs and diagrams and timelines and so on. So it's kind of fun to work through, including some spoof emails. We, this is a genre we learned from a mutual friend, that in order to get at certain questions, we imagine some student who's maybe traveling around the Holy Land or something, emailing back to his professor back home saying, "Hi Prof, I'm here and this is going on and I just read this and what was that about?" And then we have the prof saying, "Ah, thanks for that. I'm glad you're having a good trip. Well, you need to read this, but actually the real point is that." And so it's kind of not just straightforward prose, but great fun to to get in and explore from every possible angle the world of the New Testament, and then how is the New Testament put together? What is it? What's it doing? And, and then particularly, how do we use it? And how does it fund and shape the mission of God in tomorrow's world?

There's a question here on, "What's your morning routine with scripture?" Oh, um, my morning routine is to hold scripture within the traditional Anglican form of morning prayer. So there's an opening canticle, usually Psalm 95, and then an opening psalm or two. And so I'm reading psalms on a regular rotating basis. And I swap turn and turn about in the Hebrew and the Septuagint. And then there's an Old Testament passage. And that is just, again, working through the Old Testament on a regular basis, roughly once a year. And then there's a canticle in the liturgy which, um, praises God for his mighty acts. And then there's the New Testament reading, which is usually, um, I, I have a marker which just moves forward from Acts to Revelation. And then I have another marker which moves forward from Matthew through John. And those are just going on either a chapter or half a chapter a day. And then there's a time of prayer. So, um, I've been doing that for years and years and years. And, and it's just, it's just going on all the time.

Do you have a favorite psalm right now? Oh, interesting. Somebody asked me a little while ago, "If you had one sermon left to preach, what would you preach on?" It's a really stupid question, but I said, so I, I gave an off-the-cuff answer. I said, Psalm 2. And actually, I, I thinking about that, the first lecture I did in Oxford, um, two, two weeks ago, I did a lecture on Psalm 2, which I really enjoyed. But I think I want to say 72. And it's not only because that's going to be my next birthday, but, um, 72 is this amazing vision of the Messianic task, which is to look after the poor and needy and the widow and the orphan. And that when God's anointed does that, then the whole earth will be filled with his glory. It's the end of the psalm, you see. The point in scripture, the Messiah has several tasks. One of which is to build or rebuild or cleanse the temple. Think David, think Solomon, think Josiah, think Hezekiah, think Zerubbabel, think the Maccabees, think Herod, of all people, think Jesus, of all people. Why do you rebuild or cleanse the temple? So that the presence of God may fill the temple. Why do you do justice for the poor and the needy and the widow and the orphan? So that the glory of God may fill the whole earth. It's the same thing.

I heard you reference one in a podcast or a radio broadcast of some sign that in the midst of certain disagreements, that there are demands that are placed on our charity, but not on our conscience. What do you mean by that? Oh, okay, okay. This was a principle that was hammered out by the church in South India in the 1940s, when they decided that it was totally ridiculous there in South India to have the Methodists, the Presbyterians, the Congregationalists, the Anglicans, the this, that, the everybody else. And that they were pretty similar. And from the perspective of mainstream Indian culture, they look more or less identical. They're reading the same scriptures and often singing the same hymns and, you know, all the rest. So they decided they would get together. And one of the sticking points was ordination. That some of them, particularly the Anglicans, believed very much that only people who had been episcopally ordained should preside at the Lord's Supper of the Eucharist. Some of the churches didn't believe that at all. Anyone could do this. And there was quite a lot of disagreement about that. So they agreed that rather than putting a strain on anyone's conscience, they would put a strain on people's charity. And they would say, "We'll have a waiting period. And during that waiting period, everyone who now comes forward for ministry will be ordained in such a way that this will be acceptable to everybody." And in the meantime, we won't force anyone to receive communion from somebody that they're they really in conscience don't feel they can do that. And I've seen this principle at work as well. As we in the Church of England have received women's ministry, sometimes it goes horribly wrong because some people get very angry and very rude in both direct, all directions. But in principle, it works like this, that we don't want anyone to sense that their conscience is being bruised by this. But we want to help them grow together to a place where even if we disagree, we can accept one another's another as brothers and sisters. And that's really tough. But this is the principle then which Paul works out of, adiaphora, of things that shouldn't make a difference. They may make a difference, but if they shouldn't make a difference, then we need to help one another's consciences toward this. This is all First Corinthians 8, 9, and 10, by the way, particularly 8. But while that process is going on, we don't force people to act against their consciences. And one of the most important things we have to learn as Western Christians today is how to tell the difference between the differences that make a difference and the differences that don't make a difference. Should I say it again? How to tell the difference between the differences that make a difference and the differences that don't make a difference. And the difference between those two sorts of difference is night and day. When Paul was going around pastoring the churches in Galatia and Corinth and etc., and he says, "Circumcision and uncircumcision doesn't make any difference now because Jesus Christ died and was raised." He knew perfectly well that that was explosive because that's a major thing in Judaism. There are many things in the church today which some people, in my view rightly, perceive as radically divisive. And other people say, "No, we can live with that difference." And the answer is, you can't just assume. You can't just assume that because you're happy with it, that automatically means it's adiaphora, it's something you shouldn't make a difference over. This has to be worked out. And the decision as to what sort of difference it is cannot be taken locally. It's probably quite enough.

So, have we been richly blessed tonight by this conversation, Tom? Tom, I wonder if you would be willing to, uh, give us a closing prayer. Sure, sure. Shall we stand? Um, I'll say a prayer, and then I'll use a blessing which I regularly used when I was Bishop of Durham. Father, thank you for this church, and for all that it has meant to so many. Thank you for those who've labored here in the past, and thank you for the honor that I have of doing something with that name attached. Thank you for those who today are working here, both in public leadership and behind the scenes, in doing all the things that make a church a church. Thank you for the impact that this church has had and is having and will have on Atlanta and on Georgia and on many other places around the world. Father, I pray for strength. I pray for courage. I pray for wisdom, especially with all the difficult things which we all face politically, socially, ethically, theologically. Pray for Rich and his colleagues, that as they preach and teach and study and pray and learn, you will guide them, you will steer them into wise paths. Keep far their foes, give peace at home, where you are, guide no ill can come. So, Father, we pray your blessing on this place. So may Almighty God give you grace. May he enable you to be faithful to his calling, fruitful in his service, cheerful in his service, and fruitful for his kingdom. And the blessing of God Almighty, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, be upon you, and through you, with all those to whom he sends you, now and always. Amen. Amen. Can we give Tom Wright? Thank you. Thank you so much. [Music]