The Paul Debate; Paul and the Faithfulness of God | NT Wright

Welcome to WTC Live this month with Professor N.T. Wright, former Bishop of Durham and now Research Professor of New Testament and Early Christianity at the University of St. Andrews. Wright has authored numerous books. Uh, I found, according to Goodreads, about 131 listed there. But at the heart of his publishing is his multivolume Christian Origins and the Question of God series, uh, which includes the books *The New Testament and the People of God*, *Jesus and the Victory of God*, *The Resurrection of the Son of God*, and now more recently, *Paul and the Faithfulness of God*.

The focus of our discussion today is his recent *Paul and the Faithfulness of God*, and as well as his book, his short book, *The Paul Debate*, uh, in which Wright responds to criticisms of his big book on Paul. So, Professor Wright, thank you for taking the time to join us today.

Thank you. It's good to be with you. I should just say, since we are both sitting in the UK right now, that both of those books are published by SPCK in London. Um, uh, for Fortress, pick up the SPCK one, but then the Baylor one was commissioned by Baylor, and SPCK have picked it up. But I think my publishers in London would not be happy if I didn't mention it. I also just want to mention, uh, the book *Paul and His Recent Interpreters*, also published in the UK by SPCK, uh, that you can also access to, uh, find out about recent scholarship on Paul.

So, as we begin this interview, I'd like to just, uh, start out with a word of prayer. Lord, we're grateful for the opportunity to discuss, uh, your servant Paul and his relevance for the church. And as we reflect and, uh, discuss today, I pray that our discussion would be an act of prayer and worship of you. Amen. Amen.

So, the, the first, uh, question, um, is is quite a serious question, and that is, you have these these heavy-hitting academic books, U, published, um, you know, under the name N.T. Wright. And I'm just curious if, um, if you've ever read any Tom Wright, and, uh, so, so, and if you're comfortable with the extent to which, uh, he seems to draw from your work.

This is an old chestnut. And indeed, in America, it's more confusing because several of the books which in Britain are under the name Tom Wright are in America under the name N.T. Wright, but some of them leak across the Atlantic. The Americans prefer the initials, but SPCK, when I first started publishing little paperbacks with them, they said, "No, N. is far too formal. We want to be more chatty, so you have to be Tom." So, um, yeah, there's been an ongoing dialogue about that. And indeed, I have had people say to me, um, "Well, I read that book because I thought it was going to be easier because it had Tom on the cover, but in fact, it's an N.T. Wright book, really, so it was more difficult or something like that." I've also had people in America, um, try to discern the theological difference between the two, which would be intriguing if anyone could actually come up with it, but hopefully they won't find out.

Yeah, you've consistently described your work, uh, is, in particular your academic work, as that of a historian, and which is very clear from, from the way that you do your scholarship. Um, but I'm interested here at the start, uh, in some of the other influences on your work, and in particular, maybe some defining, um, spiritual experiences, and how those have shaped your work and scholarship.

Yeah, I mean, one can go into a lot of autobiographical detail, and that's probably inappropriate. But I, I grew up in a, in a Christian churchgoing family, um, an ordinary middle Anglican family in the middle of North, um, umberland in the 1950s. And, uh, so church once or twice every Sunday, um, prayers at bedtime, that sort of thing. And it was within that context, and knowing a lot of hymns and singing in the church choir and so on, was in that within that context that I started to have an experience, a personal experience of the, of the presence and love of God from quite an early age. So that from quite an early age, I think I was about, maybe seven, I actually believed that I was called to the ordained ministry, which I, I knew quite a bit about because there were some of my mother's relatives who were ordained, including my mother's father, who I was quite close to. Um, so it was sort of a natural thing.

And then through my teens, I used to go very frequently to, um, Scripture Union boys' camps in Scotland, which I loved because of the activities, climbing and sailing and canoeing and all that sort of thing. But also because morning and evening, we had simple Bible talks explaining some basic things, getting us to open the Bible and look at particular passages, and what did this mean, and how did this apply to us? And so I, I was really nurtured through my teens, um, on, on that, and plenty of other influences as well. And, and the quiet, um, undemonstrative context of home, which was basically supportive, even though in the usual sort of, um, 1950s, even, um, English way, one didn't talk too much about one's own private spirituality. It was too, too full-on, too emotional, one that one didn't do that.

But, um, then gradually through my 20s and through, um, uh, when I was ordained and so on, I've worked in a number of, of different contexts. And because I was, um, to my surprise, uh, apparently gifted academically, which I had not expected, I didn't know when I was young that there was such a thing as, uh, as an academic world. Never, never occurred to me. Um, but I, I became more and more attracted into, um, the serious study of both philosophy and ancient history, which that was my first degree, and then into theology. And so all of these things flowed together with the sense of vocation, of putting together a vocation to love God and serve him and know him better, a vocation to public ministry in the church, and a vocation to historical and theological scholarship. So the New Testament has always been, um, a natural focus, maybe the natural focus.

So then, as you moved into the academic study of the New Testament, how is it that you specifically landed on Paul as the, the, the recurrent focus of your scholarly work?

Well, I, it's curious. I was attending the lectures of George Caird in Oxford. Caird was one of the great, um, lecturers in Oxford that I had the privilege to sit under. And I remember thinking, "Wow, you know, that's just an amazing thing to be able to do, to stand up there and hold forth and explain whole chunks of the Bible and do this big picture stuff as well as some of the little detail and hold all that together." And it's quite dramatic. Um, but I decided if I was going to do research, I wanted to do something which would keep me focused on Old as well as New Testament, which means I was looking at the use of the Old, Old Testament in the New. I don't actually like that phrase, but, um, it's, it's a phrase we often use because I think it's a more organic connection rather than just use in a sort of pragmatic way. But still, so I thought, well, where are you going to start with that? And I thought, well, the, the obvious places are either John or Paul.

And I went and talked to George Caird, rather nervously, and said, "I'd really like to do research. I want to do something on Old Testament in New, and I'm thinking of John, I'm thinking of Paul." And he strongly put me off John. He said, "At the moment, there's a lot of stuff being done on hypothetical Jewish lectionaries which may lie behind the use of the Old Testament of John. He said, "The trouble is that nobody really knows that much about that stuff, and so you sink in a morass of speculation, and you could spend an entire doctoral dissertation just going around those loops and never really get anywhere." And so I said, "Well, okay, Paul then." And, and so the rest is, is history. I'm still struggling to get back to John. I love John dearly, and I write about John from time to time, but I haven't done major work on him.

But so then naturally, the focus for me was Romans, where, which is the highest concentration of the Old Testament of Paul, and particularly Romans 9-11, where Paul is actually wrestling with the question of, "What then do we say about Israel's scriptures? What do we say about the Abraham story, the law, and so on?" So that's always been, uh, where the thing has focused from.

So then, as you got into the, the study of Paul, and in particular Romans, then what were, what were some of the questions that, when you started in the study, in academic study of Romans, were unanswered at the time and were really driving and motivating you in your investigation of Paul?

Well, there's all sorts of things which came out of my experience in the student Christian work in the Christian Union in Oxford, which I was very much involved with, where, for instance, there was a lot of discussion about how you read Romans 6, 7, and 8, and whether, in fact, Romans 7 describes the normal Christian life, or whether that is a sort of second-rate Christian life, and one should escape from that and get into Romans 8 instead. Dead. And if so, how? And people were reading old writers like Watchman Nee and saying that there was, uh, okay, you had to be justified by faith, we all knew that, but now you had to be sanctified by faith, and that this was a kind of a second step. So there was a lot of that theology which was also around with some of the early charismatic movements in the '60s, um, where people were saying that now that you have spoken in tongues or something, this has lifted you to a different spiritual plane. Now, I don't think that Paul was talking about any of that stuff, but these were questions which forced me to look at Romans 6, 7, and 8 and to ask difficult questions about what was he talking about, how did it work? And only gradually, over the years, I've realized that, um, we have to read Paul in terms of first-century questions and not 19th or 20th-century questions. But that takes a lot of work to get there.

At the same time, there were all the questions in the Calvinism of the time about predestination and election, and naturally those focused on Romans 9 in particular. And I got more and more puzzled about that. And gradually, gradually, gradually, the question to me that emerged was, "Okay, it's to do with justification. It's to do with Abraham in Romans 4. It's to do with Abraham in Galatians 3. And then it was to do with the interplay between Galatians and Romans on the, the business of the law." And here's one of the big questions which was driving it, where I always disagreed with George Caird. And by the time he died, I think we had got much closer together, bless him. But, um, to begin with, he was taking what I would see as a more robustly Lutheran view. Interesting, because he was himself in the Reformed tradition, but the Lutheran view, which very broadly and broad brush says, well, um, the law was, uh, there in the Old Testament, and that was to drive you to the gospel because you can't keep the law. So now Christ is the end of the law. Romans 10:4 became the central text, really. What do you do with *telos* and *Christos* in Romans 10:4?

And so, um, I saw that as actually related to a lot of other issues because I would hear people in sermons, particularly in my church back home, if you quoted the Old Testament back at them, they would say, "Ah, but Christ has come since then, and Christ is the end of the law." In other words, we are more or less Marcionites now. That wasn't George Caird's position at all, but there was a sense of an abolition of the law or fulfillment of the law, and it was, if you like, a replay of Luther versus Calvin. And that's when I found Charles Cranfield's work so enormously helpful, a positive view of the law, which then led me back into the Calvinist tradition, where you have a much more, much stronger view of the positivity of the call of Israel, of the election of Israel, of the law. And then the question comes, "What then do you do with Galatians?" because Galatians seems to be very negative about the law. And so that question of the, of the integration, did Paul just change his mind? Was there a development? Those became the big questions. And then it became the question of how actually Romans itself integrates, what is the sequence of thought within the four main sections of Romans itself? And so, so that was how I got into it. And inevitably, we all sort of stumble in sideways and find ourselves dealing with texts which are saying things that we weren't expecting them to say. And that's when the question of being a historian really matters, that the historian is trying to find out what was going on in the first century that made Paul write like this. He wasn't writing a first-century version of a 20th-century handbook of dogmatics. He was addressing issues that he saw. And so that then drove me back into the first-century Jewish world, to Josephus, to the Scrolls, to the Septuagint, and so on, to try to discern what was the matrix of thought within which all this made sense. But that Jewish world, of course, within the Greco-Roman world, which I knew from my classical studies, um, and which I've never really left behind. So that, that really tells you what was the way in for me all through.

So, of course, that, that Jewish context and the Greco-Roman context are, are sort of the focus of the first, of all the first half of your *Paul and the Faithfulness of God* book. I'm just wondering if, uh, for our listeners and viewers, you could outline for us the, the major aims of *Paul and the Faithfulness of God*. What is it that you were, what were the driving questions there, and what is it that you hope to accomplish?

Goodness. Um, the main aim of *Paul and the Faithfulness of God* is to articulate, uh, the center of Paul's theology. How did his theology work? And the main way I was doing that, and it's a thought experiment, but it's one which I, I think I still think has worked, um, the way of doing that was to say, "Let's put to one side the categories of how we organize systematic theology, particularly from the 16th century onwards, where you have God, humans, sin, salvation, etc., etc., and you have sort of ethics in the church way down the back somewhere." And let's say, "Supposing Paul, as a first-century Jew, really does believe that Israel's God has revealed himself fully and finally in and as Jesus of Nazareth." That seems to be basic. But in that case, his theology is much more likely to be oriented around the way that first-century Jews would think. And if you go to Jewish books on, what we basically, not that Jews do theology in the way that Christians do it, and that's part of the point, that theology is something that is one of the theses of the book that Paul invents, because it's only as you're thinking prayerfully, scripturally about who God is, who God's people are, etc., that the church will be the church. So part of my argument is that Paul invents this new discipline, this new exercise, spiritual and mental exercise, because only when the church is wrestling with these questions will it be united and holy, which is what again and again and again in his letters he insists on, the unity and the holiness of the church. We have pushed that to one side in the post-Reformation debate. For Paul, it's absolutely central. Every letter is dealing with that in one way or another.

So then I was saying, "Okay, if this is what he's doing, here's the thought experiment. Supposing you take monotheism, election, and eschatology, the three main things of Judaism: one God, one people of God, one future for God's world. And supposing you see each one of those rethought around Jesus as Israel's Messiah and around the gift of the Spirit, what then does it look like? How then does it fall out? How then do we approach our normal topics in a whole new light?" But at the same time, I wanted to say Paul is doing this not in a bubble, not in a vacuum, but within this very complex historical world. He was a Roman citizen, he was fluent in Greek, and had lived in Tarsus, one of the major centers of ancient philosophy. A lot of what he was doing was resonating with his Roman world, his Greek philosophical world. And in a sense, he never left behind his Jewish world. There are some people today who talk about Paul within Judaism as a way of saying, "Paul is just another way of being Jewish," and that's that. I think that's misleading. For Paul, the idea that Israel's Messiah was crucified and raised from the dead had shattering, scandalous, as he knew, implications for what it meant to be a Jew. But anyway, so I decided the only way of getting at this, because there have been so many misunderstandings, was to do some serious groundwork and to talk about Paul's Jewish world, his Greco-Roman world, and so on, in the first quarter of the book, actually. And then to look through the worldview model at the stories and symbols and practices and the questions which enable Paul's worldview to be mapped in the way that I've talked about in my other books. And only then to say, "So what is the heart of his theology?" And then to come back and say, "If that's what it was for me, for Paul, thank you." I'm tracking with. Before theology is not just an exercise in which we sort out our ideas and then we feel good because we've got a nice coherent package. Theology has to be in the service of the mission of God for the world. And hence, I wanted to come back to that world of Rome, of Greece, the world of ancient religion, the world of ancient Israel, and say, "If this is what Paul's theology looked like, what impact did he believe it was having?" And there I engage with current debates which are going on in those. So that's about as short a summary as I think I can do of what is the longest book I have ever written, and please God, the longest book I ever will write.

That's a really helpful overview. Um, one of the things that I, I saw you wrestling with in that book is this, uh, the tension between saying that Paul is, uh, sees something radically new that's happened in in Christ on the one hand, but on the other hand, that this is something that, uh, is either expected or in continuity with the story of God's people in Israel. Um, is that a fair assessment of that tension? And then how do, how do you, how did you maintain that, that balance? And what happens if you tip off too much to one side, either continuity or discontinuity?

It's very, very difficult for me, and I think I'm tracking Paul here. Uh, the heart of it is the death and resurrection of Jesus as Israel's Messiah, who represents Israel, who there represents the whole world. That chain of representation, by the way, is absolutely vital. That Israel is called, according to Isaiah, according to the Psalms, according to Genesis, Israel is called to a role within the Creator God's purposes for the whole world. And Jesus, as the king, as the Messiah, is called to sum up Israel's destiny and himself. For me, everything hinges around that sequence of thought. Then, uh, the continuity and discontinuity comes with the shock that Israel's Messiah was crucified by the pagans. This was not a noble death. This was a shameful death. This was the most shocking thing that could possibly happen. And of course, it said to anyone watching, "Well, he was a failed Messiah, then, because everybody knows it's failed Messiahs who end up on crosses." Um, but then God raised him from the dead. And the resurrection, and the continuity of the body of Jesus between death and resurrection, continuity yet transformation. It's a transformed body, though it is still known by the mark of the nails. All of that is really, really important. And I think that's what's going on in the Gospels as well. It's a way of saying that what is now born with the resurrection is new creation, but it's not a *creatio ex nihilo*, a creation out of nothing. It's a *creatio ex vetere*, it's the new creation born out of the old. Romans 8 says this in terms of the metaphor of birth, where the creation is groaning in travail and then will give birth. And he describes it in 1 Corinthians 15 as a great battle, um, in which the enemy, sin and death, are destroyed. And when death is destroyed, that means that the thing that death was itself trying to destroy is liberated from that. So there is continuity, even though there is, is the radical discontinuity. And you can see that working out, for instance, in terms of what you might call, it's a tricky word, Paul's ethics. That for Paul, there are some things which for a Jew, you just don't do, like eating pork or whatever. And Paul says, as in Mark 7, as in Mark 7, Jesus said that actually now all foods are clean. God is the God of all people, Jew and Gentile alike. So the Jew-specific aspects of Torah are now set aside. But at the same time, that doesn't mean Paul is saying, "Oh, well, the law was a first attempt and it didn't work, so let's forget that." Because he says, "No, the law is the marker which says this is what genuine humanness looks like." So, for instance, Paul's sexual ethics are very much consonant with ancient Israel's sexual ethics, because Paul believes in new creation. He believes that the new humanity has come to birth, and therefore there are some things which are enhanced, particularly the identity of male and female and so on. And so people get in a huge puzzle about this today, but actually for Paul, there is a coherence to it, which so much contemporary Christian teaching of whatever sort really hasn't grasped. Because it's not enough to say, "Oh, well, the Bible says this, therefore..." Because actually, Galatians 3, Hebrews, etc., there is huge transformation with the death and resurrection of Jesus and the gift of the Spirit. And there's some things which were appropriate under the old covenant which are not appropriate under the new. Other things which are intensified and brought out. So whatever sphere you're looking at, whether it's justification, Christology, whatever, that continuity and discontinuity is always there.

Yeah, that's good. Um, so along the lines of continuity, one of the things that you're wanting to say in your work is that Paul is writing these letters addressing specific needs in Rome, Galatia, etc., but that underneath and and driving and sustaining, uh, these letters, there is a big story of Exodus, Covenant, land, then exile, and so on. So for some reviewers of your book, *Paul and the Faithfulness of God*, they've had trouble seeing a consistent big story in Paul, and specifically exile and return supporting his arguments. What, in your mind, is the strongest case for seeing a storied worldview at work in Paul, and what's at stake in losing that storied worldview?

Okay. Um, this is a long and complex argument. Inevitably, when I first set it out about 20 years ago, I thought it was completely simple. Then I started getting feedback from people and realized the layer upon layer upon layer of misunderstanding, misunderstanding what I was saying, misunderstanding, as I see it, of what the Bible is saying. A lot of this goes back to Daniel 9 and the use of Daniel 9 in the Second Temple period. In Daniel 9, it says that the exile will not only last for 70 years as Jeremiah had said, but it'll be 70 times 7 years, which is like a kind of mega-Jubilee. And that means there's a 490-year exile. And whenever you think Daniel was written, if it's being edited or put together at the time of the Maccabean crisis in the second century, um, BC, then the assumption is, and you can see this in Jubilees, you can see it in Qumran, you can see it in several different texts, and all the way on to Josephus, that people are calculating, "When will this 490-year period be up?" Because until that time, then the Messiah won't come, then the pagans will still be ruling over us. So you have Ezra and Nehemiah both saying, "We are in our own land, but we are slaves in our own land." And this is the point, that the time after some Jews returned from Babylon, they didn't all return, of course, the time after that return was an ambiguous time from some points of view. They had returned, they were rebuilding the temple, but if you read Zechariah, if you read Haggai, if you read Malachi, it is a deeply ambiguous time. And Zechariah and Malachi pick up the prophecies of Isaiah and Ezekiel, which say that Israel's God will return to the temple, and they say, "But that hasn't happened yet. We're still waiting for that." That's why the priests are bored in Malachi, because, "Oh, why, why are we bothering doing this stuff? Just bring any old sheep, it doesn't matter." And Malachi says, "No, the Lord whom you seek will suddenly come to his temple." In other words, there is this strong sense of waiting for the final fulfillment of Isaiah and Jeremiah and Ezekiel. And the whole of the Second Temple theology is like that.

The resistance to this comes, I think, from those who grew up, as I grew up, believing in a great break, that the Old Testament is sort of back there and is full of promises and types and shadows, and then something totally new happens with Jesus. Whereas you only have to read the first page of Matthew, or the first two pages of Luke, or the first page of John, to see that all the Gospels, in their own way, are saying, "This is where the great story of Israel was going." And for Matthew, it's very clear: Abraham, David, exile, Messiah. That's how to tell the story. The key thing is then the end of Deuteronomy. Deuteronomy from 26 through to the end, but particularly 28, 29, 30, and then 32. And we know that Deuteronomy is being, uh, read this way in the first century from all sorts of, uh, different bits of evidence, not these, Josephus. And then the fusion of Deuteronomy with Daniel 9 in many readings is to say that the Deuteronomic scheme is that Israel will sin, will commit idolatry, will be sent into exile, and then one day, Deuteronomy 30, God will circumcise their hearts so they will love him and return to him, and he will return to them. And then Deuteronomy 32 is a kind of advanced warning of the whole history of Israel. And Josephus, very interestingly, as well as saying that the Jews were incited to war in the middle of the first century by a book he refers to, which I'm pretty sure must be Daniel, he also says that Deuteronomy 32 is the story that we're still living in. He says, "This is a prophecy of events which are being fulfilled in our own time." And the early Christians do not say, "No, no, no, let's not think about historical fulfillment, let's think about God breaking into doing something totally new." They plug into that Deuteronomic and Daniel-shaped expectation. That's the simplest, most basic way I can say it. But, uh, in chapter 2 of BFG, I've set it out as fully as I have ever dared. To some people, grumble about the length of the book. And the answer to that, I'm afraid, is if you see the kind of flak that I've had with previous attempts, the only way to get the case on the table is to go through text after text after text. And one of the things I find frustrating about some of the reviewers is that they actually aren't critiquing that book. They're critiquing, um, earlier first attempts where I was summarizing things. So that the debate continues, should we say.

Yeah. Uh, one of the things that that also came up in a review, um, by Larry Hurtado, is that, uh, in in your book, you've, you've, you've said on a number of occasions that, um, you've repeatedly accounted for Paul's reworking of Israel by ascribing to the Jewish people a failure to be a light to the nations, to the nations, a selfish grasping, uh, after that elect status for themselves. But then Hurtado says that, but to my knowledge, Paul's only expression of disappointment with his Jewish kinsfolk have to do with their unbelief in or opposition to Jesus in the Gospel. So, for him, it, it seems that for Paul, it was Jesus in the Gospel that produced the question of whether Israel had fallen irreparably, and not a putative prior failure, uh, of Israel as the elect people. So what would you say to that, uh, that criticism?

That's, that's, as one would expect from Larry Hurtado, that's a shrewd and interesting criticism. However, I would go back to Romans 2. And in Romans 2, and I, I have a very particular, uh, take on Romans 2, as, as my readers will know, and there's a whole long essay on it in the book, *Pauline Perspectives*, and one, one of them. Yeah, causing God's name to be in disrepute. Is it that? Well, exactly. But the, but the point then is that when Paul is critiquing, um, his Jewish kinsfolk in, in, uh, Romans 2, he, he isn't saying this as a new criticism. He is actually quoting from Isaiah and, and also an allusion to Ezekiel. Because what he has said in 2:17, following this, is really, really critical for understanding the whole sequence of thought in Romans, is that, uh, the Jew believes himself called to be, uh, teacher of the teacher of babes, having the form of knowledge and truth in the law. The one who is supposed to be teaching the world. In other words, the Jew's vocation is to be, as in Isaiah 49, a light to the nations. But as in Isaiah again, and that's the whole point why he, why he quotes this line in, uh, chapter 2:24, "The name of God is actually blasphemed among the nations because of you." In other words, the, the prophets themselves said that Israel's vocation to be the royal priesthood, to be the light of the nations, has gone horribly wrong. And that's etched into all the prophets, but particularly Isaiah and Jeremiah and Ezekiel. And Israel is shamed among the nations. So Paul is not there saying, and he isn't saying in Romans 9 either, anything which the average, well-educated Jew would disagree with. They would say, "Yeah, the prophets did say that, but somehow we still have this calling." And Paul finds himself held between those. Now, it's perfectly true that what then happens is that Paul sees the prophetic critique of the people of God building to a height in the rejection of Jesus. Um, but you can see in Romans 9 and 10, layer upon layer, their unbelief in Jesus as the quintessential moment of their turning away from vocation. And the end of Romans 2 and the beginning of Romans 3, passages which are often glossed over in Christian readings, which just say, "Well, Romans 1:18 to 3:20, it's just saying all have sinned, and the rest of that is just sort of details." No, it isn't. Paul is picking up the idea that God made a covenant with Israel, and that that was God's chosen way of rescuing the world. So that the key passage then in Romans 3:21-26 about the death of Jesus is not simply, "Everyone sinned, God had to punish somebody, happened to be Jesus, so now it's all right." No, it's, "God chose to promise to save the world through Israel. Israel as a whole has let him down. Jesus has offered the faithful obedience culminating in his death, as in Philippians 2, through which God has been faithful to his promise. Now there is justification available for Jew and Gentile alike." That is absolutely central. And I think what Larry may be doing, and I may need to restate the argument yet again, but he, he is, he is quite right to draw attention to Paul's critique of the fact they haven't believed in Jesus. But it goes back behind that to the prophetic critique which is focused there, but also which you can see, I think, in, in Galatians as well. Yeah.

That's good. Uh, one of the other themes that that comes up in your book, and I think has has gained momentum in recent scholarship on Paul, is is the idea of of participation. And, uh, you said in your, uh, *Paul's Recent Interpreters* book that, um, Protestant interpretations basically fall into either following Calvin, which stresses continuity between the Old Testament and the New Testament, or Luther, which, uh, highlights discontinuity. And, uh, so, so one of the, um, one of the things that that comes up in thinking about like participation, then, as a, as a theme that Protestants are coming into now, why do you think that that Protestants have had such a hard time grappling with participation in Paul? And could you briefly define what that is?

Well, um, a brief definition is difficult because it's so much under discussion. And basically, we don't have good language for it. Ed Sanders said this in his big book on Paul in 1977. He was absolutely right where he said that it looks as though this, what what I would call participation, is pretty central to what Paul is saying, but that we today don't have very good categories. And if we try and force Paul into categories that make sense to us, then that is really problematic. I would rather go back to the whole of Israel's scriptures and to look at the way in which, uh, the world narrative gets focused onto this one family, and then from time to time, the narrative of this one family gets focused onto specific people, whether it's a Moses or Joshua, or then certain prophets, but then particularly the kings, and then particularly in the Psalms and in Isaiah, when you get this focus of the servant who somehow is Israel, but also stands in for Israel, who does for Israel what Israel can't do for itself, and so on. And I think a great deal goes back to that sort of insight, which some people have tried to talk about in terms of corporate personality, and others have come back and said, "No, no, no, that's a rather dodgy anthropological category. We don't really think it works." But these are modern attempts to put a label on a phenomenon which is there and won't go away, and which emerges, of course, in Paul and in John, in terms of the, in Paul, in terms of *en Christo*, in the Messiah, and so on, or in the Lord. And in John, very much in John 17, the high priestly passage, "I in them and thou in me," and so on. Now, a lot of this, of course, then turns out, and this complexifies the whole issue, to be temple language. That in the temple, heaven and earth come together, God and humans come together, God and Israel come together. And the early Christians reach for the temple category to understand who Jesus is, that he's somebody very much, in John, this in whom heaven and earth come together at last. Paul says much the same thing from different angles. And then the Spirit is the one who affects that in Jesus' people. So it isn't that you can set up a participatory category and just make it do everything. You have to say, this is a label for narratives within the Jewish world, narratives about the king and the people, and about the destiny of the people being fulfilled in the king, narratives also about God and Israel, and then what we find in Paul is that the, uh, king and Israel story and the God and the world story somehow come rushing together. So that, for instance, one of the meanings of that blessed word *hilasterion*, a famous word which Paul uses in Romans 3, which we sometimes translate as, as, "means of atonement" or "place of atonement" or something, it's the mercy seat. And the mercy seat in the old tabernacle was where God met with the people. And it looks to me as though in Romans 3, which many think is the heart of Paul, I'm not sure about that, but there Paul is telling the story of God, he's telling the story of Israel, and they come together in the Messiah. And that phrase then, "in the Messiah," the redemption which is *en Christo*, which is in the Messiah, is a redemption which God is accomplishing by his presence in the Messiah, but also in the Messiah, all those who are his people are summed up. So that what is true of him is true of them, as in Romans 6, 7, and 8. Now, I could go on, but this is a way of saying these labels need to be cashed out in terms of the narratives. We need to remind ourselves what those narratives are. It's the God narrative, the Israel narrative, the human narrative, and they're all coming together.

So another, um, question that that came up from reading, uh, both *The Paul Debate* and your, your big book and *Paul's Recent Interpreters* is, is this whole, well, there are new iterations of it, but the apocalyptic Paul movement. And this is something that's clearly caught your attention. And of all the various kinds of theories about Paul out there, what, why has this become a focus for you of critique? What do you think's at stake in that discussion?

This is a very complicated one. If anyone's interested in it, I would urge them to read part two of *Paul and His Recent Interpreters*, because I found that in order to get at what's really going on here, I had to track it back to the late 19th-century German use of apocalyptic, where apocalyptic in late 19th-century German and in British theology was this dark, nasty thing that some Jews had got into, which thankfully the gospel freed us from. Then Albert Schweitzer turned all that around and said, "No, apocalyptic is where it's at, and that's what Jesus is about, and that's what Paul is about." And already the thing was getting misshapen because people were not actually studying 1 Enoch or 4 Ezra or some of the great apocalyptic, so-called, writings of the period. And I want to stress, "apocalyptic," that word, "apocalyptic" is best used as a label for a literary genre which is to do with revelations of heavenly truths being revealed, of future truths being revealed, and and all of that. And it goes with ancient Jewish mysticism, where at a time when, uh, many were puzzled because God didn't seem to have done what he was going to do, um, the idea that through prayer and fasting you might be given a vision or a strange angelic revelation was a way of getting some idea, at least, of what was going on ahead of the time when everything would be finally revealed. Now, so the word "apocalyptic" then went from being the bad bit of Judaism which we didn't really like, we're trying to avoid, and then, you know, the little apocalypse in Mark, that's very dodgy because that's that apocalyptic stuff, and obviously Jesus wouldn't have done that. It switched suddenly through the events of the first half of the 20th century, in which the whole world seemed to be exploding through two world wars and the Holocaust, and it suddenly went to being the good thing. This is about God breaking in and doing a new thing. That's what we need. We're giving up on the old idea of of progressive continuity, of the of Hegelian or Marxist visions. You have to track it back to Walter Benjamin in the 1930s and 1940s. Benjamin, as a quintessential German Jewish character of the time, who had believed in some sort of Hegelian Marxism, that the world was actually getting where it ought to be going, and then he saw that dream collapsing because of the pact between Hitler and Stalin. And suddenly the only hope would be that all of these ideas of progress would be done away with, and something totally new would happen. That was a secular Jewish idea in Germany in the '30s and '40s. What then happened was that that was seized on by German scholars like Ernst Käsemann to say, "Yeah, apocalyptic is the mother of Christian theology. This is God putting the world right, doing a new thing." What they are reacting against, however, is not ancient Jewish views of God working in history, but 19th-century Hegelian views of a progressive revelation, a steady estate. A lot of the pushback against my reading of Paul, of in the Gospels, has come from people who are actually reacting against Hegelian schemes and assuming that that's what I'm talking about. Now, this is complicated because some people who tried to do salvation history in the 19th century were basically seeing a sort of progressive revelation, a smooth progress upwards towards the light. I have never said anything like that, and it's a mistake to critique me as I was saying that.

What then is going on, a quite different movement, is that in modern American scholarship, with Lou Martyn, who died recently, sadly, as the, as the sort of center of it, but with particularly one of his students, Beverly Gaventa, another of his students, Marty E. Marty, and then in a quite different register, but also part of the same team, as it were, Douglas Campbell, who now teaches at Duke, um, they are basically saying, "If we take this apocalyptic reading of Paul, then not only do we not need salvation history and all of that, we don't even, according to Campbell, need the traditional doctrine of justification." Indeed, Campbell says you've got to choose between the two. Now, it seems to me at this point, what we desperately need is again, a historical understanding of what apocalyptic literature, apocalyptic thought forms, if there were such things, actually were like in the first century. And unless we anchor it back there, we're stuck. There's a book about to come out by Jamie Davis, who's now teaching in Bristol, um, on the apocalyptic context of Paul, because he's saying, "Hey, look, if we, um, calling Paul an apocalyptic, then he's a first-century Christian apocalyptist. We know of others like that. What about the Book of Revelation? That's a first-century Christian apocalypse, if anything is. Let's see how that works." And he's showing that the more you put Paul's apocalyptic gospel into its first-century apocalyptic context, it doesn't mean what people mean when they wave that flag around. And that flag is being waved in the service of some ideologies right now, in the service of some ecclesiologies in which all you have to do is use the word "apocalyptic" and then you are cut free from history. You don't have to do history. Paul doesn't have to belong in history, and you don't have to worry about history now, because just God doing a new thing now. Of course, many people are much more sophisticated than that, but that's where battle is joined right now. And again, we need history. That's the anchor, otherwise it's all speculation and up in the air. Yes.

So it sounds like we're back at that sort of continuity-discontinuity question in that, so I'd like to step back from some of the technical discussion about your, your books and and ask if, if you could just offer, um, for those who are, you know, working in the church or in in business, what are some of the kind of key connections for you between what you're doing as a scholar and the life of the church, and let's say the, the life in the marketplace as well?

Yeah. Well, um, again, huge question, obviously. And, uh, referring to my own books, but a little book of mine which came out last year called *Surprised by Scripture* has several reflections on how this reading of the New Testament impacts on our culture today. A couple of years before that, there was a book called *Creation, Power, and Truth*, in which I set out quite briefly some reflections on that. And then I've got another book which I've just done the proofs for, which will be out in a month or two, and that's called *God in Public*. And that is doing exactly what you're asking, trying to relate what I'm seeing in the New Testament to a vision of real public life today. And I think, uh, the danger is that we assume that we can leave the structures of the way we look at the world intact and simply get some ideas from Paul about how to be a slightly better Christian in the workplace or whatever it may be. Now, much better to do that than not to do that, but it seems to me that Western society at the moment is in a major crisis. And we are, I've been reading some some of the stuff recently about the causes of the First World War, and people who are writing about that are saying that 100 years ago, so many people in European society were just thundering along, they were sleepwalking into that amazing crisis. They had no idea what they were getting into. They assumed.

That their world was basically all right, and all they had to do was tinker with a few things and have the odd little wall here and there, and that would sort it out, and things could go on. And we're doing that today, and this is particularly, for instance, um, that when the so-called Arab Spring happened four years ago, the Western politician journalists all said, "Oh, isn't that nice? The Arabs are growing up, and they're all going to be nice Western Democrats like us, so we just have to help them top a few tant, and then it'll all be all right." That's just amazingly naive.

And the trouble is that what you find in the New Testament is a robust Christian political theology which would critique all our various ways of going about things, which we just assume because we're modern Western, it's all right. And what we need to do is to inhabit the story of the gospels, in Paul and Revelation and so on, in such a way that we realize that the Enlightenment, which gave us our modern settlement with all its creakiness and its weaknesses, the Enlightenment is a parody of Christian truth. The Enlightenment says, "World history rumbles along in darkness and superstition, and now suddenly we have the great light, and as long as we all get on board with this, everything will be okay."

And the answer is, look at the refugees washing up literally on our shores right now. Everything is not okay. The reason we can't solve those problems is that we had no narrative within which those problems would even occur, let alone need to be addressed. And in a sense, we've been living in a bubble in Europe and North America, and the bubble is now bursting, and we do not know what to do about that. And we urgently need to get back to some biblical rootedness, which is about the kingdom of God, which is about God's purpose to run the world through wise humans, but to run the world through wise humans who he will call to account.

And here's a whole Christian political theology waiting to be recovered. People like Oliver ad Donovan have been banging about on about this for years, but people tend not to listen because either it just goes over their head, they're not into that, or they think, "Well, that may be very nice to think about for a minute, but let's just go back to doing things the way we normally do."

And so I want to say, we've got to think big. We've got to think of those large issues, but at the same time, we've got to think small and local, because the New Testament again and again, remember what Peter said to Paul in Galatians 2? The one thing he said was, "Remember the poor." And when you see in the gospels as well, again and again, Jesus talking about the poor and remembering the poor, and Paul in Acts, the last thing he says in his address to the elders at Ephesus is, "Remember the words of the Lord Jesus: Remember the poor, because Jesus said it's more blessed to give and to receive." And this comes through again and again in the New Testament.

And most Christians today in the Western World think, "Yeah, that's okay. We'll do our business, we'll make lots of money, and then we'll give some handouts here and there." But actually, no. Society needs to be reordered around the needs of the weakest. In the early church, the Roman emperors didn't know very much about what this Christianity movement was. They knew it was a nuisance because, among other things, the Bishops kept on banging on about the needs of the poor. I wish today's Bishops who are known to the same thing. Many of them are, of course.

So I think we've got to think big about our big structures and think about the meaning of the kingdom of God for Western society as a whole, and we've got to think local and small about what the actual needs are of the poorest of the poor, not least the people who are washing up on our shores right.

I think for a lot of people, um, when you talk about inhabiting a narrative, inhabiting a different worldview, that's an unusual way of talking about their engagement with scripture, because a lot of people, I say in my classes a lot, they've grown up with a life lessons approach to scripture, which is that you go to scripture and it has a series of life lessons. How does one go about engaging scripture as a narrative, and then what does it mean to live out of a narrative?

Yeah, that's a great question. I'm sorry, I'm going to refer to another of my books, which is *Scripture and the Authority of God*, where I go into exactly this question, because I believe the Bible is authoritative, but it is authoritative as what it is, not as what we can turn it into. And as what it is, is a great narrative. Genesis to Revelation presents itself to us as the story of God and creation, the story which then focuses on Israel, which then focuses on Jesus, which then opens up by the spirit to include God's people. And when you look at the end of the narrative, you see that's where we should be aiming.

The danger with the life lesson—and let me say, I would much, much rather people looked at the Bible every day for life lessons than that they looked at the thoughts of Chairman ma or the *Times* newspaper or whatever for life lessons, and with then the Bible as a little bit of commentry on the side—much better to go to the Bible. You know, some years ago, when teenagers were wearing the WWJD bracelet, "What Would Jesus Do?", I was in a conversation with some folks saying, "Oh, you know, this is so bad because this is just moralism, and how can my teenagers learn everything if if they're just thinking what would you?" And I said, I had four teenagers at the time, I said, "I wish my teenagers would ask at least once a week, 'What would Jesus do?' I think they're asking what would their peers do, what would other people do, but at least that's..." So I'm not knocking that, it's the glass is half full, that's fine.

But if the narrative you're living in implicitly says the point is to keep your nose clean more less while you're going on at the moment, because one day we'll die and then our souls will go to a disembodied Heaven, the answer is no. You're living in the wrong story. It will distort your humanness in the present and destroy, um, what you ought to be doing in God's world. Ephesians 1:10 tells you the answer simply: God's plan is to sum up in the Messiah all things in heaven and on Earth in him, and we are working towards that, the coming together of Heaven and Earth, not their separation. And it's like being an actor in a play, improvising in a play where the actors have to know what the end is that they're improvising towards, and if they think of the wrong ending, then they're going to be saying the wrong stuff and doing the wrong stuff in the process.

And it seems like you've been sort of doing some improvising recently. Um, I've seen some of your debates, or not debates, but discussions you've been having in places like Google and talking with Peter teal, the founder of PayPal, and other businesses. So what interests you about that space right now, and what is it that, how has your study of scripture resourced you to engage with a tech company like Google?

Well, it's fascinating. I didn't expect that invitation, but I was in San Francisco for some other reason last May, May, June, whatever it was, and I got this call, "Would you come and talk to Google Executives?" And then, um, somebody who knew Peter teal said he would really like to debate you, and we, he and I, actually had debated before, a year or two before, and we really, really got on well, but hadn't had time to explore all the issues. Um, because the question really is, what should we be doing, and how can these high-tech industries, or any other industries, help what we should be doing? At least in America, uh, including in California, lots of people really do want to say, "Does the church have anything to say about this?" And it seems to me that if one is asked that question, one must, to use the American idiom, step up to the plate. Otherwise, shame on us. If we say, "No, no, no, we're just going to teach you to say your prayers," then, you know, we're letting the case go by default.

So it f when I was asked that question, which was a surprise to me, I thought, "Well, I do believe in New Creation, and I do believe that what we do in the present can, in the mercy of God and in the power of the spirit, actually be part of God's New Creation." I believe that—excuse that noise, that's an email coming in—I believe that when when Jesus came out of the tomb on Easter morning, New Creation actually began. New Creation was launched then and there, and that what jesus' followers do in the power of the spirit isn't simply to build the kingdom of God by their own efforts. No, God builds God's kingdom, but we do stuff here and now which will count for the kingdom, which will bring justice and mercy and wisdom and peace and love into God's world, so that when God finally does what he's going to, what he's going to do, it will be seen that all that we have done in the present is actually part of that, even though we didn't see how. And that has to apply to technology.

And Peter teal has all sorts of other things as well about, um, how to cope with the rise of population, that if medicine advances, then we'll cure lots of diseases, and we may even cure old age. He's thinking, "What sort of a world might might we be looking at?" And I want to say, um, unless the church is prepared to wrestle with those questions with the people who are asking them and who maybe have the financial clout to work on them, then again, shame on us. Do we just want to go back and live in the 1950s or 1960s? If God is doing new things, and if our world is addressing new question questions, I really believe that the gospel of New Creation in Christ and by the spirit has to be out there matching them stride for stride and wrestling with those issues.

So, just, I'd like to wrap up the discussion, but just as a final follow-up to that, how would you suggest then that people, um, prepare themselves and to engage with those kinds of hard questions? What's a sort of steps that they can take to to to begin to inhabit inhabit a narrative biblical worldview that would allow them to address those future questions?

I often, when I speak, particularly when I speak in gatherings where there's lots of young people, people come up to me afterwards and say, "I see all these things, where do I start? What can I do?" And and I want to say, uh, vocation is a strange thing. Um, God has given you gifts, and if you pray and give your whole personality to God—Romans 12:1, "present your whole selves to God"—then God will shape you. God will take bits and pieces of of gifts that maybe you were only half aware you had and we'll develop them, and they'll be in quite different ways. And some people have great gifts in the engineering sphere, that wouldn't be me for one split second. Other people have great gifts in the artistic sphere. I dabble in music, but I'm not an artist at all. But it's wonderful when people develop, under the power of the spirit, the gifts that they've been given, knowing that larger narrative.

So the main thing is to be soaked in the larger narrative. Read the Bible big. Read Genesis to Revelation. Read it fast. Read it as if it was talking or or something like that, or Harry Potter, you know, just zoom through it. Get the big picture. You can go back and study the details, but think of it as a narrative, a narrative climaxing in Jesus, a narrative by the spirit including you. You are called up on stage to be an actor in this play which is going to this goal. Now then, wisely, with help from maybe a spiritual director or wise friends or people who know you well, try to discern what gifts you have which will then be useful perhaps within that narrative. And vocation is always a perhaps, you know, particularly at the beginning of your life, "Maybe I'm supposed to do this, perhaps I'm called in this direction." And there will be lots of false starts because our own pride gets muddled up and we make mistakes. God is God, God is gracious, and God will use people's talents in ways that perhaps they would never imagine, and often half the stuff that we do for the kingdom of God we will never know in this life anyway. It'll only be later we will discover.

But I would say, last thing I would say, go back to the beginning of The Sermon on the Mount and read it like this: It's not "blessed to the poor, blessed of the meat, blessed to the mourners" because they are good people and God is going to be nice to them. It's these are the people through whom God is blessing the world: the hungry for justice people, the people who are not content with the way things are, who grieve over it, the people who are determined to be peacemakers. And then it's it's the business of the royal priesthood. We are called to be the royal priesthood to sum up the worship of creation and to be God's agents in the world. Be attitudes like that, and pray for wisdom to see where you belong on that map.

I think that's a good note to end on, and Professor R, I just want to thank you for taking the time. And I want to remind everyone who's who's watching to, um, uh, check out the, uh, books that we've discussed: uh, the *Paul* by, uh, Baylor University Press, also available through spck, and of course, *Paul and the Faithfulness of God* and *Paul and His Recent Interpreters*, uh, through Fortress and sbck. All this is, uh, available on our website, WTCtheology.org.uk.

Professor right, could I just add one more thing? Because the people with whom I'm working on this project wouldn't forgive me if I didn't. That there's a set of online courses which are now available, coming, and that's at www.nWRonline.org, so ightonline.org. And, uh, they're available now, and there's more coming. And if anyone, for whatever reason, can't actually afford, because they're run by an American company that has to cover its cost, etc., then there are coupons available, and there's a way to write in for that. So it'd be good if people could join in with that as well.

Okay, perfect. Thanks so much for your time, and, uh, we appreciate you joining us. Thank you. Very good to be with you. Thank you.