Transcription
The whole world is now God's holy land; that's very clear. Those are the promises which the early Christians saw fulfilled in Jesus, and they do not speak of, "Oh, by the way, there's still a little bit of Holy Land left there," as it were. When I say that Jesus was a first-century Palestinian Jew, that ought to be uncontroversial. Jesus himself is the real Temple. This is what the gospels are trying to tell us in very first-century Jewish language.
That's the problem. This is the reflex of a "going to heaven" theology, which has a kind of geographical deficit, if you like. There was an article, I think in Time Magazine, about one of the candidates which said she believes in the return of the Jews to their land as being prophesied in the New Testament. This all comes to a head in Romans chapters 9 to 11, which would be the subject for about a year's lectures.
The "Ask NT Wright Anything" podcast touches on all areas of life in many ways, but many people are asking, wanting to know your thoughts on the place of Israel today and, if you like, eschatology. So let's start with Seth in Roanoke, Virginia, who says, "Can you speak to the role that modern Israel and all the Holy Land people and/or place has in eschatology?"
I agree with your thinking about the eschaton, and I'm asking specifically about the people and the place, as in the location. So, I think, yeah, Seth goes along with you in terms of the way you see the new creation and so on, but wants to know what about this particular place and people. Right, what role do they have in there?
It's a great question, and hi Seth! I've visited Roanoke once, and it's a lovely place. Maybe I'll go back there one day. A lot of this emerges from a Western Christian world which had forgotten about the significance of geography and the significance of the ethnic, and was thinking of Christianity as sort of an abstract spiritual thing, which actually it never was.
So, there was a kind of a vacuum into which then the events of 1947-48 and the creation of the modern state of Israel have suddenly come rushing. This has happened at the same time as the early Pentecostal movement from the early years of the 20th century and the earlier Plymouth Brethren movements from the 19th century were saying, on the basis of particular interpretations of Daniel and Revelation and one or two other bits and pieces, that one day the Jews will go back to the Holy Land and that this will somehow precipitate the ultimate end, whether it's Armageddon or whatever.
There's been a growth industry; it's not just the Left Behind series, but it's stuff that's been going on for the last 200 years with earlier medieval antecedents. From time to time, this thing has come up: What about the Holy Land? Is it special? Well, the Crusades were partly about that, although partly they were a displacement activity for problems in Northern Europe.
Where I start is this: In the New Testament, it's quite clear that with Jesus and the Spirit and the resurrection and Pentecost and the mission of the church, the whole world is now God's holy land. That's very clear. Romans 8, which on anyone's account is not a marginal passage, this is one of the most central chapters in the Bible, talks about the inheritance of God's people and about our present journey towards that inheritance.
The inheritance is the renewed creation; it's not heaven, and it's not one particular piece of turf in the Middle East. This idea goes back to the Psalms because God promised to Abraham in Genesis 12, 15, 17, and 22 a particular land. But Psalm 2 takes the language of those covenant promises and says, with the coming King, with the Messiah, the whole world will be his dominion.
So, it uses the same language: "Ask of me, and I will give you the nations for your inheritance, and the uttermost parts of the world for your possession." We find exactly that in Isaiah: "It's too light a thing for the servant to restore the tribes of Israel; I will give you as a light to the nations that my glory may be known throughout the world."
So, those are the promises which the early Christians saw fulfilled in Jesus, and they do not speak of, "Oh, by the way, there's still a little bit of Holy Land left there," as it were. That was contentious, no doubt, in the first century, but Paul's missionary strategy was beginning from Jerusalem, but then, as in the book of Acts, going out to Rome.
Once you got to Rome, you got to the world because all the roads lead there and from there, etc. So, the idea of there still being one strip of territory which is the Holy Land and that's where it's all going to happen is quite a major theological category mistake.
Now, having said all that, after the Second World War, there is no doubt in my mind that the Jewish peoples of Europe, who such as were left after the terrible, amazingly wicked and horrible things that were done, needed to have a new sort of security. I gather that somebody, I think some British politician, suggested giving them Uganda, and you just think, how cross can you be? What self-respecting Jew would say, "Okay, we'll have that instead," as it were?
I mean, they would have made it blossom like the rose because that's what they did in the Middle East when more and more Jews went back there. But the fact that then the movement to take more and more Jews to the Middle East, whatever we're going to call it, by the way, I get emails about this.
Somebody told me off for referring to that bit of land as Palestine and said, "Surely you should call it Israel, as it always was." Actually, in the first century, there was no country called Israel; there was Judea, which was the bit around Jerusalem, and there was Galilee, and there was Samaria in between, and there were several other quite different and hostile cultures.
This is a world before you have international borders as we now know them, where countries were more organized around cities and their environs. So, there's all sorts of misunderstandings there. When I say that Jesus was a first-century Palestinian Jew, that ought to be uncontroversial, but people who get worried about the naming of things precedented exactly.
So, what I want to say is that the Jewish people in the 1940s desperately, urgently needed the international community to say, "Oh my goodness, we've got to make this work for you." I totally get that, and I respect that and honor that. When I've lived there and I've known Jewish friends and worked with them at the Hebrew University, etc., I totally honor that.
What I don't agree with theologically is what you have in the iconography of the Hebrew University. They've got this great long corridor with photographs of the returning exiles throughout the 20th century, with then texts from Ezekiel and Isaiah and so on, and the Israel Museum, where the Dead Sea Scrolls are displayed, where Isaiah 40-55, one of the great return from exile passages, is displayed as though to say, "And we now have the fulfillment of that."
And so, that claim is dangerous. By that, it sounds like you're very much saying no to what is a very large and widespread movement, especially in North America, Zionism, which is that this needs to happen. The Balfour Declaration, the state of Israel, all fulfilling prophecy, people coming back to the lands is all part of ultimately God's plan to bring about the return of Jesus.
I met this when I got married because my late father-in-law, bless him, was an old-fashioned Derby premillennialist, and I'd never met it before. But I got it full on for some years, and we had wonderful conversations about it. I've since then realized it is, as you say, widespread in certain circles, and people get very uptight about it.
Sometimes this gets muddled up with the problem that much Western Christianity has. It has not read the Bible as a Jewish document, and I've spent my whole career trying to read the Bible as a first-century Jewish document. So, I put my hand up and say I think I'm on board with this.
You may have the same thing already answered in that case, Jeff, in KY's question, but I'll read it just so that you can expand on it. How would you respond to the dis-sensational idea that there is a stark separation between the church and ethnic Israel, a distinction which holds that the covenantal promises, like a new rebuilt Temple and the liberation of the promised land, are still waiting to be fulfilled and were not fulfilled in and through Jesus Christ's death, resurrection, and the creation of a new people of God, i.e., the church?
Okay, in that case, you have to scrub out several bits of Paul for a start, and John, by the way, and Matthew, and you know, because they all say all of that reached its climax with Jesus. Jesus himself is the real Temple. This is what the gospels are trying to tell us in very first-century Jewish language.
The idea that he came to save us for heaven, but then there is this earthly... that's the problem. This is the reflex of a "going to heaven" theology, which has a kind of geographical deficit, if you like, and which then sees the mission to the Gentiles not in terms of the just and gentle rule of Jesus being extended within the world, but in terms of going and snatching a few more souls away from the world.
You're left with this vacuum, as I say, and this thing rushes into philage. That's very unhealthy; it's bad as a method of doing theology, and the results are, if anything, worse. Having lived right there within a few hundred yards of the green line in 1989 and having gone back several times, my wife and I have led pilgrimages and so on.
I know what life was like for the Palestinian people, but I also know from my many Jewish friends there how the assumptions and the rhetoric and the whole movement works. From talking to Christians, some living in Jerusalem and some on both sides, as it were, I know it's hugely confusing. Every time I've written or said anything about this, I always want to add with every sentence, but actually, it's a lot more complicated than that.
So, I'm not saying this is simple or easy, but I'm saying that what your friend from Kentucky said, you have to erase for a start Paul saying all the promises of God find their yes in him. That's very clear in 2 Corinthians. Once you've said that, you then start to look around and see, of course, when John is talking about out of that person's heart will flow rivers of living water, and he said this about the Spirit, which those who believed in Jesus were to receive.
This is the promise of the new Temple from the book of Ezekiel, and he's saying that the new Temple promise is fulfilled in the Spirit. It's partly because we Western Christians haven't spotted the Temple resonances of so much of the New Testament. We haven't wanted to go there; liberal Protestantism doesn't like temples and all that sort of thing, so we've gone in a different direction.
Those are all waiting to be explored, but once you explore them, there is no room for saying, "Let's build a new Temple." You're going to have to strike out the letter to the Hebrews for a start, which says that sacrifices were finished with Jesus.
There are a couple of questions about the way this plays out, especially in the USA. So, let me read both of these, and you can sort of take them as both of them at the same time. Shere in Denver asks, "I'd love to hear Dr. Wright talk about the role of evangelicals in the Zionist movement. I know there are sincere Palestinian Christians that Western evangelicals don't seem to apply the Sermon on the Mount to," so she's referring there to issues over the land and so on, and the way that some evangelicals in the Zionist movement are very insistent on certain ways of treating Palestinians and so on.
Joshua in Portland also asks, "As Christians, how are we to handle Israel being raised in the United States? The treatment of the modern nation of Israel has been burned into my evangelical upbringing. We're taught that we should bless Israel, which after unpacking it seems to mean monetary support, governmental alliances, and weapon sales. We're warned not to curse them by withholding these things. Several Christians I've talked to try to point to natural disasters being linked to times the United States has interfered with Israel. It's become deeply ingrained in American politics, with Christians supporting unsavory characters, to say the least, as long as they make a strong stand for Israel. It's gotten to the point where it feels like an addendum to the gospel itself."
So, we can sort of tell where Joshua obviously stands on that issue. How much do you have sympathy for the way he sees that?
I very much understand the problem. I haven't seen it too much full on because I suspect that people who take the views he's describing tend not to turn up at my lectures or not to express all this so vividly. Though I have had emails and comments, and of course in Britain as well, there are many people who are on the lookout for anyone who says anything at all critical of the present government policies in Israel.
I want to say again and again, I am very critical of things that my own government in Britain does. That doesn't make me anti-British; it makes me very pro-British and wanting to see it done well. So, the idea that I criticize Benjamin Netanyahu for some particular policy doesn't mean I'm anti-Israel. I want to say very firmly, I do believe, as I said, that from the 1940s onwards, the Jewish people globally needed to have a place where they would be secure and where the international community would say, "Now let's be stable and have this well organized," etc.
It was not well done at the beginning because the original boundaries were very insecure and very vulnerable. I get that. I've walked up and down in Samaria and seen how narrow the original settlement was. At the same time, I know Palestinian families who were simply driven out of their ancestral homes and off their ancestral vineyards or whatever, or olive trees, and given either no compensation or just a grubby refugee camp where they still are.
As I say, it's more complicated than that, but I understand both of those very clearly from personal experience, thinking of people whose faces I can see, sitting and talking to me. The idea of evangelicals feeling that they have to be pro-Israel, in whatever that means, one of the things that needs to be said is that's very different in Britain from America.
There are some evangelicals self-identifying in Britain who would take a line rather like that, probably not so strident, but the great majority wouldn't at all. I grew up as a fairly typical British evangelical in my teens and early 20s. I think I never ever, ever heard any of this from the great leaders like John Stott or Jim Packer or Michael Green or Dick Lucas. This was not on the radar.
So, there's a big gulf between what thinks of itself as evangelical in Britain and what thinks of itself as evangelical in America. In America, that has been bound up for all sorts of interesting historical and cultural reasons with a sense of America's own identity. It's partly going back to the founding fathers of America as the new promised land, so then identifying with other people who have promised lands or whatever, as though they sort of belong together.
Then it's been mixed up with all sorts of other things, but particularly with the dispensationalist theology and politics, which your correspondent has referred to. When a scripture is taken from the Old Testament which says, "I'll bless those who bless you and curse those who curse you," that was for a time and place, not for, as it were, the New Covenant.
This then forces you to do the complicated thing of reading the New Testament and seeing what it says about the fulfillment of the promises. The New Testament is very specific. Some people say, "Oh, you're just swapping Israel for the church," and they absolutely not.
Okay, Jesus himself as Israel's Messiah, and so many Christians have just treated the word Christ as a proper name, and they've forgotten that it means Messiah. The Messiah is the one in whom Israel's destiny is fulfilled. So, if we say this is all fulfilled in Jesus, that isn't over against Israel; that's how Israel's own story, promises, and destiny came to its fulfillment.
With all that that means, and then by the Spirit, those who are Jesus' people become renewed Israel people, not by replacement but by enlargement. Paul is quite clear about this. Of course, this all comes to a head in Romans chapter 9-11, which would be the subject for about a year's lectures. I've done those again and again and written about it, but there is so much misinformation.
In one of the previous American presidential elections, there was an article, I think in Time Magazine, about one of the candidates, which said that it was one of the women, Michelle Bachmann, who said that she believes in the return of the Jews to their land as being prophesied in the New Testament, as it is in Romans 11. I thought, Time Magazine, you used to have fact-checkers who used to look at these things.
But the myth has got out there that Romans 11 prophesies the return of Jews to... it doesn't say anything about that at all. But Paul, in those chapters, does grieve at the way many of his fellow Jews have not received Jesus as Messiah. It's very clear.
In a sense, I think many people believe that Paul believed there would be an incoming of the Jews to Christianity or to a fulfilled Judaism and say, "Well, that's still to come." There is still some kind of thing God's going to do with Israel, with the Jews. Having studied that passage intensively over the last 40 years, what I find myself now saying, this is Romans 11:11 through till the end, really, is that Paul is very careful not to tie God's hands.
Paul is addressing Gentile Christians in Rome because we have to remember the situation. He's writing in the mid-50s. Nero has become Emperor; Claudius's edict banishing the Jews from Rome has been rescinded. The Jews have come back, but there's been a period of five or six or seven years when the Roman Church was basically Gentile, and where Paul seems to know that a lot of the Gentile Christians were saying, "Well, of course, this thing may have started with the Jews, but thank goodness we've got rid of them because we never liked them anyway."
There's a sort of a proto-Marcionism, a proto-sense of, "Well, the God of Israel isn't really the God of Jesus." Paul is saying absolutely not; this is the one God. If you start talking like that, then watch out because you're in trouble.
He doesn't have a particular timetable. He is basically saying to potentially anti-Jewish Christians in Rome, "Watch out because actually God made promises to the people of Israel, and that means that just like I, Paul, a Jew, am also a Messiah person, God can save many more like that. This remnant can grow, and you should welcome them."
Then he wants, in Romans 14-15, to say, "And here's how you navigate the difficult issues of how to have a community with some Torah-observant Jews and some non-Torah-observant Gentiles and everyone getting it together."
By the way, just to do a plug for a book, the recent commentary on Romans by Brian Walsh and Sylvia Kizmat, "Romans Disarmed," has some very remarkable fictitious but very vivid little scenarios of Roman Christians trying to figure out what's going on at that point. I don't agree with them all down the line, but my goodness, it makes you think.
So, you cannot simply scoop up Romans 11 and say, "There it is; Paul is predicting some future." Paul wants to say God can do whatever God wants to do, and I bet that includes a lot more Jews, thank you very much. So, you Gentiles, don't despise them. That's the long and the short of it.
Just with the final moments we've got on today's podcast, I wonder, you talked about Paul not putting a timetable in place, but many Christians do and have done, that such and such events need to happen before the return of Christ and so on.
Peter, who comes from, I assume, a place called Brown, though I wasn't sure if he simply entered his surname in terms of the Mighty Unity University, might want to know about, "Well, you know, it seems like people were expecting Jesus to return within their lifetime."
Possibly in the New Testament, in Revelation 22, Peter says Jesus declares three times that he is returning to the Earth soon or quickly. Well, it's been almost 2,000 years, and still no Jesus. Granted, God does exist outside of time, and a day with him is a thousand years, but Jesus is talking to people who exist inside of time. Why use such potentially misleading terms like soon or quickly?
Others have asked similar questions about, you know, it seems as though in certain parts of the gospels, Jesus is talking about his return within the lifetime of his followers. Paul seems to have an expectation of the imminent parousia, as it's called. What's your take on that?
Okay, huge, huge question, by the way. There's a model; I don't know whether it's a mistyping or something, but there isn't a Revelation 23 unless it's a new text which this colleague has just discovered, and it wouldn't be Peter saying it if it did.
Well, it was Peter asking the question. Oh, sorry, Revelation 22 does say a few times, "I'm coming soon." I think it must have been 22 that I just... the mind boggled. Wow, wish there was another chapter of Revelation, but I'm unaware of this.
Yeah, of course, this is again one more time C.S. Lewis, who has Aslan saying to the children, "I will see you again soon." I think it's Lucy who says, "What does that mean?" Aslan says, "I call all time soon."
I don't think that's a cop-out. I think it was Lewis's way of saying that God doesn't work on the same time scales as we do. I don't think it's helpful to think of God as outside time. I'm not quite sure really what that means when God made a good world, which is a forward-moving world, as it were.
However, the quote from 2 Peter about one day with the Lord is a thousand years and vice versa, that is pretty important. I often think in this connection of the Jewish people between when they were in Babylon and when some of them, at least, came back to Judea and Galilee.
For those 400 years, they were praying, they were singing the Psalms, they were waiting, they were struggling, they were trying to be obedient, they were trying to keep Torah, and praying for a Messiah, for a turnaround, for a real return from exile, etc. 400 years is a long time, half a millennium.
Finally, those prayers were extraordinarily answered in ways that they weren't expecting. But when they, like the two on the road to Emmaus, suddenly realized, "Oh my goodness, this was what the scriptures were about all along."
So, it seems to me that's a model for how we should hold our eschatological expectations, that yes, God will bring the whole thing together. There will be a moment when we will say, "Of course, this was how it had to happen," even though we hadn't seen it coming.
Now, the question of in their own lifetime: Yes, the early Christians, because Acts 1 says, "This same Jesus will come in the same way that you saw him go," they expected that this would be at any time, which meant they thought in their own lifetime.
Paul, in First Corinthians, is quite clear that he will be among those who don't sleep, who don't die ahead of time, but he will be changed when Jesus returns, transformed because God is going to transform the whole creation and our bodies along with—not come and take us away to heaven.
That's the spurious reading of 1 Thessalonians 4. By the time he writes to Corinthians, he's been through a huge crisis, and I described that in my biography. Partly as a result of that, but also what he says in Philippians, where he clearly is facing the possibility of a death sentence, he knows that he might well die ahead of time.
That doesn't bother him. As we see, if we go on from Paul into the writings we call the Apostolic Fathers, into Clement, Ignatius, and then second-century people like Justin Martyr, Tertullian, you'd have thought that if the early message had been this must happen within 40 years, they would be really panicking.
There is no sign of that. The people who have done the detailed study of those writers say no, they all believe this could happen at any time. It doesn't bother them that it hasn't happened within a generation. This is another displacement thing.
It's because what is going to happen within the generation is the fall of Jerusalem, and that did happen, right? And you've obviously covered that in other podcasts, where people, in your view, that obviously people have thought of Jesus talking about his return is actually talking about the destruction of Jerusalem.
Exactly, because if Jerusalem and its Temple are the place where heaven and earth are held together, then if that's going to be destroyed, what other language is appropriate other than the sun and the moon being darkened and so on?
The vindication of the Son of Man is his exaltation to world sovereignty, not his coming down in return. Those are key exegetical moves, and within that, we can take the pressure off the idea that, "Oh dear, it didn't happen within a generation; therefore, something's gone horribly wrong."
Do you think, as we finish today's podcast, we should still, rather like those early Christians, be living in the expectation that it could be tomorrow? It could be today?
No, absolutely. I remember my theological college principal saying something about this, and somebody saying, "Principal, it could be tomorrow." He said, "Why tomorrow?"
"Well, it could be at any time."
"Well, so why not today?"
"Oh, okay, fine. Well, I suppose yes."
Jesus had things to say about being ready at any time of the day or night for the return of the bride. Absolutely, and those are, I think, deliberately vague because Jesus doesn't want us to be thinking about timetables. He wants us to think about faithfulness and following; that's what it's all about.
Well, thank you for being with us again on the podcast. God willing, this will be broadcast before Jesus returns to claim his kingdom. But in any case, it's been great to spend some time with you again. Thank you very much for...