Transcription
It's not going to heaven; it's new heavens and new earth. God so loved the world, not God so loved us that he rescued us from the world, but God so loved the world. Paul is not putting together exactly the argument that we might have expected if the reformers had made Ephesians rather than Romans and Galatians the set texts. The whole history of Western Europe would have been different.
I met Jordan Peterson once; he's undoubtedly a very interesting man. God made humans in order to work through humans in his world. Do you believe the Christian story could make a comeback even in our very secular, post-Christian webs? Well, I'm so delighted to be joined now by NT Wright. He is senior research fellow at Wycliffe Hall, Oxford University, and the new book is *Into the Heart of Romans*, looking at Romans chapter 8. Tom, so good to chat with you again.
Thank you; good to be with you. Yes, it's been rather a while since we last connected. We were obviously doing many episodes together of the *AR to Write Anything* podcast, but it's lovely to connect with you again with this new book. Tell me why particularly Romans 8. Obviously, you've written books on Romans before; why one specifically on this chapter?
Yeah, this arose out of the lectures that I was doing at Wycliffe Hall nearly two years ago. When I've been doing Bible expositions at Wycliffe Hall, I've often done a whole book in a term, like I did 2 Corinthians in eight or nine lectures, which is quite big chunks. In fact, this last year, I did for them the whole of the book of Acts in eight or nine lectures, getting it in great big sections.
But I decided that actually it was good for the students, as well as for me, to take a passage and go through it absolutely in minute detail, millimeter by millimeter, drawing attention to all the small words and the little things that you might easily pass over, and wrestling with particular details of translation. Because, you know, this is something which clergy and we all are here to train clergy and preachers should be doing on a regular basis—wrestling with the text. So I wanted to give a kind of a master class in, here's how to do it.
And of course, Romans—and of course Romans 8—I said at the book launch that when I was working as a bishop, I often used to ask clergy who I was interviewing for parish jobs, "If you were going to be on a desert island and were allowed to take one chapter of the Bible, what would it be?" Like Desert Island Discs, I would make it harder or easier by saying you've already got Romans and John 20; those were the two passages I thought many people, certainly I, would naturally home in on.
And so, Romans 8 has got it all. I mean, it's got creation and new creation; it's got atonement; it's got resurrection; it's got Jesus as Messiah, as Son of God; it's got the Holy Spirit; it's got suffering and prayer and lament, and so on. Surrounding it all is this amazing sense of assurance: there is no condemnation because nothing in all creation shall separate us from the love of God in Messiah Jesus our Lord.
So being able to see all that in one, and of course part of the fun of this was that it's actually 20 years since I last wrote a commentary on Romans, and a lot has changed since then in terms of how I've seen things. Not least because of one or two of my research students who have needled me and pushed me into saying, "But Professor Wright, surely what Paul is actually saying is such and such," despite what you said in your commentary. I've encouraged them to do that; I name two or three people in this book as people who I am standing on the shoulders of, especially.
And so it's been exciting. Well, we'll come to one of those, Romans 8:28, where you say that you've changed your mind on exactly what was being said there. I mean, you give a very helpful overview in the beginning chapter of the book, and you liken Romans and the way Christians approach Romans to the difference between knowing London via the underground system and just popping up at various points versus a cabbie who has this organic sort of knowledge that even forces their brain to grow larger in certain parts because they just know the road so well.
I mean, what are you saying there? Are you saying we often simply cherry-pick bits and we don't really understand the full picture? That's undoubtedly the case, and I have a pop at the so-called Romans road, which, as you know, has been very, very popular, especially in America.
Which basically is a truncated, abbreviated, and distorted summary of the biblical message reduced to certain key passages in Romans. Like, you know, you first need to realize you're a sinner, Romans 3:23. You then need to realize that Jesus died for you, Romans 3:24 to 26. You then need to realize that God loves you so much, Romans 5:1 to 5, or 1:1, and therefore you're going to heaven, Romans 8.
And of course, part of the oddity about that is that the word "heaven" only occurs twice in Romans, and in neither case does it refer to the place where God's people go after their death. The inheritance in Romans is actually the whole new creation; the whole world is now God's holy land. That's very clear from Romans 4, but then particularly Romans 8.
So, yes, when I was a young Christian, of course, like so many, I learned individual verses, and it was as though they were just isolated stops on the tube line, if you like. And then the excitement of actually studying the text and understanding how the argument works and realizing Paul is not putting together exactly the argument that we might have expected.
Allowing Paul to be Paul, allowing the Bible to be the Bible has been central to my life, but especially in reading and rereading. Another of the sort of issues you take issue with is the way that some people—and I've been guilty of this myself—tend to put the whole story of scripture into four acts, whereas you're keen to see that there's actually five.
You very kindly wrote a foreword for my book in which I do precisely this at one point, and you sort of suggested, "Well, yes, there is creation, there is fall, there is redemption, and new creation, but you might want to add one more act, which is Israel and the law." Just explain why we sometimes skip that and why actually we can't skip that, especially if we're looking at a book like Romans.
Alas, I'm afraid that the reason we skip it is that the whole Western Christian tradition has skipped it. If you go back to some of the early fathers, they tend to go creation, redemption, creation for redemption. And though they're aware of scripture, the Old Testament scriptures as pointing forward to Jesus, it's very much sort of random types and shadows and bits and pieces in the Old Testament which they kind of cling on to, whether by allegorizing or whatever.
There are reasons for that—historical reasons to do with the development of the church in the 2nd and 3rd century and the kind of Jewish interlocutors that they were talking to. But that's a whole other issue. For Paul, it's very clear that God's solution to the problem of evil and the problem of the corruption of the world begins with Abraham, and that's the importance of Romans 4.
Abraham is not simply an example of somebody way back when who happened to be justified by faith because chapter 15 says so. Abraham is where the story of redemption really starts. I'm fond of quoting one of the later rabbis who sums up the long Jewish tradition by having God say, "I'll make Adam first, and if he goes wrong, I'll send Abraham to sort it all out."
And Paul says, "Well, yes, but the problem is that Abraham too is part of the Adam problem." So then you get this poignant analysis of the problem of Israel being, on the one hand, the people called to be the bearers of the solution to the world, and on the other hand, people who are instantiating in themselves part of the problem.
It's as though the doctors are themselves infected with the disease that they've been sent to cure, and that reaches its head in Romans 7 and is dealt with then gloriously in Romans 8. I try to show how that works. Obviously, in this book, you talk about the fact that Romans 8 is fundamentally about assurance, you know, from its beginning lines to its end lines. It's about our security in that sense in what Christ has done and so on.
But as you say, the temptation has always been to make this about just me and God, me and my personal journey to heaven or whatever. So explain why it's not just about that kind of personal assurance. Okay, I mean, it is personal assurance. It becomes very personal and singular. There is no condemnation; the law has set you free from the law of sin and death.
It's as though he's turning to somebody in the audience, "Set you free, set you free, set you free." And that's all true; that's really important. We mustn't collapse into the idea that it's just a general message and it doesn't much matter if we're really signed up or not. Far from it; it is very detailed and personal.
But assurance in Romans 8 is very much geared to the situation that the Roman church is facing of imminent persecution. If it's not happening already, it pretty soon will. Paul is writing in the middle to late 50s, and he can see coming over the horizon all sorts of trouble. Sure enough, in '64, the Neronian persecution in Rome.
But Paul had faced it in Thessalonica, Philippi, Ephesus, and many places already, and in Jerusalem, of course. So there, it's as much assurance about sticking in there and hanging in there. They can do what they like to you because nothing's going to separate you from God's love.
It's that sort of assurance rather than the modern Western assurance, which is, "Okay, I'm trundling along as a comfortable middle-class person, but I need to know that when I die, I'm going to heaven." As I say, it's really not about that; it's about the assurance of God, new creation, and ourselves being raised from the dead to share in that new creation, which is the ultimate future.
It's not going to heaven; it's new heavens and new earth, as the Book of Revelation says. So reorienting our minds around that—and obviously I've written about that in *Surprised by Hope* and elsewhere—but it's still something which so many Western Christians slide back into because a lot of our hymns and prayers imply that the real aim is, "Okay, well, we're off out of here."
For Paul, assurance is about the love of God grasping us in the here and now, even though really bad things are happening to us. Part of that assurance is something which has often been soft-pedaled in traditional Western Christianity, especially Protestant and Evangelical Christianity, which is the ethical imperative that if the Spirit of God is dwelling in you, then you need to learn the discipline—the hard discipline—of putting to death all that is earthly in you.
He says that in several letters, of course, but it's very clear in Romans 8:12 and following. But this is not contributing to our salvation; it's cooperating with God's Spirit at work in us to make us the people through whom God is then working in the world. And that's the thing: the focus is away from us and rather through us into the world.
The question is, it's rather like John F. Kennedy: "Ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country." It's not just "Ask what God is going to do for you." That's very clear in Romans 8:1-1 and 8:31-39; that's what God is going to do for you. But then, 8:12-13, now we are debtors to God, and therefore this is how we must live to be part of God's plan for the world.
You take in each chapter a specific section of Romans 8, and it would be lovely to look at all of them if we had the time, but we don't. I wondered if we could maybe move to, you know, near the end of the chapter, Romans 8:28-30. One of the first things people might notice, the eagle-eyed reader, is your translation of Romans 8:28.
So I'm going to read first of all from my NRSV here, and the way it puts this well-known verse is, "We know that all things work together for good for those who love God, who are called according to his purpose." But when I read it in *Into the Heart of Romans*, the way you've translated that is, "We know in fact that God works all things together for good with those who love him, who are called according to his purpose."
Now, the big difference I see between my NRSV version and your translation there, Tom, is that in a sense you've put God as the subject there. And do you know it is God who works, whereas in mine it's more passive: "All things work." What’s the difference, and what’s changed here? Because in the book, you say that this is something where you had to revisit your old assumptions about this verse.
Yes, indeed. I went back through the story of how that happened because I was in touch with one of the students who had been working on this, and we were discussing who thought what when and so on. The student in question was Haley Goren, and Jacob as she now is—she was Haley Goren but married somebody called Jacob subsequently—and she was working on Romans 8 and on glorification particularly, emphasizing that the glory throughout Romans 8 is the human glory, as in Psalm 8, that we are made a little lower than the angels to be crowned with glory and honor, with all things put in subjection under us.
So that the glory is not, "I'm going to heaven." It's God is scarily putting me and all redeemed Christ followers in charge of his world. And what does that look like? It looks like the groaning in prayer, etc. Now, that was a crucial move. There are other things to be said about glory; we might come back to that.
But then she pointed out that actually the Greek verb in Romans 8:28, *sunergi*, means to work with, not to work for. *Sun* in Greek means definitely "with," and it's with those who love God. Here, we're actually tracking with—and I think we had forgotten this. I certainly had forgotten it with the old RSV, which says, "We know that in everything God works for good with those who love him," which is more or less exactly what I've gone back to now.
I grew up with the RSV, but I'd forgotten that because of subsequent modern translations, and I'd flicked back mentally to the King James Version, which so many people know, which really is almost a Stoic idea that all things are kind of working things out—a kind of a self-performing jigsaw that the world looks a mess, but it's all just going to come together.
Which can easily collapse into a Christian version of, "You know, what doesn't kill you makes you stronger," or whatever—just little trivial things like that. People will quote Romans 8:28, but it was three years ago when the pandemic was going on, and I was—you may remember, I think we talked about it on the podcast—and I wrote a little book called *God and the Pandemic*, and I quoted Romans 8:28 in the older version.
I sent it to my dear friends Brian Walsh and Sylvia Keesmaat, who had written their book *Romans Disarmed*, and Brian shot straight back at me and said, "You're still getting Romans 8:28 wrong." This was independent of Haley Goren and Jacob, and so I went back and I thought, "Oh my goodness, yes, *sunergi*, come on! I'm supposed to be a Greek scholar; I know perfectly well what that means."
And it goes with what he says at the beginning of 2 Corinthians 6 and a bit in 1 Corinthians 3 as well. The problem is that because we have thought that the passage was about salvation, we have backed off from any suggestion that we cooperate in the work of our salvation because that's the sort of thing that the great Reformation tradition would say, "No, no, no, it's all of grace."
But this is not about salvation; this is about God at work in the world through the ones who by his Spirit he calls to love him. The other thing which came through very strongly to me here, which I don't think either Brian or Haley had picked up, is that when it says "those who love God," this is a reference back to the previous verse where he's talking about the way in which by the Spirit we are sharing in the groaning of creation, and God the Father is listening to what the Spirit within us is saying.
That goes back to Romans 5:5 about the Spirit pouring out the love of God in our hearts. So it's a very dense, tight little verse, like so much in Romans 8, but it's actually about the way in which what God the Spirit is doing in and through us is part of the means by which God is rescuing his world.
When I started lecturing on this, it was just when the war in Ukraine was starting, and we were all agonizing about what was going on there. I was thinking a lot about lament, and I realized that right here in the middle of Romans, we are sharing in the groaning of creation, and we don't know what to pray for as we ought. The situation is far too big for us to be able to say, "God, please do this," or "do that."
But when we groan and share in the pain of the world, then God actually uses that, even if it's inarticulate, as part of the means by which he is bringing about his ultimate purposes. So that's the way it goes. Yes, I mean, I think very often that has been a comfort to people, of course, this idea that there will be an ultimate resolution and the things we can't make sense of, God will make sense of one day in the bigger scheme of things.
But as you say, it's often been seen as a kind of passive thing. You know, we really have no influence there; it's just God will move all the pieces together in some grand way in the end. But this idea that God is actually working with us, this synergy, as you call it, is an interesting one because in that sense, I think that helps us to realize that yes, the things we do, the prayers we pray, they are part of it.
It's not that sort of we—it's all just sort of somewhat irrelevant at the side. You know, really, it's just God who's going to sort it all out. God's doing it with and through us, and that's the whole point, isn't it? That's absolutely right, and this is part of the re-evaluation of the role of human beings in the purpose of God.
This has come up in my preaching recently for various reasons a couple of times. There's a very old joke from 19th-century Punch, which was recycled in the Times the other day, of a vicar walking past a chap who is digging his garden, and the vicar saying, "Ah, it's wonderful what providence and the hand of man can do when they get together."
And the chap says, "You should have seen this plot of land when providence had it all to itself." And of course, we laugh because it's as though actually God's rather incompetent; he needs us to help out. But part of the whole point of Genesis 1 and Psalm 8, which Paul is emphatically tracking with here, is that God made humans in order to work through humans in his world.
God always wanted to do that, and I see that as explicitly Christological from Genesis 1 onwards—that God made human beings to run his world wisely in order that he might come himself in the person of his Son and be the ultimate running-the-world-wisely person. Which is why in verse 29, Paul says that we are thereby to be conformed to the image of the Son.
You know, this idea that if God was really doing it, then we would just sit back and watch—that's absolutely not the case. God wants us to become genuine humans, and getting that into people's minds, I found, is very difficult. Getting it into my own mind is hard enough, let alone into anyone else's.
I mean, having said all that, very often verses 29 onwards have been used by those who do hold a very sort of Calvinistic predestination kind of view that really we've got nothing to do with it; it's all God and so on. Because obviously, again, in many of the older translations here in the NRSV, it puts it this way: "For those whom he foreknew, he also predestined to be conformed to the image of his Son," and so on.
And "Those whom he predestined, he also called." I mean, I think that the word "predestined" is often doing a lot of work there because people assume, "Oh, that just means there was no role; you know, God's sort of making it all happen. He's chosen who's going to be in, who's going to be out, who's doing what, who's not doing what."
What do we misunderstand with that way of looking at it? Okay, what we're misunderstanding yet one more time is the Old Testament background and context. When I was working through that passage a couple of years ago, you know, for the umpteenth time, but doing it again, I was very struck by the direct echo there of the Greek version of Isaiah and the servant songs in Isaiah, particularly where the servant is Israel, who is called to a task in the purposes of God.
The servant is justified and glorified, and this is—Isaiah is not talking about going to heaven when you die, and he's not talking about God selecting some individuals to go to heaven and telling others, "Too bad, the deal is already done." It's about the call of the servant people to be God's agents in bringing about his new creation.
The whole theme of new creation is, of course, Isaiah 40-55 in a nutshell—new creation through the work of the servant. And then it's noticeable that in verses 31 following of Romans 8, Paul immediately goes back to the servant songs, where he's tracking with, "It is God who justifies; who shall condemn?" etc., etc.
So he's got Isaiah 40-55 in his head all the way through. The problem with, as you say, the word "predestined" is that we've got four centuries of Calvin and so on in our heads, and before that, actually Augustine and Aquinas. You know, Calvin didn't invent these interpretations.
Part of the problem, then, all the way back to Augustine and Aquinas, is that they've screened out the whole Old Testament story of God's purposes for Israel, failing to realize that those are the purposes which are fulfilled in Jesus, and it's for the benefit of the world, not to rescue people away from the world.
So we really need a better translation than the predestined one, which is why I've translated it "those he marked out." I think that's what I've said at that point. That's right, yes, "marked out," "he called." And there we get this strange picture which is not here telling us exactly, as you were, who's in, who's out.
I'm not a universalist; I do believe it's possible for humans—actually for humans—to say no to God. But I don't think that's what this verse is about. Some people being in and some people being out is that if you're grasped by the love of God in Christ, if the Spirit is stirring in your heart, then you have a calling.
And you have a calling which involves you being then vindicated and glorified in the sense of, through your agonizing in prayer, being set in this strange glorious authority over the world and thereby sharing the extraordinary mission of the Son, who comes to his glorification precisely on the cross.
So the whole thing is saying to Christians who are suffering or who are about to suffer, "This is actually not just something you've got to get through, but it's part of the strange means by which, as with the death of Jesus himself, God is actually redeeming the world." Which is, of course, both an encouragement and, in a way, a warning.
But it really isn't about the issues that the great Reformation tradition has made it about. Yes, you frequently remind us of that so helpfully, and I think so many Christians have found a sort of finding this original way of understanding Paul's words freeing.
It helps to sort of enliven our role in God's big story. It stops it being about just this vertical, "Oh, this is just something that tells me how to make sure I get into heaven." It becomes about us being part of a much bigger cosmic story.
And I find, you know, when you read it in that light, everything that Paul says in Romans 8 about the groaning of creation and those being set free from bondage to decay, it makes so much more sense that we're part of a bigger story in which we are participating with God. Exactly.
And that's—I mean, the early passages in Romans, earlier on in the book, are so much about this is what humans are made for. When humans worship idols, they mess up their humanness. The problem with that is that God's purpose through humans for the world is thereby messed up as well.
It is not just that we ourselves are messed up; it's that all the good things God wanted to do through wise, obedient, trusting, energetic humans fall by the wayside. And it's redeeming God's purpose as well as his people.
Hi, Justin here. Hope you're enjoying the conversation. Just to say, if you'd like a free chapter of my book *The Surprising Rebirth of Belief in God*, I'll send it to you when you join my newsletter. Just visit Justinbry.com; the link is with the info below. Now back to the conversation.
When I just step back a bit and think about the Bible in larger terms, you know, this is just one chapter in one letter in a much larger set of stories and books. Yet it does have an extraordinary potency for today. I mean, do you, putting yourself in Paul's sandals, do you get any sense that he sort of realized that this wasn't just to the Roman church that he was writing, but this was to the whole of Christendom, if you like, that he was speaking?
I think he probably does have that in mind. I have often been fascinated by the way in which Romans is significantly different as a literary work from Paul's other letters. Obviously, the themes crisscross with the other letters, not least Galatians and bits which resonate with Ephesians or Philippians or whatever it is.
But Romans has a kind of a stately tread; it's got these four major sections. I am absolutely convinced that Paul, in his teaching over several years, had been thinking things through and figuring out how to say what had to be said. So that when he then arrives in Corinth for the last time, having got out of prison in Ephesus and come around one more time, he's ready to sit down with his scribe Tertius—or perhaps he was pacing up and down while Tertius was sitting down—and actually he's got it all there.
So I think it is clearly aimed at making the Roman church aware of his whole larger vision so that they can be great supporters for his projected Western move to Spain. Fine, okay, but as he does so, I think there is a global reach in view, which is one of the reasons why Romans is such an amazing exposition of the Old Testament.
He is telling them this is how to read the whole biblical story. So it's going far. I mean, it is very Rome-specific, but through that, it is reaching out for the world, which makes sense in terms of Rome being, you know, where all roads meet, etc. So, yeah, I think Paul is aware of that.
Though Paul is blissfully unaware of whether it's going to be one generation or 20 centuries—that's of no concern to him. It's just that the final great event might happen at any time. People make a mistake here and imagine that Paul thought that the second coming had to happen within a generation. Paul never says that.
He just says, "No, we're on the way; God has assured us of his ultimate future." But he doesn't say when that's to be. But I think in the process, this is the stuff that he basically wants everybody to know. Now, I actually see Ephesians as a circular letter, and I see Ephesians a little earlier than Paul, but in a similar way, mapping out a great picture.
Ephesians and Romans are not actually too far apart, although he's getting into some much more detailed stuff in Romans. Anyway, we could talk more about that. I mean, I wanted to talk in slightly more general terms, especially as regards the way the Bible keys into some of the themes of my new book, *The Surprising Rebirth of Belief in God*.
One of the things that I say in the book is that the Bible, in a sense, and the Christian story, the Judeo-Christian sort of narrative, gave people a story to live into for many generations. I mean, that is what Paul is describing. He's saying you're part of this much bigger story.
My sense is that in the modern West, as the Christian story has sort of been sidelined in the back mirror, people no longer really have a story to live in, or they're living in much smaller, parochial stories. They're trying to find things. I don't know what your sense is, Tom, about what the impact has been in that sense of losing that familiarity with and understanding and living in the big biblical story over the last couple of centuries.
Yes, yes. I mean, as you will know from our previous conversations and particularly from my Gifford lectures, which I'm sure we discussed at some point in the last year or two, in a way, I think that's been a necessary loss because Western Christianity, before the Reformation but certainly since the Reformation, has got stuck in the Platonic paradigm of going to heaven, of souls going to heaven, of people leaving this world and going to heaven.
I remember this when I became Bishop of Durham and was exploring the house that we were living in and some of the things left over by previous bishops, and the great emphasis by the saintly Bishop Handley Mole in the early years of the 20th century on heaven being our true home and that's what it's all about—heaven is where we're going, and that's our home.
He was a great man in so many ways and a prayerful and wise and godly man, but really a Platonist to his fingertips. It's as though I think we've had to lose the Platonic narrative and maybe go through a period—I think we're still going through it—a period of wondering what is the big story.
And now, please God, reconstructing the proper bigger biblical story, which is about God so loved the world, not God so loved us that he rescued us from the world, but God so loved the world, and so on and so on. The attacks that have happened against the older versions of the Christian story through the Enlightenment, whether it's Hobs and Gibbon with skepticism or whether it's Darwin, or at least those who are picking up Darwin, what I've described as the Neo-Epicureans from the 18th and 19th century—these have provided many shocks to the system for orthodox Christians.
But actually, maybe that was a necessary thing. Instead of running back to Plato and saying, "No, no, no, we believe in a supernatural world, and that's what really matters," we have to say, "No, we believe in the biblical worldview, which is of heaven and earth coming together."
I'm sure I've said it to you before, Justin, but I'll say it again: if the reformers had made Ephesians rather than Romans and Galatians the set texts, the whole history of Western Europe would have been different. Because Ephesians 1:10 has as its strapline that God's purpose in Christ is to sum up all things in him, things in heaven and things on earth—not taking people away from earth to heaven.
So we've needed to unlearn the old story, and I pray and hope that we will be relearning the true story in biblical scholarship itself. It also feels like there's been a journey of sorts over the last century or so because, in a way, what dominated the academy was that sort of form criticism of the sort of the German scholars and so on who were essentially saying, "Well, we can't really know anything about the history of this," and the historicity, and so on.
I mean, could you just give us a sort of overview of the way in which that really has changed in the past 100, 150 years? Wow, okay, huge, huge questions and story. I love going into all that, and anyone who hasn't read my book *History and Eschatology*, there is a lot about exactly these questions in those early chapters, particularly.
Basically, a lot of New Testament scholarship in the 19th and 20th century has been dominated by people in the German Lutheran tradition. Now, the German Lutheran tradition has great strengths, but attention to history, ironically, has not been one of them. Because they have called themselves historical-critical or whatever, but actually what they've done is they've used just enough historical skepticism from Hume and Gibbon in the 18th century, etc., to weaken one's grip on the happenings of history, especially of Jesus, in order to say, "But actually the events aren't the important thing. What matters is the challenge to believe or the challenge to convert or the challenge to decide for God in the present moment."
And so don't worry about what actually happened; listen for this challenge coming to you today. That was associated particularly with the great German scholar Rudolf Bultmann. But that's philosophically what is known as idealism—that is, getting away from the historical reality as the basic thing and saying what matters is the ideas and the belief and so on, which then they were able to say, "Well, there you are; that's justification by faith. You don't need history; you just have to believe."
And that's a travesty of what justification by faith really was. What has changed, particularly in the last two generations, has been the rediscovery of the Jewish world of the New Testament. This is partly many scholars seeing the awful tragedy of the Holocaust in the 1930s and 40s and have realized that that grew out of a Christianity, so-called, which was actually holding off from Judaism and saying that the Jewish world was a bad world and was against the gospel and that we had to break away from the Jewish vision.
So many people have read the New Testament like that, as we've already said in the last half hour. Instead of which, people then, especially things like the Dead Sea Scrolls, gave us a whole push: "Hang on, here are these people who are emphatically Jewish. They're saying some things very like the New Testament. How does that work?"
The new editions of Josephus and the new editions of the Apocrypha and pseudepigrapha, the Jewish writings roughly contemporaneous with the New Testament, have opened our eyes to ways of understanding what the New Testament was actually saying in a way that the older German scholarship—not just Lutheran, but much besides—and in Britain as well.
I mean, I'm not just dumping on the Germans, but so much of the Western Christian tradition had just not wanted to know about the Jewish matrix of Christianity. I and many, many others have spent our lives actually trying to understand as much as we can about what it meant to be a first-century Jew.
For me, I've often said this to people: for me, one of the clicks came when I was reading Josephus right through for the first time—that's the Jewish historian who's roughly a generation behind Paul, and he was in Jerusalem in the 40s and 50s and 60s, watching it all go on.
When we read Josephus, we suddenly realize he and his friends are not sitting around in Jerusalem wondering what you have to do to go to heaven when you die and whether it's works or faith or what. They're sitting around in Jerusalem wondering when is God going to do the thing he's promised and step into history and liberate us from these wretched pagans.
And when that happens, who of our present lot are going to be found to be on God's side? And that's justification, if you like. When God acts in fulfillment of his covenant promises, who are going to turn out to be his people? Once you approach the New Testament like that, so many issues come up in three dimensions.
Once you've seen them in three dimensions, you don't want to go back to the two dimensions or one dimension that we were used to in the bad old days. I mean, in a way, that sort of way of thinking about the gospels and Jesus sort of is still quite present in many forums. You know, the Jesus Seminar, I suppose, not that long ago, was still sort of saying, "Well, we don't really know what Jesus really said," and so on.
I mean, what difference does it make? What’s happened in your view that means we can actually latch onto the historical Jesus, and why does that matter for the way we then understand our faith? I mean, many people who talk about this stuff really don't understand how ancient history works, of course.
For much of ancient history, ancient Greece and ancient Rome, we are reduced to having one or at most two sources for what's going on. You know, ancient Greece, we've got Herodotus and Thucydides, and we've got the plays and the philosophers, etc. But there are whole decades in Athens or Sparta where we know next to nothing.
For the Roman history of the period we're talking about, okay, you've got the letters and speeches of Cicero; you've got the writings of Julius Caesar. This is a couple of generations before Jesus and Paul. But then for the early imperial period, you've got Tacitus, Suetonius, and Plutarch a bit later.
But the historian is constantly trying to put these all together and saying, "What makes sense within that world?" The better we know it, does this account make sense? Even if it's only in one source, if it makes sense and makes itself at home within that world, then many historians—not because they're credulous or silly, but just because that's how history works—they say, "Well, we can make sense of this. We can see how it fits."
And so as I read Matthew and Mark and Luke and John, and as I put them into the world which we know from Josephus and the Scrolls, etc., as well as the Greco-Roman world of the period, again and again I come back, as I've done in my work over my lifetime, and say, "Look, here's a way in which it may well make sense."
Now, it doesn't mean that all my interpretations of every saying ascribed to Jesus are correct and accurate; of course, that would be highly unlikely. But I will argue till the cows come home that those make sense in a way which the reductionism of the earlier days really, really doesn't.
The problem was that the reductionism of the very devout Lutheran-like people, like Rudolf Bultmann, was a way of saying, "Don't bother about what actually happened; bother about what God is saying to you today." Now, that's at one level for a preacher; that's not a bad thing to say.
But then if it gets into the hands of people who want to say, "Oh, well, maybe the gospels were just made up later on, so maybe we don't have to take Jesus' challenge to us very seriously," or people who say, "Oh, well, they all seem to have thought the world was going to end any minute, and we now know they were wrong, so they were probably wrong about a lot of other things as well."
That has tapped at the vitals of Western Christianity, of people who said, "Oh, well, Paul was wrong about the second coming, so obviously he's wrong about ethics, and he's probably wrong about the role of women," or whatever. That has just given free license to people to play fast and loose in a way which genuine history, which I and many others—it's not just me, for goodness' sake—what many, many of us have been trying to do for years would not support that kind of approach.
But I'm summarizing very big and complex issues, but it's a way of saying, yes, there are still problems. I had an email from somebody yesterday who had just been reading Bart Ehrman, and "Oh dear, how can I still believe?" I just sent him a little message saying one or two things.
So obviously, people need to be reassured, but not to say, "Stop thinking," but "Go on thinking, but think more deeply about what history is and what the history of the first century really is."
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I mean, it's interesting because in the new book, as you know, I talk about the growth of interest in the Bible among certain secular intellectuals, particularly one of the key characters I highlight is Jordan B. Peterson. The fact that he has begun talking to largely secular audiences, especially of young men, about the value of scripture and tradition is part of his very psychological approach to the way we can get real value out of these ancient stories and texts and so on.
At one level, I've really appreciated that because, you know, it's a breath of fresh air compared to the sort of the secular intellectuals of the new atheists who were sort of telling people that it was all fairy tales and nonsense. But at the same time, there is that same sort of Bultmann-esque temptation, I think, among people like Peterson to sort of purely see it for its mythological value, if you like, that it is just about the patterns of meaning that emerge from these stories and this archetypal hero, Jesus Christ, and so on, and sort of again sideline the historical aspect of this.
It doesn't really matter whether it happened or not. I don't know if you've got any thoughts on that. Yes, I met Jordan Peterson once; he was at a meeting in Oxford a year or two ago, and a bunch of us were invited. But we didn't have very much to say; he was talking most of the time.
But he's undoubtedly a very interesting man and a phenomenon of our age. And as such, yeah, this is different; we hadn't expected him. He's got new things to say and different life experiences, some of which have been very painful, it seems, and he seems to be emerging from those. I suspect his own story is still in the making; I think he's still himself searching, and one wants to honor that.
But yeah, I mean, of course, anyone knowing how the great mythological structures of the world and of ancient religion, ancient philosophies have worked would read the gospels and say, "Oh my goodness, this is a story for all stories—the story which contains all stories, the story of death and rebirth," or whatever it is.
Many secular commentators have said that about the gospel stories. But I also think about our mutual friend Tom Holland and what he has done as a historian. He's talking about the history that really does matter, which is of the way in which the history of the world has changed as a result of the Christian message and impetus in a way which nobody could have foreseen at the time of the early Roman Empire.
You know, the fact that we have a United Nations Declaration of Human Rights and all that sort of thing would be absolutely unthinkable in the first century, and so on. So there's all sorts of new currents going on which I find very, very exciting, and it makes some of the stuff that we grew up with look really rather shabby and piecemeal.
So I'm all for that; let's keep people thinking and keep them engaging. And when they do that, when they come back, anyone who does take first-century history seriously, I think, has got to take Jesus seriously.
It's one of the things I've been saying when I get a chance. Now and again, I'll say it here: in our education system, in our schools, I suspect that sadly very often the way pupils meet Jesus, if they do, is not in an ancient history lesson but in a period called RE, where Jesus is just a miscellaneous figure along with Buddha and Krishna and one or two others.
So they just get this idea, "Oh, Jesus, well, he's a swear word, but maybe he's the one the Christians invoke in the way that other people invoke other divine beings." Instead of which, when you're doing the Greeks and the Romans, there ought to be a whole module saying, "By the way, here's what's going on in the Jewish world at this time, and this is where a young Jewish prophet turns up saying it's time for God to become king.
And guess what? The system executes him, as the system so often does. And then something odd happened." What's going on? In other words, pupils ought to meet that as a historical data and a historical challenge, not simply as a bit of religion to be hived off to a separate period in the curriculum.
I mean, one of the things I also talk about in the book is the way the Bible seems to be able to speak across so many generations and cultures, times and places. I mean, it is quite remarkable, given this is obviously telling the story of a very specific people and culture.
And the way, obviously, this person, Jesus Christ, and the movement that grew out of his claims of resurrection and his teachings sort of obviously began to change its part of the world. But nonetheless, the fact that it has gone on to have the kind of global impact it has had over 2,000 years is somewhat remarkable because, on the face of it, it's hard to say why it has done that.
I mean, what's obvious, as a Christian, you believe there's a story there of why this story has gone around the world and changed everything. I mean, on a historical basis, does it seem plausible that if this is just one more story among many stories, that it could have the kind of impact it has had?
In that sense, yes. I mean, it is basically the story of the Israelite people, focused then on the story of the Jewish people. In other words, the remnant of Judah after the Babylonian exile—the rather few people who come back and reestablish a Jewish state of sorts, only sometimes independently.
And then out of this, this whole new flowering of something quite unexpected. Yet when it happens, people looking back and saying, "Oh my goodness, as we read our scriptures, there are all sorts of resonances. Maybe this is how it had to happen," which is, of course, what, according to Luke 24, Jesus said to the two puzzled disciples on the road to Emmaus.
And so, yes, from one point of view, it's odd, but it's the same oddity, actually, and this is sort of C.S. Lewis's point—the same oddity of the millionth chance of one speck of cosmic dust, whatever it is, turning into a planet that supports life, turning into an ecosystem that supports human life, turning into you and me and libraries and churches and all the rest of it.
You know, within the secular worldview or the Epicurean worldview, the chances of random atoms bumping into one another and producing what we now have are again a million to one or billion or trillion to one against that happening. And yet here we are.
In the same way, the randomness of ancient history—you know, there were other great civilizations. Sadly, several of them now almost entirely lost to view except for the odd bits of archaeology here and there, not least in parts of what we call the Middle East.
But this one, the Jewish one, the Israelite one, had this extraordinary flowering which has changed the world. This is again Tom Holland's point: whether we like it or not, and the new atheists don't like it, there are all sorts of things which even they, the new atheists, believe and proclaim which they would never have dreamt of believing and proclaiming were that not for the way in which Christianity has radically infected the way the whole world thinks.
Even the people who are trying to oppose it are opposing it with Christian weapons, as it were. When it comes to the overall pieces of the book that I wrote, Tom, you very kindly in the foreword wrote this: you gave a parable, actually, which was kind of based on the road to Emmaus.
And Jesus speaking to two people who are sort of wondering what the direction of Western culture is in the absence of the Christian story. You say here, "My version of the parable saw Jesus and the two travelers finally arriving at DOA Beach. On the shore stood a vast and hungry crowd. Modernism had caused the Sea of Faith to retreat, but the tide was now rolling back in. Yet having scattered their bread upon the water, all that the incoming tide of postmodernity brought them was bricks and centipedes," proving G.K. Chesterton's dictum that when people stop believing in God, they do not believe in nothing; they believe in anything.
That I suggested was the dilemma facing the serious secularist in the last decades of the last century. You go on to say that happily, I have a more optimistic thesis that perhaps we're seeing that sea of faith coming back in as people look to the Christian story again.
Now, I don't know whether the examples I've highlighted are evidence of a bigger sort of turning back to the Christian story, but what's your sense, Tom? I mean, you've seen the church and culture change just in the time that you've been doing what you've been doing.
And I think you're a very good person who's not only looking at scripture but looking at our world and seeing where things are going. Do you believe the Christian story could make a comeback, that even in our very secular, post-Christian West? Absolutely.
I mean, Oxford is atypical in so many ways, but Maggie and I have been living back here for four years now, and going around Oxford, seeing right now here we are with Christmas six weeks away or whatever it is, seeing performances of Handel's Messiah being advertised, seeing performances of other sacred music being advertised.
Is this just a musical attraction? I don't think so. I think it's something deep within our culture that many people who heard the Hallelujah Chorus on the radio or who once sung in a bit of the Messiah when they were at school or whatever, it's ringing bells.
And it isn't just nostalgia; it's something which gives shape and meaning and possibility to today's culture. And this is so with some of the other great Christian music from the Western world, like the great baroque passions, the St. Matthew and St. John Passion, and so on, but many other things as well.
And a very short walk from where I'm sitting is New College, Oxford, which has this wonderful chapel where night after night during term, the choir sings choral evensong. And on a Sunday night, that place is packed out.
If you walk 300 yards down the road to Magdalen College, that place will be packed out as well. And another few hundred yards around the corner, Merton College, that'll be packed out. Now, if all the people who are in church on a Sunday in Oxford were to get together in one place, there wouldn't be a building in Oxford big enough to hold them all, and that would actually be very exciting.
But I think because we're split up and divided and we go to our separate colleges or churches or whatever it is, people don't realize, and they assume that the secular rhetoric which you get in the newspapers and on the radio and so on is actually telling the truth and that our church attendance is dwindling these days.
Well, many parish churches have suffered like that, but many others—and cathedrals, for instance—cathedrals have been the fastest-growing churches in some diocese for some while now. There is something there that is drawing people in, and within the postmodern world, I'm quite happy to say people don't necessarily know why they want to turn up.
I mean, for instance, in 10 days or a fortnight from now, it will be Advent. On Advent Sunday, many churches, many cathedrals lay on special Advent services, and you hardly have to advertise them. People come in buses from miles around because the message of moving from darkness to light is very profound and reaches people who haven't got the theological training or the historical training but just know there is something going on here which is giving them hope, and they just don't want to lose it.
They want to cling on to it. So who knows where this is all going? But certainly, the rumor of Christianity's demise is greatly exaggerated, and it's exciting to see and to wonder and to pray for what God is going to be doing in the next generation.
Absolutely. Well, that's probably a good place to wind up our conversation. Thank you so much for this new book, *Into the Heart of Romans*, as well, which again just draws out so wonderfully the hope of the Christian story and the way in which God is calling us all to participate in that story and in his greater purposes.
Tom, thank you very much for spending some time with me today. God bless you, Justin; it's a pleasure as always, and God bless you and yours in Advent and Christmas and all that lies beyond. Thank you.
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