Transcription
Hello and welcome to another episode of Ask Ant Wright Anything, the program where we answer your questions about Jesus, the Bible, and the life of faith. I'm Mike Bird from Melbourne, Australia, and I'm joined by Tom Wright from Wickliff Hall in Oxford. Tom, it's great to be with you. Hey, do you love the city of San Diego? Do you love that city?
San Diego is great. Um, I'm always surprised that you go that far south and it's actually quite mild. It's not baking hot as you might expect it to be. Um, I've been there two or three times for conferences and that sort of thing. And it's always been a pleasure. Yeah.
Yeah. It is one of my favorite American cities. I love the zoo. I love the beach. I love the convention center, you know, where you and I spend a lot of time.
And I love the fish tacos. I never thought I would love fish tacos, Tom. I said, "What kind of an idiot puts fish into a taco? I mean, it's for beef, you know, and ground beef and a bit of salsa and avocado." But when I had my first fish taco, I felt my taste buds being born anew, you know. I was dead, but then my taste buds came alive. It's great.
Now, the reason I'm going on about this is we do have a question from someone in San Diego. And I just, yeah, it's one of my favorite American cities. But Tom, we've got some good questions this week. A question about what does it mean in Genesis that your desire will be for your husband? Should we be tithing today? And then a question about one particular group, one denomination in the United States called Oneness Pentecostals, and what should we make of them?
So to get into it, we have a question from Connie Waterworth in Billings. I think that's Missouri or Montana. I'm not too sure the state it's from. And her question is about that verse in Genesis about, you know, the wife's desire will be for the husband. And this is what Connie asks: "What does Genesis 3:16 mean in the latter half of the verse when it states, 'And thy desire shall be to thy husband, and he shall rule over thee.'"
Now, this is one of those questions that comes up particularly when people say, "Well, the Bible is just a bunch of patriarchal drivel. You know, it's full of men abusing and exercising authority over women. It's an oppressive text and it invites women to be subjugated before men."
The question here, Tom, is the idea that women will be subordinate, subservient, sort of under the thumb of males or a husband in some sense. Is that the divinely intended order, or was that a consequence of the fall, as a result of a broken world? We have all these other hierarchies of power, privilege, and identity, and whether for good or for ill, or for whatever the consequences are, it means that we have a man's world, and women, wives, can often end up being subordinate in some sense to their husband. Any thoughts on this, Tom?
Um, all sorts of thoughts. Yes. I mean, I have learned enough over many years to know that whenever you put your foot into this particular nest of questions, there are man traps ready to spring and catch you. Almost anything one says can be taken down and used in evidence against you as obviously a patriarchal person or obviously this or obviously that. So I really don't want to open myself too far to all those accusations.
And it's also, I want to be quite clear that I don't think Genesis 1, 2, and 3 is, um, what we would say, kind of the sort of literal history that you'd have seen had there been a video camera in the Garden of Eden, etc. It's a much more subtle and complicated and rich text than that. And there are many very good commentaries on Genesis, and I've read some of them, not all of them, but which bring out the flavor and meaning of different passages. And so I would say to anyone who's got serious questions about it, please do go to a library, go to a college, whatever, and get half a dozen recent commentaries on Genesis and work through and see what they say.
It seems to me that this is, in its context, quite explicitly a change or even a reversal of what you have in Genesis 2:18 when God says, "It is not good that the man should be alone. I will make him a helper as his partner." And then God makes the woman, and the man says, "This is now bone of my bone and flesh of my flesh." And so on. And therefore, he leaves his father and mother and clings to his wife, and they become one flesh. That's the intention.
And something does seem to have gone wrong. And in that wrongness, that idea of the woman as the helper, which is not a subordinate role. It's very much alongside, linking arms, linking bodies, being together, although bringing different gifts to that relationship, which is very clear, it seems to me, both in real life and in scripture, that this can indeed descend into something which is darker and less healthy. But I think here it seems to be that something has gone wrong in the way that the woman has manipulated, if you like, the situation. And she blames the serpent, and the serpent has nothing to say, and Adam blames her, etc. It's all very, very complicated stuff. But in the middle of it, there does seem to be a sense that now, if we're not careful, the role of the man in a marriage can turn into something which is domineering and so on, and the role of a woman in marriage can turn into something which is weak and subservient and liable to be exploited.
And I would want to say, as well as looking back to Genesis 2:18 and following about the original intention, we must include with this Ephesians 5, where it's very clear that Paul, quoting from Genesis 2, sees the partnership between a husband and a wife in male-female marriage in terms of the relationship between the Messiah and the church. And that the Messiah loved the church and gave himself for her. And that this doesn't mean that the Messiah isn't the Lord of the church. It means that he is the Lord because he is the one who has given himself for her.
And so I want to say, please read Genesis 3:16 in the light of the much larger picture, and particularly Ephesians 5, and particularly, of course, Revelation 21, the passage about the new Jerusalem, like a bride adorned for her husband, and the marriage of Christ and his people being the ideal towards which we are now aspiring. So that anyone who would take Genesis 3 and say, "There you are, it means that we men have to make the decisions and you women have to sit down, shut up, and do as you..." whatever else you say about that, that's not a Christian point of view. It may be that that's, as it were, the natural tendency left to themselves. Human beings may degenerate into that. But part of the good news of the gospel is that it doesn't have to be so, and that there is the possibility, the prospect of new creation waiting for husbands and wives who will then inhabit that new creational vocation.
So I think that's really all that I would want to say to that, except that about the desire being for the husband. Well, the Song of Songs, which sits there in the middle of the Old Testament, is all about the celebration of erotic love, and why not? It's part of the goodness of the original creation, the desire for one another. And here it's almost as though, well, yes, that's there, but it's in danger of being exploited, going the wrong way. And the woman becoming dependent in the wrong way.
I would not claim to be an expert on Genesis or indeed on the psychology or the sociology of where we are now in our Western society. But these issues have become so toxic that it's very difficult to talk about them without giving, whatever you want to say, red lines or red flags or red something or others. And so I would want to say, don't get stuck on two or three things that I or Mike have just said. Get back into the text, get back into the commentaries, get back into the larger biblical picture in order to try to inhabit wisely a text which is, I suspect, was challenging in its early period as it is now.
Yeah, that's good advice. That's good advice. Yeah, it is hard to tackle these issues without saying everything about everything because it touches on so many other issues. How do you read Genesis? The nature of marriage? What does it mean to be male and female? Is male and female before the fall different to male and female after the fall? And of course, what is it all going to look like in the new creation? So, yeah, sure, there's a lot of topics that relate to this, and we can't say everything about everything.
Sure. But we can change tack a little bit and go into our second question from Sarah Dioanzian in San Diego, Fish Taco Capital. Love that place. This is a question about tithing. Sarah asks, "I wonder why tithing is a Mosaic law that was kept and still practiced in the modern Western church. Is there a biblical reason why this of all laws is the one that is still widely held as mandatory for Christians?"
Tom, should we have tithing today? Is this something that really is mandatory for Christians? Because my gut feeling is to say we're called to be generous, but I don't think we're exactly, you know, giving tithes to church or charities as if they're the Levitical priesthood and we're living in the 700s BC.
No, no, that's absolutely right. And in my church, in the Church of England, there are still villages where there is a tithe barn, which was the barn near where the vicar lived, next door to the church perhaps, into which the parishioners would bring the fruit and veg, whatever that they had grown, or the tithes thereof, in order to keep the vicar and his family alive. That the tithing system was used that way, rather on the analogy of the tithing and some of the offerings and so on in the temple in Jerusalem, being there to support the priesthood because the priesthood didn't have territory of their own, because they had not been given a land.
So you've got to go back and say, don't just take a little bit out of the Old Testament and imagine you can carry it across and then drop it in a parachute onto anywhere in the New Testament or into present life. It's just not how it works. I think the point of tithing was, yes, generosity, and particularly to remind God's people that all their resources were God's gifts, that everything that they had belonged to God and was, as it were, lent to them. And that then, of course, as we find in the New Testament frequently, the love of money being the root of all evil, and all that. There is a sense in which the best thing, the safest thing to do with money is to give it away. That if you start hoarding it and start being anxious about hanging on to it, then there is great danger that the great god Mammon will come and envelop you, and you become an idolater, a Mammon idolater.
And I think that needs to be said as much as anything else at the moment. We live in a world very much dominated by the market and by money and so on. And many people have said, with some of the crises that are going on in the world at the moment, and we're recording this during the Iran conflict, America, Israel, and Iran conflict, many people have said, "Actually, follow the money. Look and see who's making money out of all this, and then you'll see who's really to blame for all the crazy things that are happening." And that's something which we as Christians shouldn't be shy of saying. Because after all, Jesus talked more about money than he did about sex, by a factor of about, I think, six to one or something like that.
And so when we then see Paul taking a collection for the benefit of the poor church in Jerusalem, who had been impoverished by sharing their resources and then by becoming, as it were, the pariahs who were the peace party in a Jerusalem that was increasingly bent on revolution against Rome. Paul goes around the Gentile churches collecting money to take to the Christians so that by this gift, they will be united and they will realize that God is creating a single new family that behaves as family. So there is something basically about the tithing being a way of making sure that we are living as family and not keeping our resources away from the family members who need them.
And the New Testament therefore doesn't give the detailed instructions that the Old Testament does about tithing because it's a different situation sociologically. But as many people have said, the fact that the New Testament doesn't re-emphasize tithe, tithe, tithe, doesn't mean you don't need to give. It means you're now free to give 20%, not just 10% or whatever it is. You're free to be as generous as you can.
There's another reflection which I've had of late, listening to our government and other governments arguing about tax policy and so on, that in the not too distant past, there wasn't much in the way of social security programs in my country or in the rest of the West. And so there were people begging on the streets. There were people who would give money to the church so that the church would look after the poor in the locality, etc. And we now have quite sophisticated, they may be not entirely adequate, but quite sophisticated policies whereby the government looks after poor people, looks after people with serious incurable illnesses, and so on. Things which in the olden days would have been done through a system based in the church.
And we've been through this transition where it used to be the church looking after the poor, and the rest of the world thinking, "Oh, well, we'll do our own thing." And now the society as a whole, more or less, sometimes less as well as sometimes more, thinks, "Actually, we should all be looking after these people in our midst who don't have the resources." And so the tax system, when the government requires us to pay tax so that they can then redistribute this money, that has something of the same effect that the Old Testament tithing system used to have. That doesn't, of course, mean, "Well, as long as I'm paying my taxes, I don't need to tithe, to give anything to the church or to other good causes." But it's just a reflection that let's be realistic about where we've got to sociologically, and that will vary from country to country and from continent to continent. But the underlying principle is, money always threatens to become a god. And the way to make sure money is not a god is to give it away, to be generous as much as in us lies. And I say that to myself as much as to anyone else.
Okay. I think that's good advice. I mean, I tend to think of the law, and I'm following my colleague Brian Rosner here. He says you should think of the law as wisdom for Christian living. It's not the constitution or the code of ethics that we're indelibly bound by. I mean, Paul, James, they do resource the Old Testament a lot in Christian ethical instruction, but it's more like it's wisdom there. It's not the constitution or the law of the land that we're following. So, I mean, tithing may be a good principle to follow, but it's not there as a legal principle that it has to be no more and no less than 10%. For some people, it might be less because of their financial situation.
But hey, I mean, if you've made a lot of money on crypto or whatever, whatever it is people are doing these days, feel free to be even more generous. Yeah. And then I think there's a danger that we would then reduce biblical teaching about the use of resources to simply the personal. Whereas I think we also ought to say that people who pass laws to eradicate the programs which were in the country which were designed to help the poorest of the people out of poverty, and when they then give tax breaks to the rich, etc., the church as a whole ought to say, "Sorry, the whole tithing principle was in order to make sure that God's resources are available for those who need them. And if you're doing something different, watch out because idolatry lies close at hand."
Yeah. Well, that's a good point to finish that topic on. We're going to go to a break, but when we come back, we're going to talk about a group in the United States that maybe you have heard of, maybe you haven't, called Oneness Pentecostals. And are they a really Christian group, or are they a heretical group? That's what we're going to answer after the break.
Pretty much universally, social science suggests that many of the institutions that we hold dear, that shape us, that provide us social support, a huge amount of this used to happen anyway inside of these traditional religious structures, and there really has been nothing to replace it. It's amazing how quickly ostensible deontologists transform before our very eyes into utilitarians on this question. We're talking about what the self is here. I mean, atheists believe in the self. Everybody believes in the self. Well, no, that's not I mean, that's not I find difficult to believe. Why would an atheist believe in the self? The self is a series of non-deciding mechanisms. The arguments against God are fairly compelling, and I think the arguments against atheism are fairly compelling. The difference is that most people who believe in God have expressed doubts, and a lot of people who are atheists tend to be more religious in this way than many of the people who are God believers. If people listening agree with me that free will in fact doesn't exist, and simultaneously agree with you that free will is somehow necessary for the upkeep of civilization, then I would simply ask them to consider who's relying on the delusion here. This show does seem to have an extraordinary capacity for putting me face to face with people that I've been talking smack about online. So, thanks again.
Hey, welcome back. Our final question for this week comes from Joseé Opino in Austin, Texas, about Oneness Pentecostals. And he asks this: "Hello Tom. I have some of your books and I watch your videos, and I can say that they have truly changed my life. Thank you for your work. My question is based on the fact that I belong to a group considered heretical, a marginalized group, which is the Oneness believers. It is a group that does not believe in the Trinitarian doctrine, but rather that God is impersonal. The Son is God because he is God made man. And the Holy Spirit is God because he is in some way God present and working in something or someone. Personally, I no longer identify much with Oneness groups, not because of the Oneness belief itself, but because of practical issues and a different theological understanding in many areas. Anyway, my question, you probably see it coming: Are we Oneness believers saved? Is it a sentence of eternal death for us not to believe in the Trinitarian doctrine exactly as it was established in the councils? Does not believing in the Trinity really mean that Trinitarians and Oneness believers do not serve the same God and do not love the same God, Christ Jesus, the Lord of the world? Again, thank you very much."
Now, Tom, my response to that is, Jose, you need some Trinity. Trinity is not the optional garnish on the side of the plate. Trinity is a pretty big deal. I think it's pretty important. But I have to acknowledge the average Christian I meet in the pews doesn't have a fully worked out doctrine of the Trinity. They may know something of it vaguely, but the average Christian I know has not memorized the Athanasian Creed. They're not aware of the Latin Trinitarian tradition of Augustine or the theology of the Cappadocian Fathers. I mean, I think you do need to be Trinitarian to be a Christian. My view is, how much Trinitarian thought do you need? And how can you have a Trinitarian view? Are there any errors that may put you beyond the pale? I mean, Tom, what do you make of this group? It's not a group that I've had any dealings with at all. And so I, like perhaps you, I'm not sure, Mike, most of what I know about them I know through the internet, which is not the best way to find out about things. But I think that the article on the internet does quite helpfully, I think, what's driving this question seems to be not so much "Can we clarify what's allowable and what's not allowable?" but an ultimate question of salvation. If you have the wrong sort of faith, will you be saved?
And before we get into the detail of Trinity and so on, I want to say that Jesus himself is the very center of the New Testament's revelation. And that Jesus himself, when he met people who needed healing, who needed all sorts of things, when they came and asked him and he healed them, he said, "Your faith has saved you." Not because they had said, "Well, Jesus, I believe that you are the Son of the Father who is distinct, and that you will one day send the Spirit who will be somebody else again." But, "Jesus, I think you're kind of in the middle somewhere." They just say, "Jesus, help me." And I think I want to say, anyone who says, "Jesus, help me," Jesus will say, "Yep, okay, I will help you now. Come with me." And there's some way to travel, and we'll be learning new things on the way, but yes, I am with you and for you.
I remember years and years ago hearing a lecture by an elderly theologian on the doctrine of the atonement. And he went through all the different theories of the atonement, and there's the sacrificial, and there's the judicial, and there's this and there's that. And at the end of the lecture, in the Q&A, one of the students put up his hand and said, "How much of all this does somebody have to believe in order to be saved?" And this wise old man said, "Very little. Something about the death of Jesus expressing God's love for me, and me thanking God for that." He said, "That's not the end of the story. God will then want to take you on and give you much more understanding and so on. But something about the death of Jesus being this expression of divine love reaching out and unfolding you, and you resting in that, that's the heart of it."
And so I want to say, anyone who says, with this Oneness belief, that there was some, there's sometimes I see called the Jesus Only movement. Well, Jesus Only is not a bad place to start. It's probably not the best place to finish, but it's not a bad place to start. Jesus himself is the center. For saying of Jesus himself, who are we talking about here? Read the Jesus of Matthew, of Mark, of Luke, of John, and say to yourself again and again, "Who is this Jesus? What is he calling me to do?" And do that before you ask big theoretical, abstract questions, because once we get into abstractions about the Trinity or whatever, it's easy to lose our bearings. And it's Jesus himself, the Jesus who walked and talked and wept and laughed and teased people and told funny stories and so on. That's the Jesus we're following. And the Jesus who led us all the way to the cross and then from the empty tomb out and into the world.
And so I don't want to say, another wise old teacher, I had a few wise old teachers when I was young, fortunately. And one of them once said to me, "Christology is a doctrine about God, and the Trinity is a doctrine about Jesus." Now, that seems counterintuitive, because you might think Christology, this. But actually, if you ask the Christological question, "How is Jesus both divine and human?" that is asking a question about who God is. And the answer then is, "God is Christlike, and in him there is no un-Christlikeness at all," which I think is a quote from Michael Ramsey. And that's when we look at Jesus, we're finding out about God. But the question about the Trinity is a question about the uniqueness of Jesus, that Jesus himself is this human being who lived and died and rose again in first-century Palestine, and who addressed God as Father and taught us to do the same. And among his teachings, he told people that there were one or two things which even he didn't know, but the Father did. In other words, that differentiation is baked into the portrait of Jesus in the New Testament itself. And when Jesus then talks about himself going away and sending the Spirit, he does say that "I will come to you." But he also describes the Spirit in a way which implies that the Spirit is a different, I don't know what word to use, a different manifestation, a different something than his person.
Well, we're working round to that. Exactly. Part of the problem here is that our English word "person" doesn't mean what the Latin word "persona" means. The Latin word "persona" means a mask. An actor at the theater puts on a mask, a persona, so that they can pretend to be this person, and then they take it off and they're back to their normal self. And the three persons are not three masks that God puts on. There is this again, this extraordinary mystery of a tripleness about God. There is something about God which is threefold, and I don't think we can escape beyond that. So I would say, anyone who hangs on to Jesus, onto his coattails, and says, "Lord, save me. I want to be with you and please lead me," then they're on the right path. There will be more to learn, but that's the great start. You're kind of, you're now in the family. Now, where do we go from there? But then I want to say, don't get hung up on what are essentially quite modern, quasi-philosophical questions about how you do the three and the one and so on. But recognize that in the New Testament itself, there is this radical differentiation between Jesus and the one he called the Father, and between Jesus and the one whom Paul refers to as the Holy Spirit. And we kind of live within that. And this is like the house in which we live. We haven't explored all its corners yet, but we learn to be at home there. I think that's probably as far as we can go.
I think that's a good point. I don't think the new creation is going to have a Trinitarian theology entry test. Before you get in, you've got to, you know, name the rank the five worst anti-Trinitarian heresies. I don't think there's going to be a Trinitarian quiz or recite the Athanasian Creed from memory.
That's right. And the Athanasian Creed, which is not really a creed, and it certainly wasn't by Athanasius, apart from that, it's a good phrase. It appears in the old English prayer book, the 1662 Book of Common Prayer, and it begins by saying, "Whosoever will be saved, they must hold this faith." And has thus expressed. And I wish that wasn't in the prayer book. I'm very glad that the prayer book is not the Bible, because most people at the time of the prayer book wouldn't have understood three-quarters of the Athanasian Creed. And most people today have never heard it, let alone would they understand it.
I know. Well, I think we can sum up, Tom, by saying nobody's saved by having the correct, pristine, perfect Trinitarian doctrine. We know that because most people don't have that. We're saved by clinging to Jesus.
But if you take Jesus seriously, you'll also follow what he taught about himself, about God the Father, and sending the Holy Spirit, which is going to send you probably in more of a Trinitarian direction than anything else.
Absolutely. And I like the way you said that nobody's saved by believing in this Trinity. But it seems to me that when somebody does really believe in Jesus and want to follow him, and is prepared to stand at the foot of the cross and then to rejoice at the empty tomb and invoke the Holy Spirit into their life, etc., and want to serve Jesus. When somebody's in that position, then as they move forward in faith, as they learn to follow Jesus, then there will be a Trinitarian-ness which will kind of bubble up around them and in their psyche. And of course, some of us are naturally given to be thinkers and system formers and, well, let's do that. That's okay. Lots of people aren't like that, and they shouldn't be droned into saying, "You've got to work out all this three-in-one stuff, or you're not part of the team." No, live within the following Jesus movement. And as the Trinitarian-ness grows around you, relish it and enjoy it, even if you can't necessarily explain it to a 10-year-old who happens to be standing near you.
Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I like to think, Tom, that only a Trinitarian God can do what is offered and promised in the gospel. I mean, so I would say the gospel necessitates a God who is triune, you know, one God in three persons. But that's something we can explore for another episode. Jose, I hope that answers your question. Although I do want to add that maybe find a church that's got Trinity in the title, Trinity Anglican, Trinity Baptist, Trinity Methodist, and maybe give them a try. That might be something else to do.
But anyway, that's all we have time for this week. But Tom and I are very keen to get your questions. So go to askantwright.com, send us your questions. But before you do, remember we have a very big back catalog. So rather than send us yet another question about the rapture, maybe go listen to some previous episodes and listen to what we've said about that in the past. And then maybe when you've got some extra questions that we haven't answered in the past, then you can send us the fresh question you have for us. And while you're at it, check out the other great programs from the Premier Network shows like Unbelievable, the CS Lewis Podcast. You can find all the links and connections to this on the Unbelievable page on YouTube. Otherwise, then it's goodbye from me, Mike Bird, and goodbye from me, Tom Wright, and we look forward to joining you on the next episode of Ask Ant Wright Anything. Until then, God bless and take care.