Nicholas Tom “N.T.” Wright is recognized as one of the preeminent New Testament scholars of this era. He’s a former bishop of Durham and has taught at Oxford University and St. Andrews in Scotland. He has written more than 80 books and specializes in analyzing the writings of St. Paul, most recently about his letter to the Ephesians.
Shortly before the publication of the book, The Vision of Ephesians, Wright talked to TIME about how contemporary churches are ignoring biblical advice to cross cultural boundaries, how Christians are misunderstanding the Bible on heaven, and the hardest part of the New Testament to translate accurately.
Church attendance around the Western world is declining. To what do you attribute this?
I don’t think there’s a one-size-fits-all answer. I think in America there is a revulsion against the perceived follies of what would call itself “Christian nationalism.” People say, if that’s Christianity, I’m running as fast as I can in the opposite direction, while, of course, there are plenty of practicing Christians for whom Christian nationalism is equally abhorrent. In Britain, the statistics have been down around between 5% and 10%, depending on which part of the country it is, for a long time. So the fact that the American church is shrinking brings it just a little bit closer to the rest of us. But I also get word from church colleagues in London and parts of America about lots of younger people coming into church.
Has your recent theological study led you to a theory on what the point of church is?
The point of church is worship. It doesn’t take any study to know that. What people do is organically related to which gods they are worshipping. Most modern Western Christians think that the point of Christianity is for my soul to go to heaven when I die. That’s not what the Bible teaches. The point of Christianity is for the kingdom of God to come, as Jesus taught “on earth as in heaven,” and many churches have hardly begun to tune in to that and to work out what that might mean. What matters is God doing new creation, and the church being the people through whose life and prayer and work new creation is already happening around us.
In your new book on Ephesians, you say the church should be the small working model of this “new creation.” What does that look like?
It looks like ordinary people doing extraordinary things, which demonstrates to the world around them that there actually is a God, that He’s the God who we see in Jesus, and that He is alive and active. Again and again Ephesians comes back to this, that the reason that God has called people to believe in Jesus is in order to create a community which demonstrates to the world that new creation has been launched. It is active. Paul wants the church to be an attractive community, and then for people to say, “How come you seem to be sort of different?” And the answer is, “Well, we follow this man called Jesus who was different, and he’s launched this thing called new creation. And we’re not very good at it yet, but we’re doing our best to be part of it.”
You write that multiculturalism is a bedrock of the Christian idea. But when you look at churches…
I know, I know. And that is a real tragedy. It’s one of the things which Ephesians addresses head on. In Paul’s day, the big divide was Jewish and Gentile. And Paul says Jesus has broken down the barrier between Jew and Gentile in order to create a single new humanity out of disparate elements. The problem we’ve had is that ever since the secular enlightenment of the 18th and 19th centuries, many people in the Western world have tried to create a multicultural society, but without the gospel as its basis.
Are saying DEI initiatives are failing because there’s no gospel?
You could put it like that. The trouble is that DEI initiatives are shaped by a kind of a secular agenda; they include all sorts of other things. It’s the ethnic thing which Paul is particularly concerned about. It depresses me and worries me enormously the thought of some Christians saying, “We will let Black people worship in their churches down the road there, and we’ll let Asian people worship in their churches over there, and we white-skinned people will worship in churches here.” Absolutely not. This is a denial of something which is fundamental. People have said to me, “Oh, you’re just following the woke agenda.” This has nothing to do with being woke. If the church isn’t true to what ought to be part of its core message, don’t be surprised if other people come along and fill in the gaps from their own motivations.
Does this mean people should travel out of their neighborhood to find a more diverse church?
It depends entirely on individual vocations and possibilities. But you know, people in the Roman Empire looking at a Christian assembly, seeing slaves in the same group as masters and calling each other brothers and sisters—this was just hugely shocking. I think all Christians today, whether or not they can do anything about it, ought at least to have the question in their minds, what are the implicit boundaries in my society that my church is going along with? And how could we transcend those?
You also write that Christianity, in all its traditions, has held what you call the “essential Jewishness” of Christianity at arm’s length. What do you mean by that?
The early Christian movement was basically a first-century Jewish renewal movement, which, because of both the teaching and then the death and resurrection of Jesus, quickly became a Jewish renewal movement for the world. But in the 19th century, particularly in Europe, there was so much implicit anti-Judaism in the society that when people were studying the New Testament, anything that looked Jewish, like the Temple, they said, “Oh no, Paul just means it as a loose metaphor. He doesn’t really mean that.” They’re not thinking about what the Temple was within Judean culture and how that transfers and transcends into what Paul might be meaning by it in, say, Ephesians chapter two.
Just to clarify, you’re saying that the historical antisemitism of the church and its dismissiveness of Jews has damaged the way the church understands the Bible today?
Undoubtedly. And this goes back to the Middle Ages and beyond—whether we’re talking about pogroms in old pre-Soviet Russia, whether we’re talking about the antisemitism of Germany in the 19th and in the 20th century, or sadly, in Britain and many other countries—there was a kind of implicit anti-Judaism.
Does the Bible give us any wisdom on the current situation with Israel and Gaza?
In Psalm 2, God says to David, I will give you the nations as your inheritance, the uttermost parts of the world as your possession, which is echoing the promise to Abraham, but saying it’s now extended. In other words, the Promised Land was an advanced metaphor for God’s claim on the whole of creation, and so the Christian mission is to make the Lordship of Jesus a reality in the whole world. At the moment in America, there is this very strong sense that the promises made in the Bible to the Israelite people about the land were not fulfilled at the time, and that now—they cite the U.N. resolution of 1948 establishing the state of Israel—they’ve got going again. Biblically speaking, this is all rubbish. I can’t say that strongly enough. It’s a total misreading. Ultimately, the whole world is God’s holy land, but as claimed in the name of Jesus, and by the means of Jesus, which is by the means of self-giving love, rather than the means of the bullet and the tank.
Your book talks about “spiritual warfare.” I saw a law firm on Twitter saying it was engaged in “spiritual warfare” as it defended religious liberty. What is spiritual warfare?
Jesus was very clear that the real enemy is not the Romans or the Greeks or the people that you could actually fight, but that it’s the dark powers that stand behind them. And Paul says, Our fight is not against flesh and blood, but we’re fighting in a different dimension. At the moment, many people use the language of spiritual warfare to justify their fight against flesh and blood, against actual human beings that they could name and that they want to take out, either by violence or by canceling them or whatever. This is the worship of Mars, the god of war. Obviously, what Hamas did in October two years ago was unbelievably horrible and terrible and wicked, but the way in which vengeance is being exacted a hundredfold, unless you’ve got very clear ideological blinkers on, you are bound to say that this is equally wicked in a different way.
We need to talk about Ephesians 5, the whole “wives, submit yourselves to your own husbands as you do to the Lord” bit. Some people say these verses hold women back.
Yeah, they have been used to do that. I believe they don’t. The other half of what you just read is the instructions for husbands, which is like that of Christ, who sacrificed himself on behalf of the church. And so if at any point a husband were to say, “You’re my wife, you must submit to me,” the wife has the perfect right to respond, “You’re the husband, and your role is to love and serve me as Christ loved the church.” Some bits of this chapter have been used for generations to say to women, sit down, shut up, and make the tea. And clearly that wasn’t Paul’s attitude. If you look at Paul’s attitude to women in, say, Romans, where Paul has written one of the most important letters ever written in human history, who does he give it to to take to Rome? Phoebe, who is a deacon in the church in Cenchreae. And the person who takes a letter in the ancient world to another community is likely going to be the person who will read it out and explain it. I would argue backwards from there that whatever else is going on in this passage, I think it’s very specifically within marriage. Paul is saying, in effect, that your homes ought to be places where the unity of the human race is modeled in the unity of husband and wife. Some sort of complementarity, I think, actually, is supported richly by empirical evidence at all levels. But to say, therefore, we should be complementarians, knowing ahead of time which roles this means women should take and men should take—that’s very different.
Similarly, when Paul writes, “Slaves, obey your earthly masters with respect and fear,” does he endorse slavery?
He doesn’t endorse it in that he’s not starting from scratch and saying, Would slavery be a good idea? He is like somebody in our world thinking about the internal combustion engine. We know that cars and petrol engines pollute the planet, but I can’t go into the pulpit on Sunday morning and say, “I want you to leave your cars in the parking lot; we will arrange horse-drawn buggies to take you home.” This is the way our society has been constructed, and we’re not yet ready to turn it around. Anybody could be a slave in the ancient world; all you had to do was run out of cash or lose a battle, and you could be a slave tomorrow, even if you were a king or a prince. Also, pretty well everything we do by electricity or gasoline was done by slaves in the ancient world. So when Paul gives instructions to masters and slaves, he’s basically saying Christian households should be models of mutual respect and forgiveness across that social barrier. We can’t erase that social barrier at the moment, but we are responsible to a higher reality, which means we treat each other radically differently within the present structure. You can see in St. Paul’s letter to Philemon, a very clear statement that this particular slave and this particular master need to welcome one another as brothers in Christ, that Paul is putting a time bomb beside the institution.
You have produced your own translation of the New Testament. What was the hardest book to translate?
Second Corinthians: it’s written like somebody who has just been through terrible trauma. It’s gritty. The sentences move this way and that, and they clash different bits with one another, and some bits are almost untranslatable. It’s completely different from First Corinthians, which is cheerful and sunny.
Do you believe in the inerrancy of the Bible?
Inerrancy was a word invented particularly by American rationalists, as a way of saying we are Protestants, not Catholics. So we don’t believe in an inerrant Pope; we believe in an inerrant Bible instead. The way I see it is, I think we have the Bible God intended us to have. It’s full of questions and puzzles and open doors, inviting us to go through but not necessarily telling us what we’re going to find when we go through them.
What do you hope and worry for the new Archbishop of Canterbury?
I think it was [former Archbishop of Canterbury] Rowan Williams who said that an archbishop has to have the patience of a saint in the hide of a rhinoceros. [Ed. note: It was “the constitution of an ox and the skin of a rhinoceros.”] I do not know whether Sarah Mullally has either of those things, but I sure hope she does. We need calm, measured, wise, Christian insight, and people do still look to the archbishop to provide that. Then, of course, there is a massive pastoral job, because the archbishop is the senior pastor for the bishops of the Church of England, who are themselves the pastors for the clergy. And so, in a sense, the buck stops with her. Good luck with that. That’s a very, very difficult place to be. The great thing is, there will be many people praying for her.
Do you think that the places in the world that still don’t recognize women in church leadership will have difficulty with this?
Yes, some will. When we first ordained women priests across the Anglican Communion, there were many people who said, “Over my dead body!” And then actually, once they listen to this lady preaching and see how she does pastoral work, they say, “Well, I didn’t realize it could be like this, but bring it on.” I would be nice to think that maybe Archbishop Sarah has the chance to effect a similar transition, not for everybody, because there are some people who have absolutely an ideological box which says otherwise. They might say it’s from Paul, but actually, he didn’t say it like that.
The post What Christians Get Wrong About St. Paul’s Letters, According to a New Testament Scholar appeared first on TIME.
