N.T. Wright is one of the world’s pre-eminent New Testament scholars. A former bishop of Durham and the author of more than 80 books, he has taught at Cambridge, McGill, St. Andrews and Oxford Universities. I spoke with Dr. Wright about the meaning of the incarnation, his faith journey and why he is a follower of Jesus; when his faith “seemed to go dark”; and the central contributions of the Apostle Paul, about whom he has written extensively.
Dr. Wright talked about political theology and why many Christians today are misguided in their understanding of heaven and in how they interpret the Bible — and how radical the concept of bodily resurrection was in the first century.
“The love of God has come and does come to the dark places of the world,” Dr. Wright told me. His vision of the church is to stand in the place where there is darkness and pain in order to help people move toward healing and hope. My editor, Aaron Retica, joined me for the interview and asked a question about the attacks against empathy emanating from some Christian quarters.
Our conversation, which has been edited for length and clarify, is the fifth in a series of interviews I am doing that explores the world of faith.
1. Why Jesus entered the human story
Peter Wehner: It struck me at a fairly early age in my faith journey that when it came to Christianity’s soteriology, the doctrine of salvation, it could have been Jesus coming to Earth at the age of 33 and on the cross bearing the punishment for humanity’s sins. But that’s not how Christians believe it happened. Instead, it was Jesus being born into this world, engaging with it, entering the human story and into complicated human relationships. With that as a backdrop, can you dilate on what the power and meaning of the incarnation is to you?
N.T. Wright: I came into Christian faith as a very small child because mine was a churchgoing family, a very ordinary Anglican family in the far north of England. Going to church, saying your prayers and celebrating Christmas and Easter was just part of who we were. And so the story of God coming into our midst in Jesus was built into the way the world was for me from very early on.
Like many people, for years I had imagined that whoever God really is, God was outside the process entirely. God was a long way away in this funny place called heaven, and it was a peculiar and rather wacky miracle that God would suddenly decide to come and be born as a baby.
I’ve come to see that quite differently. And in the last 10 or 20 years particularly, after a lifetime of doing things like being a bishop and being a scholar, I now see that from Genesis onward the way that the creator God made the world and the way that the creator God made human beings was precisely in order that it would be gloriously appropriate for this true God, this creator, to come as a human being.
The older I get, the more I think this is where the story was always supposed to go.
And of late I have come to see in the great prophecies of Israel’s Scriptures, this prophecy particularly of God returning to Zion after the long, dark years of exile. God promises He’s going to come back in person. When I was a small boy I sang in church choirs, and if you sing Handel’s “Messiah” you sing, “And the glory of the Lord shall be revealed, and all flesh shall see it together.” For many years it never occurred to me to ask: What would that actually look like? What are we talking about here?
It’s talking about God coming and becoming visible. And then you realize that the whole New Testament says yes, that is precisely what’s happened. It just doesn’t look like what we thought it might. It doesn’t look like a sudden fireworks display, a blaze of glory. It looks like this quirky, quizzical, deeply wise, challenging young man strolling around, talking to people about how it’s time for God to become king. And so for me, the incarnation is a way of saying: At last, creation has got to the place it was supposed to get from the beginning.
Now, built into all of that, of course, is the fact that creation has gone badly wrong in certain ways. When God comes to be in our midst, he’s going to deal with that as well. God is going to come, but when he comes, he’s got a particular task to do. The coming, the homecoming, is absolutely central.
Wehner: I want to stay on the person of Jesus for a moment. What do you find most captivating about him? What explains why you don’t merely respect Jesus but have devoted your life to worshiping him?
Wright: For me it was growing up conscious of a world in which God was God, and from very early on, something about Jesus loving me. I don’t know exactly when that first hit me, but I do vividly remember, as quite a small boy, maybe 7 or 8, being by myself in the house at home and weeping and weeping, overwhelmed by the fact of Jesus loving me enough to die for me. I’m almost tearing up as I’m saying this, because that sense has never left me. The frustrating thing is I don’t know whether I had just heard a particular sermon or whether it was something we’d just sung in a hymn, or whether it was a Bible verse or something else. But it was something about that self-giving love of Jesus.
And when you then read the Gospels having had that experience early on, you see it all over the place. For many people, if God were to become human, he would be rather austere and standing on his dignity and giving instructions from a great height. And then I read the Gospels and find that this is the Jesus who goes to parties with all the wrong sorts of people. This is the Jesus who weeps at the tomb of his friend. And this is the Jesus of whom Saint Paul later says: He loved me and gave himself for me. All of that combines into a very challenging world where one is loved more than one could possibly ever deserve, and where love of course is deeply demanding. We are faced with, as one of my teachers used to say, a debt of love which only love can repay.
Wehner: It sounds like for you it was in a sense transrational, almost ineffable, and that has been the cornerstone that you come back to. It’s as if you have viewed almost everything through your life since through that moment.
Wright: And not just through the moment but through the kind of world of experience where that moment was not a bolt from the blue, but it made sense, and made sense of everything else. And so yes, in a sense, transrational, because if you’re 7 or 8, there’s maybe not a huge amount of reasoning going on.
But then, when bigger questions came up as philosophical questions, I would be approaching them as one who was expecting to find a coherence in the cosmos, and a coherence which came into focus at certain points, with the notion of this God coming in person and acting out of total love. And so “the heart has its reasons that reason does not know.” But that’s not quite good enough. I would say the heart has its reasons, which can take on board all the questions that reason raises, and say: Yes, thank you; now, here’s the larger world within which all that makes sense.
Wehner: I wonder if what that moment did for you is, as you grappled with intellectual and philosophical questions, it allowed you to bracket the character of God. Whatever the answers to the hard questions are, like the slaughter of the Canaanites, you were able to insulate God’s core character from the hard questions, as opposed to intellectual and philosophical questions undermining the foundation of who God is.
Wright: Yes, exactly. Whenever I met those questions, it was: My goodness, there is a big question here, but we are like people standing on a plain looking down into a great chasm. We can’t necessarily make sense of the chasm and we find it a bit scary, but we trust that we’re part of the larger world within which that is somehow held. That’s not to escape the question or to pretend it doesn’t matter; it’s to say that somewhere in the depths of the being of God we know — as the loving, wise creator — this is somehow held.
And at the heart of the answer, of course, is that ultimately what seems to have happened in the Gospel story is the God who made the world coming to be part of it, to take the pain and the paradox and the awfulness of the world onto himself. That’s part of a faith statement about the meaning of Jesus’ crucifixion. But it’s also ranging out into the larger world.
2. Doubt, belief, darkness and light
Wehner: I wonder if you’ve struggled with moments of doubt, moments of disorientation, and how they might have manifested themselves in your life. If so, how did you face them, or are those largely foreign experiences for you, given your own particular journey?
Wright: I’ve never really had long periods of doubt or disorientation. A couple of times I have, one of which was my last year in seminary, when I was studying all kinds of stuff and was intellectually very excited about it, but the whole faith experience just seemed to go dark. I remember talking to people about it and thinking: Well, maybe the stuff that I’m studying is so challenging and so stretching that I just have to live through this, as though this is like a thick cloud. I’m going for a walk up this mountain. I think I was on the right path the last time I had a chance to look at the map, and so I’m just going to keep on if I can, putting one foot in front of another. And the frustrating thing about that is I don’t remember how that darkness lifted. But by the beginning of the next academic year, I was out in the clear again.
Yet I never stopped praying; I never stopped reading the Bible. But it was like beating your fists against a door which seems not only to be closed but locked and barred from the inside, and nevertheless just gritting one’s teeth and carrying on.
Wehner: Often Christians like to take the weakest case against Christianity and answer it. This question is different: What is the strongest case against Christianity, the one you believe has the most moral and intellectual merit, and how do you respond to it?
Wright: It’s not the way I would approach it, in that for me it’s like a fish being in water and being told: What’s the strongest case against water that you know? And the answer is: Sorry, this is where I live.
And so although I have heard arguments against Christian belief again and again, there’s a kind of oddity about many of them. When people say: Well, I can’t believe in Christianity because … they come up with lots of moral arguments. And we respond and say: Well, hang on. Where do those moral arguments come from?
I’m with the historian Tom Holland on this one, in his work on the way in which the modern Western world, even when it’s denying Christianity, is using a broadly Christian worldview from which to do that. So there is an odd wrinkle going on there in the argument.
But I suspect that most people don’t actually make the intellectual argument, pro or con, the be-all and end-all of what they do. There are some tough-minded rationalists who push everything else off to the side. But I think for most people, the awareness of the possibility of a God such as Christians talk about is something that is happening at several different levels at once. I would include the aesthetic as well as the moral, as well as the cultural, as well as the deeply personal.
For many people, the intellectual arguments may be overwhelming them, and then they go to a performance of, say, Johann Sebastian Bach’s St. Matthew Passion, and they realize that this story makes sense of us in a way that really nothing else does. And what you then do with your intellectual doubts is you say: Well, they’re still there, they’re not swept away, but this story, unless the world is totally mad, this story stands at the middle of the picture, and we have to stand there at the foot of the cross.
Bach’s music, of course, is designed to help us to do that. From there we are not able to solve the puzzles as though: Ah, yes, here we are, Q.E.D., end of the problem of evil or end of the slaughter of the Canaanites. No, those are still there. But we now see them in a larger light where they no longer have the power to overthrow.
Now, obviously, there are many rationalist atheists who would want to take a different view, but this is where I would be starting from. And for me, all these arguments come back to Jesus. And what worries me sometimes is when Christian apologists try to make a general theistic case of which Jesus is a special example. Whereas in the New Testament, it’s very clear that actually Jesus himself, as a secure figure of history, lived and died in the first third of the first century. It’s from Jesus that we then discover all the other things that are going on. So I would always want to come back to that.
Wehner: Let me let me move on to Paul. He’s been a central focus of your studies over the years, and in 2018 you wrote “Paul: A Biography.” What do you think we should know about Paul that is perhaps too often overlooked? In what ways is he widely misunderstood? And what would you name as among his central contributions?
Wright: As you rightly say, I have spent much of my adult life bumping up against Paul — relishing it, but also finding it difficult and challenging. I’ve gone on thinking and rethinking and rereading passages which 30 years ago I thought I knew well, which I’ve now had to come back to and say: Actually, there’s something else there.
I see that as a lifelong preoccupation. But it’s a delighted preoccupation. At the center of it all, I learned early on that we had to do business with the fact that Paul was a first-century Judean. He was a serious Pharisee. We need to pay attention to the Judaic worldview of his day and the Judaic hope of his day — the hope for resurrection for all God’s people, the hope that one day the creator God would remake the entire world and raise his people from the dead. That remains enormously important for Paul.
The extraordinary thing is that what we thought was going to happen to everybody at the end has happened to one person in the middle of history. So that for Paul this eschatological perspective is enormously important and often misunderstood, because Paul believes that God has come into the middle of history and pulled it apart, stretched a new gap, so that the end has arrived in the person of Jesus and his death and resurrection, and the end is still to arrive.
Those who are called to follow Jesus are living in this extraordinary gap where new kinds of things are taking place, which turn out to be the sort of things that were promised in Israel’s Scriptures but which anticipate, in certain ways, the new world, which is still awaiting to be born.
When people think about Paul, they often think about justification by faith. But they’re thinking about that in terms of a Platonic soteriology, where the question is: How do I get to heaven? And the old Reformation question is: Do I have to do time in purgatory en route and all of that? A lot of the older debates about Paul were couched within that question, rather than saying Paul believes that something has happened in history, is happening in history, and will happen in history. So that sense of the reality of a community in the present, which is formed and shaped by what God has done in Jesus and through the Holy Spirit, but which then anticipates the new world that God is going to make. That shapes and frames everything else in a way which I would say Paul would now be astonished at how much we in the West have lost that. That so many people asked about Paul’s theology would say: Well, it’s basically justification by faith, so it doesn’t matter how I behave, because if I’ve said a prayer, God is going to rescue me. Absolutely not.
And for Paul, the unity of the church, the fact of people coming together, whether they’re Judean or Greek, whether they’re male or female, whether they’re slave or free — the traditional great divisions of ancient society — you are all one in messiah, Jesus. It isn’t that Paul had to abandon his Judaic heritage. Rather, if you believe that God has sent Israel’s promised messiah, then of course the nations need to know that they’ve got a new ruler. And in Caesar’s world that’s fighting talk, as Paul discovered again and again.
3. Political theology
Wehner: “Jesus and the Powers,” which you co-wrote with Michael Bird, is an effort to explain what faithful Christian political engagement should look like when it’s aimed at what you call “building for the kingdom.” With that in mind, I have three interrelated questions. Do you believe Christianity is inherently political? If so, in what respects? And what are the duties and the dangers that attend political involvement for Christians?
Wright: It’s interesting how far we’ve come. Fifty years ago I would probably have said: No, no; politics we leave to the politicians and the social workers, because we’re interested in heaven and salvation and leaving this wicked world. What happened to me is that I started to teach classes in the university about Jesus and his proclamation and discovered that when Jesus said “the kingdom of God is at hand,” he didn’t mean, “Let me tell you how to get to heaven.” He meant that the God who made the world is now becoming king on Earth as in heaven.
Jesus has come in order to launch this strange new project of God becoming king on Earth as in heaven. But of course with Jesus — and this is where Paul really comes into his own — the very concept of kingship, of power, of rule is itself radically redefined.
One of the central passages in Paul is Philippians Chapter 2:6-11, where he talks about Jesus having been in the form of God, but not regarding his equality with God as something to exploit. Paul is here looking across to Alexander the Great, to the Syrian monarchs, to Egyptian kingship, and particularly to Caesar on the throne, because Philippi was a Roman colony. And he contrasts that whole world of power and says that Jesus has done the unthinkable — coming and dying the death of the slave — and therefore God has highly exalted him and bestowed on him the name above every name.
Now, this is a glorious theological passage. It is also radically political. One of the first long academic articles I wrote was about Philippians Chapter 2, and I completely missed all the Caesar references. It took one of my graduate students to rub my nose in the fact that this is one of the most extraordinary, dense political statements anywhere in first-century writing. Because the idea is the God who made the world has made it in such a way that he wants wise human beings to be in charge of it. The idea of human beings looking after the world is not a strange anti-God innovation. That’s how God wants to work in the world. The problem is that humans mess up. And then the question is: What is God going to do about that, and how’s he going to do it?
Paul’s vision, which I think is central to any Christian political theology, is of a new community, a community of people of radically different kinds. It’s like Revelation Chapter 7 — a great multitude of every nation and kindred and tribe and tongue. They all belong together in this small working model of new creation, which Paul calls the church. And that is then the political entity. The word “political” comes from the Greek “polis,” which means city. Is Paul interested in the local community? You bet, and he’s interested in planting little cells of unalike people — Judean, Gentile, male, female, slave, free, barbarian, Scythian, anyone from anywhere — who are loyal to King Jesus and want to show the world what that’s like in a world which is currently dominated by Caesar.
For Paul, the center of it all is not simply one political agenda over against others, but this strong sense that the God who made the world has launched upon the world this new way of being. It has Jesus not only as Lord, but as the one who redefines what lordship is, and thereby enables the church to speak the truth to power, to hold up a mirror to power, to say: There is another way of being human. And you guys are going about it in a destructive and dangerous way. We will pray for you and work with you, but we are going to go on reminding you that there’s a different way to do power, to do glory.
The model for that, in my mind, is where Jesus stands before Pontius Pilate. This is the kingdom of God versus the kingdom of Caesar, if you like, and Jesus acknowledges that Pilate has a God-given role over him. But he then says: So the one who handed me over to you is guilty of a greater sin. He implies, in other words, that when God entrusts people with responsibilities, he will then hold them to account.
That’s how the logic of it works. God wants humans to run his world, but if the humans mess up, God will call them to account. And it’s part of the church’s job to be advance bearers of the good and bad news to the people in power.
Aaron Retica: On the American right, it’s become fashionable to decry empathy as a form of weakness. It’s almost a Nietzschean critique of Christianity. There’s talk about how empathy is bad — it leads to bad policies, bad politics and bad religion, too. It’s a comprehensive critique of empathy.
Wright: The point at which you say that empathy is either undesirable or actually wrong is the point at which you need to go back and read the Gospels — and you need to go back and read 2 Corinthians, particularly. Because the people in Corinth who were getting on Paul’s case were basically saying: We want a strong apostle, we want a tough guy, we want somebody who’ll take on the world. And this man, Paul, he’s been in jail; he’s been shipwrecked; he’s been beaten up. So, obviously, the gods have got it in for Paul. And Paul articulates a theology of weakness. “When I am weak,” he says, “then I am strong.” And he boasts of all the wrong things.
They want to hear his up-to-date C.V. of all the successes he’s had, all the great achievements he’s done. So Paul says: OK, let me give you the list. I’ve been beaten up, I’ve been stoned, I’ve been mobbed. And when the going got really tough, I was the first one running away and being let down the city wall in a basket. He’s deliberately teasing them. He’s saying: This is what apostleship of the crucified messiah looks like. And so the cross of Jesus stands at the heart of the critique of any attempt to say that empathy isn’t where it’s at, because the whole point of the cross is Jesus loved me and gave himself for me.
Now, of course, if you want to translate that directly into public policy of this or that or the other government, then you’re going to have to think wisely about how best to implement it in that context.
At the same time, and I want to say this most clearly, when I read the whole of the Bible, and not least Israel’s Scriptures, there are one or two of the Psalms, like Psalm 72, which is a great paean of praise to the true king. And the reason that the true king gets praised is because he looks after the poor and the widow and the orphan and the stranger. The king’s care for the needy is repeated again and again. And this sense throughout Scripture is that actually, God cares about the people who are at the bottom of the pile, and that if there is true political authority, the primary task of that authority would be to instantiate that love of God for the poor and the widow and the orphan and the marginalized and the outcast.
I know perfectly well that that could be heard as simply: Oh, well, that’s the woke agenda, isn’t it? But believe me, it isn’t. It’s the strong agenda of a vision of God who is not the big bully in the sky. He’s the God who comes to be with us and whose personal presence with us is that of this cheerful but suffering young man who walks with us and goes to die for us, the man we call Jesus.
4. Misunderstanding faith
Wehner: In your forthcoming book, “God’s Homecoming,” you challenge what you argue is a core misunderstanding of Christian faith: the idea that believers, once they die, will leave Earth to be with God in heaven. In your words: “The point of Christianity is not that we should go to heaven. The point of Christianity is that heaven should come to us.” Why do you believe this misunderstanding is so widely shared? And why is getting the doctrine right so important? To put it in colloquial terms, why does the ZIP code of the eternal resting place matter?
Wright: Oh dear, I like that. Even though we don’t have ZIP codes in the U.K., I hear what you’re saying.
Christianity has a strong view of God’s ultimate planned new world. That is the new heavens and the new Earth. It’s not heaven against Earth. The last chapters of the Bible, Revelation 21 and 22, are not saying the dwelling of humans is now with God. The strap line is the dwelling of God is with humans. The new world is what Genesis 1 was always pointing to — namely, heaven and Earth as a unity, as a coming together. I think Paul and John both explore this when we talk about Jesus’ humanity and divinity. What they’re really saying is Jesus is standing authentically at the intersection of heaven and Earth and embodying them together, which is why it’s so glorious and so painful.
I think what happened is that from sometime in the first few centuries, many of the great Christian teachers were borrowing in order to explain things to their contemporaries. They were borrowing from the Platonic tradition, where the thing that all humans ought to be emphasizing was how to cultivate the soul so that the soul, which was presumed to be immortal, would eventually go to whatever the heavenly world would be for a Greek philosopher. If you’re a Platonist, it would be the realm of forms. For a Christian, it would be to gaze upon God. That idea sat uneasily for several centuries alongside belief in resurrection.
I’m not a medievalist, but it seems there’s a real tension which runs right on through the Middle Ages, about whether the actual eventual goal is for our souls to go and see God, or whether the eventual goal is for bodily resurrection into a new creation, a new heaven, a new Earth.
From a biblical point of view, it’s definitely the latter. From a philosophical point of view, the idea of the immortal soul has had a long run for its money. I think the problem is that when the Protestant Reformation happened, the reformers were so anxious about the doctrine of purgatory, the doctrine of the Mass, what they saw as the abuse of the priesthood and false teaching about Mary, that they didn’t question the idea of souls going to heaven. What they questioned was the means by which that would happen.
And so the great doctrine of justification by faith was geared into “This is how your soul gets to heaven” rather than by doing good works, which you’re supposed to do to impress God. And that has sustained Western Protestantism for a long time. But it’s not actually what the great texts like Paul’s letter to the Romans and Galatians are about.
For me, as a historical exegete, that’s a real challenge, because I’m constantly studying these texts in their context, trying to make sense of them, and then realizing that the way we’ve read them has been upside down and inside out.
Paul doesn’t talk about this hardly at all, and in fact, it’s not a big topic in the New Testament, but insofar as there is any teaching about who or what we are between death and resurrection, Paul says, my desire is to depart and be with the messiah, which is far better. So being with Jesus Christ in the presence and power of the Holy Spirit, against the day when God will raise us from the dead, that is the Christian hope.
Wehner: If I understand you correctly, your view is that if you get the theology of heaven and God returning to Earth wrong, the responsibility we have on Earth, in the here and now, is mitigated. But if you see God returning to Earth, it ennobles the creation. Rather than a radical disjunction that says Earth is not our true home and we only have to worry about salvation.
Wright: Absolutely. Paul says at the end of his long chapter on the resurrection in the first letter to the Corinthians: Get on with your work because what you do in the Lord is not in vain. Too many Christians think that if you are feeding a hungry person on the street, or if you’re working to alleviate homelessness, or if you’re working in drug rehab or whatever, well, that’s all very good. That’s kind. But it’s all stuff that’s going down the drain. It’s like oiling the wheels of a machine that’s going to fall off a cliff. And the answer is: absolutely not.
These are signs of new creation, and the true signs of new creation will somehow be enhanced and, as you say, ennobled, in God’s new world. So it really radically alters the whole shape of the mission of the church. Instead of saying the mission of the church is to tell people about Jesus in order to enable them to go to heaven, the mission of the church is to announce and embody and effect a new creation here and now, insofar as we can. It will always be partial, and we’ll always get some things wrong. But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t be doing it and prayerfully implementing it on Earth as in heaven, to coin a phrase.
Wehner: Let me ask you about interpretive questions related to the Bible and both human fallibility and enculturation. Christians begin with the premise that the Bible is divinely inspired. But it’s also written through a human medium. It’s impossible to read the dozens of different books that comprise the Bible, written by around 40 different authors on three different continents, spanning roughly 1,500 years, and not recognize that the authors were deeply shaped by their social locations, their cultures and their life experiences.
Someone writing in the Iron Age will see almost everything, including God, through a prism that’s quite different from those writing centuries or even a millennium later.
The Bible is clearly multifocal, not univocal, and at times it presents contrasting accounts and theological perspectives, even on the same events. For example, 2 Kings and Hosea present completely contrasting perspectives on Jehu’s massacre of the house of Ahab at Jezreel, with the former celebrating it as a triumph of God’s righteousness while the latter condemns it as a shameful episode. There’s a difference in God’s attitude toward the Ninevites — in Jonah, where you see expansive mercy, and in Nahum, where you see wrath. How do you make sense of all that?
Wright: There is a polyphonic quality to Scripture which is like other forms of polyphony, and it’s like poetry in general. Most of the things that you refer to, they’re really important, they’re really interesting and significant. But the way that they’re phrased sounds to me as though they’re coming from a rational attempt to say if the Scripture was really inspired, then every book ought to be saying exactly the same all the time. And I want to say that that’s not actually how music works; it’s not actually how poetry works.
For the most part I’m a writer of prose, not poetry. But the Bible is not only poetic in its different bits and pieces; it’s poetic seen as a whole. One of my favorite works of poetry is T.S. Eliot’s “Four Quartets,” which contains many different genres and many different perspectives. Some bits are deeply sad and tragic; other bits are wonderfully forward-looking and profoundly hopeful. And yet as a whole, that quadruple poem has a unity that transcends those different bits and pieces.
Or to take a biblical example, if you look at Psalm 105, it’s a wonderful story about how God brought the people of Israel out of Egypt and took them to a promised land so that they might keep his statutes and obey his laws. And then we turn over to Psalm 106, which said: Well, God did rescue us, but then we rebelled and He had to punish us. We did this and that, and then we said sorry and God forgave us. And then we did it again. That sequence repeats and repeats. Bring Psalm 105 and 106 into the same room and it looks as though they must be written by two very different people. But actually, both stories are true. They’re just true at different levels.
Now, I’m not saying that immediately solves the problem of the Book of Nahum versus the Book of Jonah. Rather, I’m saying that’s the general hermeneutic rule I would apply. Somebody asked me just the other day about Genesis 1 and 2. Insofar as I understand this text, this whole wonderful, sprawling text, it is telling a story. And in a story there are all sorts of different things that happen and different characters who come in and different points that are being made. And gradually, just as you live within one of the great novels or Shakespeare plays, you realize that all these different things which feel so disparate may actually come together either in tragedy or in a resolution of some sort. And that’s more the sort of book that the Bible is.
My fear is that the way the question is posed comes to us from the kind of 18th-century rationalism that says if the Bible’s inspired, it ought to be true because it’s true, and there should be no wrinkles and bumps in it at all. I will say, no, the Bible is much more important than that. It’s much more real than the world of 18th-century rationalism.
Wehner: In my experience, at least in the American evangelical world, there’s a de facto assumption that the interpretive model for Scripture is the dictation model, and that’s not how Christians should see the Bible. For a lot of Christians there’s something unnerving in the way you describe how to interpret the Bible, because they think it opens the way for subjectivism. Enculturation unnerves them. The notion of a human medium, of human beings interpreting God in their time, in their culture, can call into question for them the entire interpretive project.
Wright: I see that very much. And my own personal history includes quite a strong measure of typically British evangelicalism in my teens and early 20s, where some of that — it’s not exactly dictation model, but: This is the word of God, therefore here it is, end of conversation. That was on the edge of the way that I and many of my friends would have seen things.
But I also found that all sorts of other things were going on, and that because church music has been enormously important, you encounter the Bible in something like Handel’s “Messiah” or the Bach St. Matthew Passion in a different way to when you say: This bit was dictated by the Holy Spirit. And you realize that the present enculturation resonates happily with previous enculturations. Handel is setting a glorious passage from Isaiah Chapter 40. Of course it belongs in the world of George Frideric Handel and his musical style — but in the same way, Isaiah 40-45 belongs within its world.
The whole Bible is enculturated. St. Paul’s doctrine of justification by faith means what it means within first-century Judaic and early Christian culture. John’s Gospel means what it means within the context of first-century retrievals of the wisdom tradition. We, too, are in implicit dialogues with all sorts of things. And maybe, as we wrestle with the way that worked then, it’ll help us wrestle with the way things might work now. So I want to say let’s celebrate enculturation, but it doesn’t mean relativism.
Wehner: That is a very important insight — the fusion of enculturation with relativism has led Christians to often make a hash out of the Bible and how to interpret the Bible.
5. Resurrection
Wehner: One of the things I learned from your book “The Resurrection of the Son of God,” which is a breathtaking scholarly achievement, is that the idea of a bodily resurrection was viewed as a radical claim in the first-century context. The concept of an afterlife existed, but with the exception most notably of the Pharisees, the concept of a bodily resurrection did not. But what nobody believed or could hardly even conceive of is the idea that a messiah would be raised from the dead. If I understand your argument, the very strangeness of the claim reinforces the power of the claim. Do I have that basically right?
Wright: In a sense, yes. I mean, it’s dangerous to push that one too hard, or you’ll end up with “credo quia impossibile” — it’s impossible, so I believe it. But I would say that the early Christian claim about Jesus was made in a world where the people making the claim, as well as the people hearing the claim, knew that it was absolutely out of line. People sometimes say: Oh, well, of course, then they didn’t know the laws of nature, so they were more ready to believe in things like resurrection. This is simply ridiculous. Plato knew that the dead don’t get raised; the same is true of Homer, Aeschylus, Cicero, Seneca and the rest. Everybody knows that once people die, they stay dead. And the early Christians say something new has happened, something cosmic has happened. A new order of being has come into the world. And the extraordinary thing is that everything they then say about what and who Jesus’ followers are supposed to be is also new in rather the same way.
The ethics that Paul offers on humility and generosity and forgiveness and chastity, these are not virtues in the ancient world. And anyone who thought about them would say: Oh, that’s impossible. I could never live like that. And that’s exactly the same challenge as believing in the resurrection, because both involve believing that there is a new creation, and that through the God of Israel doing what he’s always promised, this new creation is coming to birth. And we find ourselves nervously, mysteriously being caught up in it.
When Paul said resurrection in Athens in Acts Chapter 17, they laughed at him. They knew perfectly well that doesn’t happen. The court of the Areopagus where Paul was speaking had been founded, according to legend, by Athena. It was Apollo who said that when a man dies and his blood is spilled on the ground, there is no resurrection. And Paul comes along and says God is going to call the whole world to account, which means: By the way, your splendid court in Athens is not, after all, the ultimate court of all good justice. God’s court is the one that matters, and he’s given assurance to this by raising this man from the dead.
Now, that was fighting talk, because everybody knew it was ridiculous. But Paul had discovered that when you announce Jesus as the risen Lord, all sorts of things happen. A new world is born in human beings and through human beings in the community that they create and the way that they live. And that’s as important as the kind of abstract belief itself.
Wehner: You’ve written dozens of books. The number of topics on which you’ve spoken is remarkable. The questions you’ve answered number in the thousands. So I’d ask you as a final question, to pull the lens back: If there are one or two things you most hope to have imparted to others through your work in your life as a theologian and as a man of the Christian faith, what might they be? To put it another way, what would you like the legacy of N.T. Wright to be?
Wright: I suppose ultimately the powerful centrality of Jesus as the focal point of the creator God revealing himself as the God of generous, out-flowing love. That’s absolutely the heart of it.
The out-flowing love is the love that goes to the darkest places in the world and takes the darkness upon itself. In other words, it isn’t saying: Oh, yes, there’s this glorious world of God’s love and too bad about Ukraine, too bad about Israel and Gaza, too bad about this, too bad about that.
No, the love of God has come and does come to the dark places of the world. I’ve come back to that again and again because Romans 8 has been central to my work, and that’s where Paul talks about the groaning of the world, the groaning of the church and the groaning of the spirit at the heart of the pain of the world. And so my agenda for my legacy, as it were, is a vision of the church. The church is called to be the people who stand in prayer at the place where the world is in pain, in order that the healing love of God may come to be present there and that God’s purposes may work through that pain and out toward the promised new creation.
Ultimately, and in the short term, there will be healing; there will be hope. The church’s vocation is not to stand aloof from that; it’s to be the people who are in prayer at the place where the world is in pain.
Wehner: In your life you’ve shed light in dark places, and yours has been a life of out-flowing love. Thank you for that, for the things you’ve taught me over the years and the things that you’ve been able to reflect on in this interview. I appreciate it very much.
Wright: Thank you very much. It’s been good talking to you.
Peter Wehner (@Peter_Wehner), a senior fellow at the Trinity Forum who served in the administrations of Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush, is a contributing Opinion writer and the author of “The Death of Politics: How to Heal Our Frayed Republic After Trump.”
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