Via Media Podcast, Episode 24 The Biblical Scholarship of N.T. Wright N.T. Wright November 14, 2019 https://www.beesondivinity.com/the-institute-of-anglican-studies/podcast/2019/the-biblical-scholarship-of-nt-wright Announcer: The Institute of Anglican Studies at Beeson Divinity School welcomes you to Via Media, a podcast exploring the religious and theological worlds from an Anglican perspective. Here is your host Gerald McDermott. McDermott: Welcome to the Via Media. This is a special podcast today because we have perhaps the most influential biblical scholar in the world today with us, N. T. Wright. Tom, thank you so much for joining us. Wright: My pleasure. Good to be with you. McDermott: Now, N. T. Wright, as they say, needs no introduction. In case you’re on planet Mars and you’ve never heard the name he’s the author of more than 80 books. He’s a New Testament scholar, especially a Pauline specialist. And he’s influential in the protestant and the Roman Catholic world. I have noticed in the last few years that Bishop Barron, who you could say is perhaps the Catholic N. T. Wright, quotes N. T. Wright frequently, and so has exposed many Catholics to the work of N. T. Wright. He’s influential in the Eastern Orthodox world and even in the Pentecostal world, the four sectors of world Christianity today that sociologists of religion are now pointing to – beyond the earlier three. So, we’re thrilled to have you, Tom. And I’m going to divide up this podcast into two parts. The first, your work as a biblical scholar, and the second, your ministry as an Anglican priest and theologian and bishop. So, could you tell us what got you interested as a young man in biblical scholarship? Wright: Well, when I first got interested in the Bible I didn’t know that there was such a thing as scholarship. I thought one just read the Bible and it was quite exciting. I grew up in a Christian home, in a very understated middly-Anglican home. It wasn’t specifically evangelical. In fact, I don’t think we knew what that word would have meant. But we were taught, my sister and I, just a year apart – so, you grew up very close together – we were taught to read the Bible. We were taught to say our prayers. And we went to church once or twice every Sunday without fail. It was just kind of taken for granted that all of this was part of who we were. I remember reciting the list of the books of the Bible over the Sunday lunch table. My parents made sure, from quite an early age, we knew our way from Genesis to Revelation, et cetera. That was, again ... it was just taken for granted, really. Then in my teens I used to go the Scripture Union boys camps in Scotland, which you go for a week or two weeks and we’d be climbing and sailing and canoeing and doing all that stuff, but with camp prayers morning and evening, with a talk usually eight or ten minutes by one of the leaders, which was always without fail getting us to open our Bibles and the fact that one brought a Bible was really quite important, and actually here’s a passage and this is what it means, and this is what it means for you today. Then we’re done and let’s pray and get on with it. But since then ... Oh, and there were shared Bible studies as well. So, through my teens I was being fed by that movement; the Scripture Union movement and given a framework for reading the Bible myself. I and my friends who are in that ... we just got excited by this. There are so many things opening up and so many questions, and it seemed limitless. Then of course I went to university and I studied classics as my first degree – philosophy and ancient history – and then during the course of that, working with the Christian Union in Oxford, the undergraduate intervarsity group, and finding again more and more and more questions and excitements about the Bible. Then when I studied theology I was kind of raring to go – let’s get into this text – and discovered that there was this whole world of actual scholarship where people spent their whole time studying it, and that it got more controversial and more exciting and different and difficult questions. And I just thought how can I go on doing this? So, having thought I was going to be in parish and pastoral ministry, that was what I thought all the time growing up, I kind of took a half sideways move; didn’t want to lose the ministerial side, but realized that actually my passion was for digging into the New Testament as deep as I could. So, that was how it all began. McDermott: As I mentioned before some have called you, in fact many, the most influential scholar of the Bible in the world today. Certainly, I think a large part of that influence has been your reversal of Bultmann’s influence on New Testament scholarship and Christian theology generally. Someone said that in a hundred years or two hundred years, if the world lasts that long, when historians of New Testament scholarship look back on the 20th century they’ll say there really were only two names in the 20th century: Bultmann and Wright. Can you tell us, Tom, why Bultmann did so much to our damage to our understanding of Jesus, first? And then I’m going to ask you about his methodological mistakes. Wright: Yeah. This is a huge story and obviously we’ve only got a short time here, so the footnote reference would be to my Gifford Lectures, which are coming out very soon, and the title deliberately imitates Bultmann’s Gifford Lectures, History and Eschatology. And in that book, not the whole time but significant parts of two of the eight chapters there, I do an analysis of Bultmann and a critique and show why he got where he got. Because I want to say Bultmann is actually a symptom, not a cause. He was a particular, obviously very brilliant, classicist himself and he knew his Greek extremely well, and he knew the ancient Hellenistic world, and the world of ancient philosophy, and the ancient religion very well. He didn’t know the Jewish world very well. That comes out in various places. He didn’t know the geography of the holy land. He never visited the holy land. He showed no real interest in that because he was part of ... I mean, it’s quite complicated ... he was part of two or three intellectual movements that have been running in Germany for a long time. Part of the difficulty we have in the English-speaking world is that most of us, even those who studied philosophy at the university, as I did, didn’t grow up knowing Kant and Hegel and Heidegger. Heidegger is much more recent, of course. But Feuerbach and Shelling, and so on. These people absolutely dominated German intellectual life through the 19th century. And the bequeathed to the Church an inheritance of how to ask certain questions. And in particular they bequeathed to the Church the idea that Christianity, A) was a religion in the modern sense. In other words, something detached from the world of politics and everyday life. But, B) a religion of a certain sort. Ever since Hegel that meant it was a good kind of religion. In other words, not the Jewish kind. Because for Hegel the Jewish religion was the wrong sort of religion, because it was about physicality and blood and soil and so on. Think of the irony of that when you think of Germany in the 1930s – blood, soil, and so on. So, very deep in the Lutheran and the Hegelian and the Kantian DNA is a sort of sense that to follow Jesus means to turn your back on everything to do with Judaism and so you look for references to the Old Testament in the works of Bultmann and his colleagues. There’s hardly any, even when they’re claiming to be biblical theologians. And their understanding of how the Early Church used scripture is just pitiful. Well, they occasionally went back looking for a proof text to prove something that they wanted to say on other grounds. There was no sense of narrative, no sense of the Jewish narrative. In particular, Bultmann inherited from the German tradition this complicated idea of myth, which he kind of muddled up because a century before, David Friedrich Strauss, who’d written The Life of Jesus, for him saying that the stuff in the gospels was myth was actually a sort of sideways compliment, because in Germany at the time there was a sense of dislocation from the ancient world, because the 18th century historians had said, oh, it’s much harder than we thought to know what actually happened back there. Some people were despairing – how can we retrieve the ancient worlds of recent Rome which we thought we knew so well? And the answer was: we could tell the great myths and they will give us a linkage leaping over the history which we can’t do anymore. So, for Strauss saying that the Jesus stories were mythical was a way of saying we can get back there but never mind the history, never mind whether it actually happened. What matters is the spiritual ... on whatever truth, spiritual in a platonic or Hegelian sense. So, Bultmann calling many of the Jesus stories myth and then saying and this is how we de-mythologize them is retrieving that while at the same time the de-mythologizing program was his way of coping with Jewish apocalyptic which he basically didn’t understand. And Schweitzer hadn’t understood it before him either. That’s a complicated story in itself, how long have you got? Because Schweitzer was tracking with Nietzsche about the end of the world and the decline of the Hegelian vision. So, Bultmann is coming back at Schweitzer but saying, ah well, apocalyptic is actually about the existential decision that each one of us has to make. And it’s not about angels and demons. And it’s not about the real end of the world. And so Bultmann is simply not on board with how Jewish writers, like the authors of Daniel, 4 Ezra, 1 Enoch, how their minds are working. The political implications of that. If you imagine being in that trap in the 1930s in Marburg, when Nazism is running high, all he could preach about for most of that time was 1 Corinthians 7, that we have to live as if not. We have to find a way of escaping into a faith and a trust. Well maybe if you’re in Germany in the 1930s, maybe that is the best you can do, and I honor that. And in particular because he believed that you had to try to show where Christianity was derived from, and that you couldn’t use Judaism, he was desperate to find Hellenistic sources. So, he invented the idea of a pre-Christian Gnosticism as the putative theological ancestor of Paul’s theology and then of John as well. And a generation was taught that there was this pre-Christian Gnostic movement and that’s where they got it from. We now know that’s just rubbish. When people say, “Oh, Bultmann, he was this great historical critic,” I’ll say as I said in the lecture the other night he was a critic but he wasn’t much of an historian. He wasn’t actually thinking into the minds of the Early Church. Now, that is an extremely short summary of a much longer analysis. McDermott: Well, very helpful. So, how have you tried to steer the way toward a more responsible method for New Testament scholars? Wright: Short answer is through history. The trouble is that the word “history” again, as I said the other night, is a complicated word and people use it in several different senses. I mentioned three the other night. The history as the stuff that happened back then. The history as what people write about happened back then. The history as the task, the research, the study, which leads to good writing. Bultmann really wasn’t doing that, but I think we can do it. We know a lot about the first century. For me, one of the great breakthroughs when I was a young man was reading Josephus, the great Jewish historian towards the end of the first century. And I remember the day when I realized that, hey, you know, when Paul came back to Jerusalem in the mid ‘50s, having been around his world and back again, the people in Jerusalem were not sitting around discussing whether or not you have to do good works in order to go to Heaven when you die. That’s simply not the agenda. That’s a 16th century agenda. They’re discussing when is God going to do what he’s promised? How do we know? And who will be on God’s side when he does what he’s promised? And Paul is saying he’s already done it and it’s called Jesus and this is how, et cetera. That breakthrough of historical- I mean, Josephus is a very odd character, but he was there. He knew the people. And so he reveals on every page stuff about how it was all working. I don’t think Bultmann spent really any quality time with Josephus, and he didn’t know the scrolls. They were only found two thirds of the way through his career. He doesn’t seem to have spent any good time with the Jewish apocalyptic writings, 4th Ezra, 2 Baruch, et cetera. But we can and we should. Likewise, the more we know about the Rabbis, even though they’re two or three hundred years later, there are hints and guesses going back. And in particular when I was growing up and reading Bultmann and people, there was never any mention of Bar Kokhba and there a century after Jesus you have this quintessentially Jewish Kingdom of God movement, which lasts three years, and ends with the death of its founder. And the comparison and the contrast with Jesus’ three year movement and with the death of the first kingdom of God movement, focused on Jerusalem and the temple, what’s different? And I’ve often teased students with this. If you want to grow up as an Early Christian historian just think about comparing those two movements and what’s going on. And suddenly all sorts of new lines of thought open up in front of you. This is, I think, real history. And it’s time we did more of it. McDermott: Yeah, I was in dialogue with Jewish scholars in Jerusalem about seven or eight years ago and they were none Messianic, and they deliberately compared the Jesus movement to the Bar Kokhba Messianic movement. Wright: As another example of people getting it wrong. McDermott: Messianism. Yes. False Messianism. Wright: Yeah, that’s very interesting. McDermott: We could go on and on about that. Wright: Sure. McDermott: You’re understanding of justification, as a major voice ... you, being a major voice in the new perspective on Paul has been criticized for two things. Number one, paying too much attention to the role of the law and therefore discipleship playing a role in justification. You know, I think of John Piper. And, two, paying too much attention to the Church in this world and the Church’s role in its renewal, and not enough to salvation for the individual believer in the world to come. Can you tell us why these criticisms are misdirected? Wright: It’s interesting, I recognize what you’re saying, although I’m not sure if I’d been summarizing the criticisms of Piper and others, I’d put it quite like that. But certainly what I have tried to do in writing about justification is obviously to track with Romans and Galatians as best I can. I’ve found again and again that the way the Reformers in their traditions were reading Romans and Galatians was designed to ward off the two things that they were really worried about in the late medieval period. One of which is purgatory. The other of which was the mass, and the idea that Jesus gets sacrificed again and again in every mass. McDermott: Right. Right. Wright: Those are massive in the early 16th century. Well, you as a church historian knows better than I do. And so they’re reading with an eye to saying, no and no to these things and all the abuses that come out of them. So, they’re very concerned about the one-off sacrifice of Jesus, which does everything and that’s it. So, any sense that you ever have to do anything thereafter yourself is simply not on the radar screen. Part of the difficulty here is that if you compare Romans and Galatians, Romans is a very careful, intellectually artistic book. It is separated out for the sake of the rhetoric of the way the four ... I call them movements, like a symphony, in Romans work ... it’s separated out things which in Galatians and in Philippians 3, which is the other parallel passage, are absolutely scrunched together. So, justification by faith, being in Christ, resurrection, ethics, et cetera – they all belong together in Galatians and in Philippians. But people have taken Romans 1-4 and said, “Well, that’s how you get justified.” Romans 1-4 has very little about what we call behavior or ethics. It does have a bit. In particular, as a result, they’ve misread Romans 2, which says quite clearly, “those how by patience and well-doing seek for glory and honor and immortality God will give them eternal life.” People have said, “Oh, that’s just the theoretical structure. He doesn’t actually mean that. It doesn’t actually happen like that. That’s just what would have happened if we hadn’t sinned.” No, this is ... Romans 2:1-16 is a very careful sketch of the final judgment scenario. Paul affirms that. It resonates with other passages in his theology. The other thing is that the argument about justification in Romans doesn’t stop at the end of chapter four. If you look at the end of chapter eight, it’s all justification language again. Because you need the work of the Spirit and baptism and life in Christ in order to complete the narrative arc of justification. So, there’s a big hermeneutical problem about the way that Romans has been read. And one of the glories of my early years as a doctoral student is that I decided, because I’m a very visual person ... I got a piece of board which I put at the back of my desk, and I had the whole of Romans in Greek photocopied on this board in large. I got multicolored felt tip pens and I spent a couple of years with commentaries and so on just pouring over this and seeing the connections; noticing the way in which, okay, Romans 5-8 is different rhetorically from 1-4 but the themes are coming through. It is like a symphony, like a great Brahms or Von Williams, or somebody’s symphony, where the theme is in a quite different mode. Oh, but they’re there and they mean this now. This is how it works. I find that fascinating as a work of literary art, but then theologically it means that the attempt by John Piper and others to try to do justification out of 1-4 and then that’s that and then well, there’s being in Christ and ethics and that’s something else. No, it really isn’t. So, I guess that’s my answer to the first question there. McDermott: If I could just interrupt. I think, and I’d like to say this to all of our listeners, I think that one of your best books, shorter books, that really nails it and was so helpful for me years ago, and I’ve recommended it to many is What Saint Paul Really Said. I think that’s a beautiful book- Wright: Thank you. McDermott: ... where you show so well how the Reformers, as you just said, thought that Saint Paul was dealing with their 16th century problems rather than working ... rather than truly understanding the first century battles. Wright: Yes. Yes. And part of the problem there is that whereas ... if you meet somebody who says, “I think God’s going to be kind to me after death because I have done this or that, and I’ve given money to the Church,” or whatever. Then you probably need some kind of 16th century theology of justification to say, well, actually that’s not how the story works. But the other problem is that as Karl Barth pointed out, the Reformers never really sorted out their eschatology. Because they were so concerned ... and this plays straight into justification ... because they were so concerned about purgatory and the abolition of purgatory they wanted to insist you go straight to Heaven. Instead of saying, hey, wait a minute, the medieval going to Heaven ultimate goal is not the New Testament ultimate goal. The New Testament ultimate goal is new heavens and new earth and resurrection into that new creation. The Reformers believe in resurrection, but they don’t work out what that means. If you then start talking about new creation as the ultimate goal everything changes, which I hack out in my book The Day the Revolution Began. So, yes, I mean that book, What St. Paul Really Said, was a kind of early ; kind of a shot across the bows of the academy and the Church to say, “Let’s just do this differently.” But for me what counts is the historical work. And here’s the thing – western culture has lived on the renaissance and the reformation for 400 years and the enlightenment in a sense has extended that and done different things, but it’s still been the same world. Now within the postmodern world and the post colonial world and the post everything else world people are simply not asking the questions the way that those centuries were asking them. And I think many people find if you assume that people are walking around being cheerful Pelagians, thinking that they’re going to go to Heaven because they’ve learned good works, then actually most people out on the street are not thinking like that at all. The good news is that the genuine, first century, gospel turns out to be much more relevant to where many people in societies are now than the 16th century one. I don’t want to be rude about the Reformers. I cut my teeth on Luther and Calvin when I was young, and Tyndale is one of my great lifetime heroes. They were doing their best to give biblical answers to the questions of their day. That’s a great thing to do. But I think they would say to us, “Don’t just copy our answers, copy our method, which is listen carefully to the questions of the day. Go back to the text and give even better biblical answers than we did.” And that’s what I’ve spent my life trying to do. McDermott: Wow, so I think you’ve responded to the second critique. If we could move on. You did the Gifford Lectures recently, which are now being published by Baylor University Press as history and eschatology – and you mentioned Jesus and the Promise of Natural Theology. Has natural theology been unduly neglected by protestants in the last century or more? And if so, why? Wright: Yeah. I don’t think it’s been neglected. I mean, there is a handbook of natural theology which was published quite recently, which has an awful lot of protestant theologians as well as Catholics in it. But I think natural theology obviously got a bad name in the 1930s and Barth’s famous rejection of it, which was part of his rejection of Nazidom that has dominated much of the horizon. Barth was, of course ... well, two things about that, in case people don’t know ... the German Christians, Hitler’s kind of tame theologians were saying, in effect, God has obviously raised up the German nation to be the great source of prosperity and civilization for the world. So, the Christian task is to see what God is doing in history and get on board with it. Barth said, “Absolutely not. That is starting at the wrong place. We start with Jesus Christ and him crucified and only there.” Barth had learned how to do that because he’d been taught by Harnack and people like that before the first World War, and he and his fellow students had seen the disaster of their liberal theology, which was very much, “let’s see what God is doing in the world and then go with it.” The old Ritschlian theology which saw the progress of western civilization as the arrival of the Kingdom of God. Barth says, no, we need a fresh word from God to slice through all of that. You know? My heart warms to that. What a great guy. He’s reading scripture afresh and saying we’re not just going to take our orders from below. It resonates with Protestantism in the sense that it’s a kind of epistemological Calvinism in that it’s saying nothing in my hand I bring simply to thy cross I cling. We get nothing from this world; we learned it all from God. The problem then is that, as a Dutch theologian once said to me, Karl Barth has built a beautiful house but there is no front door. There’s no way in. If you’re inside then everything sort of makes sense, everything works. But there’s no point of contact. And indeed Barth hated the idea of a point of contact. What you lose is a theology of creation. And Moltmann, of course, as a good reformed theologian, has tried to roll that back. I would see his book, God In Creation, as one of the signs of people saying, “Well, yes, Barth had to say that for his time, but there is much, much more to be done.” And it was a too easy either/or for Barth. Now, Barth is one of the greats, here, I’m not knocking that, but ... there. McDermott: Tom, last year you released a popular biography of Paul. What can we see in there that will change our view of Paul? Wright: One of the things that really struck me working through that, and it was great fun to do by the way ... the bit in 2 Corinthians 1 when Paul ... and 2 Corinthians is a very painful letter. I was talking to your colleague Frank Thielman the other day whose teaching a class on 2 Corinthians. We were agreeing that this is the hardest Greek in Paul. Manifestly, as a translator I want to say it’s really tough stuff. I think the answer is Paul has just had what we would call a nervous breakdown. He says, I don’t want you to be ignorant that when I was in Ephesus I was so crushed that I despaired of life itself. Now, if somebody came into your study and said, “Dr. McDermott, I’m just despairing of my life.” I would say this is above my pay grade, we need to take you to a psychotherapist, you know? This is serious. Something has happened in Ephesus. We don’t know exactly what, but so trying to probe into what happened and why and I put that along with the riots in Ephesus, in Acts, where Paul wants to go into the theater and they won’t let him, et cetera, but the “Great is Diana of the Ephesians” and all of that. “Μεγάλη ἡ Ἄρτεμις Ἐφεσίων” – and you can hear the rhythm of it, it’s very exciting actually. I wish somebody would make a movie of that. But Paul, up to that point in Ephesus, has been the success story. People take handkerchiefs from his body and cure the sick. Everybody in Ephesus knows his name. The magicians are burning their books. Paul is riding high. He writes 1 Corinthians in the middle of that. He’s feeling good. But the dark powers have nasty ways of striking back. We don’t know exactly what happened, but it looks as though his friends deserted him, maybe half the Church turned against him, and if you’re alone and in a prison cell and your friends can’t come and minister to you you’re probably hungry and maybe thirsty. There are rats. You’re getting sick. Your spirits sink very low and then lower and then lower. And you despair of life itself. Somehow in that we find the Paul from whom we get 2 Corinthians. But not only that, because I then ... and this is speculation, but as a biographer you have to try to put things together and with a maybe. Paul himself uses the word “perhaps” now and again. Like, “Onesimius, perhaps this is why he’s been separated,” et cetera. So, perhaps. I think Paul writes Ephesians, Philippians, Colossians, and Philemon from prison in Ephesus. I’ve thought that for a long time. There are good historical reasons for that. And many people now agree with that. In Philippians 2:5-11 or 6-11 we have one of the greatest early Christian poems ever written. In Colossians 1:15-20 we have one of the greatest Christian poems ever written. Where did they come from? I am guessing that they are soaked in Israel’s scriptures. They’re soaked in Isaiah, the Psalms, the wisdom tradition in Genesis. They are poetry which come out of Israel’s scriptures but they come out Jesus shaped. I am guessing that when Paul was absolutely at rock bottom the only thing he could do day by day was to pray, Jewish-style, because that’s what he’s always done, the rhythm of prayer is in your head, you don’t stop praying even when you’re crushingly depressed, it just feels like you’re angry, but you’re still praying. And I am guessing that like a plant in harsh winter Paul’s roots went right deep down into that bit of scripture where Jesus had been all along. And up come these great poems, which then have resourced the Church ever since. So, that’s a guess. I don’t know. Maybe somebody else wrote them and Paul’s just quoting them. But that actually fits psychologically and biographically, with what’s going on. So, when he emerges it’s with poetry from which the theology then emerges. Does that make sense? McDermott: I do want to read that biography. (laughs) Wright: You mean you haven’t read it, yet? I’m shocked. (laughs) McDermott: I haven’t read it yet. I’m sorry. But I do want to read it. Thank you so much for being with us today. And thank you all listeners for listening to Via Media. Announcer: You've been listening to Via Media with host Gerald McDermott, the director of The Institute of Anglican Study Studies at Beeson Divinity School on the campus of Samford University in Birmingham, Alabama. The Institute of Anglican Studies trains men and women for Anglican ministry, and seeks to educate the public in the riches of the Anglican tradition. Beeson Divinity School is an interdenominational evangelical divinity school training men and women in the service of Jesus Christ. We hope you've enjoyed this episode of Via Media.