Via Media Podcast, Episode 25 The Anglicanism of N. T. Wright N. T. Wright November 21, 2019 https://www.beesondivinity.com/the-institute-of-anglican-studies/podcast/2019/the-anglicanism-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 Via Media again. You might have listened last week, or two weeks ago, to our first podcast with N. T. Wright. Well, today we’re with him again. Today, after all, since the Via Media is an Anglican podcast, on the midway as Anglicanism is sometimes called, we’re going to ask Dr. Wright about his ministry as an Anglican priest, theologian, and Bishop. So, Tom, thanks again for being with us today. Wright: My pleasure. McDermott: You grew up as an Anglican. And you continued as an Anglican. Now, unlike some Anglicans. And unlike so many in England who have drifted away from Anglicanism and the Church of England. What kept you in? Wright: I suspect that the real answer to what kept me in was the prayers of people that I knew and didn’t know; my grandparents, clergy that were in the family ... I had an aunt, one of my father’s older sisters, who was an Anglican nun. She lived to be 101, I think. We used to say, semi-seriously, that when she died we’d have to draw short straws in the family for somebody else to take her place, because we reckoned that the only reason we were all still vaguely on track was because she prayed for us all the time. And that, I mean, we joke about it but it is quite serious. I do believe in prayer and I’m very, very, very grateful for that family of prayer. In a very Anglican way – it wasn’t to say, as I said before, it wasn’t a specifically evangelical thing. In fact, my aunts more on the Anglo-Catholic side, my mother’s father who was an archdeacon was a sort of middle low churchman. But there was a deep fidelity there. These were people that I respected and loved and they were fun to be with and they weren’t sort of over serious, but clearly they all kind of meant it. Particularly, my dad had been a prisoner of war for five years. He was captured at the age of 19, got out at the age of 25, and through that time I think his faith went deeper and deeper and he sang in all the choirs that were going. If the Catholics had a choir he’d go and sing it, too. If the Methodists had a choir he’d go and sing in it. And he did a lot of church music and must have heard a lot of sermons. And had learned how to pray in a prisoner of war camp. So, he was very understated, quite a shy man, and that experience would have done that to him. But he, then, was a very faithful churchman, church warden, lay leader in the local church. So, I grew up in a family where that was kind of natural. Now, of course lots of other people grew up in very similar families who then drift right away. I have no idea why, really. Something to do with it would be my early experience through the Scripture Union camps, which I mentioned in the earlier podcast. Somebody told me when I was 12 it would be a good idea to read the Bible every day and I thought, yeah, it sounds like a good idea. And I’ve never seen any reason to stop. When you (laughs) form a lifetime habit which resources you then just like why would you stop drinking coffee or eating cornflakes for breakfast, or whatever it is that you do? This is what makes your life worthwhile. So, for me, at every point in the road where there have been big questions and big challenges, and big difficulties, I’ve been in a context where I’ve been able to navigate and steer. There was a time when I was an undergraduate when I looked quite seriously at the prospect, because many of my friends were, of leaving the Anglican Church and going into one of the free churches, which seemed more lively and energetic, and in some ways a bit more authentic. It was a time when Martin Lloyd Jones, in England, was debating with Jim Packer and John Stott, and trying to say that evangelicals should come out of their impure denominations and form a pure denomination. Packer and Stott were basically saying there’s no such thing as a pure denomination – don’t fool us. I wobbled a bit on that, and then came back and said, nah, the Church of England ... it’s got a lot of faults, but it’s still got a lot going for it. That’s the position I’ve still taken. McDermott: What do you think are the most essential or helpful distinctives of the Anglican way of living in the Triune God? Wright: I think the very simple, almost commonplace, discipline of daily prayer, which when I was growing up the prayer book was the prayer book. We didn’t have modern liturgies in the ‘50s. It was just the 1662 prayer book and that’s what we used. And it gradually dawned on me that actually this wasn’t just for Sunday’s, this is meant for every day – for ordinary people to use every day. It’s a very, very simple service. The discipline is basically the Psalms and the rest of the scriptures, and you read morning and evening prayer, you read the Old Testament, you read the New Testament, and to sort of sprinkle the salt and pepper on them you use canticles; many of which are drawn, themselves, from scripture. So, it’s a way of praying the scripture morning and night. That is just the basis of the Anglican DNA. One of the things about that is that the 39 Articles, which are the sort of charter of Anglicanism hammered out in the 16th century bit by bit, they’re not a full-on confession in the way that Westminster Confession is. They point back to the Bible and the Fathers. So that we say, unlike the traditions that say, “we’re Westminster Confession and that’s the thing,” we say the faith is revealed in Holy Scripture, set forth in the catholic creeds, and the Anglican formula is: bear witness to it. In other words, there’s a sense of freedom ... freedom within a definite structure ... that if you can go back to scripture and the Fathers and especially scripture itself and say, well, at this point we need to nuance this differently, then the formulas themselves say go for it. Rather than saying we will tell you what the scriptures mean so that you don’t hardly even need to read the scriptures themselves. So, whereas ... I remember when I was young meeting Heinrich Schlier who had been a Bultmann pupil. He was an elderly professor in Bonn when I met him. Schleier had loved the letter to the Ephesians and was horrified that Bultmann said it wasn’t by Paul because it had too high a theology of the Church. So, Schleier, poor man, had had to become a Roman Catholic rather than a Lutheran in order not to be caught in the Bultmann trap. I remember thinking as an Anglican, I have the latitude to move this way and that because my formulas themselves are saying go back to the Bible, read it every day, and just come back and tell us what you’re finding. That’s what I’ve tried to do. So, it seems to me that the ... it isn’t a rigid and brittle framework, it’s a very definite framework. Some people in American think that being an Anglican means you can believe whatever you like on the basis of Queen Elizabeth’s dictum, which was very specifically about Eucharistic presence. It wasn’t about everything. I’ve heard that misinterpreted. No, the Anglican way is very firm on the central issues – but with latitude around the edges. One more quote. Bishop John Robinson, as an honest to God, I once heard him say that the genius of Anglicanism is to be firm at the center and flexible at the edges, unlike some churches, which are rigid at the edges and them go wooly in the middle. I thought, actually, yeah. I’ll go with that. McDermott: Can you tell us about life as an Anglican bishop? What was most satisfying? What was most distressing? Wright: The most satisfying thing, without a doubt, was seeing the Church being the Church. On the street, in real communities, in real time. I remember once doing a confirmation in a very much below the tracks parish in Gateshead and there were some people in their thirties being confirmed, which is always a delight. You know? These are not just kids who are doing it because mum said so. And the vicar interviewed one of these ... a lady in her mid-thirties, I think ... said, “What’s different since you’ve been come to faith?” She said, “It’s like having a great big second family.” Then she looked around at me and said, “Was I supposed to say that?” I said, “Yes, because that means this is a real church,” because in that community family are the people who live in the neighboring streets who look out for you, who are there when you are a bit down or whatever, who will help out in times of trouble. To experience the Church as that, she had learned ecclesiology as a reality not as a theory. There were many other stories I could tell. As bishop it was my privilege to go around and sometimes license new ministries in that context or take confirmations and hear these stories, and all the things that never get into the newspapers, but that actually mean that the Church really is being the Church and that God is at work. So, those were the things that really delights your heart. And to see people coming forward for ordination and to have the privilege of working with them or praying with them and then ordaining them. Knowing the struggles that they’ve had and the obstacles that they’ve had to pray their way around, and just seeing, “No, God is at work here. There’s no question. It’s tough, but stuff is happening.” The frustrations. Oh, dear, many, many, many. The follies of many bits of the Church, and people in London who think that they can tell people in the northeast how to run a Church, because they sit around a shiny table in London, so of course they know, don’t they? And I’m a northerner, I’m just not having that, I’m sorry. (laughs) Cultural prejudices coming out. But so big financial questions, which ... because Durham was one of the poorest parts, is one of the poorest parts of the UK, so even supporting the ministry in the 250 parishes was quite a challenge. And also sometimes when clergy go off the rails intellectually, morally, whatever, but then don’t admit it and just bash on, and they can lead a whole church astray. I’ve often said to the students, when an engineer gets it wrong and builds a bridge, and it falls down and people die they get sued or they go to jail. When a theologian or clergy get it wrong the Church just goes on for another generation or so, and then quietly dies and nobody knows why. And to watch that happening and not always to be able to step in, because in the Church of England you can’t easily step in when people have got security of tenure, and to try to work with that, that can be very frustrating, almost soul destroying. McDermott: What would you say to someone considering ordination as Anglican clergy? Particularly to someone who says, how can I know if I’m called to ordination? And secondly, beyond seminary education, what else should I be doing to prepare myself to become clergy? Wright: Yeah. The usual advice, as I’m sure you know, to somebody who says, “I think I may be called to be ordained,” is if there’s anything else you can do, do it. Because ministry is tough, and it’s demanding. And there are times when, as Paul found in Ephesus when you may feel as though you’re being crushed by it. A wise friend who is three or four years older than me when I was coming up toward ordination wrote me a letter and said, “There will be times,” he’d been ordained a few years, “when you just feel that the burden is far too much. Not just a bit too much – far too much to bear.” He was right. If there’s something else that you can actually do, this is not a nice hobby to slide into. This is a really demanding thing. However, it is more glorious than anything else. Than conducting a symphony orchestra playing Beethoven IV. Because to be leading people in the worship of Almighty God, to be teaching them, to see the lights go on as you’re preaching and praying with people and leading a home group, and to see the comfort that comes when you struggle to say even two or three words by the bedside of someone who is dying. These are enormous privileges which one shouldn’t take lightly. But it is a life of prayer. It is a life of scripture. And I would say the best way to prepare is to learn as early as possible how to pray, how to read scripture, which means learn Greek and Hebrew as early as possible, because it gets harder and harder the further you get away past the age of 21. So, the more of the ancient languages you can get, the sooner the better. Because there is no good translation. We all, if we’re doing business with scripture, we have to be able to be able to read the serious commentaries, et cetera. And don’t stint on that. The clergy who stint on that they end up running on empty. Or they read books on sociology or whatever instead. And, you know, the sociology matters. We need to understand how our communities work, but we need to be the people who are constantly drawing fresh water out of the well and for that scripture is absolutely vital. So, the three things: learn how to pray, give yourself to it, spend time. Learn how to read the Bible. And learn how to love people. It may sound silly, you know? Some people find it easy to love the people they meet. I never met a person I didn’t like, et cetera. Other people are shy, they may find it difficult, they’re frightened, and learning how nevertheless to reach out and love. Those are simple things to say, but it takes a lifetime to grow into. McDermott: Many Anglican leaders, Tom, as you know, are discouraged about the state of the Church in the West where things are shrinking. Some are feeling burned out. How can they find spiritual restoration? Hope? Wright: As with St. Paul I think ... it does depend on the personality. For some people going deep within what the spirit is doing in your own life may be a way forward. For other people it may be spending time going and working with people who are down and out, going and working in a soup kitchen, going to work in the two thirds world for a year or so and see the extraordinary things God is doing. I’ve known people who have come back absolutely rejuvenated from that sort of thing. One of the things that I find sustaining is a very simple thing, that every month I get the prayer letter from the CMS, the Church Mission Society, which I’ve been involved with variously over the years. Every day there are different people who are working around the world, often in dangerous and difficult situations. It’s just a paragraph about what they’re doing, and you pray for them. And you realize that out there there’s all these unsung heroes and heroines who are getting on with a job, not asking for publicity, not asking for a big salary, not asking for any recognition, just asking for prayer to support them in their work. That is wonderfully humbling for those of us who are in more high profile leadership. Actually, this stuff is where it really matters. And we, in leadership, are there to serve them. When you see that it’s hugely encouraging. I was remembering, I think I say in one of my little commentaries ... I think it’s in Matthew For Everyone somewhere. I have a fictitious image, but it’s drawn from real life about a bishop at his desk getting a phone call about some disaster that’s happened at a parish. Then getting a report somebody passes to him about how the diocese budget is going down the tubes, et cetera, et cetera. Then he gets a call from one of his children’s schools saying that the child is in trouble at school. He’s just thinking, “oh my goodness.” Then he stops and he thinks back to the mission trip that they took to Uganda six months before and remembers the faces in the congregation, all the people in the parish, again, on the wrong side of the tracks who are just cheerfully getting on and doing really tough, but good, stuff. And those are the things that really encourage you. God is at work. Despite the appearances that often put themselves out to us. McDermott: Tom, as you know, this podcast is called the Via Media, because Anglicanism has often been defined as a Via Media. If this is a valid term for Anglicanism, what are the other two terms? The middle way between what and what? Wright: (laughs) That varies, of course, over the years. I remember hearing John Stott do a series of lectures, the Chavasse Lectures in Wycliffe Hall, in Oxford, when I was a student in the early 1970s, I guess. John Stott elegantly did most of his lectures by sketching Position A and Position B and then here was Position C, which was the wise, middle way. I remember thinking it’s actually quite easy to play that trick. You just pick where you want to be and then you can paint a picture over to the right and over to the left. And, here, we are in the middle aren’t we? McDermott: Most thinkers do. Wright: Exactly. Actually, saying “middle way” it was, of course, in the 16th century the supposed middle way between Catholicism and Protestantism. So, we were neither falling back into the arms of Mother Rome, nor were we going to Geneva, nor were we going to Wittenberg, or Zurich, but we were doing our own thing. I, myself, haven’t actually used that language or that method very much, because I’ve seen the Church has a much more confusing place. In my lifetime I’ve seen the Charismatic movement come from almost nowhere. I mean, the early 20th century Pentecostal movements didn’t really affect Anglicanism, except in tiny little places here and there. One county Durham, interestingly. But suddenly in the ‘60s and ‘70s this came in and nobody quite knew whether this was a good thing or not. It didn’t sound very Protestant, you know, but then we heard that some of the more lively Roman Catholics were speaking in tongues. So, some people thought, “oh, maybe this is a Catholic movement.” In some cases that drew them to it, and other cases it repelled them. It kind of rattled the cage of the idea of a Via Media, if we’ve got three things now. Then, of course, some of us discovered bits about the Orthodox Church and sometimes the Orthodox Church and the Anglicans seem to have more in common with each other than they do with Rome. And the Orthodox sometimes in western Europe play on that fact. You know? My enemy’s enemy is my friend. I’m happy to say that these days the lines are so differently drawn. When I was in Durham my closest ecumenical partners where the Roman Catholics on the one hand and the newer free churches, the so-called house churches, the charismatic free churches on the other. And I remember, more than once, introducing Catholic leaders to free church, house church, leaders on the other, and thinking maybe this is what Anglicanism is there for – to get these guys working together. But the great thing is we are working together in ways that were unthinkable, and we’re learning from each other. The idea of receptive ecumenism, which Cardinal Walter Kasper has pioneered. Where you ask the question: what gifts does God want to give to us, which we have to receive from our Methodist friends, or our Baptist friends, or whatever? That’s a wonderful way of expressing the ecumenical question. And it really knocks the idea of the Via Media. That was okay for its time, but maybe we need to do it differently. The trouble is that as we are getting more together across the traditional boundaries, so our radical wings are pulling away. So, Anglicanism is much more friendly today with Rome, with the Baptist, with all sorts of people, but it itself is a tearing of fabric. I was staying with a close friend who is a Methodist just the other day, and he’s telling me about what’s going on in the United Methodist Church at the moment—very similar. And I think some of the Presbyterian denominations are finding the same. That is a real tragedy. If God is doing a new thing to bring together people who are emphasizing the great big Trinitarian truths of the faith, then let’s try to do together everything we can do together, because if God needs to re-shape his Church, we’re all going to need each other, and we need to link arms. McDermott: Speaking of the tearing of the fabric you just mentioned, as you hinted, the Anglican communion itself is notoriously divided. Mostly over doctrine concerning marriage and sexuality. As you know, Anglicans in the global south, especially in GAFCON, are finding that they have less and less confidence in the orthodox and leadership coming out of Canterbury, or the Church of England, per se. How is this divide playing out in the Church of England today? Wright: Happily, I don’t know the answer to that, because I’ve lived in Scotland for the last nine years. When I moved to Scotland I took a kind of vow of ... I don’t know what it was, but basically I cancelled my subscription to the Church Times and the Tablet, because I found that every week I was reading these newspapers from London, and wanting to write letters or phone up the archbishop, or write an article or something. I’m a New Testament scholar, again, and I need all the energy I’ve got to catch up with my undergraduate students, to get back into the academy. So, I have not been following what’s been going on. However, I love the Archbishop of Canterbury. He’s an amazing man. He’s not a theologian, wouldn’t claim to be, but he loves to talk with and listen to theologians and draw on people. He’s trying to be an irenic bridge builder and I respect that. I don’t know what he’s doing with the Lambert Conference, which is coming up. I haven’t been involved with that at all. Likewise, I know John Sentamu, the Archbishop of York, quite well. I worked with him when I was in Durham. He’s a man I really love and trust. But these are very difficult times. Half the people, who are now dioceses and bishops, I don’t actually know them personally, because there’s been quite a change since I left ten years ago. So, as I go back to Oxford I’m a little nervous actually as to what it’s going to be like being part of the Church of England again. And that’s a bit of a challenge. I don’t want to get drawn into politics. I’m a Bible teacher. That’s what I’m there for. But I naturally pray for the health of the Church of England. The thing to remember is that the Church of England, with its general synod and its house of bishops, has not changed its doctrine or its official rules, at all, on these issues. There’s a lot of sound and fury. A lot of people doing things below the radar or off the screen, but actually general synod hasn’t voted to change the rules. The Episcopal Church of Scotland has. The Presbyterian Church of Scotland has. But the Church of England hasn’t. If it did, that would be quite a new situation. At the moment it hasn’t and I pray it won’t. McDermott: What do you see for the future of the communion? Wright: (laughs) I’m not a futurologist. You know, somebody asked old Lesslie Newbigin whether he was an optimist or a pessimist and he said, “I’m neither optimist nor a pessimist. Jesus Christ is risen from the dead.” In other words, God does strange things in his own time. If we are faithless God will do new things. We’re not going to put God out of business. We may put ourselves in an awkward spot. The Church of England has gone through many different changes over the years and one of the signs of the sheer goodness of God is if you look at 18th century Church history, for instance, when Wesley and Whitfield had to go outside the system to get done what they saw had to be done, it’s amazing that the Church of England is still standing. And it was people like Simeon and so on. There was a man ... he wasn’t a Via Media man, was he? He said he liked to live at both extremes. He was a firm Calvinist and a firm Armenian. He said, “if it’s extremes you want, I’m your man.” (laughs) And sometimes the middle can be a rather soggy place to be. But, so I think I have seen lots and lots and lots of new things happening in the Church in my short lifetime. And I see no reason why God would want to stop doing those new things. McDermott: Last question. I think most of the people who listen to this podcast would call themselves “orthodox Anglicans.” Very, very concerned about the future of the communion, and the battles between orthodoxy and what they would call heresies. What should orthodox Anglicans do to promote orthodoxy in the Anglican communion? Wright: I’m going to sound like a cracked gramophone record. They need to pray their socks off and they need to be studying the Bible to discern fresh words for our time, not fresh in the sense of trivial novelty, but fresh in the sense of coming from the deep roots of the faith. God always has new things. I know people have taken that line from an 18th century theologian, “God has yet more light to break out of His holy Word,” and they’ve taken that in a radical sense, “so, we can actually change some of this.” No, God has genuine light to break out of His holy Word and we need in every generation to be encouraging young people to embrace that challenge as a lifelong vocation. I do not know, structurally, how this will play out. I do believe that Church unity absolutely matters. The principalities and powers of the world take no notice of a divided Church, which is why Paul says in Ephesians that through the Church the manifold wisdom of God is to be made known to the principalities and powers. So, unity really matters, but as I say again and again unity and holiness must go together. Holiness is easy if you don’t believe in unity. Unity is easy if you don’t believe in holiness. The Pauline agenda is to be working at both simultaneously. And that is really tough. It takes prayer and suffering and patience. McDermott: Well, I like that as a closing word. The Christian life is not the easy and broad way – as somebody really famous once said. It is the narrow and hard way. And so, too, the way of orthodoxy and Anglican communion. Bishop Wright, thank you so much for spending time with us. Wright: Thank you very much. McDermott: Those of you listening, thank you for tuning in today. Bishop Wright, for all of our listeners, where are some good places to go to read more of you and hear more of you? Wright: Well, I have a website, which somebody kind who lives in this part of the states, actually, runs for me. It’s called TheNTWrightPage.com. Then I do some online courses, which are at NTWrightOnline.org. Then there is a podcast that I regularly take part in called AskNTWrightAnything. So, if you type in “Ask NT Wright Anything” and what happens is that people send their messages in and there’s a guy in London called Justin Brierley at Premiere Radio who collates all these questions and then I go and sit in his studio for an hour or two and we talk about the issues that people have got. We have done some fun stuff. And on some of those podcasts he, teasingly, has handed me a guitar and told me to play a song or two. So, there’s odd things happen in those particular podcasts. (laughs) McDermott: Great! Thank you. 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.