C (3:08)

I'm not an expert on that, alas.

B (3:10)

Okay, well, we'll have to. We'll have to do that. In a bonus episode, we'll get into some of the fine, some of the best cuisines we've had in America or maybe even the uk. Well, to Dom, we've got. Tom, we've got some great questions today. One on the difference between bishops and overseers. Is there one? Doesn't matter. Finding a church in difficult times. And also a juicy question about universalism. So our first question comes from Anthony Pierce on Stockton on Tees. And he's got a question that goes like this. He says, I once read in the Greek word for bishop is distinguishable from that of priest. If that's the case, why is it only bishops have the authority to ordain as priests and deacons along with other tasks? If it's true that the word for priest and bishop are indistinguishable, then bishops don't have any real biblical authority over priests. And priests themselves could actually ordain others. Could Tom, please expand on this, if it is true or not? Well, I think the first thing we've got to say here, Tom, is the word priest is not normally used as Christian ministry, except perhaps in Romans 15, where Paul says he's got the priestly service of proclaiming the Gospel. The real debate here is whether the word episcopal for overseer or bishop is equivalent and the same as presbyteros for elder or, you know, or maybe like Poyomanes for pastor or something. So do you believe episcopal and presbyteros are equivalent? Because I do. I do have a sly sleight of hand which I'll introduce as a possible way of differentiating them.

C (4:57)

Yeah, good, good. I shall look forward to that. Because it's not an area that I've researched recently, but it does seem to me clear that in the first generation there was no very definite fixed order. In the Church of England prayer book, it says rather unwisely that from the earliest times there were these three orders, bishops, priests and deacons. And you see, even the people who are chosen to look after the widows and their food distribution. In Act 6, we call them deacons, but the text itself doesn't call them deacons, but they are kind of aligned with this diaconal, this serving ministry. And different churches have reorganized or organized their ministerial offices in line with different interpretations of those and other texts. And yes, there are passages in Paul, particularly where episkopos is used sometimes and presbyteros is used other times. And you can go through and make a table of them and it can all get quite confusing. And it's by the second or third generation that people have started to realize we need actually to find ways of doing things which the first generation wasn't so concerned to do. And particularly with Ignatius of Antioch, the great concern is the unity of the church as the church grows. How is the church in Antioch and the church in Jerusalem and the church in Athens or anywhere else? How are they going to be sure that they're all on track with one another and not simply starting up completely different movements which can then go in quite different directions? And one of the answers, the answer that Ignatius gives is that the bishop, the sole bishop of that community, the one person who is there, is both representing as well as teaching and leading that community, that bishop has to be in communion with, in fellowship with the bishop of, of the next church down the road, or as it may be, three or four hundred miles down the road or whatever. And so there grows up in the early church this sense of bishops as a focus of unity, both the focus of the unity of the local church, but then as the means of unity between that local church and the other local churches in other quite far flung localities. Now I don't think you find that taught in the New Testament. So it's then a question of saying this is a tradition from the quite early church, early second century church, which is not claiming that this is what Jesus said had to happen, but it's claiming that this is a good and wise and health giving way for the church to develop. Now at the same time, anyone who wants to come along and say, well, looks as though bishops and presbyters are pretty much of a muchness in the New Testament. So should we actually go with this monarchical episcopacy or would it be better to say that in each church there will be episcopoi and presbyteroi and diaconoi as well? And it seems to me that then leaves it open for different cultural and social reasons to say what is God calling us to do and be in this particular community? And as we know from Paul's epistles, it isn't only episcopoi, presbyteroi and diaconoi. We have apostles and we have pastors, we have teachers, we have all sorts of other, are they officers or what so that each time Paul lists callings within the church, if you compare, say, 1 Corinthians 12 with Romans 12 with Ephesians 4, each time he lists the different things that God calls people to do in the church, it comes out differently. And that tells me that Paul did not have a one size fits all. Here you've got it, there are two or three, or offices, whatever it is. And so that could then lead you into a kind of an ad hoc thing where who cares? It doesn't much matter. We'll do it this way here. But I don't think it needs to do that, because Paul again and again insists, as he does in 1 Corinthians 14, on everything being done decently and in order. And there are plenty of passages, not least in the pastoral epistles, where he does give every indication that in every church there will be those who are appointed to be elders, elders, deacons, presbyter, et cetera, episcopoi, et cetera. And that when, I mean, for instance, when in Acts, we find Paul going around from town to town, city to city, sometimes he has to leave town in a hurry, like in Thessalonica. He's not there very long. He's driven out of town before worse occurs. But before he goes, he appoints, ordains, prays for, and lays hands on specific peoples to serve as leaders of that community. Now, it doesn't look as though he's there, got a specific formal differentiation, but that he knows that if the Spirit has worked to produce faith, the Spirit will work to produce leadership gifts. And that has to be maintained and worked at. Now, jumping forward from there, I'm interested. This question comes from somebody in Stockton on Tees, which is of course part of the Diocese of Durham, where I was privileged to serve for seven years, to the present Anglican practice of bishops being the ones who ordain. Well, there are many, again, gray areas around the edges of this, where, for instance, when the first women priests were ordained, that was done despite the fact that no church council had given legitimacy for it, but it was seen to be a necessity, a pastoral necessity in the place of where they were. And there are all sorts of times and places where people have tried to get too rigid on the one hand and then tried to get too loose and flexible on the other. And the Anglican Church, broadly, has kept to the threefold order of ministry, whereas other churches, Greek Orthodox, whatever, they have several different orders. Yes, they've got so many, you can't just focus on the three. So I think I want to say that it's then a matter not of the. The theologians use the Latin terms. It's not of the essay of the Church that is, is this what the Church consists in? But it may be of the bene essay of the Church that it is good for the Church at this point. And that's always open to review. But as so often, there's a sense, for me at least, of it's not broke, don't fix it. Let's ask the question. But let's not just throw the whole thing out of the window because there may be some slippage in the words in the New Testament that's a fairly fuz, but it's actually a fairly fuzzy reality over history and from church to church.

B (12:12)

Yeah, I think it's fascinating. The Greek Orthodox have got like, doorkeepers, exorcists, acolytes, readers. It's quite an interesting. They've got like, a lot more orders than we do. Yeah. But, Tom, I do have something for you. Maybe this is a red herring, but I do find this fascinating. Alistair Stewart, who's a patristic scholar, he's written a book called the Original Bishops, and he argues that episcopal for overseer or bishop and presbyteros for, you know, elder. He argues they are not synonyms. He argues they are perionyms. So they kind of different names for the same function. And where he goes to prove this is from Acts 20. So let me just click here on my. My Logos account, which is always good to have open when we're doing these episodes. So, Tom, if you look at Ephesians, chapter 20, if you go to verse 17, it says, from Manletas, Paul sent to Ephesus and called for the elders of the church. So he's at Meletus, he stopped there, he sends a message to Ephesus. It gets all the elders to come down. But then if you go down to verse 28, he gives them an exhortation, you know, watch. You know, watch out of yourselves, the whole flock, as the Holy Spirit has appointed you as overseers, or in your translation you say guardians. So his thesis is this, that a person who is an overseer of a church, when he gets together with other overseers, they become a confederation of presbyteri. So you might say that the. At least for ecclesiastical government, one episcopal meets with a bunch of presbyteroi to form a kind of synod or a council, or, I don't know, ministers, fraternal, whatever you want to call it. I mean, I am attracted to this idea because it would explain a subtle difference between episkopos and presbyteros, you know, overseer and elder, rather than treating them just as the same words for the same thing. Alistair Stewart's view is that a person who is the episcopal over their congregation is one of a number of different elders when they're there with others. I mean, does that jump out of you as like, oh, gosh, no. Or maybe that could work.

C (14:48)

That might work. I think Acts 20 and those two uses, there would be a rather slim basis for a whole theory, because I just do think that in the New Testament as a whole, episcopal and presbyteros are used almost interchangeably and that I don't think the New Testament is trying to navigate anything more subtle and specific. And if it was, I think it would be much clearer than it is. And certainly in the pastoral epistles, we would have expected, you know, what do you mean by making this Diaconos into a presbyteros or something? We don't have any such discussions. It's more functional. And I think part of the difficulty then is that over time, different churches have wanted to make these things more what you might call ontological rather than functional. That is to say, make them more about somebody actually being given by the Spirit, a specific character, that they are now this sort of a person. And certainly there are many in the Catholic and Anglican and Greek Orthodox traditions who would see ordination to deaconate, presbyterate episcopacy as conferring a kind of grace of order, which would mean that you are now a different sort of person. That can be very dangerous and damaging if it then means that these people think that they are now automatically okay, they can do no wrong whatever. And sadly, that actually is a problem with very free churches that don't have bishops as well, that people who are given gifts of leadership can think that they are now above the norm and so on. So I'm perfectly happy to hear that as a proposal about how some writing in the New Testament may have put it, But I don't see that as, oh, well, that settles it. Now we know what they all thought, because I'm just not sure we can go there.

B (16:47)

That's fair enough. That's fair enough. Well, actually, Tom, one thing I did recently, I had to go to the diocesan office and, and do a new round of signing my oaths of canonical obedience. So whether a bishop and a presbyterist are the same thing, I have pledged my obedience to our new archbishop, who will be an Englishman, Rick Thorpe. Rick, if you're listening. I have written my oaths of canonical obedience. I promise to be a good priest in the diocese.

C (17:19)

I have to say, when I was bishop of Durham, I used to get letters and messages from my clergy a lot. There were only two clergy who regularly signed themselves as your most obedient servant. And I have to say that those two were the least obedient of any of the clergy in the diocese. So I have learned to distrust all these expressions and what they may or may not convey.

B (17:44)

Fair enough. Fair enough. Okay, well, let's move on to another question. This one. This one's a bit serious. It comes from a fan of the show in Fort Worth, Texas, and our listener asks My wife and I live in a region in the United States that is politically Republican and theologically fundamentalist. Despite there being hundreds of churches in every city, we cannot find a church near us that believes in the Bible but does not preach often from the pulpit. That being a Christian means repudiating Democrats, Catholics, Mexicans, and anyone who believes women are allowed to preach. On top of that, there are multiple churches in our area that have covered up sex abuses in recent years, the truth only being recently exposed. Frankly, we cannot find a church where we feel safe. We believe that the church is central to God's mission, but the churches near us make us feel sick. It's hurting our hope and our faith, and it makes it hard to pray. I'm sure much of the problem is in my own faith. Probably I'm overestimating the evil I see. I know Jesus has overcome the world, but I feel trapped and I don't know what to do. Well, Tom, this seems like a very urgent pastoral question. What is your answer to the request from our dear reader?

C (19:02)

Yeah, I'm really sorry to hear this, but it doesn't entirely surprise me because I know that there are many parts of many countries where the church has been so subsumed into a particular political mindset that actually everything seems to be slanted that way. And if most people in that area demographically believe in one particular political and social agenda and have translated that into Christian life and practice, then that would be very difficult. I do find it hard to imagine, though, that in an area like Fort Worth in Texas, there aren't other churches, startup churches, recent church plants, et cetera, that would take a very different view. I mean, I regularly meet with church leaders from around the world who come to Oxford for meetings, whether it's of Alpha course leaders or similar, and who tell me eagerly about different churches that have been Springing up and being planted in different parts, both of America and of Australia and of many, many other countries, including Eastern Europe and so on. And though I well understand that the mainstream churches in a town like Fort Worth, whether it would be Catholic, Episcopal, Methodist, Baptist, Presbyterian, and also the different Pentecostal denominations, they might all be politically of one color, but I suspect there are plenty of others who are maybe smaller organizations. Now, I'm not a great fan of church planting in an area where there are already lots of churches because it seems to me that's a recipe for more and more disunity. At the same time, when everything seems, when all the currents seem to have been flowing in one particular direction, it really is important for somebody to stand up and say, actually, we too want to believe God, we want to serve Jesus, we want to be agents of the Gospel, we want to believe and teach the Bible, but we think this is getting it wrong and please can we meet differently and teach differently and be open to all sorts of different conversations, et cetera. So I would say look around and see, because I bet there are in fact perhaps much smaller things. Not with big flashy street front, enormous car parks, et cetera, like you see in so many American towns, but smaller organizations. There are dangers there too, of course, where you get a small organization of just 20 or 30 or 40 people with one very powerful leader, this can be pretty dangerous and damaging and you can get swept off into a particular side issue of teaching or practice, whatever. But I would say where this person who remains anonymous says, I'm sure much of the problem is in my own faith, I would say, no, it isn't. The problem is in the fact that in our churches and in our societies, and we have not really got this one worked out, and we in Britain are just as bad as anyone else, but it's easier to see the mote in our brother's eye than the plank in our own. And when I look across particularly certain parts of America, I do see precisely the landscape that this good person is describing. And I think then it's up to them to pray, to wait on God to say, lord, what should we be doing here? Are there other types of fellowship, types of Christian fellowship? There must be lots, lots of other people in your region who feel and think and pray exactly as you do and who are equally frustrated. And I bet there are already some startup churches which may not have hit the headlines, may not have yet got the big buildings, but may well be places where you would feel at home and I think pray and research and look for that. If in doubt, go onto the website of something like Alpha International and say, can you tell me if there are churches that would be Bible believing and Jesus honoring, but would not have this particular agenda and just see what comes up. There must be ways of doing that. But God bless you. I very much understand, believe me. In Britain, we have a very different problem of most of our population not being believing Christians or practicing Christians at all. And so most people, what they get by way of teaching, they get from the news media and the radio stations and so on, which is, if anything, even more damaging. And it's not neutral at all. It's very much. It's very loaded. And the churches in every situation have always got a battle on to see how to bear witness to Jesus within and for whatever political reality we may be in. And I would say no doubt there are Christians in some heavily blue states which feel similarly conflicted and want other agendas. But that's a whole other issue.

B (24:12)

Well, it certainly is. It certainly is. Well, that's good sage advice, Tom. That's good sage advice. The issues are different depending on whether you're in a red state or a blue state. The uk, Australia, there can always be the danger of being in an environment where Christianity has become syncretized with its political culture.

C (24:30)

Yeah.

B (24:30)

We're going to take a break there and when we come back, we're going to deal with the topic of universalism, in particular the species of universalism advocated by American theologian David Bentley Hart. So don't go too far. That question will be coming right at you.

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B (26:27)

Okay, we are back and Tom, we've got a final good question for this week from Samuel Connor of the usa. And this is what Samuel asks David B. David Bentley Hart presents an argument that seems to me persuasive that the conventional Western vision of an ultimate individual fate of eternal torment cannot be correct because it renders theological language about God incoherent. NT Wright has expressed disagreement with David Bentley Hart's New Testament translation choices, biased as it is in favor of universalism. I am curious as to what he thinks of Hart's argument about the coherence of theological language and its implication for this aspect of the Western tradition. It seems to me that if Hart is right at this point, it is very important for the Western theological tradition. So Tom, I guess you could offer here some thoughts about David Bentley Hart's translation of the New Testament, which is something that came out a number of years ago, which professes to be the first genuine literal translation of the New Testament. And then there's some of his arguments. Now I've read a little bit of David Bentley Hart and his arguments are a bit like salvation is like milk. If the milk goes sour, you can't like just save part of it. You've got to save the whole carton of milk or nothing. He sort of uses analogies like that and this changes or influences the way he translate the New Testament. Some of his theological arguments. He's definitely not a big fan on the church. Father Augustine Tom, what are your thoughts on David Bentley Hart's translation and his inclination or advocacy of universalism as a cure to the apparent incoherences in the Western Christian tradition?

C (28:27)

Wow. Yes. I don't know David Ben DeHart personally. I do know some people who do know him and have told me how cross he was when I reviewed his translation. The magazine Christian Century sent me his translation and because I'd done a translation of the New Testament myself, I thought it would be interesting to see what he does. And I was fairly appalled because it isn't a literal translation in the sense of absolutely word for word. You could have no such thing, because Greek and English do not map onto one another in a straightforward way. We are all in the business of paraphrasing this way or that. And some of the choices he makes in his translation are quite weird. And it's obvious that he is particularly being driven by his hatred. And that's not too strong a word for the Church. Father Augustine, he absolutely can't stand him. And I think that's partly because Bentley Hart is himself in the Eastern Orthodox tradition and sees Augustine as the real originator and driver of the Western or Catholic tradition. And that would be basically true. Augustine is the Great One to whom the Western tradition looks back. And Augustine basically thought and spoke and read and wrote in Latin rather than Greek, let alone Hebrew. And so the Eastern Orthodox Church has always said, well, he didn't always actually understand what was really going on in the Greek and so on. So there are all sorts of problems with Augustine and I certainly would not count myself as a paid up Augustinian theologian, although it depends entirely which debates we're talking about. If we're talking about Augustine versus Pelagius, I would say you probably should go with Augustine. And I would say the same about Augustine versus the Donatists. But those are not the only questions. And people who come to theology through one or more particular third, fourth, fifth, sixth century fathers may well find that the questions are being slanted by their controversies and are pulling bits of Scripture away this way and that. And I think I'm very much with David Bentley Hart, that in the Western tradition, the great picture of heaven and hell which finally emerges in things like Dante's triple work, the Inferno, the Purgatorio and the Paradiso and then the Sistine Chapel decoration, et cetera. There's this great Western tradition that the aim is to get your soul ultimately into heaven rather than being dragged off to hell. And that before you can get into heaven you're probably going to have to do time in purgatory. This is an enormous Western construct. The Eastern Orthodox have certain things which correspond broadly to that. I remember the only time I've been to a great service in the Sistine Chapel itself was a big ecumenical event, oh, 10 or more years ago, 15 years ago maybe. And because it was an ecumenical thing and I was representing the Anglicans, I was sitting next to an Orthodox archimandrite and we looked at the great wall of the Sistine Chapel with Christ in majesty, were rescuing some souls and taking them off to heaven and sending others off down below to a much less attractive place. And this archimandrite friend of mine, I was getting to know him quite well, he pointed at that and said, we just don't do eschatology like that in the Greek church. And I sadly was unable to take the. Take the line of saying, well, will you please explain to me how your orthodox eschatology does work? Because at that moment the Pope and the cardinals all came into the service and we had to stand up and sing something. And I didn't have another chance to ask, but I was just left with the sense that the Western way of doing things is not the only way and that there may be other ways of doing it. Now, because I'm a biblical scholar rather than a patristic or a medievalist, I can't comment in any detail on this. I think I would say this, that the picture of heaven and hell which you get in the Middle Ages owes an enormous amount to the ancient pagan idea that after death good people will go to a nice place and bad people will go to a nasty place. And particularly it depends on the idea that what really matters is not our whole person as we have at the moment moment, but something called the soul, the psuche in Greek, which then would be detached from the body and would find its way to this heavenly or hellish destination. Now, I want to say that whole way of doing it is not grounded in the Bible. There are Bible verses that have been used to support that idea, but really they don't. At the same time, I would say that whether it's Old Testament or New Testament, there are all sorts of passages which do seem to say that those who persist in worshiping idols, that those who persist in saying to God, my way, not your way, will ultimately be ruling themselves out of the life of the new heavens and the new earth that God has promised. But the picture in the Bible is not of an ultimate heaven up there, hell down there, rather like a concentration camp in the middle of a beautiful countryside. We've seen some countries creating that sort of situation, and it's about as ugly a human situation as you can imagine. Rather, it's a picture of people saying to God, I just don't want to be human anymore. Because by worshiping the God in whose image we're made, we are sustained in being image bearing humans. Whereas by refusing to worship that God and instead worshiping whether it's the idol of money or sex or power or whatever it is, we become progressively less and less human. And it seems to me in the New Testament it's very clear that immortality is not not something which is given at birth or conception or earlier. It's something which is God's fresh gift in Christ and by the gospel. Does that make me what people call a conditionalist? Not exactly. I have spelt out some of this in my book, Surprised by hope, as some of you will know, but it seems to me we do well to hold back from being too dogmatic. My suspicion is that the Western tradition has been far too dogmatic with its picture of heaven and hell, but that people like David Bentley Hart are being far too dogmatic in their presumption of a universalism, because it may just not be that those are the only options. And I suspect that we don't have very good conceptual tools in the modern church for navigating a way through to a third position, whatever that might be. So that's probably as far as I can take it end at the the moment.

B (35:33)

And that's probably as far as we can go Today on this episode of Ask Anti Write Anything. But in our next episode, we've got some good stuff coming out. We're going to answer questions about gender hierarchy, you know, Hubba cup two, four, the Just Will Live by Faith, and questions about whether Paul actually wrote the Pastoral epistle. So that all that is coming out in our next episode. But Tom, to close, I've got to ask, are you a big podcast fan?

C (36:02)

Actually, no. My life is quite busy and quite full. There are lots and lots of books that I still want to read, quite a few books I still want to write, actually, lots of other things I want to do, not least with family, et cetera. Where would I find time to listen to podcasts? I'm just not sure when I would do that. If I had some free listening time, I'd much rather sit down and listen to some great classical music or possibly some great jazz rather than listening to other people going on and on and on about the sort of things that I go on and on and on about. I get enough of that going on in my own head without having other people inflicted on me as well.

B (36:39)

Well, I am a compulsive podcast listener. I love my podcast, particularly in my commute to and from work or where I'm on my exercise bike going for a jog. And Premiere does have some great podcasts. They've got the CS Lewis podcast with Alistair McGrath and Ruth Jackson. And also there's the Unbelievable Podcast, one of their their best shows they've got around. So if you do like podcasts, then go check out the CS Lewis Podcast and the unbelievable podcast. Sadly, Tom, they won't be for you. But I'm sure other people can listen to them on your behalf. Well, anyway, that's everything from us this week. I'm Mike Bird.

C (37:19)

I'm Tom Wright.

B (37:20)

And we look forward to seeing you on the next episode of Ask NT Write Anything. Until then, God bless you and take care.

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