Tom Wright (3:27)

Yeah, I want to start in one rather obvious place, which is in John, chapter 19, where Jesus, who John has told us very firmly, is the incarnate Word of God. Jesus is standing in front of Pontius Pilate, who is the Roman official set up by Emperor Tiberius to be running that part of his his empire. And Pilate says to Jesus, don't you realize I have the to have you killed or have you released? And Jesus says, you wouldn't have any power over me unless it was given you from above. Therefore the one who delivered me to you has the greater sin. In other words, Jesus, the Incarnate Word of God, acknowledges that Pontius Pilate, who is a fairly corrupt and bad governor working for a corrupt and bad empire, has a God given authority over him. Now, our problems in Western Christianity have often been that we want things to be the one or the other, either the light or the dark, either the good or the bad. And here we see that. And it's typical of much biblical contextual work that actually it's a much more dense mixture because God the Creator wants his world to be wisely ordered and governed and appoints humans to do that. And I have reflected on this a lot, and you and I wrote a book called Jesus and the Powers not that long ago where we were trying to tease this out. But part of the point is that actually anarchy is even worse than tyranny is. Tyranny is not good. It actually squelches human beings and their freedoms, et cetera. But anarchy is even worse because under anarchy, the bullies and the bad guys always win, the people with muscle trample over, and so on in a way that even a so so government might try to do something about. So Jesus acknowledges that Pontius Pilate has authority over him. And we see the same thing in the Book of Acts where Paul is continually reminding rulers and authorities what their job is. In Philippi, the magistrates who have behaved abominably, they send a message to say, please just get out of town. And Paul says, no, we need a public Apology. Thank you very. He reminds them of what their job is because they're Roman magistrates, he's a Roman citizen, and they need to recognize that they shouldn't have done that. In other words, Paul is affirming that they do have a God given role, but he's just saying you haven't actually been living up to your God given role. And I think that kind of nuance is very necessary as we approach questions of this kind. And then within that, of course, Romans 13 and the passage in First Peter are basically saying God wants his world to be ordered. We who are following Jesus actually have a higher allegiance, but that doesn't mean we should be bad citizens where we are now. Of course, in some systems, when somebody is working in a junior role within that system, they may well find themselves sooner or later asked to do something which would be radically against them, their conscience. And then one is faced with a choice. Do I say, well, I, I need to go along with this, or do I say, no, at this point, I'm sorry, I need to hand in my, my, my ticket for the job. There's another passage which is in the back of my mind as I reflect on this, and it's the story about Elisha with Naaman the Syrian. Yeah, that Naaman the Syrian, who has this horrible skin disease, comes to Elisha. Elisha tells him to go and wash in the Jordan and Naam gets crossed. Eventually he does and he is healed. And he is the chief officer of the Syrian king, which is a pagan empire. And so he comes back and he says to Elisha, I now know that there is no God in all the world, but in Israel there is only one God and he's Israel's God. So please, can I have a bucket of Israel's earth so that I can take it home with me and worship the God of Israel on Israel's soil? Which is to us rather bizarre, but that's what. And then he says, now listen, my master, the king, he's an old man. And when he and I go into the house of the pagan God, when he bows, I bow. It's just what I have to do. Is that all right? And Elisha says to him, go in peace. That's extraordinary because he ought to say, no, no, that's compromise, you shouldn't do that. But it's as though Elisha can see that this man really does believe in Israel's God and that his present position of responsibility does require behavior from him, which Elisha might, under other circumstances, say you shouldn't do. It. So there is a kind of a flexibility. Is the glass half full or half empty? Meanwhile, Elisha's own servant, who presumably does know the God of Israel, et cetera, tells a pack of lies and manages to enrich himself by getting this Syrian general to give him clothes and riches and so on. And Elisha says, therefore, that nasty skin disease will apply to you, too. So in the first case, the glass is half full. Elisha says, go in peace. In the second case, the glass is half empty. He's missing out. So I think we need to reflect on the complexity and then the difficulty. We want everything to be nice and clear. Yes. If you're a policeman under Nazi Germany, you ought to give up your job immediately. But. And. And then you ought to wait until a totally godly government comes along, and then you can work for them. Will you be waiting a long time, to be honest? Because most governments have compromise built into them here or there, and people with tender consciences might well have worries about that, some of which they can address, many of which they probably can't.

Mike Bird (9:46)

I think that's absolutely right, Tom. The. The world, countries, towns, cities need government. No government is perfect. Governments are rarely purely Christian. Most of our governments, I think, for good reasons, are secular, but that's another story. And I think you can work for a government that is imperfect or nearly just to use some political language. But the line is, when you're asked to do something against your conscience or something that might be even against the law in America, there's a. When I was over there, there was a big controversy with where several members of Congress and the Senate were telling US Officials, particularly those who work in the military, don't obey unlawful commands. And I think President Trump was saying, this is unlawful, this is seditious. Now, I don't want to make Trump a, you know, a kind of a punching bag for this. I don't want to be partisan. But as someone who served in the military, we were told if you commit a war crime, you can't just say, well, I was obeying, ordering orders. Yeah, because you will still be prosecuted as a war criminal. So you will be held to account for, even for obeying the commands you're given. And you have the right as a soldier to disobey an unlawful command. So if you're commanding officer or someone superior to you says, hey, those civilians over there are throwing stones at me, can you go and blow them away, check them out? You say, well, no, because that violates the laws of armed conflict. I'm not going to do that, I'd rather be thrown in the brig. And that's what you're expected to do as a soldier. That's not like an extra duty. You can't obey unlawful commands. And I think it's the same in government. You can obey the government in law, in order, but if you're forced to do something immoral or illegal, that you simply have to refuse. Now, whether that means resigning or facing the penalties, so be it. So I guess that's how we'd answer that question. I think we're on the same page there.

Tom Wright (11:47)

Good.

Mike Bird (11:48)

Tom, let's move to our second question, which I think is equally as interesting. This is from Will Goering in Atlanta, Georgia. It's about the Old and the New Covenants. He says, hello, Tom. My question relates to the Old and New Covenant, specifically the transition between them. I have been taught all my life that the Old Covenant ended at the cross when the veil of the Temple was torn. However, I've recently begun to notice the language used throughout the Epistles that that the Old Covenant is passing away as if it is not already passed away, presumably in full. I have since heard arguments that state that the Old and New Covenants coexisted up to 70 AD with the destruction of the Temple, or that the New Covenant did not reach totality until 70 A.D. could you please try to address this confusion? Thank you. Now, Tom, I think this is a good question because in my reading of the New Testament, when I read passages like Acts 15 or Galatians 2 or even Romans 14:15, the biggest debates in the church were largely about how new is the New Covenant, how much continuity is there between the Old and the New? Do we treat Gentiles the same way we would treat proselytes in mainstream Judaism? Just get them circumcised, maybe baptized, and make them kind of para Israelite worshipers of God. How would you answer this question? What is new in the New Covenant? Or what in the Old continues? And was 70 ad a terminus date? Or was there some other event before that that may mark the turning of the ages?

Tom Wright (13:31)

Yeah, I think there's a problem here because the idea of New Covenant is something which occurs particularly in two big new big New Testament passages. Jesus on the 90s betrayed, saying, this cup is the New Covenant in my blood. And then the letter to the Hebrews, which goes back to Jeremiah and Jeremiah, promising that the time will come when God will make a New covenant, not like the Old Covenant, because they broke that one. So this time God is going to write the law on their hearts so that they will all know me. And Hebrews says, and that's what we now have. But even from the point of view of the letter to the Hebrews, it's making that case in terms of particularly the temple cult and the priesthood and about Jesus being the true high priest, the priest according to Melchizedek, and how the whole of the Old Testament is now being fulfilled in ways that people hadn't seen coming, but with Jesus arrival they now do see. And it's Hebrews that says that which is old is wearing out and is passing away, which many people take as a direct prediction of the fall of Jerusalem. Some people of course think that the letter is written after the fall of Jerusalem and so that it's. It's the sort of, the longer term effects of that. I'd be happy to say that Hebrews is written sometime in, probably in the 60s, but I don't think we know that for sure. At the same time, I worry about a too fixed idea of old and new, because in the Abrahamic passages in the Gospels and in Paul, what we have is a sense of continuity that the Abrahamic covenant is fulfilled. And when people talk about the old and the new covenant, we're really talking about the Mosaic covenant. So there's a big difference between Abraham and Moses in relation to the coming of the Messiah. And you can see it very clearly in Galatians 3 and 4 when Paul argues on the basis of the continuity of the Abrahamic covenant, that therefore the Mosaic covenant was designed by God to be a temporary arrangement. And we have to be quite clear, Paul is not saying that the Mosaic covenant was a bad thing and therefore, whew, it's abolished. We got rid of it. The Mosaic covenant was a good thing, which was time limited and the time has now fully come, he says in Galatians 4, 6. But the result of that is that the Abrahamic covenant has been fulfilled, that if you belong to the Messiah, you are Abraham's seed, offspring, heirs according to the promise. So there is this larger continuity. And when we're talking about Abraham, we're not talking about old and new, we're talking about the single covenant with Abraham fulfilled in the Gospel. When we're talking about the Mosaic covenant, then as Jeremiah says, and as Hebrews picks up, we're talking about an arrangement which God made the arrangement with Moses and his people, et cetera, which then is transformed in the new. The one Paulhein passage which is really focusing on that is 2 Corinthians 3, 4, 5, where you've got the Mosaic scene of Moses and the Torah. And then Paul sees through that to the coming of Jesus and he talks then about the renewal of the covenant which then leads in 2 Corinthians 5 to the renewal of creation, which is part of the point. So I would beware of over structuring. There's the old, there's the new, and then having to ask questions on that basis. Because I would say that for Paul and for Hebrews and certainly for Jesus on the night he's betrayed, something is happening in the combined events of the Last Supper, the crucifixion, the Resurrection, the Ascension, the. As a result of which the New has been inaugurated. But as so often in the New Testament, there is a now and not yet overlap. And the Book of Acts is very clear on that. Paul, I think, is very clear on that, that something really has been inaugurated. We're not just waiting. Something has happened as a result of which the world is a different place, but that has to work its way through. And the fall of Jerusalem is the dramatic fulfillment predicted by Jesus. The judgment of God on the city that had rejected Jesus way of peace. Very clear in say, Luke 19, but many other passages as well. I hope that's helpful.

Mike Bird (18:14)

I think it is helpful. I want to finish off with one brief answer from you. And this does reflect the question we've received. What do you think would be a better way of phrasing it? Would you prefer to say the Old Covenant is passing or we've come to, I don't know, the climax of the covenant, which, by the way, should be a great name for a book. We should.

Tom Wright (18:36)

It would be.

Mike Bird (18:36)

I'd write that down somewhere. I'd pinned that one in Tom.

Tom Wright (18:39)

Google it and see where you get. Yeah, I think when I used. When I used that phrase, I remember discussing it with the late Richard Hayes, who's one of my closest friends, bless him, I still miss badly. And Richard thought about that phrase for a moment and then he said, are you offering that as a translation of Romans 10, 4 telos nomu. The Christ is the end of the law, the completion of the law, the fulfillment of the law. And I remember we had a whole discussion about it as to whether that was an appropriate way of thinking about it or not. Because I think what's going on in Romans 10 is that the covenant in Deuteronomy 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, which is very much drawn on by Paul in that passage, the covenant is now being fulfilled in a whole new way that this is the real covenantal return from exile which Deuteronomy had predicted and which Paul is saying, that's what's happened in and through Jesus and now by the Spirit in people coming to faith, people, Gentiles as well as Judeans. So there is there a sense of the climax of the covenant that was long in coming all the way from Deuteronomy through to Jesus. But now we've got there. And as a result there is a new sort of covenantal family. A covenantal family not defined in terms of membership in the Judaic people and circumcision and sabbath and food laws and the focus on the temple, but defined in terms of Pistis Christi, the Messianic faith of this community. So there I think it is both climax and renewal. And then, and the thing which is set aside, namely the Mosaic dispensation, is set aside not because it was a bad thing, happily abolished, but because it was a good thing whose job has been done. There's all the difference in the world.

Mike Bird (20:39)

Indeed. Indeed. Well, I think we'll leave that question there when we come back. We're going to try solve the world's Anglican problems. Back in a moment.

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Mike Bird (23:36)

And we are back. We have a question from Dave Gilbert in Brooklyn, New York about the state of Anglicanism and he says hey Tom and Michael, I'm curious to know your thoughts on the current state of Anglicanism. Given that you are both in tradition, Tom from birth and Michael later in life, what do you think are the current strengths and struggles of Anglicanism in the world? It could just be the algorithms I'm swimming in, but in the US right now it feels like there's been a big movement of returning to the older Christian traditions, many to Roman Catholicism, Eastern Orthodoxy, but also to Anglicanism as well. I myself grew up Baptist, met my wife in a non denominational church, but now we find ourselves going to an Anglican church and are feeling quite refreshed and encouraged by it. What do you make of these recent movements and Anglicans place in the midst of it now? Tom, you and I, we know a little bit about Anglican politics. Certainly you've been involved in a lot of it, particularly in the early noughties during your time as a Bishop of Durham. You know, in my college we do feel the sway, the ebb and flow of Anglican politics and this is partly related to the GAFCON movement, the Global Anglican Future Conference which has recently declared that it the Anglican Communion and it's called on Anglicans to reject fellowship with the Archbishop of Canterbury. The Archbishop elect Cyril Mulally. I think we did a bonus episode touching on a lot of this we did. We did. So check out that bonus episode if you want to get Tom and my take on that. But let's say this time, here's my hypothetical. This is what I'm going to work with. Dave's question. Let's say you get a car comes to your house, okay. And it's a royal car, men in black suits and they say, tom, King Charles III has summoned you to Buckingham palace and you're taken away by these men in black suits to the palace. King Charles sits you down and says, Tom, I'm going to make you the Royal plenipotentiary and I'm going to give you unlimited power, King Henry viii, power to fix the Anglican Communion. What do you do?

Tom Wright (25:56)

Oh my goodness. I'm very glad that that is an entirely fictitious hypothetical scenario for all sorts of very good reasons.

Mike Bird (26:03)

And yet I have a strange morbid curiosity as to what it would be like. I mean, I know what I could do with unlimited power. Some lot of crazy stuff.

Tom Wright (26:10)

Well, well I think the, the great thing, and I think this is why people are coming into Anglicanism even though it's in a confused state at the moment. And I mean in America at the moment you've got OB, continuing Episcopal Church, but you've also got at least two different so called Anglican churches with different allegiances to different bits of Africa etc, And all that came out of the consecration of a practicing homosexual bishop in 2003, which had been explicitly stated by all the primates of the Anglican Communion to be not a good idea. And that this would break fellowship. And it was a result of the fallout of that when the Episcopal Church took no notice of the rest of the Anglican Communion, that no surprise different movements arose. And people have often emailed me to say, I want to be Anglican, I'm in America, but I'm not sure which movement I should join. And I have had to say to them, listen, I was very much involved in that up to about 2010 when I stopped being Bishop of Durham. I made the decision to go back to being a New Testament scholar. And that's meant that I haven't been able to keep up with all the twos and froze and turns and twists and different movements and so on. And I run into them from time to time. I go to America and I speak with this or that or the other, but I do not have a map of everything that has gone on. But having said all of that, why do people go to these churches, these older liturgical style churches? And I think the answer, and certainly a Typical Anglican answer would be cognate with the belief, which the Reformers had to be very clear about, that in the old language, the unworthiness of the minister does not hinder the effectiveness of the sacrament. In other words, if there is somebody who is properly licensed, ordained, etcetera, who is presiding at the Lord's Supper, the Eucharist, call it what we will, then it is the Lord's table. It's not their table. And people come even if they know that this particular minister is not somebody that they would really trust in other respects. But it is the Lord's table, and that's why they come. And likewise, I want to say that about liturgy in general and about the ordering of worship in general. I think what attracts people is that instead of the chaos of having different worship leaders jumping up and down and saying, we're now going to sing this song, or we're now going to do this or that or the other, you have an ordering, which is basically a presentation in morning and evening prayer. It's basically a presentation of Scripture, a reading from the Old Testament, reading from the New Testament. And we're not doing these readings in order to inform ourselves about what these passages of Scripture say, though. We're doing that as well. We're doing it because actually we are celebrating the whole of the scriptural story every time we worship. And we are seeing, when we read this little bit of the Old Testament, we're seeing the whole sweep of the Old Testament through the small window of this reading. And then we have a chapter or so from the New Testament, and we are seeing in our worshiping mind's eye the whole of the New Testament through that little window of that reading. And in order to prepare ourselves for that, we sing a psalm, or maybe more than one psalm, in order to celebrate what we just heard, we sing a canticle, which is often itself a biblical passage, and then when we've done the second one, we sing another canticle. And then, having had that whole thing, we gladly stand up and affirm our faith in the God who is revealed in this wonderful scriptural panorama that we've just seen. And then in the light of that, we bring before this God our own needs, the needs of the world. Now, it seem that that's basically Anglican liturgy. Yeah. And as such, I think any Christian who loves Scripture ought to say what a wonderful way of ordering worship. And one of the things I've worried about when I go to some more free churches, including, I have to say, some quite conservative Baptist churches, is that sometimes whole services where there is no public reading of Scripture. I'm just genuine puzzled by that. These are churches which would claim to be based on scripture, but in their worship they're not reading it. Yeah. And so I want to say, even though the church is in a mess politically, socially, culturally, for reasons that you outlined, and even though we've got to the point where some people in Nigeria and elsewhere are saying we're so fed up with Canterbury that we're going to do our own thing and we're going to claim that this is now the center center of the Anglican world. Nevertheless, Anglicanism continues offering this way of being Christian, which is basically rooted in Scripture, celebrating Scripture, allowing scripture to frame how we pray and hopefully how we live as long as we're doing that. I want to say this is a church that people should want to belong to. Now, within that, of course, if you find that this church is linked arms with people who are licensing behavioral lifestyles that you radically disapprove of, then there should be questions to be asked. Questions in the parish, questions in the diocese, questions in the province, whatever it is. We've done that ad nauseam. Over the last 20 or 30 years, I have been on international Anglican theological commissions looking in great detail at how we organize authority structures. One of the problems of Anglicanism is precisely we don't have an authority structure like the Roman Catholics or the Eastern Orthodox do. However, my Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox friends would say you could be grateful you don't have structures like we do, because our structures aren't as straightforward as they might appear from the outside. So in a sense, this is a problem that all the great churches face. The problem of how we do authority structure, and particularly this is about unity. It's not authority as in the sense of. Of is there somebody giving us bullying directions which we must obey? It's authority which means that we know that we are part of the same family as those people two continents away or those people on the other side of the world. That was the thing goes back to Ignatius of Antioch. How are we going to keep the diverse churches as one single family lest they fall apart into different ethnic groups, different locality groups, different political groups? And the answer is the bishop have got to be linking arms with one another so that then the churches which align with this bishop know that they are part of the same family as those other Christians in quite different parts of the world. Now, that's been under strain for a long time, but Anglicanism still basically believes that that's what we Ought to be working back to. It's just we're having a lot of trouble getting there. But as long as we have that liturgy, we are in a position to say we are celebrating the scriptural life and truth focused on Jesus himself. And if we can do that, this is a way of being faithful, which isn't saying we've solved all the problems, but it's saying we can pray this way, we can live this way, and we encourage others to join us in doing so.

Mike Bird (33:57)

Yeah, I think that's correct, Tom. The liturgy is very attractive to a lot of people, particularly the Book of Common Prayer, various forms. It's got a wonderful, poignant, powerful worship, great prayer, regular diet of Bible reading. And I tend to think if you've been raised on a sort of church service, which is effectively a TED Talk and a Coldplay concert where you're singing songs like Jesus, you're terrific. For you, I just swim to Pacific. Yeah, baby, yeah, baby, yeah, yeah, yeah. If you're singing songs like that and then you encounter the Book of Common Prayer, where you've got these ancient prayers, you've got even more Bible read reading, and you're there with the saints, I think that's going to be attractive because it's drawing you into a different world. You feel like you are getting a glimpse into the worship of heaven when you do that. The other thing is, I think theologically Anglicanism, although it's a reformed denomination, it's Protestant, it's not Timu Catholicism, it's not Catholicism Light. It's a via media between Geneva and Wittenberg. It's a. It's a VM halfway house between different ways of being Reformed. Okay, so that's what that means. But it still retrain. Retains its roots to the ancient English Church.

Tom Wright (35:19)

Yeah.

Mike Bird (35:20)

Okay. This is the church of, you know, of the be. This is the Church of Anselm of Canterbury, of Aden. It's an ancient church with its own distinctive traditions and roots, and it's a global tradition. That is what I think is attractive about the Anglican tradition in terms of the solution to the Anglican Church's problems. I think you've got to make sure you're getting bishops of good character who are not thieves, sleazebags or bullies. I think that will definitely help. And if it was up to. If I had unlimited power, Tom, and we pray that someday I will, I would get all the bishops together. And I think we should have a vote on how do we understand the human person. We would have like an ecumenical council on what it means to be a human being. And we would come up with a statement of faith about our humanity, what is our identity? We'd cover transhumanism, sexuality, gender. We'd have a statement and anyone who doesn't want to sign up to it would be invited to do other things elsewhere. That's what I would do with my unlimited power. And I would make sure everyone got a free copy of your Galatians and Ephesians commentaries, because I think that would so much that would help answer the covenant question we had earlier, before.

Tom Wright (36:46)

Well, well, yeah, I think, having taken part in discussions about the future of Anglicanism and holding together, I do think that the determination not to have a papacy is an important determination. However, without a Pope to say, this is where it is, end of conversation, we do need key structures. We have had them in the past. The Lambeth Conference used to work in this respect. It sadly hasn't really had that effect.

Mike Bird (37:20)

Become a talk fest.

Tom Wright (37:21)

It's become. Yeah, it has become a talking shop. The meeting of the primates has had that effect. But when they've said things that some people haven't liked, they've just been ignored. So then, well, what's actually going on? And then there's been the Anglican Consultative Council, which includes lay people as well, from each of the provinces, and that both has and hasn't had an impact. But then it comes down to the Archbishop of Canterbury, who is not and could not and should not be a Pope, but who nevertheless has had the historic role of holding things together. And I think the udi, the declaration by some that we don't want that anymore. This is the Anglican Communion. That does, of course, reflect, and we should say this, that does reflect the demographics of the Anglican Communion, that the average Anglican, as it is often said these days, is black and does not speak English as her mother tongue. You know, there's a vast world of Anglicanism in Africa and elsewhere, other parts of the world too, which makes our church attendance in Britain or North America look really rather paltry by comparison. So those are the realities and we live into the hope of a better, more united, wiser humbler church. I think we have the raw materials for that, but we have to build on the strengths we've got, which, as we've said, the liturgy is right at the heart of that.

Mike Bird (38:52)

Well, I think we'll bring that to a close then. Tom, remember, you can go to my website, make Mike the Anglican Pope.com and please make a donation there. More seriously, we'll be back next week with another episode. But if you want to join us into some of our deep dives, like when we discussed Sarah Mullally's appointment of the Archbishop of Canterbury, or even some other great topics ranging from heresy and the Book of Acts, become a bonus subscriber to the show. And don't forget as well, you can check out some other great shows in the Premier network, like Unbelievable and the CS Lewis Podcast and all their offerings on YouTube. It's really great. It's farewell from me, Mike Bird, and.

Tom Wright (39:34)

From me, Tom Wright.

Mike Bird (39:35)

And we'll see you all for the next episode of Ask N.T. wright. Anything. Until then. God bless you all.