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- [00:01]
Podcast Host / Advertiser
Before we get into today's episode, I want to invite you on a unique spiritual journey this Advent season. It's called Journey to Bethlehem and It's a free 9 day text message series designed to prepare your heart for Christmas starting on December 17th. Each day leading up to Christmas, you'll receive a short reflective message pointing you to the hope, peace, joy and love found in the coming of Christ. It's completely free and a great way to keep your focus on Jesus this season. Why not sign up today@premierinsight.org resources? That's PremierInsight.org resources. Now, here's today's podcast.
- [00:49]
Advertiser
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- [01:32]
Podcast Host / Advertiser
Eyes, exhale, feel your body relax, and let go of whatever you're carrying today. Well, I'm letting go of the worry that I wouldn't get my new contacts in time for this class. I got them delivered free from 1-800-contacts. Oh, my gosh, they're so fast. And breathe. Oh, sorry. I almost couldn't breathe when I saw the discount they gave me on my first order. Oh, sorry. Namaste.
- [01:56]
Mike Bird
Visit 1-800-contacts.com today to save on your first order.
- [01:59]
Tom Wright
1-800-Contacts.
- [02:09]
Mike Bird
Hello and welcome to the Ask nt Write Anything podcast, the program where we answer your questions about Jesus, the Bible and the life of faith. I'm Mike Bird from Ridley College and I am joined, as always, by Tom.
- [02:24]
Tom Wright
Wright from Wycliffe hall in Oxford.
- [02:27]
Mike Bird
Well, hello, Tom. And Tom, I want you to rejoice with me. I've had a wonderful experience. My new book has come out, Whispers of Revolution, both in the American and British edition. So this is American, this is British. It's my own historical Jesus book. Okay, so it does have a few references to Jesus and the victory of God and how God became king. So taking my cue from you on a few places there, but also trying to interact with the new generation of scholarship, I should say Jesus in the Victory of God is now, what, 25 years old, isn't it?
- [03:03]
Tom Wright
30 years old, nearly. It came out in 1996.
- [03:07]
Mike Bird
That's correct.
- [03:09]
Tom Wright
30 years next year, which is truly extraordinary, you know. So look back. How did that happen? That's like a generation.
- [03:17]
Mike Bird
Well, that was the first book of yours I read, and that's the one I really. That's the one where I would say I woke from my dogmatic slumbers and learned how to think big biblically. Now, I can't say this is, I can't say my own book is as good, but you could think of this as maybe a younger nephew. A young nephew.
- [03:35]
Tom Wright
Great. I shall look forward to it. In fact, I think I shall instruct the publishers to send me a copy.
- [03:41]
Mike Bird
I'm sure they will, but Tom, this week we've got questions about models of church, some of the language in the Lord's Prayer and some a question on new age religion. Our first question comes from Malone Dunleavy from Boyner park. And he's got a question about models of church. And this is what Malone asks. Having been involved in multiple expressions of church across different cultural contexts, I've experienced a variety of approaches to Christian community. How can we reconcile the current of an often service centered institutional model of church, which tends to emphasize events and programs, with the biblical and historical vision of the church of God as a living daily community? Particularly in more urban contexts, the modern service centered model often seems to leave individuals isolated in their workplaces and neighborhoods and social spaces unless they've gathered for a scheduled event. Rather than the community of God living life together, how can we reconcile our predominant view of church in the West? And what do you recommend to believers who have seen this disconnect and grow weary of services and events, but want to rather pursue a more tight knit relational community that may not be considered enough in the eyes of typical Christian leadership? I think this is a good question. If you define the church as the programs and the services and the events it puts on, rather than intentional community, it can be problematic. And Tom, here I want to hit you up with a quote from a friend of ours, a common friend, Nick Perrin, who once opined that the church has often become a weekly meeting of Jesus's Facebook friends. So if, you know, if you know the social media Facebook church is just where, you know, we all live our lives independently. But once a week, all of Jesus's Facebook friends get together. We're all connected to Jesus, but we're not really connected to each other. I think that's what the question gets at so how do we get away from the idea that church is the events, the programs? It's the weekly email you get from all the things that are offered this week. It's like as if you're going to a holiday camp and these are this week's activities. How do we get into something more people and community centered?
- [06:17]
Tom Wright
Yes, I'm inclined to say that we always ought to be working for the both and and not the either or. I mean, I understand the frust that the questioner expresses and I have enjoyed the kind of community that is being described where people actually spend a lot of time with one another during the week and not just getting together on a Sunday or for maybe one evening a week to do a Bible study together or something. At the same time, I know that in many communities, both urban and rural, often having the one meeting to which we're all supposedly committed is a way of hanging onto something which would otherwise disappear completely. In other words, you can't force a detailed and rich community on people. It just depends entirely on the demographic. And part of this, I suspect, is a social thing. In England we would suspect it was maybe a bit of a class thing that some people more naturally hang out. You know, we have still these things called pubs in England. And the point of a pub is that it's a public house because people didn't go into each other's houses because they were probably too small and scruffy and they were ashamed of the state of the kitchen. So lots of people would meet in the public house and that will be often several nights a week or several lunchtimes a week where they would get together with their friends and discuss the issues of the day and so on. And that culture has almost entirely gone, except in some very deep rooted, maybe working class cultures in Britain. And so that I suspect there are different things going on here, different perceptions of what sort of community I might like. And as well, there are individual personality things going on there that we are given different personalities. And I know the different systems of mapping them, whether it's the Enneagram or the Myers Briggs or whatever, that some people actually prefer to have a little bit more personal space and other people prefer to be right in the thick of a social group as often and for as long as possible. And we're not all the same on that. And it seems to me that it's not a good idea for the church to come in and either say we only ought to have services and a few special events, or we all ought to be in each other's pockets and in and out of each other's houses all the time. I've lived in many different situations where there's been a rich mixture. I mean, at the moment, Maggie and I live on a street where we know lots of students on the street, but we know one or two families in particular just up the road from us who are the sort of people upon whom we can call in an emergency and they can call on us in an emergency. We don't actually attend the same church. Oxford is a complicated town with lots of different churches, but we kind of know that when push comes to shove, we're linking arms together. We're. We pray for each other. We are part of a kind of extended family of faith. I don't feel a lack there. It would be nice to spend a bit more time with them sometimes, but we're all very busy. They have lots of children, we have lots of grandchildren. So I wanna say let's not be too either Orish about this and let's be aware of the different sociocultural dimensions that are going on. Because in the New Testament, there are many places where there are just a few, a handful of Christians in a particular town or city, probably many of the early house churches, there were only half a dozen, six or eight people. You know, when Paul writes to Philemon and the church in your house, I imagine there might have been 15 or 20 at most there. And because they were this strange Christian group in central Turkey where they were living then, they would stand out and so they would need one another. But we don't live in a society quite like that. Some Christians do today, but many don't. So there are all sorts of different pressures. And I don't think we can just say it's either this or that. I'm walking around the question and looking at it rather than saying a definite answer. But I hope that makes sense.
- [10:35]
Mike Bird
I think it does. I mean, there's a big difference between my wife and I. My wife, when she's at church, she has to meet every person she knows and relive their week with them, whereas I catch up with a couple of people I know. I look around, none of my usual friends are crying. I pretty much know all I need to know now, and I'm ready to go home and have lunch and maybe have a nap and take some kids to the evening service. So we've got different ways of living in people's lives. But, Tom, I do want to ask a question here. We're now a few Years out of the pandemic where we had to do lockdowns, and we certainly felt it in Melbourne is online church church. Because there are a lot of people after Covid who thought, you know, getting up on a cold, windy morning, I mean, it's just. It's right on the television, you know, and it's great. I can. I can go to church in my pajamas. I've got my favorite cup of tea here. Is. Is online church church, or is that the danger of us adopting a more disembodied digital Persona? You know, how uninvolved can we be? Can online church be a surrogate for church?
- [11:48]
Tom Wright
Yeah, I think in extremis, and we did have extremis with COVID and it was like a war period where we just have to batten down the hatches. We can't go out, we can't do this and that. So it was better than nothing. It was extraordinary to me that certainly in England, the church is. Just went ahead and did it without, as far as I can see, any real debate or discussion as to whether this was a good thing or not. Now, that took me back 30 years when I was on a doctrine commission in the Church of England, and one of the television companies got in touch with the Church of England and said, how would it be if we broadcast a communion service and people who couldn't get out of their homes to a communion service could put some bread and wine in front of the television and then it would be kind of consecrated by extension? And so they would have been to church, wouldn't they? We had a very interesting discussion about that. And we came to the conclusion, rather, as you said, that actually real church means real people really meeting together. Which is why the Church of England's normal rule has been that if there's somebody shut in who can't get out to church, then two people from the church will take the bread and the wine from the church service and take it to them so that they are, by extension, part of that same congregation. And that's always seen as a kind of emergency measure, not the ideal. The ideal is several people in the same building sharing the same meal. And when Paul says, we who are many are one bread, one body, if we do things that make that harder to believe, then I think we need to watch out. But of course, as I say, it was in extremis during COVID and I know there were some churches that said they had far more people online than they would ever get in church on a Sunday morning. Well, so God moves In many mysterious ways. But actually, the whole gospel and New Testament is about real people, real communities. The word became flesh and dwelt among us, not. The word became something in the ether which we could scoop up on a screen.
- [13:51]
Mike Bird
Yeah, the word became flesh. It didn't become an algorithm. Exactly. Well, let's move on. We have another question, this time from Chris Mundy in Brisbane, Australia, my hometown. Brisvegas for the win. And this is about the text of the Lord's Prayer, in particular the integrity of the text. This is what Chris asks. Why do we add the words, for thine is the kingdom, the power, and the glory forever and ever to the Lord's Prayer? These words are not in the original prayer in scripture, and the Anglican liturgy includes this addition as the prayer that Jesus taught us to pray. But this isn't actually correct, is it? Well, Tom, the earliest manuscripts of the Lord's Prayer do not include these words, and yet it does appear in a lot of Christian liturgical formulas. Should we have this addition here, or should we go back to what was in the original text of the Lord's Prayer?
- [15:01]
Tom Wright
That's a good question, and it's one that has amused and interested me for a long time, because as a small boy, I regularly used to attend the Church of England morning Prayer service, where near the beginning of the service, we say the Lord's Prayer in its full form. Thine is the kingdom, the power, and the glory. And then after the readings and after the Creed, we say the Lord's Prayer again, but only in its shorter form. And when I was a choir boy, you could always tell who the new, because they would forget and they would run on into, for thine is the kingdom, the power, and the glory. And the rest was, shh. You know? No, we don't do that this time. It's one of those silly quirks, but I've always been aware of that. As a result, and I think, as we say the Creed in our liturgies, even though the Creed isn't in the New Testament, it's a summary of some, maybe not all, of the key points in the New Testament. So it seems to me perfectly fair enough to take from the very early church, just like the Creed is from the very early church, that ascription of thine is the kingdom, the power, and the glory. And I suspect that people like St. John Chrysostom, who quotes it in that longer form, they may well have felt, lead us not into temptation, deliver us from evil. That's a bit of a downer. A bit of a clunky way to finish. And since we're starting the prayer with Father in heaven, wouldn't it be good to finish the prayer with kingdom, power and glory? So I have no problem, just like I have no problem singing hymns. And indeed, when I sing the psalms, I kind of expect, and my tradition does it, that at the end of each psalm we will sing glory be to the Father and to the Son and to the Holy Spirit, as it was in the beginning, is now and ever shall be, world without end. Amen. Now you can chase through the copies of the psalms in the Hebrew text in the Septuagint. You won't find that anywhere we use it. And that use goes way back in church tradition as a way of saying we're incorporating this within the larger life of the church, even though we recognize that the psalm itself doesn't have that. And so I would say I've no problem about using that traditional trinitarian finishing point. And of course, it goes back not just to Chrysostom, but to several early texts, so that there are actually different variations from the Didache in the perhaps early second century. We don't know. When do you date the Didache, Mike?
- [17:33]
Mike Bird
I date it to about 110 sometime around there, but it's pretty close to the.
- [17:39]
Tom Wright
It could be 110. Some people say it could be.
- [17:43]
Mike Bird
Some think it's earlier than Matthew.
- [17:45]
Tom Wright
Yeah, I know, I know. And some people would push it later in the second century. But the point is you've got a tradition of prayer and some early Christians are not so slavishly attached to saying, ah, these are the words of Jesus, therefore we must stop absolutely here. They're saying, no, this is part of our worship. We are worshiping in the Spirit and we want to praise God in this way as a way of holding onto the prayer Jesus taught us within our larger expression of worship. So I have no problem about that. And I think if we were to confine our worship services only to things that we are absolutely sure were there in the words of Jesus, well, that might be an interesting thing to do. But most Christians down the years of every tradition have not done that. So I'm unfazed by it.
- [18:35]
Mike Bird
I'm with you, Tom. I agree. Let's recognize that it is a liturgical addition for prayer that enhances us praying the way Jesus taught us. I don't see any problem. But here's the thing that I that niggles at my mind. What if we applied the same logic to the story about the woman caught in adultery in John 8. Or think of the Yohannine epistles. You remember that like explicit trinitarian formula that I think, you know, wasn't. It wasn't in the Greek New Testament that Erasmus found. And then someone went and found a, a text that had the Greek of that because it was in the Vulgate, but it wasn't in any of the Greek manuscripts. Could you make the same argument that those sorts of things should be used and prayed as well, that the Holy Spirit was inspiring not just the original autographs, but kind of subsequent edition, a conical edition? So, yeah, I definitely agree with you, but it raises some good questions. What do we do with other places in the New Testament where we know there are textual additions that are very popular but unlikely to be original?
- [19:51]
Tom Wright
Yeah, yes. I'm not sure. It's a long time since I studied the passage in John 8 about the woman taken in adultery, or as I and some others prefer to think of it as the men taken in hypocrisy, because that isn't in all the manuscripts. And I think it was the New English Bible which rather daringly printed it as an edition at the end of John's Gospel, you know, other authorities add dun dun, dun dun. But it seems to be very early and it actually makes sense of John chapter 8. Cause at the beginning they wanna throw stones at this woman. At the end of John 8 they wanna throw stones at Jesus. And there's something going on there, I think. And that's part of the puzzle of John's Gospel as a whole, that there seem to be dislocations and things which don't follow exactly, and so on, and those are well known. The passage in 1 John, the Trinitarian passage, is I think, a bit. It really does appear that there are manuscript traditions where we can see this being added by some scribe who obviously thought in the middle of Trinitarian controversies, we need to firm this thing up. So there are three witnesses, the Spirit, the Word, and these three are one. And I want to say that's fine where they're in touch with somebody in the third or fourth or fifth century and basically we agree with them. But that probably isn't what John wrote. So if one was preaching on it, one would lay there that out. And there are many passages like that. And also passages where there are words which are spelled a bit differently and so could mean something slightly differently. Romans 5:1 being therefore justified by faith, is it echomen or echomen have peace with God or let us have peace with God that would make a nice interesting little sermon right there and could say both, or you could argue for one or the other. So I think we need to lighten up a bit. And this has to do with the doctrines of inspiration and preservation of Scripture. And there are some people who say that because the Holy Spirit obviously wanted to give us an infallible book, therefore there can be nothing wrong with it, so that there can not be anything requiring a further addition. We've got the real thing. And as soon as you start looking at the different manuscripts of the New Testament, you realize, well, dream on. One of the glories of the New Testament is we've got more early manuscripts of the New Testament by a factor of probably many hundred than any other text from the ancient world. We know Cicero, Seneca, et cetera, et cetera, through one or two or three usually medieval manuscripts that scholars have pored over and tried to pull together. We know the text of the New Testament through dozens and dozens and dozens of very early texts. And, and that tells me that the inspiration that's going on when God wants to give us this book is all bound up with the ongoing worshiping and witnessing life of the church that was reading and transcribing these texts. And I'd rather have that sense of being part of that vivid, lively community than have a sort of mechanical thing where the Holy Spirit Inspired a text 2000 years ago and then it kind of drops down into our laps as though here it is, take it or leave it. Today. I think that earlier idea is much richer and more profoundly Christian, to be honest.
- [23:21]
Mike Bird
Yeah. One day we should definitely do a conversation and look at some of those tricky passages, like the story of the woman taking adultery, the Trinitarian passage in John. I mean, there's a few interesting texts in the New Testament like the 1 in 1 Corinthians 14 about did Paul really prohibit women from speaking in the churches? That'd be a fun episode. Maybe we'll do that another day. But anyway, we're going to take a break and when we come back, we're going to look at the topic as to whether New Age religions have infiltrated Christianity today. All that after the break.
- [24:02]
Podcast Host / Advertiser
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- [24:47]
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- [25:18]
Podcast Host / Advertiser
Hi, I'm here to pick up my son, Milo.
- [25:20]
Tom Wright
There's no Milo here.
- [25:21]
Podcast Host / Advertiser
Who picked up my son from school?
- [25:24]
Tom Wright
Streaming only on Pico. I'm gonna need the name of everyone that could have a connection. You don't understand.
- [25:31]
Podcast Host / Advertiser
It was just the five of us.
- [25:33]
TV Show Narrator
So this was all planned.
- [25:35]
Tom Wright
What are you gonna do?
- [25:36]
Podcast Host / Advertiser
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- [25:38]
Tom Wright
Get my son back. I honestly didn't see this coming. These nice people killing each other.
- [25:43]
Advertiser
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- [25:44]
Tom Wright
A new series streaming now only on Peacock.
- [25:49]
Mike Bird
Hey everyone, welcome back. We have a question from Charlotte Schemerhorn in London who's interested as to whether other religions, New Age religions, have surreptitiously infiltrated the church. Here's what Charlotte asks. Hi NT Wright, I'm wondering if you could highlight a few ways in which other religions or spiritual practices have infiltrated Christianity. I'm specifically thinking of some New Age practices that seem to have leaked into our rhythms, but would love if you could shed some of your light on ways you see external practices entering the church. Thank you so much for your wisdom and time in considering this. Tom. I think this is a good question. The New Age phenomena, I think it reached a bit of a peak in the 70s, maybe the 80s, but it still persists. One thing I get questions on is about mindfulness. Mindfulness seems to be like an attempt to do a secular version of meditation. The way some people talk about it, it maybe has connections to Buddhism or yoga or other religions. Do you have any thoughts on things like mindfulness or do you see other practices, other teachings going on in the church where you think to yourself, hang on, that sounds more like a guru from India in the 1960s that the Beatles were hanging out with than it has anything to do with Christianity.
- [27:26]
Tom Wright
Yes, I'm not an expert on the New Age phenomenon, though I do remember one or two people getting very agitated about it. Particularly, I remember one or two people I met in the 1980s, and one theologian in particular, who saw the ways in which some of the New Age movements were actually deeply anti Semitic and was pushing back at them from that point of view. Because Judaism concentrates, and always has done on the real world, on real realities in this world, family land, et cetera, et cetera. Whereas the New Age was kind of trying to escape from all of that. And of course, as we know, in the Nazi movement in the 1930s, there were many pagan practices which the Nazis introduced, often in private, but then sometimes spilling over. And a lot of that was bound up with the rejection at a kind of a deep, fundamental level of the whole Jewish world and everything that went with it. So people who have been more concerned about the dangers of antisemitism in our world have sometimes raised a flag and said, watch out, because if you go the New Age route, that might happen. Now, part of the trouble here is that if you grew up, as I did, in fairly middle to low church Anglicanism, we didn't have incense, we didn't have meditation classes, we didn't sit around in a circle linking arms and breathing deeply and all that sort of thing. So that if somebody then suddenly said in the 70s or 80s, now, as well as doing our ordinary services, we're gonna get together on a Tuesday night and we're gonna sing a chorus which is very easy and simple, and we'll go on and on and on and on singing it until we all arrive at a new state of. I think some people would have found that rather exciting. Other people would have said, no, sorry, this is vain repetition. We shouldn't be doing that. Vain repetition being an echo of what Jesus says about pagan prayer in Matthew chapter 6. At the same time, the general principle here, I think, is that there's a danger in saying that Christianity is 100% unlike everything else before or since. Because as we see in, say, Acts 17, Paul is very clear. He has an altar to an unknown God. Let me tell you about this God who you acknowledge, but you acknowledge you don't know him. And Paul is actually coming in on that by saying that the God of the Old Testament, the Creator God, he is actually the one you're already worshiping. So I'm not telling you anything strange. It's something which you knew you needed to know. And Now I'm telling you about it. And likewise, many people have said that as Christianity has made its way in the world, then there have been some things which have reminded people who've heard the Gospel. So we've got something rather like that in our culture. And then the answer is yes. But now here is something richer and fuller, even if it does remind you of that. And this is because of the goodness of creation, that God in creation has made a world in which human beings, even if they're totally outside the Judeo Christian tradition, are not left without signals of the true God's presence and provision. This is so in Acts 14 as well as 17 and various other passages, of course. And when that is so, then we shouldn't be surprised if some of the religious practices that have grown up in other places and traditions actually can have analog or even crossover points with Christianity. I know when I was first introduced to the Jesus prayer, which many Greek Orthodox or Russian Orthodox thinkers have used as their staple diet, the repetition again and again of a phrase like Lord Jesus Christ, son of the living God, have mercy on me, a sinner. And there are many holy men and women down the years who have prayed either that or similar prayers with the rhythm of their breathing until they're not even aware that they are praying it. Cause their whole body is praying it. And other things are going on in their mind. But this prayer is continuing. Now, some people would say, oh, this is very dangerous. This is like having a pagan mantra which you have to say om, Om, or whatever it might be. And I wanna say no. Actually, the content of this prayer is stunning and striking and biblical. And God has made us to reflect his image. Paul says, pray constantly. Maybe this is one way of praying constantly. You see, Paul had to face this in Corinth when things like speaking in tongues were all the rage in the Corinthian Church. And Paul is aware that it isn't only in Christianity that this sort of thing happens. So he has to say at the beginning of chapter 12, now listen, if somebody claims to be inspired by the Spirit, then they're never ever going to say, Jesus be cursed. And you can tell therefore that there are times when people are claiming inspiration and then coming out with anti or non Christian things. But there is a crossover between the different ideas of inspiration and what you find in the church. So I would say we have to be wise, we have to be discerning, but we mustn't be dualist. We mustn't say that there's nothing outside the church from which we can possibly learn. And often that has been driven by a sort of a sort of ultra Protestantism, a sort of a rejection of anything that smells of what those Roman Catholics do down the road. Incense or repeated prayers or whatever it may be. And actually in the Bible we can lighten up. You know, as people have said, according to the book of Revelation, you're gonna get plenty of incense in the new creation, so why shouldn't you have some now and so on. So I don't see a problem here. What I do then find is that some Christians in my part of the world, the northeast of England, have emphasized Celtic spirituality, which often involves candles and meditative objects and so on. But this can easily shade off into just a sor of cool, laid back, maybe even slightly tripped out way of being Christian. And I've had to say to people sometimes, hang on, when you look at serious Celtic spirituality, as in the life of Cuthbert and so on, what you find is Cuthbert standing in the sea up to his waist for half the night praying. That's part of Celtic spirituality. If you're going to do that as well as all the other, fair enough. But if you're not, then I would be a bit worried.
- [34:30]
Mike Bird
Yeah, I agree, Tom. Protestantism does have bit of an allergy and an aversion to anything that is monastic and it's got a suspicion of paganism, but can sometimes find paganism in all sorts of places. So some of the ancient prayers that you get from the medieval period, I don't think that's necessarily pagan or, or it's bad for you. There is, there is an ascetic strand in the Christian tradition and there is a long history of Christian meditation as well. You know, where I draw the line is when people start talking about, you know, finding the Goddess within.
- [35:10]
Tom Wright
Exactly.
- [35:12]
Mike Bird
That's probably a sign that something weird is going on. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, that's all we have time for today. Hope you've enjoyed this episode. In our next episode, we're going to cover Jesus and the Demon. Why are people being suddenly attracted to churches that are high church, that major on liturgy? And should Christians keep the Sabbath? If so, on what day? And if you like this show, remember, Premiere puts out some other great programs as well, such as Unbelievable and the CS Lewis podcast. We certainly look forward to seeing you on the next episode of Ask into your Write Anything. I'm Mike Burke.
- [35:54]
Tom Wright
And I'm Tom Wright from Oxford.
- [35:56]
Mike Bird
God bless you and we'll see you at the next episode of Ask NT Wright.
- [36:05]
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- [36:29]
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