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- [00:02]
A
Truly understanding your identity is a deeply personal story, and discovering who you are starts with knowing where you came from. This principle applies to us as individuals as well as collectively. Though it's popular to question the existence of a historic Adam and Eve, did they truly exist? Were they merely archetypes? The truth is, much of our uniqueness as humans only makes sense in the light of the Genesis count of creation. These questions and more are explored at length in a free download I believe you'll enjoy called Don't Dismiss Adam, Eve and the Genesis Story. It's more relevant today than ever. Discover even more about who you are when you go to premierinsight.org resources and download this important resource that's premierinsight.org resources. I encourage you to do it today. This episode is brought to you by Greenlight. Get this adults with financial literacy skills have 82% more wealth than those who don't. From swimming lessons to piano classes, us parents invest in so many things to enrich our kids lives. But are we investing in their future financial success? With Greenlight, you can teach your kids financial literacy skills like earning, saving and investing. And this investment costs less than that. After school treat start prioritizing their financial education and future today with a risk free trial at greenlight.com Spotify greenlight.com Spotify.
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B
Welcome to another episode of Ask nt Write Anything the program where we try to answer your questions and about Jesus, the Bible and the life of faith. And I'm here in London with Tom Wright. No, no, no more podcast recording for us, Tom. We are in person. No zoom, no ether, no virtual world. We're face to face, Tom in London.
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C
And I was trying to figure out when we last actually met face to face and I think it was actually something like five or six years ago. I know, extraordinary. Cause we talk online such a lot. But it's very good to be here and as you say to see the new studios taking and got a lot of intriguing questions lined up, which we do. Yeah. Quite challenging.
- [02:12]
B
Yeah. I think we must have seen each other like three British Prime Ministers ago at least. Which could be at least a week depending on what's happening in the news and in these wonderful posh new facilities that Premier has. It's fantastic. So many great things. I mean you can still smell the fresh paint. Yeah. But you're right, Tom, we've got great questions this week on is Christianity bad? What's the deal with the coming of the Son of man? And why isn't all Israel saved? So let's jump straight into it. Our first question comes from Kevin Ewart in Boston, Massachusetts. I was just there. I loved it. Clam chowder, Prudential Building. Loved it. This is a question about is Christianity bad? He says, this is a long question. I understand the critique of secularism today and its roots in the Enlightenment's focus on reason and its center. And ultimately it's a modern version version of epicureanism. We can clearly see the historical negative results of humanistic endeavors outside of God to save the world and attempt to create a utopia. My contention is that we don't often address how Christians bad actions and words resulted in a disbelief in God. Starting with the Enlightenment, which grew as a movement after the 30 years of war in Europe, which caused economic collapse and the destruction in multiple countries. The fighting between Catholic and Protestant countries over the last century prior to the Enlightenment seemed to lead to a disbelief in faith and that human reason should be the criteria for truth. We also have a lot of instances in Church history that were destructive. You know, the conquest and colonization, slavery for 400 plus years, the Spanish Inquisition, the Crusades, the Charlemagne's wars, the expansion of the Byzantine Empire under Justinian, which caused a lot of destruction in Italy, not to mention the current issues that are being brought to light with the Catholic Church. This is not to critique. Stating that God is not working through the Church or Christianity didn't do a lot of good in the world. But there's so much of Western Church history that was brutal, hypocritical and destructive, which many people are aware of and have a hard time believing that Christianity is good and will be good for the world. Tom, how do we address this struggle?
- [04:38]
C
Oh my goodness. Obviously we need quite a big picture of Church history and we need to acknowledge right up front all that's said here that of course the Church has done lots of. Well, when I say the Church, lots of people claiming to be acting on behalf of the Church have done lots of things which we rightly today would regard as wicked. And the list which Kevin Ewart lined up there isn't quite even. I mean, there are debates still about whether the colonial movement was an entirely bad thing or a possibly partly good thing and so on. There's been a lot of debate about that recently, but things like the Spanish Inquisition, the Crusades, if you've been around Christian circles for as long as I certainly, and maybe you as well have, one is used to this litany from unbelievers. Oh, you've got burning of witches and the Crusades and all this. And that people regularly, regularly trot this out. And in a sense, there's no reason to defend the Church's record when it's been so bad as that. I think what we need is something more nuanced about how we read the Church history, for instance, from the Middle ages through the 16th century into things like the Thirty Years War and so on, because a lot of what went on in the 16th century with the Reformation and the County Reformation, and then divisions within the reformed churches as well, Luther vs. Vingli and their followers, et cetera, these were all because the Church was on the cusp of something which was part Renaissance and part the humanistic movement and part new political liberation movements, et cetera, Northern Europe reacting against Rome and that sort of thing. But it was bound up with trying to rethink things which had been set in stone, or so it seemed for many years in the Middle Ages. So that the Reformers, for instance, are faced with the big doctrine of purgatory, which absolutely dominates the landscape in the 15th century in Europe. And the Reformers say, no, actually, purgatory is a myth. It doesn't happen. If you believe in Jesus, you go straight to heaven. And then that's bound up in turn with political struggles and power plays between different groups, different countries, different parts of countries. And it's almost as though the Church allowed itself to become so fixated on how people go to heaven that they didn't notice all the other imperatives which are there. For instance, in the Sermon on the Mount. You might have thought that people who said, you need to believe in Jesus would say, well, what is it about Jesus we need to believe in? And then, well, let's have a look at what he actually said, like, love your enemies and pray for your persecutors and so on. So why are we sharpening our swords to go and kill that lot who also say they follow Jesus? I mean, there's a lot of radical inconsistency. And I think we have to tell our story as realistically as we can in those terms at the same time. And this is something the historian Tom Holland has emphasized, of course, at the same time, Christianity has made different kinds of advances. It doesn't mean that everyone started to behave better, although in all sorts of ways that has been true as well, but rather that the conscience of the whole world has changed. I mean, in the 50s, 60s, 70s, most of the world was appalled at the apartheid regime in Southern Africa in a way which would not have been the case 500 years earlier or 1,000 years earlier. When different people enslaved other different people and nobody really thought there was anything problematic about that. And I mean, Tom Holland instances, cases like, or scenarios like in the ancient Greco Roman world, if people had enough children already, then another child was born. They would either give the child to the gypsies or leave it out for the wolves to take or whatever and think nothing of it, especially if it was a girl. And the fact that now we regard infanticide with horror and especially the kind of casual infanticide of parents just throwing out unwanted children, that represents an extraordinary advance. And there are many other things to which we could draw attention which were taken for granted in the 1st century of Roman world, which was a pretty nasty place in all sorts of ways, especially if you were a slave or a woman, the bottom of the social pile. And where now, even when people are not overtly Christian, there are sets of moral values which you can still debate, but which owe a lot of their origin of and energy to the larger Christian construct. And I think you and I have discussed this before, the ways in which even the rebellion against Christianity in the Enlightenment is itself predicated partly on Christian values.
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B
That's an important point that we know church history has the good, the bad and the ugly. John Dixon's got a great book on this for those who don't about bullies and saints in church history. Great book. There's the good, the bad and the ugly. But even when Christianity is being critiqued, it's usually being critiqued with Christian values. So people who think that they're an atheist, they're secular, they're simply products of, you know, a rationalist environment. They're actually riffing on Christian motifs and values in their critique of, you know, certain unchristians behavior by people inside or outside the church.
- [10:23]
C
So I think as well, something which, and again, I think we talked about this before, from the 18th century Enlightenment onwards, Western society, precisely when it's being overtly secular, is often trying to reproduce the results of Christian culture without giving allegiance to the God of the Bible. And the problem with that is it doesn't work. But the parade example in my head at the moment is multiculturalism, which is right there in the church in Antioch in the first century is one of, one of the first things that we know sociologically is that Jew and Gentile, male and female, slave and free, they're all together, they're brothers and sisters in the church. Oh my goodness, wouldn't that be nice? A new sort of human society that transcends ethnicity and all the other social and cultural distinctions that we make. And so when people sense we need to get together with people unlike ourselves, they now push it as a miscellaneous moral imperative. But without any vision of the God of Israel revealing himself in Jesus to be the God of the whole world and then working through what that might mean. So trying to get the results of the gospel without paying the price of allegiance to the gospel, that's a real problem. But it shows again, as part of the answer to Kevin, that actually Christianity has soaked into world society as a whole, not just Western society, in many different ways, with many different twists and turns. And of course, we're still in a very dangerous and muddled world. It's not as though, ah, we're on the high road now we can relax, we're nearly there. We're not. There's a lot still to be done and it's particularly because we're waking up to the danger of the Platonic vision which says the only thing that matters is how we get to heaven and we'll leave the rest to the politicians. We've done that for far too long. We need to have and recapture the vision which you have in Jesus and Paul of a new model of being human and how to do that together. Fortunately, Christianity has the resources for that. Just hasn't always been tapped into.
- [12:39]
B
That's well put, Tom. Well, hopefully, Kevin, that answers your question. Let's move on to our second question. This is from Josh McKay from Gearing, Nebraska. It's about the coming of the Son of Man. He says, I'm reading through Matthew for everyone. A great little series of books, really recommend them. In the section on Matthew 10, you note that the coming of the Son of Man might not refer to Jesus's second coming, but rather to his ascension. I have heard this point of view and would love.
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C
I've never heard this point.
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B
Oh, sorry, I've never. Let me say it again. I have never heard this point of view and would love. If you could expand on it, please. This view seems to make some sense of some passages, like Matthew 16:28, and make confusion of others, like the Olivet discourse in Matthew 24. In short, I'm having trouble deciding whether the Son of Man is coming or going in the book of Matthew and would love some insight. Tom. I think that's exactly the issue. Is the Son of Man coming or going? Is he going to heaven or coming from heaven?
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C
I have a nice story about that. I was lecturing in, when was it? 1988, I think, in Regent College, Vancouver, on Jesus in his historical context. And I went through some of this material and after one lecture, an angry young Baptist, I mean, he identified as a Baptist and I could tell he was angry. He came up and said, in my Bible it says he's coming. And you just said, he's going. I said, the trouble is, the Greek word is a cominon, which could mean either going or coming. And then he said what Josh has just said. He said, well, now I don't know whether I'm coming or going. And the answer is, go back to Daniel, Daniel Chapter 7, where it's actually very clear. I think it is. Not everyone agrees. There are scholars who take this view, that view, the other view. But as I look at Daniel chapter seven, which is the scenario in which the monsters come up out of the sea and then one like a son of man, one like a human figure, is exalted to sit beside the ancient of days. And this one, like a son of man, is given authority over the beasts, the nations of the world that have been warring and opposing, etc. And actually that's a nightmare version of Psalm 2, where the nations rage and roar and God says, actually I've set my king on my holy hill of Zion. Which I think it's the same picture, but as I say, the one is more a poem and the other is a nightmare apocalyptic scenario. But what's going on then? When Jesus invokes Daniel 7, you see, I have in mind, and I used to explain Daniel 7 to students like this when I was teaching a long time ago. The chapter before Daniel 7 is Daniel 6, where in Daniel 6 you have Daniel being thrown into the den of lions. And so you have these man eating monsters who normally would threaten and presumably kill and eat this poor defenseless human being. But in the morning the king comes and looks down into the den and sees that Daniel is there and the lions haven't touched him. And the king, mightily impressed, brings Daniel up out of the pit where the lions are and gives him authority next to him in the kingdom. So if you have that scenario in mind, then the scenario in Daniel 7 again becomes like a nightmare version of that, that here are the monsters attacking. And then in the morning the king comes, this is the ancient of days, takes his seat in Daniel 7. And one like a son of man, comes on the clouds and is exalted to sit beside the one on the throne and to be given authority over the nations of the world. And that is such a, to me, an obvious interpretation that then it makes so much sense of all these other passages, and certainly at the end of Matthew's gospel, in Matthew 28, when Jesus says, all authority in heaven and earth has been given to me, that is a specific verbal echo of the relevant words in Daniel 7, where authority over the world has been given to him. So the trouble with Matthew 24, which Josh says that becomes very confusing, is that most people have in the tradition read Matthew 24 as though it's about the second coming and the end of the world.
- [17:12]
B
Exactly.
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C
Whereas the way it's set up, and certainly in Mark, and certainly this is how Luke takes it, Matthew is a bit more tricky because there's other elements in there, but it's basically about the fall of Jerusalem and the destruction of the temple. And granted that the temple represents the coming together of heaven and earth for a first century Judean, then if the temple is destroyed, this is, as it were, the end of the world. This is like Jeremiah saying the world is going back to tohu wabohu, being without form and void because the temple, which is the heaven and earth thing, is being destroyed. So then I would say Matthew 24 fits perfectly well. And I don't know whether Josh has read as far ahead as Matthew 24 yet, but if he wanted to check across to my much longer book, Jesus and Victory of God, there's a whole chapter where I go through all these texts with a fine tooth comb and lay them all out.
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B
Yeah, but it really does require moving the mental furniture in your head.
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C
Yeah, it does.
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B
Because people think that the coming of the Son of Man has to be the second coming. And they tend to read into it, you know, the what? You know, what Paul says in 1 Thessalonians, or they've, you know, used to reading Matthew and his extended parables and to think, well, this isn't a coming to earth, it's exaltation, it's vindication. Its enthronement does change a lot, but I find it just makes so much more sense. It does. Particularly when Jesus is before Caiaphas and he says, are you the Son of the Blessed One? Jesus doesn't say, yes, I am. And in a few thousand years I will do a bit of cloud surfing. No relevance to what's going on here, but people reading a written account of us don't. He basically says, look, you can sentence me to death, but I am going to be vindicated and co enthroned with the God of Israel.
- [19:05]
C
Absolutely. And it's very interesting that in Matthew's version of that saying and Luke's version of that saying, There are two Greek expressions which mean from now on, or more or less right away. As you say, he's not saying in a thousand years or whatever, nor is he even saying caiaphas. One day, quite soon, you will look out of the window and see me floating around on a cloud. That's not the point. You know, the idea of coming on a cloud is. Is classic apocalyptic language, the cloud for God's presence, et cetera. And we have turned what is a rich metaphorical scenario into flat wooden prose. Now, you see, I got into trouble when I wrote Jesus and the Victory of God, because quite a lot of people in America, particularly read the chapter on the eschatology, on all this, the vindication of the Son of Man, and felt that I was taking away all their end times scenarios, which in a sense I was. But I was not denying the second coming. It's very important to say that you.
- [20:09]
B
Should get accused of that saying top right, doesn't believe in a second coming.
- [20:12]
C
I know, I know. Which is crazy because you just, you know, watch my lips. Of course, Jesus says, the angel says this same Jesus who you saw go into heaven will come in the same way that you saw him go, et cetera, and on and on and on. And Paul obviously, particularly. But so as a result, I think quite a lot of readers who'd got cross with me because of that chapter never read the chapter on Jesus and the cross, which was where I was thinking they would actually find. Find themselves at home. But these are. These are lost now. And that was 30 years ago. And I. I kind of got over. Got over it. Good.
- [20:48]
B
Well, I hope everyone's moving some mental furniture around their head to have a better grasp of Daniel 7 and its relevance to the Son of Man sayings in the Gospels. On this point, we're going to take a break, but when we come back, we're going to have a deep dive into the question, why isn't Israel saved? Back in a moment.
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D
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- [22:14]
B
Our third question for this week comes from Andrew Brown in the United Kingdom, who asked that. She says, I recently listened to a very helpful podcast based on Romans 9 through to 11 entitled if Jesus is the Messiah, why is Israel not saved by a chap called Steve Gregg? In this the distinction was made between the Israel of God, that is believing Jews, and ethnic Israelites. Is this distinction one Tom would agree with? It certainly has helped me to make sense of God's purpose, not least in God electing a remnant down through the years ultimate leading to Christ. Tom, this is a good question. If Jesus is Israel's Messiah, why has the majority of Israel, both ancient and in their modern expressions, failed to believe in him? And does that mean there's two types of Israel?
- [23:10]
C
Well, yeah. This is obviously, as you know well, a very complicated question and does require close attention not only to Romans chapters 9 through 11, particularly the beginning of 9 and the end of 11 actually, but also to certain passages in Galatians and in First Corinthians and elsewhere where the same topic is on the edge, and also other passages in Romans like Romans 2, 25, 29, which is very germane. I'm not sure we can cover all of that in a short space of answer to one question. It may be something we would need to discuss more length at some stage. But I do want to be quite clear that we would reject, and I'm sure you and I would agree on this, we would reject any interpretation which said that, well, Christianity may have started off as a Jewish movement, but then the Gentiles came in. So the Gentiles have replaced the Jews, and now Christianity is a Gentile phenomenon, not really Jewish. That's replacement theology, which is often deemed to be supersession. And I and many others have argued strongly against that or anything like it, as an interpretation of Paul, although many people still regard certainly my views, and perhaps yours, as implicitly supersessionist. But that's partly because at the moment there's a strong push in certain circles to say that actually believing in Jesus may be one religious option for those who like to take that up. But there might well be other religious options. So that, for instance, if somebody is a loyal Jew today and a practicing faithful Jew, then why would they need to convert to Christianity? And so then you have a scenario where Jews can stay as Jews, presumably keeping Torah in some way, shape or form, and then Gentiles become Christians. Which actually plays back into the idea that Christianity is just quite different from Judaism altogether. There's a scholar called Jacob Knesner who's now gone to his rest, but who said that Christianity and Judaism are different people talking about different things to different people. And that was a way of saying, we're just so different. We'll live over there, you live over there. We'll wave at each other from time to time, but we don't need really to engage. Now. St. Paul would have been horrified. The question that I would ask is, why is St. Paul in tears at the beginning of chapter nine of Romans? And why in particular at the beginning of chapter 10, is he urgent in prayer that his Judean contemporaries might believe the Gospel and so be saved? Because that middle section of Romans 9, 11, chapter 10, verses 1 to, well, 1:13 is all about people coming to faith and how faith in Jesus as Messiah, as Kyrios is Lord, and as being raised from the dead is the fulfillment of the new covenant promise in Deuteronomy 30. I mean, it's a dense and complicated argument, very dense. But Paul is tracking with the whole of the Pentateuch through this whole section. And here he's in Deuteronomy and is pointing ahead to the climax of chapter 11, which then picks up from. And so this is getting technical, but it's a great question which picks up from chapter nine, verse six, where Paul says, okay, we're faced with the fact that most of my fellow Judeans have not believed. But that isn't because God's word has failed. It's because there always were two different meanings of the word Israel. Not all who are of Israel are in fact Israel. He says that very clearly in chapter 9, verse 6B. So we've got this distinction already made, and we wait to see how he's going to unpack it, and it gradually becomes clear that, yes, there is a remnant. The thing, though, that when I read what Andrew Brown says here about God's purpose in electing a remnant ultimately leading to Christ, that's not actually the remnant that Paul is talking about in chapter 11 there he's talking about because Andrew's meaning the remnant, a narrower band of Judeans with Jesus as the final representative. Whereas in Romans 11, Paul is talking about a remnant which is people like himself who are Judeans who have accepted Jesus as Messiah. And he says if there's some, there will be more. So he says this is just the beginning. So it isn't a shrinking remnant, it's rather, yes, God has called actually many Judeans. All the early disciples were Judeans. And if he can do that, he can and will call more. Because here's the thing, thing which is so important for the reading of the whole thing. The situation in Rome is that the Judeans had been expelled from Rome by Claudius. We don't assume they all disappeared, but lots of them did. When Claudius died in AD 54, Nero became emperor, Claudius's edict was rescinded and the Judeans came back from all over, from Corinth, from Ephesus, wherever they got people. Yeah, yeah, yeah, and lots and lots and lots of people. And the Church, meanwhile in Rome numbered maybe, I don't know, 150, 200 people, probably in four, five or six different house churches in different parts of the city, keeping different cultural norms and being suspicious of one another. So the church is a tiny minority, whereas there are thousands and thousands of Judeans and there's several well established synagogues and so on. And Paul is faced with the possibility that Christians in Rome will look at the Judeans in their powerful position and think, well, God has cut them off, there's no hope for them. And Paul does not want them to draw that conclusion. He doesn't say exactly what God is going to do. He basically says, let's leave it up to God. If God wants to save more, then he will. But the means by which he does that will be through the Gospel. And one of the key verses there is chapter 11, verse 23. And they, that's Judeans. If they do not remain in unbelief, they can be grafted back in. There are so many who want to say, well, the Judeans are fine as they are, they don't need to come to Christian faith. But Paul says no, they can be grafted in, but they mustn't remain in unbelief. In other words, they need to come to what Paul would regard as true Christian faith. And then you get the all Israel will be saved in verse 26 of chapter 11, which I'm convinced with the other passage around goes very closely with chapter nine, verse six, where you have a distinction between the Israel, which is all the Jews at the time, and then this very specific all Israel which then I think, and I've argued and convinced some colleagues, not all, actually, by that Paul includes ethnic Gentiles as well. And the basis for that is, is partly the end of Galatians where he talks about the Israel of God, but Also partly Romans 2:25 29, where he talks about the Jew is the one inwardly, and circumcision is a matter of the heart in the spirit, and not in the letter. And he does that in order to say that if Judeans have failed and have not been the people God wanted them to be, then it's entirely okay for God to call others to be his people, even if they're not ethnically Judean. So it's a huge exegetical mare's nest. I and others and you, we've spent a long time thrashing it through. I've summarized it, I think there as best I can. You may want to add a nuance and so on.
- [31:29]
B
I do want to add stuff, Tom, but I want to add a lot. And I don't think we've got enough time today. I want to go through two things. Is there a sonder, a special way for Jews to be saved without Jesus? And how do we avoid the pitfalls of supersessionism? I mean, I think you've given us part of the answer there by saying they could be grafted and if they don't persist in unbelief and don't say that they were cut off so you could be included. So I think that rules out both supersession and son de veg. But we've got to do it because I think I disagree with you on Romans 11:26. That's right, people. Everyone says I'm like anti rights press secretary and I just believe everything. But on this one I think I might differ a little bit, even though I still get to the same place.
- [32:13]
C
Right.
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B
So, Tom, I say we park that one to the side and we do a bonus episode on the topic of supersessionism, the church and the Jews, which is pertinent because there's a lot of anti Semitism around and the last thing we need to be doing is adding.
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C
Fuel to it as well. Absolutely.
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B
Well, there we go.
- [32:32]
C
Let's do it.
- [32:34]
B
Well, that ends our program for today. Hope you've enjoyed it. And if you do like this kind of content, if you want want more of the same, if you want to listen to that bonus episode we are about to record, then please become a bonus subscriber to the Ask Interact Anything podcast where you'll get an extra episode every week where Tom and I do a deep dive into some of these topics we can only touch the surface of in our regular episodes. Otherwise, I want to thank you all for watching or for listening. I'm Mike Bird from Ridley College.
- [33:09]
C
And I'm Tom Wright from Oxford.
- [33:11]
B
And we'll see you for another episod episode of Ask nt Write Anything.