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Before we get into today's podcast, I want to offer you a powerful free resource. Many Christians have been taught that the goal of our faith is to simply leave earth and go up to heaven. But what if that's not the full story? In his remarkable book God's Homecoming, N.T. wright traces the sweeping biblical promise that God is not abandoning this world, he is renewing it. From Genesis to Revelation, Scripture tells the story not of us going up to God, but of God coming down to dwell with us. We're offering you a free digital excerpt so you can explore this hope filled vision for yourself. Download it today@premierinsight.org resources that's premierinsight.org resources and now, here's today's podcast.
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Foreign. Hello and welcome to another episode of Ask Anti Write Anything. I'm Mike Bird from Ridley College here
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with with Tom Wright from Wycliffe hall
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in Oxford, and we're here to answer your questions about Jesus, the Bible and the life of faith. And and Tom, the questions keep coming upon us. We've got good questions this week about does salvation Is that based on where you're born? Are there the luxury of where you live, heavenly rewards and Jesus and God's wrath? So this is some meaty stuff. Our first question is from John Crump from Dunedin in New Zealand. I've been to Dunedin. It is lovely. It is gorgeous. It is great down there. And he's got a good question. I really like this question. Okay, John asks, is salvation available to all humans equally throughout history and bilocation? Regarding those alive after Jesus death and resurrection, how do we reconcile the responsibilities of Christians through the Great Commission and Paul's words in Romans 10:14, 15 with his words in Romans 1:20 that God's divine nature is has been clearly seen by all and that all are without excuse? For example, do those who have never heard have a disadvantage at the hands of Christians who have failed to act? That does not seem very fair. More troubling perhaps, those alive before Jesus time would seem to face an even more challenging situation with respect to salvation. Does 1 Peter 3:18 20 help us to understand the implication of Jesus death and resurrection for those from earlier times? Or do we simply have to think that we who have been born after Jesus time have access to advantages not available to our less fortunate ancestors? Anticipating your perspective, I'm conscious that I frame this issue from an individual rather than kingdom perspective, but I think that the question works either way to some extent. Tom, if I understand John's question, he's wondering is it unfair that God would condemn people who never had any chance of hearing the gospel of Jesus. Obviously you've got the people who were born before Jesus. How could they hear about Jesus? But you know, he's in New Zealand. What about the fate of the. Of the Maori in New Zealand or indigenous Australians? Were they all condemned? And when the gospel is preached to them, was that their first chance to be saved or. And it can get even worse, you could say, well, they were already saved because they were under God's providential care and grace. Then when the gospel came, then they got the opportunity to reject it. So they were actually damned when the missionaries came, because now they could reject it now, because now they can reject it. I mean, this is a big question about the scope of salvation and the savableness of all people who, who have never heard from Christ. Tom, what is your answer to John?
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I fear that we have to track back to see where this question comes from because it comes out of the long Protestant tradition. From the 16th century onwards, where over against an assumed Christian Western Europe, the Protestants said, no, what matters is actual personal faith, personal faith and response to the Gospel. It isn't enough to be born in a Christian country, to have been baptized as a child. You've really gotta respond. And when you do that, then you get justified. And then having been justified, you will go to heaven. And the whole thing was predicated on this business of what exactly does it mean to have the right sort of faith and to have that right sort of future. And in the context of asking those questions very sharply and then doing evangelism on that basis, you need to believe now so that if you died tonight you will go to heaven. Then it does raise the question, what about all those who are still outside on the street who never even got invited in tonight, and what will happen to them, et cetera. And that's where passages like 1 Peter 3, which our questioner raises, are really quite important. It just so happens. Curious thing. First Peter 3 happened to be part of my morning readings this morning when I was getting up, and I hadn't realized it was coming up in this question. But one of the ways of interpreting that strange passage, 1 Peter 3:18 through 19, is to do with the people who, who have died before the time of Jesus. And that Jesus, after his death, goes and announces to the underworld and everything and everyone who's there that victory has been won. And that if you think of the Eastern Orthodox icons of the Resurrection, it's not just a picture of Jesus rising from the dead, it's a picture of Jesus bringing Adam and Eve up from the dead and bringing. Raising all the dead. Now and then, of course, that swings around and suddenly you get people being worried about universalism, because if they say, well, if everyone's saved, then what's the fuss about going and evangelizing and telling them? Whereas again, our correspondent quoted from Romans 10, 14, 15, which are, how will they believe in the one they haven't heard of? And how will they hear without a preacher? And how can people preach unless they're sent? In other words, we need apostles, they need to preach, people need to believe if that's all going to happen. Now, granted, Paul is there talking about the application of deuteronomy 30 and in the context of his larger argument about his fellow Judeans who haven't believed. But he does seem to be saying something which he takes to be a more general truth. But you see, there's all sorts of other passages I want to factor in. Yes, Romans 1 is important, where Paul says that basically all humans have an innate knowledge of God, although that innate knowledge is enough for them to be without excuse when they reject God because they should have known. And that raises all sorts of questions which people have wrestled with. But the passage doesn't stop there. It goes on into Romans 2, which is very clear that if you like, the judge of all the earth will do right, which is a really important principle, that all those who have sinned outside the law will perish outside the law. All those who've sinned under the law will be judged by the law. But then when Gentiles who don't have the law by nature do what the law requires, they show that they're a law to themselves. Is he talking about Christian Gentiles? Is he talking about. Some people have seen Stoic echoes here.
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Yes.
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I don't know what your view is of that. And it's. It's. I think it's one of the more difficult passages in Romans. But it's as though Paul has a much bigger view, I think, than the normal, rather narrow Protestant thing. Unless you have heard this message and said a prayer, then you are going to hell. End of conversation. And then what about those out on the street? Well, they're out on the street. And I see in Romans 2 that strong sense. And as in that quote from Genesis, shall not the judge of all the earth do right, that God is God, and it's our job to stand back and let God do his job and not tell God what he can and can't do? I'm also struck. I would want to factor in here what happens when Peter goes to the house of Cornelius, because Cornelius quite clearly has been praying and giving alms. God has heard him, God respects his almsgiving. And so God tells him to send messengers and bring Peter. And when Peter arrives, he says, I can see that God is no respecter of persons.
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Now, of course, or doesn't show favoritism.
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It doesn't show.
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Yet another translation.
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It's the same word, but yes, different translation. Now the universalist would want to say at that point, so, well, congratulations, Cornelius, you obviously have a great spirituality already. Don't let me get in the way of that. No, Peter tells him about Jesus and the Holy Spirit falls on them and they get baptized. So that really messes with our modern Western categories. Because is Cornelius already beloved by God? You bet he is. But something is going on here, which means that Cornelius is given the grace of full Christian faith and the gift of the Holy Spirit. Not that he was completely outside God's purview before, but something was going on. And I see that as a kind of a larger paradigm. And I suspect, again, it's because Western European and American Christianity since the 16th century and then the Puritan movement in the 17th, has been very focused on. On doing a kind of a spiritual timeline of where this person is and have they had this experience. And people used to draw charts of the different stages of Christian experience and whether you could cross over from belief to unbelief and back again and that sort of thing. And there is some usefulness in that if it keeps people focused on forgetting what lies behind and straining forward for what lies ahead, as Paul says in Philippians. But I think it can be very misleading if we then try and set up tram lines and say God has got to operate within these tram lines. I think God just says, let me tell you what the tram lines are. And if I want to bring in different tram lines and junctions into this whole mix, then I'm going to do that. So I would want to back off
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from
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an over precise analysis of who's in, who's out at that point.
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Yeah, well, we know through the Gospel that God does forgive people's sins and he brings us grace, mercy and salvation in Jesus Christ. So we know people who respond to Christ definitely receive the grace of salvation. Beyond that, we know that there is a mystery to God's mercy. Or as it says, I think Romans 9, God will have mercy on whom he has mercy. And when it comes to this issue, I don't think salvation is a lottery based on where you were born or which time zone or which point in history. So I like to think that there's God's divine providence orchestrating things for human good. There is God's common grace for all people, and then God's general revelation of himself through nature. I mean, human beings are ubiquitously religious, okay? We tend to believe in a supernatural world, that there is a creator God or some sort of spiritual sense to the reality around us. And I think what Paul says in Romans 1, maybe somewhat implicitly, although with a little bit of pessimism, but more optimistically in Acts 17, is that God has revealed himself through the created order. And if some people respond out of the revelation that they've received, incomplete or partial though it may be, then they would simply be offering the best response possible in that situation. Now, the tragedy is people often don't respond in the best way, and they create idols in their own image. And you end up with various sorts of pernicious responses to natural revelation that actually draws away from the most high God, the one true God. So I think natural revelation does make people savable, at least theoretically. Many end up in adultery. But I think I'm sure there are some people out there in history who have responded appropriately, and that is then completed. And Tom, this is a question I ask my students. When it comes to indigenous religions in Australia or Africa, do you see the indigenous religions simply as an example of paganism, as some sort of deviant magic and religion? Or is there something in there that can also be a preparation for the gospel? It's incomplete, might even be wrong, but there is a preparation of the gospel. And in some religions, I think you get a bit of both. You can get idolatry, but some things that are a preparation for the gospel.
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I remember old Bishop Stephen Neal, who had written History of Missions and had been around the world and back again, literally and metaphorically. Stephen said that in the history of Christian missions, the reports that come back from people who've been to places which had never heard any Western thought at all, let alone Christianity, where again and again there are some people, not everybody, but some people in each people group that they go to who say, do you know, we always thought there must be something like this. We weren't satisfied, satisfied with what our local shamans or whatever were telling us. We really had a sense that there was a true God and that he was beneficent and he did love us and so on. But now you have told us this story about Jesus and that makes sense of all those instincts we had before. Now, were they saved before? That's entirely God's job.
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Exactly.
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And I think the question partly reflects this very modern Western desire to nail things down, to say, are you saved? Because if not, you need to repent and believe. Now, now, I'm perfectly clear. There are some times when some evangelists really are called to buttonhole people and confront them with, hey, come on, you're just drifting in your life. It's time you shaped up and asked the big questions and saw where you are. But I think there are many other times when that's a deeply unhelpful approach to evangelism. And sometimes one has to sit and listen, sometimes one has to engage in dialogue and conversation. And God will close the net when God wants to close the net, which may well be through a zealous evangelist, or it may be through quite other means.
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Yeah, well, I think we've explored that topic enough. Hopefully that satisfied our questionnaire. Who was John? Let's move on to our next question. And this is about heavenly rewards. This is from Jeff Dixon in Derby in the uk. This is Derby, not Derby or Doug. Of course, I knew these pronunciation of English towns. I always get it wrong. And here's Jeff's question. He says, I'm intrigued by Tom's ideas on life after death. He often talks about the new heaven and the new earth and the historic misunderstandings that Christians have about where we go when we die. I am largely convinced by his arguments, but I still have some questions about this. For example, Matthew 5, 9, 12. Great is your reward in heaven. In light of passages like this, is it understandable that many people have adopted the idea that the afterlife takes place in heaven rather than the new earth? Perhaps Tom can shed a bit more light on passages like this for us. So, Tom, what shall our rewards in heaven be? I'm hoping for a big house with my own little sort of tap, with Coca Cola on tap. That's what I'm kind of hoping for.
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I remember when I. This is a good line. When I was on The Colbert Report 15 years ago and we were talking about surprise by hope. So we were talking about the afterlife. Stephen Colbert said that his idea of heaven was sipping a margarita and getting to ask Ronald Reagan some hard questions. This is what he was looking forward to. And we went from there. But I mean, it's very interesting that our correspondent, whose name I've already forgotten, Jeff, pulls out that bit about great is your reward in heaven from Matthew 5:12. Because just a few verses earlier, in verse 5, Jesus said, Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth. So it seems rather bad luck on the meek that the persecuted are going to go upstairs to heaven and get a reward up there, and the meek simply have to make do with the earth down here. Now, I think clearly both of those need to be contextualized within the larger vision which Jesus is offering, which just a chapter after the verse quoted has the Lord's Prayer saying, thy kingdom come on earth as in heaven. But here's the thing about rewards in heaven. And it's just the same as many other passages, including in Paul and in one Peter and so James as well, James, where you get a salvation kept in heaven for you. And I've said to you before, Mike, and we had this conversation in a previous episode, that it's like, if I have a friend coming to stay, and I say, you know, there's this bedroom and you can use that bathroom, and you'll find that the towels are kept in the cupboard, doesn't mean he's got to get into the cupboard in order to get dry after having a shower. It means that that's where they're kept safe, so that you can then take them out and dry yourself after the shower or the bath or whatever. So that the idea of things being kept in heaven is that they're kept in reserve. Heaven is God's place for storing up future purposes, which is why at the end of the Bible, in the book of Revelation chapter 21, the New Jerusalem comes down from heaven to earth. It is at present a heavenly reality in order that it may come to birth on earth. Paul reflects the same thing in Galatians 4, I think, 27, where he talks about Jerusalem, which is above, and he doesn't mean that's where we then have to go. It's this is the Jerusalem that God has in mind and is going to bring to birth on the earth in the new heavens and the new earth. Paul doesn't spell that out in that passage. Like many things in Galatians, he's talking about so many things at once that we would like to have lots more footnotes, please, Paul, in the next time around. So I think we just have to remind ourselves that the idea of a reward in heaven doesn't mean we go to heaven to get the reward. It means God has got it quite safe, like a child worried that the parent may not have bought them a Christmas present. And the answer is, it's safe in the cupboard, don't worry. And that doesn't mean on Christmas Day you've got to get into the cupboard to enjoy the new teddy bear or whatever it is means it's in the cupboard ready to be brought out when the time is right. That's how the logic of that works.
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Do you think there are degrees of re?
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Oh, Paul talks about the work that we've done will then resonate in fresh ways in the new world. This is First Corinthians 3 and so on. I don't think that either Jesus or Paul would think in terms of degrees of rewards you've done okay, but not as much as this person over here. Partly because I think Jesus whole teaching about humility and humble service implies that the greatest among you is the one who you wouldn't notice, the one who is just quietly padding along doing the meek and humble stuff. And they would be the last ones to want to have a special reward more than someone else. So our natural instincts to say how do I go for the higher rewards? Is itself something that we ought to reign in a bit, I think.
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Well, I think we've explored that topic pretty well on rewards in heaven. We're going to take a break and when we come back we're going to talk about Jesus and the wrath of God. What if Engaging Scripture could be both deeply informed and beautifully accessible? With the Filament Bible app, your print Bible becomes a rich interactive study experience. Simply scan the page number and Filament opens thousands of expertly crafted notes, devotional reflections, interactive maps and videos, plus audio scripture to help you explore the text with greater insight and context. It's a seamless way to go deeper into God's Word wherever you are. Learn more@filmamentbibles.com welcome back. Our next question is from a listener in Australia who asked this hi Tom, I found your criticism of the one dimensional view of the cross and salvation as Jesus meeting the demands of an angry God in our place that we can go to heaven. Very helpful. And it's helped me to make sense of so much of the Bible that I didn't earlier understand. But I find myself under emphasizing the ideas associated without substitutionary atonement and Jesus dying in our place. So much I'm not sure to make of passages in Scripture that do point to this. For example, Jesus spoke of the cup that he was to drink, which is repeatedly a symbol of God's wrath poured out in judgment. Does the cross have nothing to do with God's wrath and judgment? Or is it a judgment of sin in Jesus and not of Jesus himself, though I confess I'm not quite sure on how to make sense of that. Help and clarification would be appreciated. Tom, I think this is a question. Have we overcorrected? Like, we've got the idea, you know, it's not like God hates you so much he's going to get revenge on Jesus. You know, that kind of caricature of penal substitutionary atonement. But in that correction against that view, have we gone too far the other way and we're muting or playing down divine wrath, including divine wrath, against our own evil and sin? Tom, what's your response to our listener
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when you say have we gone too far? If it's a question of have I gone too far, that is quite possible because we are none of us perfect. And much of the work that I've done on this over the years, including a book nearly 10 years ago now, the day the revolution began, which is about the meaning of the cross or some aspects of the meaning of the cross, because to do a whole book on the meaning of the cross would be another 2,000 pages worth. But so this is some explorations. So it's possible that there is more nuancing and more correction needed. I want to say very clearly, just in case anyone is still misled on this, because I do get feedback sometimes, sometimes, that there is a New Testament doctrine of penal substitution. For me, the clearest passage is actually Romans 8:1:4, where Paul says, there is no condemnation for those who are in Messiah Jesus, because the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus has set you free from the law of sin and death, because God has done what the law could not do, sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh, and has a sin offering. He condemned sin in the flesh in order that the just requirement of the law might be fulfilled in us, et cetera. Now, that is clearly penal. It is a condemnation. It is clearly substitutionary in that the condemnation which has happened means that there is now no condemnation for those who are in Messiah Jesus. It's clearly penal and clearly substitutionary, but it doesn't belong within the narrative that Western Christianity has characteristically told, which is about an angry God wanting to punish somebody and fastening upon his own innocent son. So that somehow makes it all right. Against that doctrine as caricatured, many people have reacted in horror and said, if God's like that, he's just a monster and I don't want anything to do with him. And of course, that is made all the worse by the phenomenon of, say, child abuse, where if a child hears about a father figure saying, I love you so much that I'm getting my big strap to beat you with or whatever, this is a horrible memory and people want to shun it. So we are right in the middle of some very sensitive and difficult stuff. What I do want to say is that the larger picture within which that biblical doctrine of substitution occurs is a picture of victory, the victory won on the cross. That's why my big book on Jesus is called Jesus and the Victory of God. Part of our problem here is that ever since a book by a Swedish scholar called Gustav Aulane, he was actually a Swedish bishop, what, 60 years, 70 years ago, more, if anything, called Christus Victor, people have thought you've got to choose between either having the cross as a victory or having the cross as a substitution. I think. I don't know for sure, but I think that Aulein, as a Swedish bishop, was cross with some elements of the Swedish church that was so fixated on penal substitution that that was all that they could think about. And they got it in that distorted version. Yeah. So he went back to the early fathers and said, for them, the cross is about God defeating the principalities and powers and defeating Satan and robbing the spoiler of his spoil and all that stuff. Therefore, you don't need this penal substitution. And I want to say, say, to summarize it simply for Paul, and I think in John's gospel particularly, you have victory through substitution. In John 12, Jesus says, as he thinks with horror towards the cross, now is the victory of darkness. Now is the ruler of this world going to be cast out. Now is the judgment of this world, and if I am lifted up from the earth, I will draw all people to myself. Talking about gentile inclusion there. But then when we read on in the story, we see that John has woven into the story of the cross elements of substitution. Whether it's Peter or whoever it is, people who themselves would have deserved something which Jesus has taken in their place. And ultimately Barabbas, Jesus dies and Barabbas goes free. That's a moment of sudden substitution. And I would see that in the Synoptic gospels as well. Victory, kingdom through substitution. And then in order to understand that, you have to go back really behind the Middle Ages picture of this big angry God and so on, and you have to get a much more Old Testament and Judean view of God the Creator and God's purposes for creation and the Israel shape of those purposes. Because the Last Supper. And when Jesus is talking about the cup. What we're talking about is the whole history of Israel as it were, converging on this one point, the larger story of the people of God, which was always going to be the story about how the one God would rescue the world from its plight. This is all now devolving onto Jesus. And Jesus has got to go solo into the place where the darkness of the world is being concentrated. Now, as I say that, I'm aware I don't have really good categories to go much further than what I've just said, and I'm not sure that anyone does. The Bible gives us several different converging narrative lines, and they land up at the foot of the cross with this sense of horror and darkness, simultaneous with this sense of. Of victory and of the outpoured love of God. And one of the ways you can see that is the historically extraordinary phenomenon that until that event, the cross already carried symbolic meaning, including religious symbolic meaning. It meant the gods of Rome and Caesar are all powerful, and if you get in their way, this is what they'll do to you. And. And within a generation, the cross has come to symbolize the outpoured and all sufficient love of the God who is the Creator. That is truly extraordinary. And it's almost as though you can't understand it over there and then live it over here. And the understanding and the living and the partaking, including particularly coming with outstretched hands to receive the bread and the wine at the Last Supper, which are about the death and resurrection of Jesus. This has to happen in such a way that it creates a new world of understanding within which these separate categories actually settle down and make sense. And I don't think that's a way of saying, oh, we'll never understand it. It's all just a mystery, because we do understand quite a lot of it and it's explained in the New Testament. But the New Testament itself leads us to that moment of darkness and mystery and says, you just gotta come here and be humble and still before it and wait to see how that then falls out in terms of God's claim on your own life, as part of which, please God, you will receive fresh understanding which would have something of the shape of victory through substitution. I think that's probably as good as I can do it in a short way of compass.
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That's a good way of bringing together the threads of love, wrong, wrath, victory altogether to understand the cross. That is all the time we have for today. We hope our listeners have enjoyed that. In our next program, we're going to talk about building for the kingdom. Was the incarnation necessary? And why the delay in God's salvation? And as you're waiting for that episode, don't forget in the Premiere Podcast network, there's other great shows too, like Unbelievable and C.S. lewis. And if you like, you can watch these on YouTube as well. So it's goodbye from me, Mike Bird,
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and goodbye from me, Tom Wright.
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And we look forward to seeing you on the next episode of Ask NT Wright Anything.
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