← Ask NT Wright Anything
Ask NT Wright Anything
Jesus and the powers, Why does it take the Anglicans so long to choose an Archbishop? What are healthy spiritual practices?
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- [00:03]
Unknown Host
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- [01:44]
Mike Bird
Hello and welcome to the Ask Anti Write Anything Podcast, the show where we explore Jesus, the Bible and the life of of faith. I'm Mike Bird from Ridley College in Melbourne, Australia. And of course I'm joined with with.
- [01:59]
Tom Wright
Tom Wright from Oxford in England.
- [02:01]
Mike Bird
Hello Tom, it's good to see you again once more. We've got some great scintillating questions to get into, but I want to begin with one of my own. I mean, I'm not allowed to submit questions, so I've got to ask them while we're together. The uk, the Church of England is getting ready to find to elect a new Archbishop of Canterbury. What do you think are the qualities that make a good Archbishop of Canterbury? You know, experience in the oil industry by any chance? Merchant banker. I mean, is there anything that you have to have on your CV in order to be an Archbishop of Canterbury?
- [02:44]
Tom Wright
Well, unfortunately, last time I looked, the angel Gabriel had ruled himself out of this particular one. But there are so many things that different people and of course we've all been watching events in Rome as they've just chosen a new Pope quite recently. And as an Anglican, I'm a bit jealous that you can say, okay, old one's gone, new one in within a month, done, that's it. And everyone just has to sit down, shut up and take their medicine. If they don't like him, then that's too bad. This is the one we've got now. We are quite different in the Anglican Communion. And of course, the Archbishop of Canterbury has to be a uniting figure for the whole Anglican Communion, which is a worldwide communion, not simply for the Church of England. People often say it's become a cliche that the average Anglican today is black and does not speak English as her mother tongue. And there are far more Anglicans in church on a Sunday in Nigeria alone than in the whole of America and England put together. So we need to recognize this is not just can the Church of England get its act together. At the same time, there is a lot of stuff going on in the Church of England where the Archbishop has to be and is a public figure. What he or she says is going to be quoted in the press, it's going to be newsworthy, and that's demanding all sorts of qualities. I think Rowan Williams, when he was stepping down, said something like that. To be archbishop, you have to have the patience of a saint in the hide of a rhinoceros or something like that. And I have seen successive archbishops and I've been fortunate to know particularly Rowan quite well. But also I know Justin a bit. He succeeded me in Durham, and I knew their predecessors, George Carey, Robert Runcy. I even knew Archbishop Geoffrey Fisher and Donald Coggan a little bit. And so I've watched it go on at a distance. And like many jobs, there's only so much that one human being can do. And things have got much worse in the last generation. When Donald Coggan was archbishop, it was said that it was possible for him and his wife to sit at the breakfast table, opening the morning mail and discussing it before then moving on morning prayer to have a chat with the secretary about what was gonna be done. That's absolutely impossible. Now there's a mailbag and of course, email is ferocious. So there are messages belting into Lambeth palace from all over the world. And there are Twitter messages and goodness knows what. And I think one of the first things would be to have somebody who knew how to delegate to wise pas, assistants, study assistants, et cetera, so that he or she was not going to be burdened with having to respond to little thing that comes in. And that is a real problem. Time was when not that many people thought they could grab the ear of the Archbishop. And now all the world and his uncle or aunt think that if they send a one line text or email message, then they should get a response. So the sheer management is hugely important. I mean, it's one of many reasons why I'm hugely glad that they never ever dreamt of approaching me for that job. Because I'm not a manager in terms of the classic sort of models. I'm much more of a leader than a manager. But you've got to be a manager, but you've also got to be a leader. Now, that combination itself is difficult to handle. But then of course, the basic structure is that we want this person to be a person of God. We want somebody who is a person of deep prayer, reflection, who knows the scriptures up and down and in and out. Somebody who understands how the whole Christian tradition works, not least in order to maintain good friendships with, say, the Roman Catholic Church, the Greek and Russian Orthodox Churches as well, well as the free churches. It's gotta be somebody who can easily cross those boundaries. So somebody with a gift for friendship. And friendship, of course, takes time and time is then taken from something else. So that sense of time management and of every day and every week and every month coming before God and praying for wisdom in terms of allocation of time, should this task have two minutes or two hours, Should I go on a three day retreat or should I spend those three days writing a chapter in an important book? All those decisions are going to be hugely important all the time. So somebody with the patience and courage to be able to do that and to face down the people who are shouting from the margins or even full in his or her face saying, you shouldn't be doing this, you should resign at once, et cetera, you know, we've all had that sort of thing, but the Archbishop is going to have that in spades. So whoever it is is going to need our prayers and I would say our support. Whether or not we agree. The support comes in the prayer and in the little messages here and there saying, you're doing a great job, keep it up, or I really liked your sermon last week, or whatever. Those things are really important. So we want somebody who is a man or woman of God, somebody who knows the tradition and particularly the scripture at the heart of the tradition, somebody who understands the larger ecumenical situation, somebody who easily reaches out to people in cultures very different from our own and can say wise words, the good one liner. Somebody who can do a radio interview in brief and round it off with the phrase which sticks in people's minds. The late great Jonathan sacks, who was our chief rabbi, had that ability absolutely. And we need and covet that for the church of England and for the Anglican communion. So please God, give us the right person. That's my prayer. There you are.
- [08:24]
Mike Bird
Can I do a follow up about the election? Here's my proposal. What if we made the archbishop of York as the primate for the church of England and the archbishop of Canterbury became like an Anglican pope and you gathered all the Anglican bishops of the world together for a conference to elect a new archbishop. So it was not done as a crown appointment except for the bishop of York, but the archbishop of canterbury would be elected by the world Anglican communion because I like this option, because I think that's the only way I'm ever going to get made the archbishop of cambria.
- [09:04]
Tom Wright
Well, good luck to you with that. I wouldn't wish it on my worst enemy. Not that I have any worst enemies really now, but that might technically be possible. The way that Canterbury and York have worked and do work is so involved with the law of the land and with the lie of the land, et cetera, that the thought of suddenly increasing York's role to cover the whole of England, for instance, the sheer administration of that would take months and months to organ. I do think that bringing bishops together from around the world might be a very good idea. At the same time, the way that we've done it for some while now has been through the crown nominations commission, which includes several laypeople. And if there was a process which then excluded laypeople, that would be looked at very, very badly. People would say, you know, you're just clericalizing the whole thing. It's becoming the old boys club or the old girls club. So whatever you do, there are people who aren't going to like. Personally, I would much rather slice through all that and have a simple process. But because we were all sort of process mad in the 90s and noughties and we had to have more committees and more this and more that, we're now all top heavy with that. And sometimes that's not the best way of getting the message. You know, I saw this when I was a diocesan bishop that you have a parish appointment to fulfill. If you know your clergy and if you know that parish, you may well have an instinct as soon as you start to pray about it who the right person would be. But no, you've gotta have a great process and lots of people gotta be involved. And as often as not, you end up with the person that you knew from day one was the right person. So I believe in democracy. I believe in participation. But I also believe that sometimes we have to slice through that and say, no, here is a prophetic word. We're going with this person. Let's live with it and pray for them and make it work. So you can tell why I'm no longer in office. These views are very heretical and wouldn't.
- [11:07]
Mike Bird
Be, and why I never will be, and why I never will will be. But anyway. Okay, well, my question has been answered. Tom, let's answer some of the questions of our listeners. Our first question is about spiritual anxiety. It's a question from Michael Pearson, and he says this. Hi, Tom. My question is surrounding spiritual practices and the kind of evangelical angst I find pursuing them. I have tried the Book of Common Prayer. I have tried some of the contemplative practices of the historical church. I have tried meditation, like Lictio Divina, but there's always a little angry Puritan on my shoulder, whispering in my ear, but what if this is heretical? What if this is vain repetition? It has led to a rather static state in my spiritual journey. I deeply yearn to seek after God, but I'm also terrified of upsetting him by pursuing practices that are outside the scope of his will. How can I discern what are healthy spiritual practices? How do I fight this thing? I've dubbed the evangelical angst. As an aside, I want to quickly express how meaningful your works have been for me. I was born in England and moved to the USA when I was eight, but my family were never Christians. Listening to your talk and reading your books, including the ones too heavy in my backpack, is like having a long lost grandfather teach me theology. If that's not too weird of analogy. Thank you. And I pray for your continued fruitfulness for your ministry. Oh, what a wonderful question from Michael. But Tom, what do you have to say about his anxiety of wanting to find ways of keeping his spirituality fresh but worried that it may be leading him astray?
- [12:50]
Tom Wright
Yeah, thank you, Michael, for your kind words. Since I do have grandchildren now, I kind of think I understand what maybe you're meaning by having me as a tame grandfather in your backpack. And by the way, as for the little Puritan who is sitting on your shoulder nagging you, I recommend you take a walk to Geneva, bring him with you and then introduce him to some friends there. And then Quietly leave him to get on with his stuff in Geneva while you go about the rest of your business. Because you don't need him. Because actually, we all need to lighten up. And of course, especially if you're from certain kinds of tradition, it's all too easy to think, oh dear, am I doing this right? And as long as we do that, that itself, that react itself is a wrong reaction, because that means we're thinking about me and whether I'm getting it right, rather than thinking about God and what he's done for me in Jesus. Now, my short response to that would be the Psalms. Again and again and again. The psalms. Of course, the Psalms are the backbone of Christian worship, have been for 2000 years. In the Anglican Church. At the Old Book of Common Prayer, we have roughly five psalms a day. So you get through the whole lot in a month. And as long as you're praying and singing the Psalms, there's plenty of room to express your angst about all sorts of things. Your own suffering, the suffering of the world, suffering of people you know and love. They come up in the Psalms again and again. But it's not the angst of saying, oh dear, ought I to be praying in this way? The point is, God is God. He loves you. Just pour it out in front of him and as I say, remind that little puritan that he lives in a little cave in Geneva somewhere and you don't need him anymore. But of course, there is such a thing as vain repetition. Of course, any pattern of prayer air can go dry on you, whether it's, I have been in charismatic Pentecostal churches, which you'd have thought were all about liberation and the Spirit, where in fact, as you look around and listen to the songs that are being sung, this is exactly the same songs we sang last week here and the week before and the week before that. And people are just going through the motions and they're doing the actions. And it's really like a Sunday school class that have learned the actions, and if somebody doesn't do them, then people look at them. Why aren't you raising your hands in the air? Aren't you filled with the Spirit? And that can be just as legalistic as a Catholic crossing themselves or an Orthodox crossing themselves the other way around, whatever. And so I think most of us are on some kind of a journey through different expressions of prayer. Some people find a pattern of prayer early on, and that is fine for them throughout their lives. Other people will need, perhaps, through a wise spiritual director, to say at certain Points I think I need refreshing. Please will you advise me as to how I go from where I am at the moment to where. Where God may be leading me? And who knows what a wise spiritual director would say at that point. There are many, many varieties, but I would say the Psalms are absolutely all important. And then likewise the regular prayerful reading of the Gospels. And I assume from the way that Michael has said this that he knows these practices. But the one that I and many have found helpful is this practice of taking a story from the Gospels in which Jesus is meeting somebody, has a wise word for somebody, heals somebody, whatever, and prayerfully go into that story until you are imagining it and imagining yourself as a character in that story, and then let Jesus turn and speak to you from within that story and see what he says. I think again and again we need that word of Jesus to one of the churches in the book of Revelation about losing our first love. It's very easy for that to happen. We carry on doing the same things and at a certain point we have a sense, am I just doing this or am I really being refreshed day by day with the love of God In Messiah Jesus, I have to preach next week, as it happens, on Romans 8, 31, 39, one of the most amazing passages in the Bible. But it's all about the love of God in Messiah Jesus for each one of us. And it's easy to hear those words and think, yeah, what a great concept. And hang on, love isn't a concept. It's something which reaches out and hugs you and. And as long as from time to time, at least we have that sense of God in Christ by the Spirit reaching out and hugging us, then how we respond is how we respond. But it's the response to the reality rather than us generating a new reality by whatever practices of prayer they may be, whether it's the full on high mass with all the trimmings and all the bells and smells, or whether it's the Quaker meeting where you sit silently waiting for the word to occur to somebody or anything in between. They can all be a work of human fashioning if you let them be, but they can all be ways in which we are open to God and to God's Spirit. And so there is no easy answer except that we are often trapped into this sense of guilt. And CS Lewis has some words about that where he talks about humility and he says, here's somebody who's on his knees praying for humility. And then he realizes that he's seeing himself as a very humble worm like creature before God. And then he thinks, oh my goodness, I'm actually being humble. And then he is proud of his own humility. And Lewis says at that point, give up and go to bed. In other words, slice through that. It's possible to get so into that downward spiral of anxiety that you fail to see the reality. If in doubt, look back at Jesus. If in doubt, pray the Psalms and ask a spiritual director for specific help for where you have got to and where you might be going on from there.
- [18:46]
Mike Bird
Oh great, Tom, that's good. I'll always have that little image of you throwing a little puritan figurine into Lake Geneva or something like that, telling him to go for a swimming. But that's okay. Well, this is a good point for us to take a break and when we get back, we're going to look at the corrupted powers of an evil age.
- [19:11]
Tom Wright
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Tom Wright
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Mike Bird
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Tom Wright
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- [20:33]
Mike Bird
Hey, welcome back, Tom. We've got some really good questions still to come. One from Connie McCulloch who's asking a question about the powers and the corrupted powers. And and Connie is obviously wrestling with what's the difference between simply something good gone bad and what is the nature of these evil powers. She says, I am beginning to see the kingdom and our place in it much differently. But I have a question or maybe a statement in order to understand the powers. She asks, is this correct? The powers, they are structures or forces that have been corrupted by Satan and men's disobedience. These corrupted forces may include worship of mammon, its sexual license, its idolatry and its addictions. Powers were created initially good in order to structure and organize society, to work as forces, but within boundaries they are meant to be servant hearted. God created structures like sex within marriage, family structures with good mothers and fathers with authority to train up children, or delegated authorities and structures within organizations or governments, government that serve and protect it. And then there's other institutions with power and authority which are economic forces and ethnic and cultural identities. There's medical things, health and knowledge and service. They were good, but became corrupt through Satan and sin. Corrupted powers that include sex which is outside of normal bounds, either as a license outside of marriage or rape or abusive parents, tyranny or anarchy, abusive police, unjust justice systems, wealthy people who enslave addictions, hospitals who serve the bottom line, not the patients, corporations who are cruel or give poor wages. And I think Connie's question is in our own words, are these examples of a good structure or human vocation gone wrong? So I guess Connie's question, as I'm reading your question, Connie, is how do these powers relate to the visible structures around us? And are the powers just the corruption of good things like the institution of marriage, government and those sorts of things? Tom, what's your answer to Connie?
- [22:48]
Tom Wright
It's a great question and Connie has obviously thought in some detail about the way things go wrong and the way things go wrong. I think the heart of her question is that the way things go wrong is that in the Latin tag corruptio optimi pessima, that the corruption of the best thing is the worst thing. And the the thing to get clear, which not a lot of people grasp straight off, is that the powers are created good. Colossians 1, 15 and 16. In Christ, through Christ and for Christ, all things were created in heaven and on earth. All principalities and authorities and rules. They were all created in and through and for Jesus, our Messiah, the Lord. In other words, God wants his world to be wisely ordered and structured. That's God's plan from the beginning. And as with every other aspect of God's original plan, when things go wrong, God doesn't say, well, we'll scrap the plan and just have crazy anarchy or have something totally different. Instead, God says, here's how we will redeem that original plan. And so I want to put Connie's huge many sided question onto that large but essentially simple map that God calls human beings to bring wise order to his creation. That's what Genesis 1 and 2 are about, is about the human vocation. When humans worship and serve the creature rather than the creator, as Paul summarizes it in Romans 1. What goes on then is that humans hand their God given, delegated authority over to some aspect of the created order, whether it's all the long list that Connie said, whether it's money or sexual power or, or some sort of structures or whatever. And when they become an end in themselves, then they cease to be serving God's purpose and kind of suck energy into themselves. Money being an obvious example that I saw a statistic the other day. I can't now remember exactly what it was. Something like 80% of businesses in the world are about money chasing money, rather than money being used to make things, to help things, to build things which will serve the wider community. And that's a real problem. And it's at the heart of when we talk about economic forces, that these forces, once they're loosed from the vocation to serve God's purposes in the world, then they're just serving greed and dehumanizing practices. Same with all the other things that she rightly mentions. So that I would say we have to observe all the time that sequence. You see it in Romans 13, Paul says, the powers that be are ordained by God. That doesn't mean that everything Caesar does is good. It means that God wants his world to be ordered because order is always better than chaos, even bad order. We see it when Jesus says to Pontius Pilate that you couldn't have authority over me if it wasn't given you from above. It's in John 19 extraordinary that the son of God says that to Caesar's representative, that Jesus is acknowledging that the wise order is better than chaos. And then the corollary of that is, therefore the one who handed me over to you has the greater sin. In other words, when we say yes, God wants his world to be structured, we also must say, and God will hold that to account. And it's part of the vocation of the church, as we see in John 16, to be the people who speak the truth to power and who say to the people who are only concerned about making more money and not concerned about what they're supposed to be doing with their money to make that point, that this is there to serve the needs of the community and not to accumulate itself and get into this upward spiral of compound interest and then to get into all the crazy stuff about subprime mortgages and all the rest, which then brings the whole thing crashing down and mutatis mutandis. The same is true, obviously, in the realm of marriage and sex, obviously in one of the interesting ones she mentioned, Connie mentioned healthcare and so on, where we're serving the needs of the bureaucrats who run the hospital rather than than the patients themselves. I remember in one big educational institution that I had something to do with somebody taking a junior member of faculty to one side and saying, you need to know that the administration of this university exists to serve the administration of this university, not to serve the teachers or the pupils within the university. Oh, dear, that's a pretty damning thing to say. But in other words, it's always got to be possible for people to speak the truth to power, to recall the human beings who are operating systems to the original vocation. And many, many people will find that as a sigh of relief, many others will see their power challenged. And then we're into the power games, which, as Paul says in Ephesians 6, this is something which has to be addressed with prayer and spiritual warfare. So when we talk about forces, it's very interesting that modern world talks about economic forces, social forces, et cetera. We mythologize. You know, the prime minister wants to do this, but of course, the economic forces won't let him or her. Well, excuse me, what are these forces? Well, they're kind of insidious pressures. Can we put names on them? Well, not always, no, because it's a sort of a feeling in the back of the stock exchange, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And the answer is, these things have got to be named, brought out into the open, thought through. And then, as I say, the church has the responsibility of saying the prophetic word, that God is holding this system to account. And God wants wise order and not chaos. Now, in a sense, what I've done is to walk around Connie's question and look at it from different angles, but I hope that's helpful. But, Mike, you and I have written about this. Do you have anything to add here?
- [28:57]
Mike Bird
Yeah, our book, Jesus and the Powers, where we investigate how structures of human existence, government, religion, economics, other organizations are part of God's desire for the world to be rightly ordered. But they can be corrupted. And all things owe obedience to God. And we're told, I think through the message of the apostles, that one day all of the powers will either be pacified or reconciled. So that economic institutions are doing good economics, the justice system is working. So everything like that would be what now alter that perfection is only going to be in the new creation. But we're called to provide highlights as to use your language, you know, billboards or signposts for that, for what that's going to look like.
- [29:50]
Tom Wright
Yeah, yeah. The phrase I've used, as you know, which I use a lot in my lectures on Ephesians, is that the church is to be the small working model of new creation. In other words, of course, the church is just as susceptible to, to making mistakes on these lines as anybody else. And then it's pretty terrifying if the church gets power wrong and gets its structures wrong. So lots to learn there.
- [30:15]
Mike Bird
Well, that's all we have time for today. But remember, you can submit your own question to askntierright.com and hopefully it will get on the show. And don't forget as well, we're releasing some bonus episodes for subscribers to the show. And there you can listen to Tom's series going through the Book of Acts. And we're going to eventually launch another series on Justification by Faith. But that's it from me, Mike Bird. And as always, it's farewell from Tom Race in Oxford. And we look forward to seeing you on another episode of Ask nt Write Anything. Sam.