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Ask NT Wright Anything
Kingdom of Heaven vs. Secular Humanism; How to brush up on Greek, and should we pray to the Holy Spirit?
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A
I just wanted to quickly remind you that Premier Insight has been offered a $5,000 matching grant that will double your gift today to jump start giving to help close a $94,000 funding gap before the end of our financial year on June 30th. This show depends fully on the generosity of listeners like you to bring you this podcast and so many other resources to strengthen your faith. So I'm asking you to give your very best gift right now to help close this gap, knowing your gift will be doubled. You can Give now@PremierInsight.org Unbelievable. That's PremierInsight.org Unbelievible. Thank you. Hello and welcome to the Ask NT Write Anything Podcast, the program where we try to answer your questions about Jesus, the Bible, and the life of faith. I'm Mike Bird from Melbourne, Australia, joined
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B
by and I'm Tom Wright from Wycliffe hall in Oxford.
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A
Tom, have you ever misdressed yourself, like got dressed in the dark and realized you'd made an absolute hash of it?
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B
From time to time that has happened, yes. Trying not to wake up my beloved wife when I have to get up early, sometimes mistakes get made. Even long, long, long time ago when I was at theological college and was worried about getting to the early morning service, sometimes I would actually get up in my sleep and be half dressed and then look at the clock and realize it was only 2:30. What am I doing? And then would look at myself in the mirror and see I just grabbed any clothes in my sleep. Fortunately, that hasn't happened more recently. But yeah, you just never know.
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A
Yeah, I grabbed a pair of shoes in the dark this morning and I got a left foot and a right foot, but different shoes. It was a little bit strange. Thankfully, that was only my jogging shoes. So yes, people may have seen me jogging with two different sets of shoes. Well, glad to know I'm not alone. And we're not alone, Tom, because we've got some great listeners who keep sending us terrific questions. Today we've got questions about the Kingdom of Heaven versus secular humanism, how to brush up on your Greek and should we pray to the Holy Spirit? First up, we have a question from Caleb Shockley in the beautiful city of Edinburgh. I love Edinburgh. And he's got a question about the Kingdom of God and humanism. And this is what he asks. Hello, Tom. Honestly, I think this is incredible that I can fill out a form to you and ask you a question even though you may not answer it. Alas, the question. I feel you are perhaps the biggest champion of encouraging Christians to live in the kingdom of heaven now that as Christians we should be seeking to bring the kingdom of heaven to earth. I am a big fan of this, but my question is how does this differ from secular humanism? Theologically they couldn't be more different, but in practice they look almost the same. How would you differentiate the practice of living in the kingdom now and the practice to establish a utopian society that through human progress? Thank you so much for all that you do. Now Tom, I, I want to dig down a little bit deeper on this because I read a fascinating short essay on social media and I, I'll just bring it up in my, in my own feed because it was about how you can use AI to enhance human process and the article was by Ivan Zhao and, and it's on, it's called On Universe Life and AI. And let me just, let me, let me read you a quote from this article and you tell me, does this sound sort of quasi theological? He says each life and human is confined with their own reach and age. But life has this magic to summon more life and discover tricks and trades among the alliance of lives to arrange the energy of the universe according to their value together. Those human created tools and tricks like AI are like, I love this phrase, non meatball forms of life. With varying degrees of vitality, they join the alliance of life with the rest of meatball life to spread life's value in this cold universe. Now I found that very weird to read, but as I read that it, that it's a secular humanist perspective, but it's got quasi religious concepts in there and the articles about how you can use AI to subdue the earth and human progress. But I think this, you know, dovetails very nicely with Caleb's question because it sounds like secular humanism sometimes has similar goals to Christianity in terms of making human flourishing better, but it's tried to replace Christian worldview and concepts with its own language of magic and the alliance of life and non meatball life, which I found absolutely hilarious. Rather than say spiritual life, it says non meatball life. This is crazy. Tom, is there any parity between the king working for the kingdom of heaven and secular humanism? And you know, what are the differences? And so what are the similarities? What are the differences?
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B
Yeah, a couple of preliminary things apart from the fact that I've never heard the word meatball used in that kind of metaphorical sense. But I think I would have parked that for the moment or even if people in Edinburgh do use that language, I've never, never heard it before. But there's two preliminary points. One is that if you take a railway journey from, let us say, Aberdeen to, I don't know, Truro or somewhere in Cornwall, the line that you take will coincide for several miles with the line that you would take if you were going from Glasgow to Reading, say, because in the middle of England those two trains would be on the same tracks and then they would go their separate ways. Now, the fact that they're on the same track, hopefully not at the same time for some distance, doesn't mean that either their starting point or their ending point are in fact the same. They're merely using that middle bit. So that's the first point. The second point is that because of the over platonizing of Western Christianity, that is because of the anti world pro, let's all go to heaven style of so much Western Christianity, there has been a great vacuum, a great vacuum left about what we're supposed to be doing in the present time. And I see this vacuum in terms of young Christians who've been told that if they've said a prayer then they're going to heaven and they shouldn't think to add to that by any good works of their own. So there's a big kind of moral vacuum. What am I supposed to be doing? How do I know how to live if the only thing is to hang around and wait until I die and go to heaven? So that it's easy for Christians, to zealous Christians to create a system which has a vacuum in the middle and then don't be surprised if other people fill it with other things. Some of the great movements in the 19th century particularly I'm thinking of say the 7th Day Adventists or the Jehovah's Witnesses, various others, were able to get the traction they did because the Western Christianity of the time, especially in America, had left those gaps. And people reading the Bible would say, hang on, there's all this stuff and then make a system around it. That's a very broad general thing. And I'm sorry if any 7th Day Adventists or JWS listening feel I'm misrepresenting them. But I've seen this over and over again in theological history. So that it doesn't surprise me at all that in Western Christianity there has been a gap left which is all about what does it mean that we should take care of God's world? What does it mean that we should be his image bearers? What does it mean that God has put all things in subjection under our feet? Psalm 8, which is one of the most quoted psalms in the new Testamen. How do we construe any of that? And if your only idea of Christianity is saying a prayer in the present so that you can go to heaven in the future, then there's really no room for saying how to look after the planet or how to make human life better. Of course, the Old Testament is full of the idea of God bringing justice and wise order to the world through the people who are wise and obey Him. But that's often missed out. When people talk about the New Testament, they don't think about those agendas because they say, no, that's unspiritual, that's earthly, that's works, righteousness, or whatever it is. And so there's all sorts of misunderstandings which have arisen. And I have found over many years now that when we put Jesus announcement about God becoming king on earth as in heaven, when we put that into the middle of the picture, then all sorts of other things which might otherwise have got squeezed out or pushed to the margins or forgotten all together can come in and find their proper place. But then the difference is, of course, as with the trains, with a different starting point and different ending point, secular humanism tries to generate this whole thing out of what we feel as humans we could or should be doing. And the way it's going is simply making human life better in the present by better, more affluent, more perhaps peaceable, or whatever. That would be a good thing, without any sense that we are anticipating a whole new work of God to renew the whole creation, which is what the New Testament promises. And all this gets traction again, as I say, because the idea of inaugurated eschatology is actually slightly tricky to grasp. If you've never been taught to think this way before. That is to say that in the Christian gospel, with Jesus, God's new creation has been launched on earth as in heaven. And those who are caught up with it are then given responsibility not to build the kingdom of God by their own efforts, but to work, as Paul says, for the kingdom, so that when God's final kingdom happens, then we will look back on the little tasks that we have struggled to do. And if we've done them faithfully and prayerfully, then they may well be in some way, shape or form part of that new creation. But it won't be because we, like good secular humanists, have actually done all this out of our own resources and for our own benefits. It will be because we, God willing, will have been humble enough to hear God's direction and to put into practice such lifestyles, such projects, et cetera, as will then enable God's justice and mercy to flood out into creation. So, yes, it doesn't surprise me that we get that parallel, but actually, when you really understand what the gospel is all about, it enfolds within it the best that secular humanism could have aspired to, but within a framework which denies its kind of idolatrous building up of being human, and which gives you a much better eschatology than secular humanism can, because ultimately secular humanism can just collapse into epicureanism that we are just dust and atoms, and when we die, the atoms disappear. So who cares? Has Christians have a better story to tell than that? But that's a whole other topic.
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A
I think the train metaphor, Tom, the train analogy is perfect because they do seem to track parallel for a while, but they do seem to have different beginning points, their. Their assumptions, and even different end points. I mean, I do sometimes wonder whether it's just. It's just trying to be Christianity divested of Christ, like trying to read Psalm 8, which, with someone like Marx rather than Christ in mind, as, as the center. As the center of it.
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B
Yes, yes, yes. No doubt, no doubt. One could produce parodies like that. It'd be a bit scary.
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A
Yeah, it would be. It would be. Well, anyway, Caleb, we hope we answered your question there about the relationship between building for the kingdom and secular humanism. Our next question comes from Kevin Courtright of Galloway usa. And this is a question about keeping up your Greek. Now, Tom, I think a lot of people impressed on this show the way you're able to recite some Greek from memory. And I can tell listeners Tom isn't always sitting there with a, with a Greek New Testament in front of him. Sometimes he does pop it out, but other times he's literally doing it from memory. And this is what Kevin asks. He says, hello, I'm someone who briefly studied Koine Greek as part of graduate work years ago, but has since let my meager grasp of the language slip. You're not alone on that, Kevin. Any tips for getting back into the swing of things? Are there any methods or strategies you would recommend? God bless. Tom. Rather, if someone doesn't have the time and resources to, you know, spend hours every day, you know, reading the New Testament in Greek. I try to read at least one chapter a day in Greek. That's sort of, that's my thing. I do. And plus teaching and, and bit of research. Do you have any suggestions for Kevin how he can get up on his Greek.
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B
Well, it depends on all sorts of other things to do with your educational background, Kevin, and where you've come from. And actually, I have to say your age, because having taught New Testament Greek to classes, including undergraduate level students, and then people much older in life who are coming, say, to train for the ministry in their 40s or 50s, my experience with them is that basically your ability to learn new languages, especially new scripts, decreases quite sharply over time. And though it is perfectly possible for somebody in their 40s or 50s to get up and running with it, and, you know, diplomats who go to work in the Far east, say, and have to learn Korean or Mandarin Chinese, they can do that, but it's jolly hard work. They have to spend hours and hours and hours doing it. So if you're comparatively young, then, yeah, go for it. If you're older, you may want to get hold of one of those interlinear texts. I don't actually like interlinear.
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Me either,
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But I know some people have found them very helpful because you get a Greek script and then you get the English translation underneath, and they're supposed more or less to match word for word. It's much harder if you have a Hebrew one because Hebrew's going one way and he's going another, of course, and that's better than nothing. It's a kind of a crutch to help you along. But ideally you should move out beyond that into a real Greek Testament. And then I would say two things. One is I would look locally or online to see if there are courses that you could sign up for, which are precisely refresher courses in Greek. There may well be a local college or university where you are, or if not, I imagine, I don't know. But I imagine that there are online resources where you can log in and do one of these things, which you can study at your own pace, but do a little bit. Little and often. But the real, the real thing is that little and often thing. Again and again I've said to students, I'd rather you read three verses a day than that you put it off for a week and then try to read a whole chapter once a week because it just won't be there. So that then and then try and get hold of some of the much easier bits of the New Testament, not least the opening of John's Gospel, for instance, or I was going to say
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A
John's Gospel, not Hebrews, do John's Gospel,
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not Hebrews and not Romans, but John's Gospel enarche en hologos, kai hologos en prosantheon, et cetera, et cetera. In the beginning was the Word, and the word was with God. It's not that difficult to figure out how it goes. And once you get the feel and the flow of it, then that may encourage you to go a bit further. The first letter of John as well, slightly more complicated in some ways, but actually because it's quite repetitive, it comes back through the same ideas but from slightly different angles. You might well find that what you were learning in one bit was then reinforced by the next bit as well as expanded. So I would say start off with Johannine stuff and if possible, get together with one or two other people from your church or in the locality or from old college friends or whatever and say, you know, could we meet online once a week and see how we've been doing with. Which might well keep you up to the mark. But I would say this Greek is a lovely language. I didn't think that when I started it, because I started it when I was 13 and the class I was in had been doing it since they were 11, so I had to scramble, like, anything to catch up, which was very hard work. But once you get into it and once you get the feel and the flow of it, I think it's a nicer language, say, than Latin. And it's very expressive and very mellifluous in all sorts of ways, and it will shed a flood of light on passage after passage. Whichever English translation you've got, you just won't get that density. And I've often said to students that trying to read the New Testament without knowing any Greek is like trying to play a Beethoven symphony on a mouth organ. You know, you may be able to play, but actually people listening won't get quite the same effect, shall we say. So go for it and pray for it and enjoy it, relish it, such as you can. Don't try and do too much too soon. Start small and work up and see how it goes. Best of luck with that.
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A
Yeah. Well, obviously they teach Greek at Wycliffe hall, where you're at, Tom. I'm sure they've got a Greek tutor there. My own college, Ridley College, has got a great online Greek course you can do, but there are some really good online resources. A little bit of research after we got Kevin's question. Biblio lingo is kind of like duo lingo, but for biblical languages. Bill Mounts, New Testament scholar, kind of Greek teacher extraordinaire, and a friend of mine, Robert Plummer, has got a good little thing called Daily Dose of Greek where you get like a little bit of Greek emailed you to every day and that's a really good fun thing you can do. Well, hopefully everyone now is into building for the kingdom of heaven and doing it with a little bit of Greek under their belt. When we come back, back after the break, we're going to look at an important question. Can you pray to the Holy Spirit? All that after these messages.
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Tom Our final question for today is from Hannah Moore in Ellesmere, Kentucky. And this is the question about can we pray to the Holy Spirit? This is what Hannah asks. I just found your show and greatly appreciate it. Glad to hear. Hannah. My question is are we as Christians allowed to pray to the Holy Spirit? Someone at my church made a case that praying to the Holy Spirit is not allowed. We're to pray to God the Father and Jesus. Thank you and God bless. Thomas is legit. Can we pray to the Holy Spirit or is the Holy Spirit more like, you know, a heavenly fog machine? Is it like the force from Star Wars? Is it, is he? Is it just Jesus's vapor trail? And it's more of a stuff and we shouldn't pray to the stuff because we pray to the Father through Jesus, or does the Trinity maybe shape how we might pray? What's your answer for Hannah? Tom?
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I incline to say that, yes, the Trinity shapes how we might pray the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit is mysterious. And part of the mystery is that when the Holy Spirit comes upon somebody, even if it's quiet and doesn't involve any great drama, et cetera, there is a sense of a fusion between God's Spirit and our Spirit. Paul talks about this in First Corinthians. He also talks about it in Romans 8. And this is very mysterious because the work of the Holy Spirit within us, when we are kind of alert to that, sometimes we actually have to wrestle with, was this just an idea I came up with, or was this actually the Holy Spirit nudging me in some way? So there is a sense of a reverent agnosticism about how the Spirit works in anyone's life. But the New Testament language about the Spirit makes it quite clear that this is God himself, God's own self, coming to and upon his people. And if the Holy Spirit is God himself coming to and upon his people, then of course you can pray to the Holy Spirit. Now, the traditional, or one traditional Christian mode has been to say, you pray to the Father through the Son. In the power of the Spirit, the Spirit enables you to pray to the Father, but you come to the Father through the Son. Now, when you're actually praying, whether in formal or liturgical prayer or in kind of personal prayer, when you're going about your daily business and feel you need to tune in, it may be difficult to think kind of, okay, am I praying to the Father, to the Son, to the Holy Spirit? I think we want to invoke the whole triune God because God has plans that are bigger and more different than our plans. And we need God to come into our plans and reshape them. And the way that happens is so often through the Holy Spirit acting as the Father's agent, acting as the one through whom Jesus becomes real and personal to us. If in doubt, read John 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, where you get in the farewell discourses, this wonderful to and fro between the Father and the Son and the Spirit. I would say particularly the old Christian prayer which we often sing at the feast of Pentecost. Come Holy Ghost, our souls inspire and lighten with celestial fire. That goes back to the Latin hymn Feni Creator Spiritus, which is a very specific prayer to the Holy Spirit. And it seems to me that's perfectly appropriate. Just as Jesus taught His disciples sometimes to pray to the Father in his name, but sometimes he says, if you ask me for anything, I will do it. So there's a to and fro there, but also I think there's the same kind of to and fro with the Holy Spirit. So though it's mysterious and I wouldn't want to be legalistic about it or claim that we can ever really tie it down as to exactly what each member of the Trinity is doing when we pray, I think to invoke the Holy Spirit, particularly before you're leading in worship or before you're preaching a sermon, or indeed before your own regular times of Bible reading and prayer. Come, Holy Spirit, illuminate the sacred page, Enable me to understand your word. That seems to me utterly appropriate. And to be sure, you could say, come Lord Jesus, be our guest, etc. Etc. But in doing that, how is Jesus going to do that? Jesus himself says, I will give you the Holy Spirit. So I think it's perfectly appropriate. But we don't want to be. We shouldn't want to be too legalistic about exactly what each member of the Trinity does. The closer we get to the mystery, the more mysterious it is. And mysterious doesn't just mean this is all too complicated. I can't make head or tail of it, though that might be true as well. Mysterious means there is something going on here which is much greater than our normal imaginings. So don't be surprised if at a certain point you can't actually imagine this, but inhabit it rather. It's like great music. When I'm listening to a wonderful piece of music, there's no way I could sort of pause the music and tell you exactly what the oboes were doing there or what the alto line was doing there. But you're swallowed up within the whole thing and you're carried along by it and you're reshaped by it. So that days and sometimes weeks later that music will still be ringing in your head and it'll come back. In the same way, when we're praying to the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, we are taken up in something much richer and bigger and more mysterious than ourselves. And God willing, we will be shaped by that and we will be able to look back and say, God was really with me on that occasion and God has led me through and out the other side. And of God it. So I think go for it.
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Yeah, I agree, Tom. I think it's the logic of the Trinity that it's appropriate on occasions to pray to The Holy Spirit. Certainly we, you know, we Anglicans pray for the Holy Spirit during ordinations that this, you know, man, this woman will be filled with God, Holy Spirit. Fill them with, with wisdom and, and energy and unction to commit this calling to which you have set them, you know, praying for spiritual gifts. So I think it's definitely permissible to do it. There's a great book from the Church Fathers on this. Basil of Caesarea wrote a great work on the Holy Spirit which tackles this very question because he, he arrived at a diocese and he found that their pneumatology, their doctor of the Holy Spirit, was a little bit undercooked. So he wrote this book to kind of, you know, give them a slightly mature doctrine of the Holy Spirit. So, yeah, there we go. Feel free to pray to the Holy Spirit at will. Hope you you feel the liberty to do that now, Tom, that brings us to a close for this week, but we've got some great questions next week. Biblical theology versus systematic theology. You know, which one's better? And you're going to love this one, Tom. Who is the eye, the wretched man in Romans 7? Who is that great one? And then some questions about good and bad versions of Calvinism. All that to come and remember. You can send us your question for Tom to answer by going to askantewright.com and if you want to go the extra mile, you can subscribe to our premium episodes where we do things like discuss seven habits of highly effective Christians. We're going to start a series on Tom's new book, God's Homecoming, and do a few other things covering topics like works of the law. All that for the price of a single coffee. So hopefully, if you want a bit more of Tom Wright and Mike Bird in your life, feel free to follow the link and subscribe. Otherwise, it's goodbye from me, Mike Bird,
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and goodbye from me, Tom Wright.
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And we'll see you for the next episode of Ask nt Write anything. Until then, take care and God bless.