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Hey to all the pastors, priests, people involved in Christian ministry. You spend hours every week on your sermons, but come Sunday morning, are you absolutely sure of what your congregation needs or are you just guessing? When people quietly slip out because they're fighting a battle you can't see? It's heartbreaking. But what if you could see what is going on in your church, in people's lives and their hearts? Know where the church is growing, where it's not, and what to do next? Well, that's where Next Step for Church comes in. Backed by 200 years of American Bible Society research, this free assessment gives you the tools you need to stop guessing and start knowing for sure. Imagine seeing the big picture of what the people in your church are dealing with. Imagine getting ideas to support the people who need it the most. And imagine tracking and celebrating their progress year after year. The team behind Next Step for Church is hosting a live Q and A to show you exactly how it works. Grab your spot@thenextepforchurch.org after a quick overview, they'll answer your questions so you can see how it fits with your specific congregation. Sign up today at nextstepforchurch.org it's time to turn on the lights and stop guessing about what your people need. Save your seat@nextstepforchurch.org start the spring season off right with a new pair of Tokovas Western boots. Handcrafted in over 200 steps from genuine leather, they're built to last and feel broken in the moment you put them on. From cowhide to exotic leathers to Kovas, blends timeless style with all day comfort. Pair them with premium denim Western shirts and accessories for an effortless, polished look. Shop quality Western goods in store or online@dakovas.com Struggling with weight loss? Prolon's five day fasting mimicking diet is a clinically developed nutrition program designed to promote fat loss while protecting lean body mass. Developed at USC's Longevity Institute, it assists the body in entering a fasting like state that helps reset metabolism and target visceral fat in just five days. Prolon offers a science backed approach to weight loss without extreme restriction or guesswork. Get 15% off plus a $40 bonus gift when you subscribe@prolonlife.com now. Hello and welcome to the Ask Anti Write Anything Podcast, the program where we try to answer your questions about Jesus, the Bible and and the life of faith. I'm Mike Bird from Ridley College in Melbourne, Australia and I'm joined of course
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with Tom Wright from Wycliffe hall in Oxford.
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Now, Tom, I hate to say it, but we're going to get political again on this show. You know, I don't. I don't like getting political. I like to focus on spiritual things, you know, the things that bring us together. But we, we do have some pretty big questions. So we've got a question about more anxiety about MAGA and a kind of unhealthy or unwholesome syncretism between the political right and Christianity. But we've also got a question and the meat and how do you find meaning and purpose in life? And our third is. Third one's a good one. It's about how to teach writing eschatology in your church. So how do you get people coming away from that sort of, you know, popular but misleading eschatology about the end times? And how did something look more biblical or more robust where people believe in the resurrection of the body rather than the immortality of the soul? So that's what we've got coming up in this episode. But let's kick off with a question from Brent Hiller, but also with a little bit of input from Julie Nix, Brent Hiller from Hot Springs National Park. It's got a question about, you know, white evangelical churches and MAGA stuff. And Brent asks. I'm having trouble reconciling my faith with participation in the white evangelical church in the United States and, and the overwhelming support it gives to the current US Administration and Donald Trump in particular. I think I understand the idea of Christian unity, but feel at this time that active participation would be being complicit in some ways with this administration, something I'm unwilling to do. Any suggestions? So that's from Brent Hiller, but then we've got something that dovetails with that, really. Well, Tom, that's from a question from Julie Nix in Elizabeth Downs in Australia. Welcome where I am. And this is, this is Julie's question. She's got about. A dear friend is a relatively new Christian. Over the last year, they've taken the stance of MAGA in relation to things such as ICE and immigration and trying to bring the same beliefs here into our Australian population. Now, I can relate to that because our television is very heavily Americanized. I mean, we get a few British comedy shows. We've got our own sort of, you know, neighbors and, and Home and away, that kind of thing. But we have a lot of American influence in our news, in our programming. So I definitely understand where Julia is coming from and people who may have imbibed a bit too much of that Tom, what do you have to say to Brent, who's, you know, feels like being part of the white evangelical industrial complex is unwittingly providing complicitly to an administration he may not always or ever support? And this kind of stuff is even filtering into Australia, and I'm guessing you may be getting part of it in the UK as well. So what do we make of this thing?
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Oh, my. I mean, we are recording this episode just before Easter in 2026, and things are really unpleasant just now, to put it mildly. The war between Israel and America on the one hand, and Iran on the other hand, has been hotting up and other people have joined in with it, and we're not sure what's going to happen next. We're not sure what the exit strategy for any of the participants might be. So this is a very hot topic at that level, but it's been a hot topic in America. I'm very much aware of that for quite some time. And I think it's important. Two things by way of putting down initial markers. First, I'm very much aware that for the last 250 years, Americans, quite rightly and understandably, do not enjoy having British people, or probably Australians either, telling them how to run their country. I mean, part of getting rid of the British in the 18th century was to say, we're not going to be ruled by you colonialists. We're going to do our own thing. So that if a Brit comes in and says, America, you're getting this wrong and that wrong. And the other thing, that there's a kind of inbuilt reaction against that, I totally get that. And whenever I'm in America, and this will sound a typical cliche, but some of my best friends are Americans, and I've had endless conversations with them about all this range of issues and so on. So that's the first thing. The second thing is that the word evangelical means something completely different when you cross the Atlantic. I grew up knowing an evangelical world which was headed by people like John Stott and Jim Packer, which was based on a very firm commitment to scripture and the exegesis of scripture, Scripture as the backbone of spirituality and church life and doctrine, and which was focused on the cross and the death of Jesus on our behalf as the very center of everything. So Bible and cross, and then the personal experience of these in whether it's an initial conversion or somebody who's grown up in the faith discovering that they are in fact faithful, people have often said the point is not. Did you have A conversion experience. But are you now in a state of having been converted, whether or not you remember the experience? So that, for me, was evangelicalism, and it had nothing whatever to do with anything to do with skin pigmentation or ethnic background. Indeed, a lot of the evangelical teachers that I heard when I was growing up were people who'd been missionaries and had worked with people in very different parts of the world and would speak lovingly and glowingly about the way that God was working with people of all sorts and conditions. So that I never had any of what now seems to be endemic in some parts of North America. Now, I've been reading up on this because it's been a real worry for me that the way in which the movements that call themselves evangelical in America have, as it were, been taken over by certain cultural forces. There was a book I just read by a historian from Calvin College, and we can find her name and put it on the website.
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Kristin Dumas.
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That's the one. That's the one.
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She's brilliant.
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I love Kristen Dumay called Jesus and John Wayne. And I found that a very salutary and worrying book. And the way in which American hero figures, of which the cowboy is the classic sort of model, have become models for Jesus. And this goes in my mind with a couple of books which were written by a New Testament scholar, are now no longer with us. Bob Jewett and a colleague of his on the myth of the American superhero and Captain America and the crusade against evil, that these were the great narratives which most presidents over the last hundred years have said what their favorite movies were. And they all fit this pattern, whether it's the Lone Ranger or Captain America or whatever. And this kind of local mythology, which is peculiar to America but not, certainly not to Britain, certainly not to anyone else then, has tended to provide a structure in which Jesus is seen as the conquering hero, the one who rides on the white horse to go and do redemptive violence to rescue people from wickedness, et cetera. And then that gets transmuted into a question of people like us, people who look like us, over against people who look like those people down the road that we wish weren't in our country. In other words, it gets sucked into a country kind of a racist mentality. And again, I want to say we've had a big problem of racism in Britain, but it's a different sort of racism because we never had a system of slavery where we were importing people from Africa or anywhere else. Yes, we had a lot of people who made A lot of money by being part of that slave trade back in the 18th century and so on. Happily we abolished that and so on. But we never had a large indigenous population of ex slaves or the families of ex slaves. Rather, our racial questions in Britain have come from the fact that we went and colonized parts of the world and we gave people citizenship from India or Pakistan or wherever. And once they were British citizens, then they had the right to come and live in Britain. And some of them have chosen to do so. So if that's been a problem, it's been a very different problem for America. And I say all this because otherwise people can hear this phrase evangelical or white evangelical, and it gets very confusing for all sorts of reasons. And so the heart of that I want to say we need to take a step back and say, what in biblical terms might a nation be? And what in Christian terms and biblical terms might happen when you put the word Christian in front of the word nation? So that Christian nationalism, because that's the real problem at the moment, and I want to say any idea of nationalism as in our nation is the top nation and we therefore have the right and the duty to export our way of life to everybody else. You find nothing of that in the Bible. Rather, the transition from the nation of Israel, called to be the light of the world through Jesus and the apostles, to a message which is forever everybody. A message that Jesus is the Lord of the whole world, he's the Savior of the whole world. And so there is therefore now neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, no male and female. You are all one in Messiah, Jesus. That's a kind of a sigh of relief moment when the New Testament says, yes, we've had this particular nation which is the ancient people of Israel. That was God's preparatory strategy and now that is fulfilled gloriously and all the promises have come true in the Messiah. But this doesn't generate a new ethnic nation, which now is a Jesus ethnic nation. Rather, it generates the possibility of people of all sorts coming together in a new sort of identity, which is a faith identity of allegiance to Jesus. There's a passage in the letter Dionysius, which is the second century Christian document, which basically says we Christians are kind of funny because we live in all countries and we love our countries, but that's not our primary allegiance. And wherever we are, we will obey the state as long as it doesn't tell us to worship them, to worship their gods and so on. In other words, we are designed to be a multicultural, multi ethnic family. Now that for some reason has been lost in much contemporary North American Christianity, and it's in danger of being lost in other places as well. We have our own local versions of this in Britain, though nowhere near as strident or as powerful as the American versions. But I want to track back and say, please, beloved Americans, Read the lady I mentioned whose name you know.
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Christian Dumay.
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Christian Dumay May spent M E Z, I think.
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Yeah, yeah.
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On Jesus and John Wayne. Read the very important book by James Davison Hunter, Democracy and solidarity. Read the very important book by Molly Worthen, historian from University of North Carolina called Spellbound, about how there's a long American tradition of leaders emerging from nowhere in particular saying, a plague on the present system. Follow me and I'll take you to the sunlit plans and the way in which that has prepared people, kind of American subculture for what has been happening in the last 10 years or so. I find this very, very distressing. But then the other element, which I have to say, which goes with another question that we get asked, is about the whole end times philosophy, that in the 19th century there was an Irish Anglican priest who had what, in terms of historic Christianity, are very strange and outlandish ideas, namely that because the people of Israel rejected Jesus, the clock of Old Testament prophecy was stopped when Jesus was rejected, and that we've been waiting for that clock to restart, at which point lots of prophecies from the Old Testament will finally come true. And according to this theory, then when the Jews went back to their land in 1948, actually, that's a very odd thing in itself because that was a contested resolution at the United nations, and that was the last time the present state of Israel actually obeyed any of the UN's resolutions. That's a whole other issue. But people have said, okay, since 1948, the prophetic clock has started ticking again, and we are now living in the end times, and we're waiting for the real end in which there will be the Rapture, there will be the Armageddon, there will be, if you like, the war of the sons of light against the sons of darkness. There will be a tribulation. Whether before or after the Rapture, that's debated, et cetera. And the really, really worrying thing about this right now is that there are American soldiers being told that when they go off on a warship to the Gulf, or possibly sooner or later, boots on the ground in Iran, please God, no. They will be fighting Jesus battles, as in the battle of Israel against the wicked hordes. Now, there's Nothing in the Old Testament which speaks of a great nation from the west coming to rescue the people of Israel. And this gets bound up with all sorts of different ideological issues. And I want to say, please take a long step back, read the New Testament for all it's worth, and you'll find that the ideology of maga, and it is an ideology, has become an idolatry where your in effect worshipping your own ethnicity and trying to exalt that, to hook it into various pictures of what's going on in the Middle east in a way which actually deconstructs completely the teaching of Jesus. What happened to I am meek and lowly in heart and you will find rest for your soul? What happened to Mark 10 where Jesus says, the rulers of this age lord it over their subjects and they boss them and bully them about. We're going to do it the other way up. Let the one who wants to be be your servant. The one who wants to be first be the slave of all, because the Son of Man didn't come to be served, but to serve and to give his life as a ransom for many. In other words, when you look at Jesus in the New Testament, when you read the Sermon on the Mount, when you read the Nazareth manifesto in Luke 4, when you track back to those great pictures of the wolf and the Lamb lying down together in Isaiah 11 and so on, which the New Testament picks up on, what on earth has any of that got to do with the present volatile and warmongering MAGA ideology? So my message to my beloved American friends is please reread the New Testament, kneel at the foot of the cross and learn a different way.
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I think we can all aspire to learn the way of peace from the Prince of Peace. That's probably a good point for us to note. And yeah, let's. Let's move on to something a bit more existential. We've got a question from Stephanie Mm. In Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. And this is very, this is a very personal, I would say, pastoral question. Tom and Stephanie asks what is the meaning and purpose of life? I found myself thinking about this more lately as I am managing two chronic health conditions in my early 30s. I only became a Christian in my 20s and still find some Christian phrases very confusing. Many of the Christians I know say that the meaning of life is to glorify God. But what does that mean for someone who suffers from something that has made my body seemingly rebel against me? I know I should be grateful that only my quality of life will suffer from my conditions, but it's hard to not wonder why I can't be like so many of my Christian acquaintances that appear to take their health for granted. My conditions have made me wonder if God even cares for it or is active in our world. My therapist has told me that every person has to make a decision on what is meaningful for them in this life and to decide what their purpose will be. I think there is some truth to that, but it's also overwhelming. What does God say? Is the meaning and purpose for my life in, in the least Christianese way possible? Is this something that is high level but also ground level, corporate and personal? Well, thank you for your question, Stephanie. Our heart certainly goes out for you with the conditions you're having to suffer through and persevere through. Tom, what do you say to someone like Stephanie who's trying to find meaning and purpose in life amidst chronic and ongoing illness?
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Yeah, the first thing to say is, Stephanie, I've just written your name down on a piece of paper and it's going into my prayer diary. And over this Holy Week, which is just beginning as we're recording this, I will pray for you day by day and in the days to come. But equally important, we, Mike and I, cannot be your pastor at long distance. We can say general things in your direction, but you need to find a wise pastor. Not necessarily the pastor of your church, but somebody in your larger Christian family to whom you can turn, who will weep with you, who will struggle with you, who will hear where it's really hurting for you both physically and emotionally and so on, and will be your companion through the journey. That's absolutely vital. And I would say that to anyone in any condition, but especially somebody presenting with the very powerful questions that you have. I mean, we live in a very odd world. We assume these days, and I include myself in this, that we will all, unless something drastic happens, we will all live to our 70s or even 80s or even 90s and that anything short of that, oh, something's gone badly wrong with everything. I was reading recently a biography of the great Anglican 17th century poet George Herbert, who died, I think it was late 30s or conceivably early 40s and was quite expecting that that was the norm. He'd had a good life but had been ill quite often. And so that was the kind of life expectancy at the time. And we are the OD generation. Since modern medicine, we can kind of assume relatively good health for a relatively long period. That's something that nobody in previous generations could ever take for granted. That's not to diminish then, but rather to heighten the challenge that you face when you see your friends having healthy, ongoing adult lives, et cetera. And you're saying, but what about me? And. And of course, some therapists, some pastors would say you need to go deeper into your own praying, your own reading. And no doubt that's true for all of us, by the way. But as that happens, then sometimes with some people, there may come a sense of a particular vocation to pray for a particular situation, a particular, or the people who are undergoing similar things to what you are. Because after all, the climax of one of the greatest chapters in The Bible, Romans 8, is, Nothing shall separate us from the love of God. Vital though that is, but that when we are groaning with wordless groanings, when we don't know what on earth is going on, and we're standing before God without words to say, then at that very moment, the Holy Spirit is groaning within us with wordless, inarticulate groanings. And that is extraordinary. The third person of the Trinity faces a situation which is so appalling that the third person of the Trinity does not know what to say about it. And that's a reflection of your suffering, Stephanie, and mine and Mike's, when we have them, and we all will sooner or later, if we haven't already, and that of many people we know, people our relatives, people we're pastorally involved with, that. The aim of Paul in Romans 8 is to say that when you find yourself at that point and you say, what is this all about? Then actually, this is a place of focus and concentration where the pain of the whole world, the groaning of all creation, is focused on the agonized prayer of the Christian who says, what is going on here? Or I don't even have words to say that. And so in a sense, that's a place of great. I don't know what word to use. Great glory, I think Paul would say, because it is a sharing of the sufferings of the Messiah, so that the Spirit is saying in us what Jesus was saying on the cross. My God, why did you abandon me? What was this all about? Did I get it all wrong? Have my expectations been upside down and inside out? So I think we're recording this in Holy Week. And I think that's part of the meaning of the cross, is that when we come to that point, then we realize that God is there with us and that God is in anguish on the cross, just as we are in anguish in our lives. And Jesus, after all, was in his early 30s when he went through that extraordinary, unbelievable, inconceivable fate. So that doesn't solve the problem, Stephanie, but I hope it kind of reorients it. And within that, if there are other vocations, vocations of people that you could be helping, vocations of people for whom you could be praying and other things in your life, maybe aspects of things that you've enjoyed, music or literature or whatever that you need to get further into, which might be a help, then maybe there are things like that. But yes, in all of this, you will be glorifying God, because everything that has the shape of the cross about it glorifies the God who revealed himself fully in Jesus Christ. So, Stephanie, Mike and I will pray for you and God bless you and God be with you this Holy Week and in the days to come.
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Indeed, Tom, indeed. Well, we're now going to take a break, but when we come back, we're going to talk about how do you indigenize Tom Wright's theology in your church? How can you get people more on site with a good, healthy account of biblical theology rather than some of the unhelpful and unwholesome things that often do their rounds in the churches? More on that when we get back in a moment. Pastor, you spend hours every week on your sermons, but come Sunday morning, are you absolutely sure of what your congregation needs, or are you just guessing when people quietly slip out because they're fighting a battle you can't see? It's heartbreaking. What if you could see exactly where your church is growing, where it's not, and what to do next? That's Next Step for church. Backed by 200 years of American Bible Society research, this free assessment gives you the tools you need to stop guessing and start knowing for sure. Imagine seeing the big picture of what your church is dealing with. Imagine getting ideas to support people who need it most. And imagine tracking and celebrating their progress year over year. The team behind Next Step for Church is hosting a live Q and A to show you exactly how it works. Grab your spot@nextstepforchurch.org After a quick overview, they'll answer your question so you can see how it fits with your specific congregation. Sign up today at nextstepforchurch.org it's time to turn the lights on and stop guessing about what your people need. Save your seat at Next Step for Church. Hey, and welcome back. This is still Ask nt Write Anything. Remember, if you go to ask ntwrite.com you can send us your questions and we love them. We get so many good questions. We want to hear them. We want to connect with you. We want to be, you know, help you out in your life. The reason why Tom and I do this is because we want to promote the gospel. We want to help people grow in their faith and understanding and grow in their knowledge of God. So by all means, send us a question if you've got one for us. But Tom, our last question for this episode comes from Chandler Carricka of Asheville usa. Now Asheville's in North Carolina. It's one of the cities in North Carolina I want to go to. Go to. I want to go to Asheville and Charlotte. I've never been. Okay, that's somewhere we're going to get to anyway. Chandler's question is about how do we get a, you know, a bit more empty right in our churches? So this is what he asks. How would you suggest beginning to present the new heavens and new earth and God becoming to dwell among his creation. That kind of understanding of the afterlife to those whose faith is so built upon the soul, going up to heaven, that kind of understanding. I don't want to rock the foundations of another person's faith. But going to heaven is so at the root of many Christians faith that I'm afraid it would rock their faith. But I also believe this is an important conversations to start having among other Christians. Well, I'm glad to say Chandler's not alone, Tom. I remember Justin Martyr complaining in the second century that more Christians believed in the immortality of the soul than the resurrection of the body. So this has been annoying theologians since the second century. So we're just following a wave here. Now I think the, the simple answer to this, Tom, is to go out, buy an industrial scale level of surprised by hope and God's homecoming and hand them out like candy at Halloween. I mean, that's one way to do it. Or they could, you know, maybe do some of those very helpful and very reasonably priced courses you have at the website Admirato. That's another way to get people into it. But Tom, do you have a view of, of what's a safe, easy method of introducing people to a little bit of eschatology that's more biblical and is more. Is more true to the teaching of Jesus and the apostles?
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Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's a great question. And I have been aware ever since I started regular speaking and preaching and then writing about this. And it's been 30 years now since I really got launched into this aspect of my teaching. I've been aware that a lot of this is just deeply counterintuitive for many Christians. And some feel as though I'm robbing them of their whole framework of who they are and how they pray. Because it has been, as you say, based on this Platonic idea of the soul going to heaven. At the same time, I have had some people who, after they've heard me lecture on this or read, surprised by hope or whatever, have come back and said, do you know, all my life I knew that there was something a bit wrong about what I was being taught, but I was never able to put my finger on it. Of course, the short answer is read the Bible. The trouble is that we've been taught how to read the Bible in such a Platonic way, so that, well, the Old Testament that was concerned with this world, the realities, but then Jesus comes along and says, no, no, no, it's all about the kingdom of heaven. And one of the first big lessons is, let's get clear what in Matthew's Gospel, the phrase kingdom of heaven means. That's where you find that phrase. And it's not about people going to heaven when they die. It's about heaven that is God ruling on earth as in heaven, as Jesus taught us to pray in Matthew's Gospel in the Sermon on the Mount. So there are one or two basic things to learn, and that will be one of them. But I would say as well, if you are running a church Bible study, try to walk people through some of those great Old Testament passages, like Isaiah 11, or indeed Isaiah 2, Isaiah 9, Isaiah 11. That whole sequence which is about God sorting out the message on earth about a king who is coming, whose task will be to teach people wisdom and to make people live at peace with one another. That is the great biblical prophecy which then Jesus says, this is now being fulfilled. This is what we're all about. So look at the continuities between those great Old Testament promises where God is coming to put everything right. Think of the Psalms, where the trees and the field and the cows and the sheep and the sea, they're all celebrating because Yahweh is coming to judge the world. And judge doesn't mean that he's going to smash it all up and send it off to the furnace and take us away somewhere else. It means God is coming to put everything right. That great Old Testament teaching, God is coming to put everything right translates directly into the New Testament, where Jesus talks about the kingdom of God coming on earth as in heaven, and where Paul talks about God's plan to put things right is revealed in Jesus. The problem there, of course, is that so many people have misunderstood what Paul is all about and have assumed that he too is talking about how we get to heaven. So there's a lot of unlearning to do as well as relearning. But then when you get to the end of the book of Revelation and you see the way in which Revelation 21 and 22 matches Genesis 1 and 2, and you say, if God really wanted us to have this book, this thing we called the Bible in something like this form, with a good creation at the beginning, and then the new heavens and new earth with God dwelling with humans at the end, maybe that's what the rest of the story was actually all about all along. And how are we going to reread it it. So depending on where you're starting, get a fresh reading of scripture. And as Mike said, I have tried to articulate this in various books. Surprised by God's homecoming. My friend and colleague Richard Middleton has written a book on new heavens and new earth which says a lot of this as well, and there are many others as well. Of course, we're not alone, and it's not surprising because this is actually what the Bible is all about. But it is a matter of unlearning as well as relearning. And in that process of unlearning, there are dangers, there are traps for the unwary. It's possible to step right off the track and think that the only thing, therefore, which we've got to do is to join social justice movements at the moment. Well, there's nothing wrong with joining social justice movements, but don't imagine that we are building the kingdom of God by our own efforts here and now. God builds God's kingdom in God's way. In other words, don't get this out of proportion with the coming of Jesus in the incarnation and the second coming of Jesus, which will be when God will be all in all. I would say put in the middle of the picture, First Corinthians 15, verses 20 to 28, about God's raising Jesus from the dead and then finally God coming again in the person of Jesus to be all in all. And we are in between Resurrection Mark one and Resurrection Mark two. And just as an extra, and I say this in surprise by hope, wouldn't it be good if we learned how to celebrate Easter properly? The Eastern Orthodox do this with great celebrations and incense, light and music and feasting and so on in many churches that I've been involved with. We are very good at keeping Lent. We give things up or we take things up, or we stop having chocolate or alcohol or whatever it is.
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We give up Lent every year.
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Okay, but then you give it up. The rest I know you. But then we get to Easter Day, and often we've kept Lent so assiduously that Easter Day is just one day, and then we all heave a sigh of relief and go off on holiday. And actually Easter should be an elongated celebration all the way to Ascension Day, where if we've kept Lent for that period of time, we ought to keep Easter exuberantly with champagne breakfasts, with celebrations of the goodness of God, with celebrations of the goodness of God in creation, because the creation is going to celebrate when what happened to Jesus at Easter happens to the whole creation. So First Corinthians 15, Romans 8, Revelation 21 and 22, make those your new home base and work back into the rest of the New Testament from there, and you'll find it all makes sense.
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A
You know, Tom, there are days where I wonder whether we need some kind of club association where we can, you know, bring people together for a bit of teaching and not just teach them about stuff that they can read from the books, but teach them how to teach this stuff and, and to show the practical difference it makes. So, I mean, that, that, I mean, that's just an idea that comes to mind. Maybe, maybe one time, one day we'll use all of our spare time to create a big project like this. Maybe. Maybe one day. Maybe. But I do need to mention one thing, Tom. There is, I feel bad for saying this. There is a strand of Reformed Christianity that their ethos, I think, is whatever Tom Wright says, say the opposite. Like, seriously, Tom, if you wrote a book on the Trinity, there are a group of people I know who will write a book in response saying the Reformed faith is Unitarian and always has been. I do know one, one group who either has or is writing a book about heaven because they think Tom Wright is diminishing the beauty and wonder of heaven because he's focusing too much on new creation. Now, I should say that's not all Reformed people. I know Reformed people like Greg Beal and his great book about, you know, the temple and biblical theology. People like Greg, Bill, I think, are really with you. But there is a very bizarre reform strand that says whatever Tom Wright does, do the opposite. It's, you know, you should say, I've stopped punching myself in the face. And maybe they'll, I don't know, I Don't know, maybe I'm being too tribal here, Tom, but I do, I do
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think I don't know the people that you're talking about, though maybe I do.
- [39:47]
A
I'm sure you would have heard about them online at some point, but that's okay. But it's, it's a contentious area and I do think we need to find ways to simply draw our churches more into scripture so we're not just rehearsing the same old tired and trite stereotypes of, you know, when you die, you turn into an, an angel or a ghost like figure and you just float around playing volleyball with the angels and you, you go up and you meet Martin Luther or Jimmy Carter or Ronald Reagan or which, whichever president you think's in heaven. That's it. It's a, it's a new creation, a physical body, a resurrection body similar to Jesus.
- [40:31]
B
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I think. Thank you for that. I do think that asking people the question, show me where in the New Testament the word heaven is used to denote or describe the place or the state where God's people will finally end up. It's a very revealing question because.
- [40:57]
A
And the ones who are there aren't happy. Look at the martyrs in. Was it Revelation 6? There's people, the martyrs in heaven are complaining. They're there, but they're not happy about it. They want vindication and new creation.
- [41:08]
B
They're under the altar, which is a very different thing. But I mean, that takes us into the meaning of the temple in the book of Revelation and so on. And I, I would defer to Greg Beale and others on that.
- [41:18]
A
Yep. Indeed. Indeed. Well, that's all we have time for today. Remember, you can get some really good bonus content by subscribing to our bonus episodes where you'll get an extra episode every week and where Tom and I kind of banter on these sorts of things. Hot topics of the day. And we go through his various books like Ephesians and soon I think we'll probably kick off with God's homecoming. Otherwise it is goodbye from me, Mike
- [41:49]
B
Bird, and goodbye from me, Tom Wright.
- [41:51]
A
And we look forward to seeing you on the next episode of Ask N.T. wright. Anything. Until then, God bless you and take care.
- [41:58]
B
It.