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Ask NT Wright Anything
S2E5 Did Jesus claim to be the Son of God? Tom Wright responds to Bart Ehrman and other questions
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- [00:01]
John Lennox
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Dr. Mike Bird
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- [00:48]
John Lennox
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Dr. Mike Bird
Will that be cash or credit? Credit. 4 Galaxy S25 Ultra the AI companion.
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Tom Wright
That does the heavy lifting.
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Dr. Mike Bird
So you can do you get yours@samsung.com compatible with select apps. Requires Google Gemini account. Results may vary based on input. Check responses for accuracy.
- [01:25]
John Lennox
The Ask nt Write Anything Podcast.
- [01:31]
Dr. Mike Bird
Welcome back to another episode of the Ask nt Write Anything podcast. I'm Dr. Mike Bird from Ridley College in Melbourne, Australia.
- [01:39]
Tom Wright
And I'm Tom Wright from Oxford and from Wycliffe hall in Oxford University.
- [01:44]
Dr. Mike Bird
So today on the Ask nt Write Anything podcast, we're going to explore some really interesting questions that we've been getting from our listeners. And these include things about Jesus as the son of God, the Eucharist, and it also talks about Old Testament law and how it does or does not apply today. First up, we've got a question from Teneta Schneider, who asks to Tom, how do you respond to Bart Ehrman's belief that Jesus was not the son of God? Now, Tom, something you and I have in common is we've both debated Bart Ehrman.
- [02:24]
Tom Wright
Yes, And Barthes is a difficult person to debate. And this isn't terribly relevant to the question, except to show our background that I found. He has a lot of interesting ideas. He has a lot of expertise in text criticism, that is in looking at early manuscripts and trying to figure out which might be the best reading of this or that text. But that Barthes himself, and he's written about this, so it's not a secret or a private personal matter. Barthes himself came from an extremely fundamental fundamentalist background in America. And then when he rejected that, he's rejected a whole lot of the bits and pieces of Christianity that went with that. Those of us who didn't come from that background. Watch somebody like this moving from, as it were, our extreme right to our extreme left and say, that's funny. I'm quite happy sitting here in the middle, thank you very much. So that's how I initially respond to Barthes. Of course, it depends what you mean by that. Jesus was the Son of God. What does Son of God mean? The phrase Son of God has often been taken as simply a cipher to say he's the second person of the Trinity. But if you say, was he or was he not the second person of the Trinity, that implies that we know what the Trinity is, and it's just a question of whether Jesus was number two in the Trinity or what. And I think what the denial is about is denying that Jesus was himself in some sense or other, fully divine. Now, part of the mystery of that question is that it assumes we know ahead of time who God is, what it means to be God, and who humans are, and what it means to be human. Because I grew up in a world where many liberal scholars were saying what Barthes now saying, that we know that God into man won't go. We know that the idea of incarnation is an old mythological idea which we have to get rid of. But actually, actually, when you look at the ancient Israelite texts which we call the Old Testament, and at the way in which, in the Judean world of Jesus day, those were being retrieved, then the phrase son of God had a particular meaning, which was Messiah. Because in Psalm 2, God says to the king, the Messiah, I will tell what the Messiah says. I will tell of the decree of the Lord. He said to me, you are my son, this day I have begotten you. Ask of me, and I'll give you the nations for your inheritance, etc. Etc. And so being the Son of God seems to be a way of talking about the Davidic king that comes up in Psalm 89 as well, and particularly in a famous passage in 2 Samuel 7, when God promises David that he will have a son and heir who will sit on his throne and will build the temple. And God says, I will be his Father, and he will be my son. And so all those texts go together to say that in the lead up to the New Testament, if somebody is called Son of God, the primary meaning within the Judean world would be that this is the true Davidic king, the true heir to the throne of David, and hence the true king of the world. Now, at the same time, what you find in Paul's writings, which are the earliest Writings in the New Testament is that Paul talks about Jesus as the one who embodies the saving love of God for the world. And in order to get at that, Paul uses the language of Son of God so that in Romans he says that God commends his love for us in that while we were yet sinners, the Messiah died for us. And then he sums that up by saying God did not spare his own Son, but gave him up for us all. And it looks to me as though Paul has combined the idea of God coming to be human along with his people and God taking upon himself himself in the person of Jesus, the role of the appointed Davidic King. I don't think those are combined like that before the time of early Christianity. And so you have to ask, where did Paul get that idea from? And pretty certainly it's because he believed that Jesus being raised from the dead had fulfilled those prophecies in Second Samuel and Psalm 2 and so on. Those, by the way, are some of the most important texts for the early Christians. So that then what we have is a much richer view of what it might mean to be the Son of God than the rather simplistic modern Western view that that's a way of saying, is Jesus or is he not divine? You know, I've sometimes been interviewed by journalists who've said with, or rather with a sneer, do you think that Jesus was the Son of God? The implication being either you're a hopeless fundamentalist conservative believing all that rubbish, or you're a dangerous faith denying cleric Eric, who we're going to put on the front page of the paper saying bishop denies this or that. And so I want to say the question is coming from the wrong place. And of course, I believe in the sense that Paul meant it, that Jesus of Nazareth, the human being, was the living embodiment of the God who in the Old Testament says, I will come back in person to liberate my people. Now, it takes a huge amount of all the prophecies in the Old Testament and the way they're being retrieved in the Judea world of Paul's day to understand what's going on there. But what it means is that we are able with complete integrity as well as faith to say Jesus was and is the one in whom the living God was and is personally embodied, for which part of the biblical language is Son of God. In other words, the one who is now the true Lord of the world. That's the foundation of Christian mission. Jesus is Lord. Therefore Christian mission is saying to people of Every nation, language, tongue, every sort, class, condition, that the door to your prison is open and you are free to leave and God is create. The God who made the world is creating his new creation. And he is inviting you, summoning you by worshiping this man Jesus, to come into that new creation right here and now and to share in it. So the question has all those resonances for me, and I think the answer is that I don't think Bart Ehrman has really looked at all those things. I think he just wants to reject a rather simple form of traditional Western Christianity in which he was nurtured. And I think when you step back and look at the entire Judaic context, you can get a much richer and better picture, which we then firmly can affirm.
- [09:14]
Dr. Mike Bird
Yeah, I mean, Barth's an interesting guy. I mean, he's, you know, done some very high level stuff in text criticism. He works now broadly in sort of, you know, early Christian history. And, and sometimes I find him like genuinely interesting and insightful. Sometimes he'll take a kind of minority position and kind of dress it up like it's something that's been secretly hidden from people. Other times he just takes some very esoteric views on different things. And I know, you know, Bart Ehrman, he, he doesn't think that Jesus claimed to be God or in any way intimated Jesus was merely a prophet proclaiming the kingdom of God. And he argues that it was the early church that really started talking about Jesus as divine. I mean, I mean, to his credit. One thing I think Ehrman gets right is he says the early church very quickly said that Jesus was divine. The problem was there's diverse senses in which that can have meaning. You know, what does it mean? And, and, and you know, Ermin goes along saying that, well, you know, at his resurrection, they thought he became divine only upon his resurrection, which I think is, you know, based on reading of Romans 1 and, and, and parts of Acts. But that's not unique to. Yeah, sure, himself, others have argued the same view. But you know, if you, if you take the idea of divine sonship and if you stand back away from the 4th and 5th century categories and think, well, what does it mean for someone to claim to be the Son of God? I think Jesus did claim to be the Son of God. You see that in the parable of the tenants, when he tells the parable about himself as the son who's been cast out of the vineyard. And if you add that into a whole bunch of messianic expectation, kind of like what you Talk on, Tom. With 2 Samuel 7 and Psalm 2, suddenly I think you've got the matrix in which Jesus's identity, self understanding, divinity, my messianic vocation, all of that begins to make sense and it coalesces under Jesus own self understanding of him, of himself as the Son of God. Yeah, so there we go.
- [11:26]
Tom Wright
I'm very much with you on this, Mike. I mean, the thing which I think is missing from so much debate on this is that in significant parts of Israel's scriptures, Yahweh himself, Israel's God, promises that he will come back in person, having abandoned the temple to its fate when the Babylonians moved in. That Isaiah 40 and 52 says very clearly he's coming back, we will all see him and he's coming back to redeem, to rescue, to forgive, to heal. But at no point in the second Temple period does anybody say this has actually happened. They rebuild the temple, they restart the sacrificial system, but the priests are bored in Malachi. They know that we aren't really there yet. And then when the New Testament is written, the way they talk about Jesus is of Jesus as the one who embodies that personal promise of Israel's God. Richard Hayes's comparatively recent book, Echoes of Scripture in the Gospels is pretty good on this. The way the Gospels are written written is to highlight those strands of what God said he would do in order to illuminate what Jesus was and did. That's something which used not to be even noticed, let alone mentioned in Biblical scholarship. But it's now back on the table and I think that's the matrix out of which one can give the right answer to Barth Ehrman and many others like him.
- [12:55]
Dr. Mike Bird
Indeed. Indeed. Well, let's push on to a slightly different question. We're moving from Christology, who is Jesus? To some doctrines of the sacraments. And here's a question from Melanie Lynn. She writes, raised in a Puritan heritage, I'm unfamiliar with high church practices, but wonder if I'm missing out on some of their richness. What is your view on Eucharistic adoration? There we go. Tom, how often are you adoring the Eucharist in your local Anglican church?
- [13:29]
Tom Wright
It depends what you mean by adoring and it depends what you mean by the Eucharist. Is this the whole meal or simply the bread or what is it? So let's just take the question slightly apart and I would say that from the Puritan time, which is we're Talking about late 16th and then through the 17th century particularly, there was a huge reaction against the way that medieval Western Roman Catholicism had been doing church. So that all sorts of people thought that as long as you went along and you went across yourself or went and genuflect or went to bow your head, that this was the real thing that mattered. And this got muddled up with two other issues. One is the whole question of justification that people thought this was people trying to do religious ritual in order to impress God, which then degenerates into some kind of sympathetic magic. You know, if I do this in the right order, then God will bless me or answer my prayers or whatever. And that seems to have very little to do with genuine faith, hope and love that you find in the New Testament. But then also it gets muddled up with various philosophical ideas which say that the reality of Christianity is purely spiritual, not material. So that anything that we do with physical objects, whether it's on a communion t or whether you call it an altar or not, and whether you kneel down or stand up, these are completely irrelevant because what matters is the soul or the heart and how the soul or the heart is relating to God. So those are two quite different strands. And then, of course, in addition to that, there's the great muddle which happened, I think, before the 16th century, but then, particularly in the 16th century, about the nature of sacrifice that the Protestant reformers were really worried about. Cathol clergy, Roman Catholic clergy, who believed that they were, as it were, re sacrificing Jesus in every Mass. Now, that was a double misunderstanding because in fact, traditional Roman Catholic teaching didn't say that the priest was sacrificing Jesus afresh, but rather with the collapse of time between the present moment and the past of God's action in Christ, that we were, as it were, being taken back to the crucifixion, so that the one sacrifice was being made present again in the present time that was misunderstood both by clergy and by laity. And many of the Protestants said, this is terrible. It means that the clergy think that they are doing the atoning event, which is an insult to Jesus because he was crucified once. Only Paul says he died for sins once for all, so he can't do it again and again and again. Meanwhile, the Roman Catholics were saying, in effect, you Protestant Protestants say that what you do when you are celebrating the Eucharist or calling it Holy Communion or whatever, that this is something different from what happened when Jesus died for our sins. So it's you Protestants who are saying that you're adding Something to the finished work of Christ. And that debate nearly got sorted out in the 16th century and then it fell apart again. This is cutting a long story very short, but it left people like the Puritans with that sense that whatever the Catholics do, we've got to do the oppos, that if they have an altar, we'll have a table, if they genuflect, we will stay standing or whatever. And we certainly won't do these manual acts like crossing ourselves. Although I notice that many Christians in the Protestant traditions now raise their hands in worship at a certain point, which is just as much of a manual act as crossing yourself. But still. So all of that's going on in the background. And part of the trouble there is that this has infected the way in which many Christian teachers, particularly in the Protestant Western churches, understand what they ought and ought not to be doing. So that there are some people, some churches to this day who think that anything you do to make the bread breaking service more informal is somehow striking a blow for the Gospel. And I want to say that's one misunderstanding building on top of another. That actually to have a proper liturgy, a liturgy which appropriately celebrates what Jesus did on the night he was betrayed, which tells the story and which accompanies it with whatever actions seem to be embodying our devotion at that point, that this is actually not just a good thing, but it's a way of honoring the great tradition. Because I'm often impressed by the fact that every week, every day since Pentecost, there have been followers of Jesus breaking bread and sharing wine and doing it in memory of Him. So that when we are doing that, I tend to attend the Eucharist once a week on Sunday mornings. Some people do it every day, some people do it once a month. There are some parts of Scotland where they do it once a year, which is just as solemn and serious as doing it once a week or once a day. But whenever we do it, we are in that long line, that long tradition, and that sustains us like family life sustains us. Good, healthy family life doesn't squash you into being somebody you aren't. It gives you a context to be the person that you can be. And the family life of the church enables us to be the people we're meant to be and called to be. So there are many high church practices, so called, which people have been worried about because they think we're being led back into Roman Catholicism. And the implication is we know that Roman Catholicism was wrong because of this and that and the Other. And all those 16th and 17th century polemics, I want to say, having engaged in dialogue with many Roman Catholic friends, we have misunderstood one another and we need to talk honestly about what we really believe is going on here. Now, in the middle of all of that, there is the other wrinkle, which is that ever since Thomas Aquinas in the Middle Ages, people have debated about whether the bread and the wine become the physical body and blood of Jesus. And some of the eucharistic practices, like devotion, are predicated on the assumption that, yes, this bread has ceased to be bread and it is now the body of Jesus. And therefore we should worship Jesus in the bread, even outside the parameters of the service, the liturgy themselves. I have a problem about that because. Well, at least two problems. One, the theology of Thomas Aquinas is based on the philosophy of Aristotle, in which there is a difference between the subst. Something that something really is, and the mere outward accidents. In other words, the bread remains bread in terms of you can do a chemical analysis on it and show that it is still made of wheat or whatever, but that it's got an inner reality known only to God, invisible to the human eye. And that inner reality is the reality of the body of Christ. Now, most of the medieval teaching didn't really cash that out. And most of the worshippers in the average Roman Catholic church in the 15th 16th century really did believe that when the priest at the altar had said those words, there was a physical change in the elements. This is cutting a long story very short, and there are reams of books and articles written about all this, but this is, I think, what was going on. So that anything which then implies that this is actually physically the physical presence of Jesus, I think is misleading. And I think it's misleading because of that Aristotelian philosophy which came in through Thomas Aquinas. Again, there are a thousand footnotes that could be put in here. But for me, when I come to the Lord's table, Sunday by Sunday, I am delighted to kneel, and as the hymn says, kneel and adore him. The Lord is his name. I am adoring Jesus. I am not adoring pouring a piece of bread. However, Jesus himself said, at the supper, this is my body given for you, this is my blood shed for you. And Jesus was channeling the whole Passover meal idea that when we are taking part in this Passover meal, we are the people who came out of Egypt, we are the redeemed people under the shed blood of the lamb. And so adoration within the context of the service seems to me thoroughly appropriate. However that is expressed when you take it out of the context of the liturgy, I then have anxieties about it. I know why people do this. I know that they then have special ways of revealing the bread and people worshiping. Ideally, those people need to know that it is the Jesus who lived and died and rose again and is ascended who they are worshiping, not this piece of bread. There is a danger with taking some of those devotional practices to the point where people then become deceived, as many in the 15th and 16th centuries were. So I think we need discernment. We need to lose some of our inhibitions, but then we need to recover our critical faculties. And that is a long process. And while it's going on, we are commanded to be charitable one with another and make the assumption that we are not idolaters but that we are all really seeking to worship the God who is revealed in Jesus. Long answer, but I hope it's helpful.
- [23:28]
Dr. Mike Bird
Yeah, well, Tom, I've got a very profound point to add to that and I'm going to tell everyone when we get back from this break.
- [23:37]
Tom Wright
Okay.
- [23:42]
John Lennox
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- [24:44]
Tom Wright
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- [25:05]
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- [25:36]
John Lennox
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- [25:38]
Dr. Mike Bird
45% off select styles, rules and restrictions may apply. Well, Tom, here's the thing I would add. I've attended a lot of churches where whenever they do the Lord's Supper, the first thing they do is spend a strange amount of time explaining why it's not a big deal, you know, that nothing magical is here, there's nothing special going on, you know, no one's getting saved. Which always made me think, well, if it's really so ho hum, then what was the point of doing the thing in the first place? One of the things I like being Anglican is that, you know, it's important. We might disagree on how it's important, but we all agree it's important. And I really do feel sorry for some churches that feel, you know, so afraid of being sacramental or being so afraid of treating it the Lord's Supper as a means of grace that they overemphasize the insignificance of what is going on on. And I mean, I feel like they're, they're, they're, their views of the sacraments are so impoverished they could qualify for theological food stamps because they're obviously, they obviously don't have a high view. You don't. You know, I would say mere memorial and Roman Catholic transubstantiation with adoration of the elements. Those are not the only two options. And traditionally, Protestants have had a pretty high view of both the preaching of the Word and the administration of the sacraments. And I'll never forget, you know, John Calvin's letter concerning the Lord's Supper where he said, you know, look, if, if nothing happens here, if there's no special event going on, then this, this meal has no point. There's no point in doing it if we're not somehow encountering God. Now Calvin very much believed in the spiritual presence of Christ in the Eucharist, not the physical sense, as per the medieval Catholic tradition. But you should think of the, the sacraments, the Lord's Supper as a big deal and make a big deal of it. That doesn't mean converting to Catholicism or Anglo Catholicism or going down, you know, a whole bunch of routes that ends up with you walking down the aisle, swinging incense and carrying a crucifer. There's, you know, it's, it's not binary. There's a few middling options. But anyway, let's move on to our next question. We've got another really good one from Hatton Dorado, who's got a question for you on doctrine, Sabbath, and the Ten Commandments. Her question is, what role do the Ten Commandments, particularly the Sabbath, play in a Christian's life today? You know, for me, I've experienced this question of profound way. When I lived in Scotland, there were two Lord's Day observant societies. I rented a house from a Presbyterian minister, and in the lease was a list of all the things we were not allowed to do in the house or around the house on Sunday. I wasn't allowed to mow the lawn, do gardening or hangout washing in the backyard. So Sabbath observance was embedded into my very lease agreement when I was renting a house in Scotland. What about yourself, Tom? I mean, where does the Ten Commandments figure in our ethics? And should Christians keep the Sabbath? I think that's what Heritin is asking us.
- [29:19]
Tom Wright
Yeah. I mean, the Ten Commandments are obviously basic in so many ways, both to the life of ancient Israel and reaffirmed in the New Testament, but they're not all on the same level. When God says, I am the Lord thy God who brought thee out of the land of Egypt, you shall have none other gods but me. That's a vast blanket condemnation of all idolatry and an invitation to worship God the Creator. That's a huge thing which we never should forget as the basis of everything. When we get down to the very specific things about theft or adultery or slander, whatever, then we see those reaffirms confirmed again and again in the New Testament. And when Jesus says, here are the two great commandments, love God and love your neighbor, both of which are themselves Old Testament commands, we can see how the loving the neighbor includes most of the commandments which aren't specifically about loving God. And when Paul sums up the Ten Commandments in two or three places, then he says pretty much the same. If there's any other commandment, it's summed up in this phrase, love your neighbor as yourself, because love works no ill to the neighbor. So love is the fulfilling of the law. But what's missing is the Sabbath. That in Paul, whenever he gives a summary of the Ten Commandments, the Sabbath has somehow dropped out. When Jesus in Mark 10, is addressing the rich young Ruler and says, if you want to enter life, keep the commandments. And he says which ones? And Jesus basically lists them, but he doesn't mention the Sabbath. And when the young man replies, he says, well, I've kept all these from my youth up. Again, doesn't mention the Sabbath. Which is is the more fascinating because in the Old Testament and in the Judaic tradition, up to and including and past the time of Jesus, Sabbath is absolutely mandatory. It's not a little optional extra. But in Romans 14 and one or two other passages, Paul says things like this person observes this day and that person chooses not to. Not a big deal, don't despise one another. That shouldn't be a fellowship breaker. What's he talking about? Special festivals? Sabbaths possibly. I think Sabbaths as well. For this reason, when Jesus said the time is fulfilled and the kingdom of God is at hand, one of the implications of that was that the great ultimate Sabbath, the moment of new creation, the time when God was coming to join heaven and earth, that great Sabbath had arrived. Jesus was himself the Sabbath in person. People have often said the Sabbath is to time what the temple is to place. And so just as Jesus was able to speak of the temple of his body, as John says in John Chapter two, so he was able to speak of, if you like, the Sabbath of his time. That when he said the time is fulfilled, this is that all those great Sabbaths, that the sabbaths were forward looking signposts pointing on to God's new creation. Jesus was saying new creation is right here in your midst. And I've often used the illustration. I was speaking in New York recently and I said in order to make this point, you put up signs to New York when you're 5 miles away, 10 miles away, 100 miles away this way to New York. You don't put up a signpost saying this way to New York in Times Square, because you're already there. In the same way, the Sabbaths were signposts pointing ahead to God's new creation. Jesus has a sovereign freedom to disregard the Sabbath. He seems to choose to disregard the Sabbath again and again, to the scandal of many, many people. But I think the underlying rationale is not because he is overthrowing their legalistic systems of law obedience, but because he is the Sabbath in person. He is God's new age arriving in the present, and therefore the Sabbath is fulfilled in Him. How do we then observe the Sabbath? And I now am preparing to make my home in a part of Scotland which is even more Sabbatarian. Than where you were living, where it's only recently that they've allowed the ferries to go over to the islands on the Sunday. And right now they're having a big debate as to whether the big supermarket in Stornoway, the capital of the Hebrides, should be allowed to open on a Sunday. And I'm standing right back from those discussions. I don't want to get involved as a newcomer, but it seems to me that is a misunderstanding, a misunderstanding which goes a long way back in Christian history. But actually, some of the reformers themselves, some of the early English reformers, were not Sabbatarians. They took roughly the same view that I would. They would say, of course you should go to church on a Sunday because it's the day when we celebrate the Lord's resurrection. But then God' new age has arrived in the present. That's what we are living by the Spirit now. So the idea that you've therefore got to have legislation as to what you can and can't do, hanging the washing out in the back garden or whatever, that's to misunderstand something has happened in Jesus and by the Spirit, which means that the Sabbath is already fulfilled. It's not abrogated, it's fulfilled. And we should be living in the Sabbath rest day by day in whatever way is appropriate.
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Dr. Mike Bird
Well, does that mean then, Tom, we should think of the Sabbath as fulfilled in Christ, not as a kind of silly Jewish ceremony that's been done away with, but a good thing that's been fulfilled? And rather than speak of the Sabbath, should we think of celebrating the Lord's Day?
- [35:09]
Tom Wright
Yeah, I think so. I mean, of course, that's one of the things which often Sabbatarians forget that Sunday, the Lord's day, was the first day of the week, not the seventh day of the week. Of course, because in the Western world we now have this thing called the weekend where people think of Sunday as the seventh day. And you can buy diaries, and I think this is one which start the week on Monday. Then people forget that keeping the seventh day holy would be Saturday. So actually, if you were going to be a strict Sabbatarian, you ought to go to Saturday. But, but, but, but. All sorts of ifs and buts there. And I would say, don't go down that rabbit hole, celebrate the Lord's Day, the day of resurrection. Precisely. Resurrection, because it's new creation. The Sabbaths were pointing forward. And the last great Sabbath was when God incarnate rested in the tomb after his crucifixion. And on the first day of the week, says John In John chapter 20, something totally new happen happened and the world has never been the same since.
- [36:13]
Dr. Mike Bird
Granted all that, do you think there is a principle we can take from the Sabbath as it's practiced and promised in the Old Testament, and see Sabbath or like a times of rest as, as what we can do as Christians, even though we're not bound, you know, by the, the Torah, the Jewish law, to make Friday night to Sunday a Saturday evening, our time of rest. Is there still some principle of you need to rest from your labors so the Lord can work in you? Is there still a principle that's valid?
- [36:49]
Tom Wright
Absolutely. But I mean, having worked for most of my professional life as a clergyman, then as every clergyman knows, it's very difficult to take Sunday as a day off. It's an extremely busy day and it's very difficult to take Saturday as a day off because your mind and heart are incubating all the things that you're going to have to do on the Sunday and often preparing physically for how the church is going to be, et cetera. So that for most clergy, taking a day off some other day in the week is a very good idea. And that's what I always tried to do when I was in full time ministry. And I would say that is part of a Sabbath principle, but it's not a legalistic thing about which day or how long, or is it sunset to sunset or whatever. So I think, yes, yes, the principle of a work life balance, a work rest balance is absolutely vital. But I would say that for human health, not specifically, because, oh my goodness, this is one of the ten commandments given by Moses on Mount Sinai. As with the other great commandments, these are commandments which are about the health of a whole human community. And in many cases, as with theft and murder and adultery, they still jolly well mean what they meant. But with Sabbath, I think we can detect precisely with Jesus and the Holy Spirit, the gift of God's peace. When Jesus says my peace I leave with you, God's peace I give to you, it seems to me there may there be something of a sense of you are now to figure out how to be Sabbath people in your lives. And most of us might hear that as a rebuke because we are too busy and doing too many things and dashing around around, and somehow there is to be a wisdom and a peace between ourselves and God's creation and between ourselves and one another, which I think, yeah, that's an agenda for today, but it isn't about do we or don't we keep the Commandments?
- [38:44]
Dr. Mike Bird
Yeah, that's a good way to put it because, you know, we live in a 24.7world, a seven day a week economy. You know, Sunday trading is kind of normal in a lot of places. So many things are open 24, 7 and, you know, finding time to switch off from, not just from work, but from, you know, social media, from the world, the busyness of life. I think that's one of the best things you can do to perpetuate your or to maintain your spiritual, mental and physical health. So, yeah, I think Sabbath is definitely a good principle. Tom, I want to just go back to one thing. I'm trying to imagine some of the other questions that our listeners would ask, particularly on the Ten Commandments come in. There's, there's a whole bunch of, of things we could do there. It's common to divide the Old Testament law up into three parts, which is civil about how to run a, you know, the ancient Israelite kingdom, civil ceremonial, like, you know, all the sacrifices in Leviticus and moral. And then you've got, you know, your ten Commandments and maybe a few other prohibitions here and there. Do you find that tripartite way of breaking down the law? Is that, that, is that something that's helpful or is it kind of external categories that people are imposing on their understanding of the Old Testament biblical laws?
- [40:04]
Tom Wright
Great question. I would be with the latter view that this may be helpful in some ways as a way of distinguishing and saying there are some things which were important for the ancient Israelite community, but not for us. But I think that's probably an early modern way of trying to get at something rather different, which is the great story of Scripture in which some things are appropriate at some time and then those things reach their God ordained climax and are not needed anymore. I mean, Paul's argument about the law in Galatians 3 or Hebrews Arguments about the sacrificial system and the abolition of the sacrificial system system with the death of Jesus. These are not exactly saying, well, they're moral, civil and ceremonial. And the civil law of ancient Israel kind of translates. And some of the English reformers were very interested in how that might work, kind of translates into the principles of how God wants his world to be put right. And it's about making wise judgments, about dealing with problems in society, about having appropriate, healthy authority structures in society as well. Which might well look very different from the ancient Israelite systems, although they too changed over time between The Babylonian exile and the time of Jesus. There were several different regimes which came and went, as you know. But particularly the distinction between ceremonial and moral, which was a way of people say in the Reformation period saying, so we don't do sacrifices anymore, so we now just have the moral ones instead. I think that is in danger of downgrading what the sacrificial system was all about. The sacrificial system was there because God has promised to dwell in the midst of his people. That's at the end of the book of Exodus. And if God is dwelling in the midst, then as people have often said, you're going to need some health and safety rules in order to cope with that. And that's what Leviticus is all about, that the temple needs to be purified again and again with this disinfectant, which is the sacrificial blood, because that's a way of honoring the fact of God coming to dwell in the midst of his people. Now God has come in Jesus to dwell in the midst of his people. And the sacrifice then that makes that possible is Jesus own sacrifice. And then the Holy Spirit is God coming to dwell in our hearts and our homes and our churches and our work, worship, and so on. And so we have to think about what is appropriate as how to live as the people in whose presence and midst God has come to dwell. And those are the points at which I want to say we should take those ceremonial laws and rethink them in the light of the new stage of God's economy that we have reached. And obviously the moral laws will translate out into very similar moral laws. But let's not be too quick to label things, things moral, civil, ceremonial, and then think that we can ditch two of those, don't need to worry about them anymore, and simply go for the moral. Because what was going on in those others is part of the great story of the people of God, the great story which is continuing. And we need to think about how that plays out, as that's why I wrote that book 20 years ago. Scripture and the authority of God. The whole scripture is authoritative, but how its authority lands through the five acts of God's great drama is something which has to be worked out with great sensitivity.
- [43:45]
Dr. Mike Bird
Yeah, Well, I mean, I was just thinking then of a lecture you delivered at St. Andrews about the history of Biblical studies at St. Andrews, where you pointed out one of the main reasons that people took classes on Old Testament is these were people from the ruling class of Scotland, and they were learning about the historical, historical books because that was providing a template on how to run a Protestant nation. So if you want to know how to be a, you know, a Scottish baron or a duke in the, you know, 16, 17, 1800s, you go to Saint Andrews University, you do Old Testament 101 and you study the, the example of, you know, Saul, you know, a bad king, David, a good king, and, and Hezekiah, Josiah, etc.
- [44:28]
Tom Wright
Etc.
- [44:29]
Dr. Mike Bird
Would you recommend this fig for the, for the British, for the British Prime Minister to. Do you think, Sir Keir Starmer, could he deal with some good Old Testament historical booklets?
- [44:38]
Tom Wright
I think it wouldn't go down badly if he was at least to say what does wisdom consist in, in these great old texts? And even if he didn't believe in the authority of scripture at all, and I have no reason to suppose that he does, nevertheless, there was hard won wisdom there. And the book of Proverbs and some of the great songs, psalms like Psalm 72, this is what the king should do. He should be looking after the poor and the widows and the orphan and the stranger. And those are not extra things that you do when you've done everything else. Those are the number one things that you do. Before you decide on penal policy, before you decide on economics, etc. Let's think about the poor and the widows and the stranger and the orphan. So I think there are problems, principles there. It was interesting. I mean, I remember doing that lecture and the point which was fascinating was that in the 17th century there were two professors of Old Testament and then the 18th century there was only one professor of Old Testament because that way of reading the Old Testament as a template for modern British political life died a death. People didn't think you could do that with the Old Testament anymore. They tried that and they reckoned it, it didn't work. And so they were being more pragmatic about their politics and then they wondered what was the Old Testament there for? Oh, well, it was to point ahead to Jesus and then suddenly everything was different. So that was a major shift even within the early modern period.
- [46:08]
Dr. Mike Bird
Yeah, that's good. Well, that's some fascinating stuff about the Sabbath and the Old Testament law and yeah, terrific stuff. Well, thanks everyone for listening. Let us know what you think. Go check out ask and anti wright.com where you can learn more about the show and you can send us some questions. If you want to listen to some more. If you want to listen to some of that classic Tom content from this podcast, then go to the back catalog, go to premiereunbelievable.com forward/shows and you can come out some of the best bits of previous episodes. Until next time, it's goodbye from Tom Wright. Goodbye and it's Goodbye from me, Mike Bird God bless everyone. We look forward to seeing you at the next episode of Ask Anti Write Anything. You've been listening to the Ask NT Write Anything podcast. Let other people know about this show by rating and reviewing it in your podcast provider.