← Ask NT Wright Anything
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- [00:01]
Justin Briley
Have you ever found yourself in a tough conversation about faith, unsure of what to say or how to say it? Maybe with a skeptic, a friend, or even a family member, we want to help. That's why we're giving you a free download of five Steps to Having Better Conversations. This powerful guide will equip you to navigate faith's discussions with confidence, wisdom and grace so that you can share your beliefs in a way that truly connects. Get your free copy now@premierinsight.org resources that's premierinsight.org resources. Don't miss out. Start having better, more meaningful conversations today. The Ask NT Write Anything Podcast.
- [00:54]
Mike Bird
Well, welcome to another episode of Ask nt Write Anything. This is the program where we answer your questions about the Bible, theology and living Christian life. I'm Mike Bird from Ridley College in Melbourne, Australia, and as always, I'm joined.
- [01:09]
Tom Wright
With I'm Tom Wright and I'm here in my study in Oxford in England.
- [01:13]
Mike Bird
It's great to be with you, Tom. Well, the program is going well. We keep getting questions in so people still have things that bother them, baffle them. And Tom, they want to hear what, what you think on these things. So it's a, this is a pleasure, it's an honor to keep working with you on this, on this program. And we've got a couple of good today, one about resurrection and another one about apostles and ministry. So let's, let's jump straight in. Let's jump straight in. Our first question this week comes from Bradley Bowen in Kirkland, Washington, usa, and he's got a question on the topic of resurrection and he asked this in light of individual resurrections in Jewish tradition, do you agree with William Lane Craig's view that first century Jews wouldn't have considered individual resurrection a possibility before the end times? Now, for those who don't know, William Lane Craig is a very famous Christian philosopher and theologian. He does a great job debating atheists and agnostics and various critics. He's a very smart guy, very philosophically savvy, a very good communicator as well. He seems to have said at some point that Jews would not have considered resurrection before the eschaton, before the end times, before the great restoration and reckoning of all things to be a real possibility. Tom, I suspect you're probably very sympathetic to William Lane Craig on this point, but can you spell out your precise view on this matter?
- [02:54]
Tom Wright
Yeah, I'm often asked about this because people do get genuinely confused during the course of Jesus public career. We see in Luke's Gospel that he raises from the dead a young man who's the only son of his mother, who's a widow. And that happens at the village called Nain. We see him famously going into the house where a man called Jairus has a daughter and she has just died. And the house is already full of people in mourning and wailing and weeping and so on. And Jesus goes into the room, raises the little girl from the dead with the famous phrase talitha kumai, little girl, get up. And then classically we have in John chapter 11, Jesus going to where his friend Lazarus is already in the tomb, having died three days earlier. And Jesus seems to have waited to go there. That's a very strange thing in itself. And then Jesus tells him to take away the stone. There isn't a smell, so it seems, which they'd expected. And. And Jesus summons Lazarus from the dead. So they look back those stories look back to stories of Elijah and Elisha in the Old Testament raising from the dead this or that or some other person. And so people have often said, well, resurrection from the dead, they seem to think it happened all the time. So it's not a big deal for Jesus to be raised from the dead as well. And then when people have said, as I myself have said, that the Judean people, those who did believe in resurrection, that is the Pharisees and those who listened to them, which was most people at the time, they were waiting for a large scale, last minute, everybody, all God's people being raised from the dead, that's what they were waiting for. So they weren't thinking of one person being raised from the dead in between. While. So people have come back to me and said, well, what about these other folk, including the ones that Jesus raised? Now here's the difference in those cases with Elijah and Elisha, in those three cases in Jesus public career, the people who were raised from the dead came back from the dead into the present life again. Lazarus was raised in order to continue with ordinary mortal, bodily living. Someday Lazarus was going to die again. And indeed, by the end of the chapter in John 11, it looks as though people are already plotting to kill him because he's good evidence for the claims of Jesus. So that they are coming back into a life like the present one, which is mortal, that is to say, which is going to die, which can get sick, et cetera, et cetera. Whereas as Paul makes it abundantly clear in Romans 6, and as the Gospel stories and the beginning of Acts seem to indicate, Jesus resurrection is qualitatively different Jesus goes through death and out the other side to be what Paul calls the first fruits of new creation. He is the first to be raised from the dead. That's really important in First Corinthians 15, in Colossians 1, because he is the beginning of a new creation. And as Paul says in Romans 6, when the Messiah is raised from the dead, he will never die again. Death has no more dominion over him. That's totally different from what happened to all those others that I've mentioned. So of course, the same word resurrection would apply to both, because resurrection is about bodies that were thoroughly dead becoming thoroughly alive again. But the Christian meaning of resurrection, as in Jesus resurrection and the promised resurrection of all Jesus people, is about people going through death and out the other side into new creation, which is then by definition immortal. That is to say, undiable, will never die again. There's a mistake here people make in translations of Revelation 21 when it says the dwelling of God is with humans. The old translation was the dwelling of God is with men, in order to avoid the masculine word men. Some modern translations have said the dwelling of God is with mortals. But that's not the point. The point is they are not mortal anymore. They are human. They are bodily, but they are now immortal. So what we're talking about is an immortal physicality. Now, that's the thing that hadn't happened yet. You can see this in Mark, chapter nine, when Jesus says, when they're coming down the mountain after the transfiguration, he says, don't tell anyone what you just saw until the Son of Man is raised from the dead. And Mark says that they argued with one another about what the rising from the dead might mean. Because as far as they were concerned, if you're with the person you think is the Messiah, and if you just had this wonderful revelation from God, this is my beloved Son. Listen to him. Then he's not going to die, surely. And what then would the rising from the dead mean? They are thinking in terms of arising from the dead, which will be all God's people at the end of time. Jesus is hinting already that he, as the representative of God's people, will rise from the dead in that full, rich sense ahead of the last days. So that the other wrinkle which comes in here is when Herod Antipas hears about Jesus going around doing all the things he's doing. Some people think he might be John the Baptist raised from the dead. Now that's an interesting thing. Not that we expect to learn good 1st century Jewish theology from silly old Herod. But even granted, there's something, something there. It's Herod's guilty conscience because he'd had John killed. And so now here's somebody else doing remarkable things and being hailed as a prophet of God's kingdom. Maybe God has sent John the Baptist back again. Now it looks as though this can't actually be resurrection because John had been beheaded in Herod's prison and his disciples had taken away his body. So I don't think that means that Herod is going to send a search party to look at John the Baptist's grave and see whether he's still there or not. It's just a vague saying. Oh, maybe it's John the Baptist back again. And so I think the key thing then is that the claims for Jesus resurrection, and that's what William Lane Craig and others would be arguing about here, are claims about something happening which people, insofar as they believed in resurrection, they had thought this was going to happen at the end of time. And it's happened to one person in the middle, which is a shock. And that's one of several features of what they said about Jesus resurrection, which shows it is both like and unlike what people, resurrection believers of the time would have expected.
- [09:46]
Mike Bird
Yeah, I'll never forget reading that book of yours, what St. Paul really said, where you said that Paul was saying that God had done for one man in the middle of history what the Jews thought he was going to do for all people at the end of history. And, you know, that's what created a little bit of confusion with, you know, with resurrection. Oh, I mean, you find the same thing in John's Gospel. Where was it John 11, where, you know, Jesus is trying to comfort. I think it's, I think it's, I think it's, it's Martha, I think.
- [10:19]
Tom Wright
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
- [10:20]
Mike Bird
Where he says to her, you know, your brother will rise again. And she says, I know he will rise on the last day. And then she says, no, but I am the resurrection life, whoever believes in me, you know, we'll have, you know, eternal life. There's both a life to be gained in the present, but there's also the not yet and the, the great resurrection. And what Lazarus gets is more of a, a miraculous resuscitation rather than the resurrection for which Jesus is the first fruits and foretaste. But I mean, I think there are so many questions we could have on resurrection. You know, you've got the individual stories, the resurrection appearances, that real strange one at the end of Ma Matthew's gospel about when people came out of the tombs. There's a lot of things people might want to ask. If you've got any other questions about resurrections, plural, what it means in light of the Bible storyline, you should definitely let us know. Go to askantirite.com and yeah, hit us up with your resurrection questions because I think we've got a whole bunch of good material to draw on that people may have a few curious questions about. So if you've got some of those curious questions, hit us up on the show. But we need to move on to our next topic, which is a right ripper. But before we do that, Tom, we're going to take a brief break.
- [11:43]
Justin Briley
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- [12:46]
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Mike Bird
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- [13:20]
Mike Bird
Well, welcome back. We're going to continue with our Q and A with Tom where we put to Tom some really hairy questions and then he normally gives them. A haircut would be the best way to describe it. Something nice and arty rather than just a blade one all over. But we've got a question. A great question from Syriza Rodriguez, it's about church leadership. And so Ritza asks, what was the role of an apostle? Were they elders, pastors, or preachers? I think this is a good question, because the role of an apostle, it seems to include a lot of different things. Sometimes I think the. The distinctions between these roles are a little bit different. Like, what's the difference between a pastor and a teacher? What is the difference between a prophet and a teacher? Because sometimes in the New Testament, these roles kind of get put together in very close position. Like in the church in Antioch, you have prophets and teachers and Ephesians 4, they all kind of get linked and maybe they kind of overlap a bit. But, Tom, when it comes to an apostle, is it all that different to an elder pastor or preacher?
- [14:36]
Tom Wright
Yeah, I think the word apostle already in the New Testament time was able to be used in different senses. And in Luke's Gospel, when Jesus calls the twelve, he sends them out. And the word apostle in Greek means ones who are sent out. But then when Paul is talking about his own apostleship and having to defend his own status as an apostle, as he does in various places, particularly in the Corinthian letters, then for him, apostle clearly means somebody who has seen the risen Jesus. At the beginning of 1 Corinthians 9, he says, am I not an apostle? Have I not seen Jesus, my Lord? Now, the Corinthians had had many different spiritual experiences, probably too many for their own good sometimes. And they had plenty of elders and pastors and teachers and prophets and speakers in tongues and goodness knows what. But they didn't in their community have anyone who had seen Jesus raised from the dead. And so Paul is differentiating himself from the Corinthian church at that point. Then in the second letter, he gets into the question of who is a false apostle and who is a true apostle. And how would you know? That's a whole other. But certainly in the New Testament, there seems to be a fluidity of role. And I come from a church which has had bishops and priests and deacons, and basically that's it. And then various lay officers, like church wardens and sidesmen and that sort of thing. But those are sort of ad hoc. Nobody has claimed that you get church wardens in the New Testament, although some people would align the role of deacon with that sort of job, although it might be church treasurer or it might be all sorts of things. But what we have in the New Testament is a few lists of people doing things. You mentioned in the church in Antioch, there are prophets and Teachers and so on. That's in Acts 13. But in Ephesians 4, there is this list which Paul rattles off, which is like, but not the same as the list which he rattles off in 1 Corinthians 12. Now, if Paul had had in mind a very clear order that some people are this, some people are that, some people are the other, and evermore shall be so, that would have shown up pretty clearly. But it doesn't in either of those places or in the other passages, like say, 1 Peter, where different roles are mentioned. And my take would be this, that these words that we have, like pastor, evangelist, prophet, teacher, these are fluid roles that can morph into one another. And you can see this laid out for us in the book of Acts, because in the book of Acts, in chapter six, there is a major problem in the early church. Interestingly, the first real social problem that they had in the early church was when the widows from different ethnic contexts. Actually, it was linguistic ethnic contexts, some Aramaic speaking and some Greek speaking, they were being differentiated against one another in terms of the distribution of food every day, because the church was now living as an extended family, which means, what do families do together? They eat together. So the church was looking after widows who didn't have people to provide for them. And there was a problem about how that was being done. So the apostles say, we know what our job is. Our job is the word of God and prayer. We've got to be people who are teaching and expounding scripture. We've got to be people who are regularly praying for, interceding for the whole church, leading the church in worship and prayer. Therefore, it isn't our job to be organizing the food distribution. So they pray and they choose these seven, who we then subsequently call deacons, among whom are Stephen and Philip. Now. So they lay hands on them and they're getting on with them. They're doing their jobs. Almost at once, Stephen emerges as the church's leading apologist. Hang on, Stephen, you're supposed to be a deacon. You're supposed to be ministering food to widows who are being. And Stephen says, well, God seems to be giving me this gift. And I find myself in controversy with people who are saying that Jesus can't be the Messiah. And I think I can see where the nub of the issue is. So I'm going to debate them. And he does, and he gets martyred for his purposes. Now, that wasn't in the job description of the deacon in Acts chapter six. And then likewise, Philip, once there is persecution after the death of Stephen, they all scatter, except for the apostles who stay in Jerusalem. And Philip, you're supposed to be looking after the widows. Well, but God calls Philip somehow to go and be an evangelist in Samaria. Well, that's extraordinary. We didn't know Samaria was going to have this stuff. But then no sooner has he done that and that's all been ratified, then Philip suddenly gets picked up by the Holy Spirit and sent off to the desert road going down through Gaza, where he sees somebody coming by in a chariot, and he goes and meets him and he explains what Isaiah 53 is all about, because the chap just happens conveniently to be reading it now. Again, that's not in the job description of a deacon. So when I read those stories, I'm reminded of what my life was like when I was bishop, when one of the things I did regularly was to lay hands on people and pray for the Holy Spirit to come upon them and equ. Equip them. That was the normal thing we did in the service we call confirmation or then in ordination, when people were to be deacons or priests in the church, then ditto, you lay hands on them and pray for God's Spirit to do whatever he's going to do through them. And I've had the experience then of meeting people who I've laid hands on and prayed for, who said to me a year or two later, e Bishop, if I'd known what God was going to do in my life, once you'd said prayers for me, for the Holy Spirit to come upon me, I'm not sure I'd have been up for that in the first place. And so it says to me that God wants people to be teachers, God wants people to be evangelists, pastors, et cetera. These roles overlap. Paul himself was most, if not all of those things. He was certainly an apostle, he was certainly a teacher, one of the greatest ever. He was certainly an evangelist, announcing to people that Jesus is Lord. He was certainly a pastor. Look at his speech to the Ephesian elders in Acts, where he says, night and day I went from house to house, exhorting and warning you with tears. That's the work of a pastor. So if Paul can do all those things, then God may well want this person to do one or two of those things. And then as they learn and grow and develop, that might change. So this is a warning against any rigid categorization which says, hey, stay in your lane. You weren't called to do that. The answer is God, the Holy Spirit. The Spirit blows where it wills and you hear the sound of it, but you don't know whether it's coming from or where it's going to. So it is with everyone who is born and gifted of the Spirit. So it seems to me the church. Church does need elders. That's people who are the sort of solid, sensible people who have been around a while and know what's what and understand some of the dynamics and have a maturity to them. It needs pastors who will go and get alongside people. It badly needs teachers. One of the main things in the early church that they taught people to do was to read so that they could read the Scriptures, because an awful lot of converts would be from backgrounds where they weren't particularly literate. So there's a teaching role, the teaching of Scripture, the teaching of the Christian way of life, and these merge into one another. And the whole church has these whole ministries. And the ministries are meant to support one another and to contribute to the unity of the church. The danger with pigeonholing people and saying, you stay in your lane and I'll stay in mine, is that it tends then to pull the church apart. And people go with this person because they like him or her as a pastor with that person because they like their teaching. No, the aim, as in Ephesians 4, is God gives many minutes ministries to serve the unity and mission of the whole church.
- [22:34]
Mike Bird
Well, that's fantastic, Tom. I mean, I. As you were saying that, I had so many other questions about the nature of the priesthood. Like when Paul talks about the priestly service of proclaiming the gospel. What's the function of elders today? I mean, there is one final question I've got, I've got to hit you up with, and that is your view, view on apostolic succession. What is apostolic succession? Because as Anglicans, we kind of live between two worlds. The sort of, the. Some elements of the medieval tradition, the classic Christian tradition, but also we are. We are Protestants as well. Is the apostolicity. Is apostolic succession the way we hand on the apostolic message to our congregation into the ordinance and to, you know, priests and deacons? Is that our apostolic succession or. Or is it more of a genealogy of ordination where people laid hands on you and you became a deacon, a priest, a bishop, and then you've laid hands on other people as deacons, priests, and they've become bishops and then they'll go on and lay hands? So what is apostolic succession? What's your understanding of that?
- [23:46]
Tom Wright
I think again and again there are all sorts of good things which God has given to the church, which then can get corrupted or can become parodies of themselves. And the idea that as long as somebody's laid hands on you, who had hands laid on them, and in a chain going back, supposedly, to the apostles, as long as that's happened, then these people are priests, whatever, that's in real danger of then becoming a casual thing, like you see in many parts of the medieval church and on in different parts now, where once somebody's had hands laid on them, then they can more or less do what they like. But they are now stamped with this indelible character that goes back to a Latin phrase. And the danger with that, of course, is complacency and corruption. And we know only too well that both of those can and do happen. But the reason why apostolic succession in some way or other matters is because with every generation there is a tendency, a temptation, to think we're the ones who've got it right. And these old people in church, they don't know what's going on. So we're doing something quite new. And there's a danger now with church planting and with new churches springing up that haven't got any connection, connection with anything historic, that they think that God is doing a totally new thing. And those funny buildings down the road that call themselves churches, they're really not part of the same deal at all. And sometimes when those movements happen, then people do happen to bump into people in part of the older or mainline churches or whatever, and discover they seem to be lovers of Jesus as well. They seem to be saying their prayers as well. They are invoking the power of the Holy Spirit as well, kind of, what's not to like? And that's when we are reminded that actually the church is part of the people of God, from Abraham stretching forwards to God's new creation. And actually the unity of the church, as I hesitate to use the words either organization or institution, because both of those smack of the hardening of the arteries and the corruption, et cetera. But the continuity of the people of God from generation to generation absolutely matters. The church does not invent itself. With every generation, the church is rooted, rooted in Jesus himself, in the Scriptures, in the first witnesses. And then it celebrates the work, as we said in a previous question of the great fathers in the first five or six centuries. It celebrates great teachers from all contexts and learns from them and thanks God for them, and doesn't imagine that it can be freestanding and going out on its own. So I think that's what apostolic succession really, really means. And the Church of England, as you say, or the Anglican Communion, is in an interesting position because whereas some of the Protestant churches in the 16th century were very clear that they were breaking any sense of physical continuity with the older Roman churches, the Anglican Church began with bishops who had themselves been consecrated as bishops within the Roman Catholic Church. Even though some of them, like Cranmer and Ridley and Latimer just down the road from where I'm sitting, were actually burnt at the stake by the authorities at the time, nevertheless, they were in the historic succession. And so for me, apostolic succession is part of the fact that history matters. History is not, oh well, who cares what happened last generation or 10 generations ago? No, Psalm 90 still is really, really important. Lord, Thou has been our refuge from one generation to another. And there is that sense of things being passed on. And there are formal ways of doing that by being ordained by somebody who themselves ordained. There are informal ways of doing that by being taught by people who were clearly soaked in the older traditions, etc. Not to say there aren't new things to happen. God is always doing new things. But beware of the idea that we can be reinventing it just from scratch, as though what went before doesn't matter. So, yeah, there are pitfalls with a kind of wooden theory of apostolic succession or, or what people used to call the pipeline theory of grace, that God just pours grace into a drainpipe and it goes on down and we happen to be at the bottom of it. Stephen Neill once said to me, there is no such thing as grace. Grace isn't a thing. There is a gracious God, but it's a God who works in and through history. And the continuity of history matters, as well as the rejuvenating power of the Spirit in every generation.
- [28:27]
Mike Bird
Okay, fascinating. I think this could lead to some very good follow up about, you know, what it means to be an app, you know, one holy, catholic and apostolic church. And if people have got questions on that again, we'd love to hear them. And you can drop those questions@askantyright.com well, that's all we've got time for this week, Tom. It's been great to engage you on these questions of the apostles and resurrection. I mean, this is, you know, this is typical of some of the great stuff we get to cover on this podcast. And we still have more good stuff to come because people keep sending us really good questions. So next time when we're back, we'll be answering more questions, we'll be hearing more from Tom on that. Take care until then. And we look forward to seeing you on the next episode of Ask nt Write Anything.