← Ask NT Wright Anything
Ask NT Wright Anything
S2E9 Resurrection, judgment, and salvation— NT Wright and Mike Bird break it down
00:34:14
Loading summary
Transcript34 lines
- [00:00]
Samsung Voice
I can say to my new Samsung Galaxy S25 Ultra, hey, find a keto friendly restaurant nearby and text it to Beth and Steve. And it does without me lifting a finger so I can get in more squats anywhere I can. 1, 2, 3.
- [00:15]
Commercial Announcer
Will that be cash or credit?
- [00:17]
Mike Bird
Credit.
- [00:17]
Commercial Announcer
4 Galaxy S25 Ultra the AI companion that does the heavy lifting. 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.
- [00:31]
Tom Wright
Over the past several days, three females have been found dead.
- [00:36]
Mike Bird
Looks like someone's going after these girls. Then they have to know to watch their backs.
- [00:42]
Commercial Announcer
Streaming March 13th.
- [00:43]
Mike Bird
You really want what happened to this.
- [00:44]
Commercial Announcer
Woman happened to you.
- [00:45]
Mike Bird
Exactly why I need to keep going on this.
- [00:48]
Commercial Announcer
Starring Emmy Award winner Amanda Seyfried.
- [00:50]
Mike Bird
Worry about what you're gonna find. So am I.
- [00:54]
Commercial Announcer
Long Bright River a limited series streaming March 13th only on Peacock.
- [01:01]
Mike Bird
Well, hello and welcome to another episode of the Ask Anti Write Anything podcast. I'm your co host Mike Bird from Ridley College in Melbourne, Australia and I'm.
- [01:10]
Tom Wright
Joined by I'm Tom Wright from Oxford.
- [01:13]
Mike Bird
In England and we're going to try answer your questions about the Bible, faith and the Christian life. First up, we have a question from David Frampton. This is what David asked and David's in Southampton. He says for a modern reader, the argument of peter in Acts 2, quoting Psalm 16, you know, as evidence that the psalmist spoke in advance about Jesus rising from the dead doesn't seem remotely convincing. Although the psalm speaks of God's deliverance, it's talking about God rescuing from dying rather than beyond it. This is worrying because Peter would have received this kind of understanding from Jesus, such as, you know, the Emmaus story. And Jesus is said to on several occasions have taught his disciples that he must die and rise on the third day. How do you deal with this issue? Tom, you've recently done a commentary on the book of Acts. It's a cracking good read. And you would have done that great sermon that Peter delivers on the day of Pentecost where he quotes Psalm 16 about God would not allow David to stay in the pit, but brought him back from life. You know, is it with it when it comes to the apostles, when it comes to interpreting the Bible, should we believe them but not imitate them? Should we not interpret the Old Testament the way the apostles did? I mean, if you're a professor, would you fail Peter on an exegesis class of the Old Testament?
- [02:43]
Tom Wright
It's a great question and of course one of the first things to say is that we again and again have to refresh our sense of how 1st century Judeans, Jesus contemporaries were reading their scriptures themselves. And as we know from all sorts of sources at the time, there are many different ways of reading and understanding the Scriptures. And the rich Judean tradition of multilayered interpretation of Scripture is there all the way through. I mean, every time they celebrate Passover to this day, Jewish communities, they're telling the Exodus story, but they're hearing all sorts of echoes and resonances. Not just the exodus from Egypt, but the return from Babylon on, and then they hope next year in Jerusalem that it's still a forward look. And nobody says, but hang on, those texts were about that. How can you apply them to this? Because in the Judean tradition all the way through, there is this sense of patterns, of layers, of different levels of interpretation of one text which can resonate out and mean all sorts of things in different contexts. And we see this going on in the Bible itself, in the Torah itself, in Genesis and so on, and the echoes in Genesis and Deuteronomy and then the way the prophets pick that up. So I think what we're looking at in the New Testament and in the teaching of Jesus and then in the preaching of the apostles is a further extension of this and a sense of oh my goodness, these texts just came to life in a new way. And that's part of what's going on in the Emmaus story, which David Frampton refers to in Luke 24. And of course, if you read Luke and Acts as a consecutive two book sequence, then Luke 24 is not far before Acts chapter two. It's just in the background there. But what's going on is Jesus saying, don't you realize this is how it had to be? And part of the answer is they didn't realize because a lot of people at the time will have read prophecies or heard prophecies about death and resurrection and thought that they were metaphorical about the restoration of an earthly kingdom in Jerusalem or something like that. And Jesus has to say to the two on the road to Emmaus, don't you realize, Let me explain to you, this is how the Scriptures actually work. And that isn't because Jesus is doing sort of fancy footwork with exegesis and saying, well, it looks as if it means that, but really I'm giving you a secret interpretation. It's because the entire pattern of what Christians call the Old Testament, the whole Tanakh, the Hebrew Scriptures, is a huge story about the Creator God rescuing his people from one thing after another after another, another, whether it's from Egypt, from Babylon, as I said before, and then within that, using the language of resurrection, as in Ezekiel 37, where Ezekiel 37 is a vision of a valley of dry bones. And Ezekiel is full of these extraordinary visions which we might call dreams or fantasies or whatever, apocalyptic imaginations. And it's very hard to know, if we'd pressed one of Ezekiel's contemporaries, would they have said, he's actually talking about bones coming together in the desert and forming human beings, et cetera? They would have said, no, no, no, this is about the return from exile. And the text actually says, this is about the return from exile. So what we've got is resurrection texts which are being interpreted as about return from exile, but we're also getting return from exile texts being interpreted about resurrection. And there is this rich confluence where it's very artificial to say, oh, it must have meant X, therefore it can't also mean Y when we see how the layering works and how that then plays out. But when you get in Mark 9, after the transfiguration, Jesus says to the disciples, don't tell anyone about this until the Son of Man is raised from the dead. And the disciples say, what's this resurrection from the dead stuff all about? Because as far as they were concerned, resurrection was going to happen to all people at the end of time, not to one person in the middle. And so what Peter is doing is saying, look, there's a whole layer of meaning in Psalm 16 which we might have missed. But when we now look back and see that God has taken this Jesus and made him not only alive, but has made him Lord of the world, this all suddenly fits and creates a bigger picture within which the earlier expectations than the different ways people were reading scripture find a natural home, even though it isn't a one for one correspondence. So I think we have to kind of lighten up from our rather rationalist what did this originally mean? And it can't meant anything else approach and say, no, that's not how Judeans in the first century are reading Scriptures, and certainly not how the Christians are reading their scriptures. And to be able to see and hear the resonances and echoes is, I think, actually part of Christian discipleship. Of course, that can wander off into fantasy and people can make all sorts of things and hope that they will somehow fit together. So there is a discipline to it as well. It's not just unlimited guesswork, but the basic pattern of God rescuing people and that ultimately, because God is the creator, he wants to do new creation, and in Jesus, he's come and embodied that new creation in himself. And then you look back and say, oh, my goodness, all that stuff from David and the prophets and Moses, et cetera, this is where all this was going. So that's how I would approach it.
- [08:20]
Mike Bird
Yeah, I think you've got to play Psalm 16 in that interpretation, that context, that interpretive strategy for wrestling with the Old Testament and reading it in light of their Messianic faith. So, yeah, in. In Psalm 16, assuming it's written by David, it says, you will not, you know, you will not say, you will not abandon me to the realm of the dead. Except, you know, David did die and his tomb was still there. So this psalm cannot necessarily been about David. So it has to be about someone else who is of the Davidic line, but who was not left in the. In the, in the realm of the dead.
- [08:55]
Tom Wright
From that point of view, it's rather like the argument that the letter to the Hebrews uses, where the letter to the Hebrews, for instance, takes Psalm 95 and says, There's a warning here that you. Unless you're faithful, you will not enter my rest. And you can see the author of Hebrews sort of mentally scratching his head and saying, that's funny, because Joshua had given them rest. But this psalm seems to be speaking about something out beyond that. Therefore, there remains a rest for the people of God. And several of the arguments in Hebrews work like that. And so I think that's the kind of what we're doing is. Well, that was an original meaning, but there does seem to be a superfluity, something going out beyond.
- [09:33]
Mike Bird
Or there's, there's, there's a. Not yet in a lot of those promises that find their.
- [09:38]
Tom Wright
Yes.
- [09:38]
Mike Bird
That find their now in whole or in part in Jesus. Yeah, you know. You know, maybe you should write a book on the Psalms one day, Tom, about a Christian reading of. Oh, wait, I believe you already have.
- [09:50]
Tom Wright
I did, about 10 or 15 years ago.
- [09:52]
Mike Bird
Well, how to read the Psalms as a Christian, I think would be. Maybe that would be a. A good question. If anyone's asked questions about how to read the Psalms as a Christian, I, I think that would be a good one. Well, anyway, Tom, let's move on to our next question. This is from Dennis Gordon in New Zealand. So just across the. The Tasman Sea. And this is. Well, this is another question about resurrection. He says, in the general resurrection, will those who never knew Jesus in this life be raised with A new creation body to a mortal life. I mean, that's interesting. Is the resurrection life, a kind of temporary mortal life with the prospect of death happening again?
- [10:35]
Tom Wright
Yeah. Actually the script I've got here from Dennis says, will they be raised with a new creation body or to mortal life? By which I take it he means that there's two options there. Are we talking about new creation which would be immortal, or are we talking about them being raised to a body which would then have to go and die again? Now this touches on one of the points which, as I argue in my big book on the resurrection and resurrection of the Son of God, this remains, I think, unresolved in the New Testament itself because the New Testament writers are feeling their way forwards into the huge, possibly unspeakable realms of God's ultimate plans. Because in Paul it really does look as though the promise of resurrection is for those who are in Christ, those who are indwelt by the Spirit. And Paul never mentions the bodily resurrection of those who are not in Christ, those who are not indwelt by the Spirit. However, in John chapter 5, Jesus says, and he's picking up here from many Judean traditions, that the hour is coming when those in the tombs will hear his voice and come out. Those who've done good to the resurrection of life and those who've done evil to the resurrection of judgment. And several of the very early Christian interpreters of the New Testament are people like Justin Martyr in the second century and on through Irenaeus to some of the third century fathers. They argued to and fro about this and some of them argued, for instance, that since the people who were still stuck in their sins had sinned in the body, they needed to be given a new body so that they could be punished in the body. Now the New Testament doesn't quite say that. On the other hand, it gets towards that in 2nd Corinthians 5 when Paul says, we must all stand before the judgment seat of Christ so that we may each receive what is due because of what we've done, whether good or bad. So that's perhaps the closest Paul gets to pointing towards a resurrection of the unrighteous. And of course then in Revelation we do have all the dead lined up and the books are opened, et cetera, et cetera. But as with other things in Revelation and these forward looking things, I come back to what I've said many, many times, these are language about the future, which is signposts pointing into a fog. It's a way of saying something like that. Is going on there. We don't have very good language for what it'll be like. We don't have a mathematical A plus B equals will. See. And in particular, I think the New Testament writers, following exactly from Jesus, both announcement of the kingdom and his own achievement in his death and resurrection and ascension, that they are absolutely clear that the God who has raised Jesus from the dead will put the whole creation right at the end. And the question then always comes back, and we meet this on this show again and again, what then happens when God puts everything right to those who in the present life have stoutly resisted or God's attempts to put them right, let alone to put the world right? And ultimately the New Testament doesn't give the sort of medieval answers to that. A sort of easy going, oh, well, that lot's going off to heaven and that lot's going off to hell. End of conversation. The New Testament is probing the whole time something about what it might mean to fail to worship God, to fail to love him, to fail to allow his love and his Spirit to infuse one. So that then is there to be a new life for those like that? And if so, what will that be like? So it really is. This question is more about what do we say, drawing on both Paul and John, what do we say about those who in this life have absolutely resisted the claim of the creator God, the claim of the love of God in Christ on their lives? And I think the main sort of general summary that we come back to is that God will do all things well, even though we at the moment can't necessarily analyze what that will look like in individual cases. But clearly from John 5, Jesus is teaching that there will be something which can be called a resurrection of judgment. That is God giving these people their moment in court in order to hear the verdict, as it were. That's a pretty terrifying thought, and certainly it shouldn't lend us any sense of, oh, well, we'll be all right. But as for that lot, you know, as soon as we start thinking like that, we are probably in trouble ourselves, in danger of pride or a casual approach or whatever. But it's a way of saying God will do justice in the end, God will put the world right in the end. And those who persist in rejecting that will themselves find that they are rejected. Whatever language we are going to use for that terrible prospect.
- [15:27]
Mike Bird
That's a good way of thinking about resurrection to life and judgment. Well, so far we've covered some good stuff. We've got Psalm 16 being left in the grave and resurrection. I think this is a good point to take a break, come back, and we'll talk about a question on faith and works. Welcome back. We're continuing our time of answering your questions about all things pertaining to the Bible, faith, spirituality, anything you want to know. I'm joined with NT Wright. And now we have a great question from Maggie Weaver in if I Got this Right, Stoystown in the United States, Maggie writes. Hello, Tom. Thank you for all the work you've done in this area of apologetics. It has been a great help to me through some doubts that I've been working through. But this past four, me and my family read through the New Testament and I couldn't help but notice the differences between the teachings of Jesus and the teachings of Paul. Paul is adamant that salvation is by faith alone, but I'm not so sure that's what Jesus is pointing to. He has obvious standards of how we are to act, and it seems like the book of James says the same thing. James, chapter 2, verses 14 to 26, especially leaning on a workspace salvation. I would love to hear your thoughts, as this has been very troubling to me. Tom, is there a contradiction between Paul and James and Jesus when it comes to salvation? Is it the two Jewish brothers against the apostle to the Gentiles?
- [17:12]
Tom Wright
Yeah, great question, and thanks to Maggie Weaver for this. This comes up a lot. But there's a preliminary thing which I want to say, which is that the main difference between Jesus and Paul, almost at the level of structure of how narrative of the early church works, is that in an image which I've often used, Jesus is like the person who composes the music. Paul is like the person who teaches people to sing or play the music. And the difference between the composer and the conductor is that the conductor is doing something quite different. He or she isn't recomposing the music. He's trying to be loyal to the music, but now he's getting people to sing or play it. And of course, sometimes the composer themselves might come along and say, actually, I'm going to conduct this next piece. But you see, we ought to expect Jesus has accomplished something. Paul is applying it. And again, there's all the difference in the world between accomplishment and application. The person who invents some great new piece of technology is probably not going to be the same person who markets it or who teaches people how to plug it in or whatever it may be. These are quite separate tasks. So we shouldn't be surprised that things come out differently and particularly because neither Jesus nor Paul is teaching, teaching an abstract theory of how to go to heaven. I suspect from the way that Maggie Weaver has put her question, she and her family and friends are still thinking in terms of salvation as how do I get to heaven? Do I do it this way? Do I do it that way? Whereas, in fact, the main story the New Testament is telling, the whole Bible is telling, is how God wants to come and dwell with us. The strap line at the end of Revelation is the dwelling of God is with humans, not the dwelling of humans is with God. And again, these are big, general things. But then when it comes to specifics, Jesus is doing everything that is necessary for God's new creation to come about, in which people will be rescued from sin, corruption, death, et cetera, et cetera. And what Paul is doing is explaining in the wider Gentile world and in the polyglot world of a town like Antioch, where there are Jews and Gentiles and people of every race and every color and language, he's explaining that what matters for membership in the family of Jesus is not your keeping of the Jewish law, but the faithfulness of Jesus and the answering faithfulness that you have to Jesus. In other words, every time Paul is talking about this, by grace you are saved through Faith. That's Ephesians 2. Or then particularly the great arguments in Galatians and Romans and a few echoes in the Corinthian letters as well. Every time he's doing that, he seems to have in mind the fact that because what matters is faith, the faithfulness of Jesus to God's plan, and our faith in Jesus to have fulfilled that plan. This means that the ground is even and that Jews and Gentiles and people of every race and language and tribe and tongue are all standing on a level of gratitude to God for what he's done in Jesus. That's the crucial move to make. And some people have been very alarmed at that. As though this is a secular version of the spiritual gospel, or as though this turning soteriology into ecclesiology, in other words, salvation into the church. For Paul, these all run together. One of the ways that you know that God has saved and is saving you is that you're part of this amazing thing called the body of Christ, the people in whom God's Spirit is active and the people who thereby find the fruit of the Spirit welling up within them. And you'll notice as well that in the Gospels, Jesus says from time to time. I remember being worried about this myself when I was much younger Jesus says from time to time, your faith has saved you. Usually when he's healed somebody like the woman with the issue of blood who comes and touches him in the crowd, and she's very nervous about what she's done. Jesus says, daughter, your faith has saved you. Now, some translators would say has made you well. But Luke is quite clear that salvation is not, oh well, there's a salvation called going to heaven, and then there's a sort of OD version of salvation, which is getting better. Here, salvation is all about new creation. A new creation is anticipated in healings, and Jesus himself declares, it's by faith. And it seems to me that those sayings of Jesus resonate out through the churches of Paul, so that Paul can say that what matters is by grace you are saved through faith. And you'll notice that in Ephesians 2, 1, 10, he's talking about the general picture of how sinners get saved. And immediately in Ephesians 2, 11, 12, he goes on to say, therefore Gentiles and Jews stand on the same ground and are knit together in one community, which is the new temple, the place where God lives by the Spirit. So then, of course, there flows out from that the need to be the people of God in and for God's purposes in the world. The strap line I've often used recently, as some will have heard me say before, is that the church is called to be the small working model of new creation. And each individual Christian is called to be the small working model of new creation, because God's new creation has begun in Jesus and his resurrection. It's animated by the Holy Spirit. So it isn't a matter of, oh, do I have to do these things if I want to go to heaven? It's because God has reached out and grabbed me by his grace. Therefore I am now called to be. And the whole New Testament gospels and epistles alike says this. I am called to be one in whom that new creational impulse is having its full effect. And all that wonderful language about grace and faith In Romans chapters 1 to 11 immediately issues in Romans 12 with, Therefore, therefore present your bodies as a living sacrifice. Here is how you are to live. And nothing about salvation is built on that. It's what flows from the great work of God in salvation is a life that looks like this. And actually with James, this is a different sort of question. But it looks to me as though what James means by faith when he says it isn't by faith alone is a kind of a bare old Jewish monotheism. Oh, I believe that God is one. That's my faith. And James says, well, actually, the devils believe that as well, and it scares them silly, because actually, the true faith is much bigger than simply a mental acknowledgment that God is one. And likewise, what James means by works is not exactly what Paul means by works, because James by works does mean caring for the poor, looking after those who are in need, et cetera, et cetera, which Paul would totally affirm. Whereas when Paul is talking about works, and many writers have shown this over the last generation, he is talking much more specifically about the works of the Jewish law, which marked out the Jews from their pagan neighbors. So Paul is saying, no, those don't matter anymore because God has created this single family in Christ. Now, I want to say to Maggie Weaver, if you're new to all this stuff that I've just been saying, there is a vast literature recently on it, which I'm sure you could find. Mike has written books on it, I've written books on it. But this is really where a great deal of the most creative scholarship of the last 50 years, I think, has been happening. So best of luck with getting your head around it. This is a great question, but I hope we've shown you that there is a root through.
- [25:10]
Mike Bird
Yeah, I mean, I've had the question come up time and time again with people about, you know, Jesus versus Paul, Paul versus James. But you know something? All I have in common, they all emphasize the importance of faith. And then they all emphasize in their own way, in light of the issues they're facing, that you've got to live the life of faith with perseverance, with gratitude, with effort. And, you know, I mean, Paul says in Galatians 5, 6, you know, what counts is faith working through faith love, which I think Jesus, Paul, and James would all agree on. And I think they all can also all@leviticus 19:18 about love your neighbor as yourself. That's the one text that you find in, you know, in the. In the Gospels, in Paul's letters, and you find in the Epistle of James about doing that. So it's not like Paul believes that, well, as long as you believe the right stuff, you can live how you like. And James is saying, well, you know, you've got to earn your salvation by doing good works. I think that. I think there's a lot more continuity there.
- [26:08]
Tom Wright
Yeah. Yeah, absolutely.
- [26:10]
Mike Bird
Well, I think we've got time for one more question. And this is. This is a good one. I like this one. It's from Jaden Johnson in Wichita Falls. And I like this question because it mentions me. So about time, about time. I got some air time here. I got some attention, got some love from our audience. Here's the question. He says, hey Tom, it's good to see you. And the Mike Bird. I love the way I have the Definite article the Mike Bird heard filming this new season together. I wanted to ask you for advice on how to have a balanced reading of things like scripture, scholarly monographs, commentaries, Christian living. I feel like I lose the sharpness in certain areas of my biblical knowledge when I spend too much time on one thing and not on another thing. Thank you for all your work. Love the book the two of you wrote together. TOM I can relate to this because sometimes I feel like I read more books about the Bible Bible than I actually read the Bible. And I don't know whether to feel guilty or, or maybe that's, you know, maybe my scholarship is also part of my devotion. So, you know, should I be reading more Bible and maybe less more CBEC monographs, you know, and you know, those technical big behemoth books? Tom, what's, what's your view on this question? What's your answer here for Jaden?
- [27:28]
Tom Wright
It's, it's a good question, but it's a very personal question because an awful lot depends on both where you are yourself in your Christ, maturity in your thinking, in your vocation. Is God calling you to be a Bible teacher, in which case you need to be able to be not just one step ahead of your students, but hopefully a dozen or two steps ahead of your students. And that means reading around the subject in all sorts of ways. But if that's not your vocation, then there may be other pathways that you should be taking in reading. I mean, it comes down to one particular question, which I thought you were alluding to there, Mike, which is that I remember somebody saying when I was a student that maybe one should have two different Bibles, one for reading devotionally and another for academic study. And as soon as I heard that when I was a student, I knew it was wrong. I knew it was certainly wrong for me, at least, in that I did not want to have that sense of disintegration that there's a bit of me over there and then a bit of me over there. So I have always used the same Bible. I mean, this is the New Testament that I read morning by morning, and it's the same New Testament that I read when I'm praying first thing in the morning and that I have on the desk when I'm working at whatever it is. And likewise the Hebrew Old Testament, et cetera, et cetera. And so for me, there's an integration which is important, but in terms of reading strategies, I mean, you will see, if you look behind me, I've got quite a few books in this study. People sometimes come in here and say, have you read all these books? And I like Umberto Eco's answer to that question. When somebody would ask him that, he would say, no, these are the ones I have to read this month. The other ones are upstairs. But I'm not going to give you that answer. But I want to say all these books are out here have helped me understand the Bible. There's a constant to and fro, and you never know when you're reading an academic monograph, which may be rather tedious and dry and dusty, and it got somebody a PhD, but is there really anything in it for me? You never know when you're going to turn over the page and find an insight which is so sharp and rich that you want to put it straight into your lecture course, or straight into your own footnotes, or straight prayerfully into your understanding of a whole passage in the Gospels or epistles. The God is the God of surprises. And some of those surprises come when we're reading books that we didn't expect to be learning very much from. I remember when I was a very young student being a bit suspicious of some of these German scholars, and I remember reading Jeremias book on the parables, and somebody had said, well, I'm not sure Jeremias is really sound on this. So I was a bit wary. And then at a certain point halfway through, I remember thinking, oh, my goodness, I've never seen this whole perspective on how Mark's Gospel works, or whatever it was. And I'm thinking, goodness, if I had listened to those warnings, I would never have got this bigger picture. And so one is constantly doing this. Now, in terms of reading strategies, I've often said to students, here are different pathways you need to find how you can navigate your way through that. Like when I was very young and getting into reading English poetry, I remember saying to a wise friend, where should I start? And he said, start with what you love and work out from there. And there's a wisdom in that if you try and force feed yourself stuff which you think you ought to read but isn't actually doing anything for you at the moment, that may become very tedious. There are times when you have to read things that feel Tedious sometimes, often for days and weeks on end. But normally find the things that are helping you make sense of both the larger picture and the little details. But at the center of of it all, the center of it all is your own personal daily reading of scripture itself. If you've got the Greek and Hebrew, read it in Greek and Hebrew. If you haven't, do your best to have some at least. If you haven't, make sure you've got at least two very different translations on your desk or prayer desk so that you're not fooled into thinking that what any one English translation says is the only thing that text could possibly mean. And then spend time, spend time prayerfully reading scripture. Reading scripture. Understand, I would say at least write through the Bible once a year. I would actually, for myself, I would do more than that. But I would say at least the Old Testament once every year, maybe the Gospels twice every year. And the New Testament, the rest of the New Testament once a year, whatever it is, and whatever time frame you've got, you know, if you've got five young children in the house, that may be very difficult to do that kind of reading. But to be aiming at a whole Bible reading and then whatever is gonna help you, whether it's history, whether it's philology, whether it's looking at ancient coins, whatever will help you with that and particularly the larger theological issues. Have you read Karl Barth? Well, good luck to you. Have you read Jurgen Moltmann? Not that you will agree with them all down the line, but there'll be all sorts of ways in which they will send you back to the basic texts with a fresh excitement and a fresh, oh my goodness, I need to look at that now. And that's part of the joy of it. So, but the main thing is to pray for wisdom about what to read, when, how long to spend on each book, article, whatever, because there's so many things you could do. Life is short, books are plentiful. We need wisdom and discernment to find the way through.
- [32:46]
Mike Bird
Okay, well, there you go, Jayden. Read lots of Bible and anything that interests you, excites you and expands your Horiz horizon. Well, that is all we have time for today, but please keep sending those questions in. Remember to go to ask ntright.com send us your questions. We'd love to hear them. We'd love to be in contact with you. And we'll be back with another episode in our another week. I'm Mike Bird.
- [33:15]
Tom Wright
And I'm Tom Wright.
- [33:16]
Mike Bird
And you've been listening to Ask anti right ant. Anything. See you next time.