B (3:16)

Tom, when I think of Ephesians, I think of two things. I think of ff. Bruce, you said it was the quintessence of Paulinism. And secondly, I remember a line you said in your book in Justification that if Ephesians rather than Galatians was the manifesto for the Reformation, Protestant theology would look differently.

C (3:37)

And not just Protestant theology, but actually the whole history of Western Europe would have been different because Western Europe was so radically affected by the Protestant Reformation, which was taking Romans and Galatians as its set texts, but treating them as being the vade mecum for how to go to heaven when you die, which Ephesians clearly is not. What I say clearly is not. People have read it as though that's what it is, as though it's a sort of more discursive version of Romans and Galatians. But if you let Ephesians be Ephesians, it's a vision of, I could go on about this all day. It's a vision of God's purpose for the church being, as I say again and again in the book, the Church as the small working model of new creation. God's plan is for new creation. And God has called us to be, as Jesus followers, the Church to be a microcosm of new creation, to demonstrate to the world that new creation has happened and is happening and will happen. And it's been really exciting to read Ephesians with that as the way forward.

B (4:39)

You know, Tom, I've got a thesis that if Ephesians was more programmatic for Protestantism, then maybe Germany would not have been brainwashed into the antisemitism it was.

C (4:53)

That's highly, highly likely. That makes a whole lot of sense.

B (4:57)

I mean, we should do a bonus episode on this.

C (4:59)

Yeah, Antisemitism is a horrible virus which can break out in all sorts of places for all sorts of reasons. But yes, the polemic against the law and hence against Moses and hence against the Jews by some in the early Reformation, Martin Luther, not least, certainly, it was just done incalculable harm.

B (5:22)

Yeah, well, we'll park that thought for a bonus episode maybe when we finish our series on acts and the bonus episodes. But that'll be a great one. But today, Tom, we've got some good questions. The truth and authority of scripture. A difficult text about what happened when Jesus died. Bit like a zombie apocalypse. Then all about confessions of faith. But we're going to kick off with two questions. One one from Robin Fastnight from Helsinki, and another one from Wayne Dumbleton in the charming town of Hitchin. So here's Robin's question. This is about Sola scriptura. He says this, my whole life I've been Protestant, and sola scriptura has always been the big thing. I get the theory of it, but the practice always seems to turn it into solo scriptura. It got me thinking, would prima scriptura be a more robust dance? And basically, what's your approach when it comes to those things? So, in other words, Tom, what do you think of Sola scriptura? And then our question from Wayne. He asks, how did writers of the Bible memorize long passages to write them down? For example, Mary's song of praise. I love poetry, but I can't memorize more than two lines of what I've heard. Similarly, how were writers able to write about meetings where only one or two people were present? For example, Jesus meeting Pilate. How do we also know what Jesus. That Jesus looked at Peter after the cock crowed twice as Jesus was taken away from Peter. So Wayne's worried about the veracity and the truthfulness of scripture. So there we go, Tom, two good questions on scripture. One about solar scripture and another one. Can we really trust Scripture on some of those details?

C (7:05)

Yeah, these are great questions. The sola scriptura is obviously one of the great Reformation watchwords. And that was a way of saying that when you are worried about a particular doctrine and how it ought to work, you should always take scripture as the sole authority for what the church should believe. And that was always over against the tradition of the church. For Luther, the traditions of the church had grown up and grown up and huge volumes and things that people had to pour over and study. And these were the authorities, the things that you checked out. And in the middle of there, Scripture would have a little voice somewhere. And you can still see that sometimes when I've been in ecumenical dialogues, people from other traditions, when you raise a particular topic, they start off with what the Pope said last week, and then they go back to the Second Vatican Council, then they go back to the 19th century, then they go back to the Council of Trent and back through the medieval and the patristic period. And finally you get back to Scripture. And some of the people who do that are themselves very fine scripture scholars, who I think left to themselves might well want to travel the other direction. Now I, as an Anglican, have always grown up traveling in the other direction. Any question that comes up, we start off saying, what does it say in the Bible? And then how was this understood? How was this developed? How is this then taught, et cetera? And it seems to me that sola scriptura is a way of talking about that direction of travel. Now there's a problem here, and I've been working on this recently in connection with my forthcoming book, God's Homecoming, because I realize that there are many people who will say sola scriptura, but what they mean is here is a doctrine which I, and people who agree with me have developed, and here is the scriptural proof text for that doctrine. You can see this going on in the 19th century and John Henry Newman is wrestling with it in his apologia, his statement of his own, how he got to his position that here is something that the Church has developed as a doctrine. Oh, and yes, we've got a proof text for it in Proverbs 8 or Colossians 1 or whatever it is, if it's a Christological formulation rather than saying let's soak ourselves in the world out of which Proverbs 8 and Colossians One can't, and see what they were really affirming and asserting, and then see whether the tradition of the Church, by putting those ideas into a different philosophical frame, has not actually distorted what the original meanings were all about. And for me that's really, really important because sola scriptura is saying we affirm the supreme authority of this double sided book, Old and New Testaments, which comes to us out of that whole Judean tradition focused ultimately for a Christian, on Jesus as Israel's Messiah. And the point of sola scriptura is, is that it's the expression of solus Christus. We know who Jesus is, because here it is in the New Testament. And the New Testament means what it means as the fulfillment of the Old. So then we have to learn how to read Old and New Testaments wisely and to see God's promises in the Old coming to fruition in Jesus and then by the Holy Spirit. And then we find ourselves sometimes in sharp dialogue with later traditions that have used some texts from the Bible as proof texts isolated from their original context, but really the argument is being generated from somewhere else entirely. And there's all sorts of different philosophical and cultural influences which have set things up in such a way as to leave the Bible somewhere in the background, sort of waving helplessly, saying, hey, you forgot about me. What you gonna do? And then the theologian answers, oh, yes, we'll grab one text from the Psalms or one little bit from Isaiah, and that's a footnote at the bot of the page. You see this, the Westminster Confession, great Protestant confession of faith, with the footnotes. It's got the main text is an exposition of dogma, and then it's got these scriptural footnotes with no suggestion that actually reading from Genesis through to Chronicles or Genesis through to Malachi and then Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, et cetera, that might give you a different starting point, a different set of issues. So for me, sola scriptura not only is vital and does actually, when taken seriously, challenge that solo scriptura that Robin Fasnight is worried about. I understand that that means presumably every person, every preacher becomes their own interpreter of Scripture, but rather that sola scriptura is a way of saying we have to learn to think into and live within the world of Jesus himself and see what questions should be raised within that. Which would then make us critique the the world of systematic and philosophical theology, which has often, even if it said sola scriptura, as much Protestant theology has, it simply used it as a repository of proof texts. Put in your thumb and pull out a plum kind of thing. As I remember one person saying, it's as though the Bible was a kind of unsorted edition of either the Westminster Confession or the devotional manual Daily Light, and that what we have to do is simply to take the little bits that speak to us. No, sola scriptura means we need the whole thing. So should we pause on that one, Mike, do you want to comment on that and develop that a bit before we go on to the second?

B (12:56)

I think, yeah. I mean, sola scriptura is something the Protestants were trying to leverage the Bible against institutions of the medieval age that were too philosophical, that were corrupted, that allowed something other than Scripture to set the agenda. But when the Reformers meant sola scriptura, they did not mean the neuter scriptura, the naked scripture, because they were very much integrated into the Catholic tradition. They knew the fathers of the Church, they knew the basics of philosophy, and as they wanted to allow Scripture to set the agenda for theology, they were acutely Conscious that we all have to consider the wisdom of those who have walked the path of faith before us. Now, whether that's an Augustine or that's the local, you know, the elderly nun down the road who's been, you know, quietly at prayer for the last 60 years, you can't ignore these people. So that, that's what I think it is. I think, I think it means in practice, supremo Scripture. Scripture is supreme, but it's not the only source of theology. But let's shift from that, Tom, to Wayne's question about the reliability. I mean, he wonders, you know, how much can people really memorize? And. Yeah, I mean, I, I can still recite a whole bunch of speeches from Shakespeare and I, I could probably sing the entire, the entire album of Les Mis, all three hours of it, straight off the cuff, all the way from Look Down, look down to the death of Valjean. So what do you think about their memory and their ability to recall the details, like Jesus meeting Pilate.

C (14:39)

Yeah, I mean, actually, modern people still do use their memories, as with you and Les Mis. So some of my grandchildren have got the CD of Hamilton and they listen to it in the car. They can actually rattle off all that extraordinary fast paced stuff from Hamilton. And it hasn't been there. They haven't forced to learn that at school. They just listened to it in the car and they now know it. And likewise, I grew up singing all the regular Anglican hymns. And to this day, if you give me one line from a hymn, I can probably give you all the verses or not necessarily in the right order. And like you, I did learn various Shakespeare speeches at school. I found that very easy when I was 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, that sort of time I could just read To Be or Not To Be three or four times and I basically got it. But. But I think the key thing is, of course, that in the ancient world people expected to use their memories because it was much more an oral culture than what we've got. And reading and writing was more a sort of elite thing. But ordinary people would know, for instance, all of Homer, the Iliad and the Odyssey, these were oral performances and people would know them by heart and would shout out if the singer missed out a line or got it wrong. And that was the culture that so many people grew up in. I would say to Wayne Dumbleton, check out writings on the use of memory in the ancient world and particularly the writings. Mike, help me out here. The American theologian who wrote Poet and peasant and through peasant eyes, Ken Bailey. Ken Bailey. That's right. Ken was a missionary in the Middle east for most of his life and had lived and worked in oral cultures. And there people just knew whole narratives, the narrative of what happened in their village three years ago when some great extraordinary event took place. And everybody knows the story and everybody can repeat it. And again, if you get it wrong, they'll shout you down. And I remember when I first read Ken Bailey reflecting on this when I was teaching in Oxford, and my students, even if they couldn't remember bits of the Bible, they had all been watching the same soap operas, whether it was Neighbors, one of our Aussie import, whatever. And if you ask them what happened several weeks before when person A met person B in an edition of Neighbors, they would all basically know because they'd all watched it. And if somebody got it wrong again, they'd shout them down. So I think the answer is A, people in the ancient world used their memories far, far, far more than we do. And B, people today still do use their memories. They just don't always realize that that's what's actually going on. And as for memorizing, I think the older you get, the harder it is to memorize. I think the brain kind of atrophies unless you keep it up. And obviously actors and actresses do that all the time. But there's a very specific question there where Wayne talks about writing about meetings where only one or two people were present. Jesus meeting Pilate and the cock crowing twice, et cetera, et cetera. And this is where, again, Ken Bailey is very helpful that in most ANC cultures, and many, many modern ones too, life goes on in public. There are some private meetings. But actually most things happen in a world where there are servants, where there are attendants, where there are people hanging around, and where everything gets whispered and muttered. One time I was in Jerusalem with a tour party and we had to be diverted. Cause there was a security scare. And we had to be met by our bus at a totally different part of the city from what we'd planned. And our tour guide was trying to phone the bus driver, but couldn't get through. But in the end, he didn't need to. Cause the bus driver knew where we were gonna be. And when I asked the tour guide why, he said, oh, we call it the Arabic telephone. Everybody talks to everybody about everything all the time. And so everybody knows what's happening. And it's so in many traditional societies to this day, the sort of sense of things being talked about. And I remember a guy who was a missionary in Africa, telling me about the time when Janani Luwum, the archbishop of Uganda, was murdered by IDI Amin and or his thugs, that nobody was present at the initial hearing, nobody was present when Jonani Luwum was taken in a fast car off to somewhere else. Nobody was present when he then met the next person and the next person, and then he was finally shot. But by midday the next day, the entire connected narrative was being told, repeated on the streets in Kampala. And once it had been told again and again and again, it didn't change. That narrative now was the story of Janani Luwung. And this is simply what happens in many, many traditional cultures. We have lived in an electronic bubble in which that sort of thing doesn't happen or not nearly in the same way. And so it seems odd to us. It would not have seemed odd to them. That's the point.

B (20:09)

Okay, well, that's good answers to our questioners, Tom, so I hope, Robin and Wayne, you've enjoyed those answers. All I can say, Tom, is what I'm going to say may sound indelicate. That's a quote from Hamilton, just to be clear.

C (20:23)

Right. Okay.

B (20:24)

We have another question. This is from Jeff Riddell of Winnipeg in Ontario in Canada. And it's about that tricky little verse in Matthew we keep coming back to. And he asked this. He says on a recent episode, you invited listeners to talk about a bizarre passage from Matthew's account of the crucifixion in which also tombs were open. Many bodies of the saints who had fallen asleep were raised, and after Jesus's resurrection, they came out of the tombs and entered the holy city and appeared to many people. He asked, what is this passage about? Is it historical? And if so, why isn't it mentioned in any of the other gospels? Or is it a reference to the the day of the Lord, like those passages from Ezekiel, Daniel, Isaiah? Or is it both? Thank you for sharing your brilliant insights. Well, Tom, this is a tricky passage. I've always liked what Michael Lacona said, that this was like apocalyptic special effects, although he did. He did get kind of canceled in evangelical circles for saying that because they claimed he was violating inerrancy by offering that interpretation of it because he didn't go for the strictly literal view. This is Matthew 27, verses 52 to 53. It's a tricky verse.

C (21:45)

51 is the kind of lead in. And then 52 and 3. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

B (21:49)

But I mean, you've got people coming to life at Jesus's death before his resurrection. I mean, that, that is a peculiar thing. I've always tended to see this as a kind of preview of the general resurrection. I think of it like scenes from a movie where there's a different timelines going on and it's almost as if like the future age, a clip from the future has been dropped in the present. You know, something that you might find a movie, a movie director doing, the way he puts a movie together, where he deliberately mixes up the timeline. I think Christopher Nolan's done this on a couple of different films. He's sort of told films where the timelines are mixed up but you don't know about until the very end.

C (22:32)

Right.

B (22:33)

Any later? Any thoughts on this, Tom?

C (22:36)

Yeah, I mean, that's one way of putting it. I've always been a bit wary about this passage because I know that it's often been used by skeptical scholars who want to deny the bodily nature of Jesus own resurrection. And they start off with this passage and they say, well, clearly this is just a fiction, this is just a literary way of saying that this was a great extraordinary turning point in history or something. Of course it didn't actually mean a literal resurrection. And then they say, well, since we can't believe this funny little story in Matthew, then actually probably the stories of Jesus himself being raised from the dead, they're probably kind of animated fiction as well. And so I have not wanted to go to the point of saying what St. Michael Conus said about verses 52 and 53, lest it seem to be a stalking horse for then a denial of the truth of the bodily resurrection. Now actually one ought to separate them out because they are different questions, but it's actually, I mean, we should draw it out just a little bit more. That 52 and 53 is a very odd sequence. The tombs were opened and many bodies of saints who had slept were raised. And coming out of the tombs after Jesus resurrection, they went into the holy city and appeared to many. So what's actually happening on Good Friday? According if we take this strictly, the tombs are opened but they don't come out until the Sunday. That's a very strange kind of combination. I think there must be some kind of historical memory behind this. I do not know what that historical memory really was. Quite apart from anything else, it's subject to the question, well, what happened next? Did they like the figures in the Gilbert Sullivan opera Ruddy Gore? Did they go back the next day and lie down again or did they stick around? If they'd been raised from the dead, were they now immortal? Were they like Jesus, immortal physicality. I'm told, though I haven't researched this, that there were some early fathers who insisted that these people were still living in Jerusalem and that they were still around and you could go and meet them. I've not, as I say, done the research on that, but it is a tricky one because I do think that Matthew does intend us to hear that sort of sense of this is the great turning point of history. This is the moment when God finally did everything he promised he would. But it is very proleptic. It's not all the saints from all times were raised. It's many bodies of the saints who had slept were raised and went into Jerusalem. And so it is a kind of a ripple effect. But I want to have my cake and eat it at this point and say, yeah, it's got all those wider resonances of this is the great turning point of history. But that doesn't mean that nothing happens. What precisely it was that happened and what happened next, I'm not sure we'll ever know until we have a chance to meet Matthew in person and ask him for ourselves.

B (25:59)

That will definitely be one to discuss with Matthew over a cup of tea and some gones in the new creation, or scones, as maybe we call them in other parts of the world. Yes, indeed. Well, thank you for your question there, Jeff. Don't go away, don't go too far, because when we come back from our break, we're going to have another question about the necessity of public confessions of faith. Back in a moment.

C (26:27)

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A (27:03)

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B (28:03)

And we're back. Well, you are in the room where it happens here on the Ask NT Write Anything podcast. Tom, that was another allusion to Hamilton. This is a very musical episode. We've got Les Mis, Gilbert and Sullivan, Hamilton. I just think we need a little bit of Andrew Lloyd Webber or a bit of Stephen Sondheim and we'll have the complete collection. Maybe, maybe we'll maybe we'll get a bit of Jesus Christ Superstar in by the end. But anyway, our final question for this week, Tom, comes from Nicholas Spratlin from Kennesaw, Georgia. Now, George, I have to say, is vastly overrepresented in questions on the Ask NT Write Anything. So I'm glad to say the the proud godly people from Georgia in America are definitely, you know, head and shoulders above everyone else when it comes to asking us questions. And Nicholas from Georgia has got a question about public confessions of faith. He says Greetings anti Right. I am privileged to be leading a group of 11 Baptists, mostly cooperative Baptist Fellowship with a Southern Baptist history. This group includes ministers who have graduated from Southern Baptist Southwestern Seminary. One of these taught Philippians and Galatians, plus first year Greek. We have been working to understand all that you say into the heart of Romans. I mean, this is your book on Romans 8. We are enjoying this book and find your exegesis of Chapter 8 on Romans to be much deeper than any of us previously encountered. We are in agreement with your themes in this book, but one question came up last night near the bottom of page 99 of this book. You state the we here in fact means those who are in Christo or baptized, believing followers. Our Baptist understanding of salvation requires a public profession of faith. While being baptized, preferably by immersion, is very important something God wants us to do when it follows our profession of faith, our salvation does not hinge on whether or not we have been baptized. It hinges on our public profession of faith. So here's the question from my group. Will you please elaborate on your view of how important a public profession of faith and baptism are to gaining personal salvation? In addition, I'm curious about a dear beloved relative who I believe prayed to God during some of life's toughest times, and whom attended his Methodist church and public took communion alongside me. If this person ever made a public profession of faith, I am unaware of it. My second question is, did that person do enough to gain his personal salvation or will absence of a public profession of faith keep him out of heaven or when it is restored here on earth? Well, then, we've got a very, very loaded question there from Nicholas Spratlin about public confessions of faith. Good to see people reading your book into the heart of Romans. But, Tom, what are your answers to Nicholas's questions about public confessions of faith?

C (31:13)

Yes, it's a typical thing that I had written that about baptized and believing as a shorthand way of saying from the New Testament point of view, these are the things that publicly marked out people as members of the church. Now, we're not talking about borderline or boundary issues here. We're talking about the generality is that in the first century, people who were members of the church had been baptized and they made some sort of profession of faith. Now, as time has gone on, then all sorts of other questions have come in. And it's very interesting that the second question that our questioner here asks is, did that person do enough to gain personal salvation? Now, all my Protestant hackles from way back when, and I would have thought all his Protestant hackles from his Baptist background should say, as soon as we're talking about doing enough to get to heaven, we are talking about justification by works again. And this shows the sort of tangle that we get into when we insist on trying to make the Bible answer late medieval or 16th century questions rather than addressing the questions that are actually going on. So let me do the questions the other way around, because the more I have worked as a pastor on and off throughout my adult life, the more I have known real people, the more I have realized that there are many, many people who, at whatever stage in life, make some kind of thing that looks and sounds like a public profession of faith. And without being too cynical as I have known them, I have had cause to wonder whether they really had the slightest idea what they were talking about, whether they actually understood it, whether they actually meant it. Likewise, I know many, many people who have been baptized both as, whether as infants or indeed as adults, and who then, by the time they're in their 20s, 30s, 40s, it seems to have made absolutely no difference to them. And so that, I mean, I've had many debates with Baptist friends, the right age for baptism. And I have to say that in many Baptist churches that I know you have exactly the same problems that we Anglicans have with confirmation. Confirmation tends to happen in the early teens or somewhere between sort of age 9 and 15. And then routinely, tragically, many of those who get confirmed, we never see them again. And I know then that my Baptist friends report the same phenomenon that early teenagers get baptized. It's what everyone in the youth group is doing. It's a wonderful experience, it's a great public moment. And then by the time they go off to college or get a job or start a family, it all seems to have been left behind. Now, please God, some, if not all of them will come back to some sort of faith and public church membership. But so I want to be very cautious about saying, okay, if you've had the water thing and you've had the profession of faith thing, then you're basically in. That's good to go, tick to the box and off we go. And in the new creation you'll be there. And I want to say life's a bit more complicated than that. And as many of the reformers were wrestling with this, they pointed out that for instance, the brigand who was crucified next to Jesus on the cross, to whom Jesus said, today you will be with me in paradise, he hadn't actually been baptized. And so they developed this theory where he was baptized in his own blood, that a martyr who dies with a profession of some sort of faith, and he does say, jesus, remember me when you come in your kingdom. So is that a profession of faith in Jesus? And I wanna say let's not be too legalistic at this point. And I want to say there's a difference between the norm and then the many shaded areas outside the norm. And the norm would be that passage I quoted in an earlier episode from Romans 10. If we confess with our lips that Jesus is lor, that's the baptismal confession. Kyriosieus is the short version of the early baptismal confession, as far as we can tell. So confessing that Jesus is Lord is not just what you say with your lips and hopefully believe in your heart. It's the thing you say to say to the community, yes, Jesus is Lord, and now here I am for baptism. And then believe in your heart that God raised you from the dead. Because belief in Jesus bodily resurrection I take as the sign and symptom of the fact that something has happened in your what Edward Elgar called his insidist inside, which means that you've been opened to the life giving power of God. And so suddenly Jesus bodily Resurrection, which hitherto might have seemed completely incredible, actually makes a whole lot of sense. That is one of the signs of somebody being whether you want to, say, born again or baptized in the spirit or whatever. So there's many questions around here, and we don't need to be too legalistic. We need to state the central thing that normally, baptism and profession of faith are the things which mark you out as a member of the church whenever that happens, whether you're three years old or 30 or 90 or whatever. But that as a pastor, I know that there are many people at many stages of spirituality for whom I really do think it's appropriate to say you are part of the family, whether or not you've actually gone through these outward things yet. Yes, let's try and make an honest person of you sooner or later, if we can. But if you're in a hospital bed or whatever, that may not be possible. So one of the Anglican rules that I was always taught was to be firm at the center and then flexible at the edges. There are many traditions which are firm at the edges and then a bit wobbly at the center. I'd rather say, let's get the center right. This is the norm. And now there are many variations. But please don't use the fact that there are many variations as a way of saying so it doesn't really matter, because it actually does. And we all should be moving always closer towards the center, which is Jesus himself. Now, I've walked around that question rather than giving a precise formal answer, but I hope that's made some sense.

B (37:45)

No, I think you've answered it, Tom. I think you've said. Said professions of faith are important, but they're not necessarily the ultimate litmus test for where a person is at, because some professions of faith can prove somewhat shallow, and some people can even have an authentic faith, even if they've never done a confirmation or a public baptism. So, yeah, I think that answers the question from Nicholas very well. But as it goes, that is all we have time for today. But in our next episode, next week on the program, we're going to look on overseers and presbyters. Is there really a difference between them finding a good church when it's hard? And we're going to look at the topic of universalism, always a juicy one. Now, Tom, I didn't know whether you know this, but a lot of people are listening to our show, not on the podcast, but on YouTube.

C (38:38)

Oh, okay.

B (38:40)

It's really good. So if you do watch the show that way, don't forget to hit the subscribe button. You know, you can leave a question there. I actually go through the questions on YouTube. I enjoy every week I go through the questions, particularly the ones that say I love Tom, but the Australian guy is really annoying. If you say that, I will reply, I will do that. So I definitely look at all the questions on YouTube and hey, remember, if you've got some friends who you think would benefit from listening to the show, please recommend the show to them. Leave us a review in podcast land. It helps other people people find the program. Well, that's it from us this week. I'm Mike Bird.

C (39:21)

And I'm Tom Wright.

B (39:23)

And we'll see you for another episode of Ask NT Wright. Anything in the future. Until then, God bless and take care.

A (39:37)

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