← Ask NT Wright Anything
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- [00:04]
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Mike Bird
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Mike Bird
Hello and welcome to the Ask nt Write Anything podcast, the program where we try to answer your questions about Jesus, the Bible and the life of faith. I'm Mike Bird from Ridley College in Melbourne in Australia, and I'm joined of.
- [01:28]
Tom Wright
Course by NT Wright, Tom Wright from Oxford in England.
- [01:33]
Mike Bird
Now, Tom, you know that the English cricket team will be touring Australia at the end of this year. So I don't know how well you are at coping with disappointment, but do you think you'll be able to live with the disappointment of Australia once again completely destroying your team in the Ashes Test cricket contest?
- [01:53]
Tom Wright
We'll have to see. I mean, at the moment we've been in transition with the English national cricket team and we've got some excellent players, but we've also some of our great stars from the last few years who've now retired people like Jimmy Anderson, the great fast bowler. And so the new guys are coming on and it'll be interesting to see. Likewise, I think that Australia did have a bit of an upset recently with their big match against South Africa, and one of our commentators said, well, it looks like those famous Australian bowlers are a bit over the hill, so maybe there is hope for us after all. So we shall see. We shall see.
- [02:30]
Mike Bird
Well, I hope you I hope the English cricket team transitions from bad to worse. But the reason I say that I've got a bit of patriotic fervor today is because we have two questions from Australians. So I feel like the Australian listeners have been letting the team down. I think We've had more questions from South America than from New South Wales. So I'm glad to see a few Aussies have finally risen to the occasion. And they've got some questions for you. And we've got some good questions about the body, biblical inspiration, and whether Christians can commit the unforgivable sin. So let's get underway. Our first question is from Luke Holland Hoggeth from Sydney, Australia. And he asked this. He says, hi, Tom. A following question from the episode on the can you expand on the importance of the body? With obesity being the norm in Western culture, How do we deal with sins of greed and gluttony whilst living in a place of abundance? This seems to be quite a taboo topic to discuss with people, especially in a time of body positivity. On the other hand, the fitness industry is full on vanity. What does the Bible tell us about looking after our physical body? Well, I think this is a great question, Tom. I mean, do we need to work out? Should we take out a gym membership? Should we lift weights for Jesus? Tom, what's your, what's your answer to Luke's question?
- [04:10]
Tom Wright
It's a very good question and certainly, as we have learned as biblical theologians in the last generation, just how important the resurrection of the body is and just how important space, time and matter are. In other words, that we are not simply souls with ears that are waiting to hear the gospel and then to escape the body and go to heaven. That would be a Platonic view that what matters is the soul and how it escapes from, from the prison house of the body. Now I think most Christians in today's world would say, no, the body is not a prison house. The body is God's gift and it is the means by which we are to serve God. Paul says, present your bodies as a living sacrifice. The body in Paul's exposition of the faith is the God given means by which we serve one another and by which we serve God's purposes in the world. So clearly, if that's gonna. And as a bare minimum, the body has to be physically capable of doing that. Now of course, there are many people for whom either prolonged sickness or old age or whatever means that the body is less capable of doing some of that stuff than it used to be. And speaking now in my mid-70s, I would say, yep, there's stuff that I used to do quite easily which I simply can't do anymore. One gets used to that. But it feels a bit of a shame. But I go back to that well known passage in, in 1 Timothy chapter 4, where Paul says, go into training in godliness. Physical exercise, you see, has a limited usefulness, but godliness is useful in every way. In other words, it isn't either or he's saying, yeah, physical exercise is kind of important. And if you're tempted to lead a purely sedentary life where all you ever do is hunch over a copy of Scripture, well, better to hunch over a copy of Scripture than lots of other things. But you actually need the fresh air. You need the air exercise. You need the invigoration of being out and about and doing stuff. And obviously that wasn't a problem for Paul. He was always out and about doing stuff. But it seems to me there is a proper balance there, like the balance in First Corinthians about the body being made for the Lord and the Lord for the body. So Paul says, glorify God in your body. And so that passage in 1 Corinthians 6, along with the passage in Romans 12 about presenting your body as a living sacrifice, that the body is the thing you say, here I am, Lord, this is me. This is who I am. Use me in your service. And if the answer is you're going to have to do some training in order to have sufficient energy to get around all the places I want you to go and visit, well, do that training. There have been times in my life when I've realized that for whatever job I was doing, I needed to be in better shape physically. I've always had a kind of athletic, sporty background, but as you get older, it's hard to maintain that for all sorts of obvious reasons, health, weight, et cetera. So I would say there's a balance to be kept. And I think what's happened is we've swung back from the negativity about the body to now, as the questioner says, this body positivity where we don't like to say that this or that or the other about people, because that's sort of abusive. But clearly the physical body does need looking after. And this means different things at different times and to different places in different places. In the early church, it was taken for granted that you would fast probably twice a week. There's one of the Apostolic Fathers which discusses which days you should do that on. And we who have learned lately about how you can actually have a fasting diet and actually lose weight quite quickly by having two days a week or whatever where you simply don't eat at all, and then you can eat normally the rest of the week. We're Kind of relearning things that people in the ancient world knew very well. And it may well be that as Christians, we should take more responsibility for researching and putting into operation appropriate styles of both looking after our bodies and making sure that they are in good shape to do the work that God has for us to do. So the question do I need to work out? I think it depends entirely on who you are and where you are and what you're doing. And sometimes yes and sometimes no. I wish I was a bit fitter than I am currently, but that's partly because of my knee operation 18 months ago, ET cetera, et cetera. So it's something we're all wrestling with. But I think certainly let's be positive about the body while not overdoing that, as though that was the only thing we should be concerned with.
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Mike Bird
Tom, did I recorrect that? Remember someone saying that you played rugby as a young man? Is that true?
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Tom Wright
Oh, yes, yes, yes. I mean, I was at a rugby playing school through my teens, and it was the kind of school where five or even six days a week you would change and do exercise in every afternoon. And if you weren't actually playing rugby, you'd probably be playing squash or maybe just going for a run in the countryside. It was wonderful countryside all around. But so I, through my teens, through the winter terms, I probably played rugby three times a week through the school terms, and I loved it. It was great. And now, what position did you fly? Oh, I played flyhalf.
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Mike Bird
Oh, wow.
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Tom Wright
Sometimes center, sometimes fly. I ended up, to my surprise, playing fly half on the school team. And it was very much a rugby school, so that was one of the high points of my career. I then played flyhalf for the university freshman team my first year at Oxford. But early on in my second year, one day I suddenly realized I wasn't enjoying being trampled on under a loose scrum quite in the way that I had been. And I remember thinking, perhaps my rugby playing days are over. But it took me many years before I accepted the fact that I was never again going to do a drop goal or whatever it might be.
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Mike Bird
Yeah. For our American listeners, fly half. I think the NFL equivalent would be quarterback. Yeah, it's very much. I played rugby league and I was half back. So I was the one who. I was the one who fed the ball to the fly half.
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Tom Wright
The scrum half. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
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Mike Bird
So I was the. I was the other half of the fly half. For people who don't know rugby league or rugby Union. This will make absolutely no, no sense.
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Tom Wright
We've never had this conversation before, but there we are. Mike, you, you were still doing it. You're passing the ball to me and I'm trying to, to see how it goes down the line.
- [11:05]
Mike Bird
The team is continuing. The team is continuing well. And in the very least, I think we, we all know we need to honor God with our body. Well, looking at another question, this also from Sydney. This is from Noah T from Sydney, Australia. And he's got a question about biblical inspiration. He says, oh. He asks, how can we view all of the New Testament as authoritative and divinely inspired? What gives them authority? I mean, yes, Jesus said, whatever you bind on earth shall be bound in heaven. However, he said that to the 12. He didn't say that to Paul or to Mark or to Luke or the author of Hebrews. So, Tom, what makes the Bible authoritative and inspiration? I mean, if the New Testament was written by people who were not amongst Jesus closest followers, I mean, what makes their teaching authoritative or definitive for the rest of the church in all ages around the world?
- [12:06]
Tom Wright
It's a great question. And I was brought up very much to believe that the Bible is the authority. And that's where we go, meaning whatever questions come up, that's the place to go to find answers, whatever they may be. And in a sense, in these podcasts, we're simply exemplifying that, that you're tossing me questions that people have written in with, and I naturally open the Bible and well, there are these passages and these passages and so on. So in a sense, we are performing what it means to be living under the authority of scripture. And actually, that's more complicated than it sounds. Just to stop on that for a moment, when I was bishop of Durham, I sometimes used to say to colleagues, all churches say that scripture is authoritative or that they live under the authority of Scripture. And I've said, what would it look like if we came into a room and there were people living under the authority of scripture? What would we see going on? And I think part of what we might see is people doing lectio divina, reading a passage of scripture, pausing in silence, waiting on God, reading it again, and then saying to one another, what are you hearing in this? How does it apply to us today? That's part of it, but it's also when great questions come up in the church, should we do this? Should we not do that? Well, then we need to say, what does scripture say? And if that's controversial, how can we get right down into the detail of Scripture and make sure we've understood it. But behind all of that, behind all of that, there are a couple of much bigger background questions. One is, why does this idea of authority of Scripture have such purchase, particularly in the Protestant churches of Western Europe and North America? And part of the answer, whether we like it or not, is that in the 16th century and subsequently, authority of Scripture was taking the place of the authority of the Pope. And this is part of the Reformation idea that, that, well, the Pope has claimed all authority, but in fact, it's in the Bible. So Luther and Calvin and in my country, Tyndale and people, they're saying, no, we must go back to the Bible, and what the Bible says will override anything that the Pope happened to say last week. And so there is that implicit sense in Protestant cultures. And much of North America was a Protestant culture when the founding fathers and their predecessors arrived and were setting up shop there. But actually, though, we have to acknowledge that context. And then that might make us just a bit wary. Was this a polemical doctrine, authority of Scripture? And where does that then let us down? But the other question is that Scripture itself has Jesus say in Matthew 28, or, all authority in heaven and on earth is given to me. He doesn't say, all authority in heaven and earth is given to the books you chaps are going to go and write. So what does it mean then to say that Jesus has all authority? Because clearly this is a Son of man image. This is a Daniel 7 image. This is the Son of Man is exalted to sit beside the ancient of days, and to him is given authority and kingdom and power. Jesus is saying, that's where we now are with Jesus as Messiah, crucified, raised, ascended, he is in charge. God's authority is vested in him. So when we then use the phrase authority of Scripture, we have to say that is a shorthand way of saying God's authority exercised through Jesus in the power of the Holy Spirit working through these books. That's a much more complicated thing than simply saying, yeah, the Bible's authoritative. You just look it up and find the right answers. So I think again and again we say, so why is the Bible authoritative? And the answer is, well, the Old Testament creates a whole world, a whole, what we call a universe of discourse, within which the coming, the kingdom, inauguration, the life, death, resurrection, ascension of Jesus makes the sense that it makes and the sense that God intended it to make. So if we want to understand Jesus and see what it means that he has all authority we need to be constantly refreshed in that biblical world because outside that it isn't just neutral territory. There are other worldviews within which the Jesus events wouldn't make sense. And then the very early church, starting with Paul, who I think is the earliest writer, though the gospel traditions probably go back at least to the time of Paul, if not earlier. Paul and the Gospel writers, they are the ones who seem to be called specially to tell the story of Jesus in such a way that it is able to shape the church for its mission in the world. And so they are the ones who seem to be specially authorized to carry forward that work authority, not just as like the dictionary is the authority on the meaning of words. So we go and look stuff up. Well, that's important too. But basically this is a dynamic authority that as people read the Bible, the power of God, authority of God goes out to do things in the world, to change people's lives and thereby to change the world. That's real powerful authority. Now in the second century there were many of the early Christians who actually really liked some of the slightly later books like the shepherd of Hermas, some of the second century fathers. They wished that the shepherd of Hermas could be in their beginning to be what we then call canon. But they knew that the shepherd of Hermas wasn't written by an apostle. Now we might say, well, it's not abundantly clear that every book in the New Testament is written by an apostle. We don't know that for sure. But they're all close up witnesses to Jesus. And pretty soon, certainly by the time of Irenaeus and Tertullian at the end of the second, the beginning of the third century, they were looking back to something pretty like what we now call the New Testament and treating it as in a fresh way, Scripture in the same sense that the Old Testament is scripture. That's more complicated than just saying, oh, Bible Mark 1, Bible Mark 2. But somewhere in there is the point that Jesus is the one who carries all authority. This book is the thing that shapes our understanding of who Jesus is and puts what he has done into practice through the church in the world. So that's basically what we mean.
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Mike Bird
Okay, that's a good way to put it. I mean, I've always been impressed with Protestants at one level because they were responding to problems with the medieval Catholic tradition that said all authorities bound up with the papacy and the magisterium and they saw the Bible as giving them leverage over the corruption and the errors of a medieval tradition. But the Protestants never said that the Bible is a magical book that's authoritative in its own mystical sense or magical sense. Neither did they say the Bible is authoritative because of its teaching. They said it's authoritative because the Holy Spirit was speaking in it. And it was the Holy Spirit that mediated the power and the authority of, of God. And this is why when I wrote a theology book, I put the doctrine of Scripture not at the front of a theology like so many others have done. I put it as a subsection under the Holy Spirit. So I think the place where the doctrine of Scripture belongs, dogmatically speaking, is a subset of the work of the Holy Spirit. I should give a hat tip there to my former colleague Andrew McGowan, who's angry argued similarly. Do you think if we had a better understanding of Christ as the one with all authority and the Spirit's role as well, that would help solve a lot of the bad Biblicism or a lot of the Bibliology we get around doctrines of Scripture in pop evangelical churches.
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Tom Wright
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And I mean, part of the problem there is that precisely that bad sort of bibliography generates a reaction. And I have been in many churches in England where people have seen that sort of, oh, the Bible says, the Bible says, the Bible says. And they say, well, hang on, life's a bit more complicated than that. Don't just beat me over the head with that. At the same time, you will find that some people who react against that hyper bibliology nevertheless will use, say, the Psalms or the parables of Jesus as means of a very deep and profound meditation for themselves and for their congregations. So actually sometimes people's actual practice is better than the theory and the polemics that they use. But in the middle of it, the Bible is pretty well non negotiable. So that anyone who says, as tragically some have said, oh well, the church wrote the Bible, so the church can now rewrite the Bible. That's just playing around. That's not serious.
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Mike Bird
Yeah, well, that's probably a good point for us to take a break and when we get back, we're going to look at a question, a question that comes up very often. Can Christians commit the unforgivable sin? We'll be back in a moment to answer that question.
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- [22:24]
Tom Wright
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- [23:13]
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- [23:45]
Mike Bird
We're back and our next question is from Michael McLean in Japan about the unforgivable sin. And Michael says, hi there. Greetings from Japan. I have read many of your books and taken your Simply Good News online course. I love your work and want to thank you for all that you do. In Mark, chapter 3, verses 20 to 30, Jesus references an unforgivable sin. I struggle to wrap my head around this and often have trouble understanding blasphemy in general. Is it true that we could say something that can never be taken back? What is Jesus saying here and to whom? And related to this, is there the danger of taking the Lord's name in vain? I think, Tom, I get this question every now and then, particularly by young, anxious Christians who are worried that in a moment of anxiety or despair or anger, they've said something to God or about God and they are worried if they have imperiled their soul and they might have committed the unforgivable sin. Tom, what do you say to people who have this anxiety? I mean, how would you answer Michael's question?
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Tom Wright
Yeah, yeah, I think the first thing to say, and this is almost a cliche, because it's what many Spiritual teachers have said down the years is that if you're worried about having committed the unforgivable sin, that is an absolute sure sign that you haven't. Because if you had committed it, then you would have written off all the questions about God and all of that, and you wouldn't. Wouldn't even be interested. But the second thing to say is that the context, and Michael is quite clear in Mark 3, 20, 30, the context there is when Jesus has been healing people who are demon possessed. And some people are saying that Jesus casts out demons by Beelzebul, who is the prince of demons. That's Mark 3:22. And so Jesus does this whole riff about how can Satan cast out Satan. In other words, if there's a war between Satan and himself, then clearly he's already being destroyed. And part of the point of Jesus Kingdom ministry is to retake the territory which the enemy has been squatting on, as it were. But then when Jesus gives the warning in verses 28, 29, it's all, all sins of whatever sort will be forgiven, and all blasphemies that people can blaspheme, but anyone who blasphemes the Holy Spirit will not have forgiveness forever. And that's because, and it's very clear in Mark, Jesus does what he does in his public career because of the Spirit coming upon him in baptism, which equips him to be the kingdom person. Now, this goes back to Isaiah 11, the messianic picture where the Spirit of the Lord clothes the Messiah or the coming king, or then in Isaiah 42, the servant, so that then what the Messiah does, what the coming king, what the servant does, is done by God himself through the Spirit. Now, if somebody then looks at something which is in fact the work of the Spirit and says, actually that's the work of the devil, then it's not just in some arbitrary sense that, oh my goodness, that was a triple red line. That's the end of the conversation. It's rather that they have shut and locked the very door by which rescue could have come to them. It's rather like when Jesus says in Matthew 18 that if you don't forgive people, you won't be forgiven. Which is a very hard saying until you realize that there is, as it were, in each of us, in our hearts, a door which we open when we forgive somebody, we give them the blessing of forgiveness. And that's the same door which, when open, can receive God's forgiveness. And if we harden our hearts, shutting our hearts against the possibility of forgiving our neighbor, then we are shutting our hearts to the possibility of God forgiving us. In other words, it's not simply an arbitrary punishment for an arbitrary rule, for breaking an arbitrary rule. It's kind of ontologically true that if you don't forgive, then you are not open. And sadly, pastorally, I have known people who have seemed to be in that position. So likewise, if God is working through the Spirit and somebody says that's the work of the devil, then there is no way that they themselves can ever receive the forgiving and life giving blessing of the Holy Spirit. They have just ruled that out. So again, let's go back to it. It isn't an arbitrary punishment for a particular, specific and rather odd sin. And to repeat, if you're worried about having committed it, it's clear that you haven't at the same time taking the Lord's name in vain. Well, that's a different issue. But clearly, I think part of our problem as modern people living in the so called secular world is that even if we take certain Christian things seriously, we may not realize that there's a whole world of holiness and a world of lies and the two are in competition with one another at all sorts of levels of life. And we have to be careful of the ground we tread on. And especially when we're talking about God, when we're talking about Jesus, and especially then when we're paying attention to what God is doing in the world. These are serious issues. We're not fooling around.
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Mike Bird
And Tom, that's a, that's a great answer. You know, the way I answer is pretty much the same. I say, look, you know the scribes who said this. The problem was that what they said was not careless, it was calculated. I mean, they looked at the work of God, the work of the Spirit in Jesus, and they damned it all to hell. They put it at the feet of, of a Philistine God called Beelzebul. And although there is a wideness in God's mercy, there is a point where mercy ends and judgment begins. But I, I don't think that's possible for people who are born of the Spirit, baptized in the Spirit and indwelt in the Spirit and simply crying out to God in frustration. I mean, read the Psalms. The psalmists often cry out with like God, are you, are you there? Do you know what you're doing? Have you gone out to lunch? Are you going to remember us anytime soon? The Psalms and the Book of Lamentations are filled with people offering complaints to God like, you know, are you there and do you really care? And I, I agree. You know, if, if you're worried that you've committed this, that itself is the, the sign that you haven't because you are concerned with the holiness of the Lord and his name. That's probably a great point. Point for us to finish our episode today. Hope you've enjoyed it. Remember, you too can send us your questions on anything about Jesus, the Bible, the Old Testament, Christian theology, some things in the Christian life you've always wondered about. You can send them to us by going to askantewright.com also, you should know there is a great, great, great back catalog of episodes. We've done a number of shows on all sorts of things. Feel free to go and check them out and to listen to the things we've discussed in the past. So that's all from us this week. I'm Mike Bird.
- [31:55]
Tom Wright
And I'm Tom Wright.
- [31:57]
Mike Bird
And we look forward to seeing you on the next episode of Ask nt Write Anything.
- [32:04]
Casual Friend
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- [32:30]
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Tom Wright
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Tom Wright
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- [32:58]
Casual Friend
Yo, this is important, man. My favorite Lululemon shorts, the ones you got me back in the day. I think they're called pace breakers. The ones with all the pockets. I just got back from vacation and I left them in my hotel room. And dude, I need to replace these shorts. I wear them like three times a week. Could you send me the link to where you got them? Oh, also, my birthday is coming up soon, so. Anyways, thanks, bro.
- [33:17]
Tom Wright
Talk soon.
- [33:18]
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