← Ask NT Wright Anything
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- [00:01]
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Mike Bird
Hello and welcome to another episode of Ask Nt Write Anything. I'm Mike Bird.
- [01:52]
Tom Wright
And I'm Tom Wright, and this is.
- [01:55]
Mike Bird
The program where we answer your questions about Jesus, the Bible and the life of of faith. The questions keep pouring in as we come into the new year. Tom, we've got questions on spiritual protection through being involved in a church. You know, how do you get saved? And what does that mean about baptism and how to deal with bad teachers? Which I'm really hoping is not going to be an indirect attack on us. If the question says I listen to a couple of podcasts. One of them's got two guys, one's English, one Australians. They're really bad teachers. Should I keep listening to them? Hopefully the question's nothing like that, but anyway, let's get into our first question. This comes from Sylvia Burnside in Ballymena, and this is a question about the spiritual benefits or protections of being involved in a church. This is what Sylvia asks my friends and I have pondered, is there a unique covering or protection that comes from being part of a church community? While some argue that it's possible to maintain genuine faith without attending church, I've noticed that those who disconnect from church life often experience blurred theology and face challenges in living out their faith consistently. What role does church participation play in spiritual protection, clarity of belief and accountability? Well, I think that's a good question. What do you get from church that you can't get from having lots of Christian friends on Facebook?
- [03:30]
Tom Wright
Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think there's a danger in trying to be too specific about yeah, if you do this, you'll be okay. And if you don't do it, you won't be. Because I want to say on the one hand that regular attendance at worship shared with fellow Christians, whatever sort of church it is, is always going to be a positive a plus and shaping us in enabling us to continue in faith, in enabling us to pray for the world, et cetera, in a way that doing it by ourselves or as you say online simply won't do it. At the same time, I also want to say that sometimes churches can be places of real darkness, that sometimes they can be places where toxic, unhealthy, very toxic, unhealthy relationships and practices can be fostered and sometimes undercover of people assuming that because it's in the church it must be okay or whatever. So I mean, I, in my quite long life and in my different bits of ministry, I have seen both wonderful things going on where there has been a sense of God's protection leading, guiding through a church community. And I've also seen some pretty dark things and places where people have used the fact of oh, where God's people so it's all right in order to do and sustain and propagate bad teaching and bad practice of all sorts. And I want to say it's not the case that there is this thing called good teaching in which everything is exactly right and there is this thing called bad teaching where everything is exactly wrong. There are always continuums. And I have been in many churches where there are wise, faithful pastors preaching their hearts out, saying their prayers, etc. But still in my view, not getting half of what's there in the Bible. It's just not been part of their training and so they're not factoring everything in. And I want to say, please will you read this as well and factor that in as well. But I'm not saying they're bad teachers. It's just I think we're all of us less than complete. You know, there are bits of the Bible which I would not be too keen to preach on because I just don't know that I understand what's going on there. And all my life I've been trying to extend my biblical knowledge. And so it's not a matter of here is protection over there and there is a mess over there. But at the same time, coming back to where I began, I do think that both places of worship and the assembling of worshipers is more than the sum total of simply the individuals who are there that Jesus talked about. When two or three gathered in my name, I'm there in the midst of them. And where buildings have been consecrated by generations of faithful, praying, praying people, a sense of God's presence can be known there, even though, as I say, sometimes there can be dark forces which, which cluster around it as well. So it's, it's, it's not an easy one. But I, I wouldn't, I wouldn't want to say that because it's sometimes messy. Therefore there's no such thing as anything special about it.
- [06:59]
Mike Bird
Yeah, I had a pastor who told me in the church, he said the people who not only attend church regularly, but regularly attend like a home group or Bible study group. He says on average they seem to have far less problems and hassles in their life than people who don't. And I don't know whether it's that spiritual protection, but I think the idea of having a group of friends you wriggly meet with for prayer, fellowship, Bible study seems to offer a certain structures of support in your life because one of the epidemics we have these days is one of loneliness and disconnected and I mean, Tom, I remember the days where life was so busy and hard and then we'd go online to get away from it. Now all of my work is online and now I want to go outside to get away from the Internet.
- [07:54]
Tom Wright
Get away from the Internet. I quite agree.
- [07:56]
Mike Bird
So, topsy turvy, I think it's true. If you're part of a Bible study fellowship within your church, maybe you meet on a Tuesday, Wednesday or Thursday night. And if you meet for meals, for Bible reading, worship, whatever it is, you'll be constantly asking each other, how are you going? Oh, it's great, but my mother's sick. I need someone to look after the kids. You'll just have this network of friends and supporters and not just people to talk about, you know, what's good and bad in your life, but people who actually may be there to assist you in the things you're going through. Those sorts of people, I think, will probably have less stresses and more support in life. So I would say, I don't know if you call this a spiritual answer or a material answer, but there seems to be a lot of blessings and benefits to being part of a regular Bible fellowship group.
- [08:48]
Tom Wright
I totally agree with that. And I know that when Maggie and I have been in places where we have been part of a regular group, that has been an enormous, enormous strength. At the same time, it's not a one for one. It's not putting coins in the slot and getting the benefit out. Because people who are regular devout churchgoers and attenders at weekly meetings, whatever, can still have incredibly bad things happen in their lives. That's true. I mean, when I read the Book of Acts and I see Herod killing James with the sword, does that mean James hadn't been attending his Bible study group or that his mother had not been worshiping properly? No. Bad things happen. And particularly we live in comparatively comfortable Western surroundings. There are many, many devout Christians who live in places where worshiping is very hard collectively because the authorities don't want it to happen, et cetera, et cetera. And so in a sense, we're talking about what we've often labeled as first world problems here. But yes, in. It's rather like the psalm which says, you know, I've been young and now I'm old, and yet I've never seen the righteous forsaken, nor their seed begging their bread. And we want to say. Well, we have actually, we still saw them on the television just the other day. But the answer is the psalm is talking about the norm that normally if people actually are following God's way, then things tend to work out. Whereas if they kick over the traces and do whatever they please, sorry, guys, bad things are going to happen if you go that route. This doesn't mean, though, that. That if something apparently really bad and horrible happens, it means you've been doing something wicked. You might have been, but that's not necessarily the point. It's like when we had the pandemic and people were saying, oh, what have we done wrong in our Western society that we got this pandemic? And the answer is that's the wrong question. Just read the Book of Job or read Psalm 44 or Psalm 73. Bad things happen. And there is no one on one correlation with how people were behaving before it. There might be, but there necessarily. And we have to be careful about Implying that there would be a one for one. You know, that if, if something really bad happens to somebody. Oh, well, we suspect that you were, you know, wandering off on the side somewhere. No, that's, that's a very devastatingly bad thing to say. And I hear that sort of underneath, not the question necessarily, but where that may be coming from. Yeah.
- [11:22]
Mike Bird
Well, Tom, let's move on from spiritual life and protection to salvation and what it means in different denominations. So we've got a question from Jen Holland in Crystal, usa, and this is what Jen asks. There are so many denominations with differing views on how one is saved. What is your view from the Scriptures? I always hold onto Acts 2:38, where Peter says repent and be baptized as the pathway and baptism is the point where you are saved, since you have to repent first. To me, this makes infant baptism invalid for salvation. In conjunction, when do you think children become responsible for their sin and at what age or developmental stage can they truly repent? Well, thanks for your question, Jen. Tom, I see a few things going on here. One is the issue, obviously, do you think infant baptism is valid? But if it's repent and be baptized. And I haven't seen too many babies repent. I know, I know a lot of things babies need to repent of if they could. And at what stage do children reach the age of accountability when they need to start repenting? So, Tom, I mean, you've baptized babies in your time?
- [12:39]
Tom Wright
Sure, yes. Yes, including some of my own. Including some of my grandchildren.
- [12:43]
Mike Bird
Oh, wow.
- [12:44]
Tom Wright
Yeah. Which is a wonderful moment. I hear where this question is coming from, but I want to sort of come around the back and say, I wouldn't come at this like that. And actually beginning by saying Acts 2:30. 37. Was it Acts 2:38, Peter saying, repent and be baptized? Peter does go on immediately. The promise is for you and your children and all those who are far off and you and your children, I think in a 1st century Judaic context is pretty significant. He doesn't say you and your children, provided they're over the age of 10. We're doing this as a family. I think those who've worked in a variety of cultural contexts will know perfectly well that our Western separation of, well, this person is an adult, so they are ready to do this, but this person is a child, so they haven't really worked it out yet. That's actually incredibly arrogant. It assumes that people past the age of 10 or 15 or 20, they can now get it right, as it were, whereas these Poor kids, they can't. And actually, Jesus said, unless you convert and become like little children, you won't be part of God's kingdom on earth as in heaven. And actually, little children have a priority according to the Gospels. So I want to push back quite hard against the use of that one text, and no doubt others like it as a way of saying, therefore, we shouldn't be baptizing children. And I think that's the animus underneath this question. I was asked once by a cousin of mine who. They're roughly the same age as Maggie and me, but they got married a long time after us, and so they had children long time after ours. And when their first child was born, the wife asked me, at what age does a child become potentially aware of the love of God? And I said, about five minutes. And she looked shocked, as though she was expecting me to say, maybe age 7 or 9 or something like that. And I said, listen, you're a mother. When you're feeding the baby, the natural focal length of the baby's sight is on your eyes. That's how bab have their eyes programmed, is to be able to establish a contact of love with the mother while she's feeding. I said, if the human parent can make that loving contact with their child more or less straight away, are we actually saying that God has to wait a few years before he can make loving contact with that child? How that shows up is another question. But I have had no problem, no difficulty in seeing young children respond to human love. And human love is one of the primary ways by which they then come to realize God's love. And there is. There is then a continuity. So I would say go to the next verse in Acts, the promises to you and your children. And when we talk. I mean, I know there's been endless debate about households. The households, did they have a cutoff point at a certain age? And I think, no, lighten up. There wasn't such a cutoff point. This is. This is very much part of the modern Western. You've got to do everything explicitly or it's not quite real, which then shades off into rationalism of various sorts. So I know that what I'm saying is anathema to my good Baptist friends, but that's the view to which I've come over the years.
- [16:20]
Mike Bird
Well, Tom, I used to be a Baptist, so I kept the faith.
- [16:23]
Tom Wright
Sorry about that.
- [16:24]
Mike Bird
No, I love my Baptist roots. I trained at a Baptist seminary. It's the church of and for believers. But one of the things that got me to change my mind is understanding that the Abrahamic Covenant, the Abrahamic Promise, had a place for children. There was a place for children in the promises given to Abraham. Okay. And the New Covenant is in many ways think the fulfillment or the realization of the Abrahamic Covenant. So if the Abrahamic Covenant has a place for children in, it should not also the New Covenant. And I believe it does. And what I tell Christian parents is, do you want to raise your child to be a Christian or as a Christian? Now you might say it's a little bit of both. But I think if you're raised in a Christian home, you're going to expect your children to behave in Christian ways, you're going to teach them Christian values. So I would say you raised them as a Christian within the New Covenant. That's the fulfillment of the Abrahamic Covenant. And I think to show that you've entered into that family or part of that covenant community, you have the sign of the covenant, which is baptism.
- [17:35]
Tom Wright
Absolutely.
- [17:36]
Mike Bird
So that's the sort of the covenantal logic for me that I found persuasive. And that's why I've now found a home in the Anglican Church. Just a brief detour with my Presbyterian friends while I was in Scotland.
- [17:49]
Tom Wright
That's right. Right. No, I'm very much with you on that. And I think the idea of having children as not yet there, so that if you're a parent, you shouldn't actually teach them to say the Lord's Prayer because they might want to decide differently when they grow up or something. I think that's actually cruel.
- [18:09]
Mike Bird
Let them choose for themselves.
- [18:11]
Tom Wright
Quite, quite. But we don't leave them in a vacuum and we don't tell them they can't come to church or can't go to Sunday school. And I think what we've done, and I think this goes back to particularly the 17th century forms of piety in the Western world is we have looked for very explicit signs of actual faith in ways which then create other problems. I mean, when I was Bishop of Durham, there was one church in particular where there were lots of children with down syndrome who came to that church. And people have often raised the question, can somebody with that syndrome be a practicing Christian? I would say two. Right. They can. They can really respond to the love of God. And I've seen wonderful signs of real faith among children who the rest of society is embarrassed by. But the church, thank God, is a place where they can be welcomed. And you see, if you want to know what infant faith looks like, see some sort of five, six, seven year old down syndrome children coming to a family Eucharist on a Sunday morning. It's a heartwarming and actually tear jerking sight. So I want to be much more open to those possibilities than the nervous application of a kind of 17th century. Here are the stages of spirituality Point of view.
- [19:36]
Mike Bird
Okay, so we're not saying to Jen, repent and be Anglican, but we are saying there are some different views of baptism and how we understand children, the life of the church. Yep, that's great. Well, we're going to take a break. When we come back, we're gonna look at what do you do when a bad teacher comes to your church on that topic in a moment.
- [20:01]
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- [22:11]
Mike Bird
Our next question comes from Joe Yandel from Thousand Oaks. This is about bad teachers. And I'm glad it doesn't begin by saying Mike Bird came to my church the other day and he began talking about the. The evils of coffee and the superiority of the Australian cricket team. No, it was nothing like that. This is Joe's question. He says, we had a guest speaker in my church recently who was billed as a gifted Bible teacher. The speaker was a gifted public speaker, clear, articulate, engaging and passionate biblically. The speaker sort of attempted to exegete the passage, but the speaker ignored the larger context of the passages in the book and chapter they were located in and ignored the historical and cultural context of the text. As a result, the application was incorrect. This was not a situation of multiple valid interpretations, but making the text say something the speaker wanted to say instead of letting the text say what it says. This seems very common in the United States where people lauded as gifted Bible teachers make basic interpretive errors. How are we as laymen to respond to teachings of this nature? Many times these teachers have high levels of education, seminary training and endorsements from other pastors. Should this be confronted? Should it be ignored? Is there an antidote? What do we do when someone brings in a bad teacher to church on high billing, but the quality of the Bible teaching is pretty low or pretty bad?
- [23:46]
Tom Wright
Yeah, it's a tough one. At the same time, this is a problem of strength that I grew up in a world where teaching was. Was not Christian teaching was not a big thing, and the sermons tended to be discourses on issues of the day with a vague reference to dropping in a Bible verse here or there. And actually, over the course of my lifetime I have watched as my own church, the Church of England, has become. Tried to become a bit more biblical and it's become more common than it used to be for the preacher to take the Gospel reading for the day as the text to be preached on. And then I have seen over the course of my lifetime some improvement in the attempt to make, to find a message, discern a message for this congregation from the text which we've had read. But as you know and I know, Mike, as ourselves, teachers and theologians and working with seminary contexts etc. There is an enormous variety. I mean, if you go to, you've just come back from the Society of Biblical Literature annual meeting in, in America and there are many, many people there who are basically teaching Bible in churches, in academies, in seminaries, but there are many, many different points of view And I can imagine if all the people in those different congregations were to get together, you would have very different views about what will constitute good and bad teaching. I mean, I have. I have heard brilliant sermons. I've also heard terrible. And some of the terrible sermons have been people who have themselves been, as the speaker said, as the questioner says, supposedly trained. And I don't think there's any easy answer. I think the problem comes, and I've seen this again and again, when somebody lives in a town or a village where there is only really one viable option for going to church on a Sunday, and they're faced with the question, if you get really terrible teaching in that church, do you drive 25 miles up the road to another town where there's a different speaker? And sometimes for some people, that might be the right thing. The problem is you're then robbing the church there of your own fellowship, of your own participation in the local Christian community, and also then perhaps robbing the preacher of a prayerful, humble, but discerning audience who can then find ways, sometimes not always easy, of saying to the preacher, I have real problems with what you were saying. I don't want to make a fuss, but I would like to have a chance to discuss with you, and perhaps with one or two others, the general line you are taking. And when that can be done, it does take humility on both sides, of course, but when that can be done, there is sometimes the possibility for real improvement. But it is a problem. And I fully appreciate that as somebody who's preached many, many sermons and no doubt many, many bad ones. You know, I'm glad I haven't always instantly been blacklisted by the people who walk out and have never returned. But we're all on a learning curve of one sort or another. And I think the church has actually, the Western church has actually made considerable strides at being better educated and. And better trained than it was, say, 150 years ago. I do recall from that period, though, in the 19th century, Charles Haddon Spurgeon, as a young man, man, saying that there was one preacher who he listened to and other people found him totally heretical. And Spurgeon said, it's all right. When I'm listening to him, with every sentence I hear him say, I add the word not. And he said, then it. Then it's perfectly all right.
- [27:37]
Mike Bird
Yeah, but it is a hard one. I mean, there's a difference between what's a bad sermon, what's a disagreeable sermon, and then what's just really Bad and harmful and is leading people astray.
- [27:48]
Tom Wright
Yeah.
- [27:49]
Mike Bird
And I think I can tell the difference between bad, unhelpful and harmful. A lot of people may not have that discerning ability. I think what you've got to do is talk to some friends and say, look, did you find that as bad as I did? And if your friends say, yeah, that was pretty terrible. I mean, what you're saying about X, that's just either for application or exegesis. And then I think you go and see that the pastoral leaders and you say, look, some of us are concerned about, you know, we were told this guy's the bee's knees, but he's not even the grasshopper's toes. You know, whatever analogy you want to use, I don't think we should have him back. And in some cases you need to get the church to say, stand up and make response saying, yeah, we had our guest speaker last week, he's known for being a good teacher, but last week was probably not his best week. And so we want you to know that the pastoral staff actually shares the concern. We've heard the concerns of many you.
- [28:54]
Tom Wright
Right.
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Mike Bird
And yeah, we won't be doing that again or something like that, but you.
- [28:59]
Tom Wright
Would presumably as part of that sort of disciplinary move, you would want to sit down either one on one or in a close group with the preacher concerned and say there were serious concerns raised about your sermon and we don't want to act behind your back, but we, we do have to say that this point and that point in the way you said the other thing really did upset some people and make them worried that we weren't being taught the truth and see what reaction you get. I, I have once or twice in, when I've been in senior leadership roles and we've had guest preachers, I've had to say, can you come and have a cup of coffee and I'd really like to talk to you about what was said. And, and sometimes I've ended up lending them books which I hope would, would make them think differently about things. And sometimes that has been helpful and sometimes it hasn't had any effect at all. I mean, it's not about there, there's some good teachers over here, there's some bad teachers over there. So it's all nice and easy. There's a continuum and the same person can be good or bad on different days apart from anything else. So, so I want to say judge, not that we be not judged, but that doesn't mean we should be undiscerning.
- [30:11]
Mike Bird
I think you've got to give grace to people. Some people can just have a bad day or they say something in error. But I mean I once heard one speak. This is my favorite one clan. There was nine people in the Trinity. This is Benny Hinn. He said each person in the Trinity is a triune person in their own right. So there's nine members of the Trinity. I mean look it up on the Internet. It's is on the heresy meter. It scores a 20.9 and it only goes up to 10. I mean it was bad. I mean it was terrible. But, but anyway, Tom, I think that's all we've got the time for this week, Tom. But we want people to keep sending in their questions. So go to askantyright.com in our next episode we're going to answer questions on Can Christians work for a bad government? What about the Old and the New Covenants? And a question on the state of Anglicanism. Now Tom, I think you and I should do a bonus episode on what is the worst heresy we've heard in our lives? Or what's the worst doctrine or teaching we've heard. I think that would be fun. We should do a bonus episode on that maybe. And for people who like this content, please consider becoming a subscriber to our bonus episodes. It's a great way to support premiere to support the show, and it means you get an extra episode every week. That's a deep dive into some topic or where we trace some themes through a book of the Bible. But that's all we're going to do for now. I'm Mike Bird.
- [31:40]
Tom Wright
And I'm Tom Wright and we'll see.
- [31:41]
Mike Bird
You for the next episode of Ask nt Write Anything. Until then, God bless you all.
- [31:58]
Tom Wright
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Tom Wright
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