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Mike Bird
Hey to all the pastors, priests, people involved in Christian ministry. You spend hours every week on your sermons, but come Sunday morning, are you absolutely sure of what your congregation needs or are you just guessing? When people quietly slip out because they're fighting a battle you can't see? It's heartbreaking. But what if you could see what is going on in your church, in people's lives and their hearts? Know where the church is growing, where it's not, and what to do next? Well, that's where Next Step for Church comes in. Backed by 200 years of American Bible Society research, this free assessment gives you the tools you need to stop guessing and start knowing for sure. Imagine seeing the big picture of what the people in your church are dealing with. Imagine getting ideas to support the people who need it the most. And imagine tracking and celebrating their progress year after year. The team behind Next Step for Church is hosting a live Q and A to show you exactly how it works. Grab your spot@thenextepforchurch.org after a quick overview, they'll answer your questions so you can see how it fits with your specific congregation. Sign up today at nextstepforchurch.org it's time to turn on the lights and stop guessing about what your people need. Save your seat@nextstepforchurch.org ready to soundtrack your
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Mike Bird
Hello, and welcome to another episode of Ask nt Write Anything, 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
Tom Wright
Melbourne, joined by Tom Wright from Wetterfall in Oxford.
Mike Bird
And Tom, as we record this, it's the beginning of Holy Week. So do you, do you have any particular Holy Week traditions or things you like to do?
Tom Wright
Well, they've come and gone because I've done various jobs which have required me to be in particular places and to do particular things for Holy Week. So we've never developed one single sort of family system for it. And just at the moment, because we've had a very busy term and there's another very busy term coming up, Maggie and I are very quietly away in Scotland just lying low. So what we'll probably do, among other things, is we'll probably listen to Bach's and Matthew Passion. We were at a performance of the St John Passion a couple of weeks ago in New College in Oxford. And so that's fresh in my mind. But we've often done this, just put some CDs on of the Matthew Passion and, and, and read through it. And it's just such an extraordinary piece of music. So that, that may be one part of it, but then we will be part of the local church here, where we are.
Mike Bird
Well, in my case, we go to services on Easter Sunday and then we come home, we have these Humpty Dumpty Easter eggs. It's a chocolate Easter egg with a bunch of Smarties inside and it's in and they got like a Humpty Dumpty wrapper. So all of my kids line up on a wall that they sit on. We sing the Humpty Dumpty song. We then smash the Humpty Dumpies and eat them. I, I, I don't think you'll find that in the liturgy of the Syriac Orthodox Church.
Tom Wright
Well, you never, you never know. But I, I do hope you take a video of this sometime, Mike.
Mike Bird
Oh, we do, we do the, every year. I think I've got about, well, my eldest daughter is now 26, so it's the annual smashing of the the. Of the Humpty Dumpies.
Tom Wright
Oh my. Okay, if it pleases our Lord.
Mike Bird
But anyway, Tom, we've got Holy Week or not. We've got great questions about, you know, when do you become a child of Abraham? Are you a there children of Abraham who don't believe in Jesus? Did Jesus make mistakes? Did Jesus have to do anything by trial and error? And the whole concept of apostolic succession? How do you have continuity with the apostles? So to that end, our first question is from Jody Root in Tomar, usa. It's about Paul, his Messiah and being a child of Abraham. Here's what Jody asks. Our family recently completed the advanced study of Galatians provided by Anti Right Online.
Tom Wright
Good.
Mike Bird
There's some great courses you can take there. In the last lectures of the series, it seems that Tom Wright stresses that in Galatians, Paul redefines Israel to be the Messiah's people who are the true children of Abraham. We have heard of Paul's conversion on the road to Damascus. It appears that with Jesus revealing himself, Paul grasps that Jesus is the Messiah and that he is the fulfillment of of all promises in the Old Testament. Does this mean that Paul was not a true child of Abraham until Jesus appeared to him? Is it appropriate to say that Paul converted from Judaism to Christianity? We appreciate all your writings and lectures. The Lord has continued to expand our understanding of him and the cultural context of those who wrote the Scriptures through this podcast and other resources. And thank you. So Tom, this is a good one. Conversion Did Paul convert to Christianity? Are Jews part of the children of Abraham or is that now transferred to Christians? Tom, what do you have to say to Jody?
Tom Wright
I would never. I would never use a word like transferred because that easily goes with an older view, which some have held, alas, that God stopped being interested in ethnic Jewish people and decided instead to invest in ethnically gentile non Jewish people. And that was never the New Testament's point of view. But my mind goes back to what John the Baptist said when he was warning the crowds who were coming to him for baptism. Don't presume that you can say we have got Abraham for our Father because God can raise up children to Abraham from these stones. In other words, already for John the Baptist there seems to be a sense that it really matters to be a child of Abraham. But then that's an open question as to who is really a child of Abraham. It's as though John the Baptist is anticipating what Paul says in Romans 9. 6 and following that not all the children of Abraham are in fact the children of Abraham. Not all the ones who are ethnically Judaic are actually the promised seed. Now Paul then spends three chapters teasing out what that means. But for Paul himself, I think I've often thought it's wrong to use the word convert to describe what happened when he met Jesus on the road to Damascus, because Paul was already a very, very devout worshiper of the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, and a devout student of Torah and a man of prayer and faith and hope and so on. But what changed for him was realizing that if Jesus of Nazareth really was Israel's Messiah, and the proof of that was that God had raised him from the dead and here he was alive again, then everything that he had thought before, everything that he prayed before, was from one point of view, gloriously fulfilled, from another point of view, totally subverted and stood on its head. So the trouble is, when people today talk about somebody being converted, they often assume that this is from either atheism or agnosticism or secularism of one sort or another. And suddenly they get religion. The answer is Paul had a whole lot of religion already, thank you very much, just get radically refocused. But for Paul, once you realize Jesus of Nazareth is the Messiah, then it's impossible for a 1st century Judean to say, yes, I agree, so and so is the Messiah, but never mind, I'm going to do something over on the other side of the picture instead. Once you realize so and so is the Messiah, this is the defining moment. That's why 100 years after Jesus, when Rabbi Akiba declared that Simeon ben Kozibar was the son of the star, the Messiah, this didn't mean here's a messianic experience for anyone who would like to have it. But actually if you want to go on being following somebody else, that's fine too. No, the answer is if God has declared this person to be Messiah, this is where the people of God are being redefined, re centered, refocused. And actually all the great Judaic movements of the time, think of Qumran and actually think of the early rabbis, they had this sense that God is doing a new thing. And it's here, therefore there. From that point of view, to use the dangerous word, the whole idea of supersessionism, God doing something new, is actually a deeply first century Judaic idea. The Qumran people were in that sense supersessionist. Not that they were saying God's forgotten the ethnic Jews, it's just God has done a new thing and this is where God is at work. So then when, when Jesus says in the Sermon on the Mount, you are the salt of the earth, you are the light of the world. I don't think that they're not kind of in a neutral space. His hearers before then, they are ethnically Judaic, and they are coming and listening to Jesus because he seems to have a message which is what they've been taught to expect and to want, except they weren't expecting it quite like this. But saying you are the salt of the earth immediately is followed by, so watch out in case you've stopped being salty enough. And if you're the light of the world, then what are you doing putting a tin bucket over the top of it. So there's a challenge to be, in fact what you are in theory. And I think that comes right through the whole of the New Testament, that the note of a fulfillment, which is also a new day dawning. And if you insist on keeping the curtains shut to keep the daylight out, then don't be surprised if the new day proceeds without you. And that is not emphatically, not either replacement or in the normal sense, supercession. It is enlargement. It's God doing what in the prophets and the Psalms, he promised, you know, that the princes of the people are joined to the people of the God of Abraham, says the psalmist. And God says, abraham, in you and in your seed, all the families of the earth shall be blessed. So it's simply taking the Old Testament seriously, the Jewish scriptures seriously, and saying these are fulfilled in Jesus and by the Spirit. I hope that's clear. It's a very contentious issue.
Mike Bird
Of course, of course, of course. I think that's right, Tom. It's not like Paul was Persona non grata before God and then he became a Christian to become a child of Abraham. I think he was a child of Abraham by virtue of being Jewish, being within the covenant, being faithful to God. But God was doing a new thing within Judaism in the Messiah. And it's a case of, are you. Are you catching up to where. Where God is going, more like that, and joining this new movement of the. Of the Spirit in the Messiah.
Tom Wright
Right. And so many of the debates that we have in New Testament scholarly circles are about putting together these things of fulfillment at 1:1 level and radical innovation as another, and then discovering that the radical innovation was itself promised as a saying. You know my friend Jamie Davis, who's just becoming professor in Aberdeen now.
Mike Bird
Yes.
Tom Wright
I remember Jamie saying in a seminar, God has acted radically surprisingly dramatically, as he always said he would. In other words, there's that combination of the radical newness and then looking back and saying, oh, well, he did say he would do something like this, however surprising it may be.
Mike Bird
But Tom, that line you quoted from John the Baptist, I think, was it in Luke, Luke 3, where, you know, don't say to yourself, we are sons of Abraham because, you know, God can raise up children of Abraham from these stones. I mean, this is a bit of a side note. I remember when Dale, Dale Allison wrote an article on that passage and he, he argued it was proof against covenantal gnomism. Now, covenantal gnomism, for those who don't know, is the idea that God elects all of Israel by grace and works. Keep you in. Dale Allison argued that verse was kind of a counterpoint to it. Now, we can't do that right now, but I think that might be a great bonus episode for us one day to do. For those who don't know, every now and then, Tom and I record a bonus episode. Well, in fact, once a week we put them out where we do these additional episodes on Ephesians or Hot Topics. But that might be a good one. Covenantal Gnomism and its Value. But anyway, Tom, let's get into our second question. This is from Salome Shisa from Sweats in Switzerland. And Salome's got a great question. Did Jesus make mistakes? And she asks, you know, humans learn best by making mistakes as mistakes or error and sin overlap. This seems quite mysterious to me what is meant when it says that Jesus learned obedience by suffering. Now, if I understand Salome's question right, I mean, learning requires making mistakes. Obedience means you've gone through trial and error to reach a point of obedience. Did Jesus make mistakes? And Tom, I've got a very good test case here, a very good test case. The story of the Syro Phoenician woman, you know, Mark 7, parallel version in, in Matthew 15 about the Canaanite woman and where she says, look, you know, please heal my daughter. And Jesus says, you know, it's not right to give the food of children and throw it to the dogs. And she says, ah, yes, but even the, the dogs eat the crumbs that fall for the. From the children's table. And a lot of people interpret that as if that, sorry, Phoenician woman enables Jesus to overcome his ethnocentrism or even his racism or his ethnic prejudice. I remember George Caird had a great, a great understanding of this passage. But yeah, I mean, did Jesus make mistakes? Did he have to grow in knowledge? Was there anything, Trial and error? Did the sorrow Phoenician convince him to change his mind?
Tom Wright
I'd like to know what George Caird said about the Syrophoenician woman, because I. No, not about that. What were you saying? That George Caird had a passage on,
Mike Bird
on the Syrophoenician woman. George Caird said, you've got to imagine Jesus asking this woman this question with a wry smile on his face inviting her witty reply. And I in fact, read something near identical from just last night from George Van Kooten. He's got a good little book out called Reverberations of the Good News about the Gospels, which is very interesting.
Tom Wright
I have it. I have it on the desk somewhere here.
Mike Bird
Yeah, yeah, it's, it's, it's a fun read. It's a fun. It's. It's. Some places it's brilliant. Other place, places it's like, oh my gosh, man, what, what book of the Bible are you reading anyway? Does Jesus make mistakes, Tom?
Tom Wright
Yeah, well, let's go straight to that passage in Hebrews, because it's really important, Hebrews 5, 8. Even though he was son, son of God, he learned obedience through the things which he suffered. Now, I was looking at that verse in the Greek and I realized, and I'm not sure I'd realized this before, it's almost got a poetic feel to it. He learned through his suffering is emathen, aphone, epathen, and then obedience. So emathen, aphon, epaphen. It's almost as though that's one of these little quizzical ways of putting something he suffered. And so he learned. And what he learned was what obedience really means in practice. And the context is very clear. It's a reference to the episode in the Garden of gethsemane in Matthew 26, and the parallels, because it says in the days of his flesh, Jesus offered up prayers to God with loud crying and tears to the one who was able to save him from death. And even though he was heard for his piety, Barty had to learn what obedience meant. So it's fascinating because in the episode which is being referred to in Matthew 26, the Gethsemane episode, Jesus says in effect, please, isn't there another way? And the answer is, no, there isn't another way. And actually you do know that. And so Jesus says, thy will be done. But that's not that he wasn't heard, he was heard. But he had to discover what obedience really meant in practice. I think that's what that passage in, in Hebrews is all about. And actually, you having quoted my old teacher, George Caird, I remember in his lectures on Hebrews, he says much the same thing
Mike Bird
with trial and error, though there's no kind of trial and error learning from your mistakes. That's not really what's going on.
Tom Wright
I understand that line about we learn through our mistakes. And the answer is, well, we do and we don't. That's a bit glib sometimes that. Yeah, if you're doing. If you're learning a new language, when you make a mistake and the teacher explains to you why that's a mistake, you really do learn it, then there's all sorts of things in life which are like that. But, you know, when I learned to drive, fortunately I didn't learn by crashing into a lot of other cars coming the other way on the motorway. I actually learned the safer way. Although no doubt as a young driver I was a bit of a liability sometimes. But so that there are. There's learning by mistakes and learning by mistakes. And I don't think Jesus, I mean, in Gethsemane when he says, isn't there another way? And then on the cross when he says, my God, why did you abandon me? Had God abandoned him? I mean, generations of people preaching on that passage have said God had not abandoned him. It was just that the dark cloud of human sin and all the rest of it had come between him and God and it felt as though he was abandoned. And so he reached the Psalm 22, which is a prayer out of that. Now, I think we need to be careful before simply saying, well, Jesus got it wrong. Although I do want to say that Jesus was as aware as anyone else in first century Judea that it is failed messiahs who end up on crosses. And so if you think that you're God's Messiah and you end up on a cross, well, join the club. There were lots of others who have the same fate. So I think to find himself being challenged at that deep level, to question, to doubt is not to sin. It's not in that sense to make a mistake. It's to say, have I made a mistake? Was I barking up the wrong tree all the time? Which is a different thing, I think, from saying, no, I've just been getting it wrong. So when you go back to the Syrophoenician woman, I'm very much of a mind with George Caird there, that I think it all depends how you say it, because after all, we have several other stories in the Gospels. Think of the Samaritan woman in John 4, for instance. And Jesus says, well, give me a drink. And now if you knew who was talking to you, you'd be asking me for a drink. So he's clearly not in a position to say, no, no, no, you're an outsider. We're not having that, anything like that. And after all, we've got the parable of the Good Samaritan and lots of other stories in the Gospels which show a very different attitude to what's there on the surface of the text in Mark 7, which is Jesus just saying, no, we don't want any of you pagans, thank you very much. So I think the question then is how you read the text. And I mean how you read it, as you say, whether you've got a smile on your face and a smile in your voice as well, that I think there's many passages where Jesus teases people and probing them, pushing them. Can you not actually see, penetrate the disguise, see what's going on here? And I think this may be one such. But I would beware of simply saying, we learn through our mistakes. Therefore, if Jesus learned anything, obviously it was because he made mistakes. Well, no, that's a bit. That's a bit too glitz.
Mike Bird
Yeah, fair enough. Well, we're going to take a break now, but when we come back, we're going to look at how do we have continuity with the ancient church, particularly with the teaching and the liturgy and the lives of the apostles. More on that in a moment. Pastor, you spend hours every week on your sermons, but come Sunday morning, are you absolutely sure of what your congregation needs, or are you just guessing? When people quietly slip out because they're fighting a battle you can't see, it's heartbreaking. What if you could see exactly where your church is growing, where it's not, and what to do next? That's Next Step for church. Backed by 200 years of American Bible Society research, this free assessment gives you the tools you need to stop guessing and start knowing for sure. Imagine seeing the big picture of what your church is dealing with. Imagine getting ideas to support people who need it most. And imagine tracking and celebrating their progress year over year. The team behind Next Step for Church is hosting a live Q and A to show you exactly how it works. Grab your spot@nextstepforchurch.org After a quick overview, they'll answer your question so you can see how it fits with your specific congregation. Sign up today at nextstepforchurch.org it's time to turn the lights on and stop guessing about what your people need. Save your seat@nextstepforchurch.org have no fear.
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Mike Bird
And we are back. Tom Our last question for today is from Tristan Graney of Fort Worth, Texas. And this is about apostolic succession. And Tristan asked this. He says hello Mike and Tom, thank you for this podcast as it has had a transformative effect on my family both in learning and unlearning about our faith. My wife and I recently converted to Anglicanism and the the angels rejoiced and one of the most formative shifts have been discovering a more historically continuous and liturgical version of the church, especially in its episcopal structure and claims to apostolic succession. As I've read the New Testament, it seems that roles like bishops and deacons are presented as part of the Church's ordinary life, not just later developments. But many Protestant traditions don't retain that structure, and it doesn't seem to be central to any debate with any other issues. Given your emphasis on the Church as the continuation of God's new creation people through history, how should we understand the apparent discontinuity? Is apostolic succession something essential to the church's faithfulness, or is it better understood as one historically conditioned way of ordering the church's life? Now, Tom, if I'm understanding Tristan's question, he sees bishops, priests and deacons as established very early and that provides a structure that's passed on and that's type, that's a type of continuity. So is that where the continuity is? Is the continuity with the apostles in this, you know, three levels of ordination, or is our continuity with the apostles based on something else? Like we believe the same apostolic gospel, or we have a a passing on of the Holy Spirit through the laying on of hands? How do you understand our continuity with the Church of the Apostles, Tom?
Tom Wright
Yeah, yeah, it's a great question. And of course, it becomes a very controversial one at the time of the Reformation, the Protestant Reformation, because the Protestant Reformers saw this great monolithic Western Catholic Church, the Roman Church, claiming that it had apostolic succession, and therefore the Pope was the successor of Peter. Therefore you had to do what the Pope said. And the structure all sort of worked, worked like that, except that it didn't work, and there were lots of major problems with it. And basically people who were saying, in effect, because we are in the apostolic succession, whatever we do must be right, whatever we teach must be right. And you just have to suck it up, get used to it. And the Protestant Reformers said, well, we've been reading the original sources here. We think you're getting some seriously making some seriously wrong judgments as to what
Mike Bird
the ad fontes back to the sources.
Tom Wright
Well, exactly. And we're going back to the beginning and we're discovering it ain't necessarily so what you're teaching us. And I want to say we have to be careful because in the New Testament, though we do have episcopoe, we do have presbyteroi, and we do have diakonoi. They are not exactly, in the New Testament, bishops, priests and deacons, like we find them in subsequent centuries. And in the certainly in my church, the Anglican Church to this day, we have bishops and priests and deacons. And the word priests itself is controversial because some have interpreted that in a sense of these particular clergy being like successors to the Aaronic priesthood. And others have said, no, this is simply a contraction of presbyteros, which means elder. And then in the New Testament we notice that there seems to be some confusions between episcopoi and presbyteroi. Are they the same people or are they some of the same people or what? And even when we get that some sort of sense of a map there we are then left with the question, well, where was Paul in all that when he was going around setting up these churches and appointing elders in the local churches? Is there a subsequent equivalent to Paul, a kind of a super bishop or an archbishop or a metropolitan or somebody like that? And I think. And if that was actually going to be really important for the development and continuity of the faith, then I think somewhere between Matthew's Gospel and the Book of Revelation, it would have been made very clear. And I don't think it is. I think some sort of ministerial structure which actually grows out of the synagogue authority structure. And is transformed through the gospel. Some sort of structure like that is not exactly mandated in detail, but strongly emphasized. And that's for the sake of continuity, but not continuity, just in the sense of one person, then another, then another. And as long as you know you've tagged your predecessor, you're okay. It's not about, as people have often said, when you think about the bishop taking his seat, his throne, that actually the continuity is not about bums on seat, it's about the teaching office, it's about the teaching of the gospel. And that's what actually constitutes the continuity from one generation to another. But I do want to say as strongly as I can that the earliest church did have a strong sense of unity, and the unity was across space and quite quickly across time.
Mike Bird
The communion of the saints.
Tom Wright
Well, the communion of the saints, exactly. But there's a sense that we belong together and that the danger in the Protestant Reformation and then in the subsequent breakaway movements, of which of course there have been many, and more and more almost every week, it seems now that people seem to think that they can start something up, pray for the Holy Spirit, go and talk to people about Jesus, start meeting on a Sunday, and just basically invent your own church without any visible link to anyone else, either before you or to left and right of you. And that it seems. I mean, I think it's almost as though at the moment we seem to be going through a time when God is doing new things. There's no question about this. I meet with leaders of young churches and church planters and so on quite a bit. And I couldn't begin to deny that God is doing extraordinary things in some of these new movements, many of these new movements. However, history shows there's a great danger in new movements just going off and doing their own thing. That's very risky because basically the enemy is not such a fool as just to sit idly by and watch this happen. And the danger is then the fragmentation of the church, the fragmentation of the witness of the church, so that the outside world, from Caesar on his throne, whoever that may be right now, right the way through, looks at this muddle and says, why should I care? Whereas if the church were able to speak with one voice on any issue, then the rest of the world would notice and would take thought and so on. So I want to say the continuity is through this rich combination, not simply one person, then another, then another, but the combination of scripture, of a tradition of prayer, especially the saying of the Lord's Prayer, the tradition of breaking bread, Together, that is the euchari. And the sort of sense that when we do these things, when we're reading the Scriptures, when we're saying the prayers, especially the Lord's Prayer, when we're breaking bread, we are celebrating our unity with all those who've gone before us and with those who we may not know yet, but maybe we should, who are a mile or two down the road from us or hundreds of miles away across the sea. And we need to find better ways of expressing that, because that is absolutely vital for the New Testament vision of the church. And so I want to say the ideal is some sort of flexible, visible unity. I stress the flexible and the visible. But just as happily, God doesn't wait for me to become totally sinlessly perfect before I think he can do some things through me, know that they would be done better if I were sinlessly perfect. But God doesn't wait for that. God is happy to work through me, I believe, and try to put me right as we go along. In the same way, God can and does work through all sorts of expressions of Christian faith, even though we might, well, looking at it from the larger picture, say it would be better still if we had ways of expressing our unity across space and time. So, hallelujah, when somebody realizes that that unity across time matters. But watch out lest it shrink into the kind of succession narrative that the Protestant reformers quite rightly reacted against. I hope that's clear, Tom.
Mike Bird
I think that's not only clear, I think that is a word in season for the global Anglican Church. Because we need, we do need at a certain level, I think, a kind of a new reformation to call the church back to Holy Scripture. But some people want to doing it as if the communion of the saints, the. The physical signs of our unity don't matter. As if, you know, we're all about having the right theology. Who cares about institutions? There's no Greek word for institutions in my Bible. So it's, it's. It's kind of like that. So I think what you said, what was that phrase? It's got to be, but not too flexible, was. What was the precise phrase?
Tom Wright
Flexible. It's got to be flexible and visible. But the flexibility, which, you know, which I see all over the place, mustn't obscure or shouldn't obscure the visibility. And sadly, it often does. You know, when somebody starts a new church, as I say, just a few hundred yards down the road from an existing church and makes no contact and has no sort of getting together for fellowship or whatever, come on, guys, if we're following the same Lord, reading the same scripture, we ought to be able to find ways of doing at least the basic things together. Let's work at that.
Mike Bird
Okay, so flexible forms of church, but we're rooted in a broader communion around us. That's definitely a way to go. Well, that's all we have time for today. I want to remind everyone, if you've got a question that you've got for Tom, then send it to us@askntirite.com and Lord willing, we'll be able to get it on the program. Now, Tom, have you been to the cinemas recently?
Tom Wright
Actually, no, I haven't been inside a cinema for, for some months. I'm, I'm sorry to say I believe in keeping up with popular culture. It's just I don't have the time to do it.
Mike Bird
I went to a, I went to see a movie not long ago and I paid 16 for a massive bucket of popcorn. 16 Australian pesos for this man. And I'm, and I'm here eating my popcorn and I say to myself, for the price of this, you know, cup of popcorn, I could get three months worth of bonus episodes of Ask nt Write Anything. And I'm eating this going, I think I'd rather the great content, an extra bonus episode every week rather than eating this salty popped corn of which the worst thing is. Did you know, Tom, the cardboard is worth more than the popcorn. That is the real insane thing. It is. The biggest popcorn is the biggest ripoff of all time. Sorry I'm ranting against big cinema, but there we go. Well, everyone, if you for the price of one big bowl of popcorn, you can get effectively three months worth of bonus episodes, which I guarantee has got a lot more spiritual nutritional value than the nutritional value you'll get in a, in a big bowl of popcorn. So yeah, subscribe to our bonus episodes. You'll have, you'll have, you'll have never ending fun from them. Tom and I have great fun making them. But anyway, it's goodbye from me, Mike Bird.
Tom Wright
Goodbye from me, Tom Wright.
Mike Bird
And we look forward to seeing you on the next episode of Ask nt Write Anything. Until then, God bless.
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Episode: Who are Abraham's children? Did Jesus make mistakes? Is apostolic succession essential to the Church's faithfulness?
Date: April 20, 2026
Host: Mike Bird
Guest: NT (Tom) Wright
This episode dives into three theologically significant questions:
With characteristic warmth and depth, Mike Bird and NT Wright discuss scripture, church history, and contemporary practice, addressing listeners’ real questions.
[03:08–05:17]
Tom Wright [04:59]: “Well, you never know. But I do hope you take a video of this sometime, Mike.”
Mike Bird [05:17]: “If it pleases our Lord.”
[05:17–13:47]
Jody Root (Tomar, USA):
Does Paul teach in Galatians that being a true child of Abraham is redefined in the Messiah? Did Paul convert from Judaism to Christianity? Is there a "transfer" from Jews to Christians as Abraham's children?
NT Wright [07:01]:
“I would never use a word like transferred because that easily goes with an older view... that God stopped being interested in ethnic Jewish people and decided instead to invest in ethnically gentile non Jewish people. And that was never the New Testament's point of view.”
NT Wright [08:40]:
“For Paul himself, I think I've often thought it's wrong to use the word convert to describe what happened when he met Jesus on the road to Damascus... what changed for him was realizing that if Jesus of Nazareth really was Israel's Messiah... then everything that he had thought before, everything that he prayed before, was from one point of view, gloriously fulfilled, from another point of view, totally subverted and stood on its head.”
NT Wright [11:35]:
“It's not emphatically, not either replacement or in the normal sense, supercession. It is enlargement. It's God doing what in the prophets and the Psalms, he promised... these are fulfilled in Jesus and by the Spirit.”
[13:47–22:56]
Salome Shisa (Switzerland):
Did Jesus make mistakes and learn by trial and error, especially in light of passages like Hebrews 5:8 (“learned obedience through suffering”)? How does this relate to the story of the Syrophoenician woman (Mark 7 / Matthew 15)?
NT Wright [17:19]:
“He learned through his suffering... It's almost as though that's one of these little quizzical ways of putting something—he suffered, and so he learned. And what he learned was what obedience really means in practice.”
NT Wright [21:17]:
“To question, to doubt is not to sin. It's not in that sense to make a mistake. It's to say, ‘Have I made a mistake? Was I barking up the wrong tree all the time?’—which is a different thing, I think, from saying, ‘No, I've just been getting it wrong.’”
NT Wright [22:37]:
“So I think the question then is how you read the text... there’s many passages where Jesus teases people, probing them, pushing them. Can you not actually see, penetrate the disguise, see what's going on here? … I would beware of simply saying, ‘we learn through our mistakes, therefore, if Jesus learned anything, obviously it was because he made mistakes.’ Well, no, that's... that's a bit too glib.”
[25:41–36:40]
Tristan Graney (Fort Worth, TX):
Is apostolic succession (bishops ordaining bishops, etc.) essential for the continuity and faithfulness of the church, or is continuity with the apostles based on belief and practice rather than institutional lineage?
NT Wright [28:47]:
“In the New Testament, though we do have episcopoi, we do have presbyteroi, and we do have diakonoi—they are not exactly, in the New Testament, bishops, priests and deacons, like we find them in subsequent centuries.”
NT Wright [30:41]:
“It's not about, as people have often said, when you think about the bishop taking his seat, his throne, that actually the continuity is not about bums on seat, it's about the teaching office, it's about the teaching of the gospel. And that's what actually constitutes the continuity from one generation to another.”
NT Wright [35:21]:
“The ideal is some sort of flexible, visible unity... just as happily, God doesn't wait for me to become totally sinlessly perfect before I think he can do some things through me... In the same way, God can and does work through all sorts of expressions of Christian faith, even though we might... say it would be better still if we had ways of expressing our unity across space and time.”
“The annual smashing of the. Of the Humpty Dumpies.” [05:03]
“Well, you never, you never know. But I, I do hope you take a video of this sometime, Mike.” [04:59]
“For the price of one big bowl of popcorn, you can get effectively three months worth of bonus episodes—...a lot more spiritual nutritional value than the nutritional value you'll get in a, in a big bowl of popcorn.” [37:14]
Warm, thoughtful, pastorally sensitive, laced with both scholarly insight and humor. Both hosts blend theological depth with approachability, using anecdotes, scholarship, and gentle banter to serve listeners wrestling with complex issues.
For full references or to submit your own question, visit askntwright.com.