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- [00:01]
Tom Wright
Close your eyes, exhale, feel your body relax and let go of whatever you're carrying today.
- [00:08]
Mike Bird
Well, I'm letting go of the worry that I wouldn't get my new contacts in time for this class. I got them delivered free from 1-800-contacts. Oh my gosh, they're so fast.
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Unknown
And breathe.
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Mike Bird
Oh, sorry. I almost couldn't breathe when I saw the discount they gave me on my first order. Oh, sorry. Namaste.
- [00:25]
Unknown
Visit 1-800-contacts.com today to save on your first order.
- [00:28]
1-800-Contacts Ask nt, Write Anything is sponsored by Logos. Start going deeper in the Bible with.
- [00:35]
A free trial@logos.com NT.
- [00:41]
On WhatsApp, no one can see or hear your personal messages. Whether it's a voice call message or sending a password to WhatsApp, it's all just this. So whether you're sharing the streaming password in the family chat, trading those late night voice messages, that could basically become a podcast, your personal messages stay between you, your friends and your family. No one else, not even us. WhatsApp message privately with everyone.
- [01:13]
Well, hello and welcome to the Ask into your Right Anything podcast, the show where we try to answer your questions about Jesus, the Bible and the life of of faith. I'm Mike Bird from Ridley College.
- [01:25]
Tom Wright
And I'm Tom Wright in Northern Scotland.
- [01:28]
Unknown
And we're here to answer your questions that you've sent in because Tom's got a particular bit of wisdom he can share when it comes to answering them, and we've got some good ones today. Our first question comes from Kathy Wenman in Spalding of the United Kingdom, and she asks, why does God say in Joel 3:20, But Judah shall dwell forever, and Jerusalem from generation to generation? And in Hosea 11, 8, how shall I give up thee, Ephraim? Shall I deliver thee Israel? In verse nine, I will not execute the fierceness of my anger. There are many, many other verses she says I could quote where God declared his constant and unending love for Israel. So time does God have a love for Israel that is inexhaustible and eternal? And I guess, what does that mean for the state of Israel today? I mean, this is a question that you could argue links God's love for Israel with contemporary political events. So, Tom, what do you have to say to Cathy about these particular Bible verses that she's bringing up?
- [02:46]
Tom Wright
Wow. This is one of those questions which, if I was to try to answer it fully, I'd probably need a three or four volume book to take each element of it, to clean it up, to allay misconceptions et cetera, and then to move on. But trying to compress all of that, I want to stress that in the New Testament it is precisely promises like those ones that are seen as being fulfilled in Jesus. In 2 Corinthians, Paul says all the promises of God find their. Yes, in part of our difficulty has been that we have seen Jesus as simply this great divine Savior who arrives to rescue us. And, oh, there are some verses back there that refer to him, but never mind too much as though this is a completely new thing. Whereas part of the whole point of calling Jesus Christos the Anointed One, the Messiah is that the Messiah sums up in himself all God's promises and purposes to Israel. The New Testament stresses that again and again. So the promises in Joel, in Hosea, and in many, many other passages as well are not done away with. It isn't as though God has said, we'll forget those and do something else. And of course, that is how many Christians have been taught to read the Bible. I have heard it said and I've seen it in print that, well, God had a first shot at saving the world, which was to call this people called Israel and give them the law. But that didn't work out because keep the law. So God said, well, we'll forget that and I'll send Jesus. I'll come in the person of Jesus myself. And that then sort of puts the whole history from Abraham through to Jesus in a kind of a bracket where we can safely ignore that. And that is a travesty. The whole of the New Testament would say, no, you can't say that, because these great promises come forward. And the early Christians, the followers of Jesus, were very much aware that they were the inheritors of those promises. The whole Christian movement is basically one of the first century attempts to say this is how Israel's God is doing the new thing that he promised. Now if you look at the other attempts to say that, whether it's in the community that wrote the Dead Sea Scrolls or the Pharisaic movement, they're all saying this is how the promises are fulfilled. And by the way, that means you lot are going down the wrong track. So please stop and come with us. The early Christians, from that point of you are saying just the same thing. This is where the promises are fulfilled. How do we know? Because God did for Jesus personally what he had promised to do for Israel at the end, raising him from the dead so that all those promises are fulfilled in Jesus. And that means that the early church is not oh, well, we're now a Gentile movement and the Jews are not loved by God anymore. And as I said in answer to a question in a previous podcast episode, in Romans 9:11, Paul wrestles with exactly this question. And particularly in Romans 11, he says, has God then cast off his people? And what he's been doing in Romans 9 and 10 is to expound the whole story of the Old Testament seen through the lens of Genesis to Deuteronomy, which is the Torah, which is the backstory as well as the whole story of the people of God. And he comes to the end in Deuteronomy. He says, well, God always warned in Deuteronomy 32 that if Israel didn't believe and obey and follow, then bad things were gonna happen. They have now come to pass. And then he says in Romans 11, so has God cast off his people? By no means. And then he talks about Israel still being beloved for the sake of the patriarchs. Now, that belovedness doesn't mean that all Jews are automatically saved. Far from it. Because he says at the crucial moment in that chapter, in Romans 11, I magnify my ministry. I make it clear to my Jewish contemporaries the effect of my work in all the world in order to make my fellow Jews. He actually says, to make my flesh jealous and so save some of them, like he says in 1 Corinthians 9, all things to all people, so that I might by all means save some. Paul is a realist. He knows that his preaching doesn't mean that everyone who listens gets saved. And likewise, he hopes and longs to make his fellow Jews jealous of what God has done in the Gentile world. That idea of jealousy only makes sense if these promises are still Israel's for the taking. And if they then say, no, no, no, we don't want that. Well, Paul will go on grieving, but he will go on saying, look, this is what God, your God, always promised to do. Think of Isaiah, think of the Psalms. What God does in and for Israel, he's going to do for the whole world. That is very clear in many passages in the Old Testament. And so that when God then is doing for the whole world what he promised, this doesn't mean he's forgotten those promises to Israel. It means precisely he's fulfilled them in J. He is fulfilling them. In terms of a worldwide Jew plus Gentile church. That is, of course, hugely controversial today. I'm well aware of that. And I have to say this means that Romans 11 cannot be used, as many have tried to use it as a validation for the present day state of Israel. I have known people for whom the founding of the present modern state of Israel, through the decree of the United nations in the late was the fulfillment of prophecy, so that now the prophetic clock has started and so that any minute now Jesus is coming back and there's going to be a rapture and so on. I have to say that whole sequence of thought is completely wrong and dangerously so. The present state of Israel, of course, many of us would say, and I'm convinced of this was necessary, that something should be done to make sure that the Jewish people had a safe place to be after the terrible wickedness of European antisemitism. But that doesn't mean that now Israel can do what it likes because it is the chosen people of God and they must then have the whole land. And so the Palestinians can just push off and go somewhere else. It certainly doesn't mean that, yes, these are hugely, hugely difficult issues. As we speak, there are people dying in Gaza and elsewhere because this whole thing just has never been resolved and there are enormous political puzzles. But you can use Romans 11 to say that therefore God is going to send the Jews back to their land with carte blanche to do whatever they like. Romans 11 simply isn't about that. It's about God wanting to create a Jew plus gentile family shaped by and rooted in Jesus, the Messiah, in whom all the promises of God find their. Yes.
- [10:03]
Unknown
Yeah. Tom, one of the things I do with my students when we do biblical theology is I use Israel as the test case for different systems of biblical theology, whether covenantal or dispensational or some other scheme of promise and fulfillment? And the question I get students to answer is, should we regard the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948 as divine providence or an act of fulfilling divine prophecy? And I think how you answer that question tells you a lot about the biblical theology you've got going on. Yeah, I think that is a very good question.
- [10:47]
Tom Wright
That's great, Mike. Sometimes when I hear what you say to your students, I think I wish my lecturers at theological college had asked us questions like that. So go for it. It's obviously, you're doing a great job.
- [11:00]
Unknown
I try my best. I try my best. Although it will be up to the students at Ridley College in Melbourne to determine how well I'm doing. But anyway, we've got another question. We've got another question. This comes from Wesley Ekstrom Santos in Orebro, Sweden. I've got no idea if I've pronounced these names correct or not. So please forgive me to my.
- [11:22]
Tom Wright
I have lectured there. I think it's, er, brewing, if I remember right.
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Unknown
Okay, we'll run with that. We'll run with that. But anyway, Wesley asks. Hi, Tom, I have been headhunted by a company that manufactures defense systems for the military. Is it morally wrong for a follower of Jesus to work for companies like these? Well, that is a great question. I mean, if you were working for a company that made land mines, I mean, that's pretty bad because weapons like that tend to kill very indiscriminately. But Tom, what are your thoughts? I mean, you know, Britain has a very big and thriving defense industry. So this is a question a lot of Christians can ask or people who work for the Department of Defense or anyone involved in military adjacent companies and businesses.
- [12:17]
Tom Wright
Yeah, yeah, it's a great question. I faced this quite sharply when I was dean of Litchfield. So this is going back maybe 25 years. One year we held what we called an industrial harvest festival where we invited all the industries of the West Midlands to come and display what they were doing in the cathedral. So we had potters from Stoke on Trent, we had car manufacturers displaying bits and pieces of what they were doing. We had all sorts. And one of the people and I chaired a seminar which this man was leading was the chair and managing director of a small company in the West Midlands that among many other things was making materials for the defense industry. In other words, weapons of war and bombs, so on. And we had a wonderful debate. So it was very kind of sharp edged for me back then, 25 years ago, and it has remained so. His argument why it was important was, I think, twofold. One, that I have a lock on my front door because I have a wife and family and there are bad people out there. There are burglaries. In the part of the world where I live, sometimes people get murdered in their beds. And I do not want that to happen to my wife and kids. So I have a lock on the front door and I want there to be a good locksmith who will make that. Now transpose that up. Many countries feel that there are dangerous and arrogant countries out there that might attack them, that might come and try to take them over, and that we have to have an appropriate defense system in order to defend our country against the danger of foreign attack. Which is why, incidentally, a long time ago, Britain changed from having a parliamentary office called Minister for War to one called Ministry of Defence. In other words, we don't think of ourselves as wanting to go to war. But we do believe that we have to have an appropriate defense because we live in a dangerous world. We have a responsibility to keep our citizens safe, et cetera, et cetera. Now then, the question falls much more awkwardly that what instruments of defense are appropriate and what aren't? Oh, the other argument, which my colleague in that seminar was advancing, was basically, if we don't make them, somebody else will. And this is good for British industry rather than having to outsource that to countries that we might disapprove of on other grounds as well. And that's a more dodgy argument, though I understand it. But then it is a question of is it okay to make tanks and ordinary guns, et cetera? Is it okay to make drones? Is it okay to make the kinds of weapons which can be operated from thousands of miles away by somebody sitting in a bunker playing basically video games and killing somebody that they can see on their screen? Just what are we talking about here? And this is where we need a whole better revamped theory of just war. Not just jus ad bellum, but jus in bello, which is not just the rightness of going to this particular war, but then how do we wage war rightly, if it has to be done? And then we get into the larger questions. And of course, somebody who was a pacifist would say, we shouldn't be doing this at all. We ought to dismantle all these industries. I feel the lure of pacifism. I've had good friends who have been pacifists, but it seems to me, both in the 1940s with Germany and for many people right now, I mean, I would have found it impossible to say to the president of Ukraine at the start of the Russian invasion three years ago from when we're recording this, yeah, war is wrong. So if he wants to invade your territory and take over, then just let him have it. Though that would have spared a lot of lives, I cannot find it in my heart to say that that would have been the right approach. And so these are very difficult. It's to do with living in the now and the not yet again, with living in the now of blessed are the peacemakers and living in the not yet of saying, as in Romans 13, that authorities, properly constituted authorities, have the right and sometimes the duty and necessity of using some kind of violence in order to protect the innocence, the innocent, and to keep the peace as best they can. Now, these are very complex issues, but I would say, for instance, there are certain types of should we say cluster bombs, which, as you said about landmines, kill randomly, all sorts of people? I would say very emphatically that about nuclear weapons, though I'm well aware that once you get into a nuclear arms race, then there are questions about how on earth you scale that back and whether it would ever be possible to do without them altogether, which, please God, that would be wonderful if we could. So those are the sort of issues I want to say. Yes, it's important that people defend their countries. Yes, it's important that people manufacture appropriate weaponry to do that. But then the question of what counts as appropriate and what counts as appropriate forms of warfare in today's world, these are huge issues, and I don't see any easy knockdown argument about how we should address them. But, Mike, you served in the military, which I never did. Maybe you've got an inside track on some of this.
- [17:55]
Unknown
Yeah. As someone who became a Christian while he was in the military, this is something I did have to wrestle with. And I basically came to the conclusion that just war theory, although it may not be ideal and doesn't often get applied well, is still the least worst option. And the best way to maintain peace is to, you know, as they say in Latin, parabellum, you know, prepare for war. If you have a good defense industry, a good defense force, that is one of the best deterrence for aggression against you by other malignant actors, whether they are states or whether they are terrorist organizations or something of that order. But if some people really do have a conscientious problem with working in defense or serving in the military, there are a number of other areas you can work in. I mean, you can work in medical hospitals, you can work with companies that produce medical kits to help people in conflict. One thing I've been trying to encourage my younger son to do is to look at a career in cybersecurity, since cybersecurity is very important these days for national security, since the cyber world, the information domain, is one of the new theaters of conflict in our age. So, I mean, that's the view that I come down to on that topic.
- [19:28]
Tom Wright
Yeah, that's fascinating. And yes, tomorrow's world is going to be quite different. And I think the drone warfare we're seeing now is just a sign of what's to come, which I find pretty horrendous, but that's where we are.
- [19:41]
Unknown
Yeah. Well, it's probably a good time to take a break. When we come back, we're going to look at some further questions related to topics such as the sons of God in Genesis 6 and some of the things that we might want to do on Monday Thursday. So don't go too far. We'll be back in a moment.
- [20:04]
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- [22:31]
And we are back. And we have got a question from DJ Freeman in Thomasville, North Carolina of the usa who's got a question about the Sons of God in Genesis 6. Now this is a very tricky text. This is a a very disputed text because this is the one where the Angels saw the daughters of men and then somehow seem to have procreated with them. And there's all sorts of debates of who the sons of God are. Are they angels, Are they ancient kings? But anyway, this is, this is the question we have from, from DJ Freeman. It's about the daughters of men. And it's asked, doesn't that imply that spiritual beings had carnal desires? Does it also imply that the sons of God were actually male? I always thought of spiritual beings as being more or less asexual. Now, if I was going to preach this text, Tom, I would call it the case of the Amorous Angels or something like that. It's, you know, if you put that outside the church, you might get some more people coming along to hear what you're talking about. But Genesis 6 is a very interesting story. And there's a whole stream of ancient Judaism that saw the entrance of evil, not so much in Genesis 3 with the fall, but rather with the actions of evil angels. And, and I think we've got a good question here about angels, gendered and sexual beings. And I'm thinking of this text, but also in juxtaposition with the story of Jesus and the Sadducees, where the Sadducees put to Jesus the question about, you know, what happens when that man, that man's wife who end up being married to several brothers, when she goes to heaven, her wife, whose wife will she be? And Jesus says, well, it's a silly question because in heaven there's neither marriage nor giving in marriage. Rather, we will be like the angels. So are angels capable of being amorous or are they asexual beings? This is a tricky question about angelology, Tom. I mean, what are your initial thoughts?
- [24:44]
Tom Wright
Yes, I don't have an inside track on angels, alas. And I do notice that, yes, there is that huge stream of Jewish literature around the time of Jesus, well before and then after the Enoch literature among them, but plenty of other stuff, speculation about angels and speculation based on Genesis 6, but that in the Bible itself, such speculation is very, very much withdrawn. And we just have these few verses. If it wasn't for Genesis 6, 1 4, we wouldn't have any idea of any such thing. And the other passage you have to include with that, I think is the beginning of the Book of Job, where in job 1 6, there was a day when the sons of God came to present themselves before the Lord, and Satan came also among them. And the Lord said, what have you been doing? Et cetera, et cetera. And then it repeats itself in chapter two. And again, the Satan, the accuser is one of the sons of God. And in that hinterland of the world of ancient Israelite thought, God is clearly sovereign, God is clearly unique. But God has his kind of his civil service, the people who run different departments. And there are different ways in which different ancient Israelite traditions saw that. But the important thing in Job is that one of the departments that has to be run is the director of public prosecutions, which assumes, by the way, that there already is evil. And it's the Satan's job to say, this person is guilty of this, and therefore I'm going to accuse him. The word Satan means the accuser. So we get a little bit of help from Job and one to other texts, but not much. But I think part of our problem here is that because of the residual Platonism of Western culture, we have assumed that what we call spiritual beings would have nothing carnal or physical about them. So that the idea of a spiritual being having carnal desires, but seems to us a contradiction in terms. And I suspect that part of what's going on here is a reminder that actually heaven and earth are not that far apart. They overlap and they interlock. And maybe there are ways in which the beings that we have called spiritual beings who are here referred to as the sons of God, may actually have been like human beings in some way. And the passage goes on in verse four about the giants which are in the earth in those days. And then when the sons of God came into the daughters of men, they had children with them and they became the mighty men of old. So there seems to be almost a confusion between a distant memory that there were enormous people, giants in those days, the Goliaths of this world, who then seemed to die out as a race. And it looks as though that's partly a way of accounting for the biblical scheme in which when God calls Adam and Eve, they are the first hominids to be so called, to be told, now you are going to have a vocation to reflect me into the world and reflect the praises of the world back to me. But this doesn't mean that they are the only hominids around. Otherwise, where did Cain get his wife from? Et cetera, et cetera. This is. This is complicated because the Bible doesn't tell us very much about it. We need to be careful of the ground we're treading on. So it does look as though that there's a memory here of early goings on in which there were what we would call spiritual beings. Or heavenly beings who could take human form or maybe always had some sort of human form. I don't have a good answer to this. And If I had 10 commentaries on Genesis behind me on my shelf here, which I don't, I could have spent all morning looking them up, but I haven't done that. But I would say if anyone really wants to know, then go and look at some recent commentaries on Genesis or do what you've advocated before, Mike, to look up sons of God in the Logos software and see what comes up. And there'll be quite a lot of stuff there. So I think I want to say this does seem to be not a second story of the fall because already in Genesis 3, 4 and 5 we have all sorts of signs of wicked evil, particularly Cain murdering Abel and so on. So that then this is part of the accumulation, part of the focusing of evil and of the sense of the world being out of joint, that the heaven earth world which God intended the, isn't working out the way that God wanted it to. And so the rebellion then, if that's what it is of these angelic creatures is part of the problem to which then ultimately the story of, well, of Noah to begin with, but then of Abraham is a solution. That's about as far as I can go with that one. I know it's not very satisfying, but Mike, where would you take this?
- [29:58]
Unknown
Well, look, if you pushed me into a corner, I probably say that these are angels that somewhere somehow have become corrupted and perverted and out of that perversion they have then pursued, as I think it says in Jude, other flesh. So something has happened within the angelic order with the angelic powers that they have then sought to express a lust for power as much as a lust for flesh and, and doing that in God's good creation. I mean that's probably how I would put it. But again, this is not my prime area of technical expertise and I'll happily defer to some Old Testament colleagues on that score.
- [30:45]
Tom Wright
I think we do need to notice that the New Testament doesn't make very much of this theme. It's kind of on the edge somewhere. I know this is a bit of a catch all or a cop out even, but I sometimes feel like saying if that was really important then we would add more information about it somewhere.
- [31:06]
Unknown
We do get a little bit in Jude and in the book of Revelation, like when Satan's cast out of heaven and Jude. But yeah, it's certainly not a mainstay of the explanation for evil in the New Testament that's normally explained in different terms.
- [31:21]
Tom Wright
Yeah. Right.
- [31:23]
Unknown
Well, let's move on to our last question for this week. And it comes from Jim Bryson in Eagle River, Alaska, and he's got a question about whether Christians should reunite the Passover during the Monday Thursday celebration. So this is what Jim asks, with Lent and Holy Week just around the corner. Here is my question. It's about Passover meals and foot washing liturgies. Should we as Christians, maybe not messianic community, should we as Christians be reenacting the Passover meal on Maundy Thursday? Wasn't the Last Supper truly the Last Supper? Also in our modern Western shoe wearing, non agricultural society, are footwashing liturgies relevant and should we do them? So, Tom, do you do a Monday Thursday celebration with foot washing? And you ever been part of a church where they've had a Passover celebration during that night?
- [32:28]
Tom Wright
Yes, I have, and several times I've been to Christian versions of Passover on Maundy Thursday, the Thursday the night before Good Friday. I think that the problem that I see is the danger of, as it were, seeming to upstage what our Jewish friends down the road may be doing with their Passover celebrations. Sometimes, by no means always. Of course, Jewish Passover celebrations are going on at the same time as Christian Easter celebrations because of different ways the calendar is organized. But whether or not that's so, I think there is just a slight danger of what now in our politically correct world, we call cultural appropriation, as though we are kind of pretending to be Jews, as though we're sort of play acting as though we are first century Jews. However, when I was growing up, I knew very little about how Passover worked and what it meant. And so the first time I was actually taken to some Jewish friend's house for a Passover, it was a revelation to me. They tell the whole story. They do this, they do that, and it all comes together and it was very meaningful. And so when I then belonged to a church which actually took time on Maundy Thursday, not just to have a Eucharist, but to have a kind of fellowship meal in which some of the Passover liturgy was reenacted, I have never felt that to be a bad thing. I wouldn't say it's necessary. I wouldn't say it's the best thing always to do. It seems to me that sometimes for some churches, that may be a wonderful educational exercise and a form of spiritual discipline. I would expect that most churches that value the Lord's Supper, the Last Supper, would want to have A celebration of the Lord's Supper on Monday evening. And that itself is a commemoration of Passover. Part of the problem, of course, is that in the accounts of the Last Supper, it's not entirely clear that this is exactly a Passover meal. I mean, from one point of view it clearly is a Passover meal, but it's a Passover meal with a difference. And Jesus changes the words, if that's what it is.
- [34:44]
Unknown
But.
- [34:44]
Tom Wright
And so there's a sense that we're here at a very difficult, almost nodal point. So I am cautiously in favor of churches laying this on as a kind of fellowship meal in addition to a regular Christian Eucharist. But I wouldn't say that this is something that all churches ought always to do and that we always ought to be very much aware of the danger of seeming just to appropriate a Jewish way of life, as though there isn't an ongoing Jewish community down the road somewhere that will be having its own Passover. As to footwashing, I have enormously valued the times when I have taken part in foot washing ceremonies. Although of course it's very different. If you're wearing open toed sandals, walking the roads of dusty Galilee and Jerusalem and going through fields, et cetera, then of course your feet get very dirty, very messy, probably very smelly. And. And one of the normal common courtesies of a host at any meal would be to make sure that the guest's feet got washed, because you don't want to sit at table with your feet all covered in mud and possibly smelling of all sorts of things as well. So it becomes very necessary. However, I've experienced this both in small churches and in great cathedrals and so on, where even though we wear shoes and socks now, and even though we haven't been tramping fields and getting our toes all muddy, there is something enormously powerful, intimate, special and humbling in all sorts of ways, both about having your feet washed by somebody and in washing somebody else's feet. We used to work when I was Bishop of Durham. We would have a. Before the ordination service, we would have a retreat for a few days, and in the service towards the end of that retreat, we would have foot washing where we would take it in turns to wash one another's feet and somebody would come forward and sit at the stool and take a shoe off and somebody else would come forward randomly, whoever it was, and wash their feet. And then that person would sit there and somebody else would come forward. And we always found that a deeply moving thing because it symbolized the fact that ministry is all about serving one another. Jesus says, you've seen that. I've done that for you, now I want you to do it for one another. And, of course, this is not part of our culture. We don't wash the feet of guests who come to our house for dinner in the way that they did in the first century. However, it remains a very powerful symbol, which I wouldn't wish the church to lose altogether. But of course, what it ought to mean is that we ought to be constantly thinking, what. What symbols do we have in our culture? What does go on in our culture, which is about welcome hospitality, offering of cleansing and hope and help and so on, and how can we prioritize that as well? So it isn't everything. If there's a church that's never done it and has no intention of ever doing it, I wouldn't say they're missing out on some rich blessing, but I would say that it can be, and for many people has been a very helpful part of the preparation for Good Friday and then Easter itself.
- [38:11]
Unknown
Yeah, it's definitely something worth doing as you prepare in Holy Week. Yeah, I mean, I tend to think that Paul says, christ, our Passover lamb, has been slain. So I'm kind of reluctant to hold my own Passover meal. And I think it may be potentially offensive to some of my Jewish friends who think I'm sort of just doing a very bad imitation of what they do. Although maybe participating in a Jewish Passover led by Jewish friends. I think that would probably be more appropriate. And, yeah, I think we keep the foot washing for sure, because I think in the Roman Catholic Church, it's almost. Is it a sacrament? The sacrament of foot washing?
- [38:50]
Tom Wright
I'm not sure if they classify it as such, but certainly it is a regular thing. And I've experienced it in Orthodox churches in Jerusalem, I've experienced it in Durham Cathedral, in Litchfield, various places where I've worked, as well as in the situation of retreats, which I mentioned.
- [39:09]
Unknown
Well, that's all we have time for for today. I hope you've enjoyed this episode of Ask NT Wright Anything. Don't forget, you can ask us your questions. Go to askntirright.com and send us your questions. Whether it's about Easter or the end of the world, we would love to discuss them on the show. So it's goodbye from me, Mike Bird.
- [39:32]
Tom Wright
And goodbye from me, Tom Wright, and.
- [39:35]
Unknown
We'Ll see you on the next episode of Ask NT Wright Anything.