← Ask NT Wright Anything
Ask NT Wright Anything
Why does the New Testament show so much demonic activity? and why are so many young Christians turning to high church traditions?
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Podcast Host
Before we get into today's episode, I want to invite you on a unique spiritual journey this Advent season. It's called Journey to Bethlehem and It's a free 9 day text message series designed to prepare your heart for Christmas starting on December 17th. And each day leading up to Christmas, you'll receive a short reflective message pointing you to the hope, peace, joy and love found in the coming of Christ. It's completely free and a great way to keep your focus on Jesus this season. Sign up today At Premiere Insight, PremierInsight.org resources that's PremierInsight.org resources and now, here's today's podcast.
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Mike Bird
Hello and welcome to the Ask nt Write Anything podcast, the program where we try to answer your questions about Jesus, the Bible and the life of faith. I'm Mike Bird from Ridley College.
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Tom Wright
And I'm Tom Wright from Wycliffe hall in Oxford.
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Mike Bird
And Tom, we're back again to answer some more questions. We've got some, we've got some great ones. But Tom, I want to know, where do you go for the winter?
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Tom Wright
I mean, well, we, we have no set pattern. We, we, we used to go and stay with one or other set of parents when we were younger. But since our parents have now passed away, the question is, do we spend time with our children? That's how it now works. That too gets a bit complicated because some we can stay with and some we can't because the house is too small or whatever. So they have tended to come to us and we've sometimes done Christmas with them, sometimes done New Year with them. Last year we actually spent some of December before Christmas in our new house in the Hebrides and then we came back for Christmas. This year we are hoping if our health is okay and if the roads are not completely snowbound, to go up to the Isle of Harris between Christmas and New Year and spend maybe three or four weeks up there before we come back for the start of the spring term. It's lovely up there in the winter. The days are very short and dark and you light a fire in the grate and you sit round and keep warm and it's all very cosy. And then often.
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The mountains that we can see from the house are covered in snow and it's absolutely beautiful with the snowy mountains and the sea and so what's not to like? And one can settle down and be cozy there.
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Mike Bird
It sounds lovely, but I think I'd rather spend my Christmas at Surfers paradise with a bit of, a bit of warm air, sand and the beach. But yeah, different things for different people. Well, Tom, we've got some great questions today. We've got questions about Jesus and the demonic. You know, why, why are people being attracted to high church traditions and one on the Sabbath? So our first question comes from Charlotte Shermer Horn, if I got that right, from London. I think she had a question on last week, Tom. She snuck onto this program again. Well done, Charlotte. You got past me. Well, Charlotte's got a great question for us. It's this. Hello, Dr. Wright. Is there a significance or correlation between Jesus's arrival and what seems to be an increase or beginning of demonic activity in the New Testament? Was there any demonic activity before Jesus's birth? Is it pertinent for Christians to be informed about dark spiritual forces, demon, evil spirits, the Satan, and even to ask God to see physically into their spiritual world as some preachers encourage, you know, learning to become seers. Thank you for taking the time to shed light on this matter. Now, Tom, I can see some good things and some dangerous things here. It's good to be alert to the spiritual textures of our world. But there can always be the danger of being too focused on it and having a sense of wanting to find the satanic or the demonic under every stone in all sorts of places. But I do think Charlotte asks a good question here. Was Jesus's arrival his first advent? Did that cause a, a surge of demonic activity or was it always there and Jesus simply brought it to life? And I, I guess the implied question is, should we expect to see more of the demonic in our own world? Have we blacked it out? Because we, we think we, we, we've gone beyond all that sort of spiritual stuff. We deal in the world of, you know, Biology and. And digital algorithms, you know, that we don't have any of that demonic stuff here that happens in other places. So, Tom, how would you answer Charlotte's question?
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Tom Wright
That's a great question. And something that I had to come into gradually over time because I wasn't brought up with the language of spiritual warfare at all. And I didn't know anybody who thought that somebody's particular problem might be because of a demon attacking them or whatever. I just didn't know that. And so gradually I've come into it, particularly about, I suppose, 30 years ago, there was a book by the late, great Michael Green, EMB Green, called I Believe in Satan's Downfall. It was actually slightly amusing because he had this I Believe series, which was I believe in the Incarnation, I believe in the Resurrection, I believe in this. And he originally he was going to do I Believe in Satan. And somebody said, you can't do a book called I Believe in Satan. So hence it was called I Believe in Satan's Downfall. Because Michael Green had, who was a New Testament scholar and a theologian and well respected preacher, evangelist, et cetera. Michael had become involved through some of the ministry that he'd been engaged with, with finding that he was being confronted by people who were shrieking or squealing or yelling things at him, which sounded exactly like the tales of what happened when demon possessed people were shrieking at Jesus or whatever. And he'd studied this and taken advice and counsel and had become involved in an ongoing ministry of whether you call it exorcism or at least least the practice of spiritually dealing with spiritual out of jointness. I mean, just to put it no higher than that. Now, I know that there were some in Michael's church and elsewhere who took this way out beyond. And almost every pastoral problem that was presented, there was the danger of people saying, oh, I think there's a demon at work here. We need to pray that God will cast out the demon of whatever it is. Now, I don't want to downplay the activity of non human dark forces. What I think is fundamental is that we have to get away from any dualistic sense that there is God on the one side of the page and Satan on the other side. And they're locked in endless struggle. It's very interesting that in First Corinthians 8:10, when Paul is talking about should we eat meat offered to idols? He says, actually, all meat is okay if you say thank you for it, because God has created it and if it's good, and that's fine. Say thank you, but don't go into the idol temples because there are nasty, sneaky little, I won't even call them creatures, but beings call them Daimonia demons, whatever, who, though they're not actually the real big gods, Zeus, Athena, et cetera, et cetera. They don't exist. But these nasty little demons will try to mess you up. And their aim is to spoil God's good creation and to pull it down. So Paul doesn't say you should go around worrying about these Daimonia all the time, just he says there are some places where they seem to hang out and particularly things which are. It's as though the Daimonia use paganism in its various forms to lure people into kind of a slavery and a diminishment and.
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A sub humanity. And I've read other books about people who've gone the route of serious drug abuse or people who've gone the route of serious sexual abuse, pornography or whatever, and prostitution, who can get lured into a world where there seem to be dark forces which are more than the sum total of the wicked humans involved. That's how I would say it. And I would say, yes, indeed. Over the last two or three centuries, most Westerners have said, oh, demons, that's all medieval mumbo jumbo. We don't believe in that stuff anymore. But what we've actually seen in the last two or three hundred years in the Western world is some incredible and horrible evil movements. We all know we just have to look back at the 20th century, never mind anything else, and you can see movements, large scale movements, taking over whole swathes of population with believing lies and committing serious wickedness as a result. And when we look at that, we say, well, that wickedness is more than the sum total of half a dozen evil people at the top of the system who said we're going to do this. It's something which has taken people over now. So that makes me realize that actually there are dark forces out there and we need to be aware of that while being supremely aware that in his death and resurrection, Jesus has won the victory over them, even though that victory is yet to be finalized and completed. As Paul says in 1 Corinthians 15, we live between the initial victory and the final victory.
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When we're in that position, then I have had a secondhand experience working as a bishop with a team in the diocese who worked under the radar. It was never in the newspapers or whatever, but from time to time there would be a problem in a parish or in a house or In a family where somebody had to go in and say some special prayers to deal with what seemed to be something which you could loosely call demon possession or almost infestation, like having a house that was infested with fleas or rats. There are some places where, and some Christian ministers really have got a God given gift, as I discovered from meeting them, of discerning what's wrong in a place and discerning how to pray for the place and the people who are involved in it. So I thank God for that ministry. I also thank God that I have not been given that ministry because those who have tell me that it's a dark and messy place. One of them said, when you get involved in this kind of thing and people outside might think it's all rather flamboyant and exciting, they said it isn't. It's like cleaning out the toilets. It's a messy world, a murky, nasty world. Poor human beings who are trapped in things and in all sorts of convoluted nonsense which is ruining them. And to clean that out in the name and power of Jesus is a great gift, but it's also hard work and messy work. The people who do that need a prayer team around them at the same. Indeed, while that is going on, there ought to be three or four people in the church or in somebody's house praying for them while they're doing it. I mean, this is serious business. So back to the question about Jesus. But I've often thought this, that when Jesus comes into Galilee and starts saying the kingdom of God is at hand, it is as though suddenly all the furniture starts flying around the room. You know, people shrieking at him in the synagogues, people plotting, people conspiring against him behind the scenes, people saying he's in league with Beelzebub. Now, when Jesus responds to those charges, what he says indicates that, that it was well known in that society that people could be taken over by dark forces of one sort or another. Because he says, if I'm casting out demons by Beelzebul, then what about your exorcist you've already got in your community? In other words, though the sources we have about Second Temple Judaism don't say very much about demons, though there are some, like in the Book of Tobit and so on. There is enough evidence to say that this was well known in the ancient world, that most serious practicing Jews at the time would have known that you could exorcise, that you could say prayers for deliverance if somebody was seriously afflicted. In this way. And that those dark forces, seeing that the kingdom of God is being announced, they realize they're going to be in serious trouble. And we see that in the gospels, Please don't send us down to the pit, whatever that means, say the demons to Jesus. And so it's as though the arrival of Jesus on the scene opens up the floodgates. And suddenly the dark powers realize if he does everything that he looks as if he's going to do, then we're in deep trouble. And the answer is, yes, they are. But that goes on all the way through. So that when it says in John 13 that the Satan entered into Judas Iscariot, this doesn't just mean he became demon possessed, it means he became the accuser. The Satan is the accuser. Judas became the one who turned Jesus over to the authorities. And so there's a sense that Jesus whole experience of going to the cross is a way of going into the very heart of darkness. And you can see that the darkness on the cross is symbolizing that in order to defeat the power of that darkness. And then the resurrection says it's done, it's finished, it's over. And there are still going to be plenty of occurrences of evil and wickedness, but the basic victory has been won. So I want to agree with the question of that. Yes, there is a kind of acceleration and a publicness about.
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The demonic activity once Jesus starts announcing the kingdom. But that in the practice of the church throughout the years, the church has basically known strange things happen and some people have to be trained to deal with them wisely and not superstitiously and not grandiosely. Oh yes, I exorcised 15 demons last week and so, and so came to see me and I discerned that they had a problem with this or that or the other. We have to be very, very careful of going down that route because that just colludes with a sense of dark fascination. Ought to avoid like the plague.
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Mike Bird
Yeah. I'll never forget once visiting a church and it was a fine service. But then after the service they asked does anyone want deliverance ministry? And about half the church got up to be delivered from demons. And I remember thinking, okay, either one or two things is going on. Either these people have an unhealthy fixation on the topic or there are a lot of demon possessed people here. So I did not go back to that church. But Tom, let me press you on two things and I think this will be of interest to Charlotte and others. So this is the two questions I've got. Is it possible for Christians to be demon possessed? And secondly, do you think we should bring back or bring in the office of exorcist? I know they had that in the Greek Orthodox Church. Is that something we need to have either at a church level or a diocesan level? So do you think Christians can be afflicted with this? Do Christians need deliverance ministry? Because being tested by a demon is one thing, but can they be possessed?
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Tom Wright
Yeah, yeah, yeah, I see. I mean, I'm not sure that our categories, our hard and fast categories will really work. I think yes, Christians can get to the point where they are overwhelmed, oppressed by dark forces. However, those who have gone into this much more than I have will say that if somebody has been baptized, even if it's that they were baptized as a baby and none of the family really knew what it was about, it was just a thing that they did. Nevertheless, the baptism itself seems to put a wall against serious major full on demonic possession. It doesn't mean that people can't be afflicted in some way and need rescue from that. But baptism does seem as it should. Part of the point of the baptism service is to say we renounce the dark forces, evil and all that therein is, and in the name of Jesus and with the sign of the cross. So, you know, these things really matter. And I would say yes, churches do need to have some kind of quasi official ministry of exorcism. When I was bishop of Durham.
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One of the first visits that I had from a group was three people who came to me by appointment and said, we are your exorcists. You may not have heard of us, but actually we are licensed to do this. And this is really, really important as a way of making sure that this is not a random thing. Some people just say, oh, I think God is calling me to do this. So I'm just going to go off and see if I can exercise this person down the road who seems to be in difficulties, that these were people who were authorized by bishop, who were prayed for by the bishop and his staff, and who would report back when they had been called out to see to some problem in a house or a place or maybe a church or a person, and that they would report back so that it was held within the larger praying life of the church and was not a freelance voluntarist. Let's just go and see if we can exorcise some people movement which when that's happened, it's been very dangerous. Bad things have occurred.
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So Yes, I think Christians can be afflicted, but probably not possessed in the deepest sense that some other unfortunate people can be. And yes, there ought to be. However much under the radar, however much it doesn't get into the newspapers, please God, because it'll be misunderstood if it does, there nevertheless needs to be authorization of such people and regular prayer for them.
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Mike Bird
Yeah. Yeah. Indeed. Well, let's try move to a slightly less maab and dark topic. Let's look at one about why people are attracted to churches with a more liturgical flavor to them. So we have a question from Taylor in Birmingham, the good Birmingham, the one in Alabama. He's got this question. Like many in the American South, I grew up in a fairly fundamentalist evangelical Baptist church. And while I'm very grateful for the faith foundation I developed in this church, several factors ultimately drove me away from this area of faith. As I entered college, I found myself disagreeing with the strict inerrancy, the ecclesiology as doctor of the church and symbolic views of many evangelical churches. Further, there's politics. Politics where it's I've been told it's impossible for a Christian to vote Democrat in the US and Covid19 with anti vax, anti masks, he says. I'm very interested in a high church, Protestantism, you know, Lutheran and Methodist. But I've also found great appeal with the Catholic Church. I appreciate that both have rich histories, sacramental theology and a liturgical worship. The Catholic Church, though, has a greater unity than any of the Protestant churches here in the South. There's dozens of associations and groups, plus it's easy to find a Catholic church that's more lively and active. What advice do you have to give to a young Christian trying to find their way? I'm praying, reading the scriptures and regularly talk with other Christian friends, but would appreciate any and all advice. This is something I'm founding increasingly common. I've heard there's a quiet revival going on and people are gravitating to two types of churches, either Pentecostal churches or Catholic churches. So they either want a experiential sensation through the music and the atmosphere, or they want something that feels like you're praising God in the very catacombs of Rome and you're standing with monks and saints. What do you have to say to our dear friend here, Taylor, in his quest for a a church that speaks to that hung that he has? Would you recommend a Lutheran, a Methodist or a Catholic church, or even an.
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Tom Wright
Anglican, dare I say.
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Mike Bird
Oh, I mean Heaven end? Yes, as a last resort, you May want to consider the Anglicans. I do think there are. There are a couple of good Anglican churches in Birmingham, I believe.
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Tom Wright
Oh, there are. I know one. I've preached in one of them, the cathedral in Birmingham, Alabama. I have to say, when you said the right Birmingham, the one in Alabama.
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We had to go to the English Birmingham a few months ago, going to a concert. And my wife had booked to stay in a hotel very near the concert hall. And when we got there we found that there wasn't a booking. And she said, well, I made the booking and they checked back and she'd gone online with that particular chain of hotels and it had booked her into the hotel by the same name in Birmingham, Alabama, and had charged our bank account in dollars. And so we then had to rebook and come through to the right Birmingham. So I've been a bit confused about that. Now it sounds to me that Taylor's question is part of a much, much larger thing where like many, many people, as he says.
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There are churches which are broadly in the fundamentalist.
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You know, there's a crossover of fundamentalist and evangelical. They mean things in America to what they mean elsewhere in the world. But also that goes with a particular political stance. It goes with a particular view of the so called. It goes with styles of worship. And often those churches grew out of movements, one of whose defining characteristics in the 19th century was we are exactly not Roman Catholics. I mean, the great dispensationalist movement came from J.N. darby, who was a disaffected Anglican clergyman in Ireland. And the Anglican Church in Ireland more or less defined itself by not being Roman Catholic, by making sure that you had long surpluses as opposed to the short ones that the Catholics wore, etc. Etc. Now, of course, the idea of high church and low church is very, very broad brush and has meant many different things to many different people. When I grew up, being high church meant that you probably would genuflect in the church before the altar or before the reserved sacrament, indeed, that you would have a reserved sacrament and that you would almost certainly have incense, you would have processions, you would sing particularly particular hymns, and you would expect a particular eucharistic theology, a theology of the real presence of Jesus in the bread and the wine. And the low church movements had rejected pretty well all of that. But when I grew up low church, you still wore a cassock service instead of a stole, which associated with the Catholic doctrine of the Eucharist. You would wear a scarf and a hood, which was your degree, your hood which many people thought that was a bit odd, as though God was going to be impressed by your academic qualifications, et cetera. Then I discovered that by the late 1970s, many people in the newer bouncier Pentecostal churches regarded any sort of robes as high church and regarded any sort of procession or announcing of a hymn and then walking in while it was being sung. Oh, this is so high church. And so many went to the oppos extreme, where you had the people leading the worship dressed very casually with open neck shirts rather than clerical collars, with jeans and so on, as though to say, we are not doing any of that fussy stuff. And I very much understand why that happened. But I also very much understand that some people would say, do you know what? I'm coming to worship the God who made heaven and earth. Can I just wander into his presence dressed like I am on the street? And part of the answer is, yes, you can. God is not fussy. Think of the Pharisee and the publican. There's the poor man at the back. God be merciful to me, a sinner. This is the man who went down to his house justified. So in other words, you don't need all the razzmatazz. However, as I've often said, I'm not a great wine drinker, but I know the people who are will say, here's a wonderful bottle of wine. It's special wine. Now you can, if you choose, drink it out of a Styrofoam cup, such as you'd get on a coffee stool. It's still the same wine, but you'll find if you drink it out of a wine glass of the sort that is made precisely for a wine like that, you will find much more in it. Now, in the same way, I've often said to people that the more elaborate services are like the fine wine glass. If you go to a church where they don't bother about any of that stuff, it's still Jesus you're meeting, it's still the Gospel that you're hearing. But actually, if you want to take it seriously, then you don't just want to mess around as though you could drift in and out of God's presence and it really doesn't matter, and treat God casually. You want to take this very seriously. And if this means you want to spend time on your knees, you want to organize worship in such a way that there is a dignity and a majesty and a solemnity about it, then let's find ways of doing that while recognizing that at both Ends of the scale. It's possible to be careless, casual, flippant, idolatrous, etc. In other words, you don't escape idolatry by becoming low church and you don't escape flippancy by becoming high church. It's much more subtle than that. There are also personality things going on. There are also socio cultural things going on. Where certainly in England, there are certain parts of the country where the high church people have been of a certain social class. And part of the appeal of the low church has been we're just ordinary working class chaps, so we don't want any of that fussy stuff that they have up the road at the Anglican or the Roman Church. But then there have been other things coming in alongside, like a lot of Irish people who came to live in England, broadcast their Roman Catholicism with them. So that kind of cut across those things. Now, I think God looks at all of that and just shakes his head and says, you're just playing games. The really important thing is constantly to be refreshed in who Jesus is, what the breaking of bread is all about. And if as you do that, you find yourself drawn into wanting to worship in particular ways, well, explore that, but do it with your eyes open with prayer for discernment. There is folly in all quarters of the church. Trust me, I'm a bishop, I've seen it. There is also extraordinary holiness and grace in all corners of the church. And again, thank God, I've seen it so often. This is a matter for the personal preference and preferably talk about it with a spiritual director. Find somebody you trust who can say now from where you are and the prayer life you've had so far and your reading of scripture, why don't you try doing this and see? And let's lighten up about this. There is no one size fits all. We're all different. Wouldn't it be wonderful if instead of different denominations doing things differently, we were able to move this way and that and find space for one another so that we could all worship in ways that we found more and more drawing us out of ourselves to adore the God in whose image we're made? That, after all, is what it's all about.
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Mike Bird
Tom, I think that's a great exhortation about what to look in a church. It's not the specific denomination per se. Is the Bible faithfully preached? Are the sacraments duly administered? And is this a place where they encourage people to love God, love their neighbor, labor, and build each other up in the most holy faith?
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Tom Wright
Yeah, exactly.
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Mike Bird
Liturgies and sacraments are props, holy props to do that very thing. Yeah. Well, we're going to take a break now and when we come back, we're going to get onto the topic of the Sabbath, not just whether Christians should obey it, but on what particular day. All that to come. Next up.
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Mike Bird
Welcome back, Tom. We've got a question from Malcolm Heap in the uk. It's about the Sabbath, but it's a little bit out of left field. This is what Malcolm asks. Oh, I'm slurring words here badly. I feel like I'm drinking wine. Sorry, let me do that again.
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Welcome back, Tom. We've got a question from Malcolm Heap in the UK about the Sabbath, but it's a little bit out of left field. This is what Malcolm asks. Is it right for the church to be observing Sunday when the Bible specifically commands us to obey every word of God? To keep the commandments. And one of those commandments is to keep the Sabbath holy, not Sunday day. So should Christians keep the Sabbath and keep it on Friday night and Saturday the way Jewish people do? Now, Tom, when I was in Bible college, I met a group of six day Baptists. They were kind of like a cross between a Baptist and a Seventh Day Adventist. They were Baptists, but their day of worship was Friday evening and all of Saturday. And I'd never met them before, I've never met them since. But there was quite a few of them I came across. Tom, should Christians keep the Sabbath or do we keep the Lord's Day? And why don't we have the Lord's Day on, you know, Friday night and Saturday the same time as our Jewish friends?
- [34:03]
Tom Wright
It's a great question. And I think here we're running into a problem of biblical interpretation and application because undoubtedly throughout the Old Testament, really from the Book of Genesis onwards, and then emphasized particularly in some of what many regard as post exilic literature, like the final few chapters of Isaiah, the keeping of the Sabbath is really, really, really important. And that continues through the Second Temple Jewish world. And one of the things which struck me, particularly when I was researching this for the the Gifford Lectures, which I did eight or 10 years ago, was the Jewish scholars who were pointing out that in the time, and in the rabbinic thought and on into the high rabbinic period in the sort of 4th, 5th, 6th centuries A.D. the Sabbath was seen as a day of anticipating the age to come. That you would say, one day God is going to renew the whole creation. And he gives us each week a day when we can imagine we're already there. And in a sense we are already there. That new age has come forward to meet us. And on Shabbat, on the Sabbath, we do the things which say we are already living in God's new age, in the new heavens and new earth. For instance, on the Sabbath you shouldn't even kill a fly because in Isaiah 11 it says that in the new creation all will live at peace. Now that was a revelation to me because when I was growing up, all the stuff in the Gospels about Jesus healing people on the Sabbath, people used to interpret that simply in terms of, oh, the Jews had all these fussy rules and regulations and Jesus says, we don't believe in rules and regulations, we just believe in grace. So forget all that and I'm just going to get on and do what I have to do. And that is a travesty. That's not what the Sabbath was about just fussy rules and regulations. And indeed that attitude contributed to a sub Christian antinomianism where people would say, oh, we believe in grace, not law, therefore we're not bothered about all those regulations you find in Leviticus or anywhere else. We're just going to say God accepts us, so who cares? And that spilled over into all sorts of other areas as well as the Sabbath. Now, once you say that the Sabbath is the anticipation of the age to come, then in the Gospels, what we find is Jesus saying, the time is fulfilled, the kingdom of God is arriving. So repent, get on board, believe the good news. The good news is that with Jesus, God's kingdom is arriving here and now. Now if that is so, then then you don't put up the markers which say God's new age will arrive at some point in the future. Because to do that would mean you don't really believe it's here in the present. It would be like I've often said in New York, if you were in New York, if you were 50 miles up country somewhere, you might have a sign saying this way to New York. But you don't put up a sign in Times Square saying this way to New York because you're already there. So for Jesus to break the Sabbath in the Jewish terms was actually an act of fulfillment that Jesus says, is it lawful to heal or to harm on the Sabbath? Jesus is doing things on the Sabbath which say the kingdom is arriving. And this is what it looks like. And so it's very interesting when we find in various passages in the New Testament the Ten Commandments listed as still mandatory. Whether it's in Mark 10 when Jesus is talking to the rich young ruler, or in Romans 13 when Paul is saying, if there's any command, it's all summed up in love your neighbor as yourself. Each time you get lists like that, the Sabbath is missing. Why? Because the true Sabbath, the arrival of God's kingdom on earth as in heaven, has actually happened and is happening. God's future has arrived in the present. This is why I find it very ironic that one of my favorite movies of all time, Chariots of Fire, which many of our listeners will know, won an Oscar in 1980, whichever year it was. 81, I think, or 82, possibly.
- [38:39]
The thing turns on the fact of a Christian and a Jewish athlete, and the Jew is quite happy to run races on the. On the Saturday, his Sabbath. But the Christian absolutely refuses to run a race on the Sunday because he was brought up in a Sabbatarian tradition. That said, the Sunday is the Sabbath. It's the Lord's day. We are not gonna do this stuff. And God honored that quite clearly. Eric Liddell won his race at the end of the day. But I wanna say that's glorious, but it doesn't actually reflect what the New Testament itself says. So why did the early Christians move to Sunday? And the answer is, of course, it's the day when Jesus rose again. So Jesus resurrection is the point at which the arrival of the kingdom, which Jesus has been doing and talking about in his public career, becomes an ontological reality. Jesus risen body is the beginning of the heaven and earth new reality. And when we are celebrating Jesus resurrection, which we do on the first day of every week, we are already celebrating that overlap of heaven and earth, that overlap of God's ultimate future with the present. And so from very early times, the Christians felt that it was appropriate to do that on a Sunday and not to import all the different bits of legislation from the Jewish Sabbath legislation because. Because that legislation pertained to the anticipation of something that hadn't happened yet. Now it gets more complicated than that. There are books on my shelves behind me here explaining all the things that went on in the second and third centuries and so on, but I think that's at the heart of it. Don't forget that every time the commandments are listed in the New Testament, the Sabbath is missing. And that's not accidental. It's because the Sabbath is the anticipation of the age to come which has arrived in Jesus. And that arrival is best celebrated on a Sunday. Now, a footnote to that, of course, that doesn't mean that all Christians everywhere should import the whole no work on the Sabbath legislation into Sunday, for a start. Clergy, It's a very busy day. You can't easily be a practicing clergy person, preaching sermons, taking services, doing baptisms, et cetera, and call that a day of rest. It's energetic, anything but. So most wise clergy will set aside a day at some other point in the week by negotiation with the parish that they serve, where people will know that from sunset one day through to sunrise a day and a half later, you don't phone the vicarage. You don't go around and say, I've got a problem. There's somebody else who can deal with that. And so I do think that the discipline of a day which is quite different, which can then be spent, spent with family, with friends, but doing things which celebrate God's new creation, that's a very good discipline to have. Even though it becomes harder to navigate and negotiate with different types of ministry as I know from experience.
- [41:53]
Mike Bird
Yeah, that's a good way to put it. One thing I read many years ago that helped me was a book by Hugh Williamson and Don Carson called From Sabbath to Lord's Day. That book's about 50 years old, but I still think it's probably the best thing I've read read on this topic. Well, Malcolm, I hope you like that answer. That wraps it up for this week. We've covered a lot of good stuff there. I should also add that our producer Nancy has advised me to say that Birmingham in England is just as nice as Birmingham, Alabama. So we definitely send warm greetings to all the Birminghammers wherever you are in England or Alabama. Now, if you're enjoying this program, remember you can always subscribe to our bonus episodes. Tom we do some good stuff, don't we, in those bonus episodes? Yeah, we've been going through acts. We do some stuff on the hot topics of the day. It is great. And don't forget too. We're always eager to get more questions. So if you've got a question for Tom on the Sabbath, what will Birmingham look like in the new creation? Whatever that question is, we would love to hear it. But it's a goodbye from me, Mike Bird.
- [43:10]
Tom Wright
Goodbye from me, Tom Wright.
- [43:11]
Mike Bird
And we look forward to seeing you on the next episode of Ask NT Wright Anything.
- [43:20]
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- [43:42]
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