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Mike Bird (2:26)

Hello and welcome to another episode of Ask NT Write Anything, the program where we answer your questions on Jesus, the Bible and the life of faith. I'm Mike Bird from Ridley College, joined here in merry old London with none.

Tom Wright (2:40)

Other than Tom Wright from Wycliffe hall in Oxford.

Mike Bird (2:42)

And I'd love me some time in London where the Tesco's never close. There's the wonderful drizzle in the street. And Tom, we've got some good questions this week.

Tom Wright (2:52)

We do, we do indeed. And quite taxing ones.

Mike Bird (2:55)

Yeah, indeed.

Tom Wright (2:56)

Things that you might have a whole tutorial on if you were teaching in the university.

Mike Bird (2:59)

Our first question for this week is from Lexi Hibbard of Leeds in the uk and this is her question. She says, my Bible in a Year podcast from premier yesterday actually presented me with laws about if a woman commits adultery and Nazarites. So I have two questions. What should I make of the lack of any consequence for the men involved in adultery compared to the public humiliation of women via the cursed water, whether they did it or not? And second, why would anyone decide to be a Nazarite? What did it mean to them? So there we go. That's our question from Lexi. Tom, let's take it up first with adultery, I mean, do women get a little bit of a raw deal in the Bible, like, you know, when there's adultery, like blame the Jezebel.

Tom Wright (3:51)

Well, you could read some texts like that. And no doubt many feminists have critiqued the presentation of women in in the Bible on many accounts. And there are passages where I have to say, yep, I think in the first century that text would have been read by smug men looking down on women. However, woven through the Bible, there is a counter narrative quite clearly. And one of my favorite moments for that is the story which appears in John's Gospel at the beginning of chapter eight. At least that's where it's currently put, although the manuscripts have it in different places in the story, but it's commonly referred to as the woman taken in adultery. I have a good friend who says the proper title for that is the Men Taken in Hypocrisy, because Jesus doesn't condemn the women. He looks around the men and says, the one who is without sin among you should throw the first stone. And then they all look around and they slink away. In other words, Jesus is saying, actually, let's just turn the tables, shall we? And then at the end, the woman is left alone and he says, has no one condemned you? And she says, well, well, no. And he says, well, Go and don't sin again. And that for me is a kind of gold standard. Where yes, in a sense the ancient views of men and women with for many people, women as more or less the property of men, meant that if somebody is committing adultery, then there's a property thing and not just an immoral thing. And also of course there's a question then. If a man and woman lie together and then a child is conceived, who is responsible for, for funding that child's upkeep and upbringing? And that, that, that looms quite large in the ancient world, as in some parts of the modern world. And so taking responsibility is really important. And that of course would then bounce back onto the men, which is why in Leviticus and elsewhere it's actually lined up together. If a man commits adultery with another man's wife, the wife of his neighbor, both the adulterer and the adulteress are to be put to death. So that isn't one law for the man and one law for the woman. It's, sorry, that's it for both. So, and I think I detect in the way the question is put out a sort of sense of one verse by another, one passage by another, and trying to build something out of that. Whereas we really do need the whole larger picture. Yeah, as I'm sure you'd agree.

Mike Bird (6:36)

Well, can I ask a follow up to that, Tom? You know, if the law is the will of God, why don't we do that now? Why don't we have the death penalty for adultery now? Could be bad for a lot of famous people who are known for their extramarital shegetting or actually just, you know, ordinary people. I'm sure we all, we all know people who have not done right by their spouse for, you know, a variety of reasons. Why is it this bit of the law, like we obeyed the ten Commandments, but why don't we obey this part of the law today?

Tom Wright (7:09)

Yeah, the whole of the whole question of how the Old Testament law relates to people in the time of Jesus and onwards is a huge question which covers all sorts of different issues. You might raise it about Sabbath for instance. Yeah, it's another very interesting one because every time the commandments are summarized in the New Testament, the Sabbath is missing. Because the Sabbath is actually all about God's new day dawning. And ever since Jesus, Christians believe that God's new day has dawned with Jesus. So keeping a forward looking signpost becomes irrelevant. I mean, that's the Sabbath. And then you've got the whole argument that Paul mounts say in Galatians 3 or the whole argument of the letter to the Hebrews, which is saying that the Old Testament itself explains that certain aspects of what it's teaching were designed to be for a time and that when God's new day dawns, then things are going to be different. And I think the way in which the death penalty has been abolished in most modern Western countries, not all, of course, hashtag America. Well, quite. But I think that's a sign that actually something about John 8, about no, we're not condemning you go, but that doesn't mean a moral free for all. It means go and don't sin again, but we're not going to stone you to death. That I think that has woven into popular consciousness and we've got a sense for many, many people, irrespective of Christian faith, that actually there have to be better ways of punishing people who really have done something that as a society disapprove of. Of course there are countries still that will, will put to death people taken in sexual misdemeanor. And so it is. The whole world is not on the same footing on that one. But I think the majority of Western Christians would say no. There are some things which were appropriate then because of the particular sociocultural situation of the ancient people of Israel, which then as a result of the Gospel we say, well, that did. But now the gospel has generated a new community which is a worldwide community. And we have to figure out new ways of applying, let's say the Sermon on the Mount, where the warnings against adultery are as clear as anywhere in scripture. But there's also a sense of the love and grace of God creating a new world in which God's forgiving and welcoming presence is the controlling feature.

Mike Bird (9:55)

Yeah, well, that's, that's a good time. And we, we could do all about New Testament sexual ethics and marriage in the future. Sometime maybe a bonus episode on adultery. Not a great topic to cover, but you know, maybe one day. Okay, then at the end of this question we've got the, the follow up. Why would anyone want to be a Nazarite? Now this is, you know, you've got all these sort of rules and regulations, I think in numbers 6. Why would someone decide to decide to become a Nazarite? I mean, is it because they don't like shaving for a guy teetotaler who doesn't like to shave? That's how I, how I imagine them.

Tom Wright (10:29)

I remember being with some friends some years ago and a mutual friend of the people that I was with had just decided that instead of going forward in the ordinary way for ordination, he was going to become a monk. And one of my friends, a much more Protestant one, said, why would anyone do that? And the other friend who we were with, who was a devout man in the Anglo Catholic tradition, responded, maybe he just wanted to give his entire life to God. And there's kind of a hush descended upon the company, you know, well, okay, what would that look like? And I think the impulse towards that sense of total consecration and concentration is something that some people are aware of very strongly of God putting his hand on their life and saying, I want you to be utterly special, to be utterly mine. I don't want any distractions. I want you to be devoted to me. Prayerful living without all those distractions which pull other people in different directions. Now, those of us who have lived out in the world and bounced around and got married and had children and done different jobs and so on, we can look at that sort of thing, either the contemporary temporary monastic life or the Old Testament Nazarite vow, with a certain awe and a measure of respect. Now, because my experience of human beings is that everyone has some sort of mixture in their motives. You could say that some might be doing it because they want to make themselves special. But I think some people really do this kind of thing because they feel God's call upon their lives so powerfully that I just have to do this. And that means I'm not going to do this, I'm not going to do that. I'm keeping this straight path. So I don't see a problem about it. I think in many different religious traditions, there are people who are called to special devotion. And it looks as though the Nazarite was simply the ancient Israelite version of that. And after all, John the Baptist was very much. He was going to be straight on, no wine, strong drink. He was just going to be a prophet of God.

Mike Bird (12:51)

Yeah.

Tom Wright (12:51)

And suffered for it.

Mike Bird (12:52)

Yeah. Well, there we go. So it's like an ancient monastic movement seeking holiness and consecration to God, which I guess all people do at various levels, I guess. You know, becoming a monk or a nun. And there are Anglican orders of nuns, of course.

Tom Wright (13:08)

Yes, I've heard. Yeah. One of my late demented aunts was an Anglican nun.

Mike Bird (13:12)

Yeah.

Tom Wright (13:13)

Yeah.

Mike Bird (13:14)

Well, there we go. I'm not sure I want to sign up. I'm happy with the level of consecration I have as an Anglican priest, but there are days when it's very. A lot of raucousness in the house. I do think a monastic light may be calling me.

Tom Wright (13:28)

Yeah, yeah. And I, when I was at seminary and we had quite a strict regime in my day of morning and evening prayer and everyone just had to turn up whatever was going on. But I remember actually finding myself quite enjoying that, that there was a rhythm to it and a structure and an to it which without that your life can wander off in different directions. And so within that order, other things become possible and other ways of constructing who you are and what you're doing sort of fall away and oh no, this is how we're going to do it. So I can see considerable attraction for some people for some of the time, but it's obviously not for most people all the time.

Mike Bird (14:12)

Okay, that's fair enough. Okay, well, I think that's enough about adultery and Nazirites for one day. We're going to take a break, but when we come back we're going to talk about the Eucharist or the Lord's Supper. Is Christ present there or is it just a memorial one? After the break.

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Mike Bird (15:07)

Well, Tom, we've got another question from Shonda Talitsky from Calgary. And this is about the Eucharist. Since the pandemic, my husband and I have left our evangelical background and become Anglican. And the angels have rejoiced. Our views on the Eucharist have naturally evolved from a more memorialist to real presence view. So rather than just being a remembry of what Jesus did, it's something where Christ is present. But I'm still struggling to believe in or feel feel Christ's presence in the Eucharist. I try to prayerfully seek Christ's presence in the Eucharist. I find myself caught somewhere between Catholic transubstantiation and Protestant consubstantiation or spiritual presence. I want to believe that Christ is truly present, but sometimes wonder if the spiritual presence is enough. Can you help me understand how the spiritual presence view is? Isn't gnostic in its apparent distinction between literal and spiritual presence? Thank you so much.

Tom Wright (16:12)

Oh my goodness. It's a great question. And it's one which many, many people come to. And good for Shonda for articulating it so clearly. I was kind of amused when she says, my husband and I have left our evangelical background and become Anglican. I have described myself for many decades as an evangelical Anglican or an Anglican evangelical. And I don't see any contradiction. But I that she means coming from a free church evangelical context with, as she says, a memorialist view of the Eucharist, perhaps we would say a Zwinglian view in terms of the history going back to the 16th century. The key thing here is this word substance, as in trans substantiation or con substantiation, that in the Middle Ages, mainly through Thomas Aquinas retrieval of the philosopher Aristotle, they made a distinction between what they called substance and what they called accidents. So that the substance, as opposed to the accident, the accidents of this book are that it's square, it's hard, it's blue, it's got print in et cetera, et cetera. That's the stuff, which is, as it were, accidentally true here. But the substance is the reality of the book, which you don't see, but which is presumed to be behind or under or. Or something. And so the word substance is quite a complicated word philosophically because it implies that exists on two different levels. There's the stuff you can see, that you can measure, that you can weigh in scales, and then there's the substance, which is the real thing, which is something else, though it's hard further to define it. So then, for the Aquinas theology of the Eucharist, what happens is that the accidents of the bread and the wine, the bread still tastes like bread and the wine still tastes like wine, et cetera, et cetera. But the substance, some sort of inner or hidden reality, has changed. Part of the problem by the time of the Reformation was that at a popular level, this was not well understood and people really did believe, and you can see it in the iconography and the pictures they painted and so on, that the bread really changed into the physical body, physical human body of Jesus, and the wine really did change into the physical blood of Jesus. So the subtlety of the accident, substance distinction was lost. And at a popular level, people had this sense of this is actually Jesus himself in some quite crude sense, and that then you get all sorts of extra devotional acts on top of that, where you wave a wafer around and people bow down and so on, which of course, still happens in some.

Mike Bird (19:02)

Venerating the eucharistic elements, venerating the elements and it does my head in. I struggle with that.

Tom Wright (19:08)

I understand what it means. I understand why for some people, that's how they have to go. I think it's a misconception. The trouble is, then, the word consubstantiation was Luther's way of saying that we'll stick with the substance, accidents, distinction, but we'll say that the substance of the bread and the substance of Jesus go together, and somehow you're getting them together. And it was against that that then Zwingli and Calvin, in his rather different way, created their scheme. I want to say this is not how a biblical ontology, a theory of being, actually works. And that what we need to be thinking about is how we conceive space and time and matter within a biblical point of view. So that for space we have heaven and earth, and heaven and earth are meant to go together. So that God's intention for the world is, as Ephesians 1:10 says, for all things in heaven and earth to come together in the Messiah. So you expect there to be a unity of that which is true in heaven, that which is true on earth. Jesus taught us to pray thy kingdom come on earth as in heaven. So that's the space, the time thing. Jesus, by inaugurating the new day, the new age in God's purposes, Jesus is saying, in effect, that which we have been promised for the future is actually arriving in the present. And a lot of New Testament theology is based on that idea. Something which God wants to do in the presence, filling the whole earth with his glory, et cetera, is strangely anticipated in the present, so that that filling with glory is anticipated when the church is filled with the Spirit. You can see that going on in Ephesians chapters two and three. I want to say something similar about matter, about the material world that we can see in the resurrection of Jesus. The transformation of the old decaying cosmos into a new existence, a new physicality which has gone through death and out the other side. So the bodily resurrection of Jesus, though still recognizable by the mark of the nails, is the sign of this is how the new world is going to be. Paul says in Romans 8, in effect, that God will do for the whole creation at the end what he did for Jesus at Easter. Now, so much preamble. Yeah, the way I've come to see it now, and by the way I've articulated this. I don't know when this podcast will go out, but there's a book of mine called God's Homecoming, which is coming out in February 2026. And it has a whole chapter on this. Oh, wow. That. That the view that I've come to. To is that the new matter of the new creation which we're promised in the end, mysteriously, there's that word again, comes forward to us in the present time. So that without invoking Aristotle's distinction of substance and accidents, when we come to receive the bread and the wine in the Eucharist, what's happening is we are actually standing at the overlap point between heaven and earth, between future and present, between the future physical reality and the present physical reality. That then gives me a way of articulating something that is really happening in the Eucharist, which is much, much more than a mere memory and which to me legitimates the kinds of devotion which some nervous Protestants resist, like kneeling down to receive and so on. It seems to me perfect, right and proper and natural. And for many of us to cross ourselves before receiving because we're handling holy things, we're handling God's future in the present, we're handling God's reality in human terms, et cetera. So how can we not. And I understand what Shonda says. I find myself trying prayerfully to seek Christ's presence and want to believe that he's truly present, et cetera. And I think. I think believing and doing are the key things. How we feel will vary with all kinds of things that comes and goes. But the humble obedience of kneeling down to receive God's future in the present, to receive God's new creation in the present, physicality of bread and wine, that, for me, is at the heart of it. And you don't actually need transubstantiation and that whole Aristotelian structure in order to make some sense of that. But it remains a mystery. I mean, we are here absolutely at the heart of. I've often said when Jesus wanted to teach his followers what his death was going to be about, he didn't give us a theory. He gave us a meal. And the meal is the reality. It's not that the meal is a way of thinking about the theory. The meal is the reality. And the theory may help us or may not.

Mike Bird (24:19)

Yeah, well, I'm just grateful the Lord Jesus didn't give us, like, a PowerPoint presentation with 80 slides. That's good, Tom. I actually agree. For most of Church history, there's been a belief that Christ is present in the Eucharist, but without saying how. I mean, Ignatius of Antioch said, anyone who denies that Christ is in the Eucharist, that's like Docetism that's like denying the Incarnation. John Calvin in his letter or treatise on the Eucharist, said, if there is no presence, there is no point in the meal. So while the Eucharist, the Lord's Supper, may not be less than a memorial, we do record the Lord Jesus death and hope for his return. It is more than that. And I've always gone to 1 Corinthians 10 where Paul says, it is a fellowship, it is a quinonia between the believer and Christ. There's a real communion that takes place there. And yeah, I often opine the somewhat low view Protestants have of the Eucharist. And I've heard so many communion services begin with three reasons why this is insignificant. You know, nothing special is happening here. Nothing magical, nothing sacramental, which makes me think, well, then why are we doing it? This is so kind of like trying to sell me on the unimportance.

Tom Wright (25:40)

Yeah.

Mike Bird (25:41)

And then they. And then in some churches, I hope I'm not offending any friends of mine, but in churches where they hand out like a little prepackaged, like little cup with a wafer on the top, I feel like I've got kind of like the Tesco brand of Eucharist that someone's picked up in a six pack and is hanging around.

Tom Wright (26:00)

It's very. It's. You know, I have worshiped in churches where that is the style. And I think a lot of that goes back to often an early 20th century rejection of a perceived Catholic mumbo jumbo. Yes, exactly.

Mike Bird (26:17)

Exactly.

Tom Wright (26:17)

Wrong sort of mysticism. Just where. Where we do crazy things and we wave things around and we make all sorts of gestures and somehow this creates. It's a fear of magic.

Mike Bird (26:28)

Yes.

Tom Wright (26:28)

And it can then turn into a rationalistic fear of magic.

Mike Bird (26:32)

I agree.

Tom Wright (26:33)

Protestantism making an awkward bedfellow with rationalism.

Mike Bird (26:38)

That's not thoughts and feelings. Thoughts and feelings, but nothing in the material world. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, I know. Well, we could. We could do another bonus episode on theologies of the Eucharist and maybe explain the difference between Baptist, Presbyterians and Catholics or something like that. Or maybe someone will write into the show and ask us more questions. Well, that brings a close to our episode for this week. Remember, you can send us in your questions@askantyright.com we love getting your questions. If you like this content, then check out our bonus episodes where we do more of deep dives into the Bible and heated topics. So until next time, it's goodbye from me, Mike Bird.

Tom Wright (27:20)

And it's goodbye from me, Tom Wright.

Mike Bird (27:22)

And we look forward to seeing you. On the next episode of Ask into youo Write.

Tom Wright (27:35)

Sa.