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- [00:00]
Tom Wright
Do you ever struggle with the question, if God is good, why is there suffering? We unpack this timeless question in a free chapter download from why you can believe. It's called why does God allow suffering? And it's honest, hopeful and deeply personal. From free will to a broken world, to the way suffering can lead us to God, this chapter will equip you with real biblical insight. Get your free Download today@premierinsight.org resources. Again, that's premierinsight.org resources. Member week is here at Lowe's. Don't miss your chance to get up to 40% off hundreds of items like paint, outdoor and home essentials and more. Shop our exclusive deals happening in store and online now through May 14th. Not a rewards member. Join for free today and get ready to save more lowes. We help you save loyalty programs subject to terms and conditions. Details@lowe's.com Terms subject to change.
- [01:16]
Mike Bird
This episode is brought to you by LifeLock. Not everyone is careful with your personal information, which might explain why there's a victim of identity theft every five seconds in the U.S. fortunately, there's LifeLock. LifeLock monitors hundreds of millions of data points a second for threats to your identity. If your identity is stolen, a US based restoration specialist will fix it, guaranteed or your money back. Save up to 40% your first year by visiting lifelock.com podcast terms apply. Well, hello and welcome to the Ask NT Wright Anything podcast, the show where we answer your questions about the life of faith and anything in the Bible. I'm Mike Bird from Ridley College and as ever I'm joined by.
- [02:02]
Tom Wright
I'm Tom Wright from my study in Oxford in England.
- [02:05]
Mike Bird
And Tom, today we have some great questions. We've got questions about the nature of grace, even on cremation, whether, you know, that's something fitting for Christians and Jesus and the law. So this is going to be a pretty good episode. Our first question comes from David Mabie and he's got a question about grace and loving kindness as it relates to the Old and the New Testament. He begins by talking about how much he loves the show and he enjoys even reading the transcript. And this is his question. He says, do you see a correlation between grace in the New Testament and loving kindness hesed in the Hebrew Bible? This has always fascinated me. The Hebrew word hesed is extremely difficult to translate into English and appears as loving kindness, steadfast love, covenant love, and many more variations. David Stern, in his complete Jewish Bible, frequently translates hesed as grace. David De Silva wrote a great description of how the understanding of Grace in the first century was based on giving, receiving and giving thanks. And John Barclay describes grace as a gift. The giving of Jesus Christ is the greatest gift to humanity. In other words, Jesus is grace. In Amazing Hesed Living a Grace Filled Judaism, Rabbi Shapiro argues that Judaism has always believed in God's love being freely given by grace. I was brought up in the Anglican Church and spent many years in an American evangelical church believing the reform doctrine of grace and became very pro gr. But the Spirit has been moving me for many years backwards towards the position you so eloquently described in the second episode of the series on the work of the Spirit that includes putting to death the deeds of the body and leading you to a life of holiness. This topic fascinates me. Any thoughts from both of you would be much appreciated. Grace Hesed peace and love in Christ be yours for From David well, there we go. Tom, I think we've got a question there of Is there a difference between Old Testament grace and New Testament grace? Is there a better way to translate the word grace in both Testaments?
- [04:30]
Tom Wright
Wow. The question of translation is always a fascinating one. And I've got, sitting just behind the computer screen at the moment, the concordance to the Septuagint, the Greek version of the Old Testament. And with every Greek word in the Old Testament it tells you what the Hebrew Hebrew equivalent in the Hebrew Bible is. And quite often, and this is certainly true with chesed, it goes in different ways that I remember being fascinated by this when reading Psalm 23. Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life. And it's tov and chesed. Why is hesed translated as mercy there and grace elsewhere, and so on and so on. And hesed is one of those big huge words which, which expand to fill the Old Testament and reach out to all readers to say when we're talking about God, we're talking about God's overwhelming kindness and goodness and God's desire for our good. Now, of course, different languages have different ways of expressing things like that. And as I've often said, the different Greek and Hebrew words don't necessarily match up. Those of us who grew up speaking only one language and then learned other languages as we went along, had to learn painfully sometimes that there isn't a one for one equivalent. Obviously, if you have a word for an ordinary object, like a table or a horse or something, the chances are in other languages that is a straight one for one. This means that. But in so many cases of words, especially big theological words, there is no absolute one on one. My classic example being dikaisune, which the older King James Version tends to translate as righteousness. But righteousness, the English word, has had a very checkered career over the years. And the Latin word justitia, which is in between dikajune and righteousness, has likewise meant different things in different contexts. So you have to go back to individual context and say, what is going on here? Now, I do want to say that the New Testament doctrine of grace, which is not the same, by the way, as the later Reformed doctrines, plural of grace, which is a very specific theological system which you don't find in the New Testament, or certainly not in that 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 lineup. The older New Testaments are both unanimous in saying that when we are talking about the word God, we're talking about the Creator who is overwhelmingly loving and wants the best for his creatures. What we see in the New Testament is this idea of the God who is overwhelmingly loving, becoming human and walking about, forgiving people and healing people and having a party with sinners, and then going and dying for people, giving his life as a ransom for many. And it's as though the New Testament writers are saying, you want to know what chesed is really all about? Just look at this man. He's actually being it and doing it. So whether or not they use the word charis, which would be the normal New Testament word for grace, that's what's going on. That the story of God in the Old Testament is focused now on the human being Jesus in the New. And then out from that flows, well, the theology of Paul, John, Peter, etc. The early church, and they use the word charis in a number of different ways. But again and again, the main emphasis is whatever needs to be done, whether it's running the world or saving an individual person from their sin and the death which it would bring, it's God's job to do that. And we are caught up within God's job. Now, what happens when we are caught up within what God is doing is actually more complicated than some theologians have made out, because it's quite clear from beginning to end of the New Testament that though this is all of grace, God wants humans to be people, not puppets. And so we don't just lie back and say, okay, save me and I don't have to do anything. Paul makes it very clear, and Paul is the great theologian of grace in the New Testament that I think we've got another question somewhere in the lineup where quoting 1 Corinthians 9 I am severe with my body and I keep it under, lest having preached to others, I myself should be a castaway. What, Paul, you don't believe in grace? Yes, I do believe in grace. And because I believe in grace, that's why I am now committed to living the way that I have to live and not just sliding along and assuming that God will do it all. So the New Testament doctrine of grace is more interestingly complicated and more humanized, if you like, than some systems from the 16th and 17th century would have us believe. And this is not to water down the fact of God's sovereignty. It is to say, and this goes all the way back to Genesis 1, that God the sovereign creator, creates humans in order that they should be image bearers, that they should take responsibility for God's world, for themselves, for one another, and not simply hang around waiting for God to take them off somewhere else. So that it's really about a trinitarian vision of grace. God catching us up by his Spirit, enabling us. Paul says, if by the Spirit you put to death the deeds of the body, you will live. He hasn't undermined grace at all. He simply said, when God is working through grace by the Spirit, this is what it looks like. Romans 8 being one of the classic passages. So basically, yes, chesed and Charis are both pointing in the same direction. But grace is not a thing. Grace is not a heavenly gas that can be pumped down a pipeline or transferred like a suit of clothes or something. The shorthand for the fact that the God of creation is the God of overwhelming self giving love. We see that in Jesus by the Spirit, we are to know it and express it ourselves. I hope that's reasonably clear.
- [10:50]
Mike Bird
Sounds clear, but I've got two follow ups for you, Tom. First, how did you translate Charis in your New Testament for everyone? So I don't know if people know, but you've got your own translation of the New Testament. Did you normally translate charis as grace or along some other way? Okay, Tom, I've got it open. This is what you write in the New Testament for everyone. How has this all come about? You have been saved by grace through faith. This doesn't happen on your own initiative. It's God's gift. It isn't on the basis of work. So no one is able to boast.
- [11:27]
Tom Wright
Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I've just opened up as well from 2 Corinthians 12:9, where God says to Paul, my grace is enough for you. My power comes to perfection in weakness. But I think again, we have to remind ourselves that, that using the word grace doesn't mean that there is this thing called grace, which is a thing which you can sort of analyze and put in a box, that grace always is an abstraction from the belief that the God who made the world is the God who is full of generous love and longing to pour it out. So grace is a shorthand way of saying that.
- [12:04]
Mike Bird
So grace is not an abstract concept. We know it is the God of creation, of covenant, and the God who meets us in Christ. Okay, one final follow up question. As a young Christian, I was told that we should think of grace as something like God's riches at Christ's expense. So, I mean, what do you think? Is that too simplistic or is that a good little way to think about grace?
- [12:31]
Tom Wright
There's a lot in that and obviously a nice mnemonic, G R A C E will help, particularly a young person, to get some kind of a handle on it. I mean, the idea of Christ's expense. Yeah, that's there in the New Testament. That's one way of putting it. I would say that's a good starting point. But like all shorthand ways of saying things, especially for Sunday school use, et cetera, that's a starting point. But you now need to move on and see the larger picture. And particularly for Paul, the larger picture includes, as in Ephesians 2, immediately after the passage you just quoted, he goes on, therefore, the Gentiles who've believed in Jesus, they are part of the same family. And sometimes when Paul talks about grace, that's what he's talking about, that God is reaching out beyond the borders of ethnic Israel to include the whole wide world. So it's a good place to start, but you want to go on beyond that.
- [13:30]
Mike Bird
That's a good way to put it, Tom. I think that'll be useful for people understanding how we think of grace. Well, let's move on to another topic. I think this is a delicate one and this will be very important for people. And that's how we about Christian burial and whether cremation is an option. So we have a question from Janet Caldwell from Mandeville in the United States. Janet asks, what about cremation? None of my family was ever cremated, but several of my friends have this tradition in their families. I had one friend that said she wanted her body all put together when Jesus came back, not spread out across the land in ashes. Just curious what your thoughts are, Tom. What are your thoughts on Christian burial, cremation going into the grave?
- [14:21]
Tom Wright
What are Your thoughts? I did write about this a bit in Surprise by Hope, and I've written about it in one or two other places. But let me summarize, and I should say, most members of my family, after their death, have been cremated, and I have taken part in the burial of ashes in several cases, including my parents. I have always thought that's not what I want for myself. I want, in the good old phrase, six feet of English earth or Scottish earth, as it might be. There is something about the dust going back to the earth that gave it something about our earthiness which belongs with and in the earth. And there's something good about that. Even though death is a cruel and horrible last enemy, there's something about the rest, et cetera. However, let me say this. The early Christians faced this very early on, actually, because already halfway through the second century, some Christian martyrs were being burned at the stake. Actually, that had happened in the 60s, according to the Roman sources, that when Nero was persecuting the Christians, he would daub them in pitch and set them alight so that they would be giving light at one of his nocturnal parties. So the idea of Christians being burnt to ashes goes way back. And that didn't stop them talking about resurrection, particularly in 177 AD, in the French town of Lyon, there were the martyrs of Lyon who had been Christians, who had been preaching resurrection. And the local pagans were fed up with them for all sorts of reasons. And they said, we're going to burn your bodies, burn them to ashes, and then we're going to sprinkle the ashes into the fast flowing river Rhone. It'll go down into the Mediterranean, Mediterranean Sea, and then we'll see what will happen to your resurrection. Now, after that, the new bishop arrived. His name was Irenaeus. And Irenaeus robustly preached and taught the resurrection of the body. So how does that work right from that time onwards? And I think Origen in the early third century was the one who formulated this more precisely, they knew perfectly well that actually our bodies are in a state of flux, just as our fingernails and our hair, they grow and need to be cut off. So all sorts of bits of, of the rest of us in tiny little fragments, perhaps bits of skin, et cetera, but actually the whole body is in a state of change. Origen knew that human bodies don't retain the same molecular content all the way through. They actually change. And so roughly every seven years, we are physically a different being from what we were before. Of course, there's a funny footnote at this point because Tertullian in the early third century was asked this question, what's gonna happen? How's God gonna deal with the bodies of people who've been burnt? And Tertullian basically said, go away. That's not the sort of question you should be asking. But Origen's answer was much more theologically and physically robust because. And I first met this actually in CS Lewis's book Miracles, which though I've got some questions with that book, he's awfully good on resurrection. And Lewis making this point about the fact that our molecules change over time completely. I am to that extent like the curve in a waterfall. There is continuity of form, but discontinuity of matter. In other words, I am the same person, but this material is flowing slowly, more slowly than a waterfall, but flowing through me. And Lewis says something like, I can't remember the exact quote. No doubt there are many molecules. Many an eel, many a dinosaur has used the bits and pieces of God's matter which are now composing my body. And if I was to get back the same molecules as I've got at the moment or 10 years ago or whatever, we would need to get them from other places. So the idea of resurrection depends on the idea of a new creation in which God is going to make new matter. And the gift of the new body is a gift of a body which will certainly be me, certainly be you. It will be knowable and recognizable. Although we remember that Jesus himself was not instantly recognized by his friends when he rose from the dead. So there will be continuity of form, maybe discontinuity of matter, but that doesn't matter. God can raise the dead, but God can give to the dead completely new bodies as Irenaeus and the others believed already in the second century. So in other words, I prefer the symbolism and the actuality of, of old fashioned burial in the earth. And it's interesting that the Greek Orthodox Church with its robust theology of resurrection, insists on burial, not cremation, even though Greece is a land where it's hard to find unstony bits of earth to bury in. But they still do. But if somebody has been cremated, that doesn't mean for a moment that God can't give them a new resurrection body which will really be them. Continuity of form even though there's discontinuity of matter. So I hope that's reasonably clear.
- [19:53]
Mike Bird
Yeah, I mean, that speaks a lot to me as well, Tom. Just before Christmas my mother passed away and in conversation with the family and her wishes, she was cremated And I'm about to go up in a few months, just after Easter, to do the service to scatter her ashes where she wanted them scattered. We have a divinely appointed duty to remind people that they will return back to ash. And the good news of Easter is that what we're expecting is not a resuscitation of a corpse. It's not a zombie apocalypse. It is new creation. So whether we're buried, whether we're cremated, whether we got eaten by crocodiles in the Northern Territory, God is going to bring us back to life with a physical body.
- [20:38]
Tom Wright
Right? Good. Well done.
- [20:40]
Mike Bird
Well, that's probably a good point to take a break talking about grace, new creation, burial. We're going to take a break, but don't go too far because we've got a cracker of a question about whether we Christians still have to keep the Jewish law or whether Jesus has fulfilled it all. So don't go too far. We'll be back after this message. Welcome back. Our next question is from Davis Trujillo from West Lafayette, Indiana. And I like his question, Tom. He asked does Jesus fulfill the law or replace the law? My friend thinks Christians should follow the Jewish law. He says, I hope you're doing well. I want to say I'm so glad the podcast is back. I spent most of my high school years listening to your insights into the Bible and faith and it has been deeply helped me, especially in the weird American culture surrounding faith. Onto the question. I have a friend here at university who is an ex Catholic and has gone through a rather radical faith journey. Through that journey he has come to believe that Christians ought to follow the Jewish law because he believes Jesus will turn away anyone who practices lawlessness appealing to Matthew 7:22 27. He believes Jesus fulfills the law but doesn't replace its, so the old Jewish law still applies. In addition, he thinks that God wants us to worship on the Sabbath and not Sunday because he says the early church got it wrong and that we should listen to what God says in the Ten Commandments and not the apostles and early church who are fallible men. Is there any basis for what he is saying? I find it all a bit ridiculous and I think he's ignoring the larger narrative of the Gospels and the Bible, but I don't know how to have a conversation with him about it. Your insight would be appreciated. I pray you have a good day from Davis. Well Tom, I've met a few Christians like that who think we should do more of the law. I think in the Adventist tradition there's more on that. I've even met like Seventh Day Baptists who do their worship on a Saturday, a small group I met in Brisbane, but they held their worship services on a Saturday. Tom, what's your advice to Davis and his dear friend?
- [23:16]
Tom Wright
Yeah, yeah. I grew up in a world where a lot of preachers and teachers that I heard in the home church where I belonged would be a bit disparaging about the Old Testament law and would say, oh well, that was then, this is now. And they would regularly quote Romans 10:4, Christ is the end of the law, as though that was to say, once Christ came, we can forget about all that funny old stuff in the Old Testament. And this probably reflects the fact that many Christians, when they start to read the Bible for themselves, enjoy Genesis in the first half of Exodus and then get totally bogged down in the second half of Exodus, not to mention Leviticus and quite a bit of numbers, and think, what is all this about? Oh well, Christ is the end of the law, so we can forget that now, of course, Mike, as you and I know, the words for end of the law in Romans 10:4 Telos nomu in Greek are much more interesting than just, oh, well, that's all gone then. The word telos means goal as much as it means end. Sometimes, of course, when you arrive at your goal, then you stop traveling. If I travel from here to London, London is my goal. And when I get to London, I stop traveling. Not because my journey's been bad, but because it's been good and it's taken me where I was meant to get to. Now, this idea of a journey and of reaching a goal which is the fulfillment of that journey is very germane. I have argued in my book Scripture and the Authority of God and one or two other places that the whole Old Testament and the whole New Testament together present themselves as like a five act play. Creation, fall, Israel, Jesus, and then the new creation, heaven plus earth, coming together with ever since Jesus and the Holy Spirit. That ultimate new creation being strangely anticipated. We'll come back to that. But the point is that as in a Shakespeare play, what's going on in Acts 4 and 5 is utterly dependent upon what happened in Acts 1, 2 and 3. The characters have to be in character. They have to say recognizable things that make sense for that person, granted that history. But they don't repeat speeches. Hamlet does not, in Act 4 of Hamlet, start off again with to be or not to be. That's the question. He did all that an hour or so ago. So in the same way there are many things in the Old Testament which actually, I suspect even your friend's friends would say, oh, no, of course we don't do that. Like, what about the red heifer? What about all the temple ritual? What about the sacrificial system? Do you do all this stuff with the lambs? Do you bring bullocks? Do you do a scapegoat on the day of atonement? Do you do all that stuff? And if not, why not? And if the answer is because the letter to the Hebrews says that that was fulfilled in Christ, I would say you're absolutely right. And the Gospels, particularly John, who highlights Jesus as the Passover lamb, seem to endorse that. That what Jesus did, who he was, drew together like a vast, wide river rushing together into a narrow confine, drew together all that great tradition and said, this is where it was all going. This is where Act 3 was heading. And in Act 4, that is the achievement of Jesus. It isn't abolished as though it was a silly idea in the first place. It's actually now fulfilled. And what then happens, and you see it happening in the New Testament again and again, is that by the Spirit, the true fulfillment of the law is taking place. The Spirit given at Pentecost, Pentecost in some Jewish traditions, is the feast of the giving of the law. The early church certainly knew about that. So that when they're talking about being filled with the Spirit or animated by the Spirit, talking about being people in whom the law's original intention is being fulfilled. Paul in Galatians, and I've worked this out in my commentary on Galatians, particularly Paul is very clear about the fact that the great promises in the Old Testament, like the promises to Abraham and so on, are fulfilled. And he's also clear that the Mosaic dispensation was a temporary but but necessary dispensation between the time of Abraham and the coming of the Messiah. It isn't that the Messiah is saying, oh, Moses was a stupid idea. We can forget that. It's rather that this was a necessary moment in God's narrative and that now we've got where we ought to be going. One extra little bit on this, which is really important, the Sabbath. You'll notice that not only does Jesus himself appear to treat the Sabbath quite likely, to put it mildly, but that every time in the New Testament when people like Paul quote the Ten Commandments or a selection of them, the Sabbath is always missing, as it is indeed in Jesus. Reply, when the rich young ruler says, what must I do to inherit eternal life. And Jesus either rattles off the commands or gets him to recite them. And the Sabbath is missing. Why? Why? Because as in some Jewish traditions, the Sabbath, week by week, by week to the age to come, it's looking ahead to the great future. It's a way of getting God's future one day a week in the present. Which is why in some Jewish traditions, you shouldn't even kill a fly on the Sabbath. Because in the new creation, all species will live together at peace, according to Isaiah 11 and so on. So when Jesus says the time is fulfilled and the kingdom of God is breaking in right now, this time being fulfilled means we're now in full on Sabbath mode. So you don't need to keep the weekly Sabbaths anymore, because that would be like putting up a sign saying this way to New York in the middle of Times Square. Sorry, you're already there. We are already supposed to be perpetual Sabbath people anticipating God's ultimate new creation. Now, there's much more one could say, and this is a great question, but this is a. The Old Testament law really matters, but we need to think about the narrative within which it's set. Not least otherwise we ought to be rebuilding the temple. We ought to be restarting the sacrificial system. We ought to avoid wearing garments made of two kinds of stuff, all sorts of other things. The New Testament and the early church are teasing out what it now means to be people who honor that entire story in the light of Jesus and the Spirit. It.
- [30:11]
Mike Bird
Well, Tom, I think that's a great answer because Jesus, the law. And how much of the law should Christians obey today? That is a question that gets asked time and time again. And I think, you know, as you've posed it, we should think of the Lord not as a bad thing that's done away with, but as a good thing that's been fulfilled. And we keep the Sabbath because Jesus is our Sabbath. Or we could even go so far as to say that the climax of the covenant has been attained in Jesus. I like that phrase, Tom. We should. You should use it for a book title one day. Jesus is the climax of the covenant. Which kind of, you know, transforms the way we think about the law.
- [30:52]
Tom Wright
Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. And to be quite clear, and Paul is quite clear on this, do we then abolish the law? On the contrary, we uphold the law. A Torah as given by God through Moses was a good thing now fulfilled, not a bad thing to be cast away. But the mode of its fulfillment is precisely within that larger narrative, always aiming at the new creation for which some bits of Torah were forward pointers. And you don't cling to the old signposts when you've arrived at the reality.
- [31:27]
Mike Bird
Well, thank you very much for that answer, Tom. That is all we have time for today. But please, please keep sending us your questions. Go to askantewright.com There's a place there you can give us those little niggling questions that you've always had, whether it's about Jesus and the law or some other difficult topic. And don't forget as well, we've got a great backlog of episodes where we've covered all sorts of things in the past. We certainly look forward to seeing you for the next episode where we're going to cover some really amazing stuff, things like deconstruction, transgender and was Jesus wrong in thinking about the world going to end within one generation? All that will be there in the next episode. So I'm Mike Bird, I'm joined by.
- [32:15]
Tom Wright
I'm Tom Wright from Oxford.
- [32:17]
Mike Bird
And we'll see you on the next episode of Ask NT Wright. Anything.
- [32:21]
Tom Wright
See you.
- [32:25]
Mike Bird
Sa.