Kerux interview: N. T. Wright

Bishop of Durham, New Testament scholar, and author of Simply Christian

N. T. Wright is the Bishop of Durham in the Church of England and a leading scholar in New Testament studies. Wright has written numerous books and articles on many aspects of New Testament theology, especially with respect to the epistles of Paul. Wright’s new book, Simply Christian: Why Christianity Makes Sense, is billed as a contemporary work of apologetics in the same vein as C. S. Lewis’s Mere Christianity.

Wright spoke at the January Series in the Fine Arts Center of Calvin College on Friday, January 5 and met before dinner with Kerux Editor in Chief Christian Bell to discuss C. S. Lewis, cultural transformation, and political theology.

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Kerux: Do you prefer Bishop Wright, Dr. Wright, Tom, any variation thereof…?

N. T. Wright: In the diocese and indeed in the Church of England in general, bishops these days are known as Bishop so-and-so, so Bishop Tom or Bishop Jim. We’ve kind of developed that as a way of being semi-formal or semi-informal; typical British compromise. [Laughs] Some people still call me ‘My Lord’ or ‘Your Grace’ or whatever; actually ‘Your Grace’ is technically incorrect, that’s only for archbishops, and not bishops.

Kerux: You mentioned C. S. Lewis several times in your lecture today. In his later years, it seems like Lewis focused a lot on vernacularization or putting theology in words and language that everybody understood. You said, ‘We need to take seriously the mindset of the audience.’ You had also mentioned not wanting to conform an apologetic approach to rationalistic terms. You’re a bishop; practically, how do you speak these grand, beautiful theological truths to people in a way that they care about and understand?

Wright: Well, it’s different every time because the audience is different every time. I live and work in a part of the country where a lot of people are unemployed. A lot of people did not spend very long at school. A lot of people barely read the newspaper. And that’s one of many reasons why I stress that the thing which communicates the Gospel is people actually doing it on the street, and showing what it means in practice. And it’s remarkable how, when that happens, people are drawn in. And as they’re drawn in, one of the things that God does in their lives is open them to new visions of truth which they’d never imagined before, and that’s very exciting.

So, with that kind of a culture, you don’t start off with a grand apologetic, telling the story and the intellectual history of the Western world since Descartes or whatever. But equally, there are plenty of people – and Durham is of course a major university city – who are coming out of a very strong intellectual tradition, and you have to engage with them too. So it’s horses for courses.

And Lewis, though he did do the vernacular stuff, was also a philosopher as well as a literary critic. The main thing Lewis did was tell stories; I mean, he started writing the Narnia stories after that famous debate he had with Elizabeth Anscombe [at the Oxford Socratic Club in 1948] where he’d run into some philosophical comeback at a different level than what he’d been used to. And I think then it seems as though one of the reasons he went more into narrative – though he’d always been into narrative, I mean The Great Divorce and The Pilgrim’s Regress are among the earliest Christian books he wrote – but there was a sort of innate sense that actually where people are, whether they’re high or low or rich or poor or young or old, is narrative.

And so we do narrative, because that’s a good way of communicating.

Kerux: Speaking of language, you mentioned “agents of new creation.” That’s the sort of language that Calvin College uses in terms of how they shape their students, and yet I get a sense that maybe you and Calvin College aren’t quite talking about the same thing. There’s been a big emphasis at this college on engaging culture, and yet that’s come under some criticism from some people who say this sort of neo-Kuyperian attitude has too much of a tendency to engage in culture, and has lost what some have called an eschatological vision of seeing the Kingdom and doing Kingdom work. Could you clarify what you mean by “agents of new creation?”

Wright: I’m starting off quite simply with passages like John 20, with Revelation 21, with Romans 8, and with Ephesians 1, and I’m saying that in the New Testament, there’s this big picture of what God is going to do, which is to bring together all things in heaven and earth in a new creation in Christ. But the point of the resurrection of Jesus is that this new creation, this coming together of heaven and earth, has already begun with the resurrection of Jesus. But the point of the Holy Spirit is that the Spirit is given to continue that work of new creation.

Now much of the Western Christian tradition has confined that to the individual human being. So with Charles Wesley, “Finish then thy new Creation” – and we think, “Yes! Absolutely!” – and then he says, “pure and spotless let us be.” And it’s all about us being changed from glory to glory, rather than transforming the world, which is ironic, because the Wesleyans did an awful lot of world transformation among the poorest parts of English society. So there’s a sense in which their practice was better than their theory. But I mean, that’s not a put down, that’s a good thing to say about somebody – let the theory catch up with the practice if the practice is right.

But I would see that in terms of implementing the achievement of Jesus and thereby anticipating God’s eventual vision, and that must mean doing justice. I mean, practical example: Desmond Tutu in South Africa making reconciliation happen on the ground. It’s a vision of the coming together of people in reconciliation and mutual forgiveness – such a wonderful vision. Or more close-up, after that awful shooting in the Amish community recently, the way in which the community immediately knew what the right response was. They didn’t have to have a seminar about how to do community; they knew right away what you have to do, and they did it. And it’s hugely costly, and the rest of the world looks on and thinks, “Didn’t know you could do that!” You know, that’s just the most amazing thing.

There’s a church in my diocese, well actually various churches brought together, in one of the poorest parts of the whole country, where shops have shut and where banks have shut because you know there’s just no money around. The churches took over an old disused bank and they’ve turned it into a literacy training center, a credit union, a mothers and toddlers group, a this, a that, and it’s actually… walking in, it’s like living Easter. It’s just amazing, this is new creation, and the whole community jolly well knows it! And these are not people who have got master’s degrees in liberation theology, these are just very, very ordinary Christians who come out of the Eucharist and onto the street and start doing it. I just think that’s what it’s all about.

I don’t know which conceptual box to put that into in terms of post-Kuyperian discussions, because it’s not my tradition, but that’s the sort of thing I mean.

But also, in the middle of that, the work of the arts, in terms of music, in terms of literature, in terms of dance – whatever it may be. In order to get to the transforming of the culture, you’ve got to engage the culture; you can’t simply parachute in your transformation from outside. And the danger with that is that engaging the culture is always a risk, and people looking at what you’re doing from inside the church may not see the transformation, and they may see you colluding with things that they regard as bad within culture. That’s the risk.

Kerux: That seems to be the tension here: between engaging in culture and baptizing culture.

Wright: It depends what you mean by baptizing. Baptizing is putting to death and bringing to life again. People often use baptizing meaning just patting it on the head.

Kerux: So when you talk about communities of peace in Christ, is that what you had in mind, the things you were just talking about?

Wright: Sure, peace-making communities.

[Sighs] It is quite extraordinary, you know… We’ve just done Christmas again in my country, and I get quite depressed at people talking about the angels’ message of peace and goodwill, etc., and seeing this having no effect whatever on what people are saying about Iraq, and what people are saying about this, that, and the other, and then hearing what’s happening in America.

We need to start thinking globally about how you actually do peace and what it looks like, and at the moment what it looks like is we go in and drop enough bombs on people so that they will all keel over and say, “Oh, I see you want us to be a Western-style democracy. Oh, alright then.” I mean, life’s just not like that.

The amazing, astonishing naïveté of the Western powers faced with major global crises is just very, very scary, and I hope and pray that the churches can get their act together to say, “No, there’s a different way of doing it.”

Kerux: You had talked about Christians’ involvement in politics. My sense is that you were calling for Christians to be more engaged in politics in a real and true sense, much apart from this sort of neo-conservativism.

Wright: Part of the problem is that there has been a tradition in the Western world of Christians not being engaged in politics, and indeed not knowing that there was such a thing as political theology, because the Enlightenment had told us that there wasn’t. Religion was about your private space, and politics is about running the world, so we’ll kick God upstairs and we can go visit Him on Sunday and when we say our prayers or whatever. That’s basically about my own spirituality and disembodied salvation hereafter, and then we will run the world the way we want to run the world. And so, the idea that there might be a strong Christian tradition of how you live as Christians in the public square – that’s unheard of.

A couple of times I’ve spoken in the House of Lords in England where I’ve been saying things about Christianity and further education, for instance. And people from the old Labour Party stood and said, “This is a secular business and we shouldn’t have anything to do with faith. It’s completely inappropriate.” And that’s the reaction you get.

But part of that reaction is then fueled by would-be Christians going into the public square and making a complete mess of it. You know, the idea of soldiers in Iraq taunting Muslim prisoners and pretending to defecate on copies of the Koran, and then pretending to baptize them and so on, I mean… how to set back the cause of global peace and the Gospel by about a millennium, you know? Those stories will still be told by Iraqis for hundreds of years. And how have we got to the position where one of the greatest would-be Christian nations in the world, namely the United States, could have people who behave like that? What haven’t we been teaching them in churches?

Kerux: That’s been my concern, because I see Christians engaging in politics, and the resulting product is just a mess, and it really tarnishes the name of Christianity. So I’ve been thinking recently, why engage in politics if there’s such a risk involved there in doing so?

Wright: Well, okay, if your garden is growing some horrible weeds, you have two choices: you can pave it over with concrete and say, “We just won’t bother about trying to grow stuff here,” or you can deal with the weeds and plant enough flowers to keep the weeds at bay. A well-planted flower garden has less room for weeds because the soil is actually producing good stuff, but that’s hard work; you have to work at then keeping it weed-free.

This is adapting a metaphor from chapter 2 of Simply Christian where I talk about paving over the ground with concrete, but in the last two centuries we have paved over the world of political theology with concrete. And then, you know, “Look, we have no weeds! Isn’t that wonderful?” Yeah, but you don’t have a garden either. And that’s pretty inhumane.

And the trouble is, when you do that, when you retreat, Christians just go off into the private sphere, and how can you then read Matthew 28, which says all authority on heaven and on earth is given to Jesus? You just have to cut that bit out. And you know, I’m sorry, I’m kind of old-fashioned about these things; I think the Bible means what it says. And it’s quite clear in Philippians 2 when it says Jesus is Lord, it means that Caesar isn’t.

That great poem, that Christological poem in Philippians 2, is, I think, a deliberate parody of imperial rhetoric, where Caesar is the servant of the state; therefore, we hail him as our Lord and Savior, and all the rest of it. It’s a project of self-aggrandizement. And Paul is saying no, Christ’s project was the opposite of self-aggrandizement; it was the humbling of Himself, and it’s because of that that He is exalted. It’s a different sort of power.

Mark 10: the rulers of the world do it like this, but you’re not going to do it like that, not because you’re going to be a private sector in the ghetto, but because you’re going to run things in an upside-down, or rather a right-way-up, way. Or the Beatitudes. I mean, you can go on. The New Testament is full of the standing on its head of political theology, of pagan political theology.

One of the odd things about the way we’ve read the Bible is that everybody knows that the Old Testament is about world politics, about the rise and fall of empires, about the position of Israel within that, and Israel called to be a light to the nations. And then so many people think, “Oh, well that was the Old Testament. We got rid of that now, and we now know with the New Testament that it isn’t actually about politics at all, it’s about going to heaven when you die, and that’s the end of it.” Come on, give me a break.

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