Webmaster’s note: Tom Wright, the Bishop of
Durham, has agreed to answer a few questions occasionally from the Wrightsaid email list. I
am pleased to make this Q & A available on the N.T. Wright Page.
These are his responses for November, 2004.
—
Question:
What do you see as the Biblical justification
for infant baptism? What does baptism
signify for our children? Does Covenant
Theology play a role here?
Much
more to be said of course but that’s a start!
—
Question:
In your Romans commentary on 8.3-4 (page 578)
you wrote, “What was at stake was not simply God’s judicial honor, in some
Anselmic sense, but the mysterious power called sin, at large and destructive
within the God’s world, needing to be brought to book, to have sentence passed
and executed upon it, so that, with its power broken, God could then give the
life that sin would otherwise prevent.
That is what happened on the cross.”
You have affirmed substitionary atonement, but what do you see as the
limitation with the Anselmic penal substitution view? Does it rely too heavily on a Greco-Roman legal understanding
rather than a more Hebraic covenant-relational model? Or is it insufficient in taking into account the God whose honor
was at stake was the one who sent Jesus in the first place?
A full
analysis of Anselm himself and (a different matter) of those who have in some
way or other invoked him is beyond possibility at this moment, but the key
thing is that in his scheme God’s honour was offended and needed to be
restored, like a mediaeval prince who had been publicly shamed. This is to import into Paul’s picture ideas
quite extraneous to it. There are in
fact all kinds of different ways of speaking of substitutionary atonement, and
using that last phrase as a shorthand often in my experience masks disagreement
between different types of theology.
Paul is concerned to speak here, which I think is if not his clearest
statement of the doctrine then certainly one of the two or three most clear,
not about God’s honour being wronged and the death of Jesus making satisfaction
for that wrong — something he never puts like that, actually — but of sin as a
force and power at large in the world which needs to be condemned and executed,
which condemnation and execution took place in the death of Jesus. This makes
sense, yes, within the larger Jewish world of thought to which the entire
section and indeed entire letter belongs.
—
Question:
You state in your 2003 Gordon College
Convocation address: “The heart, and its redemption and renewal, remains
central to a genuine biblical soteriology and spirituality. Loving God with the heart is the true
response to the unmerited and boundless love of God, of God’s own heart; this
response is itself, as Paul insists, the result of the Spirit pouring it out
into our heart.” Do you think that
because of the focus on corporate aspects of salvation, NPP writers have neglected
individual salvation? Has there been an
over-reaction to the romantic movement in the opposite direction of denigrating
the renewed heart in the individual?
And how does one hold the corporate and individual together in Paul’s
theology in an organic, non-artificial way (does Paul’s understanding of union
with Christ play an integrating role here)?
Some
NPP writers may have neglected individual salvation but I’m not sure which they
might be. I think some disciples of
Sanders may have wanted to go that route.
But Jimmy Dunn and I have never neglected it to my knowledge and (as he
and I agreed in a public debate last week!) it is very frustrating to be
harangued and vilified for doing something we are not guilty of! Yes, there may have been an over-reaction to
romanticism, but I don’t think I am guilty of that and anyone who reads my
published sermons will surely see what I mean.
Holding together corporate and personal (I prefer ‘personal’ to
‘individual’, because the idea of the ‘individual’ is almost self-defeating: as
Paul says, we none of us live to ourselves or die to ourselves) is not
difficult. Actually, you need to start
wider again, as does Ephesians: with God’s plan to sum up all things in Christ
(1.10), which then plays out in terms of the church as a whole (1.15-23),
before focusing in on each individual being saved by grace through faith
(2.1-10) which in turn indicates, exactly as in the best NPP writing, that Jew
and Gentile are brought together in Christ (2.11ff.). In fact, Ephesians is the first real NPP author... go figure!
—
Question:
In your article on “Romans and
the Theology of Paul” you wrote: “What is not so often seen, though, is the
way in which the theology of the cross, so dear to the hearts of Lutheran
expositors as it is so close to the center of Paul, lies at the heart of this
critique as much as it ever did in the old scheme.” I was wonder if you could perhaps explain what you mean by
that? In particular, in Lutheran
theology the cross exposes individual human pride and self-confidence (which, it
was assumed, first-century Jews possessed in abundance)? Does the new reading still allow this or
does the critique of Judaism on the basis of the cross only function at
redemptive-historical level?
Sorry,
I can’t now recall what exactly I meant just then and haven’t time to
look. But let me pick up your last
line: what do you mean, ONLY function at a redemptive-historical level? The whole point of what I have been saying
about Paul for many years now is that the distinction between the personal
salvation and redemption-history is misconceived, an attempt to salvage some of
the false antitheses of post-reformation theology... for Paul, salvation is
that which God will give at the very end when he renews all things in Christ,
that which is given already in the resurrection of Jesus, and that which,
between these two, is given to all who, ‘called’ by the Spirit at work through
the word of the gospel, believe that gospel and have their lives transformed by
the Spirit. This is the gift which God
promised to Abraham, that he would have a worldwide family characterized by
this faith... So the cross (this may be what I meant) stands over against all
the boasting which would say (see Romans 3.29f., so often marginalized in
anti-NPP exegesis) that God is basically the God of the Jews...
—
Question:
From reading your article “My Pilgrimage in
Theology” it appears that during that time period you found many of your
insights not from intellectual efforts, but from other means - sometimes even
under strong emotional stress. Either
by intention or circumstance, it appears that you not only balanced your
professional and domestic life, but also your intellectual intensity/strategem
with patience and alternate traditions.
Where are you today, and how do the answers come? How is the pride and fear (or in total, the
psyche) controlled?
Oh
boy, I don’t know I can go too far into this without writing more than there is
space and time for here. I hear the
question, and I think it’s a good one; though actually I would assume, perhaps
wrongly, that all genuine Christian maturity is attained by learning to love
God simultaneously with heart, mind, soul and strength. It shouldn’t surprise us, then, if hearing
in a new way the call to love God with heart and soul should precipitate new
challenges for mind and strength, or any other combination. And certainly, yes, patience is of the
essence in all of these, as we glimpse what it might be to see the truth
perfectly and then it clouds over again (not that we lose our grasp on Jesus
Christ and the gospel, but there are times when we see some aspects of the
truth of that gospel in greater clarity and times when it appears harder), and
as we glimpse what it might be to love God and adore him perfectly and completely
but of course we know at that same moment that we fall so far short... and so
on. I’m not sure what you mean by
‘alternate traditions’ — could sound flaky and new-agey, which wouldn’t be me
at all. As an Anglican I have always
been aware, at least from quite early in my life, that there were resources
available to me in various parts of church life, some of which (unaccountably
to me) didn’t seem to acknowledge one another’s existence. E.g. praying in tongues on the one hand and
richly liturgical worship on the other... or classic reformed bible study on
the one hand and using the Jesus Prayer on the other... why not have it all?
Question:
Secondly, how is this balance in your pilgrimage
related to your answer to the earlier question of what is the most
under-investigated item in Christian scholarship? In your words: “the unspoken and unexamined assumptions about the
split between religion/faith and real life”?
I
think my answer there was related principally to the post-enlightenment split
which has allowed `religion’ and ‘real life’ to float free from one
another. I have to say that I see this
in my own culture in various ways and in American culture in various, sometimes
different, ways (e.g. we make prayer in schools compulsory by law and you make
it illegal, even though 50% of your population go to church compared with 10%
or less here). I also had in mind the
way in which the Enlightenment split has allowed e.g. big business to control
the way people think, vote and do foreign policy without reference to the
gospel of Jesus Christ...
Can I
add one more thing, conscious that an election has just taken place in America
and that many in my country were surprised as well as alarmed by the
result? I take the view that whatever
we wanted to happen, even if we think that this is a terrible result, even that
puts us in the position of the children of Israel in Babylon commanded to pray
for the peace of the city where they were held captive. More positively, I want to say to George W
Bush and those who help him run the world: OK, fine, you have a world
empire. We had one of those and we have
spent a century counting the cost of it.
You have a world empire with a strongly Christian flavour in the vote
that sustained it. We had one of those
(though not always the same type of Christianity that many in America now
embrace, but never mind); and we learned, painfully enough, the deep ambiguities
of thinking that in bringing Christ to the world we could ignore the things
that were being done in his name. More
to the point, the idea of a Christian empire came to first embodiment under
Constantine, whom most Americans (if they’ve heard of him) learn early in life
to reject, partly because it reminds them of George III sending bishops to the
colonies. For generations now people
have criticized Constantine and his empire. If you now have a Christian Empire,
could you perhaps begin to think about how to avoid the mistakes both of Constantine
and of Victorian England, and about how to get it right this time?
Warmest good wishes to my readers far and near
+Tom