NT Wright | New Creation Breaking In

Wright:

If we pray for the renewal of creation, then the question comes back to us, what are we doing about that right now? Signs of renewal, not that we renew creation by our own efforts in the present, but that we can do things which will be genuine future pointing signposts of new creation.

My name is Tom Wright, or full name, Nicholas Thomas Wright. I am senior research fellow at Wycliffe Hall in Oxford,

Stump:

Welcome to Language of God. I’m Jim Stump. 

A few weeks ago, I had the great pleasure of sitting down in the same room with the esteemed New Testament scholar Tom Wright.

We were in Oxford, England, for some events with Francis Collins—the founder of BioLogos, former director of the NIH, and leader of the Human Genome Project. For one of those events, he was joined by his good friend, Tom. As Tom tells the story, the friendship began with a cold call from Francis more than 15 years ago inviting him to a BioLogos event. From early on, they realized they had a lot in common, including a shared love of music, which has led to many rewritten songs and performances.

While Tom admits that his own career in science ended fairly early—somewhere around secondary school, with what he describes as a rather unremarkable performance in chemistry—his work has been enormously influential for many who are trying to understand how to read the Bible in light of modern scientific knowledge. His book of essays, Surprised by Scripture, grew out of his participation in those early BioLogos events. Its title is a riff on his most widely read book, Surprised by Hope, which is often cited for its compelling vision of Christian hope—not as an escape from the world, but as the renewal of creation.

In this conversation, I wanted to step back and talk more broadly about the biblical story—how we should read it, what we mean when we talk about history, and how to recognize the different kinds of writing we find in Scripture. What does it mean to say that something in the Bible really happened? And how do those questions about the past shape what we believe the Bible says about the future?

Along the way, we talk about the resurrection of Jesus as both a real event in history and the beginning of what Christians call new creation—not the abandonment of the world, but its renewal. And we explore what it might look like to live in the present as people who are already, in small ways, pointing toward that future.

And speaking of that shared love of music—stick around after the credits to hear a bit of Tom and Francis singing together from our event in Oxford. And if you listen closely, you can hear me backing them up on the bass. It was a lot of fun!”

Let’s get to the conversation.

Stump:

Well, welcome to the BioLogos Podcast. It’s good to have you on again, Tom.

Wright:

Thank you. Yeah, good to be with you.

Stump:

So I want to organize our conversation around the past and the future, particularly as it relates to our understanding of scripture. But maybe to prime that pump a little, we’ll start with some of your past and future. And I hope it’s okay for me to say it out loud, that one of those dimensions is probably longer than the other at this point.

Wright:

Should be.

Stump:

But as you sit here at this point in your life and narrate your life so far, what are a couple of the big points or hinges, maybe forks in the road that anyone who would write the biography of Nicholas Thomas Wright one day might take special notice of?

Wright:

Yeah, I’m sorry for anyone who tries to do that, because it’s been a bit of a muddle. I don’t think either my wife, Maggie, or I had the slightest idea when we married 54 years ago, just how many twists and turns life would take. We’ve never lived in the same place for longer than six or seven years at a time, because I knew from an early age I was called to pastoral ministry, to be ordained, and pastoral and preaching. But I didn’t at that stage know anything at all about the academic life.

And it was when I was studying first philosophy in ancient history and then theology, that I realized, I want to go on doing this, I don’t want to stop. And it was actually quite difficult to think of writing dissertations and books and things while being a parish priest, an ordinary clergy person. So, I eventually got a research fellowship and was able to get a doctorate on the go. So, that was all going on in the 1970s. That was really very, very formative and a vital moment for me when I was then able to dig down deep into Pauline theology, which was my first real academic field.

And from there on, I did some pastoral jobs and some academic jobs, but I suppose the biggest things that anyone would want to focus on would be the complete reworking of Pauline theology on the one hand, and the complete fresh understanding of Jesus and the kingdom on the other.

And when I look back now at the stuff that I was taught even here in Wycliffe, when I was a student, right here in Wycliffe Hall in the early 1970s, I think the world has changed totally the academic world. We now approach so many things differently, partly because we know more about the world of first century Judaism than we did 50 years ago. It’s not just that the Dead Sea Scrolls and so on have come on stream. There’s a sort of sense of, we’ve been able historically with the new texts that have been available this last generation or two, to understand what it was like to be, say, Saul of Tarsus. When he talked about zeal and zeal for the law, what did that actually look like? We now know a lot more about that than we did. And that has compelled us to reread Paul’s letters, like it’s compelled us to reread the gospels, with fresh eyes. And in the process, to rethink some of our cherished theological concepts. And that’s been really what I’ve spent my life doing.

Though with the pastoral element woven in, so that it’s never been detached for me from being with people and being there to help and answer their questions and pray with them and so on. So the two streams, the academic and the pastoral have just gone side by side, not always comfortably, but it’s been fun, mostly.

Stump:

On that academic side in particular and this new view of Paul, for people in our audience that are perhaps more on the science side of things and have not been privy to those arguments and those conversations, give just a Cliff’s Notes version of what was the understanding of Paul, maybe even particularly as you were a student? And then how did that change over the course of your work?

Wright:

Yeah. Most people reading Paul back in the ’60s and ’70s assumed the kind of view that you’d get from the European Reformation in the 16th century. That is to say that Paul was opposed to something called Judaism because it was about works righteousness, it was about doing good things to earn God’s pleasure or favor, and ultimately with the view of getting to heaven. And that actually, first century Jews didn’t think like that and if that’s what Paul thought he was opposing, his arrows were missing the mark.

But what we now, I think all realize is that Luther particularly, but the others as well, were inventing a kind of thing which they called first century Judaism. But actually, it was like a repristination of the medieval Catholicism that they were reacting against. And there’s a lot of mismatch there, which only gradually has come to light because that understanding is woven into great many church traditions. It’s been very difficult actually, to unpick it. And people get scared if you say, “Well, Paul was not interested in the normal picture of works righteousness of doing good things to go to heaven. That’s not what works of the law was all about for Paul.” For Paul, the key thing was that the works of the law, circumcision, Sabbath, the food laws, adherence to the temple, these were things that his contemporary Jews and he himself did in order to demonstrate and to solidify their membership in God’s covenant people. And the whole idea of God having a covenant people, purposes for the covenant, and that these are nothing to do with the medieval idea of, how does my soul get to heaven?

And so then when we reread Paul talking about Jesus, talking about Jesus’ death and resurrection, one of the first things we realized, and really this is where many of us came in, is that in say the letter to the Galatians, the argument that Paul has with Peter is not about works righteousness as we usually understood it. It’s about, who are you allowed to sit down and eat with as a Christian? Are you allowed to sit down eat with Christian Gentiles? Because surely, they’re idolaters, they’re unclean, because that’s what Gentiles were regarded as by the Jews.

And for Paul, Paul says, “This is a matter of the centrality of the cross.” And this is something where the so called new perspective on Paul has not always done itself favors by not really going for this. But for Paul, the point is, if this person is from a Gentile background, yes, of course they were idolaters, they were sinners because Gentiles were. But if this person is now a believing and baptized member of Christ’s family, then the meaning of the cross is that they are not idolaters anymore. They’re not sinners anymore. That’s been dealt with by the cross. So, the cross is absolutely central, but not because, “Oh good, I’m a sinner, but Jesus has died in my place so I can get to heaven.” Rather, yes, we are sinners, Jesus has died in our place so that now God is creating a new family, a new people for Abraham from every kingdom and people and tribe and nation.

And the characteristic of that family is adherence to the faithfulness of Jesus the Messiah, fulfilling God’s purposes for Israel, and adherence by faith. So it’s Jesus’ faithfulness and my answering faith, and that’s what justification by faith is actually all about. And it constitutes people as members in the present time of the community who are supposed to be modeling what God’s new creation is supposed to be all about. Now, there are 1,000 different ways of saying that. I wrote a book some years ago called Paul and His Recent Interpreters. And if anyone listening to this wants to follow up any of that, there’s a whole chapter on this there where a lot of the details would be filled in.

Stump:

Good. Well, just listening to you talk about that, it strikes me as there’s a kind of parallel with this work that BioLogos is involved in in science and religion, and the way certain interpretations of scripture had been woven through church traditions. And some people like our mutual friend, John Walton, whom you’ve worked with, have helped to undo some of that.

And so, let me transition from here to talking some about scripture and the claims of scripture about the past and history. And this is one of the difficult things sometimes for Christians who are new into the study of the sciences, to understand what in scripture is talking about history and what is not really talking about history. Can you maybe start into this conversation just by giving us some handle on scripture as it relates to actual history, things that have happened in the planet? What’s some relationship there?

Wright:

Yeah. I mean, it’s complicated because we today use the word history in more different senses than we normally realize. I once gave the students an exercise of mapping all the different ways in which the word history is used and it’s vast, but people simplify it by thinking that it means something had happened in the past. And then the question is, well, how do you know? Well, it’s somebody wrote about. So, is history what somebody wrote about what happened in the past, or is history the task of researching whether those documents really fit together, etc?

The simple view is, history means stuff that happened. And when the early Christians talk about the stuff that happened, they’re talking about Jesus particularly, and they’re saying that God’s purpose for the people of Israel, which was the kind of advanced thing for God’s purpose for the whole world, that has reached its climax, its great long awaited fulfillment in the person of Jesus and in the gift of the spirit. And because God is the creator and God has promised to do new creation, the fact of this actually happening matters because if you say, “Oh, this was just an idea that some people had in their heads,” then that’s not about new creation. That’s taking a big step towards philosophers like Plato, where the only thing that really matters is not this boring, bodily reality, but the ideas that we have in our minds, which maybe hook into God’s ideas or whatever.

And the early Christians basically have this very typically Judaic view that the Judean people, the Jews, believe that what mattered was stuff that happened. It wasn’t about getting the right ideas into people’s heads, so that would help. It was about, when is God going to do the thing he’s promised us that he will do? When he does that, what will it look like? Who will be part of his team when that happens, and how will that all play out? And the early Christians say the answer to all those questions is Jesus and the spirit. And well, excuse me, what then does that mean? It means that… Well, okay, back from that, this is the more interesting in that one of the things people really know about Jesus is he told these things called parables.

Now, parables were not supposed to be Jesus telling people about something that happened last week or last month. It makes no sense to say, “Where was the prodigal son’s father doing his farming?” Or, “Where was this field where somebody sowed grain in four different soils?” And so on, or, “Where precisely was the inn that the good Samaritan took the wounded man, etc?” That makes no sense because that’s not how parables work. And so then the question is a matter of literary genre, how do we know which texts are parables? And none the worse for that, there’s nothing wrong with Jesus’ parables for saying that that didn’t actually occur, but he’s making a point, he’s getting us to think differently, and which texts are clearly intending to talk about things that happened. And you just start in the middle and work out the stories about Jesus and particularly his death and resurrection.

Paul says quite clearly in 1 Corinthians, unless that happened, we’re all wasting our time. If this is not something that happened, then he says, “We are of all people most to be pitied.” In other words, this is because it’s about new creation and creation, and the goodness of creation, but then God’s purpose to rescue creation from its present fallen-ness, its present corruptability and decay. And to launch his new creation in which everything that’s good about the old creation will be enhanced and enriched and put within the larger framework which God always intended.

Stump:

So you’ve written a big, fat book about the resurrection of Jesus, and marshaled the evidence of showing that this event that is so crucial for our faith really, really did happen. Can you maybe talk about a few of the other sorts of episodes that we wonder that maybe it’s difficult to identify the genre and we’re not sure if this really happened or didn’t and whether it matters?

Wright:

Yeah. I mean, one obvious one, and it’s in my head because Michael Lloyd, the principal here at Wycliffe, did a series of talks on it this last term, is the Book of Job in the Old Testament.

Now, it starts off with this man called Job, and we were told roughly where he lived, not told when, and it’s about his life, and then it becomes weirder and weirder, and becomes a rather obvious literary frame for a very serious and difficult discussion of what we today might call the problem of evil. And was there somebody called Bildad the Shuhite who actually made a speech like the one in that particular chapter? And I think 99% of readers of Job would say, “No, there really wasn’t.” This is a setup, a way of telling something which is true at a different level. And that’s the problem there about levels of truth, because like a parable is true at a certain level. But the point is not this happened down the road recently, but this story will enable you to get into the larger questions that you need to be addressing to break open your worldview and make you think differently about it.

So, Job would be an example from the Old Testament where some people have said, “Oh no, no, this really has to be a real story.” And there may have been a person called Job and bad things may have happened to him, but I don’t think actually that his three friends came and did these nice poetic speeches one after the other, just as it says in the text. And that’s not the point, it’s asking the wrong question.

The famous one, Genesis 1, you mentioned John Walton, and John Walton certainly opened my eyes and that of many others. And as have other people as well in the last generation, that anyone in the first and second millennia BC reading Genesis 1 and 2 would not say, “Oh my goodness, how could there be periods of 24 hours like that? The sun hasn’t even been created yet, and yet this is the first day.” That’s not the point. The point is the patterns in the story and the sevenfold structure, which goes with what the ancient near East used to describe or actually to build temples being constructed. Solomon’s temple is built in these seven stages, etc, etc, because that’s what this story is all about. God building a heaven and earth structure to be his own home, which he wants to share with his image bearing human creatures. It’s not about proto 19th century science in such a way that would conflict with some geological find or other, that’s simply missing the point.

And part of the frustration of that for me, slightly off your question, but it’s important. Part of the frustration of that is that there are many, many devout Bible readers who have missed the point of the story, which is that humans are the crown of God’s creation designed to reflect God’s stewardship into the world and designed to reflect the praises of creation back to the creator. And you can see this. Psalm 8 sums it up perfectly. “What are humans? You made them little lower than the angels to crown them with glory and honor, putting all things in subjection under their feet.” This is the human vocation. Guess what? When the New Testament quotes Psalm 8, it’s talking about the human vocation which Jesus has modeled to the uttermost, and into which by the spirit and the gospel, we ourselves are invited.

And if you go back to Genesis and say, “Oh, but did it actually happen in six days in 4004 BC?” That’s not the point. You just changed the subject. That’s like somebody turning up to play a rugby match with a soccer ball or vice versa. I’m struggling to think of American equivalents, but you’ll be able to do that easily enough. Turning up to a baseball game with a hockey park or something like that.

Stump:

Very well, very nicely done.

Wright:

It’s simply not the point. That’s not what this game is about.

And so, I think part of the problem is that ever since the reformation in the 16th century, Protestant Christians and America was very much founded by Protestant Christians. How does their kind of back marker that we know the Pope was wrong? We know that Roman Catholicism is wrong. That’s why Americans are having such an interesting time navigating, having an American Pope right now. That’s a whole other story. But in a lot of the backstory of the founding fathers, etc, it’s a sort of variety of or different varieties of Protestantism, which is why there was such a fuss when the British did the deal with Quebec just north of the border. What do you mean we’re going to have a Roman Catholic state just across the river? How can we possibly allow that? All these things were going on. But if you don’t have the Pope to tell you what to believe, what do you have in the altar if you have the Bible? So the Bible gets pumped up, as it were, to be a book which serves the function of an authoritative Pope.

But then when you get 18th century rationalism, you have people saying, “Well, how can it tell us the authoritative stuff?” And so they apply these rationalist categories, like it must be inerrant, it must be infallible, it must be this, it must be that. And if you say, “No, that seems to be missing the point.” “Oh, you don’t believe in the Bible.” And actually, these are attempts flailing around at gaining the security which for a traditional Catholic would have been gained by the Magisterium and the Pope, and I want to say that whole game is up for radical revival. That’s not how the Bible works. We shouldn’t go and pull it off the shelf in order to look up one answer to one problem.

Okay, the Bible is full of answers to all sorts of problems, but it’s not there to provide authoritative information about everything we might want to know. It’s there to provide the story of the Creator God, His purposes for the world, His purposes for Israel, the way those purposes for the world and Israel were fulfilled and reshaped through Jesus and the Spirit, and to be the book which when we get inside that narrative or let it get inside us, we can become people who being shaped by that story can take it forwards towards God’s promises of new creation. And that remains the massive thing about the Bible, to which the question was of, well, is 23:5 inerrant or not? That’s simply not the point. And that’s just a nervous twitch which has been in Protestant DNA for centuries and we somehow have to get beyond that and read the Bible for all it’s worth.

Stump:

Well, let me add another layer to this then because just, I think it’s fascinating to hear you talk about this. And so, what about the human authors of scripture themselves? And we’re speculating about some of these events as to whether they actually did happen in space and time, the way in that sense of history, or not. And would some of them have drawn that line differently of what actually did happen versus what were stories that were being conveyed? And does that matter for us if we draw them in different ways?

Wright:

I think the early Christians would have wanted to say that certainly the four gospels, that it was pretty much like this, but every historian knows that if I make a selection and arrangement of the data available to me, and if you make your selection arrangement, they may come out slightly differently. And some of the stories for aesthetic reasons may come out in a different order. That’s not a big deal. If you go to the gospels on the night Jesus was betrayed and say, “Hang on, how many times did the rooster crow and at what stage in the sequence when Peter is denying Jesus?” And try to marry it all up, you’ll find that quite difficult, because they’re not trying to write what you’d have seen in a video camera. They’re putting the story together in their own way. But of one thing we can be quite sure, Peter denied Jesus more than once—

Stump:

Something happened.

Wright:

—and the rooster was crowing at the same time, and Peter knew he’d blown it big time. That’s what matters, not whether we can fit the bits together.

But of course, in the New Testament itself, there are other genres. I’ve mentioned parables, but also the whole apocalyptic genre that when we read a sentence like, “The sun will be turned into darkness and the moon will be turned into blood and the stars will be falling from heaven,” we ought to know as a matter of genre that the next line is not going to be that the rest of the country will have scattered showers and sunny intervals. This is not a first century weather forecast, this is the use of Isianic imagery, of Ezekiel and Jeremiah and people like that. This is how they used imagery to talk about what we would call the rise and fall of nations. The great powers. When Cyrus captured Babylon, took it and sacked it, it looked as if Babylon was fixed for 1,000 years, this great empire. And suddenly Cyrus the Persian comes along, bang, that’s it.

Now, how are you going to describe that? Well, think if similar things were to happen, please God, they won’t in our own day. The clash of empires resulting in a totally different configuration of which nations are now in power globally. What language would we use? Sounds to me like sun of the moon and the stars, that would do the job reasonably well, but that doesn’t mean that there was an eclipse of the sun when this person invaded that country. It just means that the language of the eclipse of the sun is probably the best metaphorical way we can do to say that’s what it felt like at the time.

So then when we move along to say the Revelation of Saint John, we have the lamb who is also the lamb who’s got a sword coming out of his mouth and he’s got horns and eyes. And there’s an implicit footnote like, “Do not try this at home.” This is not meant to be a photographic description of Jesus. It’s a collage of different images, a kind of a complex mixed metaphor, each bit of which has a point to be made about who Jesus is, but it doesn’t mean that this is a photograph of what it looks like right now in the heavenly dimension. It’s a way of putting it all together.

Now, of course, we don’t know what the ultimate new creation will be like. There may be extraordinary surprises to come. C.S. Lewis has that lovely line when he talks about if a dog were able to experience the life of a human for a day, the dog might be surprised both by the differences and by the embarrassing similarities that humans did some of the same sorts of rather messy things that dogs did. And Lewis said, “A reverent dog might be shocked, and a modernist dog distrusting the whole experience would ask to be taken to the vet.”

So in the same way, maybe new creation will be more like the present creation than we realize, and maybe there will be other ways in which it’ll be so radically different, according to Revelation. There’ll be no more sea, whatever. But what I believe about that goes like this, just as the two disciples on the Road to Emmaus were seriously puzzled about what had happened, we thought he was the one to redeem Israel. And Jesus basically says, “Well, actually, yes, but you have to learn how the story works and then you’ll see,” and then he reveals himself. And then they say, “Ah, we were so blind. We should have known all along and we missed it.” It seems to me that when ultimate new creation happens, we will all be like that. That’s how it was going to be. And those bits of my life and the life of the world, which were genuine anticipations of God’s new world, we didn’t realize that’s what they were at the time.

And Jesus says, “If someone gives someone a cup of cold water because they’re a disciple, they will not lose their award.” Well, most people who give a cup of cold water to somebody else metaphorically or literally, probably forget about it in the next minute. God hasn’t forgotten about it. There’ll be lots of things which are part of God’s new creation, which we’ve ignored and maybe other things which we’re really rather pleased with and proud of, which God will say, “Well, nice try, but that’s not what it was actually all about.” Does that make sense?

Stump:

Yeah. So we’ve transitioned to talking about the future here, and I’m really interested to pursue this line a little bit further, because I think one of the struggles that we Christians have about the future is understanding the relationship of what we’re doing here and now to that future.

So you’ve just gone into this, but maybe to give it a little bit more framing and the sorts of scientific terms are used, I guess these are theological terms, creation ex nihilo was how this happened to begin with most Orthodox Christians believe. But the new creation is not another creatio ex nihilo. Neither on the other side is it what has sometimes been called creatio continua, that it’s just this order of things that just continues as it was into the future but instead, there’s a transformation. So John Polkinghorne from here used to use the phrase creatio ex vetere, creation out of the old, and taking the resurrection of Jesus as the prototype of that, where the body is no longer there in the tomb as though the new… If it would’ve been created ex nihilo, we could have just had another one. But instead that which was, was transformed, scars and all. So, talk about that a little bit and the—

Wright:

I mean, this is so important and it touches on so many different things philosophically and culturally and so on, but yes, the resurrection of Jesus, it’s almost as though the entire worldview hinges at that point, because if you say, “Well, no, his original body stayed in the tomb, but then he grew a new one or God gave him a new one,” that would imply something completely different about God’s verdict on the goodness of the present creation. Apart from anything else, that when God saw creation in Genesis 1, he says, “Very good,” and that’s never been rescinded. It’s been messed up big time and death and corruption have occurred, but obviously Paul deals with that in Romans 8, that the creation will be set free from its slavery to decay, not, God will throw away this creation to do something totally different.

The oldness that is done away with, that’s Revelation 21 as well about the old heaven and old earth were no more. The oldness that is done away is not the creation as a whole, it’s creation quay, corruptible, decaying, dying, and actually in some respects in rebellion against God. That’s done away in order that creation can at last be what God intended it to be. And according to Romans 8, what God always wanted it to be and what creation knew in its bones, it was meant to be. And creation is waiting, according to Romans 8, for the humans to be redeemed and restored because it’s under human stewardly rule that creation will be what it’s meant to be. And that begins with the resurrection of Jesus. So Psalm 8, Psalm 110, Psalm 2, these are fulfillments of the scriptural prophecies about what God is going to do through the rule of the Messiah, bringing about new creation.

So then we have the question of continuity, and that’s where I think you and I were talking about this before. At the end of 1 Corinthians 15, I mean, Paul has just written this spectacular chapter on resurrection, and how’s he going to end it off? He might have said, “Therefore, hang around and wait because sooner or later God’s going to give you a new body and it’ll be great.” No, he says, “Therefore, get on with your work because you know that what you do in the Lord is not in vain.”

In other words, it may seem as though the seminar you’re leading right now, the hospital visits you’re doing to somebody who’s seriously sick or whatever, the spending of a couple of hours with a child who’s had a difficult time and needs some adult affirmation, whatever. These things may well be gloriously part of the new creation in ways which at the present we can’t see. Whereas some of the grandiose schemes that we have, building a new building or writing a dozen books or whatever, God may well say, “Well, we had to let you do that to keep you out of mischief, but actually the real thing you were put on earth to do, thank you for doing that. And that is part of my new creation.” And this inculcates both the humility that we simply don’t know which of our grand schemes are in fact part of this. So we pray that we will do the work we’re called to do. But also, a kind of excited hope that we don’t know in what ways what we do in the present will be part of that.

But in the middle of that, I would say segueing slightly, the question of creation care right now, absolutely vital. In my new book On God’s Homecoming, I wanted to have a whole chapter on that and a friend gave me the bibliography that I should read for that. And I realized, this would set the book back by a year if I read all that bibliography, it’s not my field. But it seems to me in Romans 8, if Paul says God is going to set free creation from its slavery to decay and we’ll do that through raising humans from the dead, then the present situation of the groaning of all creation and the groaning of the church and the groaning of the spirit within that must include the present work of humans sharing the groaning of creation, the sufferings of creation in all sorts of ways, human and non-human creation. In order that the crying out of the corrupt and decay in creation may come into the presence of God, the creator.

And that involves, it must… If you pray for God to feed the hungry or how’s the homeless, if you are not actually working with homeless charities or whatever, insofar as you are able to, then your prayer does seem to be a bit off the point. God may well turn and say, “Yeah, I really want to do that and I thought I was recruiting you to help with this.” But in the same way, if we pray for the renewal of creation, then the question comes back to us, what are we doing about that right now? Signs of renewal. Not that we renew creation by our own efforts in the present, but that we can do things which will be genuine future pointing signposts of new creation.

Stump:

Let me ask you two more questions about this, just as we will wrap this up then. So I mentioned the scars in Jesus’ resurrection body. And is it pushing this metaphor I’m trying to drop in? I’m going to apply it specifically to this creation care work. Is it pushing the metaphor too far to say what we are doing to the world right now could end up as scars in the new creation? That we’re placing limitations on what it can be transformed into and the way that Jesus’ earthly body was treated, showed up in the new Kingdom.

Wright:

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I’ve never quite thought of it like that. But of course, I mean, there’s a long Christian tradition of seeing the wounds of Jesus as signs of glory. And in John’s gospel particularly, the suffering and woundedness and the spear in the side, these are part of the word became flesh and revealed God’s glory. So, there’s a kind of a paradox there that the God that was revealed is the God who suffers on behalf of his people and the world. Whether that would have the same effect in terms of scars in creation, I’d need convincing of that.

However, there is a sense of nothing being wasted. God will take things as they are and make of them what he wills. Again, there’s a lovely passage in Lewis where Lewis says, he uses the language of heaven, which I wouldn’t, so I’ll translate it into my own language. “Will there be books in the new creation?” And the answer comes back, yeah, there will, but the only books you’ll have will be the ones you lent to people and never got back. And then the counter question is, what about all the places where the people who might lent them scribbled rude remarks in the margin? And the answer comes back, they will be turned into glorious woodcuts and illustrations and lovely passages like that.

Stump:

So in that sense, one of the ways that this could go, we’ve worked before with the Japanese artist, Makoto Fujimura, who talks about the Japanese process of kintsugi.

Wright:

Kinstugi, yeah.

Stump:

Could that be the way the scars end up in the new creation, transformed into?

Wright:

I love Mako and I love that whole line. In fact, I wrote the forward for his little book on faith and art, whatever it’s called. But yes, the whole Kintsugi idea is very, very appealing from a Christian eschatological point of view. And again, quite how that will work, I don’t think it’s up to us to second guess, but it seems to me there’s deep within Japanese culture, there is that sort of sense that beauty can be made out of brokenness.

Stump:

And you don’t intentionally go around throwing pots down to do that either, right?

Wright:

No, no, no. Quite, quite, quite. No, but where there has been breakage, there can be not just healing, but beauty made out of it. Yeah, yeah, remarkable.

Stump:

Okay. Second question, which comes from conversation with my colleague Colin here last night after we were talking about this, and whether using the resurrection of Jesus as the template for what will happen to the earth, to all of creation. The point has to be made, yeah, but he had to die first to become resurrected. What’s the analog of that for the created order needing to die first before it is?

Wright:

Yeah, I think, I mean, Jesus has images like, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains a single grain, but if it dies, it bears much fruit. The answer is, I have no idea, and nor did John Polkinghorne either. I mean, I remember discussing this with John, a committee we were on together. And you’ve got the options for the physicists who’ve got the options of either the big chill where the universe expands, expands, expands, or the big crunch where gravity pulls it all back together again.

I’m not being a high energy physicist in any way, shape, or form, I have no opinion on that. But this is where I think genuine faith or a faith of genuine sort comes in, that if you trust the God whose goodness made creation, and if you trust the affirmation of the goodness of creation in Jesus’ resurrection, then you can trust that the same God who raised Jesus from the dead will not only give new life to our mortal bodies within his new creation, but will create this beautiful, amazing new world. And that how that will happen and the different stages by which it will happen, I think are not given to us to know. And if somebody said, “Oh, well, it’s all got to die, so let’s have a nice Armageddon and it’ll all get burnt up and then God will do the new thing,” I would say, doesn’t actually sound much like Calvary and Easter to me, that sounds like somebody betraying Jesus to death.

Stump:

Well, just in conclusion here then, maybe draw together a couple of threads you’ve already been touching on that if we have this sort of understanding of what the Bible says about the past and what we hope for in the future, how do those things matter for how we live in the present?

Wright:

Yeah, it seems to me that we have plenty of guidance for how to live in the present, in the gospels and in Paul and so on, that Jesus’ very clear agenda in his own teaching is for a people who will be hungry for justice, who will be peacemakers, who will care for the poor, who will be healers and so on and so forth. And when we are doing those things, we are genuinely doing things which are forward pointing signposts to new creation. And Jesus went about doing those things and saying, “These are the signs that God’s kingdom is breaking in right now.” It is a matter of sad astonishment that the church has often seen those as things that some Christians get involved in from time to time, and isn’t that nice, but the rest of us are running the world in the normal old-fashioned way.

And I think it’s a major challenge of our times to say, “We’ve had quite enough of the old way, thank you very much.” And where it’s led us to is a moment exactly as the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche said, where actually, the whole thing, the Western society, probably global society, is now simply locked in a power struggle where all claims to knowledge are seen as claims to power, and where all the human wisdom of learning how to navigate human relations and how to navigate international relations, that’s all been pushed out of sight in order that the people with power can get more power and the people with money can get more money. And I don’t have a great, amazing program for how to reorganize society, but I do know that having powerful people becoming more powerful and rich people becoming more rich doesn’t sound like Jesus’ agenda one little bit.

Stump:

Well, thank you. We started by my asking you to reflect a little bit on your own personal past, and then we’ve gone through scriptures past and future. Can we end by having you reflect a little bit on your future and what you continue to hope for and work toward yourself during this?

Wright:

I have another two or three books that I’m wanting to complete and my publishers want me to complete, which is… I’m in my late 70s now, I should really be pegging back from all this, but they seem to want me to do it. And quite literally, it’s what old men say, I want to spend more time with my grandkids. And why not? And Maggie and I have this house on the Isle of Harris, which we absolutely love. And though being in Oxford as we are today is great, it’s a good place to be, it’s too far from the sea and it doesn’t have any mountains. So for choice, I take the sea in the mountains.

Stump:

Well, very good. Thanks so much for talking to us again, Tom.

Wright:

Thank you. Good to be with you.

Language of God is produced by BioLogos. BioLogos is supported by individual donors and listeners like you. If you’d like to help keep this conversation going on the podcast and elsewhere you can find ways to contribute at biologos.org. You’ll find lots of other great resources on science and faith there as well. 

Language of God is produced and mixed by Colin Hoogerwerf. That’s me. Our theme song is by Breakmaster Cylinder. BioLogos offices are located in Grand Rapids, Michigan in the Grand River watershed. Thanks for listening.