Beeson podcast, Episode 463 N. T. Wright Sept. 24, 2019 Announcer: Welcome to the Beeson podcast coming to you from Beeson Divinity School on the campus of Samford University. Now your hosts, Doug Sweeney and Kristen Padilla. Doug Sweeney: Welcome to the Beeson podcast. I'm Doug Sweeney, the Dean of Beeson Divinity School, and I'm here today with my cohost Kristen Padilla. We are honored to be speaking with our guest, N. T. Wright, who is probably the best known biblical theologian at work today in all the world, and who will be speaking in our chapel service in just a couple of hours. Kristen, Dr. Wright is one of those guests who needs little introduction. All the same, why don't you make sure that everyone listening to us knows who he is. Kristen Padilla: Sure. Thank you, Doug, and welcome to the Beeson podcast. Dr N. T. Wright is at Samford University this week, September 9 through 12, 2019, for our first Provost Distinguished Lecture series. He is the research professor of New Testament and Early Christianity at the University of St Andrews , Scotland. He previously taught New Testament in Cambridge, McGill and Oxford Universities before serving the church in various posts, finally as Bishop of Durham. A world-renowned scholar, Dr. Wright has published more than 80 books at both academic and popular levels and has broadcast frequently on radio and TV. He is married and has four children and five grandchildren. Kristen Padilla: Welcome, Dr. Wright To the Beeson podcast. N. T. Wright: Thank you very much. It's good to be with you. Thank you. Kristen Padilla: We want our conversation today to be very personal in nature, so I've given a professional bio of you, but if you could begin by introducing yourself, perhaps by starting at the beginning, where you are from, a little bit about your family, and how you came to faith in Jesus Christ. N. T. Wright: Okay, thank you. I come from Northumberland, which is the most northeasterly of the English counties. It's kind of English equivalent of Maine, so the top right-hand corner. So close to the Scottish border and close to the ancient city of Newcastle, which people know not least because it has a famous football team, at least famous in our English context. My father's family had lived in Northumberland for, oh, 200 or 300 years. They were from Cumbria on the west side originally, but had moved over. My father was a businessman who'd inherited a small family firm, which was a timber firm, and he was the fifth generation to to run that firm. And when I was a small boy, I assumed that since I was the oldest son, I would take it on when he gave it up. It was kind of a relief to me when at a certain stage he said something about, "When you decide what you want to do with your life," and I thought, "You mean I have a choice?" N. T. Wright: Because the other side of the family was much more attracting to me because my mother's father was a parish priest, as an Anglican priest, and ended up as an Archdeacon actually in rural North Northumberland, which is a beautiful, beautiful county and lovely seacoast, et cetera. My mother's father had the same name that I was given, which is Tom, my second name. But that's the name I'm been known by. I guess I probably instinctively identified with him, and seeing him leading worship and preaching and so on, I just think as a small boy, I thought, "That's a good thing to do." N. T. Wright: So growing up in a church-going family, because both sides were church-going, just my father's family were lay people and my mother's family had lots of clergy and not just my grandfather. It was quite natural. We would say prayers every night. We would sing hymns around the piano on a Sunday afternoon. We'd go to church every week without fail. To the extent that I remember once when we'd been traveling on vacation and the journey had taken longer than we thought, and we didn't go to church that Sunday. It made the sort of impression it would make on you if one morning the sun rose in the wrong part of the sky. There's something wrong with the world. N. T. Wright: And so I grew up in that context and from an early age, I knew the hymns and the Psalms and bits and pieces of Bible. So I don't have a moment when having definitely been an unbeliever. I became a believer, but there were several stages. One I remember particularly when I was, I think, about seven or eight. When for some reason, I don't know why, I wish I didn't know why, I remember feeling suddenly overwhelmed by the love of God as expressed in the death of Jesus, and Jesus dying for me. And that for me was not sort of something new, which contradicted everything before, but a sort of a sudden rush of deepening to what had been latent before, and that's really never left me. I'm sometimes jealous of people who have good conversion stories, but I just don't have one. That's how it was. Doug Sweeney: Dr. Wright, most of the people in our audience know about you and your work, at least a little bit. And what we think we know about you is that you've been at churchman for many, many years, and you've been a scholar for many years. Could you tell us a little bit about when it was that you felt like God wanted you to go into ministry, and then talk a little bit about how you decided to become a scholar? And, if you can remember a third question, how you've thought about combining your churchmanship and your scholarship over the years. N. T. Wright: It's a very good question. It follows naturally from what I said, that from an early age, from at least that time, sort of seven or eight, it wasn't so much a choice. It was just knowing this is what I'm going to do and wasn't quite sure what it meant, particularly, because we worshiped in a very middley Anglican church and I knew the clergy there, and my father was a church warden. And so it was just I assumed that there was a natural progression that you went to college and you studied things, and then you put on one of these dog collars, and you stood up and got on with it. N. T. Wright: It was really in my teens, that was where I was heading, and that was why I chose, for instance, to study classics because I wanted to understand early Christianity in its context. I wanted to do the Greek. Everyone studied Latin in those days in England, so I had that already. There was something natural about that. Then it was curious thing, when I was in my late teens, and then went to college myself, to Oxford to study classics, I had a sort of attention that as I looked at parish life and parish ministry, one part of me knew that that was what I was called to. But another part was thinking, "I don't feel a great yearning to do exactly that, but I do want to preach, I do want to teach." I just assumed that I would come into it and it would work out. But I didn't quite have a sense of being drawn there. N. T. Wright: Then, when I was doing philosophy particularly, I basically discovered that there was such a thing as academic life and that I was attracted to it. And rather to my surprise, I seemed to be quite good at the philosophy stuff and ancient history as well, but philosophy was the thing. So then when I studied theology as a second degree, at once, I was thinking, "Oh, this is what I have to do with my whole life." Then it was a question of: How does that fit with ordained ministry? I was firmly told by one tutor at my seminary, "You have to make a choice. You can't be both an academic and a priest." I remember being told that, and I was quite young, and I didn't want to contradict him. But I remember sitting in his study of thinking, "I'm not going to say it, but you're wrong. I'm going to do both." N. T. Wright: That's been difficult because both ministry and the academic life are increasingly demanding. There was a time when you could be a parish priest and a scholar. Those days are long gone, certainly in England. The administrative demands, the pastoral demands, academics these days. There's so much stuff out there, so much secondary literature on the Bible that it's very difficult to do both. I've moved from A to B and back to A and back to B again. I keep on doing that and trying to maintain the other side of me as it were while I'm doing whatever it is. That's been difficult, but it's also been quite enriching for me, and possibly I don't know for people whose lives I touched. So that's how it's worked. Doug Sweeney: Might I ask a follow-up question? Kristen, I'm interested in hearing from Dr. Wright if there are any ways you can identify that might be interesting for our Beeson-related community to hear, in which your churchmanship has changed the way you have practiced scholarship, or vice versa, the way your scholarship has changed the way you've served the church? N. T. Wright: I think, for me, there were some role models who I was following. Going way back people, obviously, 100 years ago, so not people I knew, but people I knew about. The two great Bishops of Durham in the late 19th century, Lightfoot and Westcott, who were great churchman and leading New Testament scholars. And they were always kind of backmarkers that, "Oh my goodness, that's an amazing way to be." Then when I was studying myself, my own mentor, George Caird, who was from the United Reform Church, he was very much a churchman and also very much a scholar. And also Professor C.F.D. Moule, Charlie Moule in Cambridge, very much a churchman, very much a scholar. N. T. Wright: So there were role models, where you could see that such people would take all the richness of their scholarship and distill it down into sermons or village Bible studies or whatever it was. Also, the analogy that I've used many times, because music is a very important part of my life, is that when you study music at a high level at university or whatever... Because would you rather be taught music by somebody who was about to dash off and conduct Bach's B Minor Mass, or by somebody who was tone deaf and didn't care about it? Of course, you'd rather be taught by the one who was engaged. Even if his or her interpretations of that music were a bit wacky. You'd still think, "Here's somebody that's actually handling the stuff." N. T. Wright: So since the New Testament is at the heart of the life of the church, and if it isn't, we're all in trouble, then New Testament scholarship ought to be feeding in but also drawing from the church. I remember saying to Archbishop Brian Williams something about that to and fro. And he said, "Yes, being a a Bishop or a priest teaches you things about theology that you probably couldn't learn any other how." So there ought to be a rich commerce of the two. Kristen Padilla: I mentioned that you were a Bishop of Durham. Can you tell our listeners about your ministry as a Bishop, especially for those who are not familiar with the Anglican church and tradition? What did that ministry look like for you? N. T. Wright: The foundational thing for a Bishop is that one is both the representative of and the leader of a group of churches, a diocese it's called. In the Durham diocese, we had roughly 250 parishes, and roughly I think 300 or more stipendiary clergy, and quite a lot who were non-stipendiary, people who had done other jobs but then were ordained in sort of semi-retirement. I was their pastor. Being a Bishop is being the pastor to the pastors. That's difficult because they're a very disparate bunch and many of them quite busy. And so trying to make that happen, and working with intermediary people to make it happen, is the constant challenge. N. T. Wright: But also still in England, because the church is "established," which we didn't really understand and nobody really understands, but it's just how it is. There is a sort of expectation that our Bishop of a diocese somehow represents the diocese in the wider world. So that one of the things that went with being the Bishop of Durham, for instance, was being a member of the House of Lords. So for seven years I had a seat in the House of Lords. Now, because it takes four hours to get from where I lived into central London, I couldn't just pop in for a debate and then nip back home again. I had to plan ahead to do three days there and then. But that gave me a chance to speak up for all sorts of concerns from the Northeast of England, which was my own home territory, in the wider public arena. That's an extraordinary privilege to do that as a Christian leader. It's interesting that the other faith communities, both other Christian faith communities and non-Christian faith communities, basically were glad that there were bishops in the House of Lords because otherwise the rumor of God is banished from the public sphere. And so, though it's controversial, that was very much how I and my colleagues tried to seize the chance. N. T. Wright: But then there are 1,000 other things that go on in a diocese, concerning programs for parishes, concerning particular initiatives, concerning ecumenical work. I did a lot of work with my neighbors, particularly the newer Free Churches on the one hand and the Roman Catholics on the other, which sounded an odd combination. But I rather relished being able to introduce them to one another and finding that what we had in common across the board, with Methodists and Syrian Orthodox and Salvation Army and whoever, was so much more important than the things which divided us. That that was really exciting. And being a Bishop, you're supposed to be a focus and means of unity, unity for the whole church. That's something I'm passionate about. N. T. Wright: I mean, I could go on, but one of the things about being a bishop is that you have to juggle eight or 10 balls in the air at any one time. Then at any moment, a phone call comes in, which means you've got another three to add to those ones. It's a crazy life, but it's very exciting, and you get to see the church being the church in real time on real streets. That's a wonderful thing, and it doesn't get into the news headlines, but you actually see real communities living out the Gospel and people's lives being transformed in very different contexts. And then to try to facilitate that and to pray with them for it. So, anyway, that's what it was all about. Kristen Padilla: [inaudible 00:13:46]. Doug Sweeney: [inaudible 00:13:47] Well, in addition to being a prolific churchman, you have been a prolific scholar. A lot of us mere mortals would like to know where do you get the energy for all of this, and have you had a strategy as you've thought about what to write about, what not to write about? N. T. Wright: Well, yes and no. It sort of happened... Like many things in life, you sort of turn a corner and think, "Oh my goodness, we seem to be on the verge of something here." I started off doing a doctorate on Paul. The reason for that was that I wanted to do something which would keep me in close touch with both Old and New testaments. And so looking at Paul's letter to the Romans, which is one of the places where he's doing Old Testament exegesis such a lot, I deliberately chose that in order to be going on working with the Hebrew text and the Septuagint and so on, as well as the New Testament. That naturally then led to teaching and writing about Paul in a bunch of articles, and finally in bits and pieces. I didn't publish my dissertation as it stood, but in those days it wasn't so important as it is now to do that. But then articles came together. N. T. Wright: Then as I was teaching through the 1980s, I could feel frustration that a lot of my students, who were pretty bright students, but there was stuff that they just didn't know and didn't have the slightest idea about how first century Jewish world worked, about why Jesus might have taught in parables, about what all sorts of things meant. And so I started to do things for the students to say, "This is what I really want you to know before you start so that we can then hit the ground running." That eventually, to my surprise, turned into a project which was going to be a book on Jesus and a book on Paul. I started writing the introduction to the book on Jesus, and it turned into a book called The New Testament and the People of God, which then became the introduction to the series. N. T. Wright: I remember the sense of shock of, "Oh my goodness, I'm writing three volumes here, not two." And then, "Oh dear, it may be more than three." And so that was kind of, "Oh, do we really have to do that? Well, yes, here it is." Then other things, like the big book on the resurrection. That started out life as the last chapter of the book on Jesus. It just grew like a cooker in the nest and escaped and became a long book, and so on and so on. Then, at a certain point, the popular thing... I was doing a lot of preaching when I was Dean of Litchfield. The publishers would say, "You just preached a series of sermons on the Lord's prayer," whatever it is. "That sounds like a nice little book there." "Oh, well maybe, okay." Print it out, send it off. Wow, there's a book. N. T. Wright: Then, particularly, I was invited by The Church Times, which is the main Anglican newspaper in England, to do their weekly column on the lessons for the week. You have three lessons in the lectionary. Every week for five years I did a 500-word column on those readings, which was really exciting and quite... Sure, 500 words is not a lot, but that was a very good discipline and it was while I was just doing that, that my publisher said, "Do you know William Barclay's series of commentaries on the New Testament? Very outdated. People still read it, but somebody has got to do that again. We think it should be you." I remember thinking, "Well, if I can do 500 words a week for five years on the lectionary, maybe I could do that." Whoa, well, then 10 years later, there it was. It's that sort of thing that you just turn a corner and, "Oh, well this may work and here it is." Kristen Padilla: Other than the Bible, what books would you say have most influenced your life as a Christian? N. T. Wright: Well, like many of my generation, I was brought up on C. S. Lewis . When the Narnia stories came out in the 1950s, my mother read them to my sister and me, when we were little children. And then I kind of graduated onto Screwtape Letters and Mere Christianity. Through my teens, I read most of Lewis' popular works, some of them two or three times. Some bits I sort of remember almost phrases by heart. There's a book which not many people have heard of these days, but somebody gave me when I was about 14, by an American lady called Isobel Kuhn, K-U-H-N. The book is called By Searching. I think it would feel terribly dated now. It's autobiographical and her life, I think, if I remember rightly, in the '20s and '30s, growing up as a puzzled young Christian woman in the United States. But there's so much there on guidance, and on the way God works in people's lives, and on how God calls people, and the pitfalls and the dangers and so on. N. T. Wright: Through my mid-teens, that was enormously helpful to me, and I cherish it. It probably isn't the sort of book that people would expect N. T. Wright to refer to him, but it was really, really helpful. I'm really grateful for it. The silly thing is that now if people say, "What are the most helpful books?" I will go straight unhesitatingly to the great lexicons, the Greek and Hebrew lexicons, The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church, The Oxford Companion to Christian Thought, and things like that. Because the whole time I'm trying to extend my reach, and something which I'm vaguely aware of on the edge of what I'm doing. And, "Okay, let's look that up and find where the key texts are and try to extend the map of what I think I vaguely know about." That's actually enormously fun, as gradually things unfold. I'm 70 now and it's going on happening, and why should I stop? Doug Sweeney: I think a lot of the people in our audience would enjoy hearing about spiritual influences on your life. You've talked a little bit about those who have been role models for you as church people or as scholars, but are there people either in the church... Or we happen to know that you've studied music, you like athletics. What are the kinds of people who have spoken into your life and really helped you to grow in your faith? N. T. Wright: When I was 13, I went for the first time to a boys camp run by the Scripture Union. That was in Southern Scotland, I guess. But I liked it so much that I went on going through my teens. Every Easter vacation, it would be like a week, and every summer vacation, it'd be like two weeks. I looked forward to them enormously. They were riotous in terms of activities, climbing, sailing, canoeing, whatever. The young leaders were mostly student-aged leaders who had given up time to come and do this. Then every morning and evening, there would be prayers with a short talk, and they're pretty rigorous about the shortness of the talk. If somebody went on more than eight minutes or so, one of the leaders would say, "Okay, now we're going to sing." In other words, it wasn't too heavy. N. T. Wright: But these leaders were really good people who one could trust and enjoy playing football with or rock climbing with. And then listening to them expounding a bit of the Bible was just inspirational. The leader of that movement in Scotland at the time was a man called Richard Gorrie, who died about eight or 10 years ago now. Richard was a wonderfully humble man. Very, very able, very gifted as a pastor, as a man of prayer, as a teacher, very self-effacing. He kind of took me under his wing, and I think he probably saw that I had some gifts which might be developed in particular ways. He was a mentor to me through my teens and into my early 20s. I would keep in close touch and go and see him or write letters and so on, long before email, of course. N. T. Wright: Then when I was ordained in the mid 1970s, I had the good fortune to work with one of the college chaplains in Oxford, a man called Mark Everett, who was from a quite different tradition. He was from what we would call an Anglo Catholic tradition, but in a very unfussy and understated way. It's interesting, those two mentors, both very, very humble, self-effacing men, which tells me something about something. But he gave me space to be myself. He didn't try and force me into his own mold. Working alongside him, celebrating the Eucharist alongside him, I learned so much about how the personal disciplines of prayer translate into the life of the church and back again. There was a sort of richness of spirituality, which enabled me not to quote, stop being an evangelical, because that's, I hope, who I still am. But to discover that actually the world-affirming nature of a more Catholic style of worship was not something to be afraid of. It wasn't ritualism. I mean, anything can turn into ritualism, but this certainly wasn't. N. T. Wright: Those two were kind of anchors, people to whom I look back with gratitude and say, "Well, I think they, under God, shaped me a great deal." Then there have been other people subsequently, counselors and spiritual directors who I've known, including a wonderful Franciscan friar, who when I was Bishop of Durham, he was my spiritual director. I would go and see him every few months, and we'd just talk about anything and everything and pray and so on. So I've been very blessed with with wise, good people who've been there for me and and so on. Kristen Padilla: You will be retiring from St Andrews at the end of this year and transitioning to Oxford, where you will serve as the senior research fellow at Wycliffe Hall. What are you looking forward to in this next phase of your life? N. T. Wright: I'm looking forward to the move being done. My wife and I have moved house 16 times in 48 years, and we're quite good at it, but we don't like it. So I wish I could just fast forward to some time around Christmas, when hopefully all the furniture will be in position, all the books will be out of the boxes. But it'll be a different pace of life, God willing. I won't be responsible for teaching any actual courses, but I will have the chance that if I'm working on something, I'll be able to do a couple of lectures on the side and I'll preach a little bit, God willing, in the Wycliffe Hall Chapel. And, of course, we will been living five minutes walk from the Bodleian Library, one of the great libraries of the Western world. As an academic, that's kind of, "Oh my goodness." This is like walking into a restaurant where they serve all your favorite food. Where are we going to start? N. T. Wright: So there's all sorts of things about that. I'm not looking forward to being down in the South of England again. Being a Northerner, we've lived in Scotland now for nearly 10 years. My wife and I both love Scotland, and we love being by the sea where we are. So we're going to keep a base in Scotland and hopefully be able to be an Oxford during the term and in Scotland for some, at least, of the vacations. N. T. Wright: The other good thing will be to be much closer to family. We have two daughters who live in Bristol and Litchfield, each of which is about an hour and a quarter from Oxford. Our youngest son lives just outside Oxford, and he's going to be studying at Wycliffe Hall, so that's very exciting. We'll be about as far south of our oldest son as at the moment we are north of himself, so closer to family will be very good at our time of life. Doug Sweeney: Dr. Wright, you have walked with God for many years now as as a person, as a disciple of Jesus, as a minister of the Gospel, as a scholar. Do you have any advice for people in our audience, pastors, divinity students, serious lay people, based on your many years of walking in step with the spirit? N. T. Wright: I would like to think that I've done at least some walking in step with the spirit. I mean we all know our own hearts, that we wander off in this direction and that, and we're very easily pulled and have to be pulled back again. There's a reason why the Lord's prayer says forgive us our trespasses and why we have to say that at least once or twice a day that we need that. So I wouldn't at all hold myself up as somebody who's got it all right. If I can imagine, your listeners don't see that there is a blank chair at this table, and I'm imagining my wife sitting in this chair and rolling her eyes at the thought of her husband being held up as some great model or something. So I would say this, and I've seen this both in myself and with many, many people that I've worked with. The people who stay the course are the people who spend time every day with God in prayer and in reading of scripture, and basically the people who spend time every week or two in whatever liturgical worship is appropriate in their tradition. N. T. Wright: Now, I say that in quite general terms because I'm very much aware that we're all different. I know we've all done these personality tests, whether it's the Myers-Briggs or the Enneagram or whatever. And knowing oneself and knowing which patterns of prayer work for the sort of person that I am, that's really important. I wouldn't say to anyone, "You must do exactly as I've done." Because you need to work with a wise helper to make sure that you are not trying to pray because that's the way you were taught at school because it actually might not be appropriate. There are the patterns of prayer. But time every day in scripture and in prayer, to be disciplined about that. That is the sheet anchor. It's kind of obvious and basic and we're all taught that. But I've discovered that quite a lot of people, sadly, including some in ministry, just let it slide. You miss a day, and it doesn't seem to matter, and you miss another day, and it doesn't seem to matter too much. N. T. Wright: I remember being told when I was quite young, and as you said, music is very important to me, the quotation from some great... I don't know if it was a pianist or a violinist, I forget, who said, "If I miss my practice for a day, I notice. If I miss it for two or three days, the public notice." That's the thing. So that steady discipline. Of course, one of the nice things about looking forward to retirement is I should be able actually to have more time just to be more relaxed about spending time reading. I mean, at the moment, if I'm reading a passage in the morning, I do have the time and the space, now that we don't have young children anymore. Because that's what constrains if you've got... absolutely. You're constantly being pulled away. But if you're walking in the mountains, and you've got a compass to guide you through the mist, sometimes something happens and the compass needle seems to swing away. And you have to let it settle back to north and take your course again. The more you can say, "Okay, we seem to have swung away. Let's get the compass back where we need to be." That's the discipline. Doug Sweeney: Sage advice from Dr. N. T. Wright, who is on the campus of Beeson Divinity School and Samford University this week to be our inaugural provost lecture series lecturer. Thank you very much Dr. Wright for being with us. N. T. Wright: Thank you very much. It's good to be with you. Kristen Padilla: You've been listening to the Beeson podcast. Our theme music is written and performed by Advent Birmingham of the Cathedral Church of the Advent in Birmingham, Alabama. Our engineer is Rob Willis. Our announcer is Mike Pasquarello. Our cohosts are Doug Sweeney and myself, Kristen Padilla. Please subscribe to the Beeson podcast at BeesonDivinity.com/podcast or on iTunes.