Hey leaders, it's Kerry Newhoff. I'm on the road this week and we decided to do something to serve you as podcast listeners. A few months ago, I did a series on pastoring in a partisan age, and with the election right around the corner, we are re-issuing those episodes. I really hope you enjoy. I hope it's helpful and I hope it's just in time as you lead your congregation and the people you care about through a very, very critical time. The art of leadership network. If you say if you're a Christian, I don't care how the city is working, I'm saying my prayers and I'm going to heaven, then you just haven't heard the primary call of the gospel, which is it's time for God to become king. And so if you then look out of the window and see bad things happening, you might want to say, we need to team up with everyone else who thinks there are bad things happening and we need to link arms and say our prayers and see what can be done to sort this out. Welcome to the Kerry Newhoff Leadership podcast. It's Kerry here and I hope our time together today helps you thrive in life and leadership. This seems to be getting a little bit harder, doesn't it? Thriving in life and leadership and that's why we're in the middle of this series on pastoring. How do you care for people in a partisan age? This is going to be a really interesting fall. So we're going deep. I kicked it off with my thoughts and we've already heard from well a number of top thinkers and now today you're going to hear from NT Wright. I am so excited for this conversation. He's one of the greatest living minds on the New Testament and he's so good at bridging the gap between what scripture says and what's happening in our world today. And because you're listening to this podcast, we got something special for you. We are giving away 10 scholarships valued at $200 each to admirato.org. That is NT Wright's online learning community. Basically, it's seminary online. 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So in part five of this series, NT Wright and I sit down and we look at why Christians have bought into the culture wars, how the gospel really has become political. And well, was it originally political? It's an interesting question and then advice on leading through the election without losing people. Isn't that kind of the goal? So NT Wright is currently the senior research fellow at Wycliffe Hall at the University of Oxford. He's one of the most important New Testament scholars of our day and a first-rate academic who writes with clarity for both professional guilds and popular audiences. His work in theology, New Testament studies and Pauline studies has created and nurtured fresh conversations and healthy debate. His book The Heart of Romans is one of his most recent books that clarifies some of the central themes in Paul's epistle to the Romans. Before becoming the senior research fellow at Wycliffe Hall, Wright served as Bishop of Jerome from 2003 to 2010 and then became research professor of New Testament and early Christianity at St. Mary's College in the University of St. Andrews in Scotland until 2019. He's got a very distinguished career and we are not in the shallows on this conversation. I can promise you that. Did you know our recent survey by the Barna group showed that the number one reason that Christians aren't making disciples is they don't feel qualified or equipped to do so. It can be really difficult when you feel like you're walking into a test without any of the answers. So as church leaders we need to rethink how to equip people to carry out the message of the gospel and that's where Subsplash comes in. Empower your community with the only church platform made for discipleship with mobile apps, messaging, website, streaming groups, giving it a whole lot more. Subsplash puts the best of today's church technology into your hands. Join 17,000 other churches by going to Subsplash.com/carry and you'll get $500 off when you sign up. That's Subsplash.com/C-A-R-E-Y to get $500 off when you sign up. And then you're probably familiar with compassion, right? And they do an amazing job of releasing children from poverty in Jesus' name. But you know they also help you as a church, as a pastor. I trusted compassion because they empower local churches around the world in North America and around the world to effectively disciple children and their bridge for congregations to share the love of Jesus with others. They effectively brought the mission field right to our doorstep and you can bring this mission focus to your church and then watch God use your people to impact the world. So if you want to connect with compassion, check it out by going to compassion.com/carry. That's compassion.com/C-A-R-E-Y. So with that said, let's dive into a really rich conversation with one and only NT Wright. Well, I know I'm not the only one who's excited to have you back on the podcast. So many listeners have said, oh, NT Wright is coming back and Tom, welcome. We're really delighted to have you. Thank you very much. Good to be with you again. Yeah. So we're diving into the deep end in this podcast talking about the world the way it is. So I want to start with a question about whether the world in your view is actually getting worse or whether we only think it's getting worse. There's an actual scholarly debate about whether we're actually things are getting worse or whether that's just what every generation thinks. Yeah. I think it's a fair question. I suspect we now know so much more about so much more than we did say 50 years ago. I mean, when I was growing up long before social media or the internet, and when the news was much more heavily edited than it might be now, then you only got to hear about what certain people wanted you to hear about. Now, no doubt that is still the case to some extent, but we're now at the position where, say, a soldier fighting a battle can take photographs or take a video and send it home to friends who will put it on the web and it'll be around the world as fast as anyone wants. And time was when that was simply unthinkable. As a result, we do know about a lot of very unpleasant things that are happening in the world, in a way which they may well have been going on before, but we didn't know about them. Now, having said that, I have been reflecting that the various crises that are going on at the moment, whether we think of Russia invading Ukraine, whether we think of them at least whatever, the world does seem to be a more volatile place than it's been for most of my lifetime. I suppose the last time it was this nervous was the Cuban missile crisis, and I was only just old enough to know about that. I think I was 13 or something at the time in the early 1960s. And I remember hearing about it and hearing adults on the radio and television being very worried about what this could mean. And then they backed down, Khrushchev and Kennedy backed down from that confrontation. And in a sense, that was the beginning of the end of the Cold War. I mean, that's an oversimplification, but you see what I mean. And then when the Cold War finally cooled off completely, a lot of people thought, "Phew, that's it. We're now in a world where everyone really wants to be nice Western-style Democrats," and so on. But since then, and as I say, the Internet has had a lot to do with it because opinions, including foolish and ill-judged opinions, can flash around the world and generate reactions and so on very, very quickly now in a way that wasn't possible before. And we've also seen, of course, in the last 25 years, the rise of something that we can loosely call Islamism, which is very different from Islam. That's been with us for many centuries and has lived alongside Jews and Christians quite peaceably for most of that time, not all, but most of that time, but quite suddenly, and obviously 9/11 was the flashpoint for this. So the Internet and Islamism are two kind of new forces which then have come in on top of existing tensions. Obviously, Russia and the West is still there with all that goes on there. And obviously, the question of Israel and the Jewish people, both in the Middle East and around the world, continues to be, as it's been for a long time, a very difficult one. And so there are some existing difficulties which go back, but I think we've got to a point where there is a lot more fraught than it used to be, and a sense that actually one or two very foolish people could do one or two very foolish things, which might literally set the whole world ablaze in a way which I don't think we've thought was likely for most of my lifetime, and I'm 75, by the way. Tom, I think one of the advantages you and I have, I don't remember the Cuban Missile Crisis, I wasn't quite born yet, but I remember the Cold War, and I remember the Salt Talks, the Start Talks, and the Fall of Berlin Wall, etc. And you're right, news was curated into 30 minute packages that you watched at night, if you caught the news, and maybe you saw it in the newspaper. I think this is a big issue for a lot of our listeners, and you have the advantage of having a long pre-digital memory. So I'm curious, because anxiety is spiking, you know that, you've read the statistics. What is your approach to news consumption in a very partisan divided age? What are some of the best practices you could recommend? It's very, very difficult. I watch, my wife and I watch various different channels, BBC, independent television, etc. And I get routinely more and more fed up with their choice of which topics they're going to focus on, and it becomes, as is well known, infotainment, if that's still allowed as a word. In other words, entertainment masquerading as information. And of course, the people who organize those channels, they want to make their shows more popular than the other ones. So they put on things which they know will spark certain interests and anger and so on. So I feel rather like, I remember watching my grandfather getting very cross with the then only channel of news that was available in the late 1950s, early 1960s, just watched the one channel, and he would shout and say, "We don't want to know about that. Tell us about such assumption." And I feel quite like that now. I'm not sure there's anything much we can do about that. People who really want to be responsible about this will take or read online three or four quite different newspapers and magazines. I mean, in this country, at the end of every week, we get the spectator, which is a right-wing magazine, and the new states mode, which is a left-wing magazine. And ideally, one should buy both and read them one eye on each, as it were, and feel the different currents of opinions. But that's only within the British scene, the left and right within the British scene, and the course, there are many, many other things, and you only have to go to other parts of the world starting with America maybe, but many other parts of the world to realize there are totally, totally different perspectives on things. And being well-informed has always been difficult, and ironically, because the world is now full of information, and you can log on to it at any time, in any direction. It's got worse, because most people haven't got time or ability really to take on board and think reflectively and wisely about all the different things that are going on. So it is difficult. And I think we each have to make choices as best we can as to how many hours or minutes a day we're going to give to trying to find out what's going on in our world. And that is a real toughy. Yeah. One of the things you're known for, you've written 80 books, is that about right? There's a few. 85, no. 85. Wow. Written a few since we started this interview, I'm sure. But one of the things that you're known for is deep work, like your biography on Paul, your work on the New Testament. I mean, they're not simple tomes, and even your new book on Jesus and the powers. It's extremely well thought through. We've had Cal Newport on this podcast numerous times. He talks about deep work. And that's one of the things I really admire about you. So I would imagine that you are drinking from deeper streams than somebody who is just addicted to X or to Instagram. And I'd love to know some of your personal reading habits, because I think one of the things I'd love to do in the series that we're doing on leading through a partisan age is if you're only getting the headlines, if you're only getting the infotainment, that is going to do something to your brain and make it very difficult to lead. So can you tell us a little bit about your habits and your reading patterns or a deeper life? I'm not sure I could hold myself up as a great shining example. And as I say, at my age, one ought really to be putting one's feet up or maybe getting out on the golf course or whatever and letting the next generation think about things and run the world. I've been trying to do various things in the church and the world for a long time now. But I try to keep up reading in different fields. I like reading biographies, especially biographies of people who've been influential, both as theologians, for instance, biography of the late recently departed Jürgen Boltzmann, which I'm actually halfway through at the moment. Very interesting stuff. And when you read biography, you're seeing the world through two other pairs of eyes. The subject and the author of the biography. And the biography is going to be the more interesting, the more distant they are from you. But I also, of course, still read as much as I can of basically ancient history. So biographies of leaders in the Herodian period, but also stuff about the new testament in its world. I've been fascinated by Roman history and Greek history ever since I was quite small. I mean, I started in on that one as about 14. And if you can probably see on the wall behind me, lots and lots of classical texts. And in a sense, that's where I feel at home. And going back to how things were in the early Roman Empire and the rhetoric and the propaganda and so on that they used and how that was received and so on, that's a very interesting exercise. It puts into perspective all sorts of things that we do today, especially the early Roman Empire, contrasting and comparison with the British Empire of 100 years ago, 150 years ago, and the American Empire today, such as it is, because there are certain patterns which repeat, but then with significant differences. And so I like to feel I'm trying to live with those different things and not get trapped in one box at any one time. I also do quite different things. I read a certain amount of poetry and I just love getting the different perspectives on life that a good poet or a good selection of poets will bring, not just in other words, history and current affairs and so on. I think that's such a wise course and some of the people I enjoy reading the most have similar habits. If there's a young reader, a young leader who would love to jump into a biography, let's say they've never read one before. Do you have one or two that you would recommend as, oh, you'll get hooked if you read these or this is a particularly good work that you would recommend? I mean, you've read dozens hundreds, I'm sure biographies over time. Goodness. I just recently read the autobiography of Peter Brown, who's the historian, I suppose is in his 80s now, he taught here at Oxford for a long time, but also taught at Princeton and various other places in the States. What fascinated me about Peter Brown was that having become a master of the ancient and then medieval period in Europe, he wasn't content with that. He wanted to know what was going on in other parts of the world. If you look further east, Iran was just the most amazing culture, still is the most amazing culture, and he went and lived there and studied it and so on just before the revolution in '79, whenever it was. And so he was able to come back with all sorts of reflections about how a very, very different society with its own high culture and so on had organized itself. And watching him as a person navigate all that, I found absolutely fascinating. Wow. I never would have thought you would have picked that one. I don't know why this comes to mind, but just while I've got you. Do you have a favorite biography of Churchill that you would recommend? Not really. The last full one I read was Roy Jenkins, which is very interesting, and Jenkins is a good writer, a bit of a scurrilous politician in my view. He's dead now, but I always enjoyed Jenkins' remark that with Churchill and money, if Churchill was running out of money, his solution was always, his solution was never to try to cut expenditure and always to try and make a little bit more, usually by writing something for the newspapers or whatever. When I read that, I thought, I know which side I'm on on this one. Same thing. There you go. You argue that with the partisanship and the culture wars and everything that's happening right now in the world, democracy is actually in danger. Can you expand on that a little bit? Well, yes. The whole idea of culture wars has come up really since the 1980s, I think, and obviously the phrase was invented, if I remember I could buy James Davis and Hunter, to try to name the phenomenon of increasing polarization, particularly in the United States society. But we have our own equivalents and most countries will, and I think this is the kind of long reach of the Enlightenment, that the Enlightenment sort of polarized in the 18th century between those who were so concerned about freedom, that they wanted to scrap as much dictatorship or autocracy as they could, and those who were so concerned to ward off anarchy that they wanted strong leadership, and European culture has oscillated between those two in American culture as well. But it's kind of got worse. And then it's picked up. And I think this is part of the international television and so on, that it's picked up steam where people are unable to separate out issues. When I go to America, it always astonishes me that the same people are vitriolically opposed to abortion and vitriolically in favor of everybody carrying guns and being prepared to shoot people at any time. On the one hand, you'd have thought, if they're so concerned about preserving human life, even in embryo and in vitro, et cetera, then why are they not concerned about preserving human life when it comes to say a school shooting by somebody who's been able to walk into a store, even though mentally disturbed and buy a weapon grade automatic rifle? I mean, for somebody from the other side of the Atlantic, and I suspect for you in Canada, this is just nonsense. But if you try to argue on one side or the other, people immediately assume that you'll go all the way down that line, that if you're right-wing so-called on this issue, you will be on all the other issues as well, or if you're left-wing then, et cetera. And I constantly want to say the issues do not bundle up like that. And to think in that oversimplified way, that simplistic way is seriously dangerous. And I guess it's a modern version of a phenomenon which must have existed all along, that my country right or wrong, or my prince right or wrong, whatever, that you make a decision as to who you're going to follow, and then whatever they tell you, you'll do it because you've made that decision. Instead of that, part of the maturity of why well-organized societies would be to be able to introduce lots of nuance and say, well, no, we've got to think this one through. And maybe there's part of it to which we want to say yes, and part of it, we want to say no, et cetera, et cetera, rather than bundling it up. So I think we've accepted an oversimpl analysis of far too many things. Thomas Jefferson said that for a democracy to work, you have to have an educated electorate. And unfortunately, in Britain and in many other countries, I look around and I do not see an educated electorate. I see newspapers and television stations beating the drum for a very oversimplified version of the issues facing a country. And I grieve over that. That's not a good or healthy way to be. And now a quick word from one of our partners. Today's episode is brought to you by preaching cheat sheet. A recent study showed that 46% of pastors say one of their biggest struggles is feeling like attendees don't absorb or use what they preach. Did you hear that? 46% of pastors feel that way. Look, I get it. Okay, we've all been there. 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That's preaching cheat sheet.com to download your copy for free. And now back to the conversation. Well, there's so much we could impact there. I mean, control, abortion. And I agree, it's very different, you know, being a Canadian who spends a lot of time in the US, I have a lot of American friends and Muslim owned weapons, etc. And most of them are on the more conservative side. And we've had some really interesting conversations because like you, I've never owned a gun. I don't get the mindset. I don't understand it. I'm not judging it. I just don't understand the mindset. And I think it's impossible for Americans to understand our mindset is like, well, how can you just walk out there in the wild and what if you get shot? It's like, well, you've done pretty well for 75 years, and I've done okay for 59, you know, it's just different. It's a very interesting mentality. And there's much more involved in the culture wars as well. Why do you think Christians have been susceptible to, succumb to so many Christians have succumbed to the culture wars and ideological partisan simplicity? I think it's partly because we've just never been taught, just like in principle, we've never been taught about Christian political theology. And the book, which Mike Burton, I've just just written, Jesus and the Powers, is a kind of primary Christian political theology. And as we were writing it, I was aware, I don't think I've ever heard a sermon series on all this stuff. But it's sitting there in the Bible. And why haven't we been doing it? And I think it's partly because clergy and preachers have been shy of appearing to preach politics from the pulpit. We're going to come back to the reasons for that. But also because it's just not been on the agenda. And again, it's the Platonism of the Enlightenment, which has done this. The idea that spiritual reality is upstairs somewhere and quite different from this worldly reality, that we render to Caesar the things of the Caesars that are earthly affairs, and to God the things that are gods, that's upstairs stuff, that's heavenly, that spiritual, that's about praying, it's about going to heaven. And Jesus' agenda of God's kingdom coming on earth as in heaven is simply not been on the radar. People don't know that that's what the whole Bible is about. It's not about how humans go to be with God, it's about how God comes to be with humans, and what happens when he does. And the church in many generations has wrestled hard with this, and there's some very fine, rich, nuanced Christian theologians who've wrestled with those political issues. But since the 18th century, the Western Church particularly has been taught and has gone along with this, that that's off limits. You don't need that. We leave that to the politicians and the social workers, and we will teach you the theology of how to go to heaven and how to say your prayers and so on. Now, of course, I believe passionately that God will look after his people after their death and will raise them from the dead in the end. That's a bit different from going to heaven. And also, the absolute vital importance of prayer. So I'm not saying that those are unnecessary or wrong or in themselves super spiritual. What I am saying is that in the New Testament itself, rooted as it is in the Old Testament, they are integrated with the concerns about justice and mercy in the real world, about being the people of God who know how to do forgiveness and reconciliation and healing and hope in and for the real world. Just as Jesus went about doing that sort of stuff, and we have allowed ourselves to drift away from that and to embrace this platonic gospel of, "Oh, well, we're out of here. This world is not my home. I'm just passing through. Therefore, I'm not going to take any trouble to understand, let alone to engage with, let alone to act within the world." And as a result, that people have thought, "Oh, politics, that's a dirty game. We don't get involved with that." But then, of course, the thing strikes back because when it comes to election time, knee-jerk reactions on certain issues come through, and they dominate the Christian mindset in a way which, if we'd been thinking about what a Christian political theology actually looked like from the beginning, we wouldn't have let that happen. Yeah, there again, a lot to unpack in that. Can we start here? Can you give just a quick dictionary definition to platonic worldview so that everybody is on the same page? Plato, whose works are up there on the shelf, and Plato basically taught that the world of reality is a kind of spiritual upstairs world, the world of ideas, the world of the forms, and that though the present world is basically not a bad place in itself, the main thing that we need to do is to learn how to escape into the other world. And one of the great Platonists' contemporary with the New Testament, Plutarch, has a treatise where he says that we all have souls which came from the heavenly world and are looking forward to going back there as soon as they're allowed to, and that that's really what life is all about. And that, of course, Plutarch was a philosopher, a politician, a biographer, et cetera. He was very active in the real world, but he didn't, what we would say is the real world, but he didn't think that was the ultimately real world. He thought there was a spiritual world, which is quite different. Now, when I first read that in Plutarch, I thought, "Oh, that's what most of my Christian friends think." That's good to say. That sounds like popular Christianity. Exactly, and it really isn't. But we have been seduced into that really ever since it started to happen in the third and fourth centuries when great Christian scholars like Origen were drawing on Plutonic thought in order to try to communicate to their generation what the gospel was all about. But it became more and more dominant until in the high middle ages. That was the thing, "How are you going to go to heaven?" And that's what the reformers are going for, because they're saying, "Here's how you do it," by being justified by faith, rather than other alternative models. But the question itself was wrong. The right question is, "How is God becoming king on earth as in heaven?" And once you ask that question, which is Jesus' question, then you're into all sorts of practical real world issues. You've written on that and a really good little primer if people want to get their head into what you're talking about in the alternative view, the biblical view. John Orberg wrote a book a few years ago based on a lot of Dallas-Willards teaching called "Eternity is Now in Session." And I think you and John would probably agree on a lot of those issues that the kingdom has somewhat realized. So that's just a quick note to leaders listening. But here's the thing, you're exactly right. In the same way that our world is polarized, Christianity these days, particularly in America and the West, seems to be polarized between a theocracy, like here's the governor we need to elect, here's the president, here's the Supreme Court, here are the decisions we need, almost teetering on theocracy. And head in the sand, this world is all disappearing, it doesn't mean anything. We're not going to get involved in politics because this is passing away. And one day we'll all be in heaven, kind of denialism, you know, if you want to look at it that way. I'd love for you to comment on both views and what you think of both views. And then maybe let's get into the alternative that you spend a lot of time in your book talking about. This is a whole seminar in itself. But one of the ironies is that the two positions which you said, which do appear polarized, actually seem to feed off one another, so that fundamentalist dispensationalists who believe that we're going to be raptured and end up in heaven are often some of the same people who are campaigning very hard on a right-wing political ticket. So out of that, they just think, "Oh, well, here is one issue which the world seems to be getting totally wrong and it really worries and disturbs us, therefore, we're going to campaign on that." Even if that's illogical in terms of this world is not my home. Which is why you sometimes get environmental comments, like it doesn't matter what we do to the earth, because it's all going down anyway, and yet we need to elect X to this office. Exactly, I know. Actually, when I was living in Canada, which is 35, 40 years ago now, this was the first time I really met that when I was doing, you'll be interested in this, I was doing a series of talks for a church in Thunder Bay, Ontario, up at the most first corner of Lake Superior. I was supposed to be talking about Jesus in his historical context. Most of the questions were about ecology, because the good people in this church were being bombarded by their American friends who were saying, "Don't give us all this nonsense about acid rain and so on," because God is going to burn up the whole world soon. So why should you worry? The important thing is that we're on the right side, etc, when that happens. They were saying, "We know that's wrong, but how can we argue against it?" And I'd never really met that before. So it goes quite deep with me from been reflecting on it for all that time. It was in the late 80s. I remember acid rain being so big. That was actually the early 80s. That was about 80s, something like that. As I say, I think a lot of the problem has come from the fact that for years now, people in the churches have taken the Bible and preached a spiritual message and not taught people how to think about what matters. And so we've then allowed a vacuum into which people have gone with, "Well, we now need to elect this person because he's the Savior who's going to rescue us from this muddle." Now, this is a very American thing, and it actually has an analogy in France, and both of them go back to the revolutions of the 18th century. And the sort of sense that if we really get this right, we will have a great leader who will take us to the sunlit uplands that we all know are really ours by right, and we just somehow have been missing them recently. We in Britain have not tended to think like that, not for a long time. We tend to think in terms of voting for the least worst option. And we don't imagine that by having an election, we are at last going to get good, wise, sensible, creative people. We may get one or two. There are lots of perfectly good, well-educated politicians, but the system as a whole militates against that, and we too have our left-right polarizations, which are like dog whistles for various bits of the community. And that's deeply unhealthy, even though they're often different dog whistles to what you'd find in America. So it does get very confusing. Yeah, so what do you, when you look at the history, because I think the culture wars are, from the '80s, as you said, it was maybe the rise and the moral majority in this idea that we're going to take back America, et cetera. Were there ingredients in the mix that make, made and make Christians particularly susceptible to the culture wars? Yeah, I guess. It is such a complex issue, and to track the roots of it, I wouldn't presume to be able to go too far with that, because I'm not a modern sociologist at all. Obviously, I'm just an observer who's been around for a certain length of time. But I mean, take the abortion issue. It seems to me that abortion became an issue, not least because people were aware, certainly in my country and I think in America, that abortion was being used as an easy and inverted commas form of contraception, and that that in consequence was licensing sexually morality, or what used to be thought of as sexually morality, promiscuity anyway. And so that the desire to have free abortion went with the desire to have free sex. And so people who were nervous about sex for whatever reason, and there'd be many reasons why people were nervous about sex, would say, "Oh, abortion's wrong, duh, duh, duh, duh." And then produce all the standard arguments about, "Well, here is a picture of a fetus in the womb, et cetera, et cetera." Whereas then, conversely, that was turned into a power play by powerful people, often powerful men, basically telling women what they couldn't do, which then you get two of the ideologies of our time, Aphrodite, the goddess of erotic love, Mars, the god of violence and war, who are kind of squabbling with each other. Is this about male violence? Is it about the right to have a fulfilled erotic existence, et cetera? And we haven't named those issues. And in consequence, I think we're often shadowboxing. We're often going by implication at this or that topic. And certainly, the same would be true for things like the military adventurism that we've seen, which there's some evil in the world. So let's go and drop bombs on it, and then it'll all be all right, won't it? And we've done that so often, and we simply haven't learned. And when I see people doing things and they're not learning from their mistakes, which is one of the definitions of insanity, by the way, then I think this is being driven by an ideology because it is not being driven by reason. And there are all sorts of ideas. So I think until we name the ideologies, and particularly name the idols that are being worshipped, then we're never going to be in a good place to steer our way through. And for me, that's one of the things I've learned over the years, that actually the early Christians were taught discipleship 101. You give up your idols and worship the living and true God. Now, I was never taught that as a child. I was taught, and we're all sinful. We're all going to hell. Fortunately, Jesus died for us. So if we trust in him, we'll go to heaven instead. And then, oh, by the way, here's how you're supposed to behave while you're on the way. There was never the logical steps there. We're never quite clear. Instead of being told, here are these idols, which people characteristically worship, and they really mess up your health and the health of the society you're living in. And here's how, worshiping the true God enables you to escape those idols, or at least to become part of the battle that Jesus is fighting to defeat all the enemies. And according to Paul in 1st Corinthians 15, the battle is ongoing, even though the initial victory was won on the cross. And once you start seeing the world like that, all sorts of things shake down differently. And when I look at Western Christianity, including my own Anglican tradition, I just don't see these issues being addressed. But the Bible, not least the New Testament, is saying, please, please, will you think in these categories, rather than those rather second rate derived ones, which have been popular in Western Christianity now for a long time? So you argue in your book that Christianity is political. But I don't think you're arguing that it's moving toward a theocracy. And a theocracy basically means, you know, people in faith with a religious agenda fused with the stamp, right? In other words, I'm going to impose my morality on the nation. What is wrong with theocracy, or what is right about it, if there's anything right about it? I mean, from one point of view, if you believe that God is king and Jesus is Lord, then theocracy technically is what we've got. Ever since the ascension of Jesus, there is now God's Messiah at the helm of the universe, sending out his people into the world. But then comes the trick, sending out his people to do what? So many people think that if God was really in charge, well, when I look out of the window here, I don't at the moment see any violence going on outside in the street, but we know that in the great world out there, there are all sorts of violent and wicked things happening. And people say, well, if God really was king, if Jesus really was Lord, that wouldn't be happening, would it? The answer is no, we haven't stopped to think what it means that Jesus is Lord, as opposed to Caesar or Herod or some global dictator. Jesus is not a dictator like that. This is where the Sermon on the Mount is so important. People have taken the Sermon on the Mount and made it very much about me and my behavior. Fine, it is about me and my behavior. But it's also about this is how the kingdom comes, not by God sending in the tanks, but by God sending in the meek and the mourners and the hungry for justice people and the peacemakers and the pure in heart, etc, etc. By the time the bullies and the bad guys have woken up, the meek and the mourners and the hungry for justice people have built schools and hospitals and are looking after the poor and have transformed the world. And actually, they have transformed the world. As Tom Holland argues in his recent book Dominion, there has been an enormous sea change in global morality over the last 2000 years. If you compare today's attitudes across much of the world with, say, the normal attitudes in the Roman Empire and its cognates at the time. There's so many things such as slavery, such as exposing infants who you don't want, just leaving them out on the street for the wolves to take or whatever. That was the normal common thing in the ancient world. Very, very few people do it today. That's a great example where there has been change. But this is because the way that the kingdom of God comes is not through what people think of as theocracy, i.e. mad clerics who think they have a hotline to have them telling everyone else what they must do and punishing them if they don't. The agenda is the Psalm 72 agenda, which Jesus is following through, which is that the primary concern is with the poor and the widows and the orphans and the vulnerable and the stranger and the homeless, etc, etc. And if we are looking after them, then all sorts of other things in society will organize themselves in a better way. But that is not something that can be dictated by powerful people sitting in a government has enforcing things. I do believe in the theocracy, but I believe in a different theos, a different God from the God that most people think of when they hear the word theocracy. They think of God as a big bully who is going to come and stamp hard on you. Instead of which, I believe in the God I see in Jesus, Jesus didn't stamp hard on people. Jesus went about celebrating the kingdom with all the wrong people actually. And when we think what would that look like if we tried to do that? Well, it might look more like the rather confused liberal democracies that some of us have than the dictatorships have left or right, which have been tried over the last few centuries and have shown how threadbare they are. Well, it's interesting. Jesus had moments where people wanted to make him king. One of his disciples, if my New Testament is right, the zealots, Simon the Zealot, that was a political movement that thought to take back the throne from Rome in part, was it not? Or did I get that wrong? No, the word zealot, which is a tricky word in the first century because there's only actually a political party called the zealots in the 50s and 60s, but in the time of Jesus in the 20s and 30s, it's a more generalized word for people who believe in being zealous for God, zealous for the law, zealous for the temple, and zealous is something you do with a sword or a dagger, not just something that's going on in your head or your heart. So he may not be part of a political party, but he's certainly on that side of things. And many of the Pharisees of Jesus' day were not just purists in terms of private religious practice, but were purists in terms of we want this country, we are God's people, to be free of pagan influence and to be masters in our own house and so on. So there's a lot going on there, which people today just don't get. So that's very similar to what we're seeing today and some of the dialogue. Absolutely. And from some points of view, the Pharisees believed that religion was far too important to be only happening in the temple. They wanted it to come right down to home life, school life, shop life, et cetera, et cetera, which sounds to us like a noble ideal until they start to say, right, we're going to enforce this and the last great kingdom of God movement in the 130s AD under Simeon Ben-Kozibar was very much about enforcing it and getting everyone on board and being pretty fierce with those who were being disloyal. That was emphatically political, but actually the gospel is about society and how society works, and the Greek word "police" from which we get political simply means the city. How is the city working? Now, if you say, if you're a Christian, I don't care how the city is working, I'm saying my prayers and I'm going to heaven, then you just haven't heard the primary call of the gospel, which is it's time for God to become king. And so if you then look out of the window and see bad things happening, you might want to say we need to team up with everyone else who thinks there are bad things happening. And we need to link arms and say our prayers and see what can be done to sort this out, but to be done wisely and humbly and with shrewd thinking through of the issues rather than let's send in the tanks and kill all the bad people. So back to the Simeon on the Mount again, it's about being hungry for justice and the meek and the mourners. And I never tell of reminding people that whatever the ethics are in, say, Paul's letter to the Ephesians, chapters four and five and so on. And there's some wonderful ethical bits there. It begins with a summons to humility and gentleness and meekness. And the minute a Christian starts getting strident and starts saying, we've got to do this. And if you don't, then you're out of line, then hang on, hang on, hang on. The number one ethical command is humility and meekness. Now, what's that going to look like? It may well look like making space for other people's points of view and then finding out how to speak the truth in love and how to navigate one's way towards a more mature and seasoned wisdom rather than just assuming that we've got all the truth and we're coming straight through. That's a really helpful distinction. I would love to know before we get into the alternative a little bit more, what in your view looking through history happens when Christians take up the sword, when they take up force, when they try to occupy office and I'm going to enforce this. As the Pharisees did, Tom Holland talks about this in Dominion. Jordan Peterson has lectured on it numerously many times. What happens when Christians say they don't follow meekness and humility, but they take up the sword, they take up power and they play the power game? I mean, that has been the disaster again and again. Jesus said those who take the sword or perish by the sword. This is not to say that I can work my way through the last 2000 years of history and show that every time the Christians have done this, it has always ended badly. But basically, if you fight fire with fire, it's always fire that's going to win. I don't know if you remember about 30 years ago, there was a movie called The Mission about the Jesuit mission in Latin America. Jeremy Irons, is that it? That's right. Absolutely. It was one of David Putnam's great films along with Chariots of Fire. The irony of that was the question, here is a great work of God. Here are people who have come to love God, who are serving him, who are singing him, who are organizing their society in a whole new way to reflect the gospel. Here comes some soldiers who want to stamp on it because it's bad for business, bad for trade in the colonies, et cetera. Do you resist those soldiers with armed force or do you say, "Okay, we believe in peace, we believe in loving ones enemies. Therefore, if you need to come and kill us, come and kill us." And I think the movie ends without resolving that question, but simply saying, "Here is the dilemma, guys. What are you going to do about it?" And in all sorts of ways, we are still faced with that dilemma with the wars and rumors of wars that are going on in our world right now. So if Christianity is political, if our faith is political, but it's not about violence or overtaking or force, what is it about? What does that look like? Well, for the early Christians, it was about the establishment of micro-societies called churches in the different cities and towns. And that inevitably was a political act. The ancient Romans were very suspicious about people meeting in small groups or middle-sized groups because they knew that that could foment revolution. And the early Christians were perceived as some sort of revolution because who are these people where they've got men and women in the same room? They've got slaves in there as well as free people. They've got people from different ethnic backgrounds that all meeting together and calling each other, sister and brother. What is going on? We're very suspicious about this. And so you see the Roman world simply not knowing, but then here's the thing. The church is called to act. It's one of my current slogans. Church is called to act as a small working model of new creation. We believe that God is doing and will do new creation, that one day the earth will be full of the knowledge of the Lord as the waters cover the sea. And the church is to be modeling what that looks like now, not privately, not hoarding it to itself because the whole point about Jesus' way of life is that it's outward-looking. And the early church spread in the first two or three centuries even though they were trying to stamp it out because they were caring for the old lady down the street who'd lost her husband and now her son and was completely destitute. They were caring for the children who other people had thrown out on the street. They would take them in and give them education and so on and so forth. So the church by being itself was doing an inevitably political act by showing up the systems that they were living in as being dehumanizing and by modeling a way of re-humanizing society from these little cells outwards. And it's not what everyone means by politics, but sooner or later, and we argue this in the book, when you then start to find that a local governor is coming to you and saying, "You're really doing some good stuff here and you're helping some of the poor people in some of the worst areas of our city. Could we work together on some of these projects?" Then if the church says, "Oh no, no, we can't do anything with you," then that's just whimping out. We've got to be able to say, it's one another of my slogans, collaborate without compromise. I've seen this when I was working as a bishop. A lot of local secular organizations who want to work with the church, because they see the church is doing good stuff, but then figuring out how to collaborate, but then knowing where the red lines are, when people say, "Now we want to do this and this," and then the church says, "Well, no, actually." Then the church hasn't been very good at that. We've tended to be either full in, getting our hands too dirty or full out and keeping our noses so clean that they're not doing any good. Do you see what I mean? I do. Is it too simplistic to say you see a bottom-up revolution than a top-down revolution? Is that too simplistic? It is really a bottom-up revolution. Of course, if then the emperor says, "I want to become a Christian," then the church would be very foolish to say, "No, no, no, please go on persecuting this, because that makes us feel so much more authentic." That would just be crazy. But then the church has to say to the emperor, "Okay, but we will give you some ground rules for how this is going to work." You can see that in the 4th and 5th centuries and so on, where sometimes emperors were excommunicated, including on one famous occasion for practicing the death penalty, and bishops who say, "I'm sorry, you may be a Christian, but that's completely out of line. We don't do that in the kingdom of God." Of course, that raises all sorts of difficulties because, well, that's the ultimate punishment for people that we really think are wicked. What we're going to do now and take on the church, 2,000 years to scratch its head and still not really know how to advise the society to cope with hardened criminals, whatever. This is the thing, and the central argument really of this book that I've done with Mike Bird, that God wants his world to be wisely ordered through human governance. This is the thing that people just can't get their heads around. They think either God must be doing it all and we're all passive, or some human must be doing it all and getting more and more arrogant. And the answer is no. Right from Genesis 1, God wants to rule his world through wise human beings who are attentive to God's creative and new creative purposes and who are particularly attentive, Psalm 72 again, to the needs of the poor and the vulnerable and the marginalized, and who will work with the grain of the kingdom of God in that respect. And here's the thing. God wants his world to be run by humans, but it's the church's job to hold those humans to account. And you see this again and again in the New Testament with Jesus holding rulers to account in the acts of the apostles. Paul is doing it all the time. He tells the Philippian magistrates, "Sorry, you're out of line. You need to do it like this." And they say, "Oh, yeah, you're right." And he goes on doing it. It's not a great way to make friends and influence people, but it is the task of the church to hold the authorities to account. We have backed right off from that in the last three centuries in the Western world. We've left it to the newspapers to be the main critics of the politicians and look where that's got us. And as a result, the church itself has lost the art of doing it. And the church then often simply reflects the already polarized society that the newspapers and others have created. So there's a lot of ground to make up, but that's the ideal God wants his world to be run through wise human beings, but God wants to hold them to account and he will use a wise, humble, creative, new, creational church to do that holding to account. That's perhaps the most central important thing that I'm likely to say to you today. Now, and that's a really important ethic, I think, and goal. And I would encourage people to get the book. We'll give you the link in everything in the show notes because it's a deeply different alternative view than I think most of us have in this culture. And it's compelling. And the other thing, you've written about this, Tom Holland has written about this, what I think is lost, and I'm glad this is getting daylight right now, is we think things like caring for the poor and, you know, dignity of life are fundamental human rights that have been around since Adam. And that's not the case. I mean, that was not the Roman Empire. That was not most of human nature through the millennia. And now it's seen even by secular people as being, well, of course, there are human rights. Well, of course, there's dignity in every person. Well, of course, you know, and it was like, no, there was no of course before Christianity. Is that accurate? I think people have lost that contrast. Yeah, Christianity, but then the Jewish world, or in the first century, the Judean world, the world of Judeans, which had gone out into the rest of the world, they had a strong ethic. I mean, I mentioned before the exposure of unwanted babies, particularly unwanted baby girls. The Jews never did that. And the Christians picked up from that. Likewise, abortion in the pagan world, many, many, many pagan men would force their wives to have abortions. And because the surgery was pretty rudimentary in those days, that quite often meant the death or severe suffering of the wife. But the men just that's, I don't want to see more children. So you've got to have an abortion. The Jews never did that. And the Christians again picked up from that. But lots of other ways as well, where the Jews cared for poor people in their own community. And the Christians said, well, actually, now that our community is worldwide, Jew and Gentile, male and female slave and free, we're going to try to care for you all, which is why the very first controversy in the church is between the distribution of food to widows from different ethnic minorities within the Jerusalem church. And which is fascinating that that's one of the first things that comes up. But it tells you that right from day one, they know that their whole restaurant is about caring for the weak and the poor and the vulnerable, which other people weren't doing. As you say, if you were poor, you sat in the street begging, or you went to the wall. If you were sick, well, if you could find a doctor, good luck to you, but we weren't going to help you otherwise, and so on and so forth. And the Christians were into helping the poor, helping the sick, and particularly educating. The reason we have books, biblion in Greek, is that when we moved from the scroll, which is something that's easier for a train scribe to have, to the Codex, which ordinary people could have, which opened up with pages easier to read. And the Christians taught people to read so that they could read the Bible apart from anything else. So there's all sorts of ways in which, and I'm absolutely with Tom Holland on this, the world has changed radically. But I remember, oh, back in 2008, Pope John Paul was speaking at the United Nations in New York, and I remember the speech well. He said, yes, human rights, absolutely, but the idea of human rights comes straight out of the Judeo-Christian tradition. And if you cut off those roots, then the fruits are going to go sour. And he spoke about what you're left with is a cacophony of special interest, special pleading, and of everyone scrambling for the supposed moral high ground of victimhood. I'm more of a victim than you are, so therefore my rights are ahead of yours and so on. I think he was absolutely right. Yeah. So as you're describing this, I see so many churches, I know, small, medium, mega. I mean, this is an all-skate, not every church, but a lot of churches, they do that. They feed the poor, they have food banks, they care, they clothe people, they have mercy ministries, they do so much of that good. But it's almost as though that's a private thing in the absence of any government or even municipal interaction. What is the problem with just doing that as a private thing for our little church, what our church does, what our big church or mega church does? How would you hope to see that shift? Yes. I mean, the idea of the state having responsibility, by the way, I'm not sure if everyone realizes, but the idea of a state, which does things, is a very modern idea. Yeah, that's like 150 years old, basically 100 years old. Maybe slightly more than that, but not that much. The idea of a multi-competent state, which can look after all the aspects of life in an entire geographical area, that's something that was simply unthinkable until comparatively modern times. But anyway, the shift from this is what the church does to this is what should be being done across the board, that happens. I mean, we have to remind ourselves as well that there are many places in the world today where the practice of Christianity is completely outlawed. If you tried to celebrate the Eucharist even in a hotel room in Saudi Arabia, you might easily face a rest, let alone somewhere like Myanmar. I don't know very much about China, but I know that there are millions and millions of Christians there and that the state tries to keep a firm hold on them. But you see what I'm saying, that it's very different in a country that gives lip service, as my country does, to some sort of Christian allegiance, even though we know that only 7% or something of the population go regularly to church. But there is still a sense that what the church is doing is showing us all what we ought to do and how you make the transition from the one to the other is interesting and tricky. We're having that debate in my country at the moment about palliative care as successive governments are toying with the idea of assisted suicide or assisted dying or whatever it's going to be called. People are looking nervously at the Canadian experiment and nervously at Oregon and Holland and so on. And many people are saying we should have more hospices where proper full-on palliative care is given. In my country, that has been almost entirely a Christian operation. And the palliative care people have been saying, we've been doing it on the basis of Christianity for the last generation or two. Actually, this is something that the National Health Service ought to be offering. And of course, that's difficult because the NHS budget is overstretched and there's all sorts of issues about that. But that's a case of where something which the churches saw needed to be done and the churches have done very successfully. Many people are now saying this actually ought to be done by the state as a whole. And I would agree with that. And then, but likewise with food banks or whatever it may be. Of course, I know the arguments that if you have food banks on every street corner, then people will give up working because they can just go and get food from the corner. And interestingly, isn't it, that Paul already addresses that issue in his letter to the Thessalonians where he talks about the freeloaders who think they can just go along to the church and get a lunch and say, it's okay. He says, no, just roll up his leaves and get on with your own work. You don't work, you don't eat exactly. But it's very interesting to me that we can see the early church navigating precisely those questions. And they're good questions to be navigating because it shows the church is doing its job. Yeah. And what you're saying, I think, if I hear you correctly, is that the church should be a beacon, the church should be the light, the church should be pointing the way and that we cooperate with civic authorities to make the world a better place. Yeah. That's why I say collaborate without compromise because the civic authorities may, whether deliberately or otherwise, try to force the church's hand and say, of course, you will come in with us on this particular project, won't you? When the church may well want to say, sorry, we can't follow you down that road. But the other thing that goes with that, we collaborate without compromise, but we must also critique without dualism. I wish there was a word beginning with C that I could use to make the education work. But the church has got to be able to critique the society, but never to lapse into the idea that the world out there is just as bad as it could possibly be. And we have all the light here in this community to critique while affirming everything that can be affirmed in what's going on in the society. But on this respect, sorry, you're getting it wrong. Jesus in John 16 talks about when the Spirit comes, he will convict the world of sin and righteousness and judgment. And I used to think, yeah, that's great. I'm looking forward to seeing the Spirit convict the world. But then you realize the way the Spirit works is through Jesus followers. So it's Jesus followers led by the Spirit, energized by the Spirit, who have to speak truth to power, who have to hold up the mirror to the authorities and say, look what you're doing. And this is actually out of light. And so collaborate without compromise, critique without dualism, and somehow then be living as a light to the world, a city set on a hill. Now, of course, that idea of the city on the hill has been, I think, taken in various ways. But in principle, this is what I mean by the Church as a small working model of new creation, that it's a place where new creation is happening, where people are finding new life, where fresh things are happening, where strangers are being welcomed, where broken and battered and outcasts are being healed and looked after. And this is a sign to the world that Jesus is Lord. And that's what Paul says in Ephesians chapter 3, that when the church is being the church, this multicolored, multi-ethnic, Jew plus Gentile and everybody else community, that then the principalities and powers who think they're on the world are being called to account. Caesar would love to make a society like that. He can't do it. The Caesar's tried, and it always became heavy-handed, top-down, always for the benefit of the elite, always for the benefit of the rich, et cetera. And the church has got to do it the other way. So this is a beautiful vision, and it gives, I think, leaders listening, Church leaders, elders, boards, and Church staff a vision to work toward. And I think it's exciting, but we're a couple months out from a major election in the United States, and probably haven't got time to implement the full vision, although I do hope it's a mid-term, long-term goal for our listeners. What do you do in the meantime, where you've got a congregation that maybe doesn't see it this way, that is into the dualism or the theocratic thing, the polls, they're playing the culture wars, and the rhetoric is going to get very, very hot. Any advice? Because in 2020, so many well-meaning pastors thought, you know, because you've got your minority that's on the side of like all Trump or all Biden, or, you know, I'm QAnon, or I'm progressive left, or whatever, you got a handful of those. But I think my theory is 90 to 95 percent of pastors are somewhere in the middle, and they're horrified by the culture wars, and they don't want, I mean, maybe they've got strong views on abortion or gun control or some of the issues we've mentioned. But they know that the political waters have been poisoned to some extent, and they see it, and they're trying to get a church to go together into the future, and they said the wrong thing, and a quarter of the church left, or they didn't say enough, or they said it with the wrong intonation, and people got upset. And so there's a lot of probably wounded, triggered leaders out there who are like, hey, we've done this before, this did not go well. What advice would you give them about leading well in a highly polarized culture? It is really, really tough, and I was just in America recently and talking with people. I feel for pastors in that situation, and I feel the political winds in different bits of America blowing this way and that, I mean, I was in New York for one week, and then I was in Houston for another week, and there's somewhat different political atmosphere in those two cities, I would say. And talking to pastors from those contexts, wrestling with precisely these issues, and I think I would want to roll right back to those basic things of teaching people how actually, within the kingdom of God, the rulers of this world are held to account, and that means all rulers of this world, and that means we're not expecting to elect a savior or a messiah. We're not expecting, and we shouldn't imagine that by voting this way or that way, we're going to create utopia, because until the Lord returns, we are always going to be in a situation where human beings are called by God to look after his world, but they will get it wrong, like we would all get it wrong, and it's the church's job to critique them. And then it's the church's job as well to have prophetic ministries within the church and to sustain those, which will tell the church when it's getting it wrong, because the church is not going to be infallible. And so we need to create enough space and not to be surprised when people come to us and say, "Look, I've been saying my prayers about this. I've been looking at what's going on, and I really think we're out of line." That's where with many contentious issues in a church, in an ordinary parish or whatever, I know that in an American mega church, it's quite different if you've got several thousand or tens of thousands of members, but certainly in parishes that I know and cathedrals that I know, it was usually possible when a contentious issue was coming up to have congregational meetings where you had very definite ground rules about how people were, about not yelling at one another, about having Ephesians 4-1, about meekness and gentleness and patience as the absolute ground plan. And now, let us hear one another and let us sense one another's concerns. Let us pray for and with one another. And I would say, just like in Southern Africa, when Desmond Tutu was working with the apartheid regime, Desmond and his fellow pastors and fellow bishops went round patiently for years, round government offices saying, "Can we read the Bible with you? Can we just pray for our country with you?" Without saying, "We need to decide today that you're wrong or right," or whatever, but just saying, "Can we do this together if we are all naming the name of Jesus?" Let us at least hear one another out and then link arms and say, "The Lord's Prayer together." That would be a whole lot better than posting something on Instagram about my wicked pastors had this in his sermon last week. And the simple Christian disciplines of listening to one another and praying with one another, people might find it's much harder to demonize somebody with whom you have just prayed the Lord's Prayer. That may sound very basic almost, prioritistically naive, but it seems to me it'd be pretty basic rock bottom stuff. And particularly, I would say this is an Anglican, but I would say it as a Christian, sharing the Lord's Supper. Once you have broken bread and shared the wine with people and linked arms and said, "We are the body of Christ in one's by one's spirit. We're all baptized into one body." Endeavour to keep the unity of the spirit in the bond of peace that comes straight out of my Anglican liturgy. But my goodness, we need to hear that. And doing the Eucharist together, like saying the Lord's Prayer together, that's absolutely basic. And where that doesn't happen, we may be leaving the door open to the polarizations that were all so aware could easily happen. I mean, I'm in the middle of doing these interviews for the series and what I'm sensing already is an early advice trend that says, "Step back a little bit. Don't get involved in the partisanship, but call us back to what we all know to be true or what has always been true rather than trying to point out a running commentary on what's happening." Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. At the same time, sometimes, some of what's happening is so clearly a symptom of something that's either good or bad, that it might be worth highlighting it. I found when I preach, I was preaching in New York just a couple of weeks ago, as an outsider coming in, I was not about to thump the pulpit for a particular cause. But from time to time, I would drop a phrase in which had to kind of let the reader understand about it, and so that there is no doubt a wise and healthy way of doing that. But I think again and again to emphasize, God wants there to be human rulers, but the human rulers are not infallible messiahs, and therefore the church has a role vis-a-vis those human rulers. And this is the whole church state thing that people have got so confused. They think that either church plus state means the church is telling the state what to do, or the state is telling the church what to do. It isn't either of those. It's much more nuanced. And actually, we have an official church state partnership in the UK, but the way it works isn't that different from how things work in the US. It's just formally the structure is different, and of course, Canada is different again. But we need to teach what people have not been taught, which is basically how Christian, I'm repeating myself, how Christian political theology actually works. Is there ever in your views, circumstances that would warrant speaking out against a particular party or candidate? Oh, I would think so, yes. Given an obvious example, if there was a neo-Nazi party that was standing in a particular constituency for my British general election, and we have had some neo-Nazi movements in my country, not as much as in France, but we have had them, then I would have no hesitation in saying that this kind of thing is a symptom of a deep sickness. We must figure out where that comes from. If there are real concerns that they want to address, let us help them address them, but let us not imagine that doing it that sort of way is going to solve anything at all. It will mainly make matters worse. It's easy to fix on that one, because I suspect that virtually all of us would not want neo-Nazi stuff. But that's an example where one would say that. And if there were some members of the congregation who got up and walked out, I would hope as a pastor to be able to visit them in their homes later on in the week and say, look, I know you walked out. You're probably mad with me, but you're a brother or sister in Christ. We need to talk about this. And they might shut the door. They might slam the door and say, go away. Okay, that's their prerogative. But this is how a healthy church in a healthy democracy ought to be working. I mean, there are different ways of doing it, as I say, different cultural contexts. If I was the parish priest of a parish in Kiev in Ukraine right now, I'd be preaching very different kinds of sermons. And if I was a parish priest in a Christian congregation in many parts of India, where Christianity is likely to be scorned or persecuted, or even if Modi gets his way made illegal in some places, they're very serious issues there, which would mean you'd have to think hard about your strategy and never mind the countries where Christianity has been illegal for some while. Well, there's complex, and I'm not an expert in any way on World War II Germany. But if you look at Bonhoeffer and the Confessing Church, the majority of Christians in Germany, in the Second World War, and the 1930s leading up to it actually supported Nazism and saw it as breath of fresh air to bring order back. And it's only in history. You look back and go. Yeah. That's a bad idea. Absolutely. And we shudder at that. But of course, they had had the great economic crash at the end of the 1920s, and the rampant inflation, 1000% percent inflation, et cetera, et cetera. And so people who'd lived through that and suffered the poverty and hunger or starvation of that, suddenly, if there's a strong leader saying we're going to do this, this, and this, that'll sort it out. And by the way, those people are the real problem. And so we're going to get rid of them. You can see that that has an enormous appeal to people who'd watched parents or grandparents, literally starving in the street. But, but, but of course, we know, we know the butts. And I was awfully struck recently by reading, I forget, where that in the 20s and 30s, a great many, what we'd call Bia Pansant, people who are sort of the sophisticated thinkers of the day in Europe, really thought that democracy was a bad idea, that we tried it. It obviously didn't work. We had to go back to strong leadership. And hence, the strong leadership, whether in Soviet Russia or Nazi Germany, many people thought, well, we need the strong leadership. We don't want to go back to that. We can water a democracy where you'll get a different different government every two years, rather like we've had in Britain recently. Different prime minister, you're prime minister. I was pretty good until recently. We're all, it's been a big mess. But many people seeing precisely that chaos would say, we need strong leadership. And then hang on, which sort of strong leadership do we want? And do we want either of those sorts? And this was the great dilemma at the end of the 1930s. Think we're not in Dietrich Bonhoe, but somebody I felt a Benjamin, faced with thinking history was coming to its climax, this great clash of the Titans, communism versus Nazism. And this is all coming out of the political philosophies that emerged from Hegelian thought in the 19th century. That may seem terribly irrelevant to people in Britain or America today, but actually, it's part of our shared history, the memories of what happened in Europe still color the way that people look at stuff today. And I go back to Mark 10 again and again. I've preached on Mark 10 several times where James and John say, we want to sit at your right and your left. And Jesus says, you have no idea what you're talking about. And then Jesus says, do you know what, the rulers of the Gentiles lord it over their subjects. They boss them, they bully them, they get what they want by sheer force. We're going to do it the other way. The one who wants to be great among you must be your servant. And the one who wants to be leader must be slave of all, because the son of man came not to be served, but to serve and to give his life as a ransom for many. And that's the political theology and what we've called a tonement theology. And we have usually held them right apart. It's time to put them back together again, just like Jesus did in Mark 10. You know, it's interesting you're talking about the lingering effects. I mean, I have European roots, Dutch roots to my both sides of my family, my mom and my dad. I was born in Canada. But going back numerous times over the last 15 years and then speaking in Germany several times over the last decade, it's really interesting. You have to talk about leadership differently in Germany today, because the word for leader is fewer. And you know, we all get a briefing when we're speaking in Germany. And I think it's worth studying. I'm going to spend by the time this releases, I will have spent some time studying Germany in the Second World War again this summer. That's one of my projects. So any other practical advice for leaders who are trying to hold a very disparate congregation or volatile congregation together? Yeah, I mean, there are serious news outlets. There are serious magazines, no doubt, if you mention any of them. I mean, I sometimes see the magazine called Foreign Affairs online. And I know that that will be a political, a particular political slant. But there are serious articles by well-trained economists, politicians, people who've studied what's going on around the world. And I would urge pastors to read two or three quite different ones each week or each month at least, and ponder them and pray through them, and ask for wisdom to see to the heart of the issues. And particularly, if you've got in your congregation, one or two or three people, who are working in serious issues of government or foreign policy or whatever it may be, then get together with them and brainstorm with them and ask them what you should be reading. But make sure you won't be able to cover all the bases, but make sure not just to reflect where your natural bent would be for yourself. In other words, constantly open yourself to critique. If it's the church's role to critique those in power, we need the critique ourselves. And that will almost always mean complexifying. We tend to oversimplify. We need to make things more complex again in order that when we have to say something definite, it's coming out with a rich and nuanced flavor to it, even if we then want to say something really quite one often straightforward. Yeah, so, and I agree, I think that's such a good advice, longer-form, deeper, more thoughtful articles than just something on BuzzFeed or you read on X. Do you have a favorite source or two that you would recommend, maybe from different perspectives that people might check out? I'm probably not the right person to ask that. You see, I still live in the world of these books called The Old Testament and The New Testament, and in order to do that, I live in the world of the Greek and Roman antiquity. And I wish there was another bit of me that I could carve out and say, "Now, let's catch up on the 21st century geobolitical thought." And I glance at things here and there. I read newspapers of various sorts. I read magazines of various sorts. I talk to friends of various sorts, but I don't do nearly as much as somebody who is prepared to dive into that. Rather than my surprise in my mid-70s, I still seem to have a Bible teaching ministry, which is going on refreshing me. And as long as that's happening, I want to carry on. I don't want to take time away from that to become a specialist in contemporary issues. So I'm afraid I don't have a great answer. I mentioned before, that if you read the spectator each week, you should also read The New Statesman each week, and vice versa. But that's just two polarized British magazines. And there are all sorts of other equivalents in other countries and other walks of life. And this has been very much a North Atlantic conversation. And fair enough, that's where you and I are. But if we'd had a third and fourth participant from, say, Latin America on the one hand or the Indian subcontinent on the other, think of the widely different issues that would have come up. And I think that's a problem that we in the North Atlantic world face, that we still tend to think in those terms and realize we are only one part of a much larger global system. And that actually, there's a lot of very sophisticated clever people out there who think quite differently to ourselves. And some of them are Christians, and we need to be more open to that. And I wish I was young enough and energetic enough to do some of that being more open myself. I have two final questions, if you have a couple more minutes, Tom. I'd love to know, I've been to England a number of times, spoken in your churches at HTB, at the Alpha Leadership Conference, and then at some other churches in England. And I'm sensing that as many problems as Church of England faces and English churches face, there's renewal, deep, meaningful pockets of renewal. And I feel like I see an embodiment of what you imagined, both what we talked about in this conversation, what you write about. What has the British, I'm sure we could go on for another two hours about what the British Church has done wrong over the last century. But what have you done right in the reconstruction that can be a hope to other churches? I think the Church of England and the other churches in England have steadily taken more and more on board. What I would loosely call the Kingdom of God agenda, that is to say that we are not simply about preparing souls for heaven. And by the way, you mentioned John Orberg's thing about eternity before eternity is a word I don't use now because it smacks of platonism of a timeless eternity. I know John Orberg, I know what he meant by it. But I'm delighted to say that many British churches have embraced the vision of God's Kingdom coming on earth as in heaven and are saying, "What does this mean on the street in Newcastle or Manchester or Birmingham or wherever it is?" Likewise, the charismatic movement which came up like an unexpected plant in the late 1960s and was very controversial to begin with because it was all about speaking in tongues and doing miracles. Well, those haven't gone away and I'm delighted with that because God can do all sorts of things in all sorts of ways. But what that has done is it taught churches, not just in the traditional Pentecostal stream, but much more broadly, that God cares about bodies. And if God cares about bodies, maybe God cares about where these bodies live and what else is going on on their street and why these people are hungry and those people are overfed and so on. And so that has helped the rise of a Kingdom oriented society. And the renewal has sometimes taken trivial forms. I mean, some of the songs and the style of worship, it seems to me, have become very trivial, though there's been some very good stuff as well. But in the middle of it all, there are people more and more. I see this, I teach part time at Wycliffe Hall. One of the seminaries here in Oxford and a lot of our intake of people coming forward for ordination come out of the Hallucian and Ybrompton or the charismatic stream. And even if they're not very much about classic Anglicanism, they have the heart of the matter in them. And the heart of the matter is the Kingdom heart, the fact that God is King and Jesus is Lord, and He wants this to become a reality on earth as in heaven. And they're prepared to put their shoulder to the wheel and say, "Okay, we're up for this. Now we need to learn, we need to pray, we need to get together." And that is enormously encouraging. And it goes with the discouragements of the great controversies that are rumbling along at the moment, which sometimes can just tap our energy. And maybe it's always like that. So we're going forward on one thing and danger being pulled back on another. There's an embodiment of what you just described that I've picked up. And it's a great articulation of it. Okay, last question. This one's not trivial, because it's toward a deeper life, which I am in these next few decades ahead, more and more interested in every day. Is it true? I think I've heard you say that when you read the Bible, you read it in the Greek and in the Hebrew. Is that right? Is that what you do generally? Yeah, yeah. Can you just explain how you have developed that over the years? I mean, obviously what's seminary, but would love to know. Well, I was very fortunate in that I was able to study Greek from the age of 13. Actually, it was tough because I joined a class that had been studying it from the age of 11. So I had to catch up two years of work. And I still remember the sweat of learning irregular verbs and so on. But it meant the time I was in my late teens, I was able then to study classics at degree level here in Oxford, which is where again, so the umpteenth time, all those classical books at the back of the room. So reading Plato and Greek and we're in Greek. Yeah, Plato and Aristotle were what I sort of cut my intellectual teeth on, as well as Herodotus and Theosidides and then the great Latin author Cicero and Seneca and Tacitus and so on. But then I started Hebrew in my late teens here in Oxford. And I didn't do too many years of Hebrew, but I decided that I wanted to carry on and I forced myself to read a little bit each day. And whenever I was studying a bit of the Old Testament, I would have the Hebrew text open and make sure I was following along. And Hebrew is quite difficult in some respects. There are some bits which are comparatively easy, but the poetry, particularly in the prophets, uses a lot of words which only occur once or possibly twice in the Hebrew Bible. And I just haven't got all that vocabulary in my head. But basically, I can see where it's going and the prose books and the Psalms. I love the Psalms in Hebrew and I pray through the Psalms on a day by day basis in using the Hebrew text. And I've been doing that for the last 52, 53 years. And that's been part of my daily routine. Likewise, with the Greek New Testament, I basically read it by rotation so that every day, God willing, I read a chapter or half a chapter from Acts Epistles, Apocalypse, and a chapter or half a chapter from the Gospels. And those two are just going on all the time so that I'm never more than a few months away from having read this bit or that bit in the original. And I've just seen that as part of my vocation as a Christian, as a priest, as a bishop, as a scholar, and you know, constantly keeping the thing polished up. And the thing is, time and again, time and again, I see things that I would swear weren't there the time before. You know, things jump off the page. Where did that come from? Because I am changing, I am learning, God willing, I am growing, and suddenly I see a meaning in this text. I can apply it to myself and pray it in and maybe turn it into a sermon or whatever. And that's been my lifelong habit. And I suppose in my mid 70s, I'm allowed to say that something's been a lifelong habit. You are, you definitely are. Thank you so much. You know, it's convicting. I won the prize in Greek. I never did study Hebrew, but I let it go. And I've got to resurrect it. I mean, I can pull it out when I'm doing exegesis, but you know, it's very convicting. And I think, you know, the reason I asked the question, Tom, is I think we need more of that in the next generation, not less of it. Oh, yeah. Because otherwise, if people are not doing that, it's very easy for misinterpretations and wrong impressions to slide in to the discourse of the church, which is why, I mean, you'll know that I recently published the third edition of my own translation of the New Testament. And when people say, why do you do it? Every generation's got to do this, because the English language is changing and our understanding of the nuances of meaning are changing. So we, every generation has to have another shot at that. And that's been a great delight. They're also quite a, quite a solid labor, as you may imagine. Well, Tom, I want to thank you so, so much for your time today. And you probably don't know what I'm going to say next, but I'm just going to let leaders know. Well, first of all, your book, latest book, one of 85 is called Jesus and the Powers It's Available Everywhere. But you also have a institute, faculty@marato.org. And we're going to give away 10 scholarships to admirato.org valued at $200 each. So here's how listeners can enter to win. This is, I've been in the program. It's amazing how many courses are there. It's basically a seminary degree from NT, right? And so here's what we're going to do. Share this episode on your favorite social platform, wherever you're listening. Be sure to tag me. You can also tag Tom if you want. And when I post this episode graphic to my Instagram account, I'm carrying you off on Instagram, leave a comment telling my team and me how the scholarship will impact your leadership. 10 winners will be chosen September 12th. So go to Instagram or whatever platform, tag me, leave a comment telling me, particularly on Instagram, how this is going to benefit you using Tom's scholarship. 10 winners will be chosen September 12th. So that's our gift to listeners. And thank you for your gift to the church, to me, and to generations of leaders. Thank you. Thank you very much. I'm delighted what you're doing with Admarato. It's been an exciting journey, which I did not expect at my age to be doing. But my colleagues who've set it all up, it's been great. All I do is talk into the camera, and then they take it away, edit it, turn it into courses and put it out there. So I am in awe of what is possible these days. So it's been terrific. Well, if you want to sit under some great teaching, it's a great way to do that, Tom. Thank you. I want to thank you for your generosity of time, for your insight. There's so much to mull over, and this will be a conversation I come back to again and again. Thank you. Thank you very much, indeed. Thank you. I told you we weren't in the shallow end on that one. Man, I love his mind. And so grateful to have some time with him. Hey, we'd love to give you more of NT, right? He has got an online learning community at Admarato.org. And so here's what we're going to do. Because you're a loyal listener, we're going to give away 10 scholarships valued at $200 each, giving you free range to choose from Professor Wright's extensive courses. So if you want to enter, and this can be huge, particularly for those of you who maybe haven't been to seminary, but you want to kind of get into the deep end, to enter, share this episode on your favorite social platform and be sure to tag me, okay? So just tag me wherever you are. And then when I post this episode graphic to my Instagram account, leave a comment telling me and my team how the scholarship will impact your leadership. 10 winners are going to be chosen on September 12th. So this is a one-time offer. Don't miss it. We want to thank NT Wright for this. We want to support you in going deeper in your faith. Hey, Subsplash also wants to put the best of today's church technology into your hands to help equip your congregation, to help them grow and make more disciples. Go to subsplash.com/carry. You will get $500 off when you sign up. And compassion wants to position your church to impact the world. If you want to connect with them, go to my page at compassion, compassion.com/carry. That's compassion.com/c-a-r-e-y. Well, next episode, we're not going to stray from the deep end. We're going back in with Mark Sayers. Gosh, I love Mark. It's part six of our series. We're going to talk about the reasons that people are so upset, the rise of the culture wars, conspiracy theories, cultural elites, and what God is doing when it seems he just can't win any more in church leadership. That's going to be so good. Also, we'll wrap up the series with Sharon McMahon. Then, for the 10th anniversary, Jim Collins, who rarely gives interviews, is going to spend some time with us. I'm so excited for that. Also, I have a special bonus episode with my buddy Mark Clark, where he flips the mic on me. Also, coming up, we've got Carlos Whittaker, Lisa Turkers, Malcolm Gladwell, Seth Godin, Chuck DeGroat, Henry Cloud, Pete Scazero, and a whole lot more. And then, leaders, if you enjoyed this episode, please share it. I know you're going to be sharing it on social to get those Admarato scholarships. But if you want to text this link to a friend or someone you think it would help, we appreciate it. Because when you do that, the podcast grows. When the podcast grows, we get the best guess. And because you listen to the end, I got something free for you. It is a conflicted age we live in. And if you want to lead toward peace, to get your church united around a common mission, I've got a church conflict guide for you that takes the very best of this podcast series, plus a lot of other insights that I've gained over the years, put them together for you. It's free. It's practical. It's actionable. Go to churchconflictguide.com, or click the link in the description of this episode wherever you're listening. And you'll get it. Thank you so much for listening, everybody. I really enjoy doing this. I appreciate everything that you do. And I hope our time together today helped you identify and break a growth barrier you're facing. (gentle music)
