[Extra web-exclusive questions included: see below]
Tom Wright is a very hard man to track down. During last year’s Lambeth Conference he remarked that it was the first time for nearly a year that he had had more than seven consecutive nights in the same bed.
The many hats he wears – bishop, theologian, academic, author, member of the House of Lords – result in what many would consider to be a punishing schedule trying to fit everything in. “It’s a constant battle with organisation,” he says. “I have a very good secretary and chaplain and they struggle to keep up with all the different things I’m doing.”
So how does he do it? Ruthless efficiency. “The short answer is I watch very little television. I get up early in the morning, I’ve always been an early riser and I find that as long as I get a jump on the day I can get quite a lot done. When there’s a task to be done, you don’t beat about the bush, you say your prayers, you get on with it, you get through the other side. I’ve learnt to read fast over the years.”
As the fourth most senior Bishop in the Church of England, Wright’s contribution to current debates on sexuality, women bishops and church unity obviously carry much weight. But it’s his experience as a theologian and academic that has brought him to the attention of those outside the Anglican Church.
He is frequently described as the world’s leading New Testament scholar. His writings come in two categories. His academic work, under the NT Wright alias, is the heavyweight material designed for those undertaking theological training. His more accessible work, written under the name Tom Wright, includes the …for everyone series, an attempt to open up the New Testament and its massive theological implications to those who don’t have a degree in divinity.
It was under this second guise that the Bishop gave us Surprised by Hope which has been a huge talking point in the evangelical community. In it he addresses questions such as whether or not we really ‘go to heaven’ when we die, the truth about ‘the rapture’ and how Christians’ view of a life to come should affect life now.
His latest offering is hot off the press. Justification: God’s plan and Paul’s vision is a riposte to American theologian John Piper’s recent critique The future of justification: a response to NT Wright. As the title suggests, Wright’s new book continues the debate which has been raging in evangelical circles about the precise nature and purpose of Jesus’ death on the cross (see review here).
Piper – who obviously sees things very differently – isn’t his only critic. He’s been attacked by other conservative evangelicals for what they see as his attempts to redefine traditional doctrines. The Times columnist David Aaronovitch got into a spat with the bishop when they didn’t see eye-to-eye over euthanasia. And there are those (although it must be said mainly those who snipe from behind the safety of a computer screen and an anonymous username) who think he spends too much time away from his north-east base. Since the bishop contends that, despite his national and international responsibilities, local ministry remains right at the heart of what he does, this seems like a good place to start.
Do you worry about the amount of pastoral time you’re able to give to the diocese?
I do worry about that, but I’m a strong believer in providence. I find again and again when there’s a pastoral emergency, a priest who’s suddenly ill or when there’s a real breakdown in the parish, suddenly, miraculously, a gap opens up in the diary, and I’m able to leap in the car and be by a hospital bed. You can’t guarantee that because if I’m in America, I can’t suddenly nip back. The reason I have a suffragen bishop and archdeacons is that they are the front lines of defence and they know that I have national and international responsibilities.
One of the joys of life is when I’m back home and folk will come to see me, and we’re actually wrestling with where they are pastorally and then I always think, “Yeah, this is the very centre of what I’m doing. This is not peripheral, it’s central.”
Some people must put you on a pedestal. How are you able to stay grounded?
I have a wife and four children and two grandchildren; enough said. They have never ever let me be on a pedestal for more than a split second before they’re pulling me off or throwing tomatoes at me! My family is a great strength and support and I know they value and appreciate what I do but they don’t let me get away with anything. If I even seem to be slightly pretentious about something my wife would let me have it in no uncertain terms.
One of the great things about being in the north-east is that they don’t stand on ceremony. You go into a parish, preach your sermon, do your stuff and then the churchwarden will come and pat you on the back and say, “Now then, Bonny Lad, come and have something to eat.” I love being “Bonny Lad,” I’m “My Lord” in the House of Lords but actually being “Bonny Lad,” up in Sunderland or somewhere, that’s where it’s at.
In Surprised by Hope, your main aim is to present Christians with the reality of what the Bible teaches rather than the mythology which has grown up around life and death. Can you describe that mythology?
The Western Church has been fixated on going to heaven and has lost its grip on resurrection and on the embodiedness of the future life. When I worked at Westminster Abbey I noticed that tombstones before about 1780 or so would often say things about the resurrection: ‘I’m resting here at the moment but I’ll be back, I shall arise.’ Through the 19th Century and on into 20th Century you don’t get that. Instead you get: ‘Gone home to be with Jesus’ or ‘Heaven is home’.
It’s important to give comfort to people so they know that the loved one who died is with Jesus, but the whole of the New Testament insists that’s not the end of the story. There will be a new day, a new world, a new creation and new bodies to live in it. When you say this, people sort of scratch their heads and say, “Yeah, I guess I sort of believe that but I really thought it was just about going to heaven.” It’s really time to get a grip because it affects everything else: how we do ethics, how we do politics, it plays out in a whole range of things.
Why do you think we’ve been getting it so wrong?
It goes way back in Western culture. The enlightenment saw an ancient deism or epicureanism where God is a long way away, upstairs somewhere out of sight. This world is where we are, we sort it out it ourselves and never the twain shall meet. If you have a religion, if you have a faith, this is a private hotline to that distant reality with the view that you will eventually go up that hotline yourself in the form of a disembodied soul.
So, the whole enlightenment worldview has conditioned people in the West to think like that and the problem is the church has gone along for the ride and they shouldn’t have done. The disappearance of a robust new heavens/new earth resurrection view and the disappearance of a robust evangelical Christian critique in present political circumstances have gone in parallel. I’ve heard devout evangelicals of my own age speaking strikingly against having anything to say about politics on the grounds that that’s a temptation Jesus refused. It’s absolutely ridiculous, the kingdom of God is about God’s kingdom on earth as in heaven but the kings of the earth think they’re running it. If we don’t tell them they’re wrong we’re just colluding with blasphemy.
Let’s talk about your new book Justification. This has been one of the major areas of debate among evangelicals in recent years...
The book is in two halves, the first half basically says, ‘These are the big issues, here’s how justification plays out to Christology and the meaning of the law, the nature of justification etc, and how the atonement fits in.’ Then the second half of the book is all about exegesis. I go right through, starting with Colossians, with every passage in Paul’s letters that can be taken to be relevant, not skipping verses that don’t fit but just wrestling with them, staying with the argument right the way through until we’re done with Romans.
Do you worry that by having a public debate with the likes of John Piper you’re making evangelicals or even the church as a whole look divided on yet another issue?
There are times when I might worry that. I think it’s more a second order issue of how we conduct the debate. Can we conduct the debate with graciousness, with love, with prayer and then with robust argument and scripture itself? You see Paul confronting Peter saying, “Look, you’re out of line, here’s the scripture, here’s the gospel, this is what you’re doing, you need to think about this.” There is nothing wrong in doing that because if you don’t then we’re failing in a scriptural duty which is mutual admonition. [Online] I get stuff coming in saying, “Tom Wright doesn’t believe in the virgin birth,” and “Tom Wright doesn’t believe in the resurrection”. Where have they got this from? It’s very odd.
Women bishops – one gets the impression that could be quite near to a resolution?
Everyone you speak to sounds very reasonable until you speak to the next one and the next one and so it goes on. It isn’t that there are two positions, there are lots of different positions. My own position, which is a very uncomfortable one, is that I believe passionately in ordaining women to all offices in the church, including bishops, but that I don’t believe in forcing things through against people’s conscience. I believe in working with them to help educate conscience. We don’t do that. We don’t work with one another, we simply shout at one another from behind barriers and then the loudest voice can win and the others feel they’re victims and have to go away and be somewhere else. That is a rotten way of doing church. I’m in the bizarre position of wanting badly that we should forge ahead with this but also wanting badly that we should keep everybody on board. There’s no sense in the engine steaming out of the station if it isn’t bringing the coaches with it.
Do the various groups and factions that have grown up within the Church of England and the Anglican Communion help?
It’s sad for me because when I was an undergraduate 40 years ago, if you were an evangelical, part of a broad church evangelical movement, in the Christian Unions, that sort of thing, we all rubbed along together. There were a few tensions – wild charismatics or occasional Calvinistic rants – but basically we got on and we knew we belonged together. My fear is that now a new generation is growing up that doesn’t know that it belongs together.
That may be partly because evangelicals in the 50s and 60s were less numerous and felt they had to huddle together for warmth because the senior church leadership was marginalising or ignoring them. We [now] have an evangelical bishops meeting and there are 25 or 30. The question is, what do you then do? The answer is we never really had a strategy for what to do if we got into power. It’s tricky.
Could you define ‘evangelical’?
John Stott gave the definition “Bible people and gospel people.” Those two things, the Bible and the gospel, that’s the evangelical world, those are the markers that I grew up with and that’s what I never shifted from. The Bible always stretches our minds no matter how we do tradition, as the Bible will always open our eyes to more. Because we’re Bible people and gospel people we must also be church people. There’s a danger with a kind of faux low church mentality that defending the gospel means getting rid of robes or not have processions in church or not having choirs or whatever. That’s simply a projection of old 18th Century low church prejudice, we shouldn’t have gone down that route.
Would you define yourself as open evangelical?
I don’t think it’s hugely helpful because it gets confused in people’s minds. The word ‘open’ actually ends up defining itself negatively by implying, “We’re not like that lot who are closed,” and I’m closed on all sorts of things. I’m closed on the Bible, I’m closed on the gospel, I’m closed on Jesus and there are lots and lots of other things I’m not open about. I’m not open, in that sense, about sexual ethics. I’m always open to hearing better arguments put forward on either side, I’m not giving up on that. So, if ‘open’ means a kind of Lucy Goosey thing where there are no boundaries and no rules then forget it. But if the opposite of open is hiding in the corner, dying in the wrong, last ditch; evangelicals are always good at dying in the wrong, last ditch: “We’ve got to stay here and die here,” and I think, “well, actually, that’s not what the real battle is,” and I find that hugely frustrating. People [appear to say] “You’re an evangelical, you must come and die with us in this ditch.” Well, sorry, I’m actually very busy as a bishop out there on the front line doing all sorts of things.
You’ve spoken in support of the emerging church movement. A lot of people, maybe some of the people who you were just referring to, aren’t so comfortable with it.
I haven’t actually said very much in favour of the emerging church movement. I merely note, to my surprise, that some folks in the emerging movement really like some of what I write. In America, a lot of the emerging folks are people who have been in (often fundamentalist) mega churches which they feel are big, impersonal and rather bullying. They want something a bit more real and something which will actually deal with real issues. I want to encourage emerging folks and say, “Yes, explore the Gospels, do the business but be aware that just because you’ve got hold of that, that doesn’t actually mean you can let go of other things in the tradition.”
We’ve been talking a lot about the church, but let’s look outside. What do you say to people who think church is about child abuse or tea and scones?
It’s fascinating. In the national media there is remarkable ignorance about the church – what it is and what it teaches. In local media (but also in local government, local authorities) they know that the church is on the ground, that it punches above its weight, that it does a good job. For instance, we’ve got a school in one of the cities in my diocese which had the reputation of being the worst school in the country. A couple of years ago the local education authority came to us, cap in hand, and said, “We just have no idea what to do here. If you turn it into an academy, set up a partnership, a businessman is prepared to help fund this, we’ll back you, see what you can do.” That school is now a thriving, happy, lively and openly Christian school. The people in the locality know what it is that the church is about. It’s about the kingdom of God on the street.
William Temple said that the church is the only society that exists for the benefit of its non-members. We, in Durham, take that extremely seriously, not only in education but in housing, drug rehab and local politics of all sorts. These are real people suffering real effects. When people see the church is doing that, they start saying, “Funny, we thought we thought that was all escapist and old hat and boring.” We believe Jesus and his death and resurrection – he actually did deal with the radical evil that has infected the world. That gives us the energy and the motivation to get out there cheerfully and do stuff. Not to get it all right, because we’ll often make mistakes, but to say we can actually make a real difference. The church has been in the business of making a difference for 2,000 years and we’re not about to give it up.
What unrealised ambitions or hopes have you got?
I would love to see the Anglican Communion turn a corner and find a way of articulating and then living by what its deep unity really should be. For me, of course, that involves the embrace of Brain McLaren’s phrase ‘Generous orthodoxy’. Obviously my ambitions include finishing off a series of books I’m writing. I would love to see my children flourish, one or two of them are not very well at the moment and I would love to see them get through that. I hope I’m spared to see my grandchildren grow up and become young adults in their own right.
I would love to see the diocese turn the corner. The north-east of England, apart from some spots of regeneration, is still pretty depressed economically. Yes, there are some bright spots and some good things happening but there’s lots of the old post-industrial depression. I say to my people again and again, “If the gospel of Jesus Christ is true, it is just as true in the back streets of South Shields as in the leafy lanes of Salisbury.” Why is it that when you advertise a parish job in rural Wiltshire you have 30 applicants and a shortlist of five people who would all be super, but when we advertise the identical-looking job in County Durham we get either only one or two applicants? I’m passionate about the north-east, I want to see the churches flourish. They’re great people, it’s a great place. God is doing things, we need people to come and join in.
Extra online-exclusive questions:
I’ve noticed you’re focusing on ecumenism a lot recently. Why is that a passion for you?You can’t escape it in the Bible. There is one people of God just like there is one God and one of the great central arguments of the New Testament is that there is not two people of Abraham, there is one. The whole point is, God is one and desires this single family. It isn’t just, “Wouldn’t it be nice if the different denominations could get on a little bit better?” It’s actually a radical imperative from the New Testament itself. All those who believe in Jesus Christ belong at the same table. That means Eucharistic sharing and it means a lot of things that we may not be ready for yet. Because I’m a biblical theologian I cannot relegate that to a second order.When I became a bishop I didn’t expect things to work out in the way they have done for me ecumenically. It turned out that shortly after I became a bishop there was a new Roman Catholic bishop appointed in the area [Kevin Dunn, the 12th Bishop of Hexham and Newcastle] who quickly became a very good friend of mine and my wife’s, we used to play golf together and all sorts of things. He was a wonderful man who tragically died last March at the age of 57. Ecumenism thrives on friendship rather than committees. The friendship with him opened up so many things and we would both get excited as we realised that what we’d been taught to expect about Anglicans and Romans simply wasn’t where either of us were.Let’s talk about spiritual disciplines. What do you find enriches your walk in terms of being disciplined on a daily or weekly basis?The Bible itself remains absolutely essential. When I was 12 I thought it would be a good idea to be reading this book every day and I started then and except for odd things, when I’ve been totally jet-lagged and travelling or when I’ve been really sick, basically the Bible every day is a must. You never know the ways in which you, your thoughts, your character, your imagination, are being shaped.
As a bishop it is a privilege to pray for the diocese day by day, to pray for the individual parishes, the clergy, the people in difficulties, the people in hospital. That prayer list gets quite long and there are times when I look at the list and I think, “Oh my goodness, there’s all these people again.” As soon as I start praying for them though, these are people I love, these are people I know, I want to stand before God with these people on my heart. That refreshes me as I do that. The sacrament is very important. Because I’m bouncing around, two nights here, three nights there, London one day, back home then off to York for a meeting then off somewhere else, it’s very difficult to have a regular daily Eucharist discipline. I’ve always been a weekly Eucharist man and frequently been a daily Eucharist man. If I have to miss a Sunday Eucharist then it really is like going without the one square meal of the day. My whole being is saying, “I’m missing out here.” It’s so powerful that it’s hard to describe.
I think I want to add Christian friendship. Having good Christian friends who will keep me up to the mark, who will challenge me, who will tease me, I don’t know how I could survive without that, actually. It’s a precious gift.
How do you switch off? Do you still play music?My kids clubbed together for my 60th birthday and bought me a new guitar. I haven’t had much time to play it yet but perhaps this is a retirement project that I shall see myself back into. I don’t often play the piano, and that’s partly out of frustration that when I was in my teens and twenties I used to play for an hour or two every day and my fingers just won’t do it now. I listen to music I lot in the car, I have an iPod with everything from Bach to The Beatles.What unrealised ambitions or hopes have you got?I would love to see the Anglican Communion turn a corner and find a way of articulating and then living by what its deep unity really should be. For me, of course, that involves the embrace of Brain McLaren’s phrase ‘Generous orthodoxy’. Obviously my ambitions include finishing off a series of books I’m writing. I would love to see my children flourish, one or two of them are not very well at the moment and I would love to see them get through that. I hope I’m spared to see my grandchildren grow up and become young adults in their own right. Maybe I’ll be a great grandfather one day. I would love it if I had more grandchildren, I’ve got two so far and I’m saying to my kids, “Come on guys!”
I would love to see the diocese turn the corner. The north-east of England, apart from some spots of regeneration, is still pretty depressed economically. Yes, there are some bright spots and some good things happening but there’s lots of the old post-industrial depression. I say to my people again and again, “If the gospel of Jesus Christ is true, it is just as true in the back streets of South Shields as in the leafy lanes of Salisbury.” Why is it that when you advertise a parish job in rural Wiltshire you have 30 applicants and a shortlist of five people who would all be super, but when we advertise the identical-looking job in County Durham we get either only one or two applicants? I’m passionate about the north-east, I want to see the churches flourish. They’re great people, it’s a great place. God is doing things, we need people to come and join in.
The Right Rev Doctor Nicholas Thomas Wright is the Lord Bishop of Durham. He was born in Morpeth, just north of Newcastle-Upon-Tyne. He studied for a degree, then ordination at Oxford University where he was also president of the Christian Union. He then held teaching and chaplaincy roles at Oxford and Cambridge Universities before moving to Canada to become Assistant Professor of New Testament Studies at McGill University, Montreal. He became Dean of Lichfield, before taking up the post of Canon Theologian at Westminster Abbey. In 2003 Downing Street announced him as the new Bishop of Durham. The bishop is a member of the House of Lords. He’s married to Maggie and they have four children and two grandchildren.
