Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Paul For Tomorrows World N.T.wright
Paul For Tomorrows World N.T.wright
ORG 1
About the Author
NTWRIGHTONLINE.ORG 2
Paul for Tomorrow’s World
Now for many in the churches the apostle Paul has been
synonymous with one particular doctrine, ‘justification by faith’, and
one particular interpretation of that doctrine, namely that the way to
get to heaven you don’t do good works, you simply believe. That is
of course a truncated and distorted version of what Paul actually
taught. But it’s what a lot of people think he taught, and they
therefore suppose that Paul, in helping people to be rescued from
the world, has little to say by way of a message for the world. In
fact, some might say that the only message Paul has for the world,
today or tomorrow or any time, is that it’s full of sinners needing to
be saved from the world.
This is how it works. Paul’s biblically rooted view is that God made
his world in such a way that it would work properly when ruled over
by human stewards who reflected God’s wisdom into that world.
That’s what it means to be made in God’s image. But how can this
come about? Paul’s vision of new creation, under the rule of
redeemed humanity, gives us the clue – because this is not a vision
only for the ultimate future.
Paul’s doctrine of
justification is part of
God, through the gospel, puts people
what in the trade we
right so that through them he can put call inaugurated
the world right. eschatology, the belief
that what God intends
to do in the coming age
has already been launched in the middle of the present age. The
cross and resurrection of Jesus encapsulate, Paul believed, God’s
condemnation of evil and his launching of new creation. It has
already begun, and we are called to be part of it. We need to follow
Paul in taking the idea of justification out of the essentially
mediaeval framework of how to get to heaven and put it into the
essentially biblical framework of how God is putting the world to
rights. God, through the gospel, puts people right so that through
them he can put the world right. Those God justified, he declares,
them he also glorified. And ‘glorification’ doesn’t mean ‘going to
heaven’. It means, as anyone in Rome in the first century might
have told you, being put in charge. God’s justified people are God’s
world-transforming people.
At this point Paul is exactly on the same page as the Jesus of the
Beatitudes. When God wants to transform the world, he doesn’t
send in the tanks, as we often assume. He sends in the meek, the
pure in heart, the mourners, the justice-hungry folk; and by the time
the rich and the powerful have woken up to what’s going on, Jesus’
NTWRIGHTONLINE.ORG 6
kingdom-people, Paul’s justified-by-faith people, have set up
schools and hospitals, centres of hope for communities. They have
begun to transform the world. We in the post-enlightenment world
have for too long believed the lie that Christianity is part of the
problem, not part of the solution. In fact, the world has been
transformed and is being transformed by people who know
themselves to be debtors to God’s mercy alone. Here, then, is the
practical outworking of justification by faith alone. Without that, it’s
easy to be arrogant, to think that our plans and projects will bring
healing and transformation. They won’t. It’s only the people who
know themselves to be rescued by God’s mercy alone who will be
humble enough, broken-hearted enough, to be agents of real
healing and change in God’s broken world. Tomorrow’s world looks
like being every bit as damaged and wounded as our own. We
need the Pauline gospel of justification, in its full biblical sense, not
least its full context in Romans and Ephesians, to generate a new
generation of humble stewards, agents of new creation.
That reframing of
justification has got It’s only the people who know
us going. I now want themselves to be rescued by God’s
to bring it into
mercy alone who will be humble
sharper focus by
looking at one of the enough, broken-hearted enough, to be
great puzzles of agents of real healing and change in
tomorrow’s ultra- God’s broken world.
postmodern world:
which story can we
now live by?
Actually, Paul’s way of telling the story of the world was already in
conflict with the great imperial narrative of his day. Under the
Roman emperor Augustus, some of Rome’s greatest writers –
Horace, Ovid, Livy and above all Virgil – told the story of Rome in
terms of a long build-up through the time of the Republic, until at
last, to everyone’s surprise, this history reached its great climax in
the arrival of Augustus himself, son of the deified Julius Caesar,
bringing peace and justice to the world, saving the world in general
and Rome in particular from chaos and ushering in an era of
prosperity and fruitfulness.
Our children and grandchildren need to learn, and they can learn
from Paul if we will help them, that the imperial ways of telling the
story of the world, including the modernist imperial ways, are based
on lies and arrogance and will lead to tears in the end. Somehow,
hard though it is in a world soaked by media repetition of the
eighteenth-century narrative, we have to remember and retell the
story which alone makes sense of the real world. Paul – if we learn
to read him aright! – can help us do just that.
One of the principal reasons why Paul’s writings are important for
tomorrow’s world, not just tomorrow’s church, is that the church is
supposed to be an outward-facing sign, known and read as he
says elsewhere by all people. It is supposed to be a working model
of how to do differentiated unity, and a working model at which
those outside will look and recognise that this is nothing less than
the multi-coloured wisdom of God in action.
Now you may say that we are as far away from realising that in the
church as we’ve ever been, and it would be hard to disagree;
though I do think that actually we have made great strides
ecumenically in the last two or three generations. But part of the
problem is, I think, that we have not really taken Paul seriously as
the theoretician of how to do differentiated unity. We have relegated
that to a section called ‘ecclesiology’ or ‘ethics’, right at the back of
our big protestant Pauline theologies. But for Paul it’s right at the
NTWRIGHTONLINE.ORG 13
front of what he’s doing in letter after letter, and particularly in 1
Corinthians.
For Paul, differentiated unity doesn’t mean a free-for all. There are
firm, clear boundaries. Some things are unacceptable: personality
cults, for instance, in the first few chapters; incest and inter-
Christian lawsuits, and various other things, in chapters 5 and 6.
But then, at the heart of the letter, we have the long section in
chapters 8—10 about food offered to idols. Here Paul articulates
the vital principle of adiaphora: there are some things which are in
fact ‘indifferent’, things about which it is fine for Christians to
disagree and over which they do not need to divide. We are not
good at this; we have not, by and large, thought it through. For us,
especially in our shrill new postmodern pseudo-moralities, once
we’ve grasped a point we know we’re right and will simply call
everyone else rude names. But we need to recognise that there is
a difference between two sorts of differences. There are differences
which really do make a difference; but there are also differences
that should not make a difference. Paul spends quite some time
teaching the church about both, and this is a lesson as much for
tomorrow’s world as for tomorrow’s church.
For Paul, the things which are adiaphora are the things which, if
elevated into principles, would divide the church along cultural or
ethnic lines. That’s why he declares that neither circumcision nor
uncircumcision matters. But note what he says. Those who have
reached the conviction that something – say, the eating of
sacrificial meat – is adiaphora, that you don’t need to divide the
church over it, are under an obligation to those who in conscience
have not yet reached that point. One cannot force one’s decision
on adiaphora on a fellow Christian. There are lessons here which
Paul has thought through but which neither we in the church, nor
we in the wider world, have really wrestled with.
One of the great signs of hope in the last generation has, of course,
been the transformed situation not only through the Civil Rights
movement in this country but also, I think particularly, in South
Africa. Who would have imagined, thirty or forty years ago, that we
would see a black Archbishop chairing a Commission of Truth and
Reconciliation? Who could deny that such a thing is still equally
unthinkable, but also equally necessary, in the Middle East, in
Northern Ireland, and no doubt in many other places too? And who
can deny that it was the witness of most of the South African
churches (not all, alas), through the latter years of Apartheid, that
forced the country’s rulers not only to accept the transition to
democracy but then to embrace the way of reconciliation rather
than the way of recriminatory violence? What counts, of course, is
the message of the cross itself. But when we study Paul we see
that what he is doing is not only saying ‘it’s all about the cross’, true
though that may be, but also working out in painstaking detail what
it’s actually going to look like on the ground. As I said, Paul’s vision
of the unity of the church, and of the cross-shaped way in which
that has to be accomplished, is the central symbol of his worldview.
It is there, from one angle or another, in letter after letter. This
provides a sign of possibility, and perhaps even of hope, which I
hope our children and grandchildren will pick up. They are going to
need it in tomorrow’s world.
The fourth and last element I want to look at has to do with the
entire worldview which Paul is offering through his radical revision
of the theology of second-Temple Judaism. This could obviously be
NTWRIGHTONLINE.ORG 15
the subject of several lectures in itself, but I want to try simply to hit
the highlights. When it comes to questions of worldview, our
grandchildren are being born into an earthquake zone. Things I
grew up with as fixed and stable are being shaken to bits.
Sometimes that’s a good thing; the 1950s was not a perfect world!
But no single new worldview is coming into play to replace them.
How can we put this simply?
In Paul’s day, by contrast, the default mode for most was some
form of Stoicism. Stoic Pantheism was a grown-up version of
NTWRIGHTONLINE.ORG 16
ancient paganism: once people started to reflect about the tree-
gods and the sea-god and the gods of war or money or sex or wine
it was a short step to suggest that a single divine energy was
pulsing through everything. There are quite a few Stoic-style
pantheists or panentheists around these days, partly in reaction
against the split world of modernist Epicureanism. But this, too, has
nothing much to do with Paul. Nor, of course, would Paul
countenance the Academic agnosticism.
Paul responds to all three positions, and articulates his own, in the
remarkable address on the Areopagus in Acts 17. And here
particularly we notice that this isn’t just a message to the church. It
is a model for what the Pauline church needs to say to the world –
to tomorrow’s world in its increasing worldview-confusion. I covet
for my grandchildren a clarity of vision at precisely this point.
Paul begins, famously, with the altar to the unknown god. He has
found, in Athens, something he can interpret in terms of the local
culture keeping a window open to fresh possibilities. He quickly
rules out the possibility that this unknown god might be one of the
usual pagan sort. The standard systems of idolatry, of temples to
this or that divinity, are simply a category mistake. The almighty
does not live in houses made with hands. Paul is not just finding
points of contact in the culture; he is emphatically ruling some
central ones out altogether. But then he goes on to say, with the
Stoics and against the Epicureans, that the divinity is not far away
from any one of us, and that in him we live and move and have our
being, while insisting, against the Stoics, that god and the world,
and god and human beings, are not the same thing. The true God
is the creator; ‘we are his offspring’. And part of the result of this is
that all humans are in fact part of the same family, of the same
blood – as radical a suggestion then as it would be in many parts of
the world still today.
The communities Paul has brought to birth through the gospel, and
nurtured through his teaching and writing – these churches are the
living words through which the world will see who the unknown God
really is. These churches are the signs to the world that paganism
is not the answer, that idols can seriously damage your health.
These churches send a signal into the wider world that the living
God is not far from any one of us, that in him we live and move and
have our being. And these churches are to make it clear, by their
common life and their unity across normal barriers, that God has
made of one blood all human nations on the earth, and that Jesus
has been raised from the dead as the start of God’s great plan to
sort the mess out once and for all. Everything Paul says in words in
Athens he is doing in the letters, in his maintenance and repair of
communities. The Christian worldview is not simply something you
learn with your head. It’s something you learn by sharing in the life
of the church, providing a pattern which makes sense of everything
else.
www.ntwrightonline.org
facebook.com/ntwrightonline
twitter.com/ntwrightonline
NTWRIGHTONLINE.ORG 20