Life & Society
  ''Jesus will appear again as judge of the world and the dead will be raised''  Sholto Byrnes
  Published 10 April 2008
    
   10 comments   
   Print version   
   Listen   
   RSS 

  Tom Wright's literal belief in the Resurrection makes him a hero to conservative Christians worldwide. Here he declares war on militant atheists and liberals, and explains why heaven is not the end of the world
     

  In a memorable episode of the television series Yes, Prime Minister, the PM, Jim Hacker, is presented with a choice of two candidates for a vacant bishopric. When the cabinet secretary, Sir Humphrey Appleby, mentions the first, Hacker expresses outrage. "But he doesn't even believe in God!" he says. "Yes, Prime Minister," replies Sir Humphrey smoothly, "but he doesn't have anything against him."
  At the time of transmission, in 1986, the joke worked well. The Anglican hierarchy seemed to be staffed by well-intentioned liberals in a permanent state of anguished bafflement about what they believed. Miracles? No, they're optional. Difficulties with accepting the Virgin Birth? Well, you don't have to accept it literally, of course. Not sure about God? Doubts are nothing to be ashamed of, do come in.
  While papal diktats - on every subject from contraception to liberation theology - streamed like thunderbolts from John Paul II's Vatican, the Church of England appeared reluctant to take a firm line on any issue. The then archbishop of Can terbury, Robert Runcie, was talked of as a man who nailed his colours firmly to the fence when faced with controversy, while his bishop of Durham, David Jenkins, was widely thought to be symptomatic of everything woolly and wrong in the Church after it was reported that he had compared the Resurrection to "a conjuring trick with bones". (In fact, he said it was much more than that, but the inaccuracy stuck.)
  No one could accuse Jenkins's distant successor Tom Wright of laxity in matters of dogma. The current Bishop of Durham, fourth most senior cleric in the Church of England (after Canterbury, York and London), is also its leading evangelical theologian. Time magazine recently described him as "one of the most formidable figures in the world of Christian thought" and "a hero to conservative Christians worldwide". He has also just written a book, Surprised by Hope, in which he spells out a view many will find extraordinary.
  It is not just that, as an evangelical, he believes forcefully in the authority of scripture and the historical truth of the Gos pels. Nor is it that, like most on that conservative wing of the Church, he is strongly opposed to gay priests. The Right Reverend Wright believes in the literal truth of the Resurrection.
  The day will come, he says, when Christ will come to join the heavens and the earth in a new creation and the dead will rise. All those who think of heaven as the endpoint are wrong, especially if they're thinking about "sitting on clouds playing harps". According to him, heaven is less a location, more a state: a kind of first-class transit lounge whereby our physical bodies sleep while the "real person" continues in the presence of Christ. What we will be waiting for is what he calls "life after life after death": the Second Coming and the Day of Judgement, when we will be not only physically re-embodied but transformed, on a new version of this earth with plenty of room for everyone.
  There are no metaphors involved here, no decoding, no poetics to be interpreted. Wright's line, which will be news to a huge number of Christians as well as way beyond the realms of credibility to non-believers, is to be taken entirely at face value. If this man is a hero to millions of conservative Christians, then belief is certainly back.
  "It is actually what the New Testament is about," says Wright in his emollient, Radio 4-friendly tones as we sit in the spring sun outside his cottage in Alnmouth, Northumberland, a family refuge away from the grandeur of his official residence, Auckland Castle. "An awful lot of western Christians have just accepted that when they say 'the resurrection of the body' they think, 'You don't really mean body. That's just the way they put it in olden days.' They don't realise it is actually the key thing. We are talking about a good physical world which is to be remade, not a bad physical world which is going to be trashed in favour of a purely spiritual sphere."
  
    Hijacking heaven  
  Before I travel to meet Bishop Tom (his preferred form of address), a senior lay Catholic says to me, "He is mad, you know." But there's nothing wild-eyed about the tall figure clad in cords and comfy jumper and waiting for me at the station - although the open-top, electric blue MG two-seater is pretty flash for a prelate. His even conversation and donnish attire almost lull one into not taking in how radical and literal his message is.
  Wright argues that, over the centuries, the influence of Greek culture and philosophy, in particular the theory of Platonic dualism - that the body is imperfect and destined to decay, whereas the soul is superior and continues after death - led to the language of heaven being "hijacked". He mentions a cathedral near Rome where there are frescoes "quite explicitly about resurrection, skeletons coming up from the earth, being clothed with flesh and becoming human again. Contrast that with the Sistine Chapel, where you have this great heaven and hell scene. It is sort of assumed that heaven is a disembodied state where immortal souls go to live, and then it becomes very difficult for the word resurrection to be anything other than a rather flowery metaphor for that state. But the whole point is that is what the Bible in the first three or four Christian centuries took for granted. We need to recapture that."
  Another recapturing has been that of the Church of England itself. If Wright's views come across as hardline, explicit and specific, verging on the fundamentalist, that is because of the gulf between his straightforward expression of belief and the kindly muddle of the old liberals who dominated for so long. "I remember talking to my godfather, who was an archdeacon near the Tyne," says Wright, "and he said it was his judgement that a lot of the clergy that he knew in the Sixties and Seventies did have a personal conversion experience which they had misinterpreted as a call to the ministry. They didn't really know what to do, so there was a sort of embarrassment: 'Are we allowed to talk about God? Do we know who God is?'" Also at that time, "The Trinity, the Incarnation - much of that was under serious question and challenge. People said these were just silly old 5th-century ways of talking about God."
  And now? "That's largely gone. I think anyone who ends up in almost any senior position in the Church now probably has not only a pretty robust personal belief in God but also a sense of why this matters. Of course there are large debates, but not about whether we do or don't believe in God."
  That this is the case is largely due to the rise of the evangelicals, who decided to work wholeheartedly within the Church, rather than act as a sect, at the first National Evangelical Anglican Congress at Keele in 1967. Committed, doctrinally clear and organised, the evangelicals gained influence as that of the Anglo-Catholics declined, especially after the ordination of women priests led many to leave the Church (notably the former bishop of London Graham Leonard, who became a Roman Catholic priest), while the liberals' lack of certainty made it difficult for them to rally. Evangelicals now make up about one-third of active Church membership and 40 per cent of financial contributions, although the strength of their voice makes them sound as though they count for even more.
  A year and a half ago a group of evangelical leaders threatened the Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, with a revolt unless he created a parallel structure so their churches could bypass the authority of liberal bishops. The rebels included the pugnacious Bishop of Rochester, Michael Nazir-Ali, but not Tom Wright. He condemned their demands as "arrogant and self-serving", "unbiblical" and "a covenant with chaos". Wright's put-down was shocking in its firmness and in effect ended the rebellion. His commitment to the unity of the Church over that of the evangelical cause may have lost him some support, but he remains their towering intellectual, and that, combined with his position in Church hierarchy and the fact that he has the ear of Rowan Williams (the two are old friends, as both taught at Oxford in the late Eighties), makes him a commanding figure for this growing band of tough new believers within the Church of England.
  Wright has deep family roots in the Durham area, which from the 14th to the mid-19th century was ruled by the prince-bishops; in medieval times they had the right to mint their own coins and raise armies. Today's incumbent may not have wanted to fight this last battle, but there are plenty for which he is ready. One, in particular, will have evangelicals itching to draw swords. "The massive denial of reality by the cheap and cheerful universalism of western liberalism has a lot to answer for," he thunders in his new book. "The nihilism to which secularism has given birth leaves many with no reason for living." The bishop would like to see nothing less than an end to the Enlightenment split between religion and politics.
  "There is a Christian view of politics," he says after lunch at a fish restaurant by the coast, "and whether or not the government knows it, it has a God-given duty to bring wise order and to facilitate human flourishing." The Church does not just have a right to comment on whether ministers are failing in their divine task, he argues. "To try to shut us up, to say, 'You keep off the patch'" is "totalitarian". So, no apologies for his Easter Sunday sermon on the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill, in which he criticised the government for "pushing through, hard and fast, legislation that comes from a militantly atheist and secularist lobby" whose aims are a "1984-style world" where "we create our own utopia by our own efforts, particularly our science and technology".
  "Using what is in effect live human tissue for experimental purposes is not a frontier we think people ought to cross," he says, "and we're going to go on saying that. The more of these moral frontiers a government crosses, the more it owes to citizens to make a space for conscience, not just in voting but in how scientists and doctors carry this work out. To think that the Church should not be involved in politics is to say: 'Here are some areas of crucial concern for human flourishing, but the Church is not allowed to address these matters of public debate.' I think that's ridiculous."
  
    Turbulent priests  
  It is primarily those on the political liberal left who have expressed outrage at the words of Bishop Wright and Cardinal Keith O'Brien. But there have been times when the self-same people gladly welcomed priests wading into turbulent political waters - when, for instance, David Jenkins incurred the wrath of Margaret Thatcher for supporting the striking miners: an action, it may surprise some to hear, that Wright describes as "exemplary. That's exactly what a bishop ought to be doing." But the paradox of evangelicalism is that the conservative stance on doctrine and scripture is accompanied by an apparently left-wing emphasis on social justice.
  When we continue to talk about the Eighties and I suggest the left-wing view of Margaret Thatcher's policies was not just that they were wrong, but that they were immoral, he cuts in. "They were wicked. Yup." He goes on: "A lot of people didn't realise that you could perfectly easily put a Christian wash over the top of the ideologies Thatcher was buying in to, to make it look nice. But in fact they were every bit as atheist a way of constructing the world as those of overt Soviet sympathisers and communists who were out to wreck society. So critical Christian faculties needed to be brought to bear."
  All this talk of religion's place in politics is a direct consequence of the beliefs Wright sets out in his new book. "Jesus's Resurrection summons us to dangerous and difficult tasks on earth," he writes. Christians must build for the new kingdom of heaven and earth. "Every act of gratitude and kindness; every work of art or music inspired by love of God; every act of care and nurture . . . will find its way into the new creation."
  One task is to do justice in the world. Wright identifies global debt as "the dirty enormous scandal of glitzy, glossy western capitalism" that must be corrected. To those who think that "taking the Bible seriously meant being conservative politically as well as theologically", he says: "The truth is very different." The Resurrection "creates a programme for change. Those who believe the gospel have no choice but to follow."
  Given the example of Tony Blair, I ask him if it won't be hard for any future prime minister to be so openly religious. "Public discourse needs to catch up with the fact," he sighs, "that doing God in public is not about someone kneeling down and saying their prayers, and God saying, 'Go and bomb Iraq.'"
  Shortly afterwards we're back on the road to the station. Wright's belief in the Resurrection also provides an injunction to be green; it is this earth, after all, that is going to be remade. "If it is true that the whole world is now God's holy land, we must not rest as long as that land is spoiled and defaced," he writes. "This is not an 'extra' to the Church's mission. It is central." Central, but not too specific; which is just as well, I reflect, as we hare down country lanes in the MG, overtaking laggards and bracing bends in a manner that can't be contributing much to the new creation. But who knows? Bishop Tom hopes there'll be room for Bach after the Second Coming. Perhaps they can fit an electric blue MG in, too.
  
  the CV
  1 December 1948 Born Morpeth, Northumberland
  1962-73 Educated at Sedbergh School, Cumbria; then Exeter College and Wycliffe Hall, Oxford
  1971 Marries Margaret Fiske; they have two sons and two daughters
  1978 Publishes Small Faith, Great God, first of more than 40 books
  1978 Fellow and chaplain, Downing College, Cambridge
  1981 Assistant professor of New Testament studies, McGill University, Montreal
  1986 Lecturer in theology, Oxford ; fellow and chaplain, Worcester College
  1994 Dean of Lichfield
  2000 Appointed Canon Theologian, Westminster Abbey
  2003 Named Lord Bishop of Durham; says Blair and Bush acted like "white vigilantes" over Iraq
  2004 Member of Lambeth Commission which took strong line against homosexuality
  Research by Simon Rudd
  Post this article to
    
   Digg   
   del.icio.us   
   newsvine   
   NowPublic   
   Shoutwire   
   Reddit 
    10 comments from readers    
Ray Ingles 
10 April 2008 at 17:15   
     It's a hilarious double-standard that you actually have to pick up a gun and kill somebody to be considered a 'militant' believer, but all you have to do to be considered a 'militant' atheist is write a book.
  
Jenny Webb 
10 April 2008 at 17:43   
     Ah the literalists who presumably believe that we should put anyone to death who works on a Sunday (Exodus 35:2) - does that include the Bishop. Wear garments of mixed thread and you could also get into trouble. It also says in the Bible (Lev. 21:20) that you may not approach the altar of God if you have defect in your sight. I hope Tom follows this wholly reasonable directive too!
  
Ron McKeown 
10 April 2008 at 18:20   
     It is understandable that Bishop Tom, being a believer, has certain beliefs about atheists. Because of his beliefs he is not able to grasp that an atheist is without belief – of any kind. Because atheists have no belief system they are also without a social system to support it. There are no atheist organisations, (I do not recognise humanists as true atheists), no atheist churches at which to gather and no atheist inspired political organisations. Politics, like religion, is a belief system hence the advice, “Never argue politics or religion”. So the article is wrong when it refers to, “a militantly atheist and secularist lobby" whose aims are a "1984-style world" where "we create our own utopia by our own efforts, particularly our science and technology". A militant atheist is a conflict of descriptions. You cannot be militant about something which you do not consider exists in the first place. It follows therefore that the other comment about atheists is also a
 conflict of terms. The article says, “Thatcher was buying in to, to make it look nice. But in fact they were every bit as atheist a way of constructing the world as those of overt Soviet sympathisers and communists who were out to wreck society”. Communism is a political belief and not related to atheism at all. 
  
  Also, atheists do not seek to impose their views on other people because what other people believe is totally irrelevant to an atheist. To an atheist the main problem is the religiously inspired laws that we have to suffer and the hatred and violence that follows in the wake of the religious and/or political fundamentalists that seek to force their manic beliefs on everyone else.
  
Douglas Chalmers 
10 April 2008 at 19:02   
     The Christian church in Western countries still has no real idea about "the soul" any more than it has about Jesus who certainly wasn't desecended from any of the current crop of Russian and European immigrant Jews who have invaded and occupied the fake state of Israel over the past 60 years. And that isn't being "anti-Semetic" because the Semites are actually the Arabs - thus Palestine and Lebanon are the true birthplace of Christianity, if not of Jesus, and that makes it essentially a West ASIAN religion and ideology just as Islam is. 
  
  What does that mean? Well, the last thing that the puppet-state priests of ancient Israel and the Roman occupiers wanted was someone preaching peace, FREEDOM and the concept of individual personal Enlightenement. No wonder they got rid of Jesus but his path was to spread the wisdom that was then sweeping the East (India and China). That was the teachings of Buddha and, if Jesus didn't come from East or South Asia, he certainly must have went there in his youth to learn. Nothing could have possibly been acquired from the bone-headed Jews in what was a comparatively primitive culture then. 
  
  Sad that the reverend Tom Wright (the British Jeremiah Wright?) thus expects Jesus to come back, still largely unwanted, to be some pathetic kind of judge, jury and executioner on behalf of the mental and spiritual decrepit weaklings of the Christian church of the West. No wonder they keep earning bad karma for themselves with ever more Crusades. The invasion and occupation of Iraq IS a Western "crusade" just as the wanton idoelogical and financial support of the Israeli regime and their ethnic cleansing of Arabs AND Christians and their agenda of regional expansionism is. 
  
  In the end, it will be Islam, not Christianity which will flourish as it is a religion which is based on a concept of self-sacrifice whilst Christians in the West have seduced themselves with a philosophy of self-serving and blinkered blindness. But the "immaculate birth" of Jesus was a way of explaining to the ignorant savages of the time how an enlightened soul incarnated. It would be interesting to postulate the real rationale behind the story of the ressurection which is largely symbolic and not accepted by the other Abrahamic religions anyway.
  
Carl Jones 
10 April 2008 at 19:38   
     If the Christian right are becoming more militant, what monsters will they produce to better Blair and Bush?
  
outsider 
10 April 2008 at 22:02   
     Like Bishop Tom Wright, I am also a Christian; I do not subscribe to many of his beliefs, but this is not the time or place for me go into the differences. 
  It is welcome that he find's Margaret Thatcher's policies 'evil', and there seems to be a little pop at Bliar re 'God saying 'Go and bomb Iraq'', but it's not good enough. Instead of basing his Easter Sunday sermon on the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill, it should have been on two illegal wars and occupations (since Iraq was invaded, over 1,100,000 people have been reportedly killed); the poisoning of Iraq with Depleted Uranium for 4 1/2 billion years; the rape, torture, cruel and inhumane imprisonment of tens or hundreds of thousands of innocent ppeople, guilty of being Iraqi, Afghani, Muslim or just in the wrong place at the wrong time; 'Extraordinary Rendition', Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib, Bagram, Diego Garcia and countless 'Ghost Houses'; and last but not least, 'Bearing False Witness Against Their Neighbours' for the Blood Libel that Muslims were guilty of the 9/11 atrocities. 
  If he really believes it was 'Osama wot dunnit', I will happily dispute this issue with him, in public or in private. I'm sure the NS will put us in touch if the good Bishop wishes. 
  Rather than belting around the countryside in a flash sports car, it would be better if he donned sackcloth and ashes, and joined Brian Haw in Parliament Square; I'm sure Brian would welcome him, and loan him his bullhorn. Or if that's too onerous (and I wouldn't fancy it myself), at least he should use all his considerable influence to get the message out that these practices are just plain evil, Satanic (or as a certain Brotherhood would prefer, Luciferian) and should be denounced up hill and down dale. 
  Before the good Bishop says another word about Human Fertilisation and Embryology, he should watch the video, 'Beyond Treason' , on the effects of DU (available to view on the net).
  
JL 
10 April 2008 at 23:19   
     I too maintain a very literal view of Christ's death and resurrection but I strongly believe that the evangelical church's treatment of gay and transgendered people has been an absolute disgrace. It really is a case of 'strain out a gnat and swallow a camel'. 
  
  Evangelicals and others who continually obsess over homosexuality and target it as being 'worse' than other sins are clearly going beyond the Bible's remit. Romans 3.23 for example says 'that there is no difference for all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of god'. This is not a justification of homosexuality, of course, but it does indicate that to treat gays as somehow 'more sinful' than others is against the plain teaching of the Bible. 
  
  As in so many things, evangelicals adopt a position that reflects their preexisting socio-political conservatism rather than nuancing their arguments in line with textual imperatives. I personally am opposed to the ordination of (practising) homosexual ministers but it still remains that the CofE, and in particular its sex-obsessed evangelical wing, has not acted in a compassionate, reasonable and reflective manner towards gay people. To deny full Christian fellowship to repentant gay people is itself an evil as great as any homosexual activity. 
  
  As for the Keele Conference of 1967. It should also be noted that at that event, in a disgraceful breach of protocol, the CofE minister, Revd Dr John Stott refused to allow Dr Martyn Lloyd-Jones to speak fully on the subject of separation from compromised denominations. Anybody with an ounce of intelligence will realise that the CofE has never been truly evangelical in its history and it remains even now 'but halfly reformed', as the Puritans had it. 
  
  It is doubtful whether any Christian remaining within that institution, flawed as it is in discipline and in its relationship with the state, can truly be considered evangelical. For him to be a truer witness to Christ, therefore, the Bishop should consider withdrawing from a state organisation that for centuries has been a hive of liberal complacency and that has frequently stifled the great works of revival, as it did in the time of Wesley and Whitefield.
  
michaelpetek 
10 April 2008 at 23:24   
     Ron McKeown says there are no such things as atheist organisations. 
  
  In point of fact there are. They're called Communist Parties.
  
Paddy Patterson 
11 April 2008 at 07:27   
     Why does this magazine give space to persons who are so mentally unstable as to believe in "God"?
  
Grahame Priest 
11 April 2008 at 08:55   
     Religion is big business. Its currency is power and franchises all over the globe compete for slices of it, looking for points of differentiation. Religions cannot even agree on a name for God, and if the devil is truly in the detail, they play the devil's game fighting and dissenting over every point of contention available. Religious people assert their individual perspective based on their favourite flavours selected from a menu of ambiguous ancient texts, and without regard for the suffering caused. There is nothing admirable in this man's stance because his 'truths' are based on nothing more substantial than his dogged belief in his own blind faith and self-informed prejudices. 
  
  That there's an assumption this is somehow to be respected, and an equally daft assumption made that any religious person speaks with moral certainty, leaves me cold. I'd no more use contentious and often contradictory texts written 2 millennia ago as my personal moral map, than I'd use a satnav system so out of date it was developed before roads were even invented! Why do we ascribe the moral high-ground to people of 'faith', when 'faith' has done nothing more than cause dissent, schism and bloodshed for the last couple of thousand years? Is it a default position we've been trained into, or some residual kind of tribal respect for the shamen of our various cultures? 
  
  The Christian church was founded by a misogynist and we only shook free from those bonds thanks to the enlightenment. In fact, listen to a few evangelicals ranting on and we'd realise that if we put power back into their hands they would do nothing other than abuse it. There are other cultures, ones that identify strongly with specific religions which haven't even started to address issues of rights, equality and freedom. Religious persecution is a demonstrably evil thing that blights the lives of millions with everything it can use from the malicious use of psychological guilt to brutally killing people. And let's not forget religious / cultural conflict thrown in for good measure. 
  
  I can just about accept peoples' right to believe what they want when I suck my acceptance through my teeth. I do this because I'm somehow accepting people have a right to be delusional if they choose. The trouble is, put a few of them together and they'll reinforce their delusions collectively. Add a few more people and they'll assert them as a truth. Even more people, and they'll impose them on others and fight amongst themselves over correct interpretations. When a whole country or culture ends up sharing the same 'beliefs', they'll gladly kill for them and have no problem convincing themselves they're morally justified in doing so. Holding the views I do, helps me put the issue of whether the story of the resurrection should be interpreted literally, into some sort of perspective. We'll either be reborn – or we won't. Blindly convincing ourselves that we will, and then arguing about it, won't change that truth one jot.

   [input]   [input]   [input]      Post your comment  Please note: you will need to login or register before your comment is displayed on the website
Message:  [input]  

¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤
To unsubscribe/subscribe or view archives of postings, go to the Gambia-L Web interface
at: http://listserv.icors.org/archives/gambia-l.html

To Search in the Gambia-L archives, go to: http://listserv.icors.org/SCRIPTS/WA-ICORS.EXE?S1=gambia-l
To contact the List Management, please send an e-mail to:
[log in to unmask]
¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤