7.01.2004

NT Wright rocks my face off

It's a little dated now, but here is an excerpt from a November 2001 interview with Tom Wright, just after he was appointed bishop of Durham. In the interview, he discusses a number of different subjects including theology, escatology, the historicism of the Gospels, and his reaction to 9/11/2001 and the expansion of American hegemony. Sehr gut! _____ RRJ: I think it was C.S. Lewis, perhaps in his Reflections on the Psalms, who spoke of the need for people who have given offense to think what may have aroused such hostility. This is really just asking the harder questions, while not exempting the other person from their hostile behavior. NTW - I preached last Sunday in Westminster Abby on Zacchaeus, which was the reading for the morning out of Luke 19:1-10. Here you have someone who was rich and exploitative, someone who was bleeding the rest of his contemporaries dry. When we read this story we're all on the side of the people on the street thinking, "Here is this creep who is in every bad shape. And he is doing all the wicked things." When Jesus goes and eats with him, people say, "He has gone to eat with a sinner." But then look what happens to Zacchaeus. It's very interesting because Jesus does not affirm Zacchaeus by saying, "I'm coming to eat with you. You're a good guy really. It's O.K. Don't worry." There is a moral challenge here that reaches to the very heart of the sort of person that Zacchaeus has spent his life being. Zacchaeus has to repent and change. But Jesus doesn't go with the cheap shots of the people on the street. Envy can pump itself up like a balloon until it claims the high moral ground when it is really standing on the moral ground of its own puffed up envy. So the duress of the two-thirds world I think I got right. Debt remission is absolutely basic. The third world has paid back our original loans many times over in interest. To keep them enslaved now, and thus to force them to grow the wrong crops, because they desperately need exports to get foreign money to service their debt destroys their own economies and farms. I'm afraid I'm giving you a whole sermon but let me give you one more line here. When Jesus says, "You know how to read the skies; why can't you read the signs of the times?" it never struck me before what he was talking about when he said the winds are from the south and thus you say it's going to be hot. When you see clouds coming from the Mediterranean you say it's going to be rain. I mean it does not take a Ph.D. in meteorology to figure this out. It's quite obvious if you're in Palestine that this is the way the weather works. The signs of the times do not take a Ph.D. in macroeconomics or theology. You just have to look and say, "How come ten per cent of the world has ninety per cent of the wealth? Was that really the way that God intended it to be?" Then when you start to probe, and say, "What's happened the last fifty years?" it prompts you to finally say, "Sorry guys, this is not a good thing." RRJ: That's helpful. You've probably heard the phrase that "terrorism is the poor man's atomic bomb." Is that part of what you're getting at? NTW - Sure it is. I sense there is a hugely self-critical Jewish movement within both Israel and British Zionism. One of the leading members of Parliament in Britain, an Orthodox Jew who has supported Zionism all along has said publicly that Sharon was a war criminal who ought to be prosecuted at the international tribunal. He has publicly said that he will not visit Israel until Sharon has been toppled. Now this is not a Palestinian terrorist saying this type of thing. This is a man whose Jewish credentials are impeccable lifelong. In the same way, I hear a lot of people in America, and not just wild people on the left but serious, sober, Christian commentators saying, "We have to hear what the rest of the world is saying." It simply won't do to say, as people in Britain and America are prone to say, "Why do they hate us because all we ever do to them is good?" It's as if they hate us from our virtues. There's much more to it than that.

3 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

Dude, N.T. Wright rocks my face off, too! I checked out the article you linked, and all I can say is "wow." Probably a good 1/3 of it was over my head, but what I could understand was really cool. I especially liked his take on the U.S. response to 9/11.

7/02/2004 8:13 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Dude, N.T. Wright rocks my face off, too! I checked out the article you linked, and all I can say is "wow." Probably a good 1/3 of it was over my head, but what I could understand was really cool. I especially liked his take on the U.S. response to 9/11.

7/02/2004 8:13 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Whoops, sorry for the above double-post. Anyway, before I was confounded by this darn technology, I meant to add that the article set off the most fascinating conversation between me and Rev (the 2cos kepyboard player) concerning hermeneutics, a word that, despite my philosophy background, I did not understand until yesterday evening....
Brant

7/02/2004 8:16 AM  

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