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Interview: N. T. Wright
by Will Refvem
News Editor
FILE PHOTO
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Dr. Wright is Canon Theologian at Westminster Abbey. He spoke at the January Series on Thursday, January 23 on the topic, "St. Paul in the Big Picture: The Apostle and the Gospel in the 1st and 21st Century. Dr. Wright was interviewed on the day of his lecture by Chimes News Editor William Refvem.
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First of all, because most of our readers are not members of the Anglican Church—I know when I first read your biography and saw that your title was Canon Theologian of Westminster Abbey, I thought, “I have no idea what that means”—so what exactly does it mean to be Canon Theologian of Westminster Abbey?
Wright: As I said in the [Q&A session the morning of the speech], each abbey or cathedral in England has two or three or four Canons—and the Greek word “canon” means a rule, and originally they are the people who are following the rule of life of this community, which basically means it’s a praying community – who meet to pray Matins and Evensong, morning and evening, and that in various other aspects of our common life we are under the rule of the Dean, in this case. The Canons help the Dean in running the place and in maintaining its common rule. Obviously in a big place like Westminster Abbey, there’s a major tourist thing—we have maybe two million tourists come through a year, and so running that—and making it meaningful for them as a spiritual experience and a meeting with God is a major priority. The four Canons each have different jobs within that, and in Westminster Abbey, like some cathedrals, we have one Canon whose job it is to be the theologian-in-residence, and that happens to be me at the moment, so that my main job description is, having done the prayers, to come home, sit down at the desk and carry on writing the book I’m writing, but also doing public lectures, running seminars, and broadcasts as that becomes a possibility.
It sounds similar, I guess, in some ways to a—I know it isn’t a monastic order, but it has that feel.
Well, it was a monastic order until the 16th century, so for the first five hundred years of Westminster Abbey’s life—it was built in the middle of the 11th century, and then of course the monasteries were all taken over by Henry VIII in the 1530s, and so many of them became cathedrals, and some of them simply became redundant and are ruined. Westminster has gone on as a great church because of its specifically royal connections, because one of the things that the Abbey always was the place where coronations and royal funerals and so on happened. Part of our job is to keep the great house of prayer as a house of prayer, so that when the Queen wants to have a big party there, it’s actually a house of prayer, not just a theme park.
I understand your talk today is on St. Paul, so I wanted to ask you a question about that. Nietzsche said that St. Paul was the first Christian. To what extent do you agree or disagree with that?
St. Paul is the first writing theologian that we are aware of within the Christian tradition. It’s clear that he wasn’t the first Christian, because he himself describes himself as the persecutor of the first Christians, so he can’t have actually been the first one himself. I mean, I know what Nietzsche would have meant by that, that he was the first person who maybe thought his way—or we can see him thinking his way—right round the full circle of what the death and resurrection of Jesus actually mean. I suspect, though, that Nietzsche meant it in a rather rude sense, that he kind of invented this thing called Christianity, which has then corrupted the Western world ever since, and that if only went back to Jesus and the first disciples we would find something rather different; and that is simply wrong historically. One of the things Paul says in 1 Corinthians 15, when he reminds them of what he basically preached at the beginning in Corinth, he says that actually, you know and I know that this what all the others preached as well—and they’d had other visits from other apostles. And if that was wrong, if Paul was out on a limb from the very earliest (Peter and so on) had been saying, the Corinthians could have called him on it and said “No, we know you’ve invented this bit, and they told us something different.” So we know that Paul was in line with those who were Christians before him.
There is in the Bible—you can tell—there is some sort of tension between Paul and the other apostles. How would the other apostles have viewed Paul—this guy who’s persecuting Christians, now coming in and saying he’s a Christian?
I think there are at least two things going on there. From one point of view, of course, there is always the tension between the very earliest members of a movement, and then the really bright guy who comes in a bit later and threatens to take it over. There’s a sense of, who do you think you are, we were here first, and what’s more you were a rat. You may be a converted rat, but we’re still not totally happy with you. That’s a very natural human reaction, but I think, in addition to that, there’s the sense that Paul has this astonishing mind. I mean, he is one of the great minds of the Western world. I cut my teeth on Plato and Aristotle—and Paul ranks with people of that caliber. And to be honest, Peter and James and John and the boys—you know, they’re good guys, but they’re not in the same league. Whoever wrote the fourth gospel, if that was John the apostle, then he certainly is in the same league, though with a very different style. But I suspect in most cases that Paul was just intellectually head and shoulders above them. Now—sorry, I said there were two things. That’s two, now here’s a third. Paul, with this very sharp, quick mind grasped from very, very early on that though Christianity is and remains ineradicably Jewish, it is for all people equally. Paul had grasped that and was implementing it at a time when many of them were still so aware of the pressure on Jews to conform to paganism, etc., that any going away from the food laws, circumcision, the Sabbath, was just rank disloyalty. How could you possibly do that? Paul had the intellectual and moral courage to say, you know, this is what the crucifixion of Jesus means, so we’ve got to get on and do it. And they hadn’t thought their way round that circle at that point. And so he’s out ahead of them saying, “Come on chaps, it’s all right,” and they’re saying, “No, but this is disloyalty, our Jewish friends and neighbors will be very cross with us if we do that.” And in a sense, they were right; but in a more important sense he was right.
Very interesting.
Yes, it is.
This next question is switching gears a bit. To what extent do you think the via media doctrine that was adopted by the Church of England during the Reformation still guides the Church of England today, and what does it mean for the average layperson?
Yes, well that’s a very good question. That’s a very difficult question precisely now, because just in the last year or two the worldwide Anglican communion, of which the Church of England is a part, has had to face in quite a new way the question, “What does it mean to be a communion?” Granted that we don’t have a Pope—you know, the Archbishop of Canterbury is not like a Pope—granted we don’t have a Vatican Council that wrote a massive book telling us exactly what was what—if somebody in Kenya says, “I’m an Anglican, and in my church people are allowed to keep their second wife or third wife, if they’re polygamous” or if somebody else says in Western Canada, “I’m an Anglican, and where I am we will bless gay marriages,” or if somebody in Sydney, Australia says, “I’m an Anglican, and where I am we’re going to have laypeople presiding over the Eucharist,” what constraints are there on other people to say, “Actually, we don’t do that, and none of those things make sense within Anglicanism.” And this is why we have every ten years called the [unclear] Conference, which is a much more low-key affair than a Vatican Council, but which is an attempt to hold the center together. The via media, as you probably know, grew out of the controversies of the Reformation, in the sense that for much of the Reformation in Europe, it went city by city and little principality by little principality, so that if your local prince wanted the Reformation, that whole area would become Lutheran, or Reformed, or whatever it was. If he didn’t, it would stay Catholic, and that’s the way it was. If you really didn’t like that, you should get out and go live somewhere else. That could never happen in England because England could not be divided up like that into small city-states, so they had to struggle with a way of having the Reformation, which they clearly wanted, but which allowed room for some people to be on the Puritan wing and others to be more on the Catholic wing. And we spent a century hammering that out, between, say, 1580 and 1680, and it was bloody. It was messy. A lot of people got killed. A king got executed in the middle of it. There were all sorts of different tensions and stresses, and out of that—and it’s really almost a pre-Enlightenment Enlightenment—there comes a way of saying, “Let’s make this a broader entity so that we don’t have to go on fighting each other about it.” And that has been at one level a strength, and at another level a great weakness, because many people who don’t want to think too hard about it, or don’t want to be too bothered, say, “We’re a broad church, so who cares? Don’t let’s make a fuss. Let’s just all be easy about it.” And then the cutting edge of the gospel gets lost, and the Church can disappear under the umbrella of “Let’s all be nice to each other.” So we fight that as a constant battle, and I love Anglicanism’s broad-churchness because it actually says, at its best, “What you need is the Bible, and the Fathers, and say your prayers, celebrate the Eucharist and get on with it. And if you come up with new ideas, tell us about them. Let’s look at them. We’re not too tied down.” And that has given me enormous scope to explore and to think and to be, and it’s wonderful. But, at its worst, as I say, it allows scope for people who are really way beyond the pale to say, “Well, in the Church of England you’re allowed to believe what you like,” and that is not like [unclear].
It’s interesting that you mention that. I remember a few years ago when the issue of allowing women into the ministry came up—the Catholic Church is obviously still very much against that, but the Church of England…
Yes, the Anglican Church as a whole has broadly done that. Not all parts of the Anglican communion have. I know there are places in the Middle East, for instance, where they are up against [the culture] on so many other fronts, that for them to do this is deeply counter-cultural, whereas in America and in Britain it’s essentially going with the culture. In many other parts of the world it’s deeply against, so there’s a real wrestling with that that has to go on. Then the question is—some people say, “Well, since we ordain women, we should now ordain practicing homosexuals.” And I want to say, “That’s not the same issue.” You can’t kind of assume a progression, one issue after another going the same way like that.
So what do you think—not just in Anglicanism, but in the Church as a whole—should our response to culture be? To what extent should it be counter-cultural?
You’ve got to take it issue by issue. There are some people who are just traditionalists, and their knee-jerk to any question is, “How was it done a hundred years ago,” or whatever it is. And that simply won’t do, because people got things wrong a hundred years ago, and we need to be called on it and told, “Nope, that won’t work.” There are other people who just love being “agin’ the government.” Whatever has been done the last 50 years, they want to do it differently because they’re just nature’s innovators. We need both in the Church. The issues themselves have got to be wrestled with point after point after point. The Trinity is a traditional doctrine. Does that mean, if we’re innovators, that we should kick it out and use something else? Well, some people say yes. I would say absolutely no. You’ve got to think it through again in each generation and know why you believe it, and not just take it as a hand-me-down and take it for granted. That way danger lies. When you’ve thought it through, I believe you can come back and find fresh ways of affirming the same thing. But something like whether you put flowers on the altar or not, or whether you do this, or the East-West divide as to whether you cross yourself like this [crosses himself in the Anglo-Catholic style] going to your heart first, or whether you end up on your heart, as the Orthodox do… Hang on…[ hesitantly crosses himself in the Orthodox style] Yeah, that’s right. [laughs] For some people that looms enormously large, and I want to say, “No, you know, that really does not matter that much.” So you’ve got to take it issue by issue, and there are no easy answers. Often people get very hot under the collar in church circles about things which in the great scheme of things really don’t matter that much.
One great controversy—I’m not sure it’s a controversy across the pond—is the role of the Scriptures. I’m sure you’ve heard the phrase “inerrancy of the Scriptures” or “infallibility of the Scriptures.”
Yes.
Continued next week...
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