The following quotes are portions of an interview with N.T. Wright that can be found at gowerstreet.blogspot.com. This guys often says what I'm thinking but don't have the ability to articulate.
And you thought N.T. Wright was a relativist who was soft-pedaling on the issue of homosexuality. Au Contraire...
On the ethics of The New Perspective...“Paul insists in some passages on the principle of what you could broadly call tolerance, tolerance of differences. Some people think you can eat meat, some people think you can’t eat meat, keeping special days, and so on. Romans 14, 1 Corinthians 8. On other points Paul is absolutely emphatic that there are rules for behavior and if you break those rules there are sanctions. He does not say ‘some of us think that committing incest is fine, others of us think it is wrong, so let not the one who does judge the one who doesn’t or whatever. It’s 1 Corinthians 5, he says ‘nope, the person living with his father’s second wife is just not on.’ And he says ultimately, if he’s impenitent, he must be sanctioned in terms of being put out of the community. In 2 Corinthians he talks about how to deal pastorally with the next stage in that, I take it, same situation. Now, under the old perspective, this always seemed a bit loose and floppy, because it looked like Paul was just choosing some ethical issues to go soft on and other ethical issues to go hard on. Whereas with the new perspective you can see very clearly that the issues he is saying you must not make an issue of breaking communion is an issue which will divide you on ethnic or cultural grounds, the eating of meat, the keeping of holy days. These are things which would keep Jews and Gentiles, or possibly other cultures, apart. And therefore you must work at living together across those boundaries. However, there are other things which are central to what it means to be the renewed human race. Paul’s whole vision is of being a renewed human race, and that includes sexual morality. And on those issues there is no room for saying ‘some of us think this, some of us think that.’ So that the new perspective actually gives us a whole new fresh angle on how to live together as God’s people.”
On food and sex...“At the last Lambeth Conference, there were many, many black African bishops who came desperate to have Lambeth speak about the fact that their people were suffering desperately. They discovered all these rich white people who just wanted to talk about sex. Sex matters. But when you look at it like that, you ask ‘what’s wrong with this picture?’ Most of the world is desperate for food and justice. A small number of people in the world want more sex. You ask ‘excuse me? Can we just get the world the right way up again?’”
On the American church...“But it is the bullying tone of voice which, in America, picks up extra speed from your official church-state separation, which is of course a joke because you church and your state are in fact intricately bound up together, it’s just that you don’t have a way of formalizing that. But it’s fascinating for me, having lived and worked in an established church for most of my life to hear the anti-established church rhetoric in America and to see that actually your church is far more established than ours is, in all sorts of de facto ways. It’s woven into American Culture.”
On the English church...“Though he denies it, Rowan Williams is actually the real leader of the opposition at the moment, because the conservatives are so much at one with Tony Blair on the key issues that are facing the country at the moment, whether it is the war with Iraq, or how we handle Europe, or what have you. They’re not offering real analysis and critique of where our public life is going. And so there is a sense that the church has a prophetic voice and actually often has had a prophetic voice. Some of the greatest prophetic voices in England over the last hundred years, people like William Temple, have been at the heart of the established church, who regard being at the heart of the established church as being a commission to speak God’s word to the nation, even if it’s not what anyone else is saying. That’s part of what establishment actually always meant in the post-constantinian world. You see people in American use the word ‘Constantinian’ as a stick to beat Christendom. But in fact if you study the fifth and sixth centuries and so on, the settlement was deeply interesting and often ambiguous and often very fruitful and creative and was by no means the swallowing up of the church under imperialism. I sometimes suspect what is going on with Americans slagging off with Constantinian Christianity is actually a projection of the American problem onto the screen of history.”
On Barth...“There is a danger with a certain kind of Barthianism which I run into often enough, which really does seem to be saying, and this is a caricature, but really does seem to run the risk of saying, that until you’ve taken your flying leap and landed in the charmed circle called faith, we have nothing to say to you and you have nothing to say to us. Unless everything you say flows directly from the fact of Jesus Christ, then its uninteresting and irrelevant. Whereas it seems to me that the whole point of who Jesus was, as the ultimate representative of God’s people, Israel was called to be God’s people for the world, and it was Israel’s failure to be God’s people for the world which resulted in God sending his son to be his people incarnate for the world, and therefore the church as the people of Jesus Christ exists precisely by doing business with the world. The question then is, what does that doing business with the world consist of? Does it consist only of saying that which the world is waiting to hear? Of course not. That’s where we have to go back to things like the Areopagus address, in Acts 17, where simultaneously Paul is saying look here you have an altar to the unknown God, let you tell you about this unknown God whom you ignorantly worship – you know, it send shivers down the Barthian spine with the very thought of that. But then in the very next breath, he says the god who made heaven and earth does not live in temples made with human hands. And what are we looking at from the Aeopagus? The Parthenon, the Temple of Nike, some of the greatest artworks in the Western World. And he’s saying, it’s all a waste of space. There is a willingness to find the points of contact, and then to do the explosive thing of saying ‘and actually two-thirds of your culture is radically idolatrous, and needs to be confronted and swept away. So real life is much more exciting than saying we need to retreat and do this in private. I can see that in America some people may need to say ‘a plague on your academic negativity. We’re going to tell the Christian story and you can go ahead and laugh at us if you like.’ There is a sort of cheerful holy boldness about that and that’s very much Stan Hauerwas’ style, as I understand it.”
On politics...“The problem is – and this is very much at this modern/postmodern/postpostmodern interface – is that the political spectrum is assumed to be from left to right, where left is revolutionary anarchy, and right is status quo, and firm government, and so on. And that is simply the legacy of the French Revolution, and the 18th century. And if you look at Jewish political thought, if you look at early Christian political thought, it simply doesn’t acknowledge that spectrum. It says on the one hand ‘God is God and the powers-that-be are not God’ which sounds very revolutionary and subversive. But it says on the other hand that ‘God does want good government, because otherwise the bullies win.’ God wants his people to hold the powers of the world to account. The church has to be able to say this and recapture the Christian and Jewish political theology that was swept aside at the enlightenment and that most people don’t even know existed. That’s a really huge and enormous thing.”
On religion and politics...“Of course, in America, it is easy for what would broadly be called liberal American Christians to see that this is happening in the right wing, because there are millions of deeply Republican Christians for whom Christianity really means, saluting the American flag, and America being raised up by God to do good around the rest of the world and have this Christian way of life and so on. So the walls between the Christian way of life and an American way of life are basically collapsed and they’re assumed to be the same thing, and so any criticism of one is perceived to be criticism of the other. It’s easy for liberal Christians to look at that and shudder, without realizing that there are ways in which liberal Christianity does exactly the same thing, baptizing certain elements of the prevailing culture, whatever it might be.”
On empire...“Sure, Let me say first, we British had an empire upon which the sun never set. We have spent the last hundred years counting the cost and feeling the pain of this. I know Americans like to make their own mistakes and resent it when other people say ‘don’t do it as we did it.’ But I do want to say I do hope my dear, beloved American friends do not have to spend a hundred years counting the cost of their empire. The fact that it isn’t called an empire doesn’t mean that it isn’t; because, manifestly, the rest of the world knows that it is. I have often felt these last four years, that the rest of the world ought to vote in U.S. presidential elections because what you’re getting is someone whose policies will determine which way the wind is going to blow for the rest of us. These last two or three years have made that abundantly clear. I seem to recall some people shouting ‘no taxation without representation,’ 230 years ago, whatever it was, getting rid of George the 3rd, maybe the rest of the world is feeling that about George the 2nd at the moment.”
On culture...“Yes, well, as I said about the Aeropagus speech, there is no one answer to this. Neibuhr explored those different ways of doing it, and it depends on the culture. In Athens, Paul saw some things in the culture, which he was able to ‘yes, fantastic, let’s go with that, and let’s build on that.’ And other things which he saw for which he said ‘nope, that’s wrong, that’s out of line, and here’s why.’”
On the creation/evolution debate...“So much of contemporary culture is not a specifically Christian product, but the product of Western enlightenment economic imperialism, often – and this is a hugely ironic point, which I wish I could find a sloganized way of putting it up on the wall – in America at the moment, you still have this hassle about Darwin, about whether you believe in Darwin or not, and I want to say ‘there are serious problems with Darwin,’ (you should look at Wittgenstein’s critique of Darwin, very interesting). But often in America, the very same people who want to rubbish Darwin and go back to a creationism, are themselves totally soaked in the social Darwinism which says that the economic and political modus operandi of the Western world since the eighteenth century has got the right to develop and do its own thing, because might is right, and because we have developed this way and therefore we can get on and do it. This is the philosophy of Malthus, actually, to whom Darwin was deeply indebted. Darwin was soaked in Malthus’s stuff long before he ever got in a boat and went looking at turtles and finches. It’s very ironic that a lot of right wing America is implicitly, absolutely solidly social Darwinist. Even while rejecting Darwin on creation. I think this needs to be explored in a lot more detail.”
On “the conversation”... “It is these issues which need to be teased out, and precisely because the church must engage with where the culture has been and still is, these things need to be smoked out, put on the table, and we need to be able to have a conversation about them without people simply saying ‘rubbish! That just fundamentalism!’ on the one hand, and ‘rubbish! That’s just silly liberalism!’ on the other.”
