Joan Bakewell talks with Bishop Tom Wright

Q Tonight, in the first of a new series of 'Belief', I'm in conversation with the Right Reverend Tom Wright who since 2003 has been Bishop of Durham. Before that, he was successively Dean of Lichfield and Canon Theologian of Westminster Abbey. But well before that, he spent the first 20 years of his ordained life in academic positions, including 5 years at McGill University in Canada. He's written over 30 books, most recently 'The Resurrection of the Son of God'. Primarily, his scholarly reputation rests on a sustained study of the 2 figures at the heart of the Christian Gospel - Jesus and Paul. He's a conservative in matters of doctrine, and regarded as the most senior Anglican Evangelical. At a time of much division around the subject of homosexual clergy, he's had a place on the Eames Commission, deputed by the Archbishop of Canterbury to find a way of reconciling the warring factions within the Anglican communion.

But lets start long before that, Tom. Let me ask about your family. Was it a devout, churchgoing family?

A We were a straight down the line Anglican family yes, in the North of England. On my mother's side I come from a long line of Anglican clergy, and on my father's side from a long line of churchwardens. So I suppose somewhere down that, I was…one of the options was always going to be a life serving the Church.

Q You went to Oxford and you studied Classics and then you changed to Theology. Had you by that time begun to realise that you wanted to be ordained?

A Oh yes. And the call to be ordained came very early. I reckon I was probably about 7, though I'm honestly not sure. And I just assumed that was how it happened and I was a little puzzled because I had assumed around that time that it would be expected that I would follow my father into the family business, because I would then have been the 6th generation father to son more or less. And, at a certain point, my father said something quite casually, which revealed to me that actually that wasn't his expectation, and I thought 'Oh good, so it will be all right. I will be able to be ordained.' And I can't have been more than 10 or 11 when that conversation took place. So suddenly yes - there was a door open.

Q And no doubts at all?

A The one moment I do remember was when I finished doing Classics at Oxford, which was basically Philosophy and Ancient History - what we call 'Greats'. I had so enjoyed the Philosophy - I just loved it. And I remember for a fortnight walking round Oxford thinking 'Maybe I should be a philosopher. I could do this, I could do that.' and at the end of the fortnight I thought 'No - nice idea but I know where I've really got to get - I've got to get back into the Bible, into the New Testament, looking at Jesus and both understanding Him better myself, and helping other people to.'

Q But why did you feel that? Can you identify?

A (Laughs) I don't know - that was just the way it was. And, and in the middle of that, around the same time, I remember hearing a wise, older clergyman giving a talk, saying what the Church really needs is for people who actually do believe all this stuff to, to go into the scholarly world, and to…knock spots off it - do it within an inch of its life. and not always be on the back foot, defending the faith against those who are trying to attack it and, and rubbish it. And I remember thinking 'Yes! What a great thing to do.' And I suppose that's really what I've spent most of my life trying to do.

Q Well let's talk about 'all that stuff' then…

A (Laughs)

Q …whatever 'all this stuff' was. A former Bishop of Durham, David Jenkins, some time in the late '80s I think, caused a bit of a stir by saying that he didn't really believe in the Virgin Birth, it was a myth, a fairytale. The bodily Resurrection was something to do with tricks with bones. Now that's quite a long time ago now…

A (Chuckling)

Q …so let's examine the current Bishop of Durham.

A (Laughs)

Q How are you on the Virgin Birth?

A Well let me first say David has routinely been misquoted, and I don't want to sign up to the various legends that surround him, and he's an enormously gifted man who gave a huge amount to the diocese where I'm now serving and, and I'm proud to be one of his successors. I have come to see the stories in Matthew and Luke about the Virgin Birth as stories which are as historians often find, so strange in themselves, that if you tried to figure out how those stories could've come about unless there was substantial truth at the heart of it, it's actually harder to do that then to see them as I do, as people saying 'This is really very odd. We know there are lots of stories like this out there in the pagan world.' I mean Augustus - there were stories about a miraculous birth and so on, and round the same time. And the Christians were standing over against that sort of pagan belief, so they wouldn't have pushed in that route and risked Mary's reputation being sullied - you know as you find in Matthew's Gospel and so on - unless it actually was so. But I have to say my belief about Jesus does not as somebody said recently, rest on the Virgin Birth, because John's Gospel doesn't mention it or maybe one hint, but that's very controversial. The Letter to the Hebrews which has this wonderfully high view of Jesus doesn't mention it. And particularly St Paul doesn't mention it - and it's Paul who is our earliest writer and has the most fantastic view of Jesus as the Incarnate Word etc, etc. , and he doesn't mention the Virgin Birth at all.

Q The bodily resurrection.

A Same thing. there's a wonderful line in Oscar Wilde's play 'Salome' where he has Herod - Herod Antipas - hearing about Jesus doing strange things, healing people, making the blind see, and raising the dead. And Herod's quite happy for him to do healings - but raising the dead - he says 'No! This man must be found and stopped and told I forbid anyone to raise the dead.' And you see that's the point - that the Resurrection - everybody in the ancient world like everybody in the modern world knows that dead people don't rise. That is, we didn't have to wait for modern science to find that out. The point is this is a new thing, a new sort of life form that has burst upon an unsuspecting world, and if that's so then there's a new world view coming with it which is going to have implications in the political as well as the personal sphere.

Q So in what form was the bodily resurrection? Was it like the flesh and blood in which we are sitting here?

A St Paul says - and it's one of the earliest analyses we've got of this - that it's not like our present flesh and blood. It's been transformed - that's why I use in my book the word 'transphysicality', which I suspect I coined. I don't really like coining words, but it seems to do the business. Which is a way of saying that it is like our present body only more so. We tend to go the other way, we tend…

Q Can you tell by looking at it?

A Well the disciples initially were puzzled. That's one of the oddest things about the stories, y'know? That sometimes they recognised him and sometimes they didn't, and that sometimes he said 'Look, touch me and see. A spirit, a ghost doesn't have flesh and bones as you see I've got.' And then in the very next breath, he disappears, vanishes. And so these are very, very odd stories. And the best explanation that there is, is that historically, is that there really was a new sort of physicality. A new kind of embodied-ness, the main difference being that it's, it's both more bodily than we are and yet able to do things which at the moment we can't. Now in the nature of the case, they knew this was very odd, we know that's very odd. The historical claim is you just try and explain Christian origins any other way. And it's very interesting, I've examined all the other basic explanations, you know, 'It was just a swoon or they went to the wrong tomb,' or all of this stuff, and they really don't hold water as historical explanations of why Christianity began.

Q And the Ascension then - Christ simply vanished. Didn't float up into the sky like the pictures show?

A Well the pictures tend to throw dust in the eyes, you know the feet sticking out, down from the ceiling and so on. This is the really exciting bit, because in our culture when we use the language of heaven and earth, we still tend to thing about an 'upstairs/downstairs' thing. But for the Ancient Jew, heaven is not another place within our cosmos - upstairs somewhere. Heaven is another dimension of present reality, so that for instance if you went to the temple it wasn't as if you were in heaven. They really believed you were in heaven because the temple was the place within our geography which overlaps with God's geography, as it were.

Q There are those who are going in search of Jesus with a specifically historical sense of accuracy. That he was one of a family, that he moved here, that he lived there. And this seems I believe to you perhaps, to underplay the value of the true history of Jesus.

A I want to say that Jesus really was a historical character. That is there really was a person called Jesus who walked and talked and lived and died in first century Palestine, and we can study Him like we can study some of His contemporaries, whether it's Pontius Pilate the Roman Governor, whether it's Tiberius who was Emperor at the time. We have sources which are not totally unlike the sort of sources that we have for these other figures, and so on. We can study that, and we must study it because central to the Christian faith is the belief that it is precisely in the human being Jesus of Nazareth that we see what the image of God really is like. That Jesus was the clear mirror who gives us the accurate reflection of God. That's one of the earliest Christian ways of talking about Jesus. So for me, I'm a classical historian - that's what I was first and foremost. And I have used all the tools at my disposal to discover more and more about who Jesus was. Now the problem has been that some people in the last 200 years have assumed a big split between history on the one hand and faith on the other. And so they've assumed that if you're saying this happened historically you're pulling away from the idea that he is the Incarnate One, the Son of God, etc. And I have spent most of my professional life insisting along with the New Testament, that we jolly well hold those two together. So I've relished every aspect of the historical thing - whether it's the Dead Sea Scrolls or coins or whatever - because the more I find out about who Jesus really was, the more I am looking at the human face of God.

Q Do you think that Christianity is in any way a more exclusive or truer religion than the others?

A It's interesting to say 'more exclusive' and 'truer' because of course, the word 'exclusive' is a 'boo word' at the moment. So saying it's both exclusive and true might be a little tricky. I want to say that Jesus matters supremely. Nobody says that Mohammed rose again from the dead. Nobody said that Krishna died to save them from evil and sin and so on. And these claims are not simply on all fours with claims made in other world views, other religious traditions. They're different in kind as well as in content. And it's my belief partly because I am captivated by this person Jesus, and delighted to be so, and also because as a scholar I've had the privilege of looking at the evidence extremely thoroughly, and I find those two strands of history and faith simply coming together and questioning each other, challenging each other, but always coming back with more depth and more passion and more power actually to change lives.

Q Well you are clearly steeped in this theology, and you've written many, many books, and your focus is on Jesus and on Paul. But I wonder is there anything new to say about them?

A There's an enormous amount new. I mean one of the fascinating developments in scholarship in the last 10 years has been the discovery that Paul himself was really quite a political thinker. That again and again, sometimes in a coded way, sometimes less coded, he is saying 'Listen - Jesus is Lord, which means that Caesar isn't.' That's why he gets put in jail, that's why his followers are being persecuted. And…

Q 'Render unto Caesar that which is Caesar's'?

A Well that's in the Gospels, and that's actually one of the toughest and trickiest sayings in the Gospels. And there's a reason for that in that it was itself quite a carefully crafted, coded, little political nugget, which was designed to make people scratch their heads and say 'What on earth was that about?' And then the moment passes and Jesus is still at large to teach for another few days anyway. But with Paul, people tend to say 'Oh well he says that bit in Romans about 'obey the governing authorities'.' So they say 'Oh well Paul's just a, sort of a right-winger.' But one of the critical things we discover - and really this is only in the last 10 years as people have been lining up elements of Paul's thought over against elements in the Roman Empire at the time - and curiously that's not been something that scholarship has done in this way before - they've seen again and again that some of the key statements that Paul makes about Jesus, for instance when he says that 'Every knee shall bow at His name and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord.' Now that word 'Lord' was a regular title in use for Caesar, as was the word 'saviour'. So again and again, we're discovering an integrated Pauline Gospel, which is both about 'Me' and 'Me and God getting it together, and God saving me from all that is corrupting and destroying me, and also about the fact that that commits me to a life of discipleship in which the powers that be, the political powers, are actually called to account by the lordship of Jesus.'

Q But did Paul create Christianity, or did Jesus?

A Christianity is of course a much later word. Paul stands in relation to Jesus like the performer of a symphony stands in relation to the composer. Jesus is the composer, Paul is the performer.

Q But what d'you think Jesus would make of what Paul made of Jesus?

A Well, I can imagine sometimes a composer listening, in fact I heard of this just recently - a composer listening to a very gifted conductor, conducting his work. And saying 'That's fantastic. That is what I wrote, but he spotted something in that, that I didn't get.' Now it's possible that Jesus might've said that (laughing) about some of the more recherché bits of Paul. But I think, imagining that hypothetical (laughing) conversation, one can suppose Jesus saying 'This was my vocation. This was what I had to do to announce God's kingdom, to inaugurate it, and to die to bring it about, for all sorts of reasons.' And that Paul has actually seen that and is taking it forward from there.

Q Paul comes in for a lot of flak, particularly these days, in the days when women are treated more equally than they were in his time, and he seemed to be in a sense the one who's a misogynist and much more, much more strict in his instruction. Indeed more particular in his instruction, because Jesus didn't give instructions to parishes and how to run them. What d'you feel of the, as it were the 'down side' of Paul?

A Well it's curious. I mean I think I know why some of this has happened. But a lot of it has to do with the view of Paul that was propagated through from the 16th to the 20th century, where Paul was invoked in order to support and sustain certain movements within the Church, and in pre-16th century as well. But it is Paul who says that it is 'Neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free - no male and female,' because you're all one in Christ Jesus. It's Paul who says that when women are leading worship in Church, this is how they should dress, in order to emphasise they are women. They're not androgynous, they're not honorary men, they are women when they're leading worship. It's Paul who says that and various other things as well. And it's from at least the Pauline tradition and I think from Paul's own pen, that we have the wonderful image of the husband loving the wife and nourishing and cherishing her, as Christ loves the Church. And the husband having the responsibility to respect and honour the wife, you know this is very different from what you'd find say in Aristotle.

Q Since you've been appointed Bishop you've been reported as being very outspoken about subjects which you may well have held to previously, but being Bishop gets you headlines. And so you came out against the Iraq War.

A Yes. Actually, this was quite amusing because for many months before the Iraq War happened, when I was merely a Canon of Westminster, I would say in sermons not every week, but from time to time, that actually the way we seem to be going in the western world is wrong for these reasons. And I would always try to relate that directly to whichever Biblical texts were on for the day. And so I haven't changed my tune, it's just that suddenly you get a different profile, as you say when you become a bishop. So yes, it seems to me absolutely vital if Jesus really is the true Lord of the world, that we submit all political programmes and aspirations to the critique which says 'Does this actually advance the kingdom of God?' Now that's not simple, there are no easy answers, but there are certain points at which it really isn't rocket science, and those of us who've been saying this for years are now having to bite our tongues to stop saying 'I told you so.' Because you know it is still going pretty horribly wrong out there and we've got to find mature and wise ways of dealing with these international crises.

Q Do you find it difficult being a political priest?

A I would find it very difficult not to see God's world as one world and Jesus as the Lord of that one world. What we mean by the word 'politics', and what we mean by the word 'religion' are basically eighteenth century constructs which were designed to be separate from one another. That's what you got in France which is why they now have their rampant secularism. It's what you've got in America in a different form, which is why they are now having terrible difficulty putting religion and politics back together again.

Q Well Tom that's a perfect explanation of the situation, but it's not how the Daily Mail sees it.

A Well tough. I mean again and again, it's the task of the Church to say 'Sorry - the false dichotomies which are out there in our world have gotta be challenged. We have to put things back together.'

Q Other things get people headlines too, and you got headlines when you came out against the move by the Bishops to give up their castles.

A (Laughs) Well some bishops wanted to give up historic houses. , there aren't actually that many of these historic houses. I think what I'm really saying there is that in western culture, we've really suffered from a loss of a sense of place. It's very interesting if you go to a great Cathedral like Durham whether it's for Christmas or Epiphany or whatever, you'll find that people are drawn to it as by a magnet. They know that this place matters. And some of these old historic houses carry amazing memories. And certainly the one that I live in one little bit of, has an astonishing set of memories for the whole of the North East of England. And if you ask people around the North East what Auckland Castle means, they see it as a symbol of what the North East is and of its rootedness in Christianity. And to throw that away in obedience to the bean counters here and there is like you know, it's basically a sort of selling the family silver, which subsequent generations will bitterly regret.

Q The headline subject of all of course at the moment, where the Anglican Communion gains a lot of rather bemused secular criticism is the issue, well several issues. The issue of homosexual clergy; the blessing of homosexual unions; and women bishops. Now all these issues seems to have come onto the agenda all over again. There was a time when we thought it was all over bar the shouting. And suddenly again they, and more seriously, they are threatening the unity of the Communion. Where do you stand yourself about those issues? I mean…

A Well

Q …homosexual clergy - yes or no?

A There are several different layers of issues. Let me first say that bundling the issues up together, though inevitably we all do it - you've just done it, one is driven into doing it - inevitably distorts them because the women bishops issue is not the same at all as the homosexual clergy issue. The New Testament is actually quite clear about homosexuality. It regards the practice of homosexuality - it doesn't talk about the 'condition' in a sort of a psychological sense - that's a much later idea, in fact it's really a late nineteenth century idea. But the practice of homosexuality is regarded by the New Testament, as by the Judaism of the day as inevitably a distortion of the created order in which male and female are the pairing that the Creator God intended.

Q That is an explanation, and that is an exposition of the testament.

A Mmm.

Q But what do you yourself feel about the case being made that you have to update according to context. I want to know how you feel about context, not what scholarship tells you.

A Let me first tell you since you ask about feelings, because the debate often gets side-tracked onto feelings, and I think actually thinking is more important than feeling at this point. But in terms of feelings, there is such a thing as instinctive revulsion against people whose sexual expression is different from one's own. And some people use the word 'homophobia' in relation to that, and I think that's an extremely misleading word and I think I'm completely innocent of that sort of pathological revulsion. Some people are now using that word to denote a very different thing, which is the thought out, ethical response to particular questions which has nothing to do with pathological feelings, and everything to do with reasoning from first principles, hearing the evidence, etc. And there I want to say yes, context matters enormously. And as a first century historian I want to say the context in which the New Testament is written is one in which there was a lot of casual homosexual experimentation and whatever. But also as you see, hundreds of years before in Plato, people who were in long-term partnerships. So it isn't the case, as some have said, that the New Testament is simply opposed to a phenomenon which is quite different from what we know today. I think they knew a very great deal about it all then. And so as a Christian I'm committed to following and thinking through the teachings of Jesus and of Paul and of the rest - in their context. And when we take that through, interestingly into the second century, we find this very striking thing - that the Christians are known in the pagan world because they really do believe in the Resurrection and they really don't believe in sexual immorality - of whatever sort. And this isn't to distinguish one sort from another. It's simply to say Christians have always been different on this one. We've always been counter-cultural. The Anglican Church has found it difficult sometimes to be counter-cultural, but this is one of the points where we really have to be today.

Q But you're in a very political situation now, and it does beg the question if the Church of England was always called a broad Church, and was seen to embrace perhaps different practices, of which certain people who read the Gospels in a particular way disapproved. Is this now going to split the Church, because the people who feel like you do will not tolerate the moves being made by the American Church?

A Well the American Church as well is split on this. And let's again be clear - we're not talking about feelings but about thinkings and about reasonings. Because that's what we've got to do. I believe in the authority of scripture. I also believe in the authority, the appropriate authority of reason. And where in a period in history, which is a flight from reason, into pure emoting - and that's part of the problem of post modernity - that I feel like this, you feel like that - and all we can do is shout at each other. Now, within the Anglican Communion, we have certain things we call 'instruments of unity' which generate what we call 'bonds of affection'. This is not like a Catholic hierarchy where the big chap at the top decides all the issues. It's a way of saying, we meet every 10 years. The bishops meet at the Lambeth Conference. We meet in between that with lay people as well at the Anglican Consultative Council. The leaders of each province, the so-called 'primates' meet on a regular basis, and the Archbishop himself - Archbishop of Canterbury - has the responsibility poor chap to hold it all together. Now there has never before been a situation in Anglicanism, where all four of those instruments of unity have said 'Please, at the moment as far as our studying, our praying, our thinking, our working out goes - we are not in that position.' And then where one province or diocese has said 'Tough, we're going to go ahead and do it anyway,' so the Windsor Report which came out of the Eames Commission, is addressing not the issue of homosexuality, but the structural issue of how we stay together within a family, within a Communion, when that sort of deliberate breach, schism if you like, has occurred.

Q Now I can see that, that's very important, because in fact the system isn't holding together, given the present structure. Let's discuss the structure and see how we can hold it together. Would it matter if the Anglican Communion split?

A Yes it really would. And when I think of the Anglican Communion I think for instance of the Palestinian Anglican clergy in Galilee at the moment who I've met and talked with. And for them being Anglican means that they are linked to this world-wide family, and they've got Israeli pressure on one side, Muslim pressure on the other side and indeed some other, different Christian groupings as well. They are beleaguered…

Q Well exactly, there are other Christian groupings.

A Yes of course. Of course there are. But for them, this is an absolute lifeline. Or I think of Desmond Tutu when he was standing there with hordes of black people baying for his blood because he was arguing for non-violence and they wanted violence. And he had of course the Afrikaaners down on him like a ton of bricks on the other side. And one or other of the bishops from England, including my friend Keith Sutton, would go and stand there with him as a sign that Desmond was not a lone voice - that he was representing the whole of the Anglican Communion. And it's that great strength in times of great need…

Q That's political strength.

A Is that politics or is that religion? This is about standing up for the Prince of Peace at a time when everyone else is baying for war - that sounds pretty religious as well as political.

Q Tom, it's clear that you're fired up by this vocation you felt when you were so young and to which you've devoted your life. But to come towards the end of your life and your death, the death we all have to face, do you believe in immortality?

A I don't think we have a kind of immortality that comes with the kit of just being human. In the New Testament, immortality is a gift. It says that God alone has immortality and He gives it to people, and the whole point about being human as we are at the moment is that we are mortal. In other words, all this stuff is going to decay and die and go back to dust. And then the immortality which is the gift of God promised in Christ and by the spirit is a 'something else' which in the nature of the case we don't have good language for, but which will eventually result according to the Christian Gospel, in us having new bodies like the new body which Jesus had in His transformed physicality as a result of the Resurrection. Now…

Q So we won't all be saved?

A According to the New Testament there is a real possibility…

Q No according to you … I want you to tell me.

A … I'm sorry - I'm a Christian theologian - therefore the New Testament is where I must start. And yes I'm affirming this. That there is a real possibility of loss but just at the point where we think the New Testament is going to say 'Bang - there it is. We're going to tell you who's in, who's out,' there are hints and vague suggestions, that actually yes, there will be those who will look God in the face and say 'Sorry that's not for me and I'm going to go the other way,' and that God will ratify that decision, because we are human beings with the dignity of making those decisions - that there are many others who are being drawn towards the light, many others who are being wooed into the love of God. And that it's not up to me to say exactly where that line is drawn on a page. I do believe that there is a real possibility and actuality of final loss, but that immortality is this strange, new gift. It's not that, as Plato said, we've all got an immortal soul and we're all just going to carry on. No, that's not the Christian belief. The Christian belief is that God promises this as a fresh gift to be received gratefully. And that means, as I think it was John Polkinghorn who said that when we die, God will 'download our software onto His hardware until the time when He gives us new hardware to run the software again for ourselves.' Now…

Q So when you contemplate…

A …all of these are metaphors…

Q …your own death…

A When I contemplate my own death, I go back to the words of St Paul when he said 'My desire is to depart and to be with Christ which is far better.' And you know, this life has a lot of wonderful things going for it, and if there's something even far better than the best that this life has got, that's fantastic. But then he also said that out beyond that, there is this thing which I call 'Life after life after death', and that's Resurrection. And that is a newly embodied state in God's new world. You can actually only understand this if you get hold of a picture of a renewed cosmos. It's a whole world view - a world renewed with us as its beneficiaries and agents and stewards.

Q Bishop Tom Wright, thank you.