Interview with N.T. Wright (by Jonathan Storment)

This past week I went with my friend Luke Norsworthy to interview N.T. Wright. Luke has a great podcast and two weeks ago he invited me to come along with him as he interviewed Dr. Wright about his new book “Simply Good News” and Luke gave me the opportunity to ask him some questions for pastors specifically for my column on this blog.

I’ve read Surprised By Hope 6 different times and after I made a slightly creepy stalker joke and then apologized for what my southern accent was doing to the “King’s English” I wanted to ask Wright how he sees his robust vision of the Restoration of All Things playing out at the local church level. In light of what I wrote on last week, I think this is great advice on how our hope shapes our practices.

I hope his answers were as helpful to you as they were to me., if so I encourage you to subscribe to Luke’s podcast, you can find the entire interview here.

Jonathan: I’m a pastor, and I hang out with a lot of pastors and we love your eschatology, we love this vision of a new heaven and a new earth and how you’ve given us tools to dismantle the gnostic bits of theology we have. What does this look like for somebody who serves the local church as they’re sitting in budget meetings? What does it look like for someone who has this hope on the local church level?

NT Wright: That’s a huge question and obviously for many years of my life I was doing precisely that. When I was in pastoral ministry, and when I was working as a Bishop.

I think what the hope does for you is that, without that, you would look at whether it’s the budget decisions, or whether it’s the church needs a new roof, or whatever it’s going to be, and you might have this awful sense of “Oh dear, are we ever going to get there, Is it worth it? Or are we actually just whistling in the wind?” And the answer is “No. God has already done new Creation, that’s the news of the gospel, in Jesus.”

God will complete that at the end. And what we do now, if it’s done prayerfully and waiting on God and the guidance of the Spirit, what we do now is part of that. That doesn’t mean that our little human projects we all be successful in the world’s terms, it means that we are planting seeds which will grow and bear fruit.

And here, when I was working as a bishop and having exactly those conversations, we came back to the Parable of the Sower and to the other parables in Mark 4 and Matthew 13 again and again and again. [We wanted} to encourage our clergy with whom we were working, and the laity as well, that what you do in the LORD is not in vain, as Paul says at the end of 1 Corinthians 15.

You are planting seeds and you may not see in your own lifetime what the fruit of those seeds will be and it is possible that some of the birds of the air will come and gobble some of them up. But if you are planting faithfully and wisely than there will be good seed and it will land in good soil, and it will bring forth fruit 30 fold, 60 fold, and a 100 fold. So the hope is precisely the hope of the parable of the Sower. But obviously, and it’s part of the reason I think Jesus was telling the parable,  there are puzzles along the way as well. But the point is we shouldn’t be put off by the puzzles, by the apparent (in human terms: failures) but we should look to the eventual fruit which God will bring.

Jonathan: In your recent book, you talk about progress, specifically you talk about the way that we (Christians) merge talk of the Kingdom of God and progress, and I’ve noticed that talk about the Kingdom of God differently than I and my pastor friends do. You talk about “entering the Kingdom”, or “receiving the Kingdom”, but a lot of my friends and I talk about “Building the Kingdom” or “Advancing the Kingdom” and then we find ourselves becoming angry.

NT Wright: Yeah, that’s why in Surprised by Hope I rather carefully talk about building for the Kingdom, rather than building the Kingdom. And the images that I’ve used again and again is of the medieval stone masons building for the cathedral.

The individual masons, if you were to say, “What are you doing?” and they said “I’m building a Cathedral” than that would be grandiose and ridiculous, because the master builder is building the cathedral. What you’re doing is carving this little bit of stone and  it’ll take you several weeks to get the carving right and the pattern right, and then one day when all the stones are gathered up, you will see your little bit of stone up there on the west front of the east wing or whatever it is, and you’ll realize that you were building for the cathedral, you weren’t actually building the cathedral.

That’s what, it seems to me, it will be like when God completes God’s New Creation. The things that we’ve done, the things which have loomed so large for us now will be these tiny little bits and pieces, and we’ll realize they were part of a much larger pattern than we could’ve ever imagined, and that’s part of the humility of it.

The things that we think are so important, may be a tiny little twiddle a gargoyle or a water spout here or whatever, on the great design that God has. And some of the more substantial, solid things in the middle of God’s new Creation, will probably be things, which we didn’t even notice were happening, but which faithful, humble “ordinary” Christians were getting on and doing below the radar when no one was looking. Those will be the things that will really be making it.

That’s back to the Beatitudes again, it’s not the big loud-mouthed, bullying people who are mentioned in the Beatitudes, it’s the meek and the humble and the hungry for justice people, and the mourners and so on. They’re the ones who make the Kingdom happen.

It’s building for the Kingdom rather than building the Kingdom in our own way.

P.S. As an end note, I have no idea what a twiddle is, but who am I to argue with Dr. Wright?