[Music] because Assurance comes not from looking at myself and seeing if I've got some something which has happened though though please God you will but in looking away from myself into the Jesus who walks around saying don't be afraid or get out of the boat then and follow me or or deny yourself and follow me whatever it is and as Jesus is perceived to be addressing us as we stepping out of the passage and embracing us um that's when it isn't that we know because we know something about ourselves we know because we know something about him welcome everybody back to the podcast we've got another excellent episode for you today my guest is the one and only NT Wright uh Tom is currently a research fellow at wickcliff College in Oxford and he's also a Meritus professor of New Testament and early Christianity at the University of St Andrews where I got to meet him uh that's where I did my doctoral work and I had the pleasure of being Tom's research assistant for two years so really fun to catch up with him and talk about his new book Into the Heart of Romans I think you're absolutely going to love this book highly highly recommend it it's one of my favorite uh Tom Wright books of recent memory particularly among his popular books that he has released Romans 8 favorite chapter of mine favorite chapter of his so a lot of fun conversation around that role of the spirit in the Christian Life what assurance means um what it means to be a human being what the gospel is all about so we have a really fun conversation Tom's an awesome guy and I know you're going to really enjoy what he has to share I think is a real blessing uh before we jump in I do want to remind you that uh the way to become a member of the center for Bible study is uh through the link that I post in the description it'll take you to our website and you can make a donation any dollar amount it's just a recurring donation of whatever amount you feel like if you want to do $1 great $5 $10 doesn't matter it makes you a member and your membership um means that you get access to all of our Center for Bible study classes we're constantly doing these four to six week classes on various topics currently um in the heart of doing an atonement class we also do a public lectures that will be recorded So you get all the past recordings all there together for you to study and dig into along with all the class notes and PowerPoints then you ALS o get access into all of our future classes alongside that we're going to give you a shout out on the podcast and uh honor you there um as well as a monthly newsletter so it's a really great deal it's a way for you to support the work we do not just in the YouTube channel and podcast but also uh in the the with the center there so want to encourage you there and lastly if you are not uh currently please do make sure that you are subscribed and following us um your subscription really helps us out in growing our platform and uh if you can leave a comment uh anything along those lines we love to interact there so make sure you're subscribed you have your notifications on and definitely want to encourage you to consider becoming a member I think it's a great opportunity to invest in uh in this community and um really gets a great deal of uh theological education for yourself for uh I think a bargain price so encourage you to uh to consider that and with that and without further Ado let's go ahead and jump into our conversation with Tom welcome back everybody to the podcast I'm so delighted to be joined today by Tom Wright uh we're going to be discussing his new book Into the Heart of Romans which is uh it's really a fantastic book I can't recommend it highly enough Tom's got the physical copy there I'm still waiting on my physical copy to arrive but I was really privileged to endorse this book uh can can't endorse it highly enough uh I said something along the lines of you know Tom is the great greatest biblical Theologian of our day and he's commenting on in my opinion Paul's greatest chapter that he ever wrote perhaps and so what what better what more could we hope for right um the other really cool connection with this book is Tom dedicated it to our our dear friend Peter Rogers and that connects directly to the work we do because this is the center for Bible study and Peter was the founder of this Center his heart was to connect biblical studies to the life of the church and that's we we carry on his legacy here so really uh wonderful to see this book dedicated honor Tom welcome to the podcast thanks so much for being here thank you very much it's good to see you again yeah it's it's really a treat it's been a while since we've we've chatted last so it's it's always a treat um I I want to get into the book but before we do I I'd love to just get a little bit of um Insight from you if I may and one of the the questions I always like to ask my guests is how they kind of got into biblical studies what what did that path look like and yeah what what motivated you to become a Biblical scholar I I imagine there's a very long story behind that so you don't have to give the whole long story but if you could just give us a little bit of a picture because I a lot of people know Tom Wright but they might not know the story of how Tom Wright became the scholar that he is today there is of course a much longer story and one of these days I might write it up we'll see I'm supposed to be writing some sort of a theological autobiography but that's down the track somewhere um I I grew up in a churchgoing family a very or middle class middle of the road Anglican family in the far Northeast of England um church every Sunday I sang as a little boy in the choir of our local Parish church so I was getting the Psalms all the time and I was hearing though not taking in very much the Old and New Testament readings and just kind of going along with that very happily when I was about 12 um there was somebody from the scripture Union who came to our school for some reason it wasn't a specifically Christian school but the for some reason the school allowed this guy to come in and talk to the pupils and he said you know you're about the age now when it might be a good idea to start reading your Bible here are some notes that would help you and by the way here are some summer camps which you might like to sign on for and to come to and that would help you more and I was I was absolutely ready for that I started reading the Bible day by day then um with the help of those scripture Union notes and I've never seen any reason to stop um though I don't use script Union notes anymore because I've kind of made my own notes as I've gone along but I also went to the camps which were were there advertised and where little simple um Bible expositions were given morning and evening prayers very short very practical very um designed for teenage boys who were really eager to get back outside and climb a mountain or canoe or whatever we were doing um but that it all it all went in and went quite deeply with me and uh uh made so much sense of so many other things that that were going on in my life through my teens um and then I I actually probably because of my love of the Bible I decided I really wanted to study Classics so I did Greek and Latin from quite an early age through my teens and particularly the early Roman Empire which is of course when the Roman world was playing host all unknowingly to early Christianity so when I came to Oxford and studied Classics that's a story in itself I always had half a mind onto and this is the context of the New Testament and wow that's exciting for all sorts of reasons then one day and just a few hundred yards from where I'm sitting now here in central Oxford um there was a talk given to a bunch of us and it was a talk about something else entirely but in the Q&A the man who was doing the talk um John Wenham who some may remember he wrote a introduction to New Testament Greek which used to be um well known on the circuit as it were he he said almost casually that for too long people who loved the Bible and Lov the Lord and loved the gospel had been playing catchup to the liberal scholarship which had been going around saying you can't believe that and this bit never happened and that was written 200 years later and bl and he said the the the believing Scholars have been nervously padding along behind trying to disprove what the Liberals are saying and he said you know it's time to get on the front foot and for people who love the scriptures to get out in front and learn new things cuz there's masses more to discover and let the liberals do the catching up and I remember like an electric shock going through me thinking wow that's a great vocation I mean I had known from an early age that I was called to Ministry that was kind of who I was and where I thought I I assumed that I was going to be a parish priest like my grandfather and my uncle and various other family members and indeed this coming Sunday I'm going to be preaching for the 50th anniversary of the ordination of my brother-in-law who has been a parish priest all his working life and I honor that vocation but that for me was the transition where I suddenly thought well I know I'm to be a priest in the church I want to be a preacher and teacher and pastor but the heart of that has got to be the research on the scriptures and trying to um Forge New Pathways without the slightest idea of what they might be um and in a sense from that moment that must have been about 19771 something like that um that's what I believe I was called to do and you know it's very difficult when you think you have a vocation because that has to be tested over time but looking back now over 50 plus years I think I can say actually I think that is what I've been doing although on route to my surprise there has been a bit of setting a new agenda and letting the Liberals catch up but there's also been quite a lot of challenging some of the assumptions made in the Evangelical world World both in Britain and America the world which in which I grown up about what the gospel is how it works Etc and I've got into some hot water on both counts and and so be it because the task is actually to understand the Bible better and and and to do so in public so that it's always open to people to come back and say no you're misreading this and in some cases as youx will know some of my own research students have said despite what Dr Wright says here it is in fact the case that Paul does this and that and I love those moments because when I was examining doctoral dissertations I would always be a bit suspicious if half the footnotes were to the candidate's own supervisor I would think well come on you not got any independent thoughts so if one of my students and you will know who I'm talking about was saying H here's something which right seems to have ignored then wow good great that's what that's how the discipline advances and it's some of those insights which have helped me with some of the Romans eight book which we're actually talking about so sorry that's a very short version Wonder yeah no I love that I love that a couple thoughts that I had when you were talking is I I've been doing a little bit more work in public spaces and so I pay attention and your name comes up from time to time you know people you're you're big famous scholar and so people like to um you know take different angles on on things and if they can score points or whatever but one of the things that always amuses me about that is knowing you you know um you love when people disagree with you actually and and because it creates dialogue and um yeah it's um that that's one of the things I always loved about the seminars that we had at St Andrews it was let's argue it out around the table and then let's go have a beer at the pub and we we still friends at the end of the day and I I always really love that the other thing too that you said that really struck me is um there is definitely within the more theological conservative circles a reactionary fear-based tendency when when it comes to biblical studies and that has often set the agenda I would say just from my perspective I think even more so in American evangelicalism um I I know it's the case in Britain as well but one of the things I really appreciated about British scholarship was it wasn't just purely take over everything from Germany or reject everything from Germany it was Forge a new way in conversation with Germany as it were and and I I appreciated that because I felt like there was just independent critical thinking not all or nothing and and that was that was really wonderful um I mean somebody asked me the other day in an email which books should I read which books do you think are setting out the right path for understanding Paul today and I instanced some obvious things like obviously Richard Hayes and and several others and Mike Gorman and so on but I said you know what I have learned even more from people like kman with whom I disagree radically on some things and Charles Cranfield very very different with whom I disagree radically about other things but figuring out when you read a sentence and think I don't think that's right but what is it that's wrong about it and try to work that out those are the real learning moments for me yeah and once you sort of shed the fear then then yeah there's there's all sorts of possibilities open in front of you yes that's a good point I get book I request for book recommendations all the time as well and my my tension is always are they going to think when I recommend this book I'm endorsing everything in the book because many of the books I want to recommend are books that I really strongly disagree with on some points but they help stimulate my thinking and so when you ask a Biblical scholar to recommend a book just keep that in mind everyone that we think about books in different ways sometimes um I wanted to ask you to uh one more question about that kind of theological education as you sit back and kind of reflect on your time you know studying and Oxford in the 70s with cared and vermesh and some of these other great Giants and and you kind of look back and think about where we are now today uh very different time theological education for some might feel like it's a a bit of a cacophony in terms of different voices at the table but maybe in a good way you could look at it also as a as a symphony I suppose it depends on what metaphor you want to use um but also theological education is is in crisis in some ways in that higher educ in general is in crisis uh the church in the west is in some ways declining in other ways not um but a lot of the established institutions that were typically the model through which theological education was delivered are facing New Economic challenges and so forth I'd just be curious to hear kind of your thoughts as both as you think about where biblical studies has gone in your the span of your career and then also what challenges you see on the horizon but maybe also hopes you have for biblical studies wow yeah I mean I I try I've tried since leaving St Andrews to step back from the detailed um almost day-to-day or week to we week by week um academic politics um whether it's College politics or or within the discipline and by I haven't because of my health the last year I haven't been to any conferences so I haven't been listening to the buzz that's going on around what I would say here in Oxford I this is slightly taking your question into a different area but it's the best way I can answer it I think um here in Oxford I'm attached to wlif Hall which is one of the Anglican seminaries here in Oxford and I was in there this morning for morning prayer as I go in each day the term has just begun this last week and the chapel is full the Lively student body um it's really exciting to feel these Bright Young Minds most of them uh young and I think most of them bright as well um coming in and offering for Ministry and uh ready to be trained and my colleagues there um teaching them and uh one of them was half grumbling half celebrating to me yesterday that there are so many students in his class he's got twice the number of essays to read each week that he was expecting from last year but he said you know that that's a great thing because the the the the hall is thriving um so that there's all sorts of good things happening at the same time I think there's been a confusion in Britain about what theology is what academic theology is and as always and this goes way back does biblical studies belong with something called theology or is it part of religious studies or how does that all work I don't see any emerging consensus there um I hear a lot of voices some of which I thoroughly approve of some of which make me scratch my head a bit um and I'm I'm waiting to see who as it were the next generation is going to um going to emerge because several of the people a little bit younger than me are coming up to retirement I mean people like John Barkley and Durham um people like my colleague here in Oxford Marcus bmu I don't know how long he's got to go but it can't be that long before retirement I imagine um I wonder who the next generation are going to be um are there any people making significant waves in the discipline um George Van Coten who's the New Testament Prof in Cambridge um he's a brilliant brilliant guy from from the Netherlands but now um teaching in the UK and uh so I don't always again I don't always agree with what George says but my goodness he's he's a leader he's going places and I hope and pray there will be more such um but we need we need to keep our foot on the pedal and we need to make it clear to the Next Generation Um not least people training for ordination or whatever or the people who are doing a theology course that this this the study of scripture is one of the most intellectually culturally personally exciting things you could wish to do with your brain for the rest of your life I mean it just goes on being stimulating and challenging and I think back to the something you said before there has been a sort of standoff between biblical studies and theology philosophical theology Systematic Theology and you're right in America this has often been conservative theologians holding aloof from what the Bible is actually all about and saying well what we really have to do is to go to the fourth and fifth century to NAA to seeden and then to or maybe just skip to the 16th century or or now these days to go to the Middle Ages to Thomas aquinus and and to to allow him to set the agenda and there are many within the older Evangelical world who who are going that route and I'm thinking hang on guys what about this thing called the Bible which you claim um is your Authority and and often and I think the trouble is I may have said this to you before the trouble is that a lot of people when they study the theology they do Bible in the first year and they probably get dragged through all the old critical issues like Jed and P for the pentat like the source criticism of the synoptic gospels and they think was it for this that I signed on to read theology what's this got to do with God and the world and the gospel and then they switch to um the patristic period or the medievals or the Reformation they think ah this is more like it this is the real stuff and then the Bible becomes that funny stuff we did at the beginning and so they refer back to it when they want a proof text but they're not actually letting the Bible set the agenda and what I'm still trying to do in this book and other ones that I'm trying to write at the moment is to let the Bible set the agenda and to challenge some of the easy fasile I think assumptions of some of the systematic theologians now yeah because you know my gford lectures you will see where that takes me within that debate but that's a whole other topic which we into today or you question before uh sem Seminary is Cemetery have you ever heard anybody use that before that that's pretty common in the US really what's funny is I was actually I was walking in today and I had this that that thought and what you were describing biblical studies as basically is it's morg work it's treating the text as a cadaver so any wonder if you're if you're treating the text in the morg you might feel like you're on the way to the cemetery afterwards wow but but you're right yeah yeah but it's it's it's a worry about history um the sort of uncontrollability of history and the fact that history might tell you new things that you didn't expect um and particularly many people in conservative Traditions are worried that if you let Jesus be a real human being then you may somehow diminish his divinity which of course is flatly against NAA and Caledon which insists on the full Humanity Etc but I go back to that line from Henry adick which I quoted in my GFS that if you started off with Na and Caledon and said now they they're talking about Jesus who who exactly was this Jesus you would never guess from ner and Caledon that Jesus was anything like what we see in Matthew Mark Luke and John this Savvy friendly funny grieving um Sovereign but sensitive human being going around being kind to as I've often said old ladies stray dogs and small children you know I mean it's just there's a sense of the the thatness of the real Jesus which is so much richer than what you would get from this very God and very man sort of thing which I mean very God and very man is fine is a Shand but it doesn't begin to get and then when you say with John 1118 no one has ever seen God but the only begotten God who's in the bosom of the father he's revealed him so when we look at this Jesus we find out who God is and so much theology has tried to do it the other way so said let's start off by proving God and getting a classical picture of God with all the attributes that he's omnipresent and omnipotent and Omni this and omy that phew and then oh then then there is Jesus who died for our sins how does that actually work and the Bible itself says don't do it like that in fact you can't do it like that You' got to go the Jesus route and that's when people get scared because they're not sure they can control that it may not come out where they want anyway that again is the whole other discussion but it really really is important right now yeah that's really well said the biggest thing I find that's a challenge for people is to take seriously the humanity of Jesus and and that's connected to taking seriously the humanity of scripture as well AB those two things are really closely connected I see that yeah amen all right so let's let's get into the book then it's been what 20 years since you wrote a commentary on Romans uh in the new international commentary and um and now is that is that right new interpreters new interpreters yes thank you new interpreters yes I think great series um so why why now a book on Romans 8 in particular I mean I'm kind of setting you up here obviously we've had conversations before about our love for Romans 8 so but just for for our our audience and everything like what what is it about Romans 8 that said you know humanly speaking it was a happy accident part of the deal that I have with withall where I'm teaching part-time is that once a year I do a series of Bible expositions which happen on Monday mornings for the whole college and they come in it's basically morning prayer but it's almost entirely Bible Exposition so I did my first year there I think I did 2 Corinthians my second year I did Philippians um and then I think this must have been my third year yes it was my third year I said to the principal you know I've done whole books but it might be fun to take one chapter and actually go down right into the weeds and look at all the little words and all the meanings of individual words and show then how the jigsaw gets put back together again and encourage the students into the task of doing it that way for themselves so I took a whole term I think it was eight or possibly nine lectures and I I simply unpacked um each section of Romans 8 three or four verses at a time and in doing that I started to see all sorts of things which I hadn't seen when I was writing the comment 20 years before and of course a lot had changed in that time because when I wrote the commentary um I was only just beginning to think through what I would now Loosely call Temple theology in the New Testament um and I was only just beginning to work out what it meant that in Romans 7 and 8 Paul is telling the story of Israel and the church as a continuous whole um with Exile at the end of chapter 7 and then coming through into the rebuilding of the temple in chapter 8 so that when he talks about the indwelling of the spirit this is Temple language and the temple is then going to be rebuilt hence the resurrection and all of that I needed to work that out and then there was stuff which was bubbling up in the seminar in in St Andrews about the meaning of the very dark passage um of Romans 81 18-28 which so many people skip over because they assume that this is simply a dark tunnel you have to go through on the way to Salvation without real and then then the thing which really strikes me is that so many commentators and I think I did it myself treat the little passage on prayer in verses 26 and 27 as though it's just like a detached comment on prayer as though Paul is just tossing in a couple of lines about prayer and rather puzzling lines at that which is a way of saying we haven't yet understood the passage because actually that comment about prayer about the the wordless lament that arises is from the heart that is indwelt by the spirit in the midst of the world that is in pain this is the very heart of the Christian vocation and and so verses 12 to 30 are about vocation not salvation Salvation is the larger ho within that the vocation of the image bearing Christian is to be the people who are in prayer at the place where the world is in pain so that the so that God the Holy Spirit may be right there in that place interceding to the father and thereby creating us according to the pattern the image of Jesus himself that cruciform shape so it it's it's like that those verses verses 26 and 27 are a kind of Pauline equivalent of the Cry of dereliction on the cross in Matthew and Mark my God why did you abandon me the spirit the heart of the world in that is in pain is wordlessly lamenting and as I I think I say in the book when even the third person of the Trinity has no words to say how awful things are then you know things are pretty bad but that's what's going on in order that creation as a whole may be redeemed and when I was doing those lectures in um whenever it was a year and a half ago was just coming up the beginning of the invasion of Ukraine and I remember thinking oh my goodness here is a very obvious place where the world is in pain what are we supposed to be doing there we're supposed to be in lament because there are no words to say how terrible this is like many other things in the world sorry I'm I'm getting launched on a sermon now but you see where I'm going I love it yeah no I love it we had the second episode I did on the podcast was with a Psalm scholar my colleague here at the University and we spent quite a bit of time talking about lament and that's it's been interesting that's been a theme that's come up several times with different guests um because I think a lot of people are sensing that this is uh well first of all you know the scriptures and the Psalms in particular give us these really rich resources for practicing this well but it's like we haven't at least in many Traditions haven't really taken seriously that this is part of our vocation as Christians to step into this space of lament that's exactly right I mean I I have enjoyed in a measure the culture of worship songs I I still love the old hymns and I love properly sung Psalms and so on but there is something very refreshing about particularly young people coming in and simply praising God uninhibitedly and again and again the worship songs are praising him for salvation for rescuing us etc etc I was thinking the other day do you know lament is itself paradoxically part of worship because as we are worshiping God the Creator God the lifegiver we are doing so as people whose feet are very firmly in the suffering world and when we are then worshiping God who is the lover of the world who made the world and loves it and has redeemed it in Christ and is redeeming it by the spirit then it's totally appropriate precisely as part of worship not as an aside from worship to say and by the way things are a fair old mess right now and as we worship you we trust that you are aware of this and that you are going to act like the psalmist saying come on Lord wake up why are you still asleep Psalm 44 which Paul alludes to a couple of times in Romans 8 um and and so finding ways of nesting appropriate lament within appropriate worship without people feeling as though the steam has just gone out of the worship service because suddenly everyone's gone sad you know that that that wouldn't be the point the point is we're bringing all of life into the presence of God and part of that is bound to me and I've often said to the students when you're preaching or leading worship when you look down at a congregation from your perch on the podium or whatever every face you see is hiding some secret sorrow and they may not want to tell you about it just yet but recognize that that is in fact the case and that when we lament we are enabling those people to bring that into their worship as well that's really really important as part of part of normal Christian Life I would say mhm that's um it's really well said yeah I'm I'm really glad that that uh we were able to hear that from you because I think that's just so so important um okay so I want to get into a couple of details that you get you draw out in Romans 8 but maybe just before if we could just real quickly take a step back Romans is obviously this is important sprawling book people often treat it as like Paul Suma you know of his of his Theology and there's all these different kind of approaches to Romans but one really popular way of treating Romans especially in the Evangelical circles is this Romans road kind of peac meal fashion um it's a kind of way of trying to articulate the gospel using tidbits of Romans what what what's the danger of kind of peac mealing Romans and where do you actually see the the flow of the argument and where Romans 8 falls into that yeah I mean I I I I need to be careful because there are a lot of people who are Christians today because somebody sat them down and walked them through the Romans road and they believed and thanked God for it and they may have moved into quite different places now but um I'd much rather people were doing that than that they were being told oh you can't believe anything these days or you ought to be a Buddhist or whatever you know no um if the Romans road is about the God who made the world about Jesus dying for you and about this meaning that God is reaching out in love to embrace you and you have to respond with faith well great let's do it it but then now let's take a deep breath and actually see what it is talking about and the danger and this is where of course I'm fully expecting to be labeled as a heretic yet again is that the thing I'm trying to write a book about at the moment it's in bits on my desk at the moment um is is the the basic Insight that most western Christians think that the aim of the game is to go to heaven when you die or for your soul to go to heaven when you die most western non Christians think that's what Christianity is all about as well but that's simply wrong that the whole Bible from Genesis to Revelation is about God wanting to come and dwell with his human creatures within his renewed creation so the strap line at the end of The Book of Revelation isn't the dwelling of humans is with God it's the dwelling of God is with humans and the aim is not as with Disciples of Thomas aquinus that the soul should go on its way on its long journey and finally end up glimpsing the face of God Jesus when asked please will you show us the father Jesus says if you've seen me you've seen the father and that that is the message of John's gospel and actually of the whole new testament if you want the beatific Vision look hard at Jesus so now the Romans road is predicated on the western assumption that what's stopping us getting all the way up to heaven is that we're Sinners God needs to deal with our sins so that we can get there whereas the Old Testament sacrificial system and the New Testament reappropriation of that round Jesus is all about how God deals with our sin not so that we Sinners can get to heaven but so that God can come and dwell with us because he can't dwell with us if we're still sinful and that's how sacrifices work they cleanse the the temple the worshippers so that God may come and dwell so that already there's a significant shift and we see that working out in what we call in the trade christology and pneumatology the picture of Jesus is God with us as in Matthew but also in Paul and all over the place the picture of the spirit is also God With Us and in us so that the spirit isn't simply the one who comes to give us a nudge and give us a a slightly happier time while we're waiting to go on to heaven the spirit is if you like this is what God always intended for his own Other Self his own third self if I can put it like that God always wanted to come and dwell in and with with his human creatures and that's the glory of of of Romans 5 to8 especially Romans 8 so that um the Romans road is much better and bigger and in some way darker than we might have imagined because it isn't just oh dear I'm a sinner few God of sent Jesus um he died therefore I go to heaven it's no we are sinful but the problem with our sin is that it's it's not just it's holding us back from going to heaven it's stopping us being genuine humans in Romans 5 Paul says those who receive the gift of righteousness will reign in life this is the theme of the royal priesthood which you find all the way from Exodus 19 to Revelation 20 um this is the image bearing humans who are to be representing the Praises and prayers of the world before God and representing the wise stewardship of God over his creation that is the human vocation and the reason we're set free from our sins is not so that we can lie back and do nothing forever it's so that we can be genuine humans at last but the present mode of that genuine humanness includes as I said before the dark Passage through the lament in which the spirit intercedes with us and for us and for the world with inarticulate groanings so that the Glorious picture of Romans 8 is the end of the of the real Romans road of of Romans 1:8 anyway of course what then happens is that Paul is now set himself up to address the two big areas one the whole Covenant relationship with Israel and two who are we then called to be as the church but that Romans road is all about God coming to dwell with us in the Messiah and by the spirit that's great yes so the kind of the I'd like to drill down a little bit for people I I think I have a good sense of what you mean by true human but I think it would be great to unpack that like what what is going on here um Paul says in Romans 8 towards the end um right before the big Assurance passage we're being conformed into the image of Christ yeah um and that seems to me to be that when we think about salvation right especially in the tradition that I'm familiar with you know American Evangelical Traditions salvation is almost always articulated as a past event we we say things like I got saved and what Paul is saying here is well our final Destin is full Conformity to the image of Christ and what you're talking about here with vocation is really participation in that kind of humanity which I think you're glossing is true Humanity so how does that work for Paul in in Romans right right well as you know I go back to the whole idea of the image of God in Genesis 1 and I read that the same way that Old Testament Scholars Like Richard Middleton read it that the image is like the angled mirror reflecting God into the world and reflecting the world back to God so the sovereignty of God over the world that's the Royal bit of the royal priesthood and then the prayers and praises and laments of the world being passed on back to the Creator as it were so the mirror is operating in both directions but the point about the image then is that creation is a temple a heaven plus Earth structure with an image at its heart anyone in the ancient world would know that was a temple and if it's the temple then uh when God remakes the temple which is Jesus and his people together as we see in the temple theology in John and Paul and and Revelation in the New Testament then um we are called to be the image bearers at the heart of that new Temple and part of the point of that is that humans are to enable the church to be the church and the church just like the temple in the Old Testament was a sign and foretaste of New Creation this is a major Insight which has been bubbling up all over the place in scholarship over the last 20 or 30 years um and I think just in a sidebar the reason we've missed it up till now is that in much Protestant theology the temple has sounded too churchy or possibly too Jewish possibly too Roman Catholic so people haven't wanted to go there but actually once we get over those Hang-Ups and see what's really going on this is an enormously exciting way of approaching biblical Theology and it means that humans are designed to play a god-given and god- enabled active role within God's purposes in and for the world in other words humans are not simply passive creatures who either are sinful or going to be rescued from sin end of conversation humans are designed to be God's means of working in the world so in Genesis 1 when God makes humans in his own image it's so that he can then work through them God wants to work through humans I I'll tell you a funny story which I'm going to use in a sermon on Sunday night because it's germine to this a few months ago uh two of my grandchildren were sitting at our lunch table and the six-year-old Leo um said grandfa if God does everything why do we have to do anything at all and while I was thinking oh my goodness great question he he bubbled over and he said again if God is responsible for everything why should we be responsible for anything at which point his sister who is 11 who had had her nose in a book like this she lifted her head from the book and said ah the illusion of Free Will and div dived straight back into the book again you know it was with the tone of voices oh we did that in second year you know um but but I thought that's such a great question because so many Christians think that either God does something or we do it and if we're saying God is great and he does everything then we sit back put on dressing gown and slippers and we're just sort of riding along but actually the whole point of making humans in God's image is because God wants to work in and through humans and the reason he does that in Genesis 1 is because God makes a world in which it will be utterly appropriate for him to come himself in the person of the second person of the Trinity and to become human as the utterly appropriate thing for him to do and then to send his Spirit to enable as in Genesis 2 already to enable human beings to become his Partners in his project first of creation and then ultimately a new creation and so when I see that verse Romans 8:29 about um we're to be conformed to the image of his son so that he might be the first born among a large family Jesus as the human being the first born among this family of humans who are at last becoming what humans were meant to be partners with God in the world of New Creation that's a wonderful vocation and of course it's difficult for us because if you stop and look in the mirror and think goodness is God the spirit at work in me right now help what's that going to look like then it might paralyze you um with a sense of inadequacy or whatever Paul says who is sufficient for these things which is why I say to people before everything that you do as you mentioned before you pray you invoke the spirit you pray and you trust and then you use all the powers of mind and body and spirit that God has given you to do the task that lies before you and you trust that even though it may be flawed in various ways God the spirit will be present and will work through you so that that's what I see going on there but you need this big picture of what it means to be image bearers which then carries you right the way through it's beautiful one of the ways that you mentioned the book that you're thinking has evolved also along with temple I mean it's intimately connected with it it's this theme of glory and how that how that ties in we we often think about glorification in kind of abstract terms like we're going to be glorified with Jesus what does that mean um it seems to me and I from what I hear you saying I think we agree in agreement on this it has it has both an ontological and a vocational Dynam Dimension to it the two can't really be separated so what what's going on with Glory with Glory language here because I mean Paul says early on right they that the the wrath of God has poured out on human beings they've they've exchange the the you know the glory of God for these images and then Romans 3:23 um you know we we've all we all all fall short or lack lack or bereft of the glory of God so Glory seems to be this theme running throughout I don't like fall short because it seems like glory is this sort of standard we have to like measure up to but I think it's more than that for for Paul it's um it's an actual uh yeah ontological reality that's that we we we've turned from God's God's glory and that leads to a downfall in our own glory and action um yeah so I'd love to hear your thoughts on that it's a funny thing because my own supervisor Professor George K wrote his doctoral dissertation on glory in the New Testament and uh that's that's never been published interestingly it's it's a very detailed technical word study but then some theological conclusions coming out of it um and I gave a copy of that to um one of my students who you will remember Haley gorens and Jacob as she now is who's now teaching not so far from where you are further north Woodworth college in Washington state um and uh Haley ran with it into her dissertation which was on Romans 8 and she was emphasizing the way in which there glory is picking up the theme from Psalm 8 where Psalm 8 says what are humans you've made them little low than the angels to Crown them with Glory and Honor putting all things in subjection under their feet in other words this is part of the human vocation to be the ones vested with God's sovereignty over the world and Haley followed that through in her dissertation which is now published and I refer to it in the book at the same time uh an old dear friend of mine car Newman who now works for Fortress press he did his dissertation on glory and he was emphasized izing the Divine Glory revealed in Jesus revealed in the Resurrection the sense of divine Glory bursting into the world apocalyptically and doing new things and transforming reality etc etc and I've said to both of them often uh I think we need to have both actually um and both of them have resisted this it's funny because I did some lectures on the same Romans 8 passage in Texas um 18 months ago or 15 months ago now and I it was in Waco and I was actually staying with Carrie and his wife Leanne while I was doing these so Carrie and I were discussing this and still not agreeing but that that's that's this is how scholarship works you you live with these tensions but so the point would be this when you talk about the hope of glory in the first century and Paul talks in Romans 5 about we rejoice in the hope of the glory of God if you say to a Jew what is the hope of glory they'll take you back to Isaiah chapter 40 um that that uh the the All Flesh shall see the glory of God um that the glory the glory of the Lord shall be revealed and All Flesh shall see it together and it becomes clear this is Yahweh returning to Zion this is what it's going to be when Yahweh after the Exile comes back to Jerusalem at last Isaiah 52 The Watchmen will lift up their voices and Shout for Joy because they see the glory of God returning to Zion they never say it's happened but Isaiah and Malachi and people say it will happen um and because of the new temple theme in Romans 8 it seems to me that's utterly appropriate that the glorification is the spirit coming as in 2 Corinthians 3 the spirit coming to enable the Divine glory to dwell in and with God's people so that they really do constitute the new Temple but at the same time this is the Fulfillment of Psalm 8 because when human beings are vested with the Glorious divine Spirit then they become the psalm 8 people who are set in authority over the world and these two belong together this is why the way in which pneumatology directly reflects christology the Divine and human are made for one another so that it's got to be both so that for me one of the big um transformations of my reading of Romans 8 is those he justified them he also glorified does not mean when you've said a prayer so that you now know your saved that means you're going to heaven heaven is not mentioned in this passage indeed the inheritance of the Christian In this passage is not heaven it's the new creation that's very clear um and when he says those he justified them he also glorified this is a direct echo of the Greek version the septent of Isaiah 45 when it's it's the vocation of Israel as the people of God to be the ones in whom God's glory comes to dwell so that they will be his agents his vice jant if you like in then looking after his world and bringing about his new creation which at a stroke undercuts a lot of the debates which the church has had for hundreds of years about predestination and election focused on verses 29 and 30 so there's all sorts of new things which are bubbling up when we read this the way that I'm convinced Paul was writing it yeah that's great and I think we see the the role of the spirit throughout as you know as you were mentioning I there seems to me there's there's several moves of the spirit being the one that leads so being led by the spirit having the mind or the mindset that that's that's of the spirit the spirit is the spirit of God which is the spirit of Christ um the spirit is as we mentioned the one that provides the mind of God to the believer but then also even when the believer is unable reflects the mind of God back to God in prayer and lament and then the spirit provides the Assurance to the believer of the resurrected and enthroned Christ so it's like we got like the whole kind of framework of the Christian Life there in some ways which is really really exciting um what what are your thoughts about how the spirit is here empowering um people to walk and to live out as Paul says the the the the tellos of God's God's good instruction in in the law even yeah I mean one of the things that came to me very powerfully when I was doing these expositions was the the moral rigor of chapter 8: um 5 through n particularly where he's talking about the mind of the flesh is hostile to God doesn't submit to God's law indeed it can't very interesting that um but you but you are not in the flesh you are in the spirit now of course he doesn't mean that we've ceased to be physical people um he's using In the Flesh there in the sort of restrictive sense of determined by the SARS which is the human nature which is corruptible and decaying and inclined to sin Etc we are not determined by that we are determined by the spirit which is a huge Challenge and goes on being I think throughout our lives but then in 8: 12 and following it's in a sense even more rigorous we are debtors not to the flesh to live according to the flesh if you are determined to live according to the flesh you will die but if by the spirit you put to death the Deeds of the body you will live now this actually puts a question mark against the kind of easygoing doctrine of assurance which says oh I put my hand up in a meeting when I was 14 years old therefore I'm going to heaven whatever else I do and the answer is um have another look here because unless by the spirit this is ongoing then the very fact of whatever happened when you were 14 years or older whenever it was might be called into question because if that was real then the spirit ought to be dwelling in you and if the spirit's dwelling in you then there has to be moral change moral um moral living and that that that remains a challenge as I say you know as a preacher and Pastor myself remains a challenge for me remains a challenge to everyone to whom I've ever been a pastor but you can't write it out of Romans 8 just because we believe in justification by faith and no condemnation Paul is very clear no condemnation but then the no condemnation is because of the spirit's work the law of the spirit of life in Messiah Jesus has set you free from the law of sin and death etc etc etc what God has done in Christ and is now doing by the spirit backs up that no condemnation so you can't have the no condemnation which is justification without having the work of Messiah and the spirit and if the spirit then then that moral challenge which comes so powerfully in particularly 8 12 to 15 really yeah no that that's really well said and I I've often thought to I think the reason why so many Christians over the course of church history and today have read their own experience into the latter part of Romans 7 is precisely because it is a challenge and it it it takes out it takes ongoing work and rigor and submission to the spirit the the the difference is is chapter 7even the eye there is quite defeated and abely and that's not the the the call of the the Christian Life precisely because for Paul the spirit is at work in the in the life of the believer exactly I mean this was a big shift for me in the late 1970s because through the 1970s when I was doing my main original work on Romans I was with Cranfield and dun who were saying Romans 7 7-25 is a picture of the Christian Life because uh if you have anything else you become arrogant if you think you've left Romans 7 behind watch out you're fooling yourself because actually you you are still sinning and you never become sinlessly perfe perfected in this life and and if you'd grown up with people preaching um oh you can have this second blessing and then you'll never sin again in your life if you grown up with that preaching you probably needed an antidote to it um Charles Haden Spurgeon the great Baptist in the Victorian era was very hot on this is this is not about becoming sinlessly perfect but the problem is that's not what Romans 7 is about we I think particularly in the last 400 years in the Protestant West we have been looking for either an Autos salutis or a kind of a theological description of stages in the Christian Life like people going back to Acts chapter two and saying oh my goodness this is Pentecost have I had that Pentecostal experience or when this when Peter and John go to Samaria and lay hands on them have I had the experience of a Samaritan that's not what act is about that's a very modern set of questions in the same way to read Romans 7 and8 that way is simply misleading Romans 7 7-2 is I I now see completely clearly I think I think is Paul's description as a Christian of the theological position of Israel according to the flesh which because it was Paul's own position and in a sense he is still because these are his kins folk according to the flesh he doesn't want to say them or they he says I in order to identify with that plight um so it's it's a very clever piece of writing but it seems to me clearly that that's the way you got to go anyway um I do spend a bit of time on that because after all the first word of Romans 8 in mostl yeah no no it's therefore is therefore if you say therefore we need to know what what went immediately before and how how all that works logically right yeah so you're not persuaded by those who argue that the the eye there is um I mean there's different ways of thinking about it but but there's one way to think about it is the eye is um a gentile convert who is trying to take on the law as a sort of moral therapy yeah no no I I mean there's been a fashion at the moment as you will know um and it's partly associated with those who call their movement poor within Judaism which is I spent my life studying the world of ancient Judaism and putting Paul into the middle of it so you know excuse me by what right do you guys have have that title all to yourselves but but there's been a desperate push to make Paul um uh simply say this gospel is great for Gentiles but of course Jews can stay as good Jews and that's okay too I mean that's people like Paula Fredericks and and so on and that has been very popular because it seemed to be post Holocaust sensitivities about Jewish people Etc which I I totally understand that's where I began in my whole Pauline studies really was with an awareness of that question but when you have Romans 21:17 following um if you call yourself a Jew um the idea that this might be a gentile who is calling him or herself a Jew and that Paul is critiquing them takes no account of what Paul is doing exegetically there he's working with the old testament which is critiquing Israel in Exile and so on with Ezekiel and Jeremiah and so on and and then all the way to the great climax of Romans in Romans 15 um and 14 and 15 but 151 to13 welcome one another therefore as the Messiah welcomed you Jews and Gentiles so that you may with one heart and voice glorify the God and father of our Lord Jesus Christ for Paul this is the single family and it's Jews and Gentiles together so all these different attempts to say oh this isn't really about Jews it's really about Gentiles I I I just think it doesn't retically and and I can see why people find that attractive it's interesting that part of that movement are some who are themselves agnostics or atheists who I think are trying to reduce Paul's gospel to saying uh here's a way of spirituality which if it suits you fine and if it doesn't that's fine too sort of thing and and that's that's just a nonsense um I I'm quite glad I'm not taking part in those debates at the moment because I I would get quite fed up with it but yeah it's up it's up to you guys you the Next Generation Well no it's good it's good to hear your your thoughts on that I know Paul Sloan whom we both we both know obviously uh he just published an article in um jts um coming back to this Romans 2 issue and he's got a very interesting argument that it is in fact he takes a lot of I mean he he he says he learns a lot from the Paul within Judaism approach and that you know but he he rejects that that that that's a gentile the so-called Jew uh and what his argument is is that Paul Paul is arguing basically against a Jew who's standing uh in the the sort of the that final generation as it were um that that where there's the final hardening kind of uh thing so I have to interact more with him but uh but it's but it's an interesting kind of way of caring forward the conversation colleague my colleague Peter headed who teaches New Testament at wickliff was telling me yesterday he's had an article accepted I think in the journal New Testament studies um on the Romans 15 passage precisely making the point that I just made which is actually echoing him about the the mutual welcome of Jews and Gentiles within the one body of Christ but he's making that being Peter he's doing that on linguistic as well as other grounds which that's wonderful that be yeah I'll look forward to seeing that yeah it was funny to I wanted to your your point about um you know the the whole order salutis and getting all these kind of things together I think the last 400 years if they've taught us anything it's that moving justification to the beginning of the process or um um or or saying that the works are are the evidence of the faith that save us neither of those things really assuage the anxiety of people they might even heighten it in some ways um I I think that we have enough data now for hundreds of years to show us that so yeah we we may need to kind of just be willing to move beyond that and and embrace very interesting yes I mean I have often heard people talking about justification by faith as if you really believe it you will never have any anxieties about anything which of course isn't true to Paul either because Paul had several anxieties which is quite clear even though he tells us not to he himself did and he talks about it but but out beyond that um it's clear in Romans that justification is both future and present you know they will be justified chapter 2 then just then the verdict is brought forward into the present but then in Romans 8 we're looking ahead to the Future Law Court um it it is God who justifies who is to condemn and one of the things that came out to me in this book particularly was the Assurance not just uh of yes you'll go to heaven when you die or indeed the proper version of that which is yes you will be raised from the dead on the last day when God renews the whole creation but also you in Rome at the moment who I think Paul prophetically senses that horrible persecution is likely to land on them any minute now as indeed it did within a decade of him writing this letter um the neonian persecution that that that he's saying neither death nor life nor angels nor principalities nor rulers nor this nor that nothing can separate in other words it's an assurance about when you're going through suffering and trouble when when you're this tiny little group meeting for prayer Dangerously in the back room of somebody's shop or in an a tenement that might catch fire any minute you know think of the the groty parts of ancient Rome um then nevertheless if God is for us who can be against us and so it's a kind of practical assurance that we here in this room in praying for the spirit to be with us can know that whatever happens whatever they throw at us um this is who we are and God is for us and that that's a wonderful thing which I think of you know devout Christians at the moment in China or Ukraine or Syria or um Ethiopia or wherever boy do they need this message right now and we in the comfortable West we shiver in our shoes as we think of what they must be going through but actually we need to be sympathizing with them and praying these passages on their behalf like we pray the lament Psalms on their behalf as that's what Assurance is it's not just do I know know that I'm going to heaven it's it's do I know that in all these things we are more than conquerors that that's the real enough of it yeah that's really good your stuff on Assurance in the book is really really awesome um theologically and pastorally would you say for Paul Assurance is really as simple as looking to the person of Jesus looking at the love of God poured out in the Messiah Jesus and and then so when we think about you know challenges and various things what it what it does is it it calls us back to for lack of a better term the Christ event and forward to as you just suggested to solidarity with others who are presently in the groaning uh of our creation yeah absolutely I I had an email from somebody yesterday who asked me various complicated theological questions one of which was something about how can I know that I have really repented and stuff like that and and eventually looking at that I said you just stop looking at the mirror and asking what you look what what the inside of yourself looks like turn it the other way around and just read passages from the gospels and ask God to make the living Jesus real to you through those passages in the gospels because Assurance comes not from looking at myself and seeing if I've got some something which has happened though though please God you will but in looking away from myself into the Jesus who walks around saying don't be afraid or get out of the boat then and follow me or or deny yourself and follow me whatever it is and as Jesus is perceived to be addressing us and as stepping out of the passage and embracing us um that's when it isn't that we know because we know something about ourselves we know because we know something about him and and that's kind of seems to me that's part of the rhythm of genuine Christian life and all always needs to be yeah and it's not Assurance is not the same thing as certainty right I I think that's a lot a lot of people struggle with wanting wanting certainty they want like I I need all my questions answered right or we have a whole apologetics industry around basically assuring people we've got an answer for everything so if you're not a Christian you must be an idiot but but in fact it's not the same thing right I I think I think this is an American problem I think the American rational tradition which is a noble tradition which I honor and respect nevertheless it has maintained a certain kind of energy in America which it doesn't have in the rest of the world certainly not in Britain right now and that rationalist energy precisely is wanting the certainty and people will say well if God is God he must want us to be certain um and the answer no according to the New Testament because God is God he wants us to be faithful and being faithful means hanging in there in the dark as often as not um and of course there are times when things are so clear and answers to prayer come in such a way that you simply can't doubt them um but when that happens it's often because you are then going to go through another day or week or year or decade when you might be tempted to doubt it and you've needed that Moment of clarity in order to look back to it and say I I knew then I'm hanging on to that God did guide us in this direction and so we've got to go um and that's not certainty that's that's that's loyalty which is a very different thing yeah loyalty faith yeah I I was thinking a lot of life actually we have moments of life that maybe feel like Good Friday and some moments of life thank God that feel like Resurrection Sunday but probably most of life feels like holy Saturday which is that in between of yes lingering and questions and what is this where are we going with this you know and um and faith is is is is that Allegiance we H we hang on to the Messiah Jesus in that yeah that's great that's really wonderful yeah well i' I'd love to ask you 50 more questions but I want to honor your time and just say thank you so much um Tom for taking the time to bless our audience um thank you for writing this book I can't recommend it highly enough um it has my recommendation on the book so you can you read there but um but but yeah really um really enjoyed enjoyed it the when I saw the email from the publisher Tom wries got a book coming out on Romans 8 my heart skipped to beat because yeah again my favorite chapter in the whole Bible and my favorite scholar So yeah thank you you're very kind you're very kind thank Max thank you very much it's great to talk to you again and I hope it won't be too long before we do this again and in the meantime God bless you and God bless your listeners readers whatever awesome thank you thanks so much for watching this video If you enjoyed it please make sure you subscribe using the link below and check out some more of our videos