I don't mean to flood this site and my own with posts related to N.T. Wright. I honestly hadn't checked Christianity Today's web site in months (literally) until today, and I came across a new Dick Staub interview with Wright. I find that delightfully serendipitous, given my present reading in one of the man's books. Inspired by a new project Wright is releasing, a 12-volume series titled For Everyone in which Wright provides commentary for beginning students of God's Word, the interview covers a variety of subjects that have gotten repeated play here at The Thinklings. Some excerpts . . .

On the "distance" between theologians and the laypeople:

I read a quote from C.S. Lewis the other day, and he said, "The problem when I became a believer in England was that you were left with either the hysterical rantings of the fanatics, or the intellectual elite of the clergy." He said, "Had theologians been doing their work, I would have been unnecessary." Why is it so rare for academics to connect to the mass of people?

I think the answer is partly just sheer pressure of time. If you're an academic and you want to get tenure, or you want to maintain your credibility within the guild, you've probably got academic projects which you're eager to get on with and write articles, and books in order to get your main ideas out among your peers.

There's always the hope that they will trickle down to the ordinary folk in the churches. That sometimes happens and sometimes doesn't happen. One of the reasons that I left the academy some years ago and went into full-time work in the church instead was that I found I was getting more of a buzz myself out of meeting clergy who were at the [coal] face, if you like, than simply teaching undergraduates who wanted to know "How soon can we finish this tutorial and then I can get off and play tennis?"

A curious bit on biblical words for "hell" and what happens after life after death:

What does the everyday person need to understand about how hell is used in Jesus' teaching?

I think part of our difficulty is that we are still firmly plugged in to a medieval picture of heaven and hell, such as you find in Michelangelo's painting of the Cistine Chapel, such as you find in Dante's Inferno in Paradiso. We Protestants miss out the middle bit, the purgatory bit, but you've still got a medieval picture which is not a New Testament picture of people after death going either to the one place or to the other.

What would a Palestinian Jew in the first century have thought when they heard those words?

A Palestinian Jew would have used the word Gehenna and Gehenna is the rubbish heap on the southwest corner of Jerusalem. I was actually filming part of a television program about the Resurrection in Gehenna just a matter of months ago, and so I know the place quite well. There was always a to-and-fro between the idea of this smoldering rubbish heap, which was always burning away as they piled more stuff on, and the idea of an event or a state of being rather like that which would serve as a metaphor for the place where the people who rejected God would go eventually.

So much of the Bible is appropriately metaphorical and we need to know what it actually refers to. But much more important than that is to get into our heads what the New Testament really is banging on about, which is resurrection, which is not a synonym for going to heaven when you die, but is what is going to happen after that.

I've often said, heaven is important but it's not the end of the world. What the New Testament is on about is what I call "life after life after death." That is, resurrection life after whatever state we go into after death. The New Testament teaches a two-stage post-mortem eschatology. And it goes on and on about resurrection and says very little about the intermediate state, which we can call heaven if we like. It's very interesting that so much Western Christianity has focused on the intermediate state so much that it's forgotten that there is an ultimate resurrection. It thinks that heaven is all there is.

On popular eschatology and "evangelicalism lite":

It strikes me that these words go straight to the heart of a major flaw in American evangelicalism, which is the desire to be popular, the desire to be mainstream. There is a loss of the sense of exile, and speaking into the mainstream prophetically.

This is very strange, but in terms of the Left Behind series?and I know that's only one sub-branch of American evangelicalism, but it's very popular?that whole theology, dispensationalism, started off as the literature of the oppressed, of the tiny minority for whom the rest of the world is going to hell and this very small group would be saved. That's very ironic now that literature is sustaining the mainstream, right-wing ideology, where you've got the anti-Christ turns out to be the head of the UN, he's a kind of a Kofi Annan figure who is allowed power because there's a weak democratic president.

It's very bizarre to see the way in which this ideology, which started out as a beleaguered minority thing, has become mainstream and therefore does not even realize just how compromised it is with so many things that are going wrong in our world right now.

On "engaging the culture":

We hear the phrase, "engaging the culture" almost ad nauseam today. What you think it means truly to engage the culture, and what Jesus teaches us about the incarnation, being transforming. What does it mean from Jesus' life and teaching to engage the culture?

I'm not sure I would start with Jesus because Jesus was doing something unique and unrepeatable and he was not just being a model of how we should be good Christians. Jesus is not the first Christian in that sense. Jesus is the one who makes possible a way of life which we loosely call Christianity. And his achievement in his death and resurrection was thoroughly enculturated. It meant what it meant within the culture which God had prepared. Paul says, "When the time had fully come." God prepared that culture so that Jesus, by being thoroughly within the culture and doing what he had to do, would make the sense God wanted him to make.

We can then see Paul and the others going out and engaging their culture. Look at the Areopagus address in Acts 17. Paul begins by saying, "You've got an altar to the unknown god, well I'm going to tell you about this unknown god." Then he says, "You also have all these temples made with hands, but I'm going to tell you that the true God does not live in temples made with hands. He's not like that at all." So he's saying yes to this and no to that, and then he negotiates his way through stoicism and epicureanism and so on, engaging the culture all the way, quoting their own poets but showing that they might mean something different. Now, that's wonderful cultural engagement and it's not a matter of saying no to everything, it's not a matter of saying yes to everything, it's a matter of Christian discernment in seeing what is good, seeing what can be redeemed, what can be refreshed.

There's lots more good stuff in the interview, including questions on demons and spiritual warfare, homosexuality in the New Testament and in the Church, what "God's kingdom" and "take up your cross" really mean, coopting Jesus for political or social advantage, and the radical call of discipleship. Go read the whole thing if you get a chance.