Socrates in the City

Conversations on Life, God and Other Small Topics

Eric Metaxas

• Publisher: Collins
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9780007461066
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

Simply Christian: Why Christianity Makes Sense

N. T. WRIGHT

October 27, 2006

Introduction

Good evening, and welcome to Socrates in the City, the thinking person’s alternative to doing macramé and decoupage.

My name is Eric Metaxas. It is my pleasure to see so very many of you here this evening, almost as many of you as there are seats.

I have to say that I am genuinely amazed to see New Yorkers like yourselves, if not yourselves, come to a beautiful club to have a glass of wine and hear a brilliant speaker. It just amazes me. It just doesn’t add up. I don’t know why you are here, but I want to welcome you.

For those of you who have had a glass of wine, it should be taking effect right about now. You should begin feeling sleepy; your eyelids are feeling heavy, heavy. The room is warm; you just want to close them, don’t you? You just want to close them, but don’t, because it is offensive to the speaker. Don’t do that, okay? But you can do that later.

Tonight at Socrates in the City, it is our privilege to hear from Bishop N. T. Wright. Yes, once again, we at Socrates in the City deliver to you a speaker with a British accent. . . . These are authentic accents— every single one of them. Not a phony one that we have detected yet. The thing is our focus groups have told us that five to one, you prefer speakers with a British accent. We try to bring you what you asked for. Focus groups also tell us that any kind of a title is a plus. For you guys, tonight we found somebody with a title and a British accent.

If you end up not really caring for what the good bishop has to say, you take it up with the focus groups. I don’t want to hear about it, okay? We just gave you what you said you wanted in the surveys. Is that clear? Don’t take it up with me.

Look, we kid around, but Americans are undeniably fascinated with things British. Part of that is because of the richness of British history. We don’t have that here; we don’t have as much history. We Americans really trace our history no farther back than 1976, when Bruce Jenner won the gold medal in the Olympic decathlon. That is about as far back as we go with our history. Before that, it is all very hazy. We know very little. Vikings. Dinosaurs. We don’t know. It’s all a haze before Jenner took the gold.

But in Britain, they have such a rich history, and we value that. So, we are impressed by Britain and, of course, by British-accented speakers. We have had Jonathan Aitken and David Aikman, but to be fair, we can also be a little intimidated by the Brits, as I like to call them. Sometimes they are beyond our comfort zone. Who can forget a couple of months ago when Baroness Cox showed up in that magnificent embroidered silk gown? With the wimple and that preposterous starched ruff! Remember that huge starched ruff? Americans aren’t used to that. We are much more into jogging suits and comfortable clothing like that.

Remember when Sir John Polkinghorne showed up in the full suit of armor? Some of you were here for that. Putting his beaver up only to speak and to glower at us in that titled British way that I find just so un-American.

So, that side of British culture we can do without, thank you very much. To be perfectly honest, inviting British speakers is really something of a crap-shoot, isn’t it? You just don’t know what you’re going to get.

And I have to say that I think we’re probably all a bit relieved that the bishop hasn’t come in here with his miter and crosier and that whole thing. So, thank you in advance for not wearing that stuff. I always hate to bring up that kind of thing with the speakers in advance, but I have been stung twice before, and I think it’s just something I need to mention because it makes us uncomfortable.

So, tonight, of course, we are going to hear from Bishop N. T. Wright, who is speaking on the subject of his latest book, Simply Christian: Why Christianity Makes Sense.

Now, in case you didn’t know it, our speaker N. T. Wright is the Bishop of Durham. And strangely enough—I’m not making this up—this morning at seven a.m. at something called the New Canaan Society— which is a UFO cult that I am a part of up in Connecticut— I introduced a speaker whose last name is also Wright, same spelling, and who is a pastor. Guess where? Durham, North Carolina. Isn’t that creepy? What is God saying? It is freaking me out. But that is true.

So, Bishop Wright, you are the second pastoral figure named Wright from Durham that I have introduced today. That really is about enough. Two are my limit. Doctor’s orders. If there’s a third, I’m sorry, but I am going to have to excuse myself.

Anyway, the Wright that I introduced this morning had a North Carolina accent, and just as the silliest thing you, Bishop Wright, might say will sound brilliant because of your British accent, everything brilliant he said still sounded like he was just “a-pickin’ and a-grinnin’.”

That’s not fair, but there it is. That is just the way it is. Well, now the book we are going to hear about tonight, Simply Christian, is not entirely unlike a book I have written, titled Everything You Have Always Wanted to Know About God (but Were Afraid to Ask), not that my book is equal to the Bishop’s extraordinary work. But I believe that with the right marketing and distribution we can give you a run for your money, Bishop. I do, I do.

I wanted to say that I have to plug my second book for the evening. I have just been working on a biography of William Wilberforce, the eighteenth-century abolitionist. When we realized that we would have the privilege of hearing from Bishop Wright this evening and the term Bishop of Durham came up, I said, “This rings a bell. Bishop of Durham.” So, I searched through my manuscript, which is now being copyedited, and I found, in fact, that I had a little thing in there about the Bishop of Durham, circa 1795.

Since nobody really will dare stop me, I am going to read from my own manuscript. What can you do? You’re stuck.

But the scene is interesting. In 1795, things were not looking good for abolition. Wilberforce was really and truly struggling. It was just the dark night of the soul. Things were looking bad and people were starting to leave the movement. In the book, I mention how Wilberforce’s friend James Stephen came to visit him, all the way from the West Indies, to encourage him and everyone else to buck up. And so, when he finally showed up, he brought his whole family and three West Indian turtles with him to London. This is before you had to clear that kind of stuff with customs officials, right?

He decided to give these three West Indian turtles to William Wilber-force as a present. In a couple of years, Wilberforce would be married and have children and a menagerie of animals, but at this point he was single and could barely feed himself, much less take care of three turtles from another hemisphere. And so, quoting from my book here:

“So, Wilberforce gave the three West Indian turtles to his friend the Bishop of Durham, who, in turn, gave them to his cook. The cook, in his turn, gave them to several waiters, who gave them to the bishop’s guests at a banquet for fifty-five people, who all enjoyed them thoroughly and who were all— the bishop informed Wilberforce in his thank-you note— supporters of abolition.”

So, there you have it. Before we let you speak here, Bishop Wright, I just want to say, if anyone gives you a pet, you really mustn’t cook it. It is just not to be done. But that is what your forebear did. Is he your forebear? Can we describe him that way? Of course not.

Anyway, to be serious for a final paragraph. Bishop Wright is one of the world’s leading New Testament scholars, and we are thrilled to have him with us today. He was the Dean of Lichfield Cathedral and the Canon Theologian of Westminster Abbey. And he is currently, as we have said, the Bishop of Durham.

He has taught at Cambridge and Oxford universities and has written over thirty books. He has also been on numerous television programs, including ABC News, Dateline, and American Bandstand. That last one might be a typo; I don’t know.

As usual, our speaker will speak for thirty-five or forty minutes on the topic, after which we will have about the same length of time for questions and answers. There should be microphones set up. Do make your way to the microphone for Q & A at that point.

But without further ado, it is my privilege to introduce Bishop N. T. Wright.

Talk

Thank you very much. I don’t think I’ve ever had an introduction quite like that before, and I don’t think I’ll ever get one quite like that again. All that stuff about Britishness reminded me of something a friend told me not long ago.

My friend and former colleague John Bowater, who is a leading English theologian who used to trot across to America frequently for conferences, told me that one time he looked in his diary [planner] and discovered there was a conference at which he was supposed to give a paper. He had to get on a plane right away and hadn’t actually thought about what to say; so, he glanced at his diary to see what he was talking about, and it said, “God in the twenty-first century,” or something like that. So, he penned something very quickly, got to the conference, went straight to the platform, did his fifty-minute lecture, and reached his stirring conclusion about God: that, if the doctrine of the Trinity didn’t exist, it would be necessary to invent it.

There was thunderous applause, and as he sat down, the person next to him, said, “Very daring, very daring,” and he said, “Daring? Why? I thought that was rather orthodox.” And the man said, “This is a Unitarian conference.” He said, “So, why are they all applauding?” The man said, “They just love your accent.”

So, what I lack in clarity of thought I may make up in clarity of British speech.

But, now that I have been for the last three years, rather to my horror, a member of the House of Lords— you didn’t sufficiently rub that in, Eric!— I was reminded of the splendid moment some years ago now when Lord Hailsham was Lord Chancellor of England. A lord chancellor wears some very fine robes and the whole legal kit and so on, and often you have parties of visitors and tourists who are being shown around the corridors of the Houses of Parliament. Hailsham came out of his own room in the House of Lords face to face with a party of American tourists. At the same time, a door opened further down the corridor. A member of Parliament, a man called Neal Marten, who was MP from Banbury at the time, emerged from the door, maybe thirty yards down the corridor. Hailsham wanted to attract Neal Marten’s attention; so, ignoring the tourists who were facing him, he raised his hand and called, “Neal.” And the tourists, of course, all did.

So, I think these are the pitfalls an Englishman has when addressing American audiences. The possibilities for misunderstanding within our common language or not-so-common language are legion and well known and written about elsewhere. And they even come in the American edition of this book, Simply Christian, and the British edition, which I have in my hands, and they’re written by two different people. This one is written by N. T. Wright, and this one is written by Tom Wright; in England, my publishers think that if it’s designed to be a user-friendly book, as opposed to one of those academic tomes, they prefer me to be Tom. But in America, the publishers apparently want me to look a bit more serious; so, they give me my full initials, N. T. Wright. It’s the same book. I think I prefer the American cover actually, but there it is. You never quite know what you’re publishing.

We live in a very confused world. I’ve just been lecturing in another place, a little way north of here in Cambridge, Massachusetts, at Harvard University, and I’ve been talking about some of the confusions that are out there in culture right now. I’m reminded of a splendid op-ed piece, which our UK Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sacks did recently in the London Times. Sacks is one of the most articulate, elegant expositors of faith and life in the UK today, along with our archbishop, Rowan Williams.

Anyway, Jonathan Sacks wrote a splendid piece about the children of Israel walking through the wilderness with God trying to guide them. He used a GPS system as his model for how this was working. What happens when you have a GPS system in your car, or as we call them, “a satellite navigation system,” in your car? Sacks said— and I wouldn’t have had the temerity to say it, but this is how he put it— “Whoever invented this GPS with a woman’s voice telling you that in two hundred yards, you must turn right didn’t do so with the average Jewish male in mind, because everybody knows that when this voice says, ‘In two hundred yards turn left,’ the answer is, ‘Who do you think I am? I’m not going to do that; I’m going to turn right.’ When you do that, there’s a sort of pause. After a while, the voice says in effect, ‘This wasn’t what we really had in mind. Since we’re now here, you probably want to do this and this and this.’”

And he said, “That’s what it was like with the children of Israel. They had God in the midst, saying, ‘Do this, do this.’ ‘No,’ they said, ‘we’re going to do that and that instead.’ ” But God hangs in there, goes along with them.

Is that a model of our culture? Is that what we’re like in Western civilization today? Is there still a divine voice in our midst saying, “Do this, do this, do this,” and are we paying any attention? Rabbi Sacks said the trouble is you can’t actually guarantee that that’s the situation. There’s another model for what might be going on, and this might be the one that is actually relevant right now.

The other model works like this. Apparently, there is a certain type of ant that, when it is lost, is programmed to follow the ant in front. Now, normally that’s a smart thing to do, because somewhere out there, there’s a furry little creature that knows where it’s going, and somehow you’ll get there too. “But,” said Sacks, “sometimes you have an entire colony of ants going round and round in an enormous circle. Each is following the one in front. They all die of starvation, because none of them know where they’re going and they don’t know how to get out of that circle.”

So, Jonathan Sacks’s article ended with this rather sharp question: Which are we more like? Are we more like the children of Israel, maybe getting it wrong, but maybe still just about listening for a voice? Or are we like those ants just merely following the ant in front, everybody hoping that if we follow where the fashion is going intellectually, societally, culturally, or whatever, then we’ll all get somewhere, while, in fact, all we are doing is going round in circles? I began this book with that sort of image in mind.

This book, Simply Christian, has three sections. Let me say a word about that.

I actually planned four sections. I got to the end of the third, and the writing time that I budgeted for the book was just about up. So, I phoned the publisher and said, “I’ve finished three sections, and I actually want to do the fourth one, but I’m not sure when I’m going to do it.” He said, “If you’ve already written three and it’s already two hundred pages, that’s quite long enough, and actually it looks like a book to me.” So, there are other things I would have liked to talk about as well. Maybe they will form the basis of another book.

The first section is called “Echoes of a Voice.” I’m not here talking explicitly about satellite navigation systems or about the children of Israel in the wilderness. I’m talking about voices that I believe virtually all human beings, in virtually all cultures, listen for and know, but are puzzled by.

The first of these is a voice that tells us to do justice. You don’t have to teach people that there is such a thing as justice. Go to a school playground where four-year-olds are playing together. If you listen to what they say— and this is a point straight out of C. S. Lewis’s Mere Christianity, to which I happily doff my cap at this point— sooner or later, you’ll hear one of these kids say, “That’s not fair!”

Has the child been to a seminar on modern theories of justice? No, he hasn’t. The child just knows that there is such a thing as fairness and that this child who is beating him up or who has just stolen his ball is not obedient to this thing called justice, or fairness. But, of course, we adults do exactly the same thing; and so do nations and countries and societies. We all know there should be such a thing as putting things right: doing justice, getting it all sorted out. But we all find it extraordinarily difficult.

This point came home to me strongly when I lived in Westminster. I lived maybe within a five-iron shot (my golf isn’t so good; maybe it was a three-iron shot) of four or five leading judicial establishments: the Houses of Parliament; the Lord Chancellor’s office; New Scotland Yard (where all the police hang out); and one or two other places too. Then, just down the river in the City of London, there are enough barristers to man a battleship (although, with all those barristers argu...