Introduction:
Bishop N.T. Wright (Tom Wright) has been a dear friend and mentor to both of us. His foreword of my "Art and Faith: A Theology of Making" has inspired many artists, and I am grateful for his theological import into my art. This is part 1 of 3 part series on Theology of Making, God's Homecoming and Missions.
Part 1: On Lewis and Platonic Influence
Mako
Your books have had such an impact of both of our lives seeking Beauty and Justice. I have been telling folks that your “God’s Homecoming” book is a “Copernicus Revolution” for theology - the Sun was always at the center, as God is, but we thought it was all about us going to heaven. You rightly removed the focus to God’s love and desire to come home to us.
I want to start this conversation with talking about C.S. Lewis. A popular topic and many will be surprised by the Platonic influence in Lewis’s writing, of the body and “soul” (Greek ψυχή - pronounced psuchē or psyche) split, and examples of that in many of the essays he wrote. But what about his fiction? Do you think there’s something?
Tom Wright
I love, I love Lewis’s fiction. Although it’s interesting because the book of Lewis’s, which he apparently he liked best, was “Till We Have Faces”. Yes, and I’ve read that twice, and it doesn’t speak to me in the same way. But I love the science fiction trilogy. Yes, and of course the Narnia stories. I grew up with them. In fact, we when my sister and I were were young in the 1950s, the books were just coming out, and so my mother got the first editions and was would read read to us from them.
Mako
Oh my goodness!
Tom Wright
And which actually which actually was a funny thing because I’ll tell you the story. My mother was very insistent. She wanted to read it. She did not want us to look ahead, to peep ahead, to see what was happening next. And one day, I couldn’t resist. I wanted to know what happened next, and I read the next chapter naughtily, and it was the first edition. And there was a sentence that didn’t have a full stop at the end, and I must have been about seven or so. I’d never seen a sentence without a full stop before, so I was fascinated by this. And then the next night, when my mother was reading to us, she got to that point, and I blurted out, “Oh, that’s the place where there’s no full stop at the end of the sentence”, and my mother says, “You’ve been reading ahead.” Found out, but I should have known from then on that I was designed to be a proofreader!
Mako
But Lewis’s imagination was influenced by his Platonic influence, or was it?
Tom Wright
Well, it’s under influence because, and I think I say this in “God’s Homecoming” book, that in the “Last Battle”, it becomes relentlessly platonic towards the end. But in the “Magician’s Nephew”, the idea of New Creation is much more intact, and it’s as though Lewis had both those ideas in his head, but he’d never reconciled them. And at one point in, I think this is not the “Last Battle”, one of the children’s stories, the old man, Professor Diggory, hearing the children’s stories, he says, “It’s all in Plato. Bless me, it’s all in Plato. What do they teach them in these schools?” And so Lewis knew perfectly well what he was doing. Oh, this is quite explicit on the page.
Mako
Plato’s influence, the Greek influence as a whole, is pretty significant in how we, in modern times, conceive the world, right? We see the world through that lens without knowing.
Tom Wright
Yeah.
Mako
Perhaps Lewis was aware, but we may not be aware of how we see integrity of holistic Biblical view worked through?
Tom Wright
Yeah. In “Pilgrim’s Regress”, there’s a passage in there where the pilgrim, who’s on his way westwards towards the island, which he can see. I think it’s Virtue is leading the character called Virtue is leading him, and at a certain point says, “Now we have to talk about the shepherd people, in other words, the Jews, and the the pilgrim says, “I was afraid you were going to mention that.” In other words, you know, to the 1930’s English person, the Jews were a kind of embarrassment - there was a lot of anti Judaism in the culture, and people have accused T.S. Eliot of that as well. But Lewis obviously knew that you can’t make sense of the gospel if you don’t have the Old Testament. He is wrestling with it - what do you do with the Old Testament? And then the temptation is very easy, and probably the majority of Christian theologians have done this to allegorize in some way or other. And in a sense, the New Testament as well does that. You know, Paul sees the crossing of the Red Sea as then echoed in baptism, and so on. So there is there is a kind of multi-layeredness which is there, but as soon as you think that the allegory is leading you away from space, time, and matter reality, and into a different kind of world altogether, then, sorry, that is that is the Platonism, which is then ultimately a denial of the goodness of creation.
Mako
And anti-semitism will lead to racism against others eventually…
Tom Wright
Easily, easily. Yes. Oh my
Mako
So tell me more about that please.
Tom Wright
Yeah, I mean, in I’m trying to remember which book it is that I’ve spelt this out more fully. In my little book on Ephesians, the vision of Jesus is there in Ephesians two and three. It’s so clear that the old idea of the new temple is of Judean and Gentile coming together to make one single body, and it’s very interesting in Ephesians chapter two, evangelicals, white Western evangelicals, have traditionally gone for the first 10 verses. We were sinners. We were enslaved. God, in His mercy, has rescued us by Jesus. By grace you are saved, so that we can do the good works. Verse 10, we stop. But in fact, verses 11 and following through to 22 are saying therefore, you who were once far off have been brought near. You’re part of the same team. You’re part of the same thing, and that has been largely ignored in many evangelical circles. And I’ve had a sense, and I say this in the new book on on Christian Nationalism, that part of the reaction against the so-called new perspective on Paul is sadly from white Western evangelicals who don’t want to be told that the gospel necessarily entails a new form of humanity in which all people share or can share by faith, because you know, as Martin Luther King said, the most segregated moment on in American society, you know the quote, is 11 o’clock on a Sunday morning, and everyone goes off to their different churches.
Mako
Yeah, and so you’re able to trace that strand of this polarization or this way that we automatically assume the “we versus them” kind of mentality.
Tom Wright
Yeah, it’s important to work it through because Paul is not saying therefore we just have a laissez-faire multiculturalism. I think he could see perfectly well that wasn’t going to work. But the church itself is designed to model multiculturalism. So multiculturalism, I think, as a global phenomenon, begins in Syrian Antioch, which was the first melting pot city where people from all races were meeting and becoming Christians, and and then sort of come all the way forward and say, well, it’s not surprising that secular visions of multiculturalism today fail because they’re trying to get the results of the gospel without the gospel. It’s made me realize more and more as I’ve reflected on this the huge significance of Paul’s imperatives to be kind and forgiving, and reconciling and seeking to live at peace with everybody, because he must have known from his experience in Antioch and Corinth and everywhere else that this stuff is jolly difficult. That we trip over our feet with trying to, you know, trying to do the right thing and getting it wrong, and cultural expectations. Well, you’ll know all about that, and that that therefore the Christian ethic is not just - while you’re doing this you should be nice to each other. it’s actually kindness and mutual forgiveness is a necessary part of the new Jesus-shaped multicultural project, and I find that delightfully integrative. You know, all sorts of things are then coming together, but it’s hard to articulate today because today’s Jewish communities are often very suspicious of any Christian attempt to say that this is the way for all people, because they say that this is a new form of anti-Judaism or anti-Semitism. To which the answer is no. The Old Testament is full of these prophecies that one day God is going to reach out and do what He’s going to do for everybody.
Mako
And Paul was very aware, so personally aware, of the difficulties of his disagreement with Barnabas, for instance. In the history of early churches is about really realizing how difficult and seemingly impossible this picture of God’s body is actualized. Paul’s understanding, you know, progression from having an identity as as a Jew, being having met the risen Christ in Damascus, and then realizing, and and frustrated by his effort to reach the Jews first in synagogues and so forth, and then all of a sudden he realizes, oh, okay, perhaps God’s plan is not what I thought God would do, but His chosen nation has been spread wide into the Gentiles, and and so that reality, is assumed in our Western reality of the church, but we have struggled to understand that such design by God was ultimately for the Jewish people to see Jesus as their Messiah. We are now struggling with this racism. What do you think they, the early church, were struggling with Platonic dualism overlapping, in terms of philosophy and the worldview?
Tom Wright
Yeah, I mean there are several different options at that stage. There are quite a lot of Stoics around, and Stoicism is the kind of popular philosophy du jour for many reasonably educated people in the Greco-Roman world. But Plato is quite significant as well, and Aristotle. But I would say between Stoicism and Platonism, you can see this in a book like the Wisdom of Solomon, which is a deeply Jewish book rooted in the Old Testament. But bits of Platonism and Stoicism keep peeping through, and I don’t think it ever reconciles those.
Mako
You know what’s interesting is I was sharing with you my experience of Odyssey and how Stoics and Epicureans, you know, kind of collide at that time as well.
Tom Wright
There are convergent points where they end up saying the same thing about ethics, for instance, and when I think it’s Seneca says, “So what if my Epicurean opponents happen to get something right from time to time?” You know, truth is the possession of everybody, and different people will grasp it. But but Epicurean to be a serious Epicurean in the ancient world, you had to be quite rich, had to have a nice farm and vineyards and well-behaved slaves, then you could relax and enjoy the creature comforts of life. But for most people, that’s not an option. Right, and it’s one of the things I’ve often reflected on that Epicureanism has become the default option for Western society as a whole, because Western society, too, as a whole has had Epicurean tendencies and so we’ve developed a philosophy which which sustains that kind of a pleasure principle.
I’ve been fascinated then by the ways in which both Judaism and Christianity navigate their way through, because they both believe, I think, that all truth is God’s truth. So that if somebody is grasping something, that’s why Paul says in Second Corinthians, my aim is to take every thought captive to obey Christ. That you know, yeah, we’ll do. We’ll have that one on board. Thank you very much.
Mako
Yeah, and so I’m full of questions right now of culture and the arts with political reality that we are all swimming in especially in USA. The church is meant to be an antidote to all the fractures, and posit new paths, and yet the church seems to not to embody of “all things working together for the good.”
Tom Wright
God works all things together with those who love Him.
Mako
Those love Him. Yes.
Tom Wright
Once you realize that that whole passage is not about how to get saved, but about the situation of the church in the suffering world. Then you, then the idea of humans collaborating with God. There’s been the huge prejudice against any idea of cooperation because of fears about grace or that we’ll start thinking we can save ourselves. Once you get rid of that, then the passage makes sense as the way in which the church is designed to model God’s New Creation. That’s I think that’s one of the themes that I bring out in the book on Ephesians, particularly, and the the the phrase which I used, which became a kind of catchphrase when I did the original lectures in Wycliffe Hall, was the chassis with a small working model of New Creation, and and and I’ve done a bit on that in terms of well, what would that look like then? And you look at the New Creation in Revelation 21;22. Things like God will wipe away all tears from all eyes. I said, well, people should know that the church is the place where you can go when you’re weeping and God will wipe away your tears, etc. etc.
Mako
So that’s been preached as universalism on one hand, but on the other hand, the reform tradition would say, “Oh, this is about predestination. It’s about the chosen people”.
Tom Wright
Yep. Yeah. Well, as Ephesians one, where you have the same language of predestination chosen before the foundation of the world, etc. But read through Ephesians one. He doesn’t say chosen before the foundation of the world so that we can go to heaven. It’s chosen before the foundation of the world so that we could be holy and blameless before Him in love.
God says, “You come with me”, is because we are chosen then to be people through whom God displays to the world, what the genuine way of being human is all about, and what a new sort of community would look like, and that’s so clear right through Ephesians. Once you get rid of the idea that it’s that the whole thing has to be about how we go to heaven, then then the vocation of the church becomes absolutely central and goes on through into chapter two, particularly in chapter three, and then the whole ethical section, chapters four and five, is very much this is how you’re supposed to display before the watching Gentile world what the people of God look like, and hence what the new creation looks like.
Mako
So, that’s God’s artwork that is being unveiled.
Tom Wright
Absolutely yeah poiema. We are God’s poem, God’s artwork. Exactly. Exactly.
(Part 2: On God’s Homecoming and Art will be added next week)