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We're saying that since this was recorded, Martin Bashir has had an interesting and controversial year and stepped back from his role as a religious correspondent for the BBC. But well, that's another story. For now, here he is in conversation with Tom Wright. I'm sure
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it wasn't lost on you that the bells rang throughout your talk and ceased the moment I came, which is an indication of Westminster Abbey's view. This is a remarkable book Professor Wright. It's historical and for ecological, sociological, theological. But in addition to you being a professor, you're also a pastor. You referred to that just now. You were a bishop. And so I want to start by asking you about one of the things that you draw out in the book in relation to suffering. You write this, the visit to Romans with the start of Paul's new life, that of a suffering apostle. God's kingdom is indeed breaking in that new divine rule, but it will mean undergoing suffering. Again, you write the bodily marks of identification that mattered to Paul were not the signs of circumcision, but the marks of Jesus, in other words, the signs of suffering. How
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does the apostle
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commend the Christian faith in the first century? And how does that compare to things we often hear today in the church, where people are promised health and wealth, a triumphalism, a God at your disposal? How does Paul differ?
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Yeah, that's very interesting. I personally don't usually attend churches that promise things like that. And that's just my background. But you know that many people do? I know that many people do, absolutely. And I mean, we can't get round sayings of Jesus about, I came that they might have life and have it more abundantly. That's absolutely comes with. And when Paul talks about love and joy and peace, that's all true. But when Paul talks about those things, he's either writing from prison, or he's writing with the wounds still on him from the last time he was beaten up or stoned or whatever. So there's an odd rich mixture. I think the crucial thing for Paul is that he really believes that he is living on the cusp of the new creation, that the new creation has broken in, but the old creation not only is rumbling on and it's deadly and it's corrupt and it's decaying, but the old creation resents the new creation breaking in and is doing its best to strike back. And I think that's what Paul thinks was going on in his moment of terrible darkness in Ephesus, which he talks about in Two Corinthians One. And by the way, I had a letter just last week from a pastor I knew from a previous job who had been reading that book and I hadn't heard from him for some years. But he said that that passage had reduced him to tears because he had just been through a period like that in his pastoral ministry. And he thought, oh
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my goodness, Paul went through this
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too. This is my life. And it was hugely encouraging to him. So that I think the main thing is that Paul is telling people that God's new world is breaking in. It has broken in Jesus. It is breaking in through the power of the Spirit. But if you are on the leading edge of that, and if you're committed to following Jesus and living in one of these extraordinary multivalent fictive kinship groups, i.e. churches, then
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stuff is going to happen. The powers
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are going to strike back. And sometimes that's apparently rather trivial and sometimes it's very dark and very nasty. But it often involves suffering of one's soul or another. I was reflecting, I didn't know you were going to ask me that question, but I was reflecting a couple of days ago for quite a different reason. I have a prayer list, people I pray for every day, some I pray for every week, etc. And I went right down a long list and I realized that all these people, old friends, family members, etc. I know things about their lives, where there are points of darkness and suffering and pain and grief and anxiety, one after another.