The Vision of Ephesians for Today’s Church : N.T. Wright

Full-Text Transcript

Jason Daye
Hello, friends, welcome to another insightful episode of FrontStage BacksStage. I’m your host, Jason Daye. Each and every week, I have the privilege and honor of sitting down with a trusted ministry leader, and together, we engage in a conversation to help you and pastors and ministry leaders just like you embrace and thrive in both life and leadership. I’m very excited for today’s guest. Welcoming back to the show, Dr. N.T. Wright. Most of you are familiar with Tom Wright. He’s a Research Professor Emeritus of New Testament and Early Christianity at the University of St. Andrews. He is a Senior Research Fellow at Wycliffe Hall in Oxford. He’s written a number of books. Over 80 influential and insightful books, including his latest, which is entitled The Vision of Ephesians. Tom, welcome back to the show, brother.

N.T. Wright
Thank you very much. Good to be with you.

Jason Daye
Yes, so good to be with you. Now, no pressure, but our last conversation together, that episode is the most watched, most listened to, and most downloaded episode of our entire show.

N.T. Wright
What on earth was I talking about?

Jason Daye
Talking about some good stuff, brother. Talking about some wonderful stuff, that’s for sure. Really looking forward to our conversation today. Before we dive into The Vision of Ephesians, though, I would love to hear from you and ask more of a backstage question in your life. Tom, you have contributed so much to the greater church as a professor, as a mentor to so many, have written a number of influential books, served as a bishop, and you’re still doing a lot. I don’t know how much you slow down, but the question for you, Tom, is, what do you do now, or what have you done over the course of your ministry, to really refresh and renew your soul?

N.T. Wright
If I knew what the definition of a soul was, I might be able to answer that question a bit better. I have a whole riff on that in my next book, which you’ll see in the spring, but that’s a whole other question. But I hear what you say. It’s been a frustrating last couple of years because a few years ago, my answer would have been that every two weeks or so, I go and play a game of golf. Now, since I had my knee operation, that’s been really hard. I have played the odd game, but it’s much harder work, and I can’t do that so much. And the second thing would be, I used to love to climb hills and mountains in Scotland, and again, my aged body isn’t letting me do that. So I suppose one of the other great inspirations to me has loomed even larger, which is music. I listen to a certain amount of music on the radio or on CDs, or I probably ought to get it online on Spotify or something. Friends tell me how to do that, and I always forget. But we are blessed because we now live for part of the time in the center of Oxford, and there is so much good classical music and choral music going on. In fact, in a couple of days time, three days time, my middle grandson, Leo, who is nine, is going to be installed as a fully fledged chorister at New College in Oxford, which has one of the greatest men and boys choirs in Britain and hence in the world because it’s one of the very few things that England is still field leader on. And so New College is right on the other side of the street from where we live. And so my wife and I take delight in drifting across the street for choral even song during the university term, often two or three times a week. And that just sustains me. It’s a kind of a sigh of relief, and it’s the combination of worship, great music, joining in with singing hymns, and so on, and that I find wonderful. But the other thing is, we now have our house in the far north of Scotland, on the Isle of Harris in the Outer Hebrides. And if I try, I can show you on the camera a photograph of the view from our kitchen window. There you are. So it is a wonderful place. And we’ve been waiting for this because the building was supposed to start quite a while back, and then COVID held it up, and one thing and another. And finally, we moved in a year ago, and so we’ve been up there all the time we can. We were up there three months this summer, and simply being there and walking on the beach, listening to the sheep bleating in the field next door, and the wind howling around because it comes straight off the Atlantic, and occasionally bathing in the sea as well, because it’s the Gulf Stream in the summer, it’s swimmable. So that has been a great delight and a great refreshment to my wife and me in our advancing old age. So there you are. It’s a long answer to your question. Music and the sea.

Jason Daye
Yeah, that’s beautiful. What a beautiful answer. I always love to hear how people get refreshed, right? Especially in ministry. There’s so much on our shoulders and so many things, we’re pulled in so many different directions. So it’s important for us to find those ways that God can refresh us. So I absolutely love that. And Paul has something to say about the renewal of the spirit of the mind in Ephesians. And maybe we’ll get into that as well, right? Absolutely. As we look at the letter to the church of Ephesus, you call this a visionary letter of Paul’s letters. And I’m curious, of all Paul’s letters, what makes Ephesians more of a visionary letter?

N.T. Wright
I think one of the things that Paul does in Ephesians is that he starts with a much longer time of prayer and praise than in any of his other letters. I mean, he often reports the prayer that he’s praying for the church to whom he’s writing. But verses 3 to 14 of chapter one are simply one long sentence full of praise. Blessed be the God whom, and so on. And then there follows Paul’s version of the gospel. We’ll get back to that. But then he says, And this is what I’m praying for you. And then in chapter two, he fills that in, in terms of God’s rescue operation and God’s plan for what he’s doing through the church. And then chapter three, he moves into a brief discussion of his own circumstances, and then says, Now here I am. I’m praying again. And so chapters one to three are really held within prayer and praise. And so it should be no surprise that in the middle of that, we have this visionary sense. We’re talking about the Creator God, the God who has made heaven and earth. What is he doing? What is the whole thing about? And I think Ephesians says that more clearly than anywhere else, even in Romans, really. And Romans gets huge and complicated and wonderful, but Ephesians is quite short, comparatively short. And there it is in chapter one, verse 10, God’s plan from the start was to sum up in the Messiah everything in heaven and on earth. And that stands in my mind, over against all the false visions which basically collude with, say, Platonism, according to which God’s plan would be to rescue us from Earth and take us to Heaven. Absolutely not. For Paul, the coming together of heaven and earth, which is, after all, what Jesus went about talking about. The Kingdom of God coming on Earth, as in Heaven, everything being transformed by God’s rescuing love. That is the vision. And so, in Ephesians, he unpacks that in terms of God’s purpose for the church in the meantime, as we live out of the fact that God has done this already in Jesus Christ. Because Jesus is the heaven plus Earth human. That’s what we mean when we say he’s both divine and human. He is the one in whom heaven and earth are already joined forever. And then, and you get this in Ephesians, I think, more clearly than anywhere else, really, except possibly the book of Acts. By the Holy Spirit, we share that Heaven plus Earth life. We are so schooled by our culture not to think like that that it’s almost as though, if we think that we’re heavenly-minded, it means we’re somehow escaping from this world and going off somewhere else. But no, heaven and earth are designed to go together. So we are to be models of that, so that then the vision is of the church being. And I use this phrase throughout the book, the small working model of new creation, so that the world may see there is a new creation, and the Creator God has done it and is doing it. And most people in the world don’t realize that. Most people in the world think that if Christianity has anything to contribute, it’s a way of escaping from the world. For Paul, it isn’t. It’s a way of the world being addressed and transformed by the gospel. Now, I think that’s pretty visionary myself.

Jason Daye
Yeah, absolutely. I love it, and there’s so much to unpack there. I’d like to start here, though, Tom, if we could. How does Paul help us appreciate the future coming of new heaven and new earth, and looking forward to that, but at the same time, as you’ve said, kind of staying grounded in the life that’s right in front of us and what we’re called to live now?

N.T. Wright
Yeah, I mean, in Ephesians, Paul doesn’t have a big scenario. You know, if you want a eschatological scenario, you get some of that in 1 Thessalonians, you get it, not least in 1 Corinthians 15, where he has a whole thing about where we stand in between the victory of Jesus on the cross and in his resurrection and the final victory, when God is all in all, and we are kind of held between those two moments, according to 1 Corinthians 15. So, the battle is going on, the battle of God, to implement the victory won on the cross in and for the whole world. So, you get that in 1 Corinthians, Paul doesn’t spell that out in as much detail as in Ephesians, he kind of takes it for granted. But, what you have then, is this extraordinary agenda for the church, that if the church is to be God’s means of displaying to the world the fact that he is the God of generous love, the fact that he is the God of grace, the fact that he has these purposes for creation, then the church has its marching orders, which, in the second half of Ephesians, is about unity and holiness. We’ll get onto that. I’m drifting away from your question, so feel free to refocus it.

Jason Daye
Yeah, you’re doing well, but just this idea of us staying grounded in what’s right in front of us.

N.T. Wright
Well, yeah. I mean, for Paul, what’s right in front of us is the reality of the church, and particularly the challenge in his day for Jews and Gentiles to get together within the same body. That’s a huge thing for Paul. We think it’s difficult to get different ethnic groups together. For him, as a loyal first-century Judean, the idea of being part of the same family with uncircumcised Gentiles, just because they happen to believe in Jesus like I do, that’s absolutely mind-blowing. But for Paul, this is the heart of so much, and so the staying grounded, I think, for Paul, is about being in this community. Imagine Paul in the church in Antioch, Ephesus, or Corinth, and we are linking arms with and sharing the kiss of peace with people who are radically different from us. Socio-culturally, we may be free. Some of them, most of them, are probably slaves. We may be male. A lot of them are women. We’re all part of the same family. No wonder people looking on in Ephesus, or Rome, or wherever were shocked. Who are these people? What are they doing? This is countercultural. This is subversive. And so for Paul, yeah, this is where we are grounded, in this new reality, which nobody had seen coming. Certainly, Paul hadn’t. But now it is. It is feet on the ground stuff, it is meeting in people’s houses stuff, and it is facing down sneers and opposition from local power brokers who are worried that their world is changing in front of them, and so on. This is very much grounded.

Jason Daye
Yeah. I absolutely love that, Tom. It’s so helpful. Tom, we know that the timelessness of Scripture, the beauty, the hope, and the truth of Scripture flow across generations, centuries, and millennia. But I’d love to hear a bit of your thoughts around the timeliness of Scripture, specifically Ephesians, for where we find ourselves today in the church.

N.T. Wright
Yeah, wow, wow, yes. I mean, I don’t actually like the word timelessness, because it smacks too much of Platonism for me. I think God made time, and he made plenty of it, and he’s going to renew it. I don’t think he’s going to abolish it. That’s a whole other philosophical discussion we could have another day if I ever write a book about time, which I’m not planning to, by the way. But, I think, for me today, as I’ve been working on this book and doing the lectures which led up to this book, I’ve been very much aware of its timeliness, and part of that comes out of what I was just talking about in terms of the gospel calling people of radically different ethnic, social, and cultural groups to live together as a single family. When I published my big book on Paul, Paul and the Faithfulness of God, which is now 11 years ago, I guess 12 years ago, I took it on the road, and people often asked me in the Q and A sessions, if Paul could come back now, what would he be most surprised by? And I would answer unhesitatingly, he would be shocked, not just that we are disunited, but that we don’t care that the church is fragmented. I was addressing a group of church leaders here in Oxford yesterday who are from different churches, actually in America, the group connected with the Alpha course, and so on. But many of them are church planters, and I was challenging them just down the street from where you’re meeting, there are probably two or three large buildings where people go on Sundays, and they have big car parks in front. Do you know these people? Do you have coffee with them? Do you pray with them? Because if we’re not building bridges with other people who name the name of Jesus and finding out where the pressure points are for them and how it’s difficult or exciting or whatever, then how can we possibly be reading Ephesians? So I mean, at the level of church unity, this is important. But then, particularly, and I’ve said this again and again recently, the Western world, over the last few generations, has been trying to get something we loosely call multiculturalism going because people in America are aware that it’s a melting pot of different cultures, so we’re all supposed to live together, and not in our little ghettos. That’s very difficult, and it’s proved very difficult, and we’ve now got all sorts of political sub-movements as that’s played out, and people get cross about it, and there is a big debate, I know, in America at the moment, about reacting against the diversity and exclusion stuff, and all of that. We have our equivalent in Britain. We’re not usually so shrill about it. But actually, there’s an article in The London Times just today about Oxford University, where I’m sitting right now, and its policies on unity, diversity, inclusion, and so on. But this is the point. The church, from the beginning, was the original multicultural project. But here’s the rub, just as ever since the 18th century, the post-enlightenment world has been trying to get the fruits of the Christian gospel without allegiance to the Gospel itself. So it is, in this case, the secular politicians have been trying, and university organizers have been trying, to get a multicultural society to work. And I want to say, the original and best way of doing that is by enabling people to come to believe in Jesus and so discovering one another as fellow redeemed members of this body. In other words, people who can then welcome one another at that rich depth. Now, of course, a lot of churches are doing that. I know some churches that are doing it spectacularly. I equally know some churches where it’s still quite difficult, and where you walk in, whether on a Sunday or some other day, and everyone looks pretty much the same. And I think Paul would say, granted, the way your wider society is, if everyone’s looking the same in church, it’s possibly because you haven’t actually embraced this vocation, and you’re not living it out. So now, I said this to somebody a week or two ago, and they said, But Tom, people will say that you’re simply following a woke agenda if you do that, because it’s known that multiculturalism is one of the woke fads. And I said, read my lips, I’m one of the least woke people that you’re likely to meet. And if you want to see how that works out, the second half of the letter is very clear, for instance, on marriage and sexual ethics, where Paul is very unwoke and very clear, very Jewish, very Judean, and very much creational. This is God’s good creation. God is going to renew it. And marriage and family are among the signs of God’s renewal of heaven and earth. That’s very clear in Ephesians 5. The way I put it is this: if you were taking a road trip from, say, Manhattan to Minneapolis, you’d be going across that bit of country. Somebody else might be taking a road trip from Cleveland to Chicago, and you might both end up at the same motel overnight, and over a beer, he might say to you, So what takes you to Chicago? And you might say, I’m not going to Chicago. I’m going to Minneapolis. He said, But, oh, this is the road to Chicago. Actually, it’s also the road to Minneapolis. In other words, you might overlap in your route for a short part of the journey. But don’t think that that means that the starting point or the goal is the same. The starting point and the goal of the gospel are Jesus Christ, and then by the Spirit, the new heavens and new earth. Not a secular, multicultural, secular paradise. But, en route, both of us believe that people of all sorts and conditions are made by the one God. And as Acts 17 says, this is Paul on the Areopagus, God made of one stock all nations of men and women to dwell on the face of the earth. In other words, the whole idea of ethnic separation was not part of God’s plan, and actually, it wasn’t part of daily life in Paul’s world either. The ancient Mediterranean basin was full of people of all kinds, colors, shapes, and sizes, and that wasn’t a big deal. It’s become a big deal to us for various factors to do with the Western world and colonization, and particularly slavery over the last 300 years. So we have to stand back from that in order to say, hey, here is the Christian vision, and we’re not just doing the short journey to a little woke paradise. We’re doing the longer and more costly, but ultimately more rewarding journey from the achievement of Jesus to the accomplishment of God’s new heavens and new earth, which, with the church as the pilot project on the way. Wow, there’s a vision for you.

Jason Daye
Hey, friends, just a quick reminder that we provide a free toolkit that complements today’s conversation. You can find this for this episode and every episode of PastorServe.org/network. In the toolkit, you’ll find a number of resources, including our Ministry Leaders Growth Guide. This growth guide includes insights pulled from today’s conversation as well as reflection questions, so you and the ministry team at your local church can dig more deeply into this topic and see how it relates to your specific ministry context. Again, you can find it at PastorServe.org/network.

Jason Daye
Yeah, beautiful, Tom. Love that. Paul roots the letter of Ephesians, as you referenced earlier in the very beginning, in laying out the gospel in a beautiful, concise way. How can we, today, as we look at Scripture, be careful that we are not trying to force Scripture to wrap around our ideas of what the gospel should look like today, or what God’s will looks like today?

N.T. Wright
That’s a constant challenge, and I’ve spent much of my life, as you know, trying to do that, to be honest, in front of Scripture. I mean, I started 50 years ago as a good, ordinary English Anglican with a strong evangelical slant to what I was doing. And having loved the Bible from an early age, I thought, Wow, this is great. My evangelical tradition is telling me, just sit down and study this book and come back and tell us what you’re finding. Now, that’s what I’ve tried to do. And the trouble is, the church, including the evangelical church, doesn’t always like it when you do that because, actually, the Bible is much bigger and richer than any of our traditions. And right in the middle of that, the verse I’ve already quoted, Ephesians 1:10, should rock us back on our heels if we come from traditional Western thinking, whether Catholic or Protestant, liberal or conservative, because most Christians in the world today, and for that matter, most non-Christians, think that the point of Christianity is for my soul to go to heaven after I die. Paul never says anything like that. The point of the Gospel for Paul is that God’s plan was to unite all things in heaven and on earth. And do you know many, many Western Christians simply haven’t woken up to what is there in front of them in the text, so that we then misread, say, the great paean of praise in Ephesians 1:3-14 as though it’s a statement of Calvinist theology about God predestinating us to salvation. It isn’t. It’s very explicit and clear on the page in terms of God’s purpose to call people to Himself through Christ, so that God’s grace, power, and glory may be made manifest through them to the world. And then chapters two and three continue with that same theme. And so there are many, many things going on in, well, just in the first chapter, but certainly the first three chapters, which ought to make the average well-trained Bible reader stop and scratch their heads and say, Hang on. I’m not sure that’s what I was taught in Sunday school. The answer is, no, it probably isn’t. But do we believe in our traditions with scripture providing a few footnotes, or do we believe, actually, in being refreshed and challenged by Scripture? I mean, I was doing a talk the other day here in Oxford, and somebody said to me, When did you learn all this stuff you’re spouting about? And I said, well, over the last 50-55 years, I’ve steadily been making my way, trying to figure out how it all goes together. And the bits that didn’t quite fit with my tradition. Where did that come from? I said, roughly every four or five years, I stumble upon some new insight, either a book I’ve read or something I’ve heard somebody say, or a text that I can’t quite figure out. And then I look up all the words again, and suddenly it jumps out at me in a fresh way. And I said, once that happens, you can’t then unsee that, you then have to go with it and say, maybe this is how it works. And so I would then try it out. And I’ve been doing, as I say, for 55 years, and it hasn’t stopped happening yet. And I love that process, even though it then means that I find myself preaching sermons and saying things in lectures, which not all my hearers will have been expecting.

Jason Daye
Right. Absolutely. And so, as we look at Scripture, Ephesians, and think about some of the things that we are facing, you mentioned division, disunity, and all those types of things. How can we get to the heart of what Scripture is saying in that regard, without trying to get our own kind of faction or tribe opinion pulled out of Scripture, right?

N.T. Wright
Yeah, absolutely. That is really difficult. I mean, I was talking about some of this, oh, 10 years ago in a seminar at Fuller Seminary in Los Angeles, after I’d done my big Paul book, and I was talking about God’s plan, which Paul is so clear about, that people of every background and ethnic context and social class, etc, should all come together as a single family. And it was very interesting, there was an African American woman theologian who was on the panel with me, who very courteously but firmly said, You need to know that when people like me hear people like you saying what you just said, what we are inclined to hear is you all get to be honorary white males. And I just said, No, that’s not the point. I said, I can see why you might think that. A long history has led you to that point. I said, but absolutely not. That’s not the point at all. And so I’m very much aware that I have to say this message about a Christian version of a multi-ethnic, poly-chrome community in such a way that it doesn’t sound like just a white man’s rather patronizing dream about how you can all come in round the edges, and I, of course, will be the chair of this meeting, and we’ll provide some space for you at one of those tables over there. That’s simply not what’s going on at all. And I relish, I mean, I relished, for instance, working very closely with John Sentamy, a black African Archbishop who was Archbishop of York when I was Bishop of Durham. So he, in a sense, was my boss. And we just used to enjoy that relationship and the cultural difference that we were straddling. And that was just one small example of many other things going on. But, of course, when you get into the second half of Ephesians, it then becomes very challenging, particularly the appeal for unity in the church in chapter 4, verses 1 to 16. Because when we have different visions, when somebody says, I believe God is calling me to do this in the church, I’m an evangelist, so I’m going to go and do that. I’m a teacher, so I want to do this. And whatever it is, the danger for us is that we pull apart from one another, and we set up our own little ministries where this is what I do, and it’s different from what you do. And I’ve known many Christian leaders who’ve said, actually, when I started this, I thought this was the gospel ministry. And I’ve had to discover that there are other people who’ve also got very different gospel ministries. But in chapter 4, verses 1 to 16, Paul is very clear that all these different ministries, of which there are several, he just gives a short list, but there are, he says, many, many more, they are all designed to serve the larger unity of the body, until we all attain to the unity of the faith and the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ, so that we won’t be little babies anymore. We are always in danger of forming little baby communities after our own image, whereas the church needs to grow up and learn from one another, challenge one another, and grow into the larger unity. If we don’t do that, the principalities and powers of the world aren’t going to take any notice of us as they don’t at the moment, and, oh, you just go and do your spirituality thing in the corner, and we will run the world our way, thank you very much. And Paul would say absolutely not. Jesus is Lord, therefore Caesar isn’t. But unless Jesus-people are demonstrating by their unity that there is a new way of being human, and that that way consists of following Jesus in the power of the Spirit and doing so together, unless the church is doing that, why should Caesar take any notice of us at all?

Jason Daye
Yeah, that’s a great point. And something that Paul makes clear, it’s something that, Tom, to be honest, it seems so difficult.

N.T. Wright
It is. It’s very difficult. It was difficult in Paul’s day. I mean, the very first point of controversy in the early church was when, in Jerusalem, they were distributing food among the widows because they were living as family. But the widows who were the native Hebrew speakers, Aramaic, presumably, and the widows who were the native Greek speakers, they weren’t being treated the same way. And so the appointment of the seven, whom we subsequently refer to as deacons, was specifically to address that problem of disunity along linguistic lines. Isn’t that interesting? That was not a 17th-century problem. That was a first-century right-off-the-bat problem.

Jason Daye
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Jason Daye
Yeah. As Paul moves throughout the letter of Ephesians, and you touch on this in chapter four, the unity piece gets very relational. The relational part about unity. Then he also touches on other relationships, family relationships, marriage relationships, and additional relationships. How does what Paul shares about these types of relationships relate to even the work of the church, that vision of heaven and earth, the new heaven, new earth now?

N.T. Wright
Yeah. I mean, this is hugely contentious. Let me say one thing by way of introduction. People have often, in my hearing and in books and articles, people have often sneered at Paul for having a rather sort of bourgeois, old-fashioned version of husband and wife and the separate roles, etc, etc. And oh well, we’ve grown up past that. You know that’s how they did it in Victorian times. But we now know better. And to that, I want to say, as I look around at the Western world, not least today, and as I read novels and plays and poems and see films, etc, and I see the chaos of male-female relations, of sexual relations in general, of gender relationships of various sorts. And it is complete chaos. It’s an absolute zoo out there at the moment. The world of pornography, the world of exploitation, etc. What makes anyone think that we in the 21st Century, in the Western world, can stand up on a pedestal and say, we now know how all this stuff works, and we can look down from a great height and sneer at silly old Paul because he’s getting it wrong. What a pretentious thing to do, and yet that’s what so many people do. So I want to say, let’s make room for a fresh voice, because Paul is not actually saying what many people have imagined he was saying, which was a kind of what used to be called the reinscribing patriarchy, or something like that. Not at all. In fact, when he’s talking about husbands and wives in Ephesians chapter five, the mutual submission is the key thing. There’s a verb just before he gets to the husband and wife bit, where he says, Submit to one another, out of reverence for the Messiah. And then all the commands that follow from that are linguistically dependent upon that opening command. So it’s, submit to one another. And that will work out like this here. It will work out like that there. So mutual submission is the overarching rubric. And then when wives submit to husbands, that’s part of that mutuality. And when husbands, and Paul has a lot to say about the duty of husbands, husbands have to treat their wives as Christ loved the church and gave Himself for her. And the self-sacrificial self-giving of the husband for the wife is a huge demand. And when you think about what Paul’s Gospel said about what Christ did for the church, then the demand gets larger by the minute as we reflect on it. But then here’s the thing, which I only noticed a few years ago, and it now seems to be very, very important. The way that Ephesians works is this picture in chapter one, of heaven and earth coming together, in chapter two, of Jew and Gentile coming together, in chapter three, of the united polychrome churches assigned to the powers. In chapter four, of the different ministries making up the one body of Christ. And now in chapter five, husband and wife coming together in marriage, not just as a well, this is how we kind of like to do it, but actually as part of that sign of new creational unity. Sometimes, when I’ve had to give talks in church on the biblical view of marriage, I started off with Genesis one, male and female together in the image of God, and went all the way to Revelation 21, where John’s vision for the New Jerusalem coming down so that the new heavens and new earth are there. The vision is of the New Jerusalem as a bride adorned for her husband, who is Christ. Paul picks up exactly that in Ephesians five, and says the quotes from Genesis two, a man leaves his father and mother and cleaves to his wife, and the two become one flesh. That’s a great mystery, but the way I see it, it’s about Christ in the church. In other words, my goodness, those of us who are married, we’ve had this as our vocation all through to be the sharp edge, as it were, of that vision whereby the church is, once again, the small working model of new creation. And I want to say, as somebody who’s been married for 54 years, as a friend of mine said, 50 years of marital blitz. And, yeah, okay, but that’s why marriage is hard. I think marriage has probably always been hard, and in many generations, people have made an accommodation to make it a little less hard by effectively separating. Just coming together a bit, but living really rather separate lives. And these days, actually, in the modern Western world, it’s somewhat harder to do, but people manage it. You know, the man goes off to play golf or the woman goes off to do whatever. But for many of us, actually, we are together. My wife and I are together many hours of most days. I was in New York last week, and the four days I was there, that’s the first four days that she and I have been apart, I think, probably since sometime in April. So, that’s kind of warts and all. We work things out. We live with that. So I think the unity of husband and wife is a sign of the larger unity. That’s a very unpopular, very unfashionable thing to say. I told you I was one of the least woke people you could ever meet. But I do think that Paul’s vision has a huge lot going for it.

Jason Daye
Yeah, that’s absolutely incredible. Tom, as we wind down this conversation, I’d love to hear a little bit for pastors and ministry leaders, as you look at the grand scope of the book of Ephesians, what encouragement do you have for pastors and ministry leaders, specifically from Paul’s words in Ephesians?

N.T. Wright
Yeah. I would say, go back to those first three chapters and say, in our worship and in our prayer, individually, but especially corporately. We’ve had a renaissance of Christian worship in the Western world over the last generation. Some of it’s been brilliant. Some of it’s, frankly, a bit shabby and thin. But the whole worship leader movement, at least, is all about getting people joining in and singing. But I do sometimes worry that we’ve become a bit samey. That we are focusing, in many of our worship songs and worship practices, simply on one narrow interpretation of the cross. Now, I’ve written about the cross. The cross is all over the New Testament. I’d be the last person to say that we shouldn’t be singing about the cross. But, actually, when you look at Ephesians 1:3-14, when you look at the second half, this is Paul’s prayer. Ephesians 1:15-23. And when you look at the prayer that he has in chapter three, then I think I want to say to worship leaders and ministers, how could those prayers and praises be translated into more mature songs, teachings, shared liturgical experiences? So many of the most lively churches today don’t really do liturgy as such. I mean, they do, of course, they do have certain things they go through very carefully, but they don’t usually call it a liturgy because, oh, that’s what those high church people do, and we don’t approve of that. Well, I don’t know whether I’m high or low or broad or what. But I know that good liturgy enables you to be sure that you’re structuring in, for instance, Paul doesn’t do this in Ephesians one to three, but it needs to be there, lament as well as praise. The yearning and groaning of Romans 8, as well as the celebration of Ephesians 1. And we need to take time to think and pray about how we can help our churches to be places where real lament is going on. I mean, you know and I know that the world is in a huge mess at the moment, and if, when you come to church, all you get is, Oh, aren’t we having a good time? Isn’t God good? Well, yeah, that’s fine. But let’s factor in Psalm 73, Psalm 88, or whatever, or the book of Job, or something which says, Actually, even though I affirm the goodness of God, I have no idea how that’s working out at the moment because the world seems to be falling apart. We need to be able to say that within the larger context of worship, and to find authentic, not shallow or trivial, ways of doing that. And so I think Ephesians one, two, and three would really help us with that. And also, particularly, of course, Ephesians six. That the spiritual warfare, which he talks about in chapter six, verses 10 and following, we need to think that through. As I say in the book, when you look at the different pieces of armor, the helmet, the breastplate, and all the rest of it, and see where in the Old Testament they come from. These are all, I think, almost all, about the armor that God Himself says he’s going to wear, or that the Messiah is going to wear. In other words, this is not simply, Oh, Paul drawing a picture of a soldier and thinking of some nice illustrations. Well, it’s certainly that, too. But, actually, these are biblical allusions to the fact that God is continuing the eschatological battle, which was won on the cross but has to be implemented until the final day. And here’s the thing. We are called to take part in that. It’s God’s battle. It’s the Messiah’s battle. But, insofar as we are seated in heavenly places in the Messiah, we haven’t escaped that battle. We are placed exactly where that battle is. So we need to develop styles of ministry, styles of worship, styles of prayer, lament, and praise, which enable us to take the whole armor of God. I have a sense we’re going to need that in the days to come.

Jason Daye
Yeah, absolutely, Tom. And that goes back to that groundedness and not escaping away somewhere, but being grounded in what’s in front of us as well. Absolutely love that, brother. Thank you so much once again for taking time to be with us. I want to encourage people to pick up Tom’s latest, The Vision of Ephesians. He goes in great more detail of just what we kind of scrape the surface of today. And you can find links to the book in our toolkit that we create for this episode and every episode. You can find that at PastorServe.org/network. Lots of different resources, links to Tom’s books, also a Ministry Leaders Growth Guide, so that you and the Ministry Leaders at your local church can dig more deeply into the conversation that Tom and I just shared together. Tom, I appreciate you, brother. Thank you so much.

N.T. Wright
Thank you very much. Thank you. It’s good to talk. See you again one day.

Jason Daye
All right. God bless you

Jason Daye
Here at PastorServe, we hope you’re truly finding value through these episodes of FrontStage BackStage. If so, please consider leaving a review for us on your favorite podcast platform. These reviews help other ministry leaders and pastors just like you find the show so they can benefit as well. Also, consider sharing this episode with a colleague or other ministry friend, and don’t forget our free Toolkit, which is available at PastorServe.org/network. This is Jason Daye, encouraging you to love well, live well, and lead well.