Society
''Jesus will appear again as judge of the world and the dead will be raised''
Published 10 April 2008
Tom Wright's literal belief in the Resurrection makes him a hero to conservative Christians worldwide. Here he declares war on militant atheists and liberals, and explains why heaven is not the end of the world
In a memorable episode of the television series Yes, Prime Minister, the PM, Jim Hacker, is presented with a choice of two candidates for a vacant bishopric. When the cabinet secretary, Sir Humphrey Appleby, mentions the first, Hacker expresses outrage. "But he doesn't even believe in God!" he says. "Yes, Prime Minister," replies Sir Humphrey smoothly, "but he doesn't have anything against him."
At the time of transmission, in 1986, the joke worked well. The Anglican hierarchy seemed to be staffed by well-intentioned liberals in a permanent state of anguished bafflement about what they believed. Miracles? No, they're optional. Difficulties with accepting the Virgin Birth? Well, you don't have to accept it literally, of course. Not sure about God? Doubts are nothing to be ashamed of, do come in.
While papal diktats - on every subject from contraception to liberation theology - streamed like thunderbolts from John Paul II's Vatican, the Church of England appeared reluctant to take a firm line on any issue. The then archbishop of Can terbury, Robert Runcie, was talked of as a man who nailed his colours firmly to the fence when faced with controversy, while his bishop of Durham, David Jenkins, was widely thought to be symptomatic of everything woolly and wrong in the Church after it was reported that he had compared the Resurrection to "a conjuring trick with bones". (In fact, he said it was much more than that, but the inaccuracy stuck.)
No one could accuse Jenkins's distant successor Tom Wright of laxity in matters of dogma. The current Bishop of Durham, fourth most senior cleric in the Church of England (after Canterbury, York and London), is also its leading evangelical theologian. Time magazine recently described him as "one of the most formidable figures in the world of Christian thought" and "a hero to conservative Christians worldwide". He has also just written a book, Surprised by Hope, in which he spells out a view many will find extraordinary.
It is not just that, as an evangelical, he believes forcefully in the authority of scripture and the historical truth of the Gos pels. Nor is it that, like most on that conservative wing of the Church, he is strongly opposed to gay priests. The Right Reverend Wright believes in the literal truth of the Resurrection.
The day will come, he says, when Christ will come to join the heavens and the earth in a new creation and the dead will rise. All those who think of heaven as the endpoint are wrong, especially if they're thinking about "sitting on clouds playing harps". According to him, heaven is less a location, more a state: a kind of first-class transit lounge whereby our physical bodies sleep while the "real person" continues in the presence of Christ. What we will be waiting for is what he calls "life after life after death": the Second Coming and the Day of Judgement, when we will be not only physically re-embodied but transformed, on a new version of this earth with plenty of room for everyone.
There are no metaphors involved here, no decoding, no poetics to be interpreted. Wright's line, which will be news to a huge number of Christians as well as way beyond the realms of credibility to non-believers, is to be taken entirely at face value. If this man is a hero to millions of conservative Christians, then belief is certainly back.
"It is actually what the New Testament is about," says Wright in his emollient, Radio 4-friendly tones as we sit in the spring sun outside his cottage in Alnmouth, Northumberland, a family refuge away from the grandeur of his official residence, Auckland Castle. "An awful lot of western Christians have just accepted that when they say 'the resurrection of the body' they think, 'You don't really mean body. That's just the way they put it in olden days.' They don't realise it is actually the key thing. We are talking about a good physical world which is to be remade, not a bad physical world which is going to be trashed in favour of a purely spiritual sphere."
Hijacking heaven
Before I travel to meet Bishop Tom (his preferred form of address), a senior lay Catholic says to me, "He is mad, you know." But there's nothing wild-eyed about the tall figure clad in cords and comfy jumper and waiting for me at the station - although the open-top, electric blue MG two-seater is pretty flash for a prelate. His even conversation and donnish attire almost lull one into not taking in how radical and literal his message is.
Wright argues that, over the centuries, the influence of Greek culture and philosophy, in particular the theory of Platonic dualism - that the body is imperfect and destined to decay, whereas the soul is superior and continues after death - led to the language of heaven being "hijacked". He mentions a cathedral near Rome where there are frescoes "quite explicitly about resurrection, skeletons coming up from the earth, being clothed with flesh and becoming human again. Contrast that with the Sistine Chapel, where you have this great heaven and hell scene. It is sort of assumed that heaven is a disembodied state where immortal souls go to live, and then it becomes very difficult for the word resurrection to be anything other than a rather flowery metaphor for that state. But the whole point is that is what the Bible in the first three or four Christian centuries took for granted. We need to recapture that."
Another recapturing has been that of the Church of England itself. If Wright's views come across as hardline, explicit and specific, verging on the fundamentalist, that is because of the gulf between his straightforward expression of belief and the kindly muddle of the old liberals who dominated for so long. "I remember talking to my godfather, who was an archdeacon near the Tyne," says Wright, "and he said it was his judgement that a lot of the clergy that he knew in the Sixties and Seventies did have a personal conversion experience which they had misinterpreted as a call to the ministry. They didn't really know what to do, so there was a sort of embarrassment: 'Are we allowed to talk about God? Do we know who God is?'" Also at that time, "The Trinity, the Incarnation - much of that was under serious question and challenge. People said these were just silly old 5th-century ways of talking about God."
And now? "That's largely gone. I think anyone who ends up in almost any senior position in the Church now probably has not only a pretty robust personal belief in God but also a sense of why this matters. Of course there are large debates, but not about whether we do or don't believe in God."
That this is the case is largely due to the rise of the evangelicals, who decided to work wholeheartedly within the Church, rather than act as a sect, at the first National Evangelical Anglican Congress at Keele in 1967. Committed, doctrinally clear and organised, the evangelicals gained influence as that of the Anglo-Catholics declined, especially after the ordination of women priests led many to leave the Church (notably the former bishop of London Graham Leonard, who became a Roman Catholic priest), while the liberals' lack of certainty made it difficult for them to rally. Evangelicals now make up about one-third of active Church membership and 40 per cent of financial contributions, although the strength of their voice makes them sound as though they count for even more.
A year and a half ago a group of evangelical leaders threatened the Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, with a revolt unless he created a parallel structure so their churches could bypass the authority of liberal bishops. The rebels included the pugnacious Bishop of Rochester, Michael Nazir-Ali, but not Tom Wright. He condemned their demands as "arrogant and self-serving", "unbiblical" and "a covenant with chaos". Wright's put-down was shocking in its firmness and in effect ended the rebellion. His commitment to the unity of the Church over that of the evangelical cause may have lost him some support, but he remains their towering intellectual, and that, combined with his position in Church hierarchy and the fact that he has the ear of Rowan Williams (the two are old friends, as both taught at Oxford in the late Eighties), makes him a commanding figure for this growing band of tough new believers within the Church of England.
Wright has deep family roots in the Durham area, which from the 14th to the mid-19th century was ruled by the prince-bishops; in medieval times they had the right to mint their own coins and raise armies. Today's incumbent may not have wanted to fight this last battle, but there are plenty for which he is ready. One, in particular, will have evangelicals itching to draw swords. "The massive denial of reality by the cheap and cheerful universalism of western liberalism has a lot to answer for," he thunders in his new book. "The nihilism to which secularism has given birth leaves many with no reason for living." The bishop would like to see nothing less than an end to the Enlightenment split between religion and politics.
"There is a Christian view of politics," he says after lunch at a fish restaurant by the coast, "and whether or not the government knows it, it has a God-given duty to bring wise order and to facilitate human flourishing." The Church does not just have a right to comment on whether ministers are failing in their divine task, he argues. "To try to shut us up, to say, 'You keep off the patch'" is "totalitarian". So, no apologies for his Easter Sunday sermon on the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill, in which he criticised the government for "pushing through, hard and fast, legislation that comes from a militantly atheist and secularist lobby" whose aims are a "1984-style world" where "we create our own utopia by our own efforts, particularly our science and technology".
"Using what is in effect live human tissue for experimental purposes is not a frontier we think people ought to cross," he says, "and we're going to go on saying that. The more of these moral frontiers a government crosses, the more it owes to citizens to make a space for conscience, not just in voting but in how scientists and doctors carry this work out. To think that the Church should not be involved in politics is to say: 'Here are some areas of crucial concern for human flourishing, but the Church is not allowed to address these matters of public debate.' I think that's ridiculous."
Turbulent priests
It is primarily those on the political liberal left who have expressed outrage at the words of Bishop Wright and Cardinal Keith O'Brien. But there have been times when the self-same people gladly welcomed priests wading into turbulent political waters - when, for instance, David Jenkins incurred the wrath of Margaret Thatcher for supporting the striking miners: an action, it may surprise some to hear, that Wright describes as "exemplary. That's exactly what a bishop ought to be doing." But the paradox of evangelicalism is that the conservative stance on doctrine and scripture is accompanied by an apparently left-wing emphasis on social justice.
When we continue to talk about the Eighties and I suggest the left-wing view of Margaret Thatcher's policies was not just that they were wrong, but that they were immoral, he cuts in. "They were wicked. Yup." He goes on: "A lot of people didn't realise that you could perfectly easily put a Christian wash over the top of the ideologies Thatcher was buying in to, to make it look nice. But in fact they were every bit as atheist a way of constructing the world as those of overt Soviet sympathisers and communists who were out to wreck society. So critical Christian faculties needed to be brought to bear."
All this talk of religion's place in politics is a direct consequence of the beliefs Wright sets out in his new book. "Jesus's Resurrection summons us to dangerous and difficult tasks on earth," he writes. Christians must build for the new kingdom of heaven and earth. "Every act of gratitude and kindness; every work of art or music inspired by love of God; every act of care and nurture . . . will find its way into the new creation."
One task is to do justice in the world. Wright identifies global debt as "the dirty enormous scandal of glitzy, glossy western capitalism" that must be corrected. To those who think that "taking the Bible seriously meant being conservative politically as well as theologically", he says: "The truth is very different." The Resurrection "creates a programme for change. Those who believe the gospel have no choice but to follow."
Given the example of Tony Blair, I ask him if it won't be hard for any future prime minister to be so openly religious. "Public discourse needs to catch up with the fact," he sighs, "that doing God in public is not about someone kneeling down and saying their prayers, and God saying, 'Go and bomb Iraq.'"
Shortly afterwards we're back on the road to the station. Wright's belief in the Resurrection also provides an injunction to be green; it is this earth, after all, that is going to be remade. "If it is true that the whole world is now God's holy land, we must not rest as long as that land is spoiled and defaced," he writes. "This is not an 'extra' to the Church's mission. It is central." Central, but not too specific; which is just as well, I reflect, as we hare down country lanes in the MG, overtaking laggards and bracing bends in a manner that can't be contributing much to the new creation. But who knows? Bishop Tom hopes there'll be room for Bach after the Second Coming. Perhaps they can fit an electric blue MG in, too.
the CV
1 December 1948 Born Morpeth, Northumberland
1962-73 Educated at Sedbergh School, Cumbria; then Exeter College and Wycliffe Hall, Oxford
1971 Marries Margaret Fiske; they have two sons and two daughters
1978 Publishes Small Faith, Great God, first of more than 40 books
1978 Fellow and chaplain, Downing College, Cambridge
1981 Assistant professor of New Testament studies, McGill University, Montreal
1986 Lecturer in theology, Oxford ; fellow and chaplain, Worcester College
1994 Dean of Lichfield
2000 Appointed Canon Theologian, Westminster Abbey
2003 Named Lord Bishop of Durham; says Blair and Bush acted like "white vigilantes" over Iraq
2004 Member of Lambeth Commission which took strong line against homosexuality
Research by Simon Rudd
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