N. T. Wright on Tolerance and the People of Faith

Peter Edman

Bishop N. T. Wright’s sermon at the end of the Anglican Consultative Council meeting deserves a wider hearing than just Anglicans. 

Wright, an eminent New Testament historian and Bishop of Durham who has moderated Trinity Forum sessions in Europe, spoke on 28 June 2005. Particularly if you haven’t been aware of his thinking before, take the time to read this through very carefully.

“Shipwreck and Kingdom: Acts and the Anglican Communion” (one source text is here) includes an ironic discussion of the politics of left and right, but is particularly thought-provoking on the concept of “tolerance” and the truth-claims that underlie the Christian faith—and all other faiths, for that matter. Faith is not a matter of personal opinion, and those who say otherwise have their own not-so-hidden agendas.

But when you are in Caesar’s world, where truth comes out of the barrel of a gun, or in his day the sheath of a sword, tolerance can simply be a fancy name for cowardice. The claim that ‘Jesus is Lord’ was never, in the first century, what we would call a religious claim pure and simple. There was no such thing as religion pure and simple. It was a claim about an ultimate reality which included politics, culture, commerce, family life and everything else you could think of. . . .

And if you stop saying ‘Jesus is Lord’ out of deference to the private opinions of your friends and neighbours, Caesar smiles his grim smile and extends his empire by one more street. After all, the great eighteenth-century virtue of tolerance was developed not least by those who were keen on extending their geographical or industrial empires, and who didn’t want God breathing down their necks to stop them. Keep religion in the private sphere and we’ll run the public square. And to that idea Luke says a clear No; and so must we.

More on tolerance and its implications:

It is becoming increasingly clear in our society—you only have to look at France to see the point—that under the superficial smile of tolerance is the hard fist of secular power. And the task of the church in this day, as in Luke’s day, is to find the appropriate ways of declaring that Jesus is Lord, openly and unhindered, recognizing that this is a statement about the real, public world as well as the world of private religious experience—indeed that it is only truly the latter, about me and my religion, because it is truly the former, about God and his created world. . . .

The point about Jesus going to heaven is not that we’ll go there to be with him one day, away from this wicked old world at last. The point is that from heaven he is ruling the world, ruling it through the faithful lives, the suffering, and the witness of his Spirit-driven apostolic followers, calling it to account, demonstrating that there is a new way of living, a way which upstages all Caesar’s pretensions to have saved the world, or united it, or brought it genuine justice, freedom, and peace. (All those claims, by the way, are the standard things that all empires have claimed, whether in the first century or the twenty-first.)

. . . [I]s it surprising that, if every doctrine from the Trinity to the divinity of Jesus to his saving death and bodily resurrection and ascension has been dismissed as outdated, disproved, or irrelevant, the church should then have no means of protesting against massive economic injustice, against the erosion and inversion of sexual morality, against rampant militarism—in other words, against Caesar and all his weapons?

His move to “shipwreck” nearer the end as a metaphor for the life of the believer in the world is also must-read as a corrective to our natural inclinations. 

Sightings, Faiths and Worldviews, Public Square, Society, Thu 30 Jun 2005