I haven’t been reading much of Wright’s press lately, but this interview caught my eye. Here are some of my favorite quotations.

Regarding homosexuality and the ECUSA:

There are lots of issues which are bubbling up under the surface. At the moment, because of the peculiar configuration of the way the postmodern culture has worked, with the deconstruction of the old ways of doing society that we all knew, one of the sharp presenting issues which has come up within our culture, is the deconstruction of marriage, and the reconstruction of more free-floating relationships in which the male plus female thing is a kind of an incidental. And why not do male plus male, or female plus female, or indeed threesomes, foursomes, fivesomes whatever. I mean there’s plenty of that going on in America as a kind of cultural mandate which people are following. And the church is finding it very difficult to hold its own in the middle of all of that.

On the probability of a split within the Anglican communion:

the church at every period in history has faced crises, struggles, big issues which have threatened to tear things apart. I think it looks now as though a great many people in North America are absolutely determined to ignore what the rest of the community’s saying, and say ‘We’re just going to do this, and if you don’t like it, tough, we’re off on our own’. If that means a loss, and it does mean a loss because that would mean part of the Anglican communion splitting off from the rest, then that is a tragedy, but it’s actually been a tragedy waiting to happen for a very long time. Because there are many churches and ECUSA has been one of them, which have embraced a particular type of theology, which leads it further and further away from where most of the rest of the Anglican communion are. Of course they will tell it the other way, they would say that the Africans and others have embraced a kind of fundamentalism which leads them away from academic purity and respectability. As an academic myself I would be bound to disagree with that. But inevitably, in any family squabble, you get this kind of ‘I said, you said, why did you say this?’ etc., to and fro, and that’s where we are right now. It’s not pretty, but it is actually what family life is sometimes all about.

On Paul:

In a sense, St Paul ought always to freak us all out, Protestants included.

On the resurrection:

Let’s be quite clear. The word ‘resurrection’ in the ancient world, the Greek word ‘anastasis’ always referred to something that we would call a physical resurrection. That is to say, the word ‘resurrection’ was never a kind of synonym for life after death, or a spiritual survival, or ‘John Brown’s body lies a-mouldering in the grave, while his soul goes marching on’. The ancient world was full of theories about bodies mouldering in graves and souls being off somewhere else, and that is not resurrection. It never was. The Greeks and Romans who explicitly disbelieved in resurrection. I should say we’re sitting in a room with Greek and Roman texts around the wall as we’re doing this recording, and many of the authors on these walls, Greek and Roman writers, when they face the idea of resurrection they say, ‘Well we’ve heard silly stories about this sort of thing, but we all know it doesn’t happen, dead people stay dead’. Aeschylus said that, Pliny said that, Homer said that. What they meant always involved bodies. It’s only in the late 2nd century and thereafter that some people who are trying to put together Christianity with bits of pagan philosophy, used the language of resurrection but mean a kind of spiritual survival. And that is a new innovation in the late 2nd century AD. It’s certainly not what the early Christians were all about.

On the nature of Christianity:

The point about Christianity is that it’s not just a new religious teaching or new ethical teaching, it’s certainly not a new way to go to heaven when you die, it’s that God’s new world has broken into the present one through Jesus of Nazareth. It’s the God who is the creator that we’re talking about, and Christianity is about new creation in and through Jesus. Dealing with the problems of the old – that’s what the Atonement is all about – and launching God’s new creation.

On the importance of the Old Testament to understanding the New:

Trying to get the message of the New Testament without the Old Testament is trying to make a tree stand up without a root system. Many Christians ignore the Old Testament and profit still from the fact that this tree is still flowering and bearing fruit. But in fact if you try cutting off that root system, you’ll find the tree falls down dead pretty soon.

Islam and Christianity:

the nub of it is really the question as to whether we are meaning the same thing by the word “God”. Whether the “Allah” of the Muslim, is actually the same as the God who is the father of Jesus Christ. Because classical Islam has said very, very definitely, ‘There is one God and he does not have a son’. And classical Islam has said very definitely that Jesus of Nazareth is a prophet but he did not die on a cross, and he was not raised from the dead. Now those are not little incidentals to Christianity, and it isn’t just that there are things Christians believe happened to Jesus. They are defining things, by which we know who the Father of Jesus is. The Father of Jesus is the one who we see revealed in the Son who dies and rises again. So we actually know the meaning of the word God by looking at Jesus.

On world religions:

it isn’t just that we’re all three branches on the same stem. Judaism, Christianity and Islam are different sorts of things. And that’s part of the difficulty about our wretched word “religion,” which ever since the 18th century has been used as a label to stick on Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism, Sikhism, etc., as though they were simply all variants on the same thing. And when you actually look at them, they’re not. They’re different kinds of animals entirely.

Lots of good stuff here for the discerning reader.