Ask NTWrite Anything podcast.

Welcome back to another episode of the Ask Ante

Ante Right Anything podcast.

I'm Dr Mike Bird from Ridley College in Melbourne, Australia.

And I'm Tom Wright from Oxford and from Wickliff Hall in Oxford University.

So today on the Ask Antirite Anything podcast, we're going to explore some really interesting questions that we've been getting from our listeners.

And these include things about Jesus as the Son of God, the Eucharist, and it also talks about Old Testament law and how it does or does not apply today.

First up, we've got a question from Tenetta Schneider, who asks to Tom,

how do you respond to Bart Amman's belief that Jesus was not the Son of God? Now, Tom, something

that you and I have in common is we've both debated Bart Amman. Yes. And Bart is a difficult

person to debate, and this isn't terribly relevant to the question except to show our background,

that I found he has a lot of interesting ideas, he has a lot of

expertise in text criticism, that is, in looking at early manuscripts and trying to figure out

which might be the best reading of this or that text, but that Bart himself, and he's written about

this, so it's not a secret or a private personal matter, Bart himself came from

an extremely fundamentalist background in America. And then when he rejected that, he's rejected

a whole lot of the bits and pieces of Christianity that went with that. Those of us who didn't

come from that background watched somebody like this moving from, as it were,

our extreme right to our extreme left and say, that's funny, I'm quite happy sitting here in the

middle, thank you very much. So that's how I initially respond to Bart. Of course, it depends

what you mean by that Jesus was the son of God. What does Son of God mean? The phrase Son of God has often been taken as simply a cipher to say he's the second person of the Trinity. But if you say, was he or was he not the second person of the Trinity, that implies that we know what the Trinity is, and it's just a question of whether Jesus was number two in the Trinity or what.

And I think what the denial is about is denying that Jesus was himself in some sense or other fully divine.

...