N.T. Wright Explains Ephesians: The Church, Christian Nationalism, and the Armor of God
Good Faith
Good Faith
5 • 1.8K Ratings
🗓️ 4 December 2025
⏱️ 53 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Christianity Isn't a Nation and The Church Isn't a National Movement
Host Curtis Chang sits down with N.T. Wright to explore the explosive themes of Ephesians, including what the Bible really says about the mission of the church—not as a lifeboat escaping to heaven, but a "small working model of new creation"—a multiethnic, multicultural community that stands against the powers and principalities of our age through truth, unity, and love. Wright discusses the church's mission in a divided world, and the rise of Christian nationalism. They address modern challenges such as misunderstandings of spiritual warfare, the communal nature of the armor of God, why the "belt of truth" matters today, and how Ephesians calls the church to resist counterfeit visions of power.
(06:12) - Has NT Wright changed his mind about the Biblical truths?
(12:15) - What is Wright's "small working model of new creation"?
(16:15) - The new community of Jesus Christ
(22:51) - The problem of Christian nationalism
(28:16) - The Challenge of Christian Multiculturalism
(29:39) - The Church's Role in Spiritual Warfare
(36:56) - Is the Armor of God a communal thing?
(43:05) - The biblical view of men and women is not antiquated
(49:19) - A final word of encouragement from Ephesians
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Mentioned In This Episode:
- N.T. Wright's The Vision of Ephesians: The Task of the Church and the Glory of God
- N.T. Wright's forthcoming God's Homecoming: The Forgotten Promise of Future Renewal
- Lecture: How Paul Invented Christian Theology (N.T. Wright lecture)
- What are the Five Elements of Christian Nationalism?
- Learn more: Desmond Tutu and the triumph against Apartheid
- Watch: How Artistotle and the Greek philosophers influenced the idea of a soul (video)
- Read: How a Man Named Lesslie Changed the Way I Think
Scriptural Thoughts on Rest:
- Genesis 1-2 (ESV) - Male & female relationships and creation theology
- Ephesians 1:1-14 (ESV) - Revealing who Jesus is to the world
- Ephesians 2:10 (ESV) - Humankind's purpose
- Ephesians 6:10-20 (ESV) - The full armor of God
- 1 Corinthians 15:20-28 (ESV) -The guarantee of the resurrection
- Revelation 21-22 (ESV) - Vision of new creation
More From N.T. Wright:
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | The church as a whole needs to remind itself and remind one another of its larger obligation. |
| 0:09.1 | Start with the belt of truth. Within postmodernity, truth is so much at a discount that, |
| 0:14.7 | oh, well, that's just fake news. This is all just made up. That's just AI generated or whatever. |
| 0:19.8 | But actually, the Christian is committed to the |
| 0:22.3 | goodness of creation and to the promise of new creation. And those are the realities, the truths |
| 0:28.0 | within which we have to live. And we can only really sustain this vision if Christian physicists, |
| 0:35.0 | Christian sociologists, Christian marriage guidance counselors, Christian, |
| 0:39.1 | all sorts of people, are at least in principle working together to reinforce the truths |
| 0:45.9 | of the goodness of creation and the promise of new creation. And if we are, then that belts of |
| 0:52.6 | truth will hold all sorts of other things in place. |
| 1:16.8 | Welcome to the Good Faith podcast. I'm your host, Curtis Chang. The Good Faith podcast is where friends who follow Jesus help each other make sense of the world. The podcast is a production |
| 1:23.4 | of Good Faith, a 501C3 nonpartisan organization. |
| 1:28.3 | For me and for countless Christians around the world, |
| 1:32.3 | the leading expert, bar none in helping us understand the Bible better, |
| 1:37.3 | is N.T. Wright, or Tom, as he's known by many. |
| 1:41.3 | Now, I am not even going to try to describe the full impact he's had on |
| 1:46.1 | scholarship, on the church, and guiding Christians to absolutely recapture more of the true |
| 1:53.0 | understandings of scripture. So I'm just going to, in fact, just give a very personal testimony. |
| 1:58.5 | I first encountered Tom Wright as a graduate student at Harvard in the |
| 2:03.8 | 1999, or better I should say, I encountered Tom Wright when I was a student in a graduate level |
| 2:09.4 | course at Harvard called Paul and the Roman Empire. And that course changed my life, changed my |
| 2:16.9 | thinking. |
... |
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