Three Bishops Walk Into a Question
N.T. Wright, John Shelby Spong, and Rowan Williams
The Anglican Communion’s greatest minds disagree about the Resurrection. That may be the most Anglican thing about them.
Every Sunday, in Episcopal and Anglican churches around the world, the congregation stands and recites the same words: He rose again on the third day. They say them together, with conviction, in languages Cranmer never imagined. And if you could somehow pause the service and ask each of them what they meant — really meant — you would get answers so different from one another that you might wonder whether they were reciting the same creed at all.
This is not a crisis. At least, not in the Anglican tradition. It may be, in fact, the tradition’s most distinctive gift to Christianity: the belief that the hardest questions deserve the most serious engagement, and that serious engagement rarely produces unanimity.
Consider three of Anglicanism’s most celebrated theologians. All bishops. All scholars of the first order. All working within the same tradition, reading the same texts, worshipping at the same table. And on the central question of the Christian faith — what happened on the third day, and what it means — they could hardly be further apart.
N.T. Wright: The Historian’s Case
Tom Wright is probably the most formidable defender of the bodily resurrection writing in English today. His argument is deliberately historical rather than devotional. He does not ask you to take the resurrection on faith. He asks you to look at the evidence.
Wright’s case rests on two facts he considers historically secure: the empty tomb and the post-resurrection appearances. Either alone, he argues, would be insufficient. Grief can produce visions. Empty tombs can be explained. But together, and in the specific cultural context of first-century Judaism — where resurrection meant bodies, not spirits, and where the disciples had every reason to expect failure rather than vindication — the combination demands explanation.
What makes Wright’s argument distinctive is his insistence that the resurrection was not the resuscitation of a corpse but the inauguration of a new kind of existence. Jesus did not return to ordinary life. He entered something the New Testament writers struggled to describe because nothing in their experience had prepared them for it. Wright calls it the beginning of God’s new creation — not the reversal of death but its transformation.
For Wright, the resurrection is not a doctrine you believe despite the evidence. It is a conclusion the evidence presses you toward, if you follow it honestly.
John Shelby Spong: The Bishop Who Said No
Jack Spong spent his episcopal career saying out loud what many Episcopalians had been thinking quietly for years. On the resurrection he was characteristically direct: the physical, bodily resurrection of Jesus did not happen in the way the creeds describe, and intellectual honesty requires us to say so.
Spong’s argument is not that nothing happened. Something clearly happened — something powerful enough to transform a group of frightened, scattered disciples into people willing to die for what they had experienced. But Spong locates that something in the realm of transformative spiritual experience rather than physical event. The resurrection narratives, in his reading, are not eyewitness reports. They are theological poetry — the early church’s attempt to say, in the language available to them, that Jesus was alive to them in a way death had not ended.
He drew heavily on the Jewish midrashic tradition, arguing that the gospel writers were doing what Jewish interpreters had always done: using the language and imagery of scripture to make theological claims, not historical ones.
Wright and others pushed back hard. If the resurrection is purely a transformation in the disciples’ understanding, Wright argued, then Paul’s entire theological edifice collapses — including the promise that what happened to Jesus will happen to us. Spong’s resurrection, critics said, is not a resurrection at all. It is a beautiful experience with a borrowed name.
Spong was not persuaded. Neither, it should be said, were many of his readers — which may be precisely the point. He was not writing for people who were already certain. He was writing for people sitting in church saying words they only half believed, wondering whether there was still room for them at the table. For that audience he was, and remains, indispensable.
Rowan Williams: The Theologian’s Caution
Rowan Williams occupies different ground from both Wright and Spong, and it is characteristically Anglican ground — careful, layered, resistant to easy resolution.
Williams insists, against Spong, that something happened to the body. The tomb was empty. The resurrection was not simply a new way of understanding Jesus but an event — something that occurred in the world, not only in the minds of the disciples. On this he is clear.
But Williams is more cautious than Wright about what the historical argument can establish and what it cannot. He is wary of the apologetic project — the attempt to prove the resurrection by marshaling evidence — not because the evidence is weak but because he thinks it asks the wrong question. The resurrection is not primarily a puzzle to be solved. It is an encounter to be entered.
What Williams emphasizes, and what neither Wright nor Spong quite centers in the same way, is forgiveness. The risen Jesus appears first to the people who failed him — who denied him, abandoned him, doubted him. The resurrection is not only the vindication of Jesus. It is the restoration of the disciples. It is the announcement that the story is not over, that failure is not final, that the community broken by fear and betrayal is being reconstituted around an empty tomb.
This is, Williams suggests, what the resurrection feels like from the inside — not a historical argument won, but a relationship restored.
What the Disagreement Tells Us
Three bishops. Three positions. One creed.
It would be easy to read this as a problem — evidence that Anglican theology is too permissive, too comfortable with ambiguity, too reluctant to draw lines. Some critics, inside and outside the tradition, have said exactly that.
But there is another way to read it. The disagreement among Wright, Spong, and Williams is not a failure of the tradition. It is the tradition doing what it has always done: holding the hardest questions open long enough for serious people to engage them seriously. Richard Hooker, the great Anglican theologian of the sixteenth century, argued that scripture, tradition, and reason all belong at the table. When you invite reason to the table, you invite disagreement. That is not a bug. It is, arguably, the whole point.
What strikes me, having spent more than a year in conversation with a scientist who came to faith late and reluctantly, is that the disagreement itself is generative. It is not the answers that kept us talking. It was the quality of the questions.
Wright gives you a historian’s case, carefully assembled, genuinely persuasive. Spong gives you permission to doubt without leaving — a place to stand when the traditional formulations no longer hold. Williams gives you something harder to name: the sense that the resurrection is less an argument to be won than a reality to be encountered, on its own terms, in its own time.
Every Sunday, when the congregation stands and says he rose again, all three of those things may be happening at once — in different people, in different measures, sometimes in the same person from one year to the next.
That, too, may be the most Anglican thing about it.
This essay is drawn from Two Episcopalians Walk Into a Bar: A Conversation About Believing, available on Amazon in Kindle and paperback editions. The book follows a year of conversations between a cradle Episcopalian and a scientist finding his way toward faith — about God, hiddenness, doubt, and what the word almighty actually means.