Tom Wright: It's not a question of left and right, says the combative priest who opposes the war in Iraq and gay bishops

There has been a lot of Tom Wright around recently. The new Bishop of Durham has arrived with a bit of a bang.

There has been a lot of Tom Wright around recently. The new Bishop of Durham has arrived with a bit of a bang.

In a Christmas Day sermon, which was broadcast nationwide by Radio 4, the man who is now the fourth most important bishop in the Church of England (he comes after Canterbury, York and London in precedence) launched a thinly-veiled attack over the war in Iraq on Tony Blair and George Bush as people who "still invoke Jesus to support plans that look much more like those of Augustus", the imperial power of Christ's day.

He also criticised Israel's "savage" policies towards the Palestinians, even quoting the words of the Jewish prophet Isaiah about "God himself fighting on the wrong side".

On Christmas Eve, in an article in The Independent, he took a withering sideswipe at "so many of last generation's theologians", including presumably his famous predecessor at Durham, Dr David Jenkins, who were eager to reduce the Christmas story to the status of a myth. That morning, on the Today programme, he locked horns with the leading Jewish scholar, Geza Vermes, on the significance of Jesus's Jewishness. And on the same day, writing in The Times, he launched a full-frontal assault on what he calls the "shrill secularists" who every year "discover" Christmas is "really" an ancient pagan festival in an attempt to cut Christianity down to size and screen out its revolutionary political implications.

As well as all that, Dr Wright is one of the key members of the international commission recently appointed by the Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, to avoid schism in the Anglican Communion over the issue of gay bishops, to whom Dr Wright is fairly stoutly opposed.

Yes, you can expect to be hearing a lot more of Dr Tom Wright.

If his combination of strong stances falls a little oddly on your intellectual template then that merely shows, so far as Dr Wright is concerned, that you are thoroughly immersed in the unquestioning presuppositions of our culture. Which makes you, I am afraid, a part of the problem.

"The faddish culture of our day is still clinging to the threadbare pseudo-moralisms of the late Enlightenment world," he told me in a study of towering bookshelves in Auckland Castle, the former hunting lodge which has been the home to the prince-bishops of Durham for 800 years.

"The Church has to say, 'Sorry there's a more sophisticated way of doing society, culture, ethics, ethos and so on", said the man who was an Oxford theology lecturer then canon theologian of Westminster Abbey before being appointed to Durham with its long tradition of scholar-bishops. Dr Wright is probably evangelicalism's cleverest contemporary thinker and communicator.

"The way we line up issues owes much to America, where things are still seen along old Civil War fault-lines. You are either a liberal Yankee in favour of gays, abortion and all other right-thinking causes. Or you're a Southern fundamentalist redneck who believes in guns, the death penalty and shooting people outside abortion clinics," he said. But life is more complicated than the Mason-Dixon line suggests. "The position of someone such as Rowan Williams is seen as inconsistent only by those who accept that tick-all-the-boxes package deal. And yet this left/right polarisation is only as old as the French Revolution. It shows that our assumptions are still those of the world of the late Enlightenment and of the Whig idea of history [that we progress constantly to a future better than the past].

"Post-modernity is assumed to be on the 'left' side of the equation, although it re-inscribes empire rather than undermining it, allowing the bullies and the bosses to create facts on the ground to their own advantage. (All those years of Derrida and we still get George W Bush!) But post-modernism flourishes only where we can create our own private spaces, put on our headphones and be in our private world. There's no post-modernism on the West Bank. The lines there are real and drawn in the sand."

All of which gives some hint of the package of simultaneous radicalism and conservatism, faith and reason, which constitutes Dr Wright's world view. It gives non-evangelicals some sense that a philosophical position, rather than outdated homophobia, lies behind the opposition to gay bishops by many in the Church. And it says something about the complex interweaving of religion and politics in the Church of England, which should remain established, Dr Wright believes, partly to "keep alive the rumour of God in society" but also to speak truth unto power. The medieval church excommunicated Holy Roman Emperors over the death penalty "and there are people in Texas today who need to be reminded of that".

Dr Wright himself has not been coy in this area. Before the invasion of Iraq, and before he became a bishop, he said: "It is horrendous that two leaders of the Western world who profess to be of the Christian faith are the two who are leading us towards war against an Islamic state. It is going to mean the whole of the Islam world will think this is a Christian-against-Islam war. America's notorious support for Israel only exacerbates that."

Today he adds: "For Bush and Blair to go into Iraq together was like a bunch of white vigilantes going into Brixton to stop drug-dealing. This is not to deny there's a problem to be sorted, just that they are not credible people to deal with it. The world now needs a UN army in the way that Britain 200 years ago needed to turn its bands of militia in each town into a national police force". The religious conservatives who surround George Bush, he says, espouse "a very strange distortion of Christianity" and the fact that "some of them stand to benefit financially from the reconstruction of Iraq" has made the whole enterprise even more suspect.

Of Israel, he says: "I agree with the millions of Jews around the world, and tens of thousands in Israel - some of whom I know from teaching at the Hebrew University - who grieve at what some Jews in Israel led by Ariel Sharon are doing. I'm not anti-Israel but when I see what's been done to the Palestinians over the past 50 years, I say, 'Well I'm sorry, but if you put people behind barbed wire, keep them caged, take their land despite international resolutions, and bulldoze their homes, you are asking for trouble'.

"This is not in any way to excuse or exonerate the horror and enormity of suicide bombing. It is just to say that if you squeeze people that tight sooner or later they'll do drastic things. There must be better ways to achieve peace than the road taken by the government of Ariel Sharon."

Interestingly, he draws a parallel between America's unilateralism in the Middle East and in the gay bishops debate, seeing the same arrogant cultural imperialism behind both. The holding agreement of the crisis meeting of primates at Lambeth to set up a commission instead of splitting the Anglican Communion immediately was "scuppered within days with Frank Griswold [the US primate] making it clear at once he didn't agree with the consensus".

Dr Wright clearly does not accept the way the battle-lines on homosexuality have been sketched by the media. "I get irritated when people suggest the debate is between literalists and those who think scripture has to be interpreted or put into context. Some of us have spent our professional lives putting scripture in its historical context and in their contexts the relevant New Testament passages basically meant something deeply counter-cultural, then as now. If people's instinct leads them towards persons of the same sex then that is, like many other things in life, something with which a Christian has to wrestle rather than just saying, 'Well, if you feel that strongly, that's the way it should be'.

"This debate is really about the role of reason. We don't do reasoned moral discourse any more. We do, 'I feel strongly about this', 'I feel wounded about that', and 'Let me tell you about my pain'. Victimhood is the new moral high ground. We've slid into a post-modern morass which sounds like reasoned discourse but which is really just an exchange of strong emotions. Feelings matter hugely, of course, but we mustn't mistake them for moral discourse. The debate has become so shrill precisely because we're trying to cover up for the fact that we no longer have any deep moral roots or thought-through moral principles." Which takes us to what Dr Wright sees as the heart of the matter. Homosexuality can't be isolated from wider cultural debate. "There is an implicit pantheism in our culture most obvious in New Age spirituality and it leaves us with no mechanism for dealing with the problem of evil."

We think that we have so many rules and regulations we can stop things from going wrong. We are lulled into a false sense of security. "But then, whether with the two little girls in Soham or the two giant towers in New York, evil is suddenly back and as a culture we don't have the coping mechanisms. But evil is powerful and it matters. In Christianity we have a God who takes the pain of the world upon himself. And thereby provides healing and new life which is a way out of it."

Sex is one touchstone in all this. "Our culture screams that sex is for enjoyment, for recreation. But sex is like fire. It brings warmth and life to a relationship. Yet we light our fire only in the fireplace; if we lit it wherever the room was chilly we'd burn the house down. If we don't keep sex in its proper place perhaps we shouldn't be surprised when it backfires on us. I don't know what sort of a mindset Ian Huntley had but I do know that he grew up in a world so soaked in a free-and-easy sex culture, a pornography culture which says 'sex is there for the taking, everyone wants it really', without any sense of human dignity or of the preciousness of sex.

"In a society which has seen a sexual revolution within a generation it is fair to ask, historically, 'Which generation in which culture would you trust to tell the truth about sex? Would you chose one like ours, which has produced so many bruised, wounded broken families, domestic chaos, and teenage pregnancies'?"

If this ignores the fact that many other eras have been characterised by sexual licence it reveals something of Dr Wright's personal history. "As someone who's been a pastor of students for many years I have picked up the pieces, time after time, of those kinds of relationships. As a society we need to take several steps back and ask whether we like where we've got to."

Liberals would respond that this does not make sufficient distinction between casual homosexual sex and faithful gay relationships but Dr Wright is adamant that the Church has to hang on to the truth that it is called to be different and not ape the world in its sexual, cultural, social, economic, military or other agendas.

The New Testament does not recognise any sex/religion/politics divide, he insists. Part of what the media rarely report about the Church is the work of unsung heroes and heroines across the country. "I was in a redundant bank in South Shields the other day where a credit union has been set up by the Church, doing what's needed where every other agency has abandoned ship," he adds.

The Archbishop of Canterbury understands all this, Dr Wright says. "Rowan is brilliant in several interlocking ways. There's nobody else who could do what he already has done. The primates' meeting showed his extraordinary gift of being able to draw people together. He's a man of such transparent Christian spirituality that it takes somebody peculiarly hard-nosed to resist. He has been called and equipped for a very difficult moment in church history and he's come across as a man of enormous integrity and courage."

This is not how many former supporters in the liberal establishment see him. They feel he crumbled under pressure, abandoning his tolerant inclusivity of homosexuals.

"No, they built him up as a great liberal hero then screamed blue murder when he turned out to be more complicated. The idea that he capitulated to a bunch of evangelicals using their financial clout to threaten the rest of the Church is a smear.

"The press tends not to see much more than a quarter of the issue. Rowan has shown that he's not going to be pushed around by any section of the Church but is going to listen extremely carefully to everyone."

Dr Wright knows many in the secular world will disagree. But the Church today, he says, is playing on a steeply sloping pitch. If the establishment view says something different from entire church tradition, on sexuality, on war, or whatever, and is criticised for that then the Church is "big enough to take that". And Tom Wright, we are invited to infer, is big enough too.

CV: DR NICHOLAS THOMAS WRIGHT

BORN: 1 December, 1948, Northumberland.

FAMILY STATUS: Married to Margaret Elizabeth Anne Fiske; with two sons, two daughters.

EDUCATION: Sedbergh school, Yorkshire. Exeter College, Oxford. Wycliffe Hall, Oxford.

EMPLOYMENT: 1975-78, junior research fellow, Merton College, Oxford.

1976-78, Junior chaplain, Merton College, Oxford.

1978-81, Fellow and chaplain, Downing College, Cambridge.

1981- 86, Assistant professor of New Testament studies, McGill University, Montreal.

1986-93, Lecturer in theology, and fellow tutor and chaplain, Worcester College, Oxford.

1994-99, Dean of Lichfield.

2000-03, Canon theologian of Westminster Abbey.

April 2003, Bishop of Durham.

He has written more than 30 books, including Holy Communion for Amateurs (1999) and The Resurrection of the Son of God (2003).