WITH JUSTIFICATION

            It is never an easy thing to write a rebuttal book if you are genuinely a Christian person.  You keep hoping that people will stop misunderstanding what you have said and written, will think better of ad hominem attacks, and you keep trying the 'turn the other cheek' approach, at least until people think you're being cheeky by not responding to their criticisms.  But finally when there is persistent, and seemingly willful, misinterpretation of what you have said, it becomes the lesser of several undesirable things to respond and clarify your views, with the hope that finally the light will dawn on those who have misread you.  To judge from some of the early reviews on Amazon one would have to say "Abandon Hope".

Of course the sad irony of this situation is that the very people who ought to be most appreciating and applauding the good bishop's work, including on this very subject, are those who are most strongly attacking it--conservative Evangelicals from the űber-Reformed side of the ledger.  In particular he is being attacked by folks like Don Carson, John Piper, and their disciples (e.g. Simon Gathercole).  What makes this an especially noxious and obnoxious situation is that in fact, at the end of the day, Wright is taking a very traditional view of the doctrine of justification, namely that Paul, when he uses the dikaios/dikaiosune etc. word group is largely referring to forensic righteousness, right standing with God established by grace and through faith in the dying and rising Messiah Jesus.  Further, in very Reformed fashion he wants to argue that in Romans and elsewhere what the phrase 'the righteousness of God' refers to is God's covenant faithfulness to promises he made.  Sounds like a good traditional Reformed reading of Paul to most of us. (I should add for those who do not know my work that whilst I attended a Reformed Evangelical Seminary, Gordon-Conwell, I am in fact a Wesleyan Evangelical, and so in the first place there are some ways in which I disagree with Tom Wright's perspective and in the second place I find it bordering on bizarre that he is being attacked by his own close theological kin.  This is truly an 'in-house' fight, and I don't really have a dog in it, except Bishop Wright is a long time Christian friend, and it is not right to stand idly by and watch a brother being unnecessarily attacked.  For what it is worth, I find Wright a far better and more Biblical ambassador for his particular Reformed theological view point than those who are attacking him).

Let us first start with the big picture.  Wright is a global thinker, by which I mean he is not into doing theology by sound-bytes, little snippets of texts here there and yonder strung together because they share some common vocabulary word.  He is also an exegete as well as a theologian, and as an exegete he knows that a text without a context is just a pre-text for whatever you want it to mean.  It has been, and remains one of the great problems of systematic theology, especially as done in the West since the Middle Ages, that it tends to mine the Biblical quarry for ideas and concepts and then thrust them into some Procrustean bed, call it a pre-existing theological schema, where they do not comfortably fit. Wright, quite properly, insists on reading Paul in the context of early Judaism and early Christianity, a necessary step for one who takes history seriously and does not think one can do Pauline theology in isolation from Paul's original contexts.  But herein, already, lies part of the problem with the űber-Reformed.  This is threatening because it means that various later Lutheran and Calvinist theological perspectives on Paul turn out to be wrong, and not in accord with what Paul actually said and meant.

Now you might expect that those who wave the flag of sola Scriptura most fervently would agree that all later systematic theologies ought to be regularly checked or critiqued by the Biblical text, rightly understood in its proper original contexts.  But sadly it is not so.  Phrases like 'imputed righteousness' are assumed to be so central to Paul's soteriology, so non-negotiable (even though you will look in vain for this phrase in any Pauline letter), that when Tom Wright questions some of the aspects of such a view on the basis of a close exegesis of Pauline texts, you would have thought he was guilty of being Uzzah, the man with unclean hands who reached out to grab the ark of the covenant when it was falling, and was zapped (1 Chron. 13.9-10).  Only Bishop Wright has not been zapped, indeed his work has been blessed and well received far and wide, to the dismay of the űber-Reformed.  They are worried about his growing influence. One wonders if pure jealousy has entered into the picture here, because of the enormous influence of Bishop Wright's work, who is probably the most well known, well reviewed Evangelical scholar in the world, whether we are referring to exegesis or theology.

Part of the problem here is that, as it turns out, the űber-Reformed too often want to do theology in isolation from the first century Jewish and historical context of Paul.  And there is a reason for this. Listen to what one ardent reviewer on Amazon, who shall remain anonymous, in critiquing this new book by Wright, says---

"I sympathize with Bishop Tom as he struggles to contradict Historic Evangelical theology as refined by the Protestant Church since Reformation. He simply is too caught up in his contextualization bias that slants his take on reading Paul. If only he could read Paul (and Jesus and John and Peter and Hebrews and Gospels and Luke's Acts and Old Testament) on a STAND ALONE basis without the baggage of 2nd Temple Judaism lenses coloring everything Bishop Tom reads."

"What is the main problem with Bishop Tom and his fans who are fascinated with "New Perspectives"?  A wholesale abandonment of Sola Scriptura as the only necessary authoritative source for theology and the doctrine of Justification by Faith Alone in Christ Alone. I would add 'Satis Scriptura Est' has been jettisoned as well: the Bible by itself is enough to rely on in determining meaning, interpretation, exegesis and what justification really involves."

Ah, there's the rub!  We should be able to read the Bible without the necessary extra heavy lifting of studying it in its original historical, literary, rhetorical, social, and linguistic contexts, because after all the Bible should only be interpreted in the light of other verses in the Bible, or otherwise you have denied the perspicuity, the clarity of Scripture.  In other words, the concept of the clarity of Scripture is used to bolster: 1) obscurantism, and 2) a particular tradition of Protestant interpretation of Scripture which is assumed to be the 'plain sense meaning of the Biblical text' without all the excess baggage of historical and contextual study.  Now of course, Wright's scholarly critics would deny this is their approach, but in fact it seems to be their fall back position when they are shown that in fact Paul was not an early advocate of their narrow view of either justification or of their sort of 'imputed righteousness'.  As Tom Wright says, once you realize the forensic character of what Paul says when he is talking about justification, it becomes plain that God/Christ who is the judge is not imputing his personal righteousness to the man standing in the courtroom who is guilty as sin.  No, he is legally declaring the man in right-standing with God on the basis of the death and resurrection of Christ, the benefits of which are appropriated through faith in Christ.  Christ's personal righteousness does not enter into the bargain or transfer here.

            But the problem is not just that Tom has skewered some sacred cows in his own tradition when it comes to either Bibliolatry or the Reformed tradition of interpreting Paul.  No, the problem is that Tom refuses to take the traditional Reformation approach to Jews and Judaism and Paul as a Jewish theologian, which quite frankly are at least anti-Judaistic when they are not plainly just anti-Semitic (for example in the case of Luther).  Bishop Wright believes that Paul is not an early version of a supercessionist, one who believes that Judaism has been replaced by Christianity as the true Biblical religion. He believes that Paul sees those who are 'in Christ', both Jew and Gentile, as the eschatological completion of the one people of God for whom God all along had a plan.  One of the real strengths of Wright's view is that it accounts for the whole Biblical witness, both OT and NT from a Jewish, and yet Christian, point of view.   What do I mean by this?  Let's let the good Bishop speak for himself:

            "Paul's view of the cataclysmic irruption of God into the history of Israel and the world in and through the death and resurrection of Jesus the Messiah was that this heart-stopping, show-stopping, chart-topping moment was, despite initial appearances, and certainly despite Paul's own earlier expectations and initial understanding, the very thing for which the entire history of Israel from Abraham onward, the entire history of Israel under Torah from Moses onward and indeed the entire history of humanity from Adam onward had been waiting. It is central to Paul, but almost entirely ignored in perspectives old, new, and otherwise, that God had a single plan all along through which he intended to rescue the world and the human race, and that this single plan was centered upon the call of Israel, a call which Paul saw coming to fruition in Israel's representative, the Messiah." (p. 35).

            Here then is the big picture.  God had always intended that through Abraham and his kin, indeed through Israel, a light would be sent forth into the world.  Israel was not chosen merely to be God's chums, God's favorites, they were chosen to be light bearers in a dark world.  Election was not merely all about the salvation of the elect, it had a larger purpose--not merely bearing witness to the larger Gentile world but setting about to redeem it, and not even just the human parts of it but in fact 'all creation'.

Now I need to take a breath here and say that this breath-taking vision does not include the idea that everyone and everything gets saved, redeemed, etc. from Wright's point of view.  Wright is not a universalist in that sense. Nevertheless, Wright believes that salvation has both cosmic scope and personal benefit.  He believes that the resurrection of Jesus is not just about creating a born again set of individuals receiving eternal security and winding up in heaven.  No he believes that Christ's history is the believer's eschatological destiny (see his other recent book, Surprised by Hope, reviewed on this blog some weeks ago).  He believes that the finish line for the Christian is not heaven but the new creation on earth.  He believes that salvation in Christ is not a reaction to the failure of Israel to save the world, but rather the completion of her task by means of the true Israelite, Jesus, the Jewish Messiah and world Savior.  And there is something more here.  Wright believes that his critics are guilty of having a truly deficient ecclesiology.  How so?

God's redemption plan ever since the Fall was not merely to create a bunch of saved individuals, but to deal with the problem of sin both individually and corporately. The effect of the Fall was not merely to alienate human individuals from their God, but to alienate them from each other.  Salvation is not just about saving this or that person. It is about re-creating community.  It has both a vertical and a horizontal dimension. Listen for example to what Paul says in 1 Cor. 12--"by one Spirit we were all baptized into the one body, Jews or Greeks, slave or free, and we were all made to drink of the one Spirit." (verse 13).   Reconciliation is not just between us and God, but also between us, for we have all fallen and can't get up except by grace and through faith.  It was always about creating a people, the heirs of Abraham, Jew and Gentile united in Christ and heading for the true promised land, not merely the Holy Land, but the new creation of the whole earth, which Jesus said the meek would one day inherit.

I think by now you can see what I mean by saying that Wright is a global thinker. He has tied together all the threads of the Biblical story into one grand narrative of creation, fall and redemption for the whole human race and made clear that late Western, non-Jewish, individualistic readings of Paul do not work.  Of course 'the Devil's in the details' as some would say, so before we bring this little essay to a close lets consider a few of the particulars of Wright's case.  First let's consider the matter of the definition of justification.

Wright correctly protests that the whole doctrine of salvation should not be subsumed under the heading of justification. Wright believes there is initial right-standing with God granted when one believes in Christ, and that this is a bringing forward into the present of final right-standing with God in advance.  Initial right-standing is by grace and through faith alone (as all the Reformers would agree), but final right-standing, whilst it is also by grace and through faith involves an evaluation of works (see Rom. 2, 2 Cor. 5 etc.). 

Wright is careful to make clear he is not an advocate of  'works-righteousness' that bugaboo particularly of Lutheran theology, but he refuses to ignore those texts which state that Christian's, including minister's (see 2 Cor. 3), deeds will be put under God's searchlight at the final assize and will either be commended or condemned (and I would add that this is connected with rewards or the lack there of in the Kingdom, though salvation in itself is not a reward).  Wright is concerned that the part (justification) has been mistaken for the whole doctrine of salvation, which among other things includes the work of the Spirit in the believer, sanctification and glorification, not just right-standing with God.

If I may be permitted a personal word here, I find it completely odd that those who most frequently use the phrase 'sovereign grace' in fact do not seem to think that that grace is a very potent transformer of human nature, because they are the same persons who most fervently deny the dramatic sanctifying work of the Spirit subsequent to justification which increasingly frees us from the effects of sin, and indeed if we are filled with God's perfect love, at least at times frees us even from fear and the inclination to commit willful acts of sin (see 1 John 4-5).  This is not about a naïve or Pelagian optimism about human potential or human nature.  It is about a belief that God's grace is more powerful than the sin in our lives.  But I digress.

As I have said, Bishop Wright thinks Paul's notion of dikaios/dikaiosune is forensic or legal.  Listen to what he says--- "Righteousness within the lawcourt setting...denotes the status that someone has when the court has found in their favor. Notice, it does not denote, within that all-important lawcourt context, 'the moral character they are assumed to have' or 'the moral behavior they have demonstrated which has earned them the verdict." (p. 90).  

He goes on to add, rightly, that legal righteousness is not the same thing as moral righteousness. Justification is not about the judge imputing his moral righteousness to the actually guilty sinner. It is about the legal definition of not-guilty or pardon, and in either case it establishes right-standing with the judge and before the Law.  It is about the position and not the condition of the sinner, but it is not about the legal fiction of Christ's righteousness being imputed to us.            

Of course we need to be actually righteous if we are to be the holy people of God, but that is a matter of the internal working of the Spirit, a matter of sanctification, not a matter of a righteousness exchange (Christ's for our's).   In fact, what Romans 4 says when talking about our forefather Abraham is that Abraham's faith was reckoned as Abraham's righteousness (or right-standing).  If we must talk about exchange then it is faith reckoned as righteousness in Romans, not Christ's righteousness reckoned as ours. According to Romans 4 both sides of the ledger, credit and debit, involve something Abraham has--faith and right-standing/righteousness, the former being credited as the latter.  The importance of Abraham is that he is being depicted by Paul as the prototype of the Christian who is in a like situation. The word justification, as Wright stresses, does not describe the whole of salvation from grace to glory it has to do with the legal verdict present and future passed on the sinner who is saved by grace through faith in the death and resurrection of Jesus the Messiah.

Where does the new Perspective on Paul fit into this discussion?  Well, you may remember the work of E.P. Sanders, J.D.G. Dunn and others who argued against a caricature of Judaism as if it were a religion of 'works'righteousness' or 'legalism'.  Wright is in considerable agreement with this group in saying that painting early Judaism, and for that matter OT religion with that broad brush is not merely unfair, it is inaccurate.  The redemption of Israel by God's grace and power in the Exodus-Sinai events preceded the law covenant known as the Mosaic covenant, and the Mosaic covenant was intended to deal with the matter of 'how then shall we live, since we have been saved by God's grace'. 

It is true of course that there were some in early Judaism that saw law-keeping as proof or evidence of their election, and it could become a means of self-justification and self-congratulation in some cases. In the striving to obey one could sometimes forget God's grace is what established the covenant in the first place. 

But Paul's critique of the Mosaic covenant and its law was not a critique of mere legalism or works righteousness.  His critique was as follows: 1) the Torah is holy, righteous and good, however 2) its effect on fallen persons, rather than its intent was condemnation rather than commendation because the Law was not the Spirit, it could not enable a person to obey it, and anyway 3) the Mosaic covenant was temporary, set up to keep God's people in line until the coming of Messiah (so Gal. 3-4).

The Mosaic covenant is likened in Galatians to a nanny, the paidagogos not being the teacher but rather the household servant who looked over a child until he grew up, walking him back and forth to school, keeping him safe, and helping him with his homework.  The function was to keep little Publius in bounds. Paul says that this covenant has been fulfilled, and so rendered obsolete by the death of Jesus (see Rom. 10.4).  The new covenant then is seen as the fulfillment of the Abrahamic covenant in both Galatians and Romans (on which see my Grace in Galatia, and my Letter to the Romans,).

Part of the problem between Wright and the űber-Reformed is that they have  different views of covenant theology.  Wright is a good enough exegete to allow Paul's words in Galatians 4 or in Romans to have their full weight, which means one cannot say that the new covenant is simply the renewal of the Mosaic one, only with better Energizer batteries included in the form of the Spirit, who enables us to keep it. 

No, for Paul the new covenant is the fulfillment of the Abrahamic one, which in turn means that the Mosaic covenant had a temporal and temporary function.  This becomes especially clear in 2 Cor. 3 in Paul's contrast between the ministry of the covenant of law which is death-dealing rather than life-giving, and the ministry of the new covenant which involves the Holy Spirit which gives life.  Paul says the former covenant has a fading splendor whereas the latter covenant has an enduring one, not least because it involves all of us being transformed into the glorious image of Christ.  One covenant is completed and fulfilled in the new covenant, the other covenant is made obsolete, through the death of Christ absorbing the curse sanctions of that Mosaic covenant, the penalty for its violation.

In a further post on this new blog site, you will hear from the Bishop himself in response to some questions I have posed to him.  Here I will say that there was justification for Bishop Wright writing Justification, and it is by no means simply a polemic. Rather, especially when he gets down to the task of exegesis in Part Two of the book there is an exegetical and theological feast to be had.  I fear however, that it will mostly give his critics indigestion, as they seem to have a limited palette and become dyspeptic when they are forced to consume something out of the ordinary that is not on their pre-ordained menu.  Let me add in conclusion as well that lest you think there are not matters of consequence involved in this discussion, and would be prone to see it as "full of sound and fury, but signifying nothing" or even 'Christians behaving badly towards each other', I would urge you to read this book and see that much is at stake, namely whether we have a fully Biblical and Pauline view of justification and salvation or not.

Dr. Ben Witherington, III
Amos Professor of NT for Doctoral Studies
Asbury Theological Seminary
Wilmore Ky.
Doctoral Faculty St. Mary's College, St. Andrews University, Scotland