I’m still grateful that I had a professor who ran us through the grammatical ambiguity of the faith in Christ/the faith of Christ/faithfulness in Christ/faithfulness of Christ. A few years later, when I finally got around to taking Greek myself, I realized that teaching Galatians honestly would always involve wrestling with that important turn on phrase.

Wright’s interpretation fits so much better with the context of Galatians. It also has enormous implications for how we are in community with one another. Community is transformed. Union with Christ imaged in baptism through faith (the faithfulness of Christ and our response to that faithfulness) is the bottom line.
I think in Wright’s view… union with Christ has implications for a reconciled relationship with God, and reconciled community relations between Jews and Gentiles, Slaves and Free, Men and Women. We are brought together in Christ’s body. Imaged by Table.
Sometimes I think that this new perspective is too challenging in terms of reconciled relations in the community. It perhaps inhibits our thinking because we would have to change our ways of being in community together–affects our status–our places etc.

Wright is not doing exegesis on Galatians in pp.91-101 (GB, some 20 pages later in American), he is banging his drum, or in his own words (p.92) he is “redress(ing) the implicit hermeneutical balance a little”. Where he says such things as “(in) context … we are forced to conclude” that ‘justified’ means to be a member of God’s family, it’s not, in fact, compelling.
In short, Wright says that Paul is saying God has instituted a different marker of who are his people. It used to be Torah, but it is now faith, so that Jews and Gentiles can come together.
What I think Paul is saying here, in short, is that we cannot be saved by Torah because under Torah we are unsaved sinners. We need to die to Torah in Christ, and be raised to new life.
I feel I should add that for Wright Torah ‘merely points to’ sin (p.101, GB).

Yes, as the faithful Israel, Jesus fulfilled or completed the “works of the law” – that is the works of Torah. (The faithfulness or righteousness of Christ.) As such, the people of God are no longer marked by those works, but by and through their believing allegiance to Jesus. By falling backwards and refusing to share the table with his Gentile brothers, Peter was falling back into the old markers for the people of God and beginning to turn from the substantial union – body and spirit – we have with Christ and with each other. Thus Paul challenged him to his face and Peter repented. Peter was, after all, the first one to whom God directly revealed this new reality (Acts 10). Changing our identities and the markers of those identities where they conflict with our new identities in Christ as the people of God is never an easy task. In some ways, one could draw parallels to the past and present divisions in the American church over slavery and race. I think there are also parallels with the infiltration of nationalism into many American churches.

David (#3), the problem with your statement is that Jews didn’t (and don’t for that matter) believe that adherence to Torah “saves” them (whatever you might mean by that term). God saved them, made them his people, made covenant with them, and then gave them Torah to keep. Keeping Torah is the response of a faithful Israel to the God who has saved them. You are imposing the interpretive framework of “natural law” on the text, which is exactly what the Reformers did. While Wright could be mistaken at any number of his points, it is clear that Paul is not writing from within that framework, so interpretation based upon it is, at best, suspect.

I just don’t get how some people are clueless to the fact that Jews did not think they were saved by keeping Torah. They believed that they were saved by faith in and obedience to the One [YHWH] who gave them the Torah.
Scot, I was impressed by how Wright points out that the confrontation between Paul and Peter over table fellowship becomes the specific instance to unpack the meaning of justification. I think it is a refreshing and as Joanne comments above, challenging perspective.

Joanne,
that is the exact reason why people like to throw the ‘social gospel’ bomb at NT Wright. If they can get that to blow up, it just might create enough of a distraction to prevent them from actually having to look at the ways our world is structured; the way in which they (we) benefit from that structure at the expense of others; and the implications of the Lordship of Messiah for those structures…

The body imagery and the Table imagery challenage us. As does Paul’s discussion on the Spirit. It’s not by the Flesh but by the Spirit. Such divisions are according to the flesh and part of the former system and way of being in the world. We now live in a new way according to the Spirit in which such divisions are overcome in Christ. We being united with Christ become the New Community, The New Man and all are brought together in Christ.
We can’t sit at separate tables or define one another according to the flesh because we have been brought together through the Spirit in Christ–because of his faithfulness as the true Israelite.

I can get excited about sharing the gospel because it’s power is truly transformative of our world, communities, families. It is the ministry of reconciliation… between God and one another.

Can anyone tell me Wright in his other book suggested the translation of 1 Cor. 15:44 from “spiritual” to “future body” are correct?

Aslan (#10), Lacking any particular insight beyond a broad general understanding, I decided to check and see if the OSB had anything interesting or relevant to add. I like its note on 1 Cor. 35-54. I think I’ll just share it.
“How will the dead rise? What is the resurrection body like? Paul’s most basic contrast is that between the natural (lit. ‘soulish’; Gr. psychikon) and the spiritual (Gr. pneumatikon, v. 44), that is, between the present body and the deified body. Other contrasts are corruption vs. incorruption (v.42), dishonor vs. glory (v. 43), weakness vs. power (v. 43), living ‘soul’ (literal translation) vs. life-giving spirit (v. 45), of the earth vs. from heaven (v. 47), of dust vs. heavenly (v. 48), the mortal vs. the immortal (v.54). This present body is only a seed (v. 38) of the body to come. The ‘spiritual’ body is not a pale shadow of the material world we now know; the opposite is true. The resurrection body is the fulfillment of what God intends for our present body. It is the material fulfilled, not dematerialized.”
So yes, I think Wright’s use of “future body” is one way of putting it. It certainly cannot be taken to mean “immaterial” which seems to be how some modern readers have attempted to interpret “spiritual body”. I gather Wright was pushing back against that particular misinterpretation.

Aslan,
I’m with Scott 100%. Given the close connection in the NT worldview between the coming of the Spirit and the presence of God’s future kingdom/world, we’d do well to always think about the Spirit as “the future” and spiritual as having to do inescapable with the future, either as actual future or future-become-present. Good question.

Scott (#5) What I mean by ‘saved’ is what Paul means by it in Rom 10.1, where he says that Israel needs salvation.

I’m enjoying this series Scott. Keep it up!

This part is hard get through when you haven’t read the book. I’ve been trying to follow along without doing that in hopes of keeping up until I could order a copy. Sometimes that works; this time it isn’t.
Thanks for this discussion, Scot.
I second your kudos for RJS; she’s really added an interesting voice to the discussions.