Justification and New Perspective 10

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 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).

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.

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...

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.

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.

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

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.