Justification: God's Plan and Paul's Vision

Justification: God's Plan and Paul's Vision
by Tom Wright
SPCK

This is the latest book by New Testament scholar, N. T. Wright, in which he outlines his unique interpretation of the writings of the apostle Paul as they concern the subject of justification. As is well known, Wright is one of the key figures in the loose grouping of New Testament scholarship known for better or worse as the New Perspective on Paul. Wright is significant not only because he is the most popular, the clearest, and the most evangelical of the main scholars associated with the movement, and therefore the person whose teachings have made the most inroads into evangelicalism in Britain and the United States, but also because in this particular book, Wright confronts his many critics who come from "the Old Perspective" or more accurately, traditional evangelicalism and confessional Reformed theology. In particular, Wright's critic, John Piper who wrote a book critiquing the new perspective and Wright especially called The Future of Justification comes in for some stinging criticism.

Wright's central metaphor in the book is that the Old Perspective is like someone who insists the earth is the centre of the solar system because the sun rises and sets each day, whereas the New Perspective is (naturally in Wright's mind) like the person who realises the deeper truth that the sun is at the centre and the earth revolves around it. Of course this immediately sets up the idea that the Old Perspective is not only outdated and less sophisticated, but also simply untrue. That does more or less poison the well. The fact is that the choice is not between an unsophisticated and demonstrably untrue view of the Bible and a sophisticated and demonstrably true view. The choice is between two sophisticated views, one which has been understood and believed for centuries and which fits the Bible's testimony (I don't accept Wright's assertions otherwise) and one which has been more or less discovered by Wright himself and missed by every generation of theologians from the post-apostolic period till the 1970s. Of course it is possible Wright is correct and everyone else did get it wrong. But just going back to the texts in itself does not guarantee theological correctness. Not if you go back and interpret them in the wrong way!

Time and time again, Wright says that his opponents "don't get it" as if the only problem with his view is that the rest of us are a bit thick. Maybe that's not how he intended to come across, but I'm afraid that is how he comes across at times, and it is not an attractive quality. It compares poorly with Piper's gentleness and graciousness in dealing with Wright.

Despite many shortcomings, I like Wright. I like a lot of what he says. And a lot of what he says is absolutely biblical and solidly evangelical, even Reformed. Just look at his defence of the bodily resurrection of Christ for example, and the way in which the covenant lies at the heart of Wright's theology. There are aspects of his doctrine of justification that are also, it seems to me, entirely in harmony with the Bible, the Reformed confessions and the best of traditional evangelical scholarship and church teaching.

However, there are also massive problems with Wright's views on the subject of justification, and this book only clarifies that the problems are a clear and present danger to the church, rather than allay any such fears.

There are a number of points that should be borne in mind about Wright's teaching in this book (and his others for that matter - the latest book does not shift much ground from what Wright has previously said).

Firstly, much of what Wright says here would find ready agreement from many "old perspective" people. I think it was the New Testament scholar, I. Howard Marshall, who brilliantly summed up the New Perspective as being "right in what it affirms and wrong it what it denies." Amen to that! Wright, somewhat inexplicably, writes as if almost everything he teaches is revolutionary and was never noticed by Old Perspective traditionalist Reformed theologians like John Piper and many others like him. That's just not the case. Almost all of what Wright states about God's covenant and purposes has been said before by Reformed theologians, particularly in Reformed Biblical theology. It is quite clear from where Wright is coming from that he does not even have a rudimentary knowledge of covenant theology, far less a grasp of its historical development from Calvin to the present day. Otherwise he could not write with that "look what I alone have discovered" tone he sometimes displays.

Secondly, there are new insights that we need to hear and correctives we need to heed in Wright's teachings. The problem for us in dealing with the New Perspective is in sifting out the sound teaching - and there is much in Wright's work that is good and true - from the errors that pepper the book. Wright is correct in probably 75% of what he says. Justification is in part a matter of ecclesiology and of telling "who has membership of the covenant people." It does have ramifications for how we do church and how we treat each other as Christian brothers and sisters. But it does so precisely because all Christians are forgiven their sins and declared righteous in God's sight on the same basis - by Christ's work received in faith. Wright is right that in Reformed theology we have too often made salvation an individual and private matter and not fully realised the implications of the gospel in a corporate sense for the whole of creation. We have de-politicised the gospel and in that sense we have truncated the gospel. Wright is on the right track I believe in all these issues. But this is not the stuff that is actually in conflict with the Old Perspective, though sometimes Wright puts it as if rejecting some of what he says that we cannot agree with means we have to reject that which we can accept. Wright's views it seems to me help us gain a better understanding of how the Gospels and Letters in the New Testament fit together. But yet again, we do not need to accept the most controversial parts of Wright's scheme in order to gain the benefits of some of his stresses and clarifications.

Thirdly, Wright has an unfortunate tendency to set up straw men in the sense that he often writes against caricatures of old perspective theology rather than the real thing. Whether this is because he fails to understand what previous generations of Reformed theologians actually taught, or whether he just can't be bothered reading them, is immaterial. The fact is that Wright often shows a shocking lack of familiarity with that Reformed theology has actually believed and taught. To give one example at the very heart of this whole debate, Wright characterises the Old Perspective of teaching that in the doctrine of justification the active obedience of Christ is imputed to believers as righteousness because Christ fulfilling the law so as to store up a "treasury of merit" which can then be granted to believers. As far as I recall, no Reformed theologian has ever taught such a thing. It is rather that in Christ we gain the benefit of his own righteousness as someone who lived without ever having committed a sin. Another example with Wright's bizarre claim that the Old Perspective doesn't have an adequate place for the Holy Spirit. That is simply wrong. As we will see, the difference is that the Old Perspective does not assign the role to the Holy Spirit in justification that Wright gives him (and quite why Wright keeps on writing 'holy spirit' instead of Holy Spirit I don't know, but I found it odd).

Fourthly, there is no way to avoid the conclusion that Wright's view also contain serious errors. The one that stood out above others is Wright's doctrine of two-stage justification, one on the basis of faith in this life and the second on the basis of works at the Last Judgment. Wright's scheme almost says the same thing as Reformed orthodoxy in a different way, but not quite. By making 'the life lived' by believers a part of justification, albeit fencing it with the fact that the works concerned are the Holy Spirit's work, Wright cuts out a key part of the Christian's assurance. Despite his protestations that his scheme is more theo-centric than the Old Perspective (another bit of inaccurate revisionism at best), Wright's scheme actually encourages experiential navel gazing rather than looking to the objective work of Christ for justification. Rather than a two-stage justification, the New Testament talks about justification followed by sanctification. Wright's scheme confuses the two things. Reformed orthodoxy is that we are in the future justified according to works, but not on the basis of works. The difference between those statements is simply whether our works show that we are already justified (which they will) or whether our works are needed in order for us to be justified in the end (which they will not be). In my view he hopelessly confuses justification with sanctification (which is in effect Wright's second stage of justification!).

So, although Wright's book offers us much, in the end, there are significant problems with it that do not make me want to change from the Old Perspective. For every new insight that Wright offers, there are also problems with things he overlooks. An example would be the New Perspective's (and Wright's in particular) inadequate view of sin and the problem it creates for the human race. Many of the problems with the New Perspective stem from this in my view. For instance, if God's plan was to save the world through Israel, how was this to be established? The only way could have been through Christ, the only sinless human being to have lived since the Fall. To my mind, this undermines Wright's insistence on God's plan to save the world through Israel as such, if considered otherwise than through the promised Messiah. The New Testament teaches that only a sinless substitute of infinite merit could achieve the salvation of sinners. Only the Messiah could do it, which is precisely what the New Testament teaches (Acts 4:12).

To conclude, paraphrasing Wright himself, I submit that the Old Perspective can do everything the New Perspective wants to do but by a better route and with much more besides. And in the end, with its emphasis on sin and grace and the salvation of lost sinners, the Old Perspective is actually closer to Paul's vision than Wright's revision.