Paul: Fresh Perspectives

Paul: Fresh Perspectives
N. T. Wright
SPCK 2005

Paul: Fresh Perspectives (hereafter "PFP") builds on and updates Wright's earlier work in What St Paul Really Said and the more technical The Climax of the Covenant by focusing on various aspects of the New Perspective on Paul (or "Fresh" Perspective as Wright prefers). However, PFP is very much an "interim report" as we still wait for volume four in his massive series Christian Origins and the Question of God which will deal with a lot of the same material in much greater detail and has the proposed title Paul and the Faithfulness of God. Each of the main chapters in PFP, which are around 20-30 pages, will, so I've heard, be expanded to up to 200 pages in Wrght's much anticipated yet delayed big book on Paul.

This earlier book from 2005 was based on a several series of lectures Wright gave and particularly on the Hulsean Lectures at Cambridge University.

Wright's is a grand theological vision in many ways which takes in God creating the world and then recreating or renewing the world through Christ and his people who are in him (en Christo = in Christ = "in the Messiah"). Wright deals with this in his chapters on "Creation and Covenant" and "Messiah and Apocalyptic". He then also argues that the Christian gospel is about much more than "fitting us for heaven, to live with thee there" as the children's carol puts it. It is about bringing the new creation to bear on this world as it is. For Wright, as I think for Jesus and Paul, the Gospel has a hard political edge to it. Wright deals with some of this in the chapter "Gospel and Empire".

In the second part of the book, Wright then turns to an analysis of how Paul built on Old Testament ideas to forge Christian theology and a Christian worldview. These three chapters are entitled "Reworking God" which is about how Paul incorporates a high Christology into the Jewish monotheism he grew up with , "Reworking God's People," about how God's covenant people Israel are redefined and rebuilt around Jesus the Messiah as the one faithful Israelite, and "Reimagining God's Future" concerning eschatology and Paul's doctrine of the Holy Spirit. The final chapter "Jesus, Paul and the Task of the Church" explores Paul's mission as an apostle to the Gentiles and tries to draw all the threads Wright has spun together in a conclusion.

This overview clearly demonstrates that Wright's project is much bigger than redefining "justification" though it is about that. Wright believes that justification is primarily about ecclesiology and only secondarily about soteriology (whereas traditional evangelical theology has seen justification as the other way round and perhaps hardly about ecclesiology at all).

This is such an interesting area of theological debate just now. It seems to me that there is no question that the implications of the doctrine of justification by faith alone are writ large in the New Testament. Almost every time justification is mentioned in the New Testament, it is mentioned in the context of Jew and Gentile Christians coming together to form one body, one church. On this I think Wright is largely correct. And it is an implication that much of the church has forgotten for too long.

In a similar way, Wright teaches that justification is first about covenant membership and then - because the covenant's purpose is to bring salvation to people - about individual salvation and the forgiveness of sins. Traditionally, it has been the other way round, that justification is first about salvation - right standing before a holy God - and then about covenant membership as an implication of having a new status of righteousness.

I wonder sometimes if it matters much which way round we view things as long as we teach that both exist and both are important and both have implications for how we "do church". My heart is still with the Old Perspective, but a renewed Old Perspective that takes a lot of New Perspective concerns on board.

That's to get away from this being a book review though. This book is worth reading, and stimulating in many ways. However it may fall between two stools between Wright's earlier work and the big book to come and so may have a limited readership for those reasons.