I summarise and comment on Tom Wright’s new book, Justification:  God’s plan and Paul’s Vision, which is itself a response to John Piper’s book, The Future of Justification: A Response to N.T. Wright.

Preface

In his preface, Wright begins by setting out some of the main ‘pressure points’ in the debate over justification:-

1.  The nature and scope of salvation.  Wright here repeats his complaint that Christians have for a long time tended to think of ‘salvation’ as meaning ‘going to heaven when I die’.  My own reaction is to recognise this as a definite risk, especially within the more pietistic strands of evangelicalism, but I am hard pressed to think of a single reputable reformed teacher or leader who could be squeezed into this caricature.  Wright correctly states that salvation is not rescue from the world but rescue of the world.  But he may be in danger of so stressing this as to neglect the very real and very important personal dimensions; we shall see.  Wright does concede that Piper and others would agree with his point, but suggests that they may not yet have allowed it to affect the questions that flow from it.  Maybe.

2.  The means of salvation.  When Piper and other insist that salvation is accomplished by God through the death of Jesus Christ on our behalf, and appropriated through faith in him, there is no argument.  However, Wright insists, the work of the holy spirit (sic) is not taken sufficiently into account.

3.  The meaning of justification.  ‘Justification’ and ‘salvation’ are not synonyms.  And when Piper and others insist that justification means the imputation of Christ’s righteousness to the sinner, this is not the way Paul handles it, for,

(a) Paul’s doctrine of justification is about the work of Jesus, Israel’s Messiah.  Jesus is the fulfilment of all God’s promises, 2 Cor 1:20.  Piper (says Wright) treats Israel’s story as merely a backdrop, and a source of proof-texts and types, rather than as itself the story of God’s saving purposes.

(b) Paul’s doctrine of justification is therefore tied in with the Abrahamic covenant, the purpose of which was to call a worldwide family to God.  In Jesus’ day, we find God’s covenant people still in exile, longing for the release and deliverance that Jesus himself offered.

(c) Paul’s doctrine of justification is focused on the imagery of the lawcourt.  The metaphor speaks not of the transference of righteousness, but of acquittal.

(d) Paul’s doctrine of justification is bound up with eschatology.  Paul envisages two moments: a final justification when God puts the world right and raises his people from the dead, and a present anticipation of that.  For Piper and others, present justification takes the full weight.  The fear that a future-oriented justification becomes a merit-based justification becomes groundless when we factor in the work of the Spirit (sic).

What’s it all about?

Tom Wright asks, in his Introduction, ‘What’s all this about, and why does it matter?’

He begins with a story; an allegory, really.  I shall call it the story of the Naive Traditionalist and the Kindly Hero.  The Traditionalist has never been told that the earth goes round the sun.  The Hero explains, with books, charts, and diagrams, that the opposite is the case.  The Traditionalist thinks he has settled the matter when he takes the Hero outside early in the morning to observe the sunrise: “You can see it with your own eyes – the sun goes round the earth!”  What the Traditionalist has, of course, proved is that he never really engaged with the Hero’s explanations at all.

Back in the real world, our Hero has been trying for many years to explain that Paul should be read in fresh ways.  In fact, he has become rather tired of making these explanations, only for Traditionalists to keep missing the point.  After all, the Hero is a Very Busy Person and he is working on a Very Important Book, and he doesn’t want to pull that book out of shape by paying too much attention to the ‘fierce little battles’ that are raging between himself and the Traditionalists.  (Sorry, that sounds like mockery, but that’s the way it comes out when I try to precis Wright at this point).

Still, our Hero is prepared to have one more try at getting the Traditionalists to listen.  Mind you, his appeal will be to Scripture.  They cannot expect to have it both ways: appeal to the authority of Scripture and then complain that the Hero must be wrong, because he questions fifteen centuries of Tradition.

In the story about the earth and the sun, the question was to do with whether the greater (the sun) orbits the lesser (the earth), or vice-versa.  Similarly, in the present debate about justification, the question is about whether everything revolves around me (me and my salvation), or whether everything revolves around God.  At this point, Wright engages in one of his usual caveats:-

Now do not misunderstand me.  Hold the angry or fearful reaction.  Salvation is hugely important.  Of course is it!

But methinks he doth protest too much.  It simply will not do to keep saying, as Wright does, “Of course, personal salvation is hugely important,” and then swiftly move on to something different.

Wright’s reminders about the cosmic scope of God’s plan are well taken.  It’s all about him; it’s not all about little me and my salvation.  But I hadn’t noticed that John Piper, while paying due attention to the personal aspects of salvation, was in grave danger of neglecting the cosmic dimension.  His call to a ‘God-entranced vision of all things’ is more than empty words.

Part of what is going on (suggests Wright) is that people feel that a whole understanding of the Christian faith, a whole way of life even, is at stake.  It’s about who is in, or not in, which group.  Are we in the group that gives primacy to the Gospels, or in the group that follows Paul?  Are we ‘conservatives’ or ‘post-conservatives’.  (Incidentally, Wright’s declaration that he didn’t realise, until Roger Olson wrote it in a recent book, that he was a ‘member’ of the latter group strikes me as odd.  Tribalism crops up in many ways in his work, from his apparent reluctance to cite or discuss ‘conservative’ theological works, to his rather disdainful comments about Don Carson and a few others in this very book and elsewhere, to the people who are allowed to blurb this book, Rob Bell and Brian McClaren.  Oddest of all is refusal to budge from his own endorsement of Chalke & Mann’s The Lost Message of Jesus along with his labelling of Pierced for our Transgressions as ‘unbiblical’).

One of the strange things that is emerging in Wright’s introduction is that he keeps agreeing with Piper and noting that Piper shares with him the same vision for the glory of God.  So what’s the problem?  Of course, I expect Wright to tackle Piper at the exegetical and theological levels, but where, exactly, is this me-centred Christianity that he keeps complaining about?  What’s the point of saying that Piper’s theology leads to an emaciated religion and then excusing Piper (and Calvin himself) from the charge?

The discussion has only a limited connection with the so-called ‘New Perspective on Paul’.  For one thing, there several versions of the ‘New Perspective’, and proponents often have as many disagreements as agreements.  For another thing, it may be time to retrieve at least some aspects of the ‘Old Perspective’ (but this cannot be a return to the Reformers’ fold except in the sense of returning to the Reformer’s insistence of testing everything by Scripture).

In traditional discussions of justification, writers have tended to miss out key parts of the jogsaw – the Abrahamic promises, incorporation into Christ, resurrection and new creation, the coming together of Jews and Gentiles, the final completion of God’s plan in history, and the holy spirit (sic) and the formation of Christian character.  (J.I. Packer, in his 1962 article in the New Bible Dictionary, is a notable exception).

Moreover, it is telling to see which Bible passages authors omit from their discussion.  Piper, for example, does not discuss Romans 2:25-29 and 10:6-9, or the promise to Abraham in Gen 15.  And Westerholm has screened out of his discussion many relevant passages, including those that deal with being ‘in Christ’.

Two bits of the ‘jigsaw’ seem particularly important.  First, Paul’s rich and subtle use of the Old Testament (in which the context is as important as the actual words cited).  Second, Paul’s understanding of the story of Israel, and the world, as a single narrative that has reached its climax in Christ and is continuing to move forward.  What is central for Paul is 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 centred upon the call of Israel, a call which Paul saw coming to fruition in Israel’s representative, the Messiah.

But I’m rather surprised when Wright says that this is ‘almost entirely ignored in perspectives old, new and otherwise’.  Even we lay preachers, who don’t read Hebrew or Greek, and who have a day job and hungry mouths to feed, have read our Graeme Goldsworthy.  We know something of the history and theology of spiritual awakenings, and entertain a scriptural hope that God will visit this planet again with power.  We have listened to John Stott and noted his statesmanlike leadership in holding together a focus on the gospel of salvation and its social and ethical implications and entailments.  Do we think that salvation is all about ‘going to heaven when you die’?  No.  Do we think of ourselves as having a (tiny) part to play in an unfolding drama of redemption?  Yes.

Anyway, says Wright, take away this story, and Romans 9-11 becomes a detached piece about predestination, or ‘the future of Israel’.  Take away this story, and the thrust of Paul’s climactic statements in Gal 3 gets ignored: ‘You are Abraham’s seed’.

There is no going back to the Reformers.  They different between themselves more than we sometimes imagine, and in any case, we hear their voices in ways that they themselves would scarcely recognise.

For too long we have read scripture with nineteenth-century eyes and sixteenth-century questions.  It’s time to get back to reading with first-century eyes and twenty-first-century questions.

Hmm…This looks a bit like a plea to sort out relationships between the different theological disciplines – exegetical, biblical (in the Vos/Goldsworthy sense), systematic, and historical.  But is the proposal to ditch historical theology altogether?  I’m sure that isn’t what Wright intends (he applauds Calvin often enough, without ever actually citing him).  Yes, let’s read Paul with fresh eyes.  But I can’t help thinking of the words of Spurgeon: ‘It seems odd, that certain men who talk so much of what the Holy Spirit reveals to themselves, should think so little of what he has revealed to others.’

‘Rules of engagement’

Tom Wright begins chapter 2 by noting the dilemma that we face when trying to relate an exegetical approach and a systematic approach when attempting to understand a text.  A besetting problem is that we bring our questions and pre-occupations to the text and end up hearing echoes of our own voices rather than the word of God.   We attend to those texts that seem to support our pre-existing convictions, and filter out all the others.

In seeking to attend to Paul’s real meaning, we should, of course allow one writing to illuminate another.  As a thought-experiment, we might come to Ephesians and Colossians first, and read Romans and Galatians in the light of them.  In that case, we would find a cosmic soteriology, Eph 1:10; Col 1:15-20, God’s rescue of both Jews and Gentiles, Eph 1:11-14 through redemption in Christ and by the spirit (sic), so that this united church, rescued by grace through faith, 2:1-10, and now forming a single family, 2:11-22, will be Christ’s body for the world, 1:15-23, a sign to the ‘principalities and powers’ of the many-splendoured wisdom of God, 3:10.

Supposing (says Wright) the Reformers had started with Ephesians and Colossians and only then gone to Romans and Galatians:-

No split between Romans 3:28 and 3:29.  No marginalisation of Romans 9-11.  No scrunching of the subtle and important arguments about Jew-plus-Gentile unity in Galatians 3 onto the Procrustean bed of an abstract antithesis between ‘faith’ and ‘works’.  No insisting, in either letter, that ‘the law’ was just a ‘system’ that applied to everyone, and that ‘works of the law’ were the moral requirements that encouraged people to earn their own salvation by moral effort.

The whole history of the Western church might have been different.

We need what Tony Thistleton has called ‘a hermeneutics of doctrine’.  We need, in other words, to ask why and how certain doctrines have been formulated as they have been.  We must ask,

Why did they emphasise that point in that way?  What were they anxious to safeguard, what were they eager to avoid, and why?  What were they afraid of losing?  What aspect of the church’s mission were they keen to take forward, and why?  And, in particular: Which scriptures did they appeal to, and which ones did they seem to ignore?  Which bits of the jigsaw did they accidentally-on-purpose knock onto the floor?  In the passages they highlighted, did they introduce distortions?  Were they paying attention to what the writers were actually talking about, and if not what difference did that make?

Such questions might be asked of the doctrine of ‘imputed righteousness’.  Scholars such as J.I. Packer and Michael Bird concede that it is not explicitly taught in Scripture, but is nevertheless an inference from Scripture.  In that case (asks Wright) if imputed righteousness is so important for Paul, why didn’t he come right out and say it?  [Note: if Wright’s argument at this point stood, then surely we should be raising an eyebrow at a few doctrines, the truth and importance of which are not in dispute, such as the doctrine of the Trinity?]

Scripture must be understood in its own first-century context.  This applies to thought-forms, rhetorical conventions, social context, implicit narratives, and the meanings of words themselves.  For example, it helps us to understand 1 Thess 5:3 if we know that phrases such as ‘peace and security’ were part of Roman imperial propaganda at the time.

Similarly, knowledge of first-century Judaism, the Greco-Roman world, archaeology, the Dead Sea Scrolls, and so on, will help us to anchor our exegesis and protect us from speculative or anachronistic interpretations.

Therefore (says Wright), John Piper is mistaken when he asserts that the New Testament must be understood on its own terms only, without reference to its first-century Jewish context.  But, says Wright, ‘all investigation of words and terms must be located within their historical context.’  Piper’s problem is compounded when he fails to take sufficient note even of the more immediate context of a text: neglecting the overall argument of Romans 3:21-25, for example, and Romans 9:30-10:13.  And if we do not come to a text with its own context and setting in mind, then we will be at the mercy of other presuppositions and influences.  The ‘plain meaning’ of the text may well, in fact, be a misunderstanding based on unacknowledged assumptions.

With regard to the doctrine of justification we can end up importing categories of meaning and explanation from other centuries, that have little to do with what Paul himself was talking about: debates about the ‘formal cause’ and the ‘material cause’ of justification, for example, or between the ‘ground’ or ‘means’ of justification.  It is disturbind (says Wright) that Piper urges his readers to go back to the renewal movements of the sixteenth century; proper evangelicals should be going back to scripture.  [Note: Piper is surely urging his readers back to the sixteenth century not in contrast to going back to Scripture, but in to contrast the sterile scholasticism and speculation of less godly times].

Exegesis of the text, therefore, must be first and foremost amongst the rules of engagement.

Wright concludes with a complaint about the New International Version.  This, he believes, gives a seriously misleading impression of Paul’s meaning at key points, including Romans 3:21-26, where ‘the righteousness of God’ in 3:21 is only allowed to mean ‘the righteousness that comes to people from God’, rather than God’s own righteousness (that is, his justice) as it clearly means in 3:25-26.  Similarly, in Rom 3:29, the NIV omits a crucial ‘or’ (‘Or is God the God of Jews only?’).

First-century Judaism:  covenant, law and lawcourt

A reading of Josephus reminds us (says Wright) that at the time Paul wrote to the Romans, most Jews were not sitting around discussing how to go to heaven.  They were not pre-occupied with the afterlife.  They were longing for Israel’s God to act decisively, to turn things around the way he had done in the days of David and Solomon.

We need to realise that the evidence for understanding the thought-world of the Judaism of Paul’s day is rather thin.  And, in any case, that thought-world was not monolithic.  There were many differen theologies that attempted to explain Israel’s law and what it meant to obey it.  And yet there was a consistent tide of hope that God would fulfil at that very time the promises made to Abraham and the visions of the prophets.

Daniel had read in Jeremiah that the exile would last seventy years, and he is told that this means seventy weeks of years.  The question for 1st-century Jews was, When would these 490 years be up?  It depended on when that period was calculated to have started.  Josephus says,

What more than all else incited them to the war [he is referring to the war of AD 66-70] was an ambiguous oracle, found in their sacred scriptures, to the effect that at that time one from their country would become ruler of the world.

What has all this to do with Pauline theology?

First, many 1st-century Jews thought of themselves as living in a continuous narrative, the climax of which might come at any moment.

Second, within this narrative their current state was, on the basis of Daniel 9, seen as one of ‘exile’.  Of course, the geographical exile had ended, but spiritually and politically it had not.  (See, for example, Ezra 9:7-9).  And this exile was nothing less than the covenantal curse articulated in Deut 27-29, a curse brought by God on his people if they disobeyed.

Third, Daniel 9 emphasises God’s righteousness (LXX dikaiosyne) and the people’s unrighteousness.  You, Lord, are in the right, and we are in the wrong.  This is the language of the lawsuit, and of covenant.  The very same attribute of God that leads him to punish his people is now also appealed to for covenantal restoration after the punishment has taken place.

But what does ‘the righteousness of God’ actually mean?  For John Piper, it means ‘God’s concern for his own glory’.  But this (says Wright) is somewhat misaligned.  Here’s why:-

1.  Piper’s view is idiosyncratic, and is not supported anywhere in the scholarly literature.  The scholarly consensus is that tsedaqah/dikaiosyne means, in biblical Greek, ‘conformity to a norm’ (God’s norm, i.e. his covenant, in this case).  It is his covenant faithfulness.

2.  It is not clear how Piper’s definition of ‘God’s righteousness’ relates to the scheme of imputation that lies at the heart of his own reading.  If ‘God’s righteousness’ means ‘God’s concern for his own glory’, how can this be imputed to others?  In Rom 4, Abraham’s ‘righteousness’ is his right standing within the covenant, and God’s ‘righteousness’ is his faithfulness to that covenant.

3.  Piper fails to deal with the larger context of Romans 3 and 4, in which ‘God’s righteousness’ is his faithfulness to the covenant with Abraham made in Genesis 15, on the basis of which he deals with sins through the faithful, obedient death of Jesus the Messiah (Rom 3:24-26).  The point of Rom 3:1-8 is not a general discussion about divine attribute and human sinfulness.  The point is that God had promised to bless the world through Israel, and Israel has been unfaithful to that commission.  What is now required is a faithful Israelite, and that is what God has provided.

4.  Piper’s attempt to downplay the importance of the lawcourt metaphor is unconvincing.  ‘Righteousness’ has to do, not merely with virtuousness, but being ‘in the right’.  And this status, though received from a judge, is not a transferance of the judge’s own status.

5.  The idea that God’s righteousness refers to his concern for his own glory cuts across the great message of scripture that God has an overflowing concern for everything he has made.  Of course, this will itself redound to his own glory, but ‘God’s righteousness’, in scripture, is regularly invoked in connection with his concern for those in need.  To be sure, God’s righteousness, is not the same as his salvation, nevetheless it is that quality or attribute because of which he saves his people.

So where does the law fit into this?

For Luther, the law of Moses did nothing but condemn.  For Calvin and Calvinists, the law was given as a way of life to a people already redeemed, and this is nothing else but what Sanders called ‘covenantal nomism’.  And if this latter view had predominated theological discussion, rather than the former, the ‘new perspective’ would scarcely have been needed, at least not in its present form.  Many a Calvinist has argued that ‘participationist’ and ‘juristic’ forms of soteriology should not be played off against one another, especially in the light of passages such as Gal 3:22-29 and Phil 3:7-11.

It was the relentless insistence on the wickedness of Judaism, the folly of arrogant self-righteous law-keeping on the one hand and the gloom of depressing lawkeeping on the other, the sense of Judaism as ‘the wrong kind of religion’, and so on…that represented the problem to which Sanders…was offering a fresh solution.

In short, for Calvinism as for proponents of the new perspective, God has a single plan.  To suppose that he gave the law as a means of salvation, found that people could not do it, and so changed his mind and sent Jesus instead, is both dishonouring to God and unfaithful to the text of scripture.  The meaning of Romans 10:4 is not that in God has brought the law to an end, but that in Christ he has brought it to its fulfilment.

Sanders’ thesis was that 1st-century Judaism was not a religion of legalistic work-righteousness.  Law-keeping was not with a view to earning membership of God’s people but in order to express and maintain it.  Even Sanders’ critics generally concede that he has a point, even if they think that he has over-stated it.

The theological question now is: if membership of God’s people is by grace, but final judgment is according to works, then what account is to be given of these works?

It is important to say at this point is that Judaism was not pre-occupied with individual salvation, but with God’s purposes for Israel and the world.  And those who would enjoy the age to come were the true Israel, those who kept the Torah, or, at least, showed a heart-felt desire to do so.  After all, Torah included a sacrificial system through which sin could be atoned.  And we can tell who will be vindicated in the future by looking to see who is keeping the Torah now (helped, of course, by God’s grace).

If ‘justification’ is the answer, what is the question?

What is the question to which the ‘doctrine of justification’ is the answer?  This is the conundrum posed by Tom Wright in chapter 4 of Justification: God’s Plan and Paul’s Vision (entitled, ‘Justification: definitions and puzzles’).

Alister McGrath is quoted, to the effect that the concept of justification, as employed by Paul and others, is not the same as the doctrine of justification as developed by the church.  The former refers to one specific aspect of God’s saving work; the latter becomes the heading under which the church subsumes its accounts of the means by which man’s relationship to God is established.

Of course, theology may use non-biblical terminology to describe its conclusions (e.g. homoousion).  But when a biblical word is used in non-biblical ways, then confusion sets in.  This is the case with the word ‘Christ’.  In Mt 22:42, the question ‘What do you think of the Messiah?’ can easily be (mis)understood as, ‘What do you think of Jesus Christ?’ (taking ‘Christ’ now as a proper name).

With both ‘justification’ and ‘Christ’, later theology has screened out precisely the Jewish, Messianic, covenantal, Abrahamic, history-of-Israel overtones.  When Paul and Augustine talk about justification, they are not talking about the same thing, any more than ‘repent’ in the New Testament will bear the mediaeval reading of ‘do penance’.

‘Justification’ does not have the same place in Paul’s teaching as it has in that of many theologians.  For Wrede, ‘justification by faith’ was an aside, designed to get Gentiles into the church.  Westerholm contrasts the ‘Lutheran’ Paul for whom Christ dies for our sins and reconciles us to God with the ‘new perspective’ Paul who offers ‘deliverance from a good deal of hassle’, namely, the need to get circumcised. Schweitzer regarded ‘justification’ as a ‘secondary crater’ within the ‘primary crater’ of ‘being in Christ’.

Later theologians have, tended, then, to abstract bits of Paul that they wanted and left the rest behind, thus pulling him out of shape.  The task now is to look afresh at what Paul was really talking about.

Many of the problems with understanding Paul’s concept of justification are due to the fact that it has regularly been made to do duty for the entire picture of God’s reconciling action towards the human race.

We have to go back to words and their meanings.  And the dikaios root, though closely related to the whole scheme of salvation, does not denote that entire scheme.  Rather, it denotes one specific aspect within that scheme.  We should not refer to ‘justification’ as the whole thing any more than we should refer to the ‘steering wheel’ is if it were the whole car.  Nor (to continue the illustration) will it do to claim that because the steering wheel is vital it is the only thing that matters.

Where the English language has two different root words, ‘just’ and ‘righteous’, Greek and Hebrews have just one each, ‘dikaios‘ and ‘tsdaqah‘ respectively.  This, together with the ways in which the meanings of words move around within and between languages, has led to anachronisms and misunderstandings.

With regard to the word ‘righteousness’, the Hebrew word does not really have the negative connotations (‘self-righteousness’) of the English equivalent.  But it does have law-court connotations that the English reader might miss: and these are picked up in Paul’s use of ‘dikaios‘ to denote the righteous status of  person rather than his moral character.  It is used of a person who is ‘acquitted’, ‘vindicated’, ‘in the clear’.  ‘Justification’ is a declaration of a change of status rather than a transformation of character.  And so (implies Wright) it makes no sense for ‘righteousness’ (now thought of, erroneously, as moral rectitude) to be ‘imputed’ or ‘reckoned’ to the believer from Christ.

What about God’s covenant with Israel?

We’re still in chapter 4.

What happens (asks Wright) when we put all this in the context of God’s covenant with Israel?

‘Old perspective’ writers such as Seifrid and Westerholm suppose that covenant theology has little or nothing to do with the issue.  But they fail to see that behind the key passages in Romans and Galatians lie Genesis 15, where God establishes his covenant with Abraham, and Deuteronomy 30, which speaks of the renewal of the covenant after exile.

Paul’s understanding of God’s purposes for the world through Israel (whether he refers to this as ‘covenant’ many times or few) is central, and we may not relegate his references to Abraham in Rom 4 or Gal 3 to the status of mere ‘examples’ or ‘illustrations’ of faith.  For Paul, the emphasis is on the single plan of God.

‘Covenant’ has four aspects: (a) it has to do with the way Jews understood themselves as God’s people, and thought of God’s purposes as stretching beyonds them and out into the whole world; (b) it is focused on the story of Abraham, with the establishment of the covenant with him in Gen 15, with circumcision, Gen 17, and with the covenantal promises of Deut 27-30; (c) a sense in 2nd-Temple Judaism that God’s plans were moving forward towards fulfilment; (d) the fulfilment of this plan (in Paul’s thought) in Jesus the Messiah.

The centrality of the covenant in Paul’s teaching means that the question of how people can be rescued from sin and the question of bringing Jews and Gentiles together in a single family are inextricably bound up together.

‘Covenantal’ thinking and ‘forensic’ thinking come together in the expectation – prominent in 2nd-Temple Judaism – of a great Assize, at which God would put all things right, including vindicating his people (Dan 7 comes to mind here).

This last point introduces the eschatological emphasis.  For Paul this meant (a) God’s purposes were moving forward to the goal of redemption of his people and the ultimate rescue of all creation; (b) that this had already been inaugurated through Jesus the Messiah; (c) that there was a dual now/not yet aspect to this inauguration.

So:-

Eschatology: the new world had been inaugurated!  Covenant: God’s promises to Abraham had been fulfilled!  Lawcourt: Jesus had been vindicated – and so all those who belonged to Jesus were vindicated as well!  And these, for Paul, were not three, but one.  Welcome to Paul’s doctrine of justification, rooted in the single scriptural narrative as he read it, reaching out to the waiting world.

But how does one speak of the final coming day of judgment, in view of Paul’s repeated statements that judgment will be in accordance with ‘works’?  The problem with the Augustinian tradition is that it has attempted to make the doctrine justification do service for entire process from grace to glory, and it is not suited to this task.  We need to understand what it means to be justified ‘in Christ’ (Gal 2:17.

To begin with Paul’s terminology: (a) ‘Jesus’ refers to human being who lived, taught, dies, and rose again; (b) ‘Christ’ denotes the same human being, but connotes the Jewish notion of ‘Messiah’; (c) ‘son of God’ means both that Jesus is the Messiah, and that as such he is God’s own son; (d) ‘Lord’ means that Jesus as Messiah is now exalted over all things, that he has attaied the position of sovereignty over creation marked out for human beings from the beginning, that he is to be identified the kyrios (LXX)/adonai/YHWH (1 Cor 8:6; Rom 10:13).

As for the meaning of Messiahship, (a) the Messiah is the one who draws Israel’s history to its appointed goal; (b) he is the one who sums Israel up, so that what is true of him is true of them; hence the language of being ‘in Christ’.

As for the Messiah’s accomplishment, he brings God’s plan for the world through Israel to its goal by offering to God the obedience that Israel should have offered but did not, Rom 5:19; Phil 2:8.  Israel had been faithfuless to God’s commission: what is needed is a faithful Israelite through whom the plan can proceed after all.  This is what is meant by pistis Christou, ‘the faithfulness of the Messiah’ (which is not to be thought of as ‘faith in the Messiah’.

The faithful obedience of the Messiah culminates in his death for sins, 1 Cor 15:3.  He stands in for his people and their representative, taking upon himself the death that they deserved.  Sin was condemned there, in him, that is shall not be condemned here, in us, in those who are ‘in him’.

The resurrection fo the Messiah is, for Paul, the beginning of the new creation.  It was God’s vindication, his ‘justification’ of his son.  But it is also the beginning of God’s promised new age, which now awaits fulfilment in final victory over all enemies, including death, and the liberation of creation itself from its slavery to corruption and decay.

The gospel message, the proclamation of Jesus as the crucified and risen Lord, summons men, women and children – and, in a manner, the whole creation (see Colossians 1:23)! – to discover in Jesus, and in his messianic death for sins and new life to launch God’s new creation, the fulfilment of the single-plan-through-Israel-for-the-world, the purpose through which, as a single act with a single meaning, sins are forgiven and people of every race are called into God’s single family.

And the ‘spirit of the son’, Gal 4:6, the ‘spirit of the Messiah’, Rom 8:9, is poured out upon the Messiah’s people, so that they become in reality what they are by God’s declaration – his children indeed, Rom 8:12-17; Gal 4:4-7.  The close connection between justification and the work of the spirit (sic) shows that the doctrine has a Trinitarian shape.  Those who trust in Christ are enabled by the spirit (sic) to say, ‘Abba, father’, Rom 8:12-16, and ‘Jesus is Lord’, 1 Cor 12:3.  And it is the spirit (sic) who will bring God’s work in us to completion at the day of the Messiah, Phil 1:6ff.

For Paul, Jesus’ Messiahship constitutes him as the judge on the last day.  The Old Testament theme of ‘the day of the Lord’ becomes ‘the day of the Messiah’.  At the name of Jesus every knee shall bow.  Everyone will be judged according to their ‘works’, which, for the Christian, are enabled and empowered by the spirit (sic), Rom 8:12-17.

Galatians

Tom Wright begins the exegetical section of his book with Galatians.  I attempt here to summarise Wright’s argument as faithfully as I can, apart from a couple of asides in [square brackets].

Galatians begins with an opening flourish about the gospel, which the rest of the letter will unpack with a specific pastoral situation in mind.

Gal 2:3 refers to Titus’ circumcision (opinions differ as to whether he was, in fact circumcised).  Certain people were challenging Christian freedom by insisting that a Gentile believer must become a Jew in order to belong to the people of God.  At Antioch, Peter had previously been ‘living like a pagan’: he had been content to eat with (uncircumcised) Gentile believers.  But when ‘men from James’ arrived, Peter separated himself, and the other Jewish Christians did the same.

The question, then, is: Do Jewish Christians and Gentile Christians belong at the same table?  That is the question to which ‘justification by faith’ is the answer.  ‘Justification’ gives a person a new identity, and is the ‘badge’ of all who believe in Christ.  Age-old differences between Jew and Gentile no longer apply.

‘Justification’ in Gal 2:16 does not mean, in in context, ‘to come into a right relationship with God’.  It means, ‘to be reckoned by God to be a true member of his family, and hence with the right to share table fellowship.’  [This looks to me like a context-specific implication of justification, rather than a definition of it].

And the ‘works’ of Gal 2:16 are not the moral ‘good works’ which evangelicals love to hate, but rather the ‘living like a Jew’ of 2:14 and the separation from ‘Gentile sinners’ of 2:15.  [Again, I wonder if we should not rather take these to be examples of ‘works of the law’, which would also include any law-keeping which we thought would be meritorious before God].

So, if we are not justified ‘by works of the law’, how are we ‘justified’?  It is by pistis Jesou Christou, which can be translated either ‘the faithfulness of Jesus Christ’ or as ‘faith in Jesus Christ’.  Wright accepts the former.

‘The faithfulness of the Messiah’ is his faithfulness to the covenant promises of God to Israel.  And his faithful death is appropriated ‘by faith’ – by coming to believe in Jesus as Messiah.

‘Works of the law’ cannot justify, firstly because they would divide Jew from Gentile in a way that is now irrelevant, and secondly because it is the function of the law to reveal sin (this part of the argument is added in Rom 3:20).

Paul’s argument is

God’s purpose in calling Abraham was to bless the whole world, to call out a people from Gentiles as well as Jews.  This purpose has now been accomplished through the faithfulness of the Messiah, and all who believe in him constitute this fulfilled-family-of-Abraham.  The law was given to keep ethnic Israel, so to speak, on track.  But it could never be the means by which the ultimate promised family was demarcated, partly because it keep the two intended parts of the family separate, and partly because it merely served to demonstrate, by the fact that is was impossible to keep it perfectly, that Jews, like the rest of the human race, were sinful.  The Messiah’s death deals with (what seems to us as) this double problem.

So, argues Paul, how can the partition between Jew and Gentile, having been broken down, now be erected once again?  ‘I’ (that is, we Jewish believers) have have died to the Torah in order to live for God; I have been crucified with Christ, yet I now live with the life of the Messiah within me, the faithful Son of God who loved me and gave himself for me’.  We have died to our old identity and risen to a new identity.

Dikaiosyne, then, denotes, not a moral quality but a status.  It means ‘membership in God’s true family’.

Based on Wright, Justification: God’s Plan and Paul’s Vision, 91-101.

Romans 1:16-17

I’m taking things slightly out of order now, in my summary of Tom Wright’s Justification: God’s Plan and Paul’s Vision.  The thing is, I’m keen to get to his exegesis of the relevant passages in Romans.

Dikaiosyne theou – ‘God’s righteousness’ – is first mentioned in Rom 1:16f.  Despite a long tradition to the contrary, there is every reason (says Wright) to see this as referring to God’s faithfulness to his covenant; his faithfulness to his promise to bless all nations through Abraham and his seed.  This reading helps make sense of key passages such as Rom 3:27-31; 4; 9-11.  And all this tells us that

Romans is a book about God, and that the primary thing it is saying about God is that he is the God of faithful, just, covenantal love, that this has beeen unveiled in the gospel message about Jesus of Nazareth, the crucified and risen Messiah, and that through this gospel message, and the radical unveiling of God’s covenant justice and faithfulness, God’s saving power is going out into the world, and will not rest until creation itself is set free from its slavery to corruption and decay and shares the liberty of the glory of God’s children.

In Paul’s opening summary (Rom 1:16f), we note that:-

1.  It is not a statement of ‘the gospel’.  Paul has various summaries of ‘the gospel’ (Rom 1:3-5; 1 Cor 15:3-5) and these show that ‘the gospel’ is primarily about Jesus, and what God has done and is doing through him.  By contrast, Rom 1:16f is a claim about what the gospel does (its effect), rather than about what the gospel is (its definition).

2.  The people who experience this ‘salvation’ are ‘all who believe, the Jew first and also the Greek’.

3.  ‘From faith to faith’ hints at what Paul will make clear later, that God’s covenant faithfulness is revealed on the basis of the faithfulness of Jesus Christ, and for the benefit of those who have faith in him.

4.  In quoting Hab 2:4 (‘the righteous shall live by faith’) Paul is aware of the entire context in Habakkuk, in which God’s covenant faithfulness appears to be in doubt because of all the terrible events going on.  In that situation, what is called for is faith, and this faith will be the badge of God’s covenant people in those difficult times.  For Paul, then, the quotation does not simply anticipate his exposition of ‘justification by faith’, but refers back to a time when God’s faithfulness was being put to the test, and his people were marked out by their faith.

Romans 2:1-16

Although the main point that Paul is making in this passage (says Wright) is undoubtedly that all people are sinful, three sub-sections are particularly important for the topic of justification.

Rom 2:1-16 draws a picture of the last judgment.  It is notable that Paul, in this his first mention of justification in the letter, states that ‘the doers of the law will be justified’ (Rom 2:13).  And the judgment will be without favouritism – Jew and Gentile will appear on an even footing.  That there is a final judgment ‘according to works’ is borne out by Rom 8:1,13; 14:10-12; 1 Cor 3:12-15; 5:5; 6:9; 2 Cor 5:10; Gal 5:19-21; 6:8; Eph 6:8.

Some seek to evade the force of these passages by distinguishing sharply between acquittal (made on the basis of justification by faith without works) and rewards (made on the basis of works).  It is clear that the New Testament does not use the logic of merit in relation to the Christians’ duty towards God.  Rather, it uses the logic of love.  We seek to please God because that is what pleases him, Rom 12:1; 14:18; Eph 5:10; Phil 2:12f; Col 1:10; 1 Thess 4:1; 2 Thess 1:11.  And within this logic of love is the logic of the work of the holy spirit (sic).  To those who have faith in Jesus Christ the Father sends the Spirit, and the Spirit sets them free to love and serve God.

Although there are some good reasons for understanding Paul, in Rom 2:1-16, as referring to the ‘moral pagan’, it is more likely that he is thinking of the Gentile believer, on whose heart God has written the moral law.  Such people do not earn the final verdict.  They are seeking, not earning, ‘glory and honour and immortality’.  From one point of view they are making free choices; from another point of view they are empowered and impelled by the indwelling Holy Spirit.  This is not the kind of ‘synergism’ that says, ‘God does some of it and I do the rest’.  Pauline synergism says, ‘striving with all the energy which he mightily inspires within me’, Col 1:29; ‘I worked harder than all of them, yet it was not I but God’s grace that was with me’, 1 Cor 15:10.

There is, then, for Paul, a final judgment, and it will be ‘according to works’.  How this relates to ‘justification by faith’ will become clear anon.

Romans 3:1-8

Moving now to section 3 of Tom Wright’s exegetical comments on Romans in his book Paul: God’s Plan and Paul’s Vision.

Paul’s argument in Rom 2:17, 29 (‘If you call yourself a Jew’) is more than an assertion that Jews, just as much as Gentiles, are sinful.  It is part of his account of the all-important covenant, God’s-plan-for-the-world-through-Israel.  And his assessment of the privileges of Judaism are sincere.  It follows that he is not talking primarily about the salvation of ‘the Jew’; he is talking about God’s plan for salvation coming through ‘the Jew’ (cf. Jn 4:22).  The point is not just that the Jews are part of the problem of sin, but that they are supposed to be the answer to that problem.  Cf. Gal 3:10-14.

This leaves, then, a problem: if God’s plan has apparently been thwarted, how can he now be faithful not only the promises he has made to Israel, but to the promises he has made to bless the world through Israel?  Rom 3:21-4:25 will provide the answer.

This verdict on Israel is not, of course, new to Paul.  The Old Testament prophets taught the same thing: Israel was meant to be a light to the nations, but instead God was blasphemed in the nations because of her.  Hence the exile: the massive demonstration that Israel is in need of the same redemption that they were supposed to bring to the world.

So Paul begins to introduce his return-from-exile theology, the restoration of a people who will cary God’s light, truth and teaching to the waiting nations.  Now, at last, after Daniel 9’s 490 years, God’s covenant is renewed by the Messiah and the spirit (sic).

And so to Rom 3:1-8.  Israel had been entrusted with the oracles of God in order to be the light of the world.  But she had been ‘unfaithful’ – not just in the sense of being unbelieving, but in the sense of not carrying out God’s commission.

The question of Rom 3:3b, then, is, Will God remain faithful to his covenant?  (This fixes the meaning of ‘the righteousness of God’ as ‘God’s covenant faithfulness’.)  Many have answered, ‘No’: God’s plan to bless the world through Israel has failed, so he has introduced Plan B, and the simple narrative of ‘all sin; God sends Jesus; all is well’.

But that is not what Paul says, either here in Romans or in Galatians.  God’s plan has ‘certainly not’ failed (Rom 3:4).  Though Israel has been unrighteous (unfaithful to the covenant) God will remain righteous (faithful to his covenant).  And it will not do simply to say, ‘this is all about Israel’s failure’: no, it is, rather, all about God – his truth, his vindication, his victory, his righteousness, hist justice, his judgment, and his glory.

But how, given Israel’s unfaithfulness, is God going to be faithful to his covenant?  It certainly does not mean that Israel has an inside track, and can avoid the condemnation that comes upon all people.  Paul lays out a catena of Old Testament passages that affirm Israel’s guilt.  Possession of the law does not excuse Israel; rather, the law condemns her.

The ‘problem’ for God, then, is how to remain faithful to his promise to Abraham to bless the whole world through his descendants, when Israel is as guilty before God as the rest of the world.  God must find a way of enabling ‘Israel’ to be faithful after all.  He must therefore deal with sin.

Romans 3:21-4:25

Moving now to section 3 of Tom Wright’s exegetical comments on Romans in his book Paul: God’s Plan and Paul’s Vision.

Paul’s argument in Rom 2:17, 29 (‘If you call yourself a Jew’) is more than an assertion that Jews, just as much as Gentiles, are sinful.  It is part of his account of the all-important covenant, God’s-plan-for-the-world-through-Israel.  And his assessment of the privileges of Judaism are sincere.  It follows that he is not talking primarily about the salvation of ‘the Jew’; he is talking about God’s plan for salvation coming through ‘the Jew’ (cf. Jn 4:22).  The point is not just that the Jews are part of the problem of sin, but that they are supposed to be the answer to that problem.  Cf. Gal 3:10-14.

This leaves, then, a problem: if God’s plan has apparently been thwarted, how can he now be faithful not only the promises he has made to Israel, but to the promises he has made to bless the world through Israel?  Rom 3:21-4:25 will provide the answer.

This verdict on Israel is not, of course, new to Paul.  The Old Testament prophets taught the same thing: Israel was meant to be a light to the nations, but instead God was blasphemed in the nations because of her.  Hence the exile: the massive demonstration that Israel is in need of the same redemption that they were supposed to bring to the world.

So Paul begins to introduce his return-from-exile theology, the restoration of a people who will carry God’s light, truth and teaching to the waiting nations.  Now, at last, after Daniel 9’s 490 years, God’s covenant is renewed by the Messiah and the spirit (sic).

And so to Rom 3:1-8.  Israel had been entrusted with the oracles of God in order to be the light of the world.  But she had been ‘unfaithful’ – not just in the sense of being unbelieving, but in the sense of not carrying out God’s commission.

The question of Rom 3:3b, then, is, Will God remain faithful to his covenant?  (This fixes the meaning of ‘the righteousness of God’ as ‘God’s covenant faithfulness’.)  Many have answered, ‘No’: God’s plan to bless the world through Israel has failed, so he has introduced Plan B, and the simple narrative of ‘all sin; God sends Jesus; all is well’.

But that is not what Paul says, either here in Romans or in Galatians.  God’s plan has ‘certainly not’ failed (Rom 3:4).  Though Israel has been unrighteous (unfaithful to the covenant) God will remain righteous (faithful to his covenant).  And it will not do simply to say, ‘this is all about Israel’s failure’: no, it is, rather, all about God – his truth, his vindication, his victory, his righteousness, hist justice, his judgment, and his glory.

But how, given Israel’s unfaithfulness, is God going to be faithful to his covenant?  It certainly does not mean that Israel has an inside track, and can avoid the condemnation that comes upon all people.  Paul lays out a catena of Old Testament passages that affirm Israel’s guilt.  Possession of the law does not excuse Israel; rather, the law condemns her.

The ‘problem’ for God, then, is how to remain faithful to his promise to Abraham to bless the whole world through his descendants, when Israel is as guilty before God as the rest of the world.  God must find a way of enabling ‘Israel’ to be faithful after all.  He must therefore deal with sin.

Romans 3:27-30

Boasting, then, is excluded, Rom 3:27.  Israel could not boast of any superiority that might arise from Torah-keeping or from having a special place in God’s purposes.  No: Torah itself tells you of your own failures, and declares that your privileged place will be taken away and given to others.  Who now are God’s people? – those whose Torah-keeping consists of faith, those who are ‘the circumcised-in-heart’, Rom 2:25-29, ‘the Jew-in-secret’ people, 2:13-16, ‘the ones who do the Torah and thus have circumcision reckoned to them’, ‘the ones who do the Torah and so will be justified on the last day, even though they are Gentiles and don’t have the Torah as their ancestral possession’, 2:10, ‘the ones who through patience in well-doing seek for glory and honour and immortality’, 2:7.  God’s people are those who keep the Torah not by works but by faith.

Rom 3:28 explains the dramatic claim of the previous verse, and has as its inescapable implication v29, which asserts that God has not two families but one.  Verse 28 brings us back to the lawcourt setting, and to the meaning of justification as the verdict of the Judge who has found in our favour.  It brings us back to the idea of covenant, for those who believe are constituted not as a bunch of saved individuals, but as the single family which God promised to Abraham.  It brings us back to eschatology, for the verdict of the final judgment, based on the entire life, has already been announced, in advance of the entire life.  The verdict is in before the evidence has been produced!  And this makes sense because of Christology: ‘In and through the Messiah, God has dealt with the whole problematic fact of idolatry, sin and death and so has begun, in the Messiah’s resurrection, the new creation which is the great new Fact standing in the middle of time, space and human culture.’  When God raised Christ from the dead, he said in actual historical event what he had previously announced at Jesus’ baptism: “This is my beloved son, in whom I am well pleased.’  In other words, this is the faithful Messiah, in whom my purpose for Israel is fulfilled.

Justification by faith on the basis of Jesus’ faithful death and triumphant resurrection, revealing the “righteousness” of the creator God, his faithfulness to the covenant-through-Israel-for-the-world – this justification means that God now declares circumcised and uncircumcised alike “in the right”, “members of the covenant family”, the former “on the basis of faith” and the latter “through faith”.

Romans 8

Although some exegetes think that Paul has stopped talking about ‘justification’ by the time he reaches Romans 8, he is ‘still cheerfully working out the full implications of what he said in chapters 3,4 and 5.’

The reason there is no mention of ‘faith’ in chapter 8 is that Paul is talking about final, not present, justification.

‘Salvation’, according to Paul in this chapter does not mean being saved from this world but being saved for the world (8:18-26).  We were created to be God’s stewards and vice-regents in this world, and salvation means fulfilling this purpose.  By the same token, salvation does not mean ‘dying and going to heaven’; salvation means victory over death and all that is associated with it (tribulation, hardship, persecution, famine, nakedness, danger, weaponry) and it therefore places physical resurrection and the renewal of creation at its centre.  ‘That is “what the whole world’s waiting for”‘ (Rom 8:19).

Paul’s doctrine of justification is based on the fact that this great rescue operation has already been inaugurated in Jesus Christ, and is already being implemented through the spirit (sic).

What we should notice in Romans 8 is the way that the renewal of all creation interlocks with the indwelling of the spirit.  According to Rom 8:4 the righteous intention of the law (which was to give life) is fulfilled in us who walk not according to the flesh but according to the Spirit.  The present moral life does not ‘earn’ salvation, it anticipates it.  Perfection is not attainable, but a sincere desire to please God, along with repentance and forgiveness for failings, is inevitable.  To believe that one has experienced new life in Christ, there must be real signs of life.

Paul’s final and glorious statement of assurance, Rom 8:31-39 does not mention faith, but it most certainly expresses faith.  It rests all its weight, not on anything we might do, but on God’s achievement in Christ.  ‘We’ who cannot be separated from the love of God in Christ are ‘those who are in Christ Jesus’, 8:1, those ‘who believe in the one who raised Jesus from the dead’, 4:23-25.  And the more the Spirit is working in their lives, the less they we even think about their efforts ‘qualifying’ them for anything.  ‘Salvation is not simply God’s gift to his people but God’s gift through his people.’

Over against a loose notion of ‘salvation by faith’, this conception is more biblical and more Trinitarian.  Paul invites his hearers to trust in Jesus Christ, crucified and risen, and in the Father whose love triumphed in the death of his son, and in the holy spirit (sic) who makes that victory operative in our lives as we seek to love and serve God in response (Rom 5:5; 8:28).  It is also more creational, and more Israel-focused.

Based on Wright, Justification: God’s Plan and Paul’s Vision, 206-212.