Category Archives: New Perspective on Paul

Blomberg on Wright on justification

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I’ve been posting, off and on, on Tom Wright’s Justification: God’s Plan and Paul’s Vision.  Haven’t finished yet.  Reviews have starting appearing, and I was particularly interested to read that of Craig Blomberg, Distinguished Professor of New Testament at Denver Seminary.  Blomberg writes:

Throughout his prolific writing career, Wright has increasingly centered his attention on the breadth of the gospel message being much more than how an individual attains salvation, defined as life in heaven after death.…

Romans and the New Perspective

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It has long been assumed that the chief emphasis in Romans is on justification by faith.

This was challenged in 1963 by Stendahl, who argued that pre-occupation with justification by faith was due to the church’s morbid conscience, based on the moral struggles of Augustine and Luther, which the church has read back into Paul.  Justification, according to Stendahl,

‘is not the pervasive, organising doctrinal principle or insight of Paul,’ but ‘was hammered out by Paul for the very specific and limited purpose of defending the rights of Gentile converts to be full and genuine heirs to the promises of God to Israel.’ …

What is ‘covenantal nomism’?

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In the light of various posts on the ‘New Perspective on Paul’, I thought I’d better clarify what E.P. Sanders meant by this term.

It will be recalled that Sanders could find little evidence that the Judaism of the 1st century AD (and therefore the Judaism confronted by the Apostle Paul) was beset by merit theology – the idea that salvation can be ‘earned’ by one’s ‘good works’.  Instead, says Sanders, it was characterised by ‘covenantal nomism’:-

Covenantal nomism is the view that one’s place in God’s plan is established on the basis of the covenant and that the covenant requires as the proper response of man his obedience to its commandments, while providing means of atonement for transgression….
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Justification according to Tom Wright

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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’. …

Tom Wright’s new book on justification

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It didn’t take Bishop Tom Wright very long to get another book out.  But then, if you have a brain the size of a small planet and the ability to write faster than most of us can read, you can produce a book while the other person is still sharpening his pencil.

This one – Justification: God’s Plan and Paul’s Vision (SPCK) flopped through my letterbox yesterday and first impressons are that it’s going to be an interesting and entertaining read. …

Doug Moo on Justification

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I was interested to come across this audio download of Doug Moo speaking on ‘Fresh Thoughts on Justification in Paul and James’.

It will be of interest to anyone exploring recent debates relating to the ‘New Perspective on Paul’ and justification.

Moo’s main point is that we should be willing to apply the familiar ‘already/not yet’ to the doctrine of justification as well as to other facets of redemption.  In other words, we should not be so single-minded about Paul’s emphasis on salvation by faith alone as to miss his (and James’) stress on the necessity of works.…

The New Perspective on Paul

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Here we go again: the New Perspective on Paul.

In the words of one writer, ‘the potential significance of the [New Perspective] school for the whole Christian faith can hardly be exaggerated.’ (Seyoon Kim)

Michael B. Thompson, Vice-Principal of Ridley Hall, Cambridge, has a useful short introduction (published by Grove Books).  What follows based on that.

The Old Perspective and its Problems

The NPP is an attempt to understand Paul in his own context, free from the categories and pre-occupations of the sixteenth century.…

Biblical Foundations of Penal Substitution 7 – Galatians

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Galatians 3:10-13

The image of the crucifixion at ‘hanging on a tree’ in Acts 5:30; 10:39; 13:29 evokes the words of Deuteronomy 21:25 – ‘anyone who is hung on a tree is under God’s curse’.

This raises the question, ‘Why would the sinless Christ be curses by God?’  Gal 3:10-13 supplies the answer.

The argument is simple: Jesus bore the curse that was due to others, thereby redeeming them from that curse.  He bore the penalty in our place.…

Tom Wright’s forthcoming book on justification

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I see that Tom (aka N.T.) Wright is about to publish a book-length response to John Piper’s The Future of Justification and other critics of his teaching on the doctrine of justification.

Wright’s book will be called Justification: God’s Plan and Paul’s Vision.  It will be published in the UK by SPCK in February 2009.

A sneak preview is available here.

UPDATE: IVP (America) has posted some endorsements of Wright’s book, and some of these rather predictably come from the ‘tribes’ (New Perspective people and emerging church people) who might be expected to love it. …

What St Paul really said about justification

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Before doing anything more with John Piper’s critique of N.T. Wright’s teaching on the doctrine of justification, I’m going to have a close look at what Wright himself has written.  If I were a scholar, I would study everything that he had written on the subject.  But I’m not, so I’m going to focus on the relevant chapter (7) in his book What Saint Paul Really Said.  What follows is my summary of Wright’s argument.…