Category Archives: Piper, John

“Your God is my devil”

Walking With Giants Posted on by

At about 3pm on 1st August 2007 a interstate bridge over the Mississippi River in Minneapolis collapsed.  Workmen had, just a few days previously, been conducting extensive repair work to the 40-year-old bridge.  There were tons of building materials piled up on the bridge at the time of its collapse.

Bethlehem Baptist Church is within sight of that bridge, and John Piper is its Senior Pastor.  Just a few hours after the disaster Piper, not yet knowing the scale of human injury and loss, or whether any of his own friends and colleagues had been directly affected, wrote of his immediate thoughts and feelings about what had just happened.…

Justification according to Tom Wright

Walking With Giants Posted on by

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

Walking With Giants Posted on by

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. …

Wright on what the gospel is, and is not

Walking With Giants Posted on by

I seem to be doing a lot a blogging about the teaching of N.T. Wright just at the moment.  I suppose it’s because I’m struggling to understand what seem to me to be his revisionist views of many aspects of New Testament teaching and Christian doctrine.

I realise, of course, that he would be regarded by many in the academy as ultra-conservative.  But, as a self-confessed evangelical, ‘revisionist’ is not a huge exaggeration when the doctrines of sin, repentance, justification by faith, and the gospel itself seem to be up for fairly drastic re-interpretation.…

Wright on Piper on Wright

Walking With Giants Posted on by

In advance of the publication of his new book, Justification: God’s plan and Paul’s vision, here is an interview with N.T. Wright from Trevin Wax.  I’m afraid I don’t think it advances the discussion very far.

Wright says:-

My anxiety about what has now been seen as the traditional Reformed view (though there are many traditional Reformed views!) is that it focuses all attention on ‘me and my salvation’ rather than on ‘God and God’s purposes’.

…

Tom Wright’s forthcoming book on justification

Walking With Giants Posted on by

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. …

Piper on Wright on justification

Walking With Giants Posted on by
I’ve just made a start on John Piper’s important book on N.T. Wright’s teaching on the doctrine of justification.

Entitled The future of justification, it is available for free download here.

A helpful chapter-by-chapter summary has been posted here.

And here’s the blurb:-

N.T. Wright, a world-renowned New Testament scholar and bishop of Durham in the Church of England, has spent years studying the apostle Paul’s writings and has offered a “fresh perspective” on Paul’s theology.

…

How our view of the gospel affects our reading of Scripture

Walking With Giants Posted on by

Chris Tilling puts it well, I think: our understanding of what Scripture means is very much influenced by our understanding of what the gospel is.

If, for example, we think that the gospel is primarily about how individuals get saved from their sin, enter into a personal relationship with Jesus and go to heaven when they die, then this becomes the lens through which everything else is seen.  So,

If Paul speaks about ‘new creation’ in 2 Cor 5, this must be another way of speaking about something that happens to me in my relationship with Christ.

…