N.T. Wright on Romans 3:27-29

There has been an exegetical point that Wright has often made that has been on my mind lately. It concerns Romans 3:27-29, which says:

Then what becomes of our boasting? It is excluded. By what kind of law? By a law of works? No, but by the law of faith. For we hold that one is justified by faith apart from works of the law. Or is God the God of Jews only? Is he not the God of Gentiles also? Yes, of Gentiles also.

No one would deny that v. 28 is in some sense a culmination of Paul’s preceding argument concerning justification by faith. On the verses that flank it on either side, Wright writes:

The meaning of the all-important verse Romans 3:28 is held firmly in place by the verses on either side. Romans 3:27 indicates that “the Torah of faith” excludes the “boasting” of Romans 2:17-20.... How then must we read Romans 3:28? [We must read it as] the decisive statement which explains (as the gar, “for,” indicates) the dramatic claim of Romans 3:27, and as the statement whose immediate implication is that God has one family, not two, and that this family consists of faithful Gentiles as well as faithful Jews.

In other words, the boasting that justification by faith eliminates is not a boasting in one’s moral accomplishments, but a boasting on the part of the Jew who takes solace in his status as being from the nation through whom God would save the world. And further, the little word “or” at the beginning of 3:29 serves to show that if the status of “righteous” were manifested by ethnic boundary markers rather than by faith, then the Jews’ boast would be true, and God is, in the end, the father of Abraham’s physical offspring only.

Thoughts?

Wright on Justification, Part One: The Divine Lawcourt

In his book Justification, N.T. Wright attempts to approach his doctrinal topic from four directions: lawcourt, covenant, eschatology, and Christology. These four aspects of justification, Wright argues, must be held together by the New Testament scholar in order to understand "what Saint Paul really said."

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In this post I will interact a bit with the first of Wright's aspects: the lawcourt.

Wright begins by denying the claim of many that justification denotes "the entire picture of God's reconciling action toward the human race" (though the dikaios root "is indeed closely related to the whole theme of human salvation"). What, then, does "justification" mean? Wright argues that the word "righteousness" (Greek: dikaios) refers to "the status that someone has when the court has found in their favor." This has nothing whatsoever to do with the moral character of the person in question: on a human level a judge could incorrectly grant the status of "found by the court to be in the right" to a criminal, and it still would not change the fact that he now enjoys the status of "righteous." Turning to the verb form "to justify," Wright insists that what is in view here is not the remedial, Augustinian notion of "making righteous" (at least not if "righteous is referring to moral character). Rather, "to justify" means to declare that one is in the right with repect to the divine lawcourt:

"To justify" does not denote an action which transforms someone so much as a declaration which grants them a status. It is the status of the person which is transformed by the action of "justification," not the character. It is in this sense that "justification" "makes" someone "righteous," just as the officiant at a wedding service might be said to "make" the couple husband and wife....

This is why, according to Wright, any notion of the "imputation of the alien righteousness of Christ" is flawed, though understandable. The righteousness spoken of in Romans 3 is not a moral quality, but a status of legal vindication (meaning that the notion that one person's righteousness could be given to another is a confusion of categories).

From a confessionally Reformed perspective, some of what Wright says is rather benign, and some of it is even refreshing (especially his insistence on the Reformation emphases of the declarative and forensic). But once you start messing around with the doctrine of imputed righteousness, that is where the good Calvinist must dig his heels in and resist.

I have up my sleeve what I consider to be a pretty solid defense of the doctrine of imputation (which I will bring out eventually). But in the meantime, what are some ways that you would refute Wright's claims here?

Some Thoughts on N.T. Wright's Justification

I’d like to offer a few random and disordered thoughts on N.T. Wright’s latest book, Justification. I may go back next week and fill in some details in order to offer a more cogent critique, or I may just let the messiness stand (depends on how emergent I’m feeling). So here goes….

First, some positives. Whether it is in response to his critics, or whether he’s been saying this all along, I’m not sure, but Wright does have a lot more to say about human sin and the need for rescue than I was expecting. One of the most common complaints from confessional Reformed theologians about the New Perspective on Paul is its failure to do justice to the serious nature of man’s plight before God (focusing instead on man’s estrangement from his fellow man, especially that of the Jew from the Gentile). This failure is seen most glaringly in E.P. Sanders’s somewhat lame claim that when all was said and done, the real problem with Judaism was that it was not Christianity. Perhaps Wright has been paying attention to the NPP’s critics at this point (or maybe he has been saying this all along, I am not sure), because in Justification he makes it clear time and time again that the whole point of Yahweh raising up a worldwide family by means of the Abrahamic covenant is to rescue man from the curses of both Genesis 11 and Genesis 3. Ecclesiology does not eclipse soteriology, but is the context in which salvation takes place.

One complaint that the confessional Reformed reader will still have, however, is with regard to Wright’s all-too-casual dismissal of the desire for personal salvation on the part of the person living in the second-temple period. Drawing from extra-canonical literature, Wright insists that the whole “What will happen when I die? Will my soul go to heaven?” mentality was just utterly foreign to the minds of people during Jesus’ and Paul’s day. What Wright seems all too eager to forget is the fact that New Testament characters asked these questions all the time. While we certainly don’t want to minimize the issue of table fellowship and Jew/Gentile relations, we must also remember that the rich young ruler had a heavy heart when considering the state of his own soul’s salvation, that the multitudes in Jerusalem on the day of Pentecost were “cut to the heart” after hearing Peter’s accusations about their sin, and the Philippian jailor’s first question to Paul and Silas was “What must I do to be saved?” If Wright is going to claim to be doing justice both to ecclesiology and soteriology, he will need to do a better job integrating passages like these into his system if he wants his claim to be taken seriously. If, as he admits, every Jew has an Adam living inside him, then we need a little more Eden and a little less Babel in his formulations.

Finally—and here I will echo Horton’s complaints—I wish Wright demonstrated a greater familiarity with traditional Reformed covenant theology. Often his foil is the Dispensationalist who insists that when God’s “Plan A” didn’t work out the way he wanted it to, he then put “Plan B” into effect, according to which man would be saved by the grace of Jesus instead of the demands of the law. I often find myself scratching my head in bewilderment at Wright’s approach, as if he believes either that contemporary Dispensationalism (1) is a worthy enough adversary to be taken seriously, (2) is the only alternative to the New Perspective’s brand of covenant theology, or (3) that the Reformers were proto-Dispensationalists. If Wright were to show a proficiency of understanding with respect to how the Reformers read Paul (and Moses), and if he incorporated the views of men like Vos, Ridderbos, and Kline into his critique of the Old Perspective, his arrows may land more successfully than they do when he shoots them at strawmen.

More next week, perhaps.

Recognition or Reckoning?

We have seen that pre-Damascus Saul’s boast of blamelessness as to the righteousness that comes from the Mosaic law was indeed a valid claim. The problem, however, was that the earthly blessings promised for obedience to the law were "refuse" compared to the eternal joy of gaining Christ and attaining the resurrection from the dead (Phil. 3:4b-11).

Because of human sin and the subsequent inability to secure the eternal, heavenly blessings by the ordinary means appointed at creation (obeying God’s commands), righteousness must be attained in an extraordinary way: through faith in Christ.

(And just so we're clear: The phenomenon of justification by faith is the divine response to the crisis brought on by universal sin (Rom. 1:18ff), and not, as the New Perspective claims, simply the solution to the exclusivity of Torah's boundary markers such as circumcision, sabbaths, and dietary laws.)

A comparison of Romans 2:13 and 5:8-9 demonstrates the necessity of another type of righteousness beyond the ordinary. In the former verse, one is justified because he is just—he is a "doer of the law." In the latter, however, the one who is justified is "ungodly" (v. 6) and a "sinner" (v. 8). This is an example of what Westerholm calls "extraordinary righteousness," and what Paul calls a "free gift of righteousness" and "justification by faith" (Rom. 5:17; 3:28).

Please don't miss this point: When it is ungodly sinners who are justified, it cannot be on the basis of their righteous conduct or "doing of the law" that this sentence is passed. Rather, they must be reckoned as righteous, receiving their justification "freely by grace" (Rom. 3:24), "without works" (Rom. 4:2, 5, 6), and as a "gift of righteousness" (Rom. 5:17), none of which can be said of those who are recognized as righteous because they are "doers of the law."

The contrast between ordinary righteousness and extraordinary righteousness, then, amounts to nothing less than the distinction between the law ("Do this and live") and the gospel ("It is finished!").

And this is precisely the distinction that the New Perspective misses.

Heaven and Earth, Abraham and Moses

We've been talking about how Paul could say, on the one hand, that the law's purpose is to stop every mouth and silence the boasting of man, but then on the other hand claim that he was blameless with respect to the law's demand for righteousness.

I think he meant what he said in both cases. Accordingly, in neither case was he talking about a Pharisaical or legalistic perversion of the law. Let me explain....

In Paul's allegorical interpretation of Abraham's family, he likens the patriarch's handmaid, Hagar, to the covenant made at Mount Sinai, which both produces bondage and points to the present, earthly Jerusalem. Sarah, however, corresponds to "the Jerusalem which is above," and points to the heavenly and eternal realities promised in the Abrahamic Covenant.

This is key to having a properly formed covenant theology. The Abrahamic Covenant promised a heavenly reward that is received simply by faith in the coming Messiah. The Mosaic Covenant, on the other hand, promised earthly, temporal, and typological rewards (long life in the land). And further, to retell the story of Adam's failure and typify the work of true Israelite and second Adam, the earthly blessings promised in the Mosaic Covenant were gained by obedience to the law. The principle that Paul extracts from the Mosaic Covenant is "Do this and live" (Rom. 10:5; Gal. 3:12; cf. Lev. 18:5).

But think about it: How could God expect Israel to obey his law in that complete, perfect, Romans 2 sense? Weren't they fallen and sinful? On that standard, wouldn't they have gone into exile the moment they crossed the Jordan?

Of course. This is why, in order to maintain the theocracy and tell the Adamic story they were supposed to tell, the "righteousness" God required of Israel consisted of having a relative measure of national fidelity to the law's demands.

The mistake of the Pharisees, then, was not that they thought the law demanded works (which it did) or that they thought they had earned the righteousness that Moses demanded (which they did). But their mistake was that they confused the relative fidelity required by the national covenant to retain the earthly land, with the perfect fidelity required by the creation covenant to secure the heavenly land.

And as I hope to flesh out later, conflating the Abrahamic and Mosaic covenants (the way the New Perspective on Paul does) is an easy way to morph law and gospel into golawspel. And that doesn't save anyone....

Will the "Doers of the Law" Please Stand Up?

We have seen that the term “righteous,” in its ordinary sense, describes the person who has performed the righteousness that the law prescribes, and that the result of this righteous conduct is justification and acquittal by the Judge on the last day. “The doers of the law,” Paul says, “will be justified” (Rom. 2:6-13).

But herein lies the problem....

Many NPP proponents claim that Rom. 2:6-13 describes normative Christian experience—the believer, through the power of the indwelling Spirit of the risen Christ, lives out his faith in active obedience to God, thus securing his final justification (which, according to N.T. Wright, is “on the basis of the entirety of the saint’s lived life”).

While confessional Presbyterian and Reformed theology certainly agrees with the New Perspective that Rom. 2:6-13 describes how justification would ordinarily occur, there is division over whether or not such an arrangement is possible given man’s sinfulness and inability to keep the law.

What do you think? Given the fact that “righteousness” and “justification” are said to be the possessions of the ones who are “doers of the law,” how ought we to understand the relationship of (Spirit-wrought) sanctification to justification at the last day?

Garden Variety Righteousness

At the risk of opening up a can of worms, I'd like to dabble a bit in some issues relating to the New Perspective on Paul.

As a disclaimer, the fact that I am an alumnus of Westminster Seminary California will probably open me up to the charge of being a bloodthirsty "heresy hunter" (as many critics of NPP are characterized), so I will do my best to keep the conversation civil.

My first proposition is as follows:

In its ordinary usage in Scripture, "righteousness" is a moral concept referring to what one has as a result of doing the good that the law requires.

Am I misdefining the term? Am I failing to do justice to its ecclesiastical or covenantal aspects? Have my Greek, forensic categories clouded my ability to appreciate the familial, loving, Hebrew context of this word's origin?

Fire away (but be gentle)....