Justification

God's Plan and Paul's Vision

Tom Wright

• Publisher: SPCK Publishing
• Year: 2009
• Print ISBN: 9780281060900
• eBook ISBN: 9780281062591
• Topic: Teologia e religione
• Subtopic: Studi biblici

In what has become known as the 'new perspective' on Paul, Tom Wright has proposed a vision of the apostle's central message that does full justice to all Paul's letters.

In particular, he focuses on the God-centred nature of Paul's gospel, arguing that 'traditional' readings of Paul can suggest that the apostle's message is simply about us: our sin, our justification, our salvation.

Ambitious in scope, yet closely argued, Justification: God's Plan and Paul's Vision suggests that this crucial understanding of the theology of St Paul, and thus of the gospel of Christ, is urgently needed as the Church faces the tasks of mission in a dangerous world.

"This is definitely one of the most exciting and significant books that I have read this year. Like all of the author's work, I found it hard to set down once I had started to read it. Strongly commended!" Professor I. Howard Marshall, Honorary Research Professor of New Testament, University of Aberdeen

Part 1

INTRODUCTION

1

What’s all this about, and why does it matter?

I

Imagine a friend coming to stay who, through some accident of education, had never been told that the earth goes round the sun. As part of a happy evening’s conversation, you take it upon yourself to explain how the planetary system works. Yes, from where we stand it does of course seem that the sun circles around us. But this is merely the effect of our perspective. All that we now know of astronomy confirms that the earth on which we live, in company with a few other similar planets, is in fact revolving around the sun. You get out books, charts and diagrams, and even rearrange objects on the coffee-table to make the point. Your friend alternates between incredulity, fascination, momentary alarm, and puzzlement. Eventually you smile, have another drink, and head for bed.

Very early in the morning, while it is still dark, there is a tap at the bedroom door. He is up and dressed and invites you to come for an early walk. He takes you up the hill to a point where the whole countryside is spread out before you, and, as the sky begins to lighten, you can just see, far off to the east, the glistening ocean. He returns to the subject of the previous night. So many wise people of old have spoken of the earth as the solid-fixed point on which we stand. Didn’t one of the Psalms say something about the sun celebrating as it goes round and round, like a strong giant running a race? Yes, of course modern scientists are always coming up with fancy theories. They may have their place, but equally they may just be fads. Wouldn’t we do better to stick with the tried and tested wisdom of the ages?

As he warms to his theme, so at last, out of the sea, there emerges the huge, dazzling, shining ball. You stand in silence, watching its majestic rise, filling the countryside with golden light. As its lower edge clears the ocean, you wait with a sense of frustrated inevitability for the punch-line. Here it comes.

‘Now, you see,’ – a gentle hand on the arm, he doesn’t want to make this too harsh – ‘we have the evidence of our own eyes. It really does go round the earth. All those wonderful theories and clever new ideas – they may have a lot to teach us, but ultimately they take us away from the truth. Better to stay with tried and tested truth, with the ground firm beneath our feet. Aren’t you happy we came on this walk?’

Now I can well imagine that, as with the Pharisees listening to Jesus’ Parable of the Wicked Tenants, there may be some readers who will at once be angry, realizing that I have told this story against them. And it may be a dangerous move to start a book by alienating still further those with whom, it appears, I am engaged in dialogue. But I use this story for one reason in particular: to make it clear that, at the present moment in the debate about St Paul and the meaning of ‘justification’, this is how it appears, to me at least. We are not in dialogue. I have been writing about St Paul now, on and off, for thirty-five years. I have prayed, preached and lectured my way through his letters. I have written popular-level commentaries on all of them, a full-length commentary on his most important one, and several other books and articles, at various levels, on particular Pauline topics. And the problem is not that people disagree with me. That is what one expects and wants. Let’s have the discussion! The point of discourse is to learn with and from one another. I used to tell my students that a least 20 per cent of what I was telling them was wrong, but I didn’t know which 20 per cent it was: I make many mistakes in life, in relationships and in work, and I don’t expect to be free of them in my thinking. But whereas in much of life one’s mistakes are often fairly obvious – the short-cut path that ended in a bed of nettles, the experimental recipe that gave us all queasy stomachs, the golf shot that landed in the lake – in the life of the mind things are often not so straightforward. We need other minds on the job, to challenge us, to come back at us, to engage with our arguments and analyses. That is how the world goes round.

Well, some might reply, is that not what’s happening? What are you grumbling about? Here are all these writers, taking you on. Might they not have spotted the 20 per cent you were talking about? Shouldn’t you be glad to be corrected?

Well, yes. But my problem is that that’s not how things are working out. I have thought about writing this book for some time, but have finally been prodded into doing it because one of my critics – John Piper, of Bethlehem Baptist Church in Minneapolis, Minnesota – has gone one better than the rest and devoted an entire book to explaining why I’m wrong about Paul, and why we should stick with the tried and trusted theology of the Reformers and their successors. (Or at least some of them; actually, the Reformers disagreed among themselves, and so do their successors.¹) And the problem is not that he, like many others, is disagreeing with me. The problem is that he hasn’t really listened to what I’m saying. He has watched with growing alarm as I moved the pieces around the coffee-table. It has given him a sleepless night. And now he has led me up the hill to show me the glorious sight of another sunrise. Yes, I want to say. I know about the sunrise. I know it looks to us as if the sun goes round the earth. I’m not denying that. But why couldn’t you hear what I was trying to tell you?

The answer may well be, of course, ‘Because you didn’t explain it properly.’ Or, perhaps, ‘Because what you were saying was so muddled and confused that it’s better to stick with a straightforward, plain account which makes sense.’ And, on the chance that one of these is true, I am writing this book to try, once more, to explain what I have been talking about – which is to explain what I think St Paul was talking about. But there is a more worrying possible answer. My friend – and most of the people with whom I shall here be in debate are people I would like to count as friends – has simply not allowed the main things I have been trying to say to get anywhere near his conscious mind. He has picked off bits of my analysis and argument, worried away at them, shaken his head, and gone back to the all-powerful story he already knew. (As I was drafting this, the new issue of Christian Century landed on my desk, with an article by a teacher to whom a student said, ‘I loved what I was learning, but I couldn’t make it stay in my head. It was too different from what I had already learned, so my brain just kept switching back to default.’²) And, partly because I am more than a little weary with this happening again and again, on websites, in questions after lectures, in journalistic interviews, and increasingly in academic and quasi- or pseudoacademic articles and books, I am determined to have one more go at setting things out.

Actually, this book is not my intended ‘final account’ of the matter. There remains the large task, towards which I have been working for most of my life, of the book on Paul which is now planned as the fourth volume of my series about Christian origins.³ But I do not want to spend two hundred pages of that book in detailed discussions with Piper and other similar writers. There are many other issues to be dealt with, in quite different directions, and to concentrate in the larger book on the fierce little battles that are raging in the circles I must now address would pull that project out of shape.

There are two other reasons why I have begun with the story of the friend who thinks the sun goes round the earth. The first is that, within the allegorical meaning of the story, the arguments I have been mounting – the diagrams, the pictures, the objects on the coffee-table – stand for fresh readings of scripture. They are not the superimposition upon scripture of theories culled from elsewhere. But the response, which puts itself about as ‘the evidence of our eyes’, ‘the most obvious meaning’, and so on, is deeply conditioned by, and at critical points appeals to, tradition. Yes, human tradition – albeit from some extremely fine, devout and learned human beings. Ever since I first read Luther and Calvin, particularly the latter, I determined that whether or not I agreed with them in everything they said, their stated and practised method would be mine, too: to soak myself in the Bible, in the Hebrew and Aramaic Old Testament and the Greek New Testament, to get it into my bloodstream by every means possible, in the prayer and hope that I would be able to teach scripture afresh to the church and the world. The greatest honour we can pay the Reformers is not to treat them as infallible – they would be horrified at that – but to do as they did. There is a considerable irony, at the level of method, when John Piper suggests that, according to me, the church has been ‘on the wrong foot for fifteen hundred years’. It isn’t so much that I don’t actually claim that. It is that that is exactly what people said to his heroes, to Luther, Calvin and the rest. Luther and Calvin answered from scripture; the Council of Trent responded by insisting on tradition.⁴

The second reason I have begun with the parable of the friend, the earth and the sun is deeper again. It is serious for theological and pastoral reasons, and is near the heart of what is at stake in this debate and many others. The theological equivalent of supposing that the earth goes round the sun is the belief that the whole of Christian truth is all about me and my salvation. I have read dozens of books and articles in the last few weeks on the topic of justification. Again and again the writers, from a variety of backgrounds, have assumed, taken it for granted, that the central question of all is, ‘What must I do to be saved?’ or (Luther’s way of putting it), ‘How can I find a gracious God?’ or, ‘How can I enter a right relationship with God?’

Now do not misunderstand me. Hold the angry or fearful reaction. Salvation is hugely important. Of course it is! Knowing God for oneself, as opposed to merely knowing or thinking about him, is at the heart of Christian living. Discovering that God is gracious, rather than a distant bureaucrat or a dangerous tyrant, is the good news that constantly surprises and refreshes us. But we are not the centre of the universe. God is not circling around us. We are circling around him. It may look, from our point of view, as though ‘me and my salvation’ are the be-all and end-all of Christianity. Sadly, many people – many devout Christians! – have preached that way and lived that way. This problem is not peculiar to the churches of the Reformation. It goes back to the high Middle Ages in the Western church, and infects and affects Catholic and Protestant, liberal and conservative, high and low church alike. But a full reading of scripture itself tells a different story.

God made humans for a purpose: not simply for themselves, not simply so that they could be in relationship with him, but so that through them, as his image-bearers, he could bring his wise, glad, fruitful order to the world. And the closing scenes of scripture, in the book of Revelation, are not about human beings going off to heaven to be in a close and intimate relationship with God, but about heaven coming to earth. The intimate relationship with God which is indeed promised and celebrated in that great scene of the New Jerusalem issues at once in an outflowing, a further healing creativity, the river of the water of life flowing out from the city, and the tree of life springing up, with leaves that are for the healing of the nations.

What is at stake in the present debate is not simply the finetuning of theories about what precisely happens in ‘justification’. That quickly turns, as one reviewer of Piper’s book noted somewhat tartly, into a kind of evangelical arm-wrestling, a text-trading contest in which verses from Paul, Greek roots, arcane references to sources both ancient and modern, and sometimes (alas) unkind words fly around the room. Many people will look on with distaste, like neighbours overhearing an unpleasant family row. Yes, there will be some text-trading in this book. That is inevitable, given the subject-matter, and the central importance of scripture itself. But the real point is, I believe, that the salvation of human beings, though of course extremely important for those human beings, is part of a larger purpose. God is rescuing us from the shipwreck of the world, not so that we can sit back and put our feet up in his company, but so that we can be part of his plan to remake the world. We are in orbit around God and his purposes, not the other way around. If the Reformation tradition had treated the gospels as equally important to the epistles, this mistake might never have happened. But it has, and we must deal with it. The earth, and we with it, go round the sun of God and his cosmic purposes.

Ironically, perhaps, this statement can be heard as the radical application of justification by faith itself. ‘Nothing in my hand I bring,’ sings the poet, ‘simply to thy cross I cling.’ Of course: we look away from ourselves to Jesus Christ and him crucified, to the God whose gracious love and mercy sent him to die for us. But the sigh of relief which is the characteristic Christian reaction to learning about justification by faith (‘You mean I don’t have to do anything? God loves me and accepts me as I am, just because Jesus died for me?’) ought to give birth at once to a deeper realization down exactly the same line: ‘You mean it isn’t all about ME after all? I’m not the centre of the universe? It’s all about God and his purposes?’ The problem is that, throughout the history of the Western church, even where the first point has been enthusiastically embraced – sometimes particularly where that has happened – the second has been ignored. And with that sometimes wilful ignorance there has crept back into theology, even into good, no-nonsense, copper-bottomed Reformation theology, the snake’s whisper that actually it is all about us, that ‘my relationship with God’ and ‘my salvation’ is the still point at the centre of the universe. I am the hero in this play. Even Jesus comes on stage to help me out of the mess I’m in. And, way back behind all talk of ‘new perspectives’, ‘old perspectives’, ‘fresh perspectives’ and any other perspectives you care to name, what I am contending for, and the reason I am writing this book, is not just to clarify a few technical details, or justify myself – the crowning irony in a book on this topic! – against my critics. (‘It’s a very small matter’, wrote Paul himself, ‘that I should be judged by you or by any human court; I don’t even judge myself … it is the Lord who judges me.’⁵) The reason I am writing this book is because the present battles are symptoms of some much larger issues that face the church at the start of the twenty-first century, and because the danger signs, particularly the failure to read scripture for all its worth, and the geocentric theology and piety I’ve mentioned, are all around us. I am not, in other words, simply appealing to my critics to allow my peculiar interpretations of St Paul some house room, or at least permission to inhabit a kennel in the back yard where my barks and yaps may not be such a nuisance. I am suggesting that the theology of St Paul, the whole theology of St Paul rather than the truncated and self-centred readings which have become endemic in Western thought, the towering and majestic theology of St Paul which, when you even glimpse it, dazzles you like the morning sun rising over the sea, is urgently needed as the church faces the tasks of mission in tomorrow’s dangerous world, and is not well served by the inward-looking soteriologies that tangle themselves up in a web of detached texts and secondary theories …

It is, after all, an interesting question as to why certain doctrinal and exegetical questions suddenly explode at particular points. I sat down to lunch last November with a man I had not met until that day. We were in company, in a very nice restaurant. As we took our places, he turned to me and said energetically, ‘How do you translate genōmetha in 2 Corinthians 5.21?’ I stared around the table. Everyone was waiting for my answer. I’ll get to that later in the book, but my point here is to ask: What is going on in our culture, our times, our churches, our world, that suddenly makes us itch at this point, itch so badly that we have to scratch like mad even in public? Answering that question would take several other books, but the answer cannot simply be ‘because the gospel is at stake’, or ‘because souls need to be saved’. We live in a highly complex world, and the sudden volcanic eruption of angry, baffled concern at the so-called ‘new perspective on Paul’ can be located interestingly in a socio-cultural, and even political, milieu where an entire way of life, a whole way of understanding the Christian faith and trying to live it out, a whole way of being human, is suddenly perceived to be at risk. It is cognate (for instance) with a large and difficult problem in Western Christianity, the problem characterized by the implicit clash between those who get their faith from the four gospels, topped up with a few bits of Paul, and those who base it on Paul, topped up with a few illustrations from the gospels. These issues in turn need to be mapped onto broader questions within parts of the Western church, as is done (for instance) by Roger Olson in a recent book, where he distinguishes ‘conservatives’ (people like Don Carson of Trinity Evangelical Divinity School) from ‘post-conservatives’ (people like me).⁶ It’s always intriguing to discover that you belong to a group you didn’t know existed. That particular cultural divide is a fairly solidly American one, and, as they say over there, I don’t think I have a dog in that fight. Behind Olson’s divide there are, of course, much larger cultural and social tectonic plates shifting this way and that. We should not imagine that we can discuss the exegesis of 2 Corinthians 5.21, or Romans or Galatians,...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Praise for the Justification
• Title page
• Imprint
• Table of contents
• Preface
• Abbreviation
• Part 1
• Part 2
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Search items for biblical references
• Search items for names
• Search items for topics