Deficiencies in the Justification of the Ungodly

A Look at N. T. Wright's View of the Doctrine of Imputed Righteousness

Alaniz

• Publisher: Wipf and Stock
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781621897781
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

In recent years, the traditional reformed view of imputed righteousness has come under heavy scrutiny and disagreement, resulting in an injection of theological fervor centering on the writings of the Apostle Paul. The primary source of much of the disagreement comes from a theological movement called the New Perspective on Paul (NPP). The NPP movement has come to the forefront of New Testament theological scholarship, resulting in a continuing debate on the Pauline writings. The debate centers on the exegetical interpretation of these writings. To state this more clearly, the debate involves the reinterpretation of Paul's corpus of work found in Holy Scripture based on a new or different perspective. The NPP encompasses a multifaceted theological rubric, which questions the traditional interpretation of the Pauline writings, including the doctrine of imputed righteousness. Currently, one of the foremost advocates for the NPP is N. T. Wright. Wright, an evangelical New Testament scholar, strongly criticizes the traditional interpretation of the doctrine of imputed righteousness. This book takes a critical look at Wright's view of the doctrine of imputed righteousness and identifies some deficiencies from a traditional reformed perspective.

1

An Excursus into the New Perspective on Paul

The first step in understanding N. T. Wright’s view of imputed righteousness begins by obtaining a fundamental understanding of the NPP movement. This begins by getting an overview of the movement with a focus on its main characteristics. This will also involve a study of biblical, historical, and theological scholars such as Krister Stendahl, E. P. Sanders, and James D. G. Dunn, who were instrumental in laying the groundwork for the movement and influencing Wright’s new perspective view. Wright’s new perspective philosophy certainly shapes his understanding of imputed righteousness.

The NPP movement is at times complex in its exegetical analysis and vastly diverse in its theological scope. It covers a wide range of theological themes found throughout the Apostle Paul’s corpus of work in Holy Scripture. The NPP has become a multifaceted movement of theological viewpoints. At times, these theological viewpoints do not agree.24 New Testament theologian Dunn, whom many scholars credit as coining the phrase the “New Perspective on Paul,” explains that the NPP is not a dogma that is binding, nor is it symbolic of some school of thought.25 Rather, the intent of the NPP is to complement other views of the Pauline writings in order to obtain a much fuller and richer understanding of the gospel message.26

Many NPP scholars, such as Stendahl, Sanders, and Dunn, focus their attention on Paul’s more polarizing themes. These themes include “the relationship between the new covenant and old, the relationship between being ‘in Christ’ and being a Jew (or even a Pharisee), the relationship between the grace of God in Christ and being under the law.”27 The central theme surrounding the NPP movement has to do with Judaism and not Paul per se.28 The primary intent of NPP scholars is to change the mindset of how contemporary theologians view the Pauline writings as it pertains to Judaism during the first century.

Krister Stendahl

The Peril of Modernization

The NPP traces its roots to a Harvard professor named Krister Stendahl,29 who on September 3, 1961, delivered an address entitled “The Apostle Paul and the Introspective Conscience of the West”30 to the American Psychological Association at their annual meeting. In this presentation, Stendahl attempts to address the dangers of interpreting history and historical documents such as biblical text with the presumption that “man [humanity] remains basically the same through the ages.”31 It is in this vein that Stendahl criticizes Western theologians for committing eisegesis by reading a contemporary Western cultural introspective consciousness into the Pauline epistles. This section will provide a general summary of Stendahl’s address and the influence it has on the new perspective movement.

The primary focus of the address deals with Romans 7:14–25. The thrust of the argument focuses on Paul’s statement, “For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I do.” For years, Western theologians have read into this passage an introspective guilty conscience inferring that Paul struggled with a guilty conscience. It is for this reason that Western theologians hail the apostle “as a hero of the introspective conscience.”32 The Western introspective conscience is comparable to what psychologist Carl Gustav Jung33 calls “individuation,” in that these views seek an internal answer, in a person’s consciousness or unconsciousness, to an individual or societal struggle.34

David Cox’s work entitled Jung and St. Paul: A Study of the Doctrine of Justification by Faith and Its Relation to the Concept of Individuation helps identify and provides solutions to the Western problem of a guilty conscience. In this book Cox makes a comparative study of how psychology and religion relate in the human psychic. According to Cox, both the Apostle Paul and Jung agree that each human struggles with and relies on his/her own inner conscious devices when confronting a dilemma. Cox goes as far as stating that the word sin in a religious setting and the manifestation of the unconscious in the psychotherapeutic setting bear the same meaning with regard to the effect on the human psyche.35

The introspective interpretation of the Pauline epistles is purely Western in nature and not the Apostle Paul’s original intended meaning for his biblical writings. The modernization of Pauline scripture is a produce of Western Christianity in its quest to satisfy the guilty conscience.36 Henry Cadbury gives an excellent summary of the implications of modernizing biblical text in his book entitled The Peril of Modernizing Jesus. Modernization of the biblical text presupposes the notion that humans and their environments remain unchanged throughout history. The perils of this presupposition can affect the modern exegete’s understanding and biases of the biblical text.37 One of the possible causes examined by Cadbury for the modernization problem incurred by many theologians has to do with the natural unconscious tendency to make biblical text real. In other words, modernization gives the reader a better understanding of the text. Cadbury equates this to a modern painting depicting a biblical event.38 This tendency results in erroneous assumptions regarding the true meaning of the text.

The point to all this is that Western Christianity (particularly Protestantism), in its quest to modernize biblical text, misinterprets the Pa...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Foreword
• Preface
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: An Excursus into the New Perspective on Paul
• Chapter 2: N. T. Wright
• Chapter 3: The Traditional View of Imputed Righteousness
• Chapter 4: Critical Evaluation
• Conclusion
• Bibliography