The
New Perspective on Paul
The
Contribution of N.T. Wright (2)
Cornelis P. Venema
In
order to understand the full meaning of this summary statement of the doctrine
of justification, we need to consider briefly several distinct aspects of
Wright's understanding. Chief among these are: 1) his interpretation of the
phrase, “the righteousness of God,” as the basis for the justification of God's
people; 2) the precise meaning of the language, “to justify”; 3) the role of
faith as the “badge” of covenant membership or justification; 4) the past,
present and future tenses of justification; and 5) the relation between
Christ's resurrection and the church's justification.
The
Righteousness of God
Students of
the Reformation are well aware that one of the key Pauline phrases for a proper
under- standing of justification is the phrase, “the righteousness of God”
(compare Rom. 1:16-17; Rom. 3:21-26). Following Luther's “discovery” that the
righteousness of God is not so much the demand of God's law as the gift of his
grace in Christ, the Reformers taught that we are justified by the free gift of
God's righteousness in Christ, which is granted 'and imputed to believers. In
this understanding, the righteousness of God is revealed through Christ who, by
his obedience to the law and substitutionary endurance of the law's penalty, is
the believer's righteousness before God. Justification is a judicial idea, and
describes the way all of the requirements of the law have been met for the
believer through the work of Christ. Those who receive the free gift of God's
righteousness in Christ by faith stand acquitted and accepted before God.
Following
the lead of Sanders, Dunn and others, Wright insists that this Reformation view
amounts to a profound misunderstanding of the language of the “righteousness of
God.” Wright maintains that “[f]or a reader of the Septuagint, the Greek
version of the Jewish scriptures, “the righteousness of God” would have one
obvious meaning: God's own faithfulness to his promises…. God has made promises;
Israel can trust those promises. God's righteousness is thus cognate with his
trustworthiness on the one hand, and Israel's salvation on the other” (p. 96).
Though the Reformation view rightly emphasized that the “righteousness of God”
reflects a “legal metaphor” taken from the lawcourt, it misapplies this
language by misunderstanding the way the Hebrews understood the functioning of
righteousness in the judgment of the court.1 In the Hebrew law court, there are three
parties: the judge, the plaintiff and the defendant. When the Judge pronounces
a verdict in the court in favor of the plaintiff or the defendant, we may say
that he has been “vindicated against the accuser; in other words, acquitted”
(p. 98). This is the only meaning that the term “righteous” has, when it is
applied to the person in whose favor the Judge acts: that person is, so far as
the court's action is concern, in the status of being acquitted or
righteous. So far as the court's
judgment is concerned, the person who is righteous has the status of being
vindicated or being in favor with the court.
Even
though Wright acknowledges, as the Reformation view also insisted, that the
language of the “righteousness of God” reflects a legal or forensic setting, he
also insists that the vindication of someone in God's court does not involve
God's granting or imputing anything whatever to the person whom He vindicates. “If
we use the language of the law court, it makes no sense whatever to say that
the judge imputes, imparts, bequeaths, conveys or otherwise transfers his
righteousness to either the plaintiff or the defendant. Righteousness is not an
object, a substance or a gas which can be passed across the courtroom” (p. 98).
When the “righteousness of God” is revealed, this means that God reveals his
covenant faithfulness by keeping his promise to his people, vindicating them as
“righteous.” Because this righteousness is God's own faithfulness to his
covenant promise, it is not something that he could bestow upon or impart to
his people.
What it is “to be
justified”
Just
as the Reformation misunderstood the language of the “righteousness of God,” so
it also misunderstood, Wright maintains, the language of justification. In the
popular mind, justification is taken to be the answer to the problem of sinners
who try to find favor with God by doing good works. There is a sinful tendency
in all of us to try to pull ourselves up by our own moral bootstraps, to seek
to find favor with God on the basis of our achievements or efforts. Whether in the
dress of Pelagianism, which teaches that sinners are saved on the basis of the
performance of good works in obedience to the law, or semi-Pelagianism, which
teaches that sinners are saved on the basis of God's grace, plus our good
works—there is an inescapable tendency to base human salvation upon
self-effort. The doctrine of justification is the only antidote to all such Pelagian
or semi-Pelagian views of salvatioan, because it teaches that salvation is an
unmerited gift of God's grace in Christ to sinners who receive the gospel
promise by faith alone. In Wright's estimation, this popular opinion regarding
justification, whatever its merits (and he acknowledges that it has some),
“does not do justice to the richness and precision of Paul's doctrine, and indeed
distorts it at various points” (p. 113).2
According
to Wright, Paul's doctrine of justification did not serve to answer the
“timeless” problem of how sinners can find acceptance with God, but to explain
how you can tell who belongs to “the community of the true people of God.” When the language of justification is
interpreted in terms of its Old Testament and Jewish background, we will
recognize that it is covenantal language.
Justification does not describe how someone gains entrance into the community
of God's people but who is a member of the community now and in the
future. In Paul's Jewish context,
Wright maintains,
“justification by works”
has nothing to do with individual Jews attempting a kind of proto-Pelagian
pulling themselves up by their moral bootstraps, and everything to do with
definition of the true Israel in advance of the final eschatological showdown.
Justification in this setting, then, is not a matter of how someone enters
the community of the true people of God, but of how you tell who belongs
to that community, not least in the period of time before the
eschatological event itself, when the matter will become public knowledge. (P.
119, emphasis Wright's).
Because
justification has to do with God's recognition of who belongs to the covenant
community, it is not so much a matter of “soteriology as about ecclesiology;
not so much about salvation as about the church” (p. 119).
Faith, the badge of covenant membership
Because
justification focuses upon God's declaration regarding membership in the
covenant community, Wright interprets Paul's insistence that justification is
by faith and not by works, in a manner that is quite similar to Dunn's
approach. The “boasting” of the Judaizers was not a boasting born of
self-righteousness, but a kind of misplaced nationalistic pride and exclusivism.
The “works of the law” were those requirements of the law that served to
distinguish Jews from Gentiles, and to exclude Gentiles thereby from membership
in the covenant community.
However,
now that Christ has come to realize the covenant promise of God to Abraham,
faith in Christ is the only badge of membership in God's world-wide
family, which is composed of Jews and Gentiles alike. Paul's insistence that
justification is by faith expresses his conviction that with the coming of
Christ God is “now extending his salvation to all, irrespective of race” (p.
122). “Justification... is the doctrine which insists that all who share faith
in Christ belong at the same table, no matter what their racial differences, as
together they wait for the final creation” (p. 122).
One
of the surprising and provocative implications of this understanding of
justification, according to Wright, is that it radically undermines the usual
polemics between Protestants and Catholics. Whereas many Protestants have
historically argued that justification is a church-dividing doctrine, precisely
the opposite is the case: Paul's doctrine of justification demands an inclusive
view of membership in the one family of God. “Many Christians, both in the
Reformation and in the counter-Reformation traditions, have themselves and the
church a great disservice by treating the doctrine of 'justification' as
central to their debates, and by supposing that it describes that system by
which people attain salvation. They have turned the doctrine into its opposite.
Justification declares that all who believe in Jesus Christ belong at the same
table, no matter what their cultural or racial differences” (pp. 158-9).
Protestants who insist upon a certain formulation of the doctrine of
justification as a precondition to church fellowship, accordingly, are guilty
of turning the doctrine on its head. Rather than serving its proper purpose to
join together as members of one family all who believe in Christ (faith being
the only badge of covenant membership), the doctrine of justification is turned
into the teaching of justification “by believing in justification by faith.”3
Justification: past, present and future
One
feature of the doctrine of justification that receives special emphasis in
Wright's understanding is its nature as an eschatological vindication of God's
people. When God justifies or acknowledges those who are members of His
covenant community, He does so in anticipation of their “final justification”
or vindication at the last judgment. Justification occurs in three tenses or
stages-past, present and future. The justification of God's covenant community
in the present is founded upon “God's past accomplishment in Christ, and
anticipates the future verdict.”4
In
the past event of Christ's cross and resurrection, God has already
accomplished in history what He will do at the end of history. Jesus, who died
as the “representative Messiah of Israel,” was vindicated or justified by God
in His resurrection from the dead. This event, Christ's resurrection,
represents God's justification of Jesus as the Son of God, the Messiah, through
whom the covenant promise to Abraham (“in your seed all the families of the
earth will be blessed”) is to be fulfilled. Because that promise comes through
the crucified and risen Christ, it cannot come through the law (compare Rom.
8:3).
This
past event of Christ's justification becomes a present reality through
faith. All those who believe in Jesus as Messiah and Lord are justified, that
is, acknowledged by God to be members of the one great family of faith composed
of Jew and Gentile alike. Because the present reality of justification focuses
upon membership in the covenant community--justification being, as we noted
earlier, a matter of ecclesiology and not of soteriology--baptism into Christ
is the event that effects this justification. “The event in the present which
corresponds to Jesus' death and resurrection in the past, and the resurrection
of all believers in the future, is baptism into Christ.”5
Though justification
has a past and present dimension, its principal focus lies in the future. At
the final judgment or “justification,” God will declare in favor of His people,
the covenant community promised to Abraham. In this final justification, God's
vindication of His people will even include a “justification by works.” Commenting
on Romans 2: 13 (“It is not the hearers of the law who will be righteous before
God, but the doers of the law who will be justified”), Wright insists that
“those who will be vindicated on the last day are those in whose hearts and
lives God will have written his law, his Torah” (p. 126-7). The “works of the
law” that justification excludes are those badges of Jewish identity that
served to exclude Gentiles. Justification does not exclude, however, those
works of the law that are equivalent to the obedience of faith by the working
of the Spirit.
Justification and the work of Christ
One
final feature of Wright's new view of justification that remains rather
undeveloped and unclear is its basis in the work of Christ. As we noted above,
Wright does speak of Christ's cross as a representative death and of His
resurrection as His vindication by God. But it remains rather unclear what
Wright understands by Christ's work of atonement, and how he relates the
believer's justification to Christ's work.
One
thing that clearly emerges in Wright's limited treatment of this subject is
that he has little sympathy for the historic view that Christ's cross involved
His suffering the penalty and curse of the law on behalf of His people. In an
extended treatment of Galatians 3: 10-14, for example, Wright insists that its
language “is designed for a particular task within a particular argument, not
for an abstract systematized statement.”6 Galatians 3 is not about Christ suffering the curse of the law in
the place of His people, all of whom have violated the law and are therefore
liable to its curse. Paul is not talking about a general work of Christ that
benefits sinful Jews and Gentiles alike. The traditional reading of this
passage, which takes it to refer to Christ's substitutionary atonement, is, in
Wright's view, “nonsense.”7 If this passage is read in its first
century Jewish context and within the setting of God's covenant promise to
Israel, it will become evident that Paul is talking about the curse of the
exile that Israel is experiencing as a people. Wright maintains that “in the
cross of Jesus, the Messiah, the curse of exile itself reached its height and
was dealt with once and for all, so that the blessing of covenant renewal might
flow out the side, as God always intended.”8
Wright's
reading of Galatians 3 is rather characteristic of his treatment of the subject
of Christ's atoning work generally. Though it is clear that he has little
sympathy for the older, Reformation understanding of Christ's saving work, what
he is prepared to offer as an alternative remains rather obscure. Christ's
death and resurrection are representative of Israel's exile and restoration.
They are the means whereby the promise of the covenant is now extended to the
whole world-wide family of God. How- ever, because Wright's understanding of
Paul's gospel and the doctrine of justification has little, if anything, to do
with the problem of human sinfulness and guilt, his understanding of the work
of Christ likewise puts little emphasis upon the kinds of emphases that
historically formed an essential part of the doctrine of Christ's atoning work.
Endnotes
1.Wright does not
believe, however, that the idea of righteousness and the “legal metaphor” it
reflects is the most important theme of the book of Romans or Paul's other
epistles. In a very telling observation at the close of his discussion of
justification in What Saint Paul Really Said, he remarks that “Romans is
often regarded as an exposition of judicial, or law-court, theology. But that
is a mistake. The law court forms a vital metaphor at a key stage of the
argument. But at the heart of Romans we find a theology of love…. If we leave
the notion of 'righteousness' as a law-court metaphor only, as so many have
done in the past, this gives the impression of a legal transaction, a cold
piece of business, almost a trick of thought performed by a God who is logical
and correct but hardly one we would want to worship” (p. 110) This language
seems to be little more than a thinly-guised piece of innuendo against the
Reformation's understanding of justification on the basis of the imputed
righteousness of Christ.
2 Cf. What Saint Paul
Really Said, p. 115: “The discussions of justification in much of the
history of the church, certainly since Augustine, got off on the wrong foot--at
least in terms of understanding Paul-and they have stayed there ever since.”
3 “The Shape of
Justification,” hll12JL www.angelfire.com/mi2/12auloage/ Sha12e.html, p.
3. This article is Wright's response to Paul Barnett's critical evaluation of
his understanding of justification. Barnett is an Anglican bishop from the diocese
of Sydney in Australia. Cf. “Tom Wright and The New Perspective,” http://www.anglicanmediasydney.asn.au/pwb/ntwright_perspective.htm.
4 “The Shape of Justification,”
p. 2.
5 “The Shape of
Justification,” p. 2.
6 The Climax of the
Covenant, p. 138.
7 The Climax of the
Covenant, p. 150.
8 The Climax of the
Covenant, p. 141.
Dr. Cornel
Venema is the President of Mid-America Reformed Seminary where he also teaches
Doctrinal Studies. Dr. Venema is a
contributing editor to The Outlook.