Five Points of NT Wright

The volume edited by McCormack includes a final chapter by NT Wright. Like a good Calvinist, Wright summarizes his views on Paul and justification under five points.

He begins where he says Paul begins, with the gospel. For Paul, Wright argues, the gospel is not a message of individual salvation, not a how-to about how to be saved. The gospel implies these things, but that’s not the content of the gospel. Instead, it’s “the proclamation that the crucified Jesus of Nazareth ahs been raised from the dead and thereby demonstrated to be both Israel’s Messiah and the world’s true Lord.” In contrast to the Roman imperial ideology, Paul’s confrontational message is that “Jesus, not Caesar, is Lord, and at his name, not that of the emperor, every knee shall bow.” When Paul preaches this gospel, he is confident that the Spirit is at work in and through the message to awaken people to faith. The message is “a royal summons to submission, to obedience, to allegiance; and the form that this submission and obedient allegiance takes is faith.”

A second point has to do with the interpretation of the Pauline phrase, “the righteousness of God,” used, for instance, in Romans 1:16-17 in a summary of the gospel. Paul, Wright insists, does talk about “righteousness” that describes a right standing or status before God, but that is not what this particular phrase means. Instead, “righteousness of God” refers to “the aspect of God’s character because of which, despite Israel’s infidelity and consequent banishment, God will remain true to the covenant with Abraham and rescue Israel nonetheless.” Righteousness is not identical to salvation; it is “the reason he saves Israel.” It can be described as “covenant fidelity,” but Wright emphasizes that it also includes justice toward “covenant-breaking Israel” and a message of future judgment according to works. But God’s righteousness is never “an attribute that is passed on to, reckoned to, or imputed to God’s people.” The question that “righteousness of God” answers is whether God has been faithful to keep His covenant. It’s a question of theodicy; it’s not about something that is transferred from God to the sinner. This righteousness has a cosmic reach, Wright says: “the covenant with Israel was always designed to be God’s means of saving and blessing the entire cosmos.”

When Paul talks about righteous status, he uses different phrasing, as in Philippians 3:9, where he talks not about the “righteousness of God” but about “righteousness from God.” In this kind of context, Paul is evoking the “context of the Jewish law court,” and the word is a forensic term. There, “when the case has been heard, the judge finds in favor of one party and against the other. Once this has happened, the indicated party possesses the status of ‘righteous’ – not itself a moral statement, we note, but a statement of how things stand in terms of the now completed lawsuit.” The status of the vindicated man before the judge is not the result of the imputation of the judge’s own righteousness; the righteousness of the judge is instead evident in his conduct of the case, whether he has tried the case fairly or not. Wright says that, within this context, it’s quite proper to say that the judge has “made” the party righteous by his verdict “because ‘righteous’ at this point is not a word denoting moral character but only and precisely the status that you have when the court has found in your favor.”

Paul does speak of reckoning or imputing righteousness, but it is “not God’s righteousness or Christ’s own righteousness that is reckoned to God’s redeemed people but, rather, the fresh status of ‘covenant member’ and/or ‘justified sinner,’ which is accredited to those who are in Christ, who have heard the gospel and responded with ‘the obedience of faith.’”

A third point in Wright’s understanding of Paul is the reality of final judgment according to works, something Paul teaches in Romans 2:1-16. Wright insists that “the ‘works’ in accordance with which the Christian will be vindicated on the last day are not the unaided works of the self-help moralist, but “the things that show that one is in Christ; the things that are produced in one’s life as a result of the Spirit’s indwelling and operation.” Paul, Wright points out, has confidence in God’s favorable verdict at the last day, not because of the merits of Christ but because of his own apostolic work (1 Thessalonians 2:19-20). Paul knows that he doesn’t do anything by “his own energy” but only can do “what God gives and inspires him to do.” This is related to justification by faith because the final verdict is anticipated in the present.

Wright, fourthly, discusses his views on the ordo salutis. As he has often written, he objects to the evangelical tradition of equating “conversion” and “justification.” When Paul talks about what happens at conversion, he describes it with the word “call,” not with the word “justify.” Prior to the call, God has foreknown and “marked out ahead of time” (Wright’s circumlocution for “predestination”) the one to be called. But justification is not part of that moment. Justification is something that is done after the call and after conversion. In Wright’s view, “God takes the initiative, on the basis of his foreknowledge; the preached word, through which the Spirit is at work, is the effective agent; belief in the gospel, that is, believing submission to Jesus as the risen Lord, is the direct result.” But this is not, Wright insists, what Paul means when he uses the word “justify.” He attempts to clarify the place of faith in this ordo by adding that “faith is not something someone does as a result of which God decides to grant him or her a new status or privilege,” since conversion “in its initial moment, is not based on anything that a person has acquired by birth or achieved by merit.” Faith is “the first fruit of the Spirit’s call.”

Finally Wright comes to justification itself. He suggests that DIKAIOO be translated as “vindicate” and the noun form as “vindication.” For Paul, vindication is not what happens at conversion, but subsequent to conversion. DIKAIOO is “a declarative word, declaring that something is the case, rather than a word for making something happen or changing the way something is.” It is “law court language,” and this is appropriate since “God is the God of justice, who is bound to put the world to rights, has promised to do so, and intends to keep his promises.” He does this “through the covenant.” Thus, God’s faithfulness and his justice are “closely interlinked,” both indicated in the phrase “righteousness of God.”

When God vindicates an individual, two things happen that Wright suggests were for Paul a “single thing”: “the declaration (a) that someone is in the right (his or her sins having been forgiven through the death of Jesus) and (b) that this person is a member of the true covenant family, the family that God originally promised to Abraham and has now created through Christ and the Spirit – the single family that consists equally of believing Jews and believing Gentiles.” That these two aspects go together is evident, Wright says, in Romans 3 (where God’s impartiality appears suddenly, if Paul is

talking about individuals becoming right with God) and Galatians 2. Justification is “God declaration that” these things are true; not His “bringing it about that.” Call brings it about; vindication is the declaration that it has happened. It is not about getting in; it’s the assurance that we are in. Though “we are justified by faith by believing in the gospel itself – in other words that Jesus is Lord and that God raised him from the dead.” When we also believe in justification by faith as a doctrine, we believe that “we are now and forever part of the family to whose every member God says what he said to Jesus at his baptism: you are my beloved son, with you I am well pleased.”

The corporate aspect of this is important to Wright, though he insists that he has never suppressed the need for every individual to respond to the gospel personally and individually. As an exegetical matter, though, justification is a deeply corporate teaching: “virtually whenever Paul talks about justification, he does so in the context of a critique of Judaism and of the coming together of Jew and Gentile in Christ . . . . The only notice that most mainstream theology has taken of this context is to assume that the Jews were guilty of the kind of works righteousness that theologians from Augustine to Calvin and beyond have used to criticize their opponents,” but what these theologians have missed is “Paul’s sense of an underlying narrative” about God and Israel, coming to a climax with Jesus.”

As Wright has already emphasized, this vindication anticipates the future verdict that will be rendered at the final judgment. Further, it is “God’s declaration about the person who has just become a Christian.” It is not, in fact, quite accurate to call it a declaration; like the final verdict, the present verdict is an event. In the future, it will be “the resurrection of the person concerned into a glorious body like that of the risen Jesus,” and so the present declaration “consists not so much in words, though words there may be, but in an event, the event in which one dies with the Messiah and rises to new life with him, anticipating the final resurrection. In other words, baptism.”

This view, Wright says, does everything that traditional Protestant theology has done with the doctrine of imputation: “Jesus was vindicated by God as Messiah after his penal death; I am in the Messiah; therefore I, too, have died and been raised.” God sees the baptized Christian in Christ, but not because the sinner has been “clothed with the earned merits of Christ.” Rather, “He sees us within the vindication of Christ, that is, as having died with Christ and risen again with him.” He argues too that justification is an ecumenical doctrine, about people of different ethnicities sitting at a common table.

He ends with four reasons to take his version of the New Perspective seriously. First, it follows the Protestant confession of sola Scriptura. Second, it brings together the cosmic, ecclesiological, and political dimensions of Paul in a way that earlier treatment of Paul have failed to do. Third, it explains some of Paul’s judgments, why he is harsh about sexual ethics but tolerate about different views concerning food and holy days. Finally, he comments that he finds the Reformed hostility to the New Perspective puzzling, since the two stand together (against some Lutherans) on many points – especially in a positive evaluation of the law: “Had the Reformed reading of Paul, with its positive role of Israel and the law, been in ascendancy rather than the Lutheran one, the New Perspective might not have been necessary, or not in that form.”

He closes with what he calls a “plea.” Paul, he suggests, has been read through Enlightenment, Romantic, or existentialist lenses, and these readings downplay the importance of history and physical reality, and highlight the centrality of the self: “All these movements are forms of dualism, whereas Paul believed in the goodness and God-givenness of creation and in its eventual promised renewal. Together they reinforce the Gnosticism that is a poison at the heart of much contemporary culture, including soi-disant Christian culture.” Against this Gnosticism, Wright pleads for the fullness of the gospel.