Zeal For Truth

Unless you have had all access to theology blogs cut off for the last few years, you have heard the name N.T. Wright. Even Christians who, as a rule, do not involve themselves in theological debate will likely have heard of him. But who is N.T. Wright, and why has he been causing a stir of late?

Nicholas Thomas Wright is a New Testament Scholar, Anglican Bishop of Durham, and prolific writer. Among other things he was educated at Oxford, taught at McGill University, was Canon Theologian at Westminster Abbey, and is well know for his opposition to the Jesus Seminar’s thought and his opposition to homosexual conduct. He is also not one to skip on scripture. Anyone who has read only a bit of his works know that they are saturated with scripture.

On first blush then one would think that he would be welcomed by conservative protestants in North America, but in fact it is a bit of a rocky relationship, particularly with how Reformed Protestants deal with Wright. Although Reformed Protestants will often accept the work that Wright has done investigating the historic Jesus, and appreciate his position on homosexuality, another one of his positions cause deep concerns.

N.T. Wright is involved with what has come to be known as the New Perspectives on Paul (NPP). Broadly speaking the NPP are a group of ideas that re-think the historical understanding of Paul. The NPP is not a single idea, but includes the perspectives of many different writers on Paul. E.P. Sanders and James Dunn are, along with Wright, leading voices within this movement although there are important differences between these authors. According to The Paul Page The NPP has:

At its core is the recognition that Judaism is not a religion of self-righteousness whereby humankind seeks to merit salvation before God. Paul’s argument with the Judaizers was not about Christian grace versus Jewish legalism. His argument was rather about the status of Gentiles in the church. Paul’s doctrine of justification, therefore, had far more to do with Jewish-Gentile issues than with questions of the individual’s status before God.

How this is worked out in Wright’s understanding, and his ability as a communicator, has troubled many in the Reformed community. Many blogs entries against Wright’s views have been written, papers given, and now the books have begun to flow with the latest being John Piper’s The Future of Justification. Some have thoughtfully engaged with his ideas, but there are some who consider him a wolf in sheep’s clothing leading many astray.

Due to the attention given to Wright and his thought, I began to read some of his work earlier this year. The most important thing that studying philosophy at university has taught me is that if you want to understand someone’s views: read them. Base your understanding on expositions of their thought, or replies from their critics, but read them. Although I’ve only begun to brush the surface of Wright’s massive amount of books having read Simply Christian, The Last Word, What Saint Paul Really Said, Paul For Everyone: Romans Part 1, and am currently working through Paul For Everyone: Romans Part 2, it’s easy already to see what the big deal about N.T. Wright is.

Without a doubt Wright is one of the most gifted communicators I’ve read lately. He is engaging and thoughtful in his writing. Although it does still require some work to understand what he is saying it’s a joy to read him. This is part of the reason that Reformed conservatives have spoke out with force against him; if he is teaching error people will be attracted to him because of his ability to communicate, and therefore their strong response to him.

Most of the responses available on the internet to Wright deal with his book What Saint Paul Really Said. This book was released in 1997, and in that time Wright has written more on the subject of Paul, yet this is the book that seems to still be the “battle ground” and for that reason I decided to read it before his newer stuff. There is a lot in the book that should be uncontroversial, but there are three terms of which Wright challenges the common historic understanding.

This challenge is what makes Wright a big deal (although for the other stuff he says, he deserves to be heard and read; and when I say “big deal” I mean why everyone writes about him). What are these three terms? Without offering my own view on them I’ll try now simply to explain what Wright says and how it’s different from the historic understanding.

Gospel
The first term the Wright wants to change is “gospel.” Like all of these terms, he believes that the church has misunderstood what Paul originally meant. Historically the church has meant by “gospel”: a way of coming to salvation. When one preaches the gospel, one preaches what one has to do in order to come to Christ. Wright thinks that this does not fit with the understanding of Paul, the message of the gospel is not how to do something, but a message about Christ. Wright says regarding this:

It is not, then, a system of how people get saved. The announcement of the gospel results in people being saved - Paul says this a few verses later (speaking of Romans 1). But ‘the gospel’ itself, strictly speaking, is the narrative proclamation of King Jesus. He can speak equally of ‘announcing the gospel’ and of ‘announcing Jesus’, using the term kerussein, ‘to act as a herald’ in each case (e.g. 1 Corinthians 1:23, 15:12; 2 Corinthians 1:19, 4:5; 11:4, Galatians 1:21, 1 Thessalonians 2:9). When the herald makes a royal proclamation he says ‘Nero (or whoever) has become emperor.’ He does not say ‘If you would like to have an experience of living under and emperor, you might care to try Nero.’ The proclamation is an authoritative summons to obedience - in Paul’s case, to what he calls ‘the obedience of faith.’

Righteousness of God
The second term deals with a topic going back to the Reformation. Luther understood the term Righteousness of God as referring to the righteous the God imputes to sinners who have by faith trust in Christ. Looking at what the term righteousness meant in the Jewish law courts in the time of Paul, Wright believes the term does not refer to anything given to a person, but to God’s own faithfulness to the covenant He has made with man. God’s righteousness is them “covenant faithfulness”. This is a major point, and beyond the historical setting of the term he has several pages devoted to looking at how the term appears in the epistles, particularly in Romans. To quote Wright again:

If an when God does act to vindicate his people, his people will then, metaphorically speaking, have the status of ‘righteousness’. I shall have a good deal more to say about this in the next chapter, when we look at the cognate topic of justification. But the righteousness they have will not be God’s own righteousness. That makes no sense at all. God’s own righteousness is covenant faithfulness, because of which he will (Israel hopes) vindicate her, and bestow upon her the status of ‘righteous’, as the vindicated or acquitted defendant. But God’s righteousness remains, to to speak, God’s own property. It is the reason for his acting to vindicate his people. It is not the status he bestows upon them in so doing.

Justification
Lastly Wright believes that how we use the term ‘justification’ has no scriptural support. Historically justification refers to the act of coming to faith in Christ, but for Wright this doesn’t make sense; it doesn’t fit with Paul’s worldview. Yes, people come to Christ through faith, but this isn’t what justification refers to. Justification for Wright is the status a person who has faith in Christ has. Wright explains it was follows:

Justification in this setting, then, is not a matter of how someone enters the community of he true people of God, but of how you can 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.

…it should be clear that certain aspects of the post-Augustine debate of what has come to be called ‘justification’ have nothing much to do with the context in which Paul was writing. ‘Justification’ in the first century was not about how someone might establish a relationship with God. It was about God’s eschatological definition, both future and present, of who was, in fact, a member of his People. In Sanders’ terms, it was not so much about ‘getting in’, or indeed about ’staying in’, as about ‘how you can tell who was in’. In standard Christians theological language, it wasn’t so much about soteriology as about ecclesiology; not so much about salvation as about the church.

These three terms then are what the big deal (for Reformed folks at least) is about Wright (the question of imputation which is often brought up follows from the Righteousness of God, it cannot be dealt with on it’s own). No matter what side you take, if Wright is wrong or right about these terms, it does need to be recognized that it is an important discussion with consequences, particularly regarding the mission of the church.