We finish this series on Tom Wright, in Justification: God’s Plan & Paul’s Vision . We will look into his treatment of Romans 6 and then offer his summary of what is being said:

“Paul does not, ‘I am in Christ; Christ has obeyed the Torah; therefore God regards me as though I had obeyed the Torah.’ He says: ‘I am in Christ; Christ has died and been raised; therefore God regards me — and I must learn to regard myself — as someone who has died to sin and been raised to newness of life.”

And: “To know that one has died and been raised is far, far more pastorally significant than than to know that one has, vicariously, fulfilled the Torah” (233).

Wright goes on about Romans 5–8 and then 9–11, and you can fill in those lines of thinking by reading his book — but his major ideas are already on the table and have been emphasized often. With one exception: Wright’s theology of Paul is robustly filled with the Spirit, and this is not always done in those who focus on justification. Wright gives plenty of space to the Spirit at work in us now.

The Story of the Bible is the Story of Jesus Christ. This Story goes through Abraham and into Jesus Christ and through the Spirit and for the whole of creation. The creator God called Abraham to bless the whole world and to do this by forgiving its sins and the curse of death and find blessing and the promise of life. The metaphor at work here is the law court and God has brought forward his judgment into history in Christ — those in Christ are in the right. The sign here is faith.

Another debate in the new vs. old perspective on Paul debate is how to understand Romans 4 and Abraham. Is he an example of faith? Or, as  Tom Wright, in Justification: God’s Plan & Paul’s Vision , puts it: “Pull out Abraham, and you won’t just pull out a single loose thread from the sweater. You will unravel the whole thing.”

For Wright, Abraham is not an example of faith so much as the substantive person in the original covenant itself. Abraham is part of the “who is the family of God” question. The issue is not about what Abraham found but whether we have found Abraham to be our father (218).

The promise to Abraham was that he would have a family as numerous as there are stars in the sky, and that through him the Gentiles would be blessed. The promise was not going to heaven when he died (220).

Wright’s contention then is that chp 4 of Romans is not about how Abraham got saved by faith but about God’s faithfulness to Abraham to bless the whole world through the one covenant and that through faith (not works that separate Gentiles from Israel). We see in this the dividing line between old and new: is the animating issue personal redemption from the works-principle of distorted humans or is it the one covenant with Israel to bless the world? (Not a simple dichotomy here, but an orienting perspective.)

One of the fiercest debates about the new perspective, from the old perspective angle, is the issue of double imputation and whether there are “two principles” at work in the human soul: the principle of works (self-merit) and the principle faith (no self-merit).

Tom Wright’s Justification: God’s Plan & Paul’s Vision  next section (pp.210-216) takes both on through the lens of Romans 3:27-28. I’ll quote that text, quote Wright, and then ask a question:

Where, then, is boasting? It is excluded. On what principle [Greek: nomos or Torah] ? On that of observing the law? No, but on that [nomos/Torah] of faith. For we maintain that a man is justified by faith apart from observing the law.

The translation of “nomos”/law with “principle” is a much-disputed translation, and one Wright does not agree with. Wright believes the people of God keep the Torah through faith vs. those who aren’t who keep the Torah through works.

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We are looking at the new perspective debate and to do that we are working our way through Tom Wright’s Justification: God’s Plan & Paul’s Vision. 

Wright’s argument is that one can’t simply read 1:18 and then 3:19-20 and conclude that in between all Paul was saying was “So all are sinful and need saving” (202). Instead, Wright sees more of a theodicy at work: God is showing himself faithful to his covenant promises to redeem the world through Israel.

Romans 3:25-26 show that Paul is concerned with “God’s own righteousness”, and I quote from the ASV:

“whom God

set forth to be a propitiation, through faith, in his blood, to show
his righteousness because of the passing over of the sins done
aforetime, in the forbearance of God; for the showing, I say, of his righteousness at this present season:
that he might himself be just, and the justifier of him that hath faith
in Jesus.”

Wright observes that the NIV’s “justice” misjudges the evidence … but there is no reason here to get into translations. The reason for Abraham is not illustrative but substantive: he emerges because of God’s promises to Abraham, not simply because he proves that it is all by the individual’s exercise of faith.

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Reading Paul in the context of the Bible’s Story, with the result that Paul sounds like he fits into the concerns of the Bible, has been the intent of both the new and old perspective. Reading Paul’s version of the Story — his “wiki-story” of the Story — in the context of his Jewish context has been the quest of the new perspective. In some important ways, the old perspective failed in this regard and it is to Tom Wright’s credit, in Justification: God’s Plan & Paul’s Vision, to point that out without ignoring that sometimes new perspective folks have exaggerated their claims too.

Tom Wright’s understanding of “God’s righteousness” as his covenant faithfulness enables him to reshape what Paul means about Jewish privilege in Romans 2. In particular, the privilege the Jew has is that God has chosen Israel to bless the world. Along with privilege, comes responsibility, and here’s the sticking point for Paul in the new perspective of Tom Wright: Israel failed in its task to bless the world and to be a light to the nations. There is in the new perspective a Jewish privilege — God chose Israel, not just for personal salvation, but to be a light to the nations. And Israel did not deliver, but Jesus did.

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One of the stickiest points in all of this new perspective vs. old perspective discussion is what to make of Romans 2:1-16, and Wright makes it clear that he thinks Paul means exactly what he says (Justification: God’s Plan & Paul’s Vision,). [I posted the text at the bottom of this post.]

First, he says this is no charade — no pretending someone can be justified by works so we can set them up for the hammer in chp. 3.

Second, doers of the Torah will be justified. That’s what Paul says in 2:13. (It’s in your Bible too.) Wright argues that one does the Torah through the Spirit. But this is not the synergism that says “I do part” and “God does part.”

Third, the scene is the great assize — last judgment — and Jesus is the judge. The judgment is based on works — and Paul says that in Romans 2 and 2 Cor 5:10 and it is implicit in Rom 14:10-12. And Wright enters here into a clear set of lines about how important works is in the Pauline sense of judgment.

All this stuff, fourth, about pleasing God is not the logic of merit but the logic of love and relationship.

Fifth, this again makes the Holy Spirit important — more important than in the old perspective.

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Tom Wright devotes no less than 70 pages to Romans in Justification: God’s Plan & Paul’s Vision, and… well … it is hard to sum up the denseness of this stuff without doing disservice to you, our readers, and to Tom, our author.

Tell me, what is the hang-up over Tom Wright’s understanding of the “righteousness of God” as God’s covenant faithfulness? How does that understanding undermine Reformed views?

So, let’s have some short posts that sum all the sections of Romans in this study… Today we look at Romans 1:16-17:

I

am not ashamed of the gospel, because it is the power of God for the
salvation of everyone who believes: first for the Jew, then for the
Gentile.  For in the gospel a righteousness from God is revealed, a righteousness that is by faith from first to last, just as it is written: “The righteous will live by faith.”

And immediately an issue comes up that distinguishes Wright’s view: what does “the righteousness of God” mean? It means something about God: “God’s faithfulness to his covenant with Israel to redeem the world through Israel.”

This Wright says makes sense best of a number of issues in Romans, including:

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In a remarkable piece of insight, Tom Wright once asked what Pauline theology would look like if we began with Ephesians and Colossians instead of Romans, and in just a few pages (168-175) in Justification: God’s Plan & Paul’s Vision, he discusses the vision of Ephesians. (By the way, it could make a huge difference.)

Notice these words: “And of course it is in Ephesians that the two ‘halves’ of the Pauline gospel emphasis are laid out side by side. Ephesians 2:1-10 is the old perspective: sinners saved by grace through faith. Ephesians 2:11-22 is the new perspective: Jews and Gentiles coming together in Christ.” And, he continues: “they belong intimately together” (168).

Here is the temptation: the old perspective can downplay the second as central; the new perspective can downplay the first as central. Is this the central theological difference: seeing Paul through the personal salvation mode or seeing Paul through the union of Jews and Gentiles mode?

This incipient (universal) ecclesiology, Wright observes, merely “a pleasing decoration, a side-comment on what a fine thing the gospel is” (168). This whole Jew-Gentile thing “is part of the reality of the gospel” (169).

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The issue in the debate about the new perspective is how best to read the apostle Paul’s theology in its historical context, and one of the more important debates is how to read Galatians … and we finish the 5th chp today of Tom Wright’s new book, Justification: God’s Plan & Paul’s Vision

where he discusses how to read Galatians.

What is the point of having the Torah after all? Wright about Galatians 4: “This is perhaps the fiercest thing he ever says about Torah: that because it was God’s gift to Israel for the time of slavery … it functioned for Israel as the tutelary deities of the nations had functioned, to keep them in check prior to the coming full disclosure of God’s purpose and nature” (137). And the agitators were tempting the Galatians to treat the Torah now as an ethinc tutelary deity! Strong stuff, indeed.

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In the 5th chp of NT Wright’s new book, Justification: God’s Plan & Paul’s Vision

, Wright explains the significance of Abraham in the middle of Galatians. Three issues emerge in chps three and four, and it gets to the heart of Tom Wright’s proposal within the new perspective — and it is not a denial of personal salvation but a placing of personal salvation within the context of what God is doing in history — and that dimension is too often ignored in the old perspective and another context is given — God’s plan for personal salvation is what drives that reading of Scripture. Here are the three major themes for Galatians 3-4:

1. The covenant and promise to Abraham.
2. The Law
3. The Messiah

The the point of the section is to show how the Law fits into all of this: “it gets in the way of the promise to Abraham” (123). How? It chokes the promise within Israel’s failure, it threatens to divide the family of God, and it locks up everything in the prison house of sin. God thereby makes his purposes clear: to carry on the single plan with Israel (and Abraham) on the basis of faith and the Torah makes that faith-response the clear implication of the whole plan. Even the curse passage (3:10-14) is connected — not to human sin — but to the inclusion of Gentiles in Abraham’s blessing and that we might receive this promise on the basis of faith.

Here it is:

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