Wrightean ambiguities

Famously and controversially, Wright argues that justification involves two dimensions, which he says were, for Paul, the same thing: the declaration that someone is in the right and forgiven, and the declaration that a person is a member of the covenant community.

This formulation helpfully highlights the corporate dimension of justification, obvious in Galatians 2 and implicit, as Wright has argued, elsewhere when Paul brings justification and Jew/Gentile union into intimate contact.

But Wright also embeds some confusing ambiguities in this formulation.

First, there is the ambiguity over whether justification is a declaration that creates or a statement about what is in fact the case. With regard to the first aspect of justification – declaration of forgiveness and declaration that one is “in the right” – Wright agrees that justification creates a status. Even before Vanhoozer, he was using “speech-act” and the notion of a performative utterance to describe what happens in justification. By His declaration that one is righteous, God makes the sinner’s righteous status.

But, second, this is not the case with the second aspect of justification. With regard to membership in the covenant family, the single family constituted of Jews and Gentiles, God is not creating a status but simply stating what is already true. In this sense, justification is “God’s declaration that” someone is in the family, not “bringing it about that.”

This second point is related to Wright’s understanding of faith as a “badge” of new covenant membership. One of Wright’s most significant divergences from traditional Reformed understandings of justification is just here: Faith is not a receptive instrument of justification, but the first fruit of the Spirit’s work. When the fruit of faith is evident, that is the mark that a person is in the family, and the declaration of justification follows from this. Accordingly, when Wright has described his thought in terms of an ordo salutis , faith is placed prior to justification.

Perhaps it is possible for a single declaration, which Wright insists is a forensic act, to both create a status and declare a finding of fact. But such would be an unusual declaration to say the least. And here Vanhoozer’s suggestion (citing the work of Tim Trumper) that adoption needs to gain greater prominence is very helpful, because adoption is a courtroom declaration that makes one part of a family and more naturally covers what Wright is trying to express in talking about the corporate aspects of justification. As Trumper has pointed out, Paul regularly moves along from talking about righteousness to talking about family (Romans 4-8; Galatians 3-4).

And, if I may, I would suggest that recognizing the “deliverdict” dimension of justification might go some way to unraveling the ambiguities here.