Scripture, Culture, and Missions
Southwestern Journal of Theology
Volume 55, No. 1 – Fall 2012
Managing Editor: Terry L. Wilder
By N. T. Wright. Downers Grove: InterVarsity, 2009. 279 pages. Softcover, $16.50.
This book is Wright’s response to John Piper’s The Future of Justification: A Response to N. T. Wright. Unlike the traditional Protestant understanding of justification, Wright argues for transformative, sacramental, and eschatological justification. Wright divides his work into two parts: his personal apology for this work and his own exegetical defense of his new understanding of justification. In the first part, Wright’s primary concern is to justify what E. P. Sanders and James Dunn accomplished in the New Perspective on Paul movement. Wright compares the New Perspective movement to the Copernican revolution. What Paul fought against within Judaism is not the works of the law as a faithful and natural response to the grace of God, but ethnic demarcation that prevented Gentile believers from becoming genuine covenantal members. Therefore, “justification by faith” must mean that every Gentile could be a member of God’s covenantal community, not by observing the ethnic regulations of the law, but by believing that Jesus abolished the ethnic wall between Jews and Gentiles on the cross. Judaism in the day of Jesus and Paul urged Jews to obey the law not in order to be saved but to maintain their covenantal membership. To see justification as a once-and-for-all event of forgiveness would be similar to a premodern Ptolemaic form of biblical exegesis.
Wright provides two fundamental critiques of Luther’s doctrine of justification by faith alone. First, he claims that Luther’s doctrine misrepresents the gospel as if it were all about “my relationship with God” alone and “my salvation” alone (25). This privatized understanding of justification ignores the covenant context of this Pauline doctrine and has failed to promote the ethical implications as well. The concept of Christ’s imputed righteousness, however, is the worst damage portrayed by Luther and his Protestants. Wright contends that Christ’s personal moral perfection cannot be an individual Christian’s personal moral attribute. He asserts that the idea of Christ’s imputed righteousness results from the Reformers’ overreaction against the medieval Catholic misrepresentation of salvation. Wright asks his readers to realize that the phrase “the imputed righteousness of Christ” is not in the Bible (46).
In the second part of this book, Wright attempts to provide exegetical evidence for his New Perspective on Paul from his reading of Galatians, Philippians, Corinthians, Ephesians, and Romans. If one wants to know specifically how Wright constructs his exegetical arguments, one must review the biblical index of this book. Sometimes, he just ignores key verses that would challenge his argument and does not present any direct answer to the questions that his critics have raised. In particular, biblical texts such as Romans 5:1 and 2 Corinthians 5:21, which clearly refer to the present realization of justification, do not receive substantial response. According to Wright, the righteousness of God in justification refers to God’s faithfulness to fulfill his covenantal blessings with human beings through the seed of Abraham. Justification is not about how to stand before God, the righteous judge, but about the divine declaration that a believer is already in that covenantal community. Justification has an “already and not yet” structure. The most problematic argument Wright makes is that believers’ present justification is by grace, but their future justification is by their sanctified lives or works. Present justification is the anticipation of the final justification that believers should receive at the eschaton.
Evangelical Protestants who hold the supremacy of Scripture over tradition would agree with Wright that we should not take the Reformers’ teachings as “infallible.” However, a careful reader will wonder whether Wright himself follows the fundamental principle of sola scriptura when he reads Paul’s critiques of Judaism from extra-biblical sources more than from the New Testament’s canonical witnesses to it. Wright’s readers should not abandon the emphasis on individual appropriation of justification. Jesus challenged Nicodemus to be born again by the regeneration of the Holy Spirit. A young rich man came to Jesus in order to find a way of personal salvation. The jailor of Philippi asked Paul, “What must I do to be saved?” The problem is not the personal appropriation of the doctrine of justification but the privatization of that doctrine in an unbiblical way that does not pay attention to God’s covenantal community and His plan for all human beings.
Unfortunately, Wright makes an unwarranted argument that Luther’s doctrine of Christ’s imputed righteousness upon Christians is nothing but a varied Medieval Catholic notion of Christ’s infused virtue by grace into sinful humanity. Wright misidentifies Luther’s doctrine of imputed righteousness with the Catholic treasury of merits concept from which one may earn moral perfection. However, this is exactly what Luther and other Reformers condemned. One should not overlook that Wright does not present any documentation that could verify Luther’s usage of God’s imputed righteousness as the infused virtue of Christ. What traditional Protestants teach from the imputed righteousness of Christ is the transmission of Christ’s perfect judicial status before God to those who are united with him by faith. Surprisingly, Wright seems to advance the concept of imputed righteousness when he argues that Christians should “inhabit appropriately the suit of clothes (‘righteousness’) that one has already inherited” (145).
No one would oppose Wright’s argument that justification is not only a present reality but also an eschatological hope. However, many traditional Protestants would disagree with Wright about the nature of future justification. Good works would be the evidence or fruits of present justification but should not be the basis of future justification, as Wright argues. In order to prove his argument for eschatological justification based on works, Wright makes a surprising claim that is exegetically unacceptable and out of the context. According to him, the Gentiles in Rom 2 who do the works of the law written in their conscience are not pagan Gentiles but “Christian Gentiles” (190). Since Paul promises peace and eternal glory to those Christian Gentiles who keep the law in Rom 2:10, argues Wright, eschatological justification based on works is a Pauline doctrine. However, Paul’s point in the first three chapters of Romans is that neither Jews nor Gentiles can be saved based on their works and, therefore, everyone is under the wrath of God. Rom 2:10 has nothing to do with eschatological justification based on works. Rather, that verse seriously challenges Wright’s argument.
