Justification and N. T. Wright Pt. 1

With the release of N. T. Wright's new book Justification: God's Plan, Paul's Vision, the topic of justification and the new perspective is capturing attention and making a plethora blog appearances. Having just completed a paper on the subject, I'm interested and excited to see it being explored carefully from a variety of angles.

I'd like to post some ruminations, beginning with a few comments on my appreciation of Wright's scholarship. First, his Christian Origins and the Question of God project is very ambitious and helpful in several ways. It's intriguing to me that in the first volume (The New Testament and the People of God) he spends a good amount of time and energy outlining his epistemological commitments that will undergird the content of the project. His account of critical epistemic realism vis-a-vis biblical studies is definitely worth reading. Second, his book The Last Word (the title in its American printing) is a useful piece of work on the nature and function of the Bible's authority. He contends that when we speak of the Bible's authority we are in fact speaking of the authority of God himself and then he rolls out some thought-provoking ideas centering around that thesis. Third, his commitment to Christian orthodoxy and serving the church (he serves as a bishop in the Anglican church) is very encouraging. Among other things, he has vigorously defended the bodily resurrection of Jesus.

Now, as for the debates about justification in Pauline theology, I think there's a bit of a mixed bag. For this post, I'll focus on what I perceive to be one strength and one weakness. On the one hand, Wright and others have rightly prodded us to recognize the Jew-Gentile interactions and tensions that pervaded Paul's ministry and epistles. In Antioch and Galatia certain Jewish Christians were acting in such a way that Gentile Christians were pushed to behave like Jews. In the Roman context certain Jewish Christians held the presumption that their obedience to God was quite superior to that of Gentiles. Paul's teaching on human sin and justification by faith is meant to level the playing field. In the latter section of Ephesians 2 Paul carefully articulates how the action of God in Christ unites Jew and Gentile. In Philippians 3 we read about some Jews (Judaizers, I think) whose delight in Jewish distinctives posed a potential threat to the Gentile Christians in Philippi (I take the Greek verb blepete to mean "look out for" rather than just "consider").

On the other hand, the emphasis on Jew-Gentile relations can be used to downplay that Paul resists Jewish nationalism as a kind of merit theology. In other words, we need to make sure we do some integrative work. In Galatians, for example, Paul is pressed to deal with the imposition of Jewish emblems (e. g., dietary laws) on Gentile Christians but ends up rejecting this imposition precisely because it amounts to an attempt to merit acceptance with God.

In the next post, I'll talk about the underscoring of the covenant motif. But, for now, any thoughts?