The Future of Justification: A Response to N. T. Wright by John Piper

Author:John Piper [Piper, John]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, pdf
Tags: Religion, Christian Theology, New Testament, History, Systematic, Biblical Commentary
ISBN: 9781581349641
Google: _oharHj3DcEC
Amazon: 1581349645
Publisher: Crossway
Published: 2007-10-31T22:00:00+00:00

Here again is his hopeful affirmation of common ground:

Here we arrive at one of the great truths of the gospel, which is that

the accomplishment of Jesus Christ is reckoned to all those who are ‘in

him’. This is the truth which has been expressed within the Reformed

tradition in terms of ‘imputed righteousness’, often stated in terms of

Jesus Christ having fulfilled the moral law and thus having accumulated

a ‘righteous’ status which can be shared with all his people. As with

some other theological problems, I regard this as saying a substantially

right thing in a substantially wrong way, and the trouble when you do

that is that things on both sides of the equation, and the passages which

are invoked to support them, become distorted.

My conclusion is that Wright’s position on the meaning 24 and the

basis of justification are not “substantially” the same as what has been

affirmed in the Reformation tradition by “imputed righteousness”

23Wright, What Saint Paul Really Said, 160. Emphasis added.

24See especially chapter 6 (above).

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on the basis of “faith alone” through the blood and righteousness of

Christ alone. That, of course, he would remind us, is no proof that he

is mistaken. Scripture, not tradition, is decisive. I agree with that. My

hope is that, in the limits of this book, the exegesis offered, and the

exegesis of others referred to, will prove to be compelling.

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C H a P t e r n i n e

Paul’s Structural Continuity with

Second-temple Judaism?

i

One important way to pursue greater clarity about Wright’s

understanding of justification and how works function in relation to

justification is to probe his understanding of the “agitators” (as he

calls them) behind the letter to the Galatians and his understanding of

Paul’s Jewish background in general. According to Wright, the term

“works of the law” (e[rga novmou, Gal. 2:16; 3:2, 5, 10) referred not to

law-keeping in general, but to the acts of circumcision, Sabbath-keep-

ing, and dietary regulations.1 These, he explains, were pursued, not

for the purpose of earning a right standing with God, or getting saved,

or entering the covenant people, but rather as a “badge” to show that

those who did these “works of law” would be found on the last day to

belong, by grace, to God’s people. Paul’s problem with this was not that

these Jewish people were trying to earn God’s favor by their own self-

wrought righteousness, but rather that they failed to see their calling

to reach the nations and instead used their “badge” to exclude Gentiles

from the covenant. They did not see that now, in Jesus, Gentiles are to

be included in the covenant in such a way that Jews and Gentiles would

be marked out by only one badge, namely, faith in Jesus.

Maintaining a Structural Continuity

with Judaism

In other words, by seeing only ethnocentrism and not “legalism” in the

agitators, Wright is able to see more structural unity between Paul and

1N. T. Wright, Paul for Everyone: Galatians and Thessalonians (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2004), 32.

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his Jewish background. That is, Paul does not present his new Christian

faith as one free from legalism and his old Jewish faith as one fraught

with legalism.

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