|
|
|
The Shape of Justification |
|
|
|
by N.T. Wright Wright submits the following
response to Paul Barnett with the caveat that he is not entirely happy being
part of what could appear a monochrome "new perspective," since
it's a complex phenomenon. What follows was written during the 2001 Feast of
the Presentation of Christ in the Just before Christmas, a
friend told me that an Australian Bishop -- Paul Barnett, himself a New
Testament scholar -- had placed an article on his website, entitled 'Why
Wright is Wrong'. (He has since toned this down to 'Tom
Wright and the New Perspective'.) The question at stake is: what did Paul
mean by 'justification'? This topic has again become a storm centre, though
perhaps not equally in all teacups. In a minute I shall go
through Barnett's piece and show where I find it mistaken, both in what it
says about me and in what it says about Paul. What I want to do first is to
show how Paul's statements about justification fit together and make sense,
and how they relate to the questions of personal faith, salvation and pastoral
practice which Bishop Barnett rightly raises. 1. It's best to begin at
the end, with Paul's view of the future. (a) The one true God will
finally judge the whole world; on that day, some will be found guilty and
others will be upheld (Rom. 2.1-16). God's vindication of these latter on the
last day is his act of final 'justification' (Rom. 2.13). The word carries
overtones of the lawcourt. (b) But not only the
lawcourt. Justification is part of Paul's picture of the family God promised
(i.e. covenanted) to Abraham. When God, as judge, finds in favor of people on
the last day, they are declared to be part of this family (Rom. 4; cf. Gal.
3). This is why lawcourt imagery is appropriate: the covenant was there, from
Genesis onwards, so that through it God could deal with sin and death, could
(in other words) put his creation to rights. (c) This double
declaration will take the form of an event. All God's people will
receive resurrection bodies, to share the promised inheritance, the renewed
creation (Rom. 8). This event, which from one point of view is their
'justification', is therefore from another their 'salvation': their rescue
from the corruption of death, which for Paul is the result of sin. The final
resurrection is the ultimate rescue which God promised from the beginning
(Rom. 4). 2. Moving back from the future
to the past, God's action in Jesus forms Paul's template for this
final justification. (a) Jesus has been
faithful, obedient to God's saving purposes right up to death (Rom. 5.12-21;
Phil. 2.6-9); God has now declared decisively that he is the Son of God, the
Messiah, in whom Israel's destiny has been summed up (Rom. 1.3f.). (b) Jesus' resurrection
was, for Paul, the evidence that God really had dealt with sin on the cross
(1 Cor. 15.12-19). In the death of Jesus God accomplished what had been
promised to Abraham, and 'what the law could not do' (Rom. 8.3): for those
who belong to the Messiah, there is 'no condemnation' (Rom. 8.1, 8.31-9). (c) The event in which
all this actually happened was, of course, the resurrection of the crucified
Jesus. 3. Justification in the present
is based on God's past accomplishment in Christ, and anticipates the future
verdict. This present justification has exactly the same pattern. (a) God vindicates in the
present, in advance of the last day, all those who believe in Jesus as
Messiah and Lord (Rom. 3.21-31; 4.13-25; 10.9-13). The lawcourt language
indicates what is meant. 'Justification' itself is not God's act of changing
the heart or character of the person; that is what Paul means by the 'call',
which comes through the word and the Spirit. 'Justification' has a specific,
and narrower, reference: it is God's declaration that the person is
now in the right, which confers on them the status 'righteous'. (We
may note that, since 'righteous' here, within the lawcourt metaphor, refers
to 'status', not 'character', we correctly say that God's declaration makes
the person 'righteous', i.e. in good standing.) (b) This present
declaration constitutes all believers as the single people, the one family,
promised to Abraham (Gal. 2.14 - 3.29; (c) The event in the
present which corresponds to Jesus' death and resurrection in the past, and
the resurrection of all believers in the future, is baptism into Christ (Gal.
3.26-9; Among the remaining
questions, three matters stand out at the moment. The 'faith' in question
is faith in 'the God who raised Jesus from the dead'. It comes about through
the announcement of God's word, the gospel, which works powerfully in the hearts
of hearers, 'calling' them to believe, or indeed (as Paul often puts it) to
'obey' the gospel ( By 'the gospel' Paul does
not mean 'justification by faith' itself. He means the announcement
that the crucified and risen Jesus is Lord. To believe this message, to give
believing allegiance to Jesus as Messiah and Lord, is to be justified in the
present by faith (whether or not one has even heard of justification by
faith). Justification by faith itself is a second-order doctrine: to believe
it is both to have assurance (believing that one will be vindicated on
the last day [Rom. 5.1-5]) and to know that one belongs in the single family
of God, called to share table-fellowship without distinction with all other
believers (Gal. 2.11-21). But one is not justified by faith by believing in
justification by faith (this, I think, is what Newman thought Protestants
believed), but by believing in Jesus. 'Justification' is thus
the declaration of God, the just judge, that someone is (a) in the
right, that their sins are forgiven, and (b) a true member of the covenant
family, the people belonging to Abraham. That is how the word works in Paul's
writings. It doesn't describe how people get in to God's
forgiven family; it declares that they are in. That may seem a small
distinction, but in understanding what Paul is saying it is vital. The three tenses of
justification have often been confused, causing some of the great problems of
understanding Paul. If we keep them simultaneously clearly distinguished and
appropriately interrelated, clarity, and perhaps even agreement, might
follow. If justification is about belonging to the single family, it would be
good if that family could try to agree about what it means. To that end, let me now
offer my comments on Barnett's original article. I am aware that in doing so
I am putting my head in a noose. Every few months some friend, or even some
stranger, tells me that people in Sydney, and some in America, are declaring
me an outcast, a distorter of the true gospel, or whatever. Considering how
little I have published on the subjects they are talking about, this is
remarkable. Bishop Paul first gives a
review of the rise of the 'new perspective' on Paul in the work of Ed
Sanders. His brief summary needs nuancing here and there, but it's not far
off track. What is interesting, though, is that even in his brief summary he
shows that the 'new perspective' has this in common with traditional Reformed
readings of Paul (from Calvin to Cranfield): it sees the Jewish Law as a good
thing now fulfilled, rather than (as in much Lutheran thought) a bad thing
now abolished. This should be borne in mind, not least because I came to my
own view, already outlined in 1976 before Sanders' book was published, from
being dissatisfied with Cranfield's Reformed position but knowing that, out
of sheer loyalty to the God-given text, particularly of Romans, I couldn't go
back to a Lutheran reading. (Please note, my bottom line has always been, and
remains, not a theory, not a tradition, not pressure from self-appointed
guardians of orthodoxy, but the text of scripture.) When Sanders' book was
published I found further reasons for the position I had already moved
towards, even though there are problems with his overall account of Judaism,
and though I found, and still find, his reading of Paul very unconvincing. This already shows that,
though obviously I have some things in common with Sanders, and some with
J.D.G. Dunn, I am by no means an uncritical 'new perspective' person.
Frankly, many of the criticisms of Sanders at least, if applied to me, are
not just wide of the mark but on a different playing field altogether. With
that, I come to Barnett's specific points. First, method. Barnett
says that I first tease out what a word, or a worldview, 'would have meant'
at the time. Well, yes. That is what all historians, all lexicographers, all
serious readers of texts from cultures other than their own, are bound to do.
If we just started with a set of documents in a language and culture other
than our own, and refused to take into account what other writers in that
language and culture meant by the words, we would be in the position I would
be in if I picked up a book in Japanese, of which I know not a word. Nor are
my reconstructions speculative and unprovable. I spent two hundred pages in The
New Testament and the People of God establishing my positions inch by
inch, and what I have said about Paul builds on all that. It is false to say
that I suggest that Paul would have seen the hopes of Israel in 'political'
terms; in our world, that word carries the overtones of 'and therefore not
religious'; whereas my point is that, as is easily provable from almost any
second-Temple Jewish writing, the 'religious', the 'political', and for that
matter the 'personal' and the 'communal', are cheerfully mixed up together in
ways that baffle post-enlightenment readers (and so much evangelicalism is,
alas, still in complete thrall to the enlightenment), but were obvious to
people in that day. When it comes to the word dikaiosune and its
cognates, it isn't a matter of 'what Wright thinks the word would have meant
then', but what serious historical lexicography tells us. Of course, Paul has the
right to use words in his own way. I insist on this in my writings, for
instance when I argue step by step that Paul retains the shape of his Jewish
theology but fills it with new content. I have often struggled to make this
sort of point clear against people who force him into a lexical straitjacket
-- and against those who think, a la Marcion, that he abandoned everything
Jewish and invented a new message from scratch. But unless Paul's usage had a
fair amount of continuity with what people of that day would have expected
the words to mean -- these were letters, after all, and he wouldn't be there
to explain it if when he said 'righteousness' he meant 'Sydney Harbour
Bridge' -- he would be incomprehensible. We can never, in other words, begin
with the author's use of a word; we must begin with the wider world he lived
in, the world we meet in our lexicons, concordances, and other studies of how
words were used in that world, and must then be alive to the possibility of a
writer building in particular nuances and emphases of his or her own. Let me risk labouring
this point by adding the following. What I am doing, often enough, is exactly
parallel, in terms of method, to what Martin Luther did when he took the
gospel word metanoeite and insisted that it didn't mean 'do penance',
as the Vulgate indicated, but 'repent' in a much more personal and heartfelt
way. The only way to make that sort of point is to show that that's what
the word would have meant at the time. That's the kind of serious
biblical scholarship the Protestant Reformation was built on, and I for one
am proud to carry on that tradition -- if need be, against those who have
turned the Reformation itself into a tradition to be set up over scripture
itself. Moving to the particular
point about 'righteousness' and 'salvation', Barnett in fact hits his own
wicket when he says they are synonyms. That's the sort of trouble you get
into if you insist on not seeing what words mean lexically. They do not mean
the same thing, and actually the passage Barnett quotes from Romans 10 shows
Paul making a careful distinction between them, as he does throughout his
writings. 'Righteousness' in Paul is partly a courtroom status and partly a
covenantal status, the former being a metaphor to help understand the
significance of the latter. 'Salvation' in Paul means, of course, rescue from
sin and death. Of course the two go hand in hand, but they are not synonyms,
and nobody is helped by suggesting they are. Is justification then a
'process', as Barnett says I say -- with the result that he suggests my view
ends up destroying 'assurance'? Absolutely not! What seems to have happened
here -- and, to be blunt, in more than one North American attempted rebuttal
of my work -- is that criticisms regularly made by Protestant evangelicals
against either Catholics or Liberals have been wheeled out as though they
somehow 'must' be applicable to me as well. This is bizarre. My short sketch
of justification above should put the matter straight. The central point that
Barnett makes has to do with the relationship between 'the gospel' and
'justification'. I have just finished writing a popular commentary on 1 and 2
Thessalonians, and it was interesting to do so, this last month, with
Barnett's questions in my head. Let me make it clear that I do not, in any
way, drive a wedge between 'the gospel' and 'justification'. They belong
intimately together, like fish and chips or Lindwall and Miller (I am trying,
you see, to contextualise myself in the world of my readers). But they are
not the same thing. 'The gospel', for Paul, is the proclamation that the
crucified and risen Jesus is the Messiah, the Lord of the world. When Paul
arrived in Thessalonica, or I do not, then,
'interpose' extraneous elements between the effectual call and God's
declaration 'righteous'. I never have, never would, never (please God) will.
I merely insist on Paul's scheme rather than our traditional evangelical
ones, because I believe in the primacy of scripture rather than that of
tradition. In Paul's terms, 'call' and 'justification' are not the same
thing. If centuries of theological tradition have used the word
'justification' to mean something else, that is another matter; but if that
tradition leads us to misread Paul (as, in my view, it manifestly has), then
we must deal with the problem at the root, and not be scared off from doing
so by those who squeal that this doesn't sound like what they heard in Sunday
school. Barnett of course doesn't do that, but he certainly misstates my
point when he says that, according to me, 'justification' is 'a badge of
membership'. It isn't, and I never said it was. Faith is the badge of
membership, and, as soon as there is this faith, God declares 'justified'.
For Paul, faith is the result of the Spirit's work through the preaching of
the gospel (read 1 Cor. 12.3 with 1 Thess. 1.4-5 and 2.13); this is not
driving a wedge between gospel and justification, but explaining how the
gospel works to produce the faith because of which God declares 'righteous'. And the classic Pauline
way in which God makes this declaration, stating publicly and visibly that
this person is indeed within the family, is through baptism -- which
obviously, in the situation of primary evangelism, follows at a chronological
interval, whether of five minutes or five years or whatever, but which simply
says in dramatic action what God has in fact said the moment someone has
believed. Nothing is 'interposed'; no 'wedge' is driven between the gospel
and justification. You might as well say that because I declare that the
starter-motor of the car is not the same thing as the petrol engine I am
driving a wedge between the one and the other. The two are designed to work
in close correlation; but if the mechanic doesn't know the difference between
them he won't be able to fix your car. And the car needs fixing.
Even though I am not an uncritical exponent of the 'new perspective', I
cannot understand how a scholar like Barnett can criticise it, as he does at
the end of his piece, as though it were a form of Pelagianism ('surely I am
good enough', etc.). Sanders's whole point was that that was not what
Judaism was saying: you may disagree with his analysis, but his point was
that the law and works were not appealing to the Jews as the basis of their
salvation. If the New Perspective is pastorally naïve (Sanders was of course
trying to be historical, not pastoral; those who opposed Martin Luther said
he was being pastorally naïve, but he opposed them on the grounds of what
Paul really said and meant) it is not for those reasons. There are other major
issues we haven't touched on, and I am grateful to Bishop Barnett that he has
raised things in such a focussed way. We haven't, for instance, discussed the
meaning of dikaiosune theou, 'God's righteousness', nor the vexed
question of imputation. But I hope I have said enough at least to hit the
ball firmly back across the net. If we are to keep the rally going, I hope it
will be centrally focussed on the exegetical details, since as I have said
more than once it is the text of scripture itself, rather than later
traditions about what it is supposed to mean, that matters to me. By all
means let's look at the theological, evangelistic and pastoral questions, but
let's be clear where our authority lies. I have spent most of my
professional career in debate with scholars a million miles outside the
evangelical tradition -- people like Sanders, Vermes, Crossan, Borg, and
semi-scholars like A.N. Wilson. I hope my fellow evangelicals realise what is
involved in this, and how many people have expressed their gratitude to me
for showing them a way to retain and celebrate Christian orthodoxy with
intellectual integrity. It feels odd now to be debating the other way round,
so to speak, but if it's necessary I shall do it. And I hope and pray that
those from within the household of faith who want to take issue with me on
this or other topics will do me the courtesy, which I promise I shall do to
them, of discussing criticisms with me first, so that we can clear up
misunderstandings, before going public. I think that, too, is biblical. |
|
|
|
|
|
|
