N.T. Wright. Justification: God’s Plan and Paul’s Vision. With a New Introduction. Downers Grove: IVP Academic, 2016. See here to buy the book.
This book is a 2016 reprint of N.T. Wright’s 2009 book on
justification. It has a new introduction by the author. Wright’s book
was a response to Reformed pastor John Piper’s 2007 book, The Future of Justification: A Response to N.T. Wright.
Wright’s views on the Christian doctrine of justification have been
controversial among Christians. Some Christians have even accused
Wright of perverting or undermining the Gospel, or of teaching another
Gospel (a la Galatians 1:8).
For a number of evangelical Protestant Christians, justification is
God’s forgiveness of people’s sins and imputation of the righteousness
of Christ onto Christian believers. The criterion for being justified
is faith: accepting God’s free offer of forgiveness and imputed
righteousness. According to this view, people can never earn a right
standing before God by doing good works, for all have sinned and no one
can be righteous enough for a perfect and holy God. Justification needs
to be God’s free act of unmerited grace. When a person is justified,
God no longer sees that person’s sin, even though he or she is still a
sinner. Rather, God sees Christ’s righteous life covering the person
who is justified. That imputed righteousness will serve the Christian
well at the last judgment, when God will accept the Christian into
heaven because the Christian’s sins are covered by the righteousness of
Christ. Many evangelicals believe that this view of justification was
taught by the apostle Paul in the New Testament.
What is Wright’s view on justification, and how does it compare and
contrast with the view held by many evangelicals? Wright shies away
from seeing justification as God’s imputation of Christ’s righteousness
onto the believer, even though he thinks that there is some grain of
truth to this idea. For Wright, justification is about God judicially
declaring and reckoning the believer as “in the right” and forgiving the
believer’s sin. But Wright thinks that justification also concerns God
placing the believer in the Christian community of believing Jews and
Gentiles. This community is Abraham’s seed, possessing God’s mission
for Abraham and his seed to bless God’s creation. It does that in this
life by serving the world, preaching the Gospel, and being a light to
people about who God is. But it will also do so after Christ returns
and renews the cosmos, as Christians will play an integral part in this
cosmic renewal. For Wright, this picture corresponds with the Old
Testament picture of God’s cosmic renewal accompanying God’s restoration
and exaltation of Israel. For Wright, Christians are the firstfruits
of God’s new creation, which will one day encompass the entire cosmos.
Wright also contends that, according to Paul, God will
eschatologically judge all people, including Christians, according to
their works. Christians’ good works, in short, will be a part of their
final justification before God. Wright’s view here has troubled a
number of evangelicals, who maintain that people are saved at the last
judgment solely by receiving God’s free grace through faith, not by
doing good works. To his credit, Wright is sensitive to the pastoral
implications of what he is saying: Christians will be afraid that their
works are not good enough to get them into heaven. Wright addresses
this concern in a variety of ways. Wright denies that final
justification requires believers to be perfect, but he maintains instead
that it requires them to be patiently doing and pursuing the will of
God, a la Romans 2:7. Wright also argues that Paul’s teaching is that
the Spirit, in cooperation with the believer, will produce fruits of
virtue and holiness in the believer’s life. Moreover, Wright holds that
the Christian’s performance of good works should not be an apprehensive
attempt to appease an unsmiling judge, but rather should flow from a
desire to please a gracious God.
In reading this book by Wright, I was perplexed about why Wright’s
view on justification is controversial among Christians, especially
Christians of the Reformed variety. Granted, Wright does not regard
justification as God imputing Christ’s righteousness onto believers,
which is important to Reformed Christians. But Wright still associates
justification with God’s forgiveness of sin and regarding of believers
as judicially righteous. Is that not what is important? In addition,
while some Reformed Christians have criticized Wright’s view on the
importance of works in final justification, how is Wright’s view
different from what I have read and heard a number of Reformed
Christians say: that people are not saved by their good works, but they
are not saved without them?
This book was not exactly a light read for me. The prose was not
difficult, but I had to pay close attention to what I was reading to see
where Wright would go with his argument, and how his argument would
hold together. In the end, Wright’s view on justification came together
rather coherently, even though some of my questions remained
unanswered. For one, I wondered how exactly Israel’s return from exile
fit into Wright’s scenario. Wright repeatedly highlighted the biblical
and post-biblical Jewish theme of Israel’s return from exile as
important in understanding Paul’s teaching on justification. But I was
unable to determine from this book how Wright was conceptualizing
Israel’s return from exile within his view on justification. Does
Wright interpret that return literally, as the Jewish people returning
to the land of Palestine and receiving political sovereignty over their
land? Some believe that such a picture is consistent with Romans 11.
Does Wright believe that the church fulfills Israel’s return from exile
in a spiritual sense, or that Israel’s return from exile in the Old
Testament stands for God’s larger renewal of the cosmos?
Second, I was somewhat unclear about Wright’s view on the role and
significance of Israel in the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament. Did God want
Israel in the Old Testament to be a light to the nations, or was
Israel’s role in God’s plan to produce Jesus Christ, who would fulfill
that mission to be a light to the nations? Wright acknowledges
Scriptural passages about Old Testament Israel being a light to the
nations: in Deuteronomy 4:5-8, for example, God talks about the nations
marveling at God’s wise laws for Israel and God’s presence within
Israel. At the same time, Wright seems to contend that Paul is saying
that the Torah separated Israel from the nations and was a dead end in
terms of Israel’s mission on account of Israel’s sins, which is why
Christ came. For Wright, was God setting Israel up to fail at the
mission that God gave her? Wright appears rather critical of a
Christian view that God gave people a law they could not keep to show
them that they needed a savior, or that Christ is God’s Plan B in
response to human sin. But how is Wright’s view different from those
views that he criticizes?
Of course, critiquing Wright is a difficult task. Because Wright is a
prolific writer, he may have addressed such questions elsewhere.
Still, in my opinion, he should have briefly addressed these issues in Justification, since that would have tied up some loose ends.
This book did provide me with a way to account for various aspects of
Paul’s writings. For example, I have long wondered about Abraham’s
faith in Romans 4, and if or how that related to Christ. For Wright, it
does: Abraham trusted that God (by giving Abraham a son) would create
from him a community that would bless the world, and Christ’s creation
of the church is part of God’s fulfillment of this divine promise to
Abraham.
In reading this book, I wondered if Wright’s views could be found
explicitly in Paul’s writings. How faithful is Wright’s interpretation
of Paul to what Paul actually wrote? In some cases, Wright seemed to be
reading his own ideas into Paul’s writings. Wright argued, for
example, that Romans 10 relates to how the Jews separated themselves
from the Gentiles, but, as far as I can see, such an idea is not
explicit in Romans 10. Overall, though, I think that there is something
to Wright’s model. Paul in Romans 2:17-24 does appear to presume that
Israel had a mission to be a light to the nations and failed at that
mission, a theme that Wright emphasizes. Paul in Romans 3:1-7 regards
Israel’s failure as a problem. Romans 8 does present a picture of
cosmic renewal in which God’s people will participate.
I am somewhat unclear about how Wright holds together his belief that
final justification relates to works with his view that believers
already possess God’s final verdict of “righteous” (though Wright
thoughtfully interacts with the issue of assurance of salvation and
critiques how some Christians have understood this). Still, Wright does
well to note that such a tension appears to exist in Philippians
3:12-16, and that Paul talks about judgment according to works, even for
Christians.
I received a complimentary review copy of this book from the publisher, in exchange for an honest review.