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In this paper, three main headings will be briefly addressed: (1) what Wrights Reformed proponents claim for Wright; (2) what Wright really said about justification, especially with respect to the critical issue of the imputation of the active obedience of Christ; and (3) what the historic Reformed Confessional understanding is with respect to justification and the imputation of the active obedience of Christ.
The question here is what it means to be Reformed. Does it mean that you can't disagree with the Reformers on any important issue? I would maintain that being Reformed means honoring the Reformers by following Scripture where it leads, as they did. I very much doubt that Calvin would be happy to be considered the source of a new infallible Tradition. That's a new Catholicism, not a Reformed faith.
Great point - for me the issue w/ Wright centers on the doctrine of justification. He is obviously twisting it and that's a problem.
I, naturally, wanted to hold out for a sense of word of God in which Scripture held the prime place and was allowed to question tradition and magisterium alike. That, I take it, is the historic Protestant position. Now I discover that some from what I had thought were Protestant quarters are accusing me of something called biblicism. Im not sure what that is, exactly. What I am sure of is what I learned forty years ago from Luther and Calvin: that the primary task of a teacher of the church is to search Scripture ever more deeply and to critique all human traditions in the light of that, not to assemble a magisterium on a platform and tell the worried faithful what the tradition says and hence how they are to understand Scripture. To find people in avowedly Protestant colleges taking what is basically a Catholic position would be funny if it was not so serious. To find them then accusing me of crypto-Catholicism is worse. To find them using against me the rhetoric that the official church in the 1520s used against LutherHow dare you say something different from what weve believed all these centuriesagain suggests that they have not only no sense of irony, but no sense of history. I want to reply, how dare you propose a different theological method from that of Luther and Calvin, a method of using human tradition to tell you what Scripture said? On this underlying question, I am standing 1rm with the great Reformers against those who, however Baptist their official theology, are in fact neo-Catholics.
He is not twisting it, he is correcting it in the light of new evidence, just as Calvin was seeking to do.
His "new evidence" is the twist.
The problem with Wright's view is that he takes matters that are in the background of Paul's message (i.e. table fellowship) and moves them to the foreground, and then takes the central issue (Paul's message about salvation and how one is declared righteous in God's sight) and moves it to the back burner. Wright continually does this with various issues. Wright likes to trivialize the momentous and complicate the obvious. His explanations are a clear case of being too clever by half.Not really, the discovery of the scrolls in Qumran in 1947 unearthed new evidence by which we could obtain a more realistic understanding of Judaism in the second Temple period. These texts, helped us to recognize that the Judaism of Paul's day was not characterized by the idea that one obtained salvation by means of works and that the patters was best understood as covenantal nomism. In 4QFlor 1:1-7 the phrase מעשי תורה were what marked out the community of the last days in its distinctiveness from the outsiders and enemies. The problem, was that Luther read his criticisms of Catholicism back into the Pauline epistles and wrongly concluded that Judaism was a works-based religion. In the Judaism of Paul's day, the terms 'righteousness' and 'works of Torah' and 'justification' meant something specific, they were misunderstood by Calvin and Luther; Wright and others have simply recovered the real meaning of the terms as understood by Paul's Jewish contemporaries.
Paul's message about salvation and how one is declared righteous in God's sight
Yes, salvation is cosmic in it's scope, but it is also personal. God's plan is vindicated through Christ's work and, at the same time, believers are made righteous in God's sight.No, Paul's message about salvation is that through Jesus Christ God has shown himself faithful to his covenant with Abraham and that the people of God, composed of Jew and Gentile, shall be vindicated on the basis of faith.
Yes, salvation is cosmic in it's scope, but it is also personal. God's plan is vindicated through Christ's work and, at the same time, believers are made righteous in God's sight.
In one conversation in Oxford, Tom Wright concurred that although he had not read the older
covenant theologians closely, he too was deeply influenced by Vos and Ridderbos.
A concluding evaluation of this book would be incomplete if I did not register my genuine appreciation for some of his points. In spite of exaggerations and false dilemmas, Wright reminds us that justification is inextricably tied to God’s covenantal, historical, cosmic, and eschatological purposes for “summing up all things in Christ.” Even if it is in some ways an over-correction, he does remind us that justification does not emerge simply out of need for personal or pastoral needs, but out of an unfolding plan that revolves around God’s faithfulness to his own righteousness and results not only in saved individuals but in a church and a kingdom. Even if he
tends sometimes to confuse this kingdom with his own political agenda, Wright properly reminds us that even in its seminal and liminal existence in this time between Christ’s advents, it is already true that Jesus is Lord.
God promised the holy land and a worldwide family in Gen 15 (222). “And once again the point about the Torah is twofold: (a) to cling to it would be to embrace the wrath which results from having broken it; (b) to highlight it would be to restrict the covenantal promises to Jews only. Both perspectives matter, and the two fit snugly together within Paul’s overall view of God’s call and
promise to Abraham” (222).
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