I finished my paper on NT Wright and justification. Here is a stripped down and simplified summary of my main take on what leads Wright’s view of justification to be different from a classical Reformational view, in four posts.
Overview
- First post, background issues (This post)
- Example passages
- Reductionism in Wright
- Conclusion
In order to “get” Wright on justification, one has to understand his hermeneutical approach to the New Testament, which is foundational to how he reads Paul. Wright is pursuing a rigorously Jewish reading of Paul–specifically, a Second Temple Judaism (”STJ”) reading. Wright thinks that one must grasp the STJ worldview through its own narrative self-understanding. Looking at Paul as the writer of abstract theological truths won’t do. One must understand how Paul, a Jew who came to view Jesus as the Messiah, would have understood Jesus within the narrative expectations of STJ. One of the aspects of STJ’s self-understanding was the narrative of God’s covenant. STJ was looking for God to fulfill his promises in the covenant—what Paul has to say about Jesus must be understood as an answer to the covenantal narrative questions and expectations of STJ, even if it was a startling, unexpected answer.
With this background in mind, I can begin to explain two important moves Wright makes to set up his understanding of justification. In line with the centrality of covenant narrative, he interprets “the righteousness of God” as “God’s covenant faithfulness.” God’s righteousness is not primarily about his “ethical” holiness, it is a narrative unveiling of God’s faithfulness as this would have been understood within STJ. Further, Wright understands the idea of “works of the law” (prominent in Galatians and Romans as that by which one cannot be justified) as “works having to do with demonstrating who is in or out of the covenant,” such as circumcision, which is big in, for example, Galatians 2. Accordingly, “works of the law” are not moral works, works attempting to earn or achieve something before God, because Wright (and other New Perspective(s) on Paul writers) think that STJ didn’t see works of the law as earning anything with God. As a consequence, Wright reads “justification by faith, not by works of the law”, as something akin to “justification comes to those who have faith (who are covenant members), not to those who insist on covenant markers.” Here’s how Wright puts it in his own words:
Justification . . . is not a matter of how someone enters the community of the true people of God, but of how you tell who belongs to that community–What Saint Paul Really Said, 119.