I recently wrote a paper (a beginner’s effort) on NT Wright and justification. In the process, I came across Michael Bird’s The Saving Righteousness of God: Studies on Paul, Justification and the New Perspective. I received the book too late to really read it for my paper; now, I want to read the book and interact with it. So, here begins a series of posts on Bird’s important contribution to the current discussion of justification. To say that I am liveblogging is a bit of whimsy: it will be as live as blogging while I read and think about Michael Bird’s book. (FYI, here, again, is Michael Bird’s blog, and here is a link to his publications, bio, etc.
Introduction.
In this first post, I’ll interact with Bird’s introductory chapter 1, which is short.
From the very beginning, Bird makes it clear that this book has the ambitious goal of drawing together two approaches to justification which have been in contention and even hot dispute.
The burden of this project is to demonstrate that reformed and “new” readings of Paul are indispensable to attaining a full understanding of Paul’s soteriology. An analysis of Galatians and Romans demonstrates that the covenantal and forensic dimensions of justification go hand in glove. . . . This is a book I felt I had to write . . . also to offer a conciliatory and mediating position in the current war being waged in evangelicalism about justification, the New Perspective on Paul, and NT Wright.
–Bird, The Saving Righteousness of God, p. 1, [from now on, when I give only a page number, I am referring to this book of Bird’s].
What then, are the strengths and weakness of both views as Bird sees them?
Wright indicates that his is a Reformational back-ground. He’s a “card-carrying Calvinist,” p. 2. But even from such a background, there are two strands of Pauline thought that account for justification: the idea of union with Christ (the Pauline “in Christ”), and the concept of forensic justification (that God declares righteous those who have faith in Christ, by reckoning Christ’s righteousness to their “account.” Bird says that he, like a Calvin, “affirmed both” without knowing “how to relate the two concepts together,” p. 2.
Bird’s study of New Perspective works and Robert Gundry’s exegetical analysis of justification texts led him to see, that at an exegetical level, “these texts do not espouse imputation.” However, unlike, say, NT Wright, Bird is willing to say that imputation is a valid theological construct at the systematic theological level.
Imputed righteousness remains a legitimate way of expressing the forensic nature of justification in light of the representative natures of Adam and Christ. . . though imputed righteousness is not “true” at the exegetical level, in the theatre of Systematic Theology it can hold its own.
–p. 3
Yet, because Bird does not see imputation at the directly exegetical level, he prefers to speak of Paul’s model of justification as “incorporated righteousness,” a term which he will unpack particularly in chapter 4 of his book.
What does this mean for how “Reformational” Bird’s view is? He may not prefer the term “imputation,” although allowing it at a theological level, yet his view of what is overarchingly at issue in justification is far more Reformational than New Perspective:
There is a tendency in the NPP to sometimes squeeze all of Paul’s righteousness/justification language into social categories. But I cannot believe for a minute that “covenant membership” is the exhaustive meaning of justification. Resultantly, NPP advocates either deny, or more often than not underrate, the way that Paul construes justification as affecting a person’s vertical relationship with God and not merely their standing with other Christians. In Paul’s thinking, justification predominantly functions to address the anthropological problem of human sin, it explains God’s contention against human wickedness, articulates the change of status from condemnation to vindication that occurs in the dispensation of Christian faith, and explicates the inability of the law to provide a means of salvation.
–pp. 3
This represents, very much, the Reformational understanding of the large-scale theological “background” of justification.
What then, does Bird see as the NPP contribution?
several of its authors were spot on in giving us a corrective to caricatures of Judaism as completely legalistic and identifying Paul’s ministry in the context of trying to normalize Jew and Gentile relationships in the early church. I think that Paul did confront Jewish exclusivism as at least one facet of his critique of Judaism (in general) and the Christian judaizers (in particular). N.T. Wright raises a valid point when he says that for Paul what counts is grace not race.
–p. 3
In closing
I’ll close my presentation of Bird’s introduction with this quote in which he gives a further preview of and definition for his whole project. If you are familiar with the debates on justifcaiton, you’ll see how he hits most if not all of the major issues in this quote:
I intend to argue . . . that Paul has a doctrine of the saving righteousness of God whereby God acquits and vindicates the ungodly because of Jesus’ death and resurrection, and what is more, this enacted verdict is the gateway for membership into the cosmopolitan people of God. The saving righteousness of God means the end of all boasting whether it is in performance or possession of the law, whether it is in one’s ethnicity or religious effort. Justification is the act whereby God creates a new people, with a new status, in a new covenant, as a foretaste of a new age. Justification is forensic (it refers to status not moral state), eschatological (the verdict of judgment day is declared in the present), covenantal (Jews and Gentiles belong at one fellowship table), and is effective (sanctification cannot be subsumed under justification but neither can they be completely separated). In this sense, I hope to offer a mediating position between the NPP and its most arduous critics with a view to marking out some shared beliefs in the discussion.
–p. 4
At this point, I won’t say much in evaluation of Bird’s views, since he’ll unpack them more fully in later chapters. So, I’ll say just two preliminary things:
First, Bird’s desire to find a way to blend what is legitimate and valuable from both a Reformational perspective and the New Perspective is very attractive. I look forward to seeing how he does this. To me, the beginning looks both promising and encouraging.
Second, I’m not sure what to think of the conclusion that imputation is true dogmatically (i.e., in the domain of systematic theology), but not exegetically, which leads Bird to prefer his particular model of justification, that of “incorporated righteousness.” If something is true “dogmatically,” shouldn’t that have a heavy weight? (Think of the doctrine of the Trinity, for example). Wouldn’t the dogmatic truth of something justify (no pun intended) it as an existing model (such as imputation), particularly when, as with imputation, it stands in close relation to exegetical data? This is something I will be thinking about as I proceed.