How can we read the scriptures like Jesus on the road to Emmaus, Peter at Pentecost, and Paul in Romans, when the word Jesus is so small in a Wordle of the bible (from the ESV blog; what is a Wordle?)?
A start may be made by realising that Jesus is in one way or another also 'Lord', 'God', the Word ('said'), 'Israel', the 'people', and 'king'.
Why Tom Wright's theology is distinctively Reformed, even though it is different from most Reformed theologies out there today.
I would talk about their similarities on:
I probably haven't read enough to make it coherent and persuasive... still that never has stopped me posting before. :)
A quick search of the internet would give me some quotes to use as illustrations though, e.g.
"I grew up in a Lutheran evangelicalism which left me with a strong antithesis between law and grace. I found this all profoundly unsatisfying until I met Calvin and Calvinism. I began to think, "Whew…the law is a good thing. It is holy and just and good. It is right and it has been fulfilled, not abrogated, in Christ." All of that is right. So, if you are faced with a choice between Luther and Calvin, you simply have to choose Calvin... What I then found, and believe me I tried very hard to do this, was that I couldn’t make the Calvinist reading of Galatians actually work." (An Interview with NT Wright by Travis Tamerius)
"From (at least) Calvin onwards, reaching something of a climax in the Romans commentary of Charles Cranfield, exegetes in the Reformed tradition found in Paul a view of the Jewish law which was far more positive than Lutheran exegesis had assumed. I am not sure that this tradition ever did full justice to second Temple Judaism, but at least it did not start from the assumption that the law itself was basically a bad thing ripe for abolition. (Notice how this works out in exegesis of the notorious crux at Rom. 10: 4: is Christ the abolition, end, completion, goal, or fulfilment of the law? Or what?) After all, in [72] Reformed Theology the Torah was given in the first place within a historical scheme, not to enable the Israelites to keep it and so earn their membership in God’s people, but to enable them, as a people already redeemed through the Exodus, to demonstrate and work out the implications of their membership and vocation. The (at least partial) convergence of Sanders’s reading of Judaism with a Reformed view of the law makes it all the more ironic that the anti-NP movement is today centred not least in Reformed circles such as the Presbyterian Church of America and Westminster Theological Seminary" (Redemption from the New Perspective? Towards a Multi-Layered Pauline Theology of the Cross)
Wright: Would you agree with the following analysis of how all this happened? The mainstream of New Testament studies from the Reformation until very recently – certainly in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries – was being led by German Lutherans who had a very definite law-gospel antithesis. Had it instead been led by people in the Reformed as opposed to the Lutheran tradition, the new perspective would never have been necessary. If you take the theology of someone like Ridderbos or Charles Cranfield, you find exactly the same idea in principle, which is that the law was never given as a ladder of good works up which people ought to climb to save themselves; if anyone ever thought that, that was an abuse of the law, because grace and particularly the covenant precedes obedience.
I find this very ironic, because if you were to go on to Google and were to type in “Tom Wright” +”justification by faith,” you would turn up many American web sites from the Presbyterian Church of America and various other strongly Reformed centers like Westminster Seminary which are extremely rude about the two people sitting on this platform tonight for having sold Paul down the river and given up the genuine Reformed doctrine of justification by faith. This is really quite bizarre, because I think that what we have both done in taking forward Sanders’ proposal theologically – Sanders is really not a theologian, he’s more of an historian – I see what we’re doing as actually much more on a Reformed map than a Lutheran map, precisely because of the emphasis on the covenant and grace as basic, and on the Law from the start as being the way of life for the redeemed people. This corresponds to Luther’s tertiary use of it, if you like, but it’s much easier to do it in a Reformed or Calvinist framework. Would you be happy with that?
Dunn: That’s entirely so. I rediscovered, as it were, my Reformed heritage in all this because I was brought up Presbyterian. I was a strong Calvinist in my youth, and one of the impressive things about Calvin is that he sees the continuity of the covenants. The covenant of grace is the dominant category running through the Old and New Testaments.
Wright: Grand narrative, you mean.
Dunn: Well, a motif, shall we say. And likewise, a very important point: Calvin’s work is systematic – Luther was never systematic like that. Calvin is able to integrate better what is typically called now a “participationist” soteriology (“in Christ”) and the forensic emphasis. One of the sad things about this rebuke coming from many in the States is that they want to operate entirely in forensic categories. They haven’t really integrated the en Christo, the “in Christ” motif, which is so fundamental to Paul. The term “in Christ” occurs far more frequently in Paul than justification language.
Wright: Yes.
(An Evening Conversation on Jesus and Paul with James D.G. Dunn and N.T. Wright)
I have done a good deal of street preaching in my life and I have often stood in a street to preach the gospel where the name of Jesus is quite unknown. It is no use mentioning the name of Jesus because no one knows what that means, but I have to use the word God. Of course I must find one of the many Tamil words for God and there are many words. And when I use one of these words, I know that in my hearers' minds they will be thinking of perhaps Shiva or Vishnu or Murugan or Subramanya or Ganesha or Hanuman. they will certainly not be thinking of the one whom I think of when I say the word God, the one I have learned to know through Jesus Christ. So what difference has my preaching made? So far, none at all. It will only make a difference when I begin to tell stories about what this God has done. Then you begin to see that God is different from what we thought, because you come to know who a person really is only be understanding that person's life, knowing how she behaves, how she responds in different situations, by interacting with her.
(p.117 "...and Culture" in Signs Amid the Rubble: The Purposes of God in Human History by Lesslie Newbigin)
Very true, and one reason why I am loving being part of sharing the Gospel through the gospel of Mark using Christianity Explored.
The only unhelpful thing about it is that by focusing on stories about God's actions, we can distance ourselves more easily than if we focus on what God has said. Although it is less fashionable, it is actually more personal to focus on the latter. Both are true though.
Paul Helm doesn't like a similarity in Richard Baxter and Tom Wright's theology of justification. He says that both believe "Justification is not a change of status, but of persons.". This may or may not be true, but consider Kolb and Arand on Martin Luther's theology of Justification:
Those who see this form of forensic justification as merely a legal fiction do not share Luther’s understanding of the power of the Word of God. The reformer knew that from the beginning of the world, God determined reality by speaking. Therefore, he was certain that God’s word of forgiveness created a new reality in the life of the sinner.
(I heard something similar in audio from them, but this is from their book, HT Shephard's Scrapbook)
So for Luther the key thing is not whether justification is a declaration or regeneration. It is both. The question is which comes first in priority.
There is a book out there by Lowell Green that argues that Melancthon "helped Luther discover the Gospel", by which he means forensic justification (or so I understand). In the Apology to the Augsburg Confession Melancthon states that:
by faith alone we obtain the remission of sins for Christ's sake, and that by faith alone we are justified, i.e., of unrighteous men made righteous, or regenerated.
Some connections could be drawn here with speech-act theory. Unsurprisingly though Anthony Thiselton got there first. He has an article called 'Justification by grace as legal fiction? : "language-games and 'seeing as' : a fresh approach to justification by faith in Paul and James"' (in Thiselton on Hermeneutics). I'll have to see if I can get hold of it.
