Tom Wright on Mere Christianity

Tom Wright's untimely born review of Mere Christianity by CS Lewis (HT Mike Bird) is an worthwhile read. Ironically given one of his regular gripes with critics is that they require you "to say everything all the time" (e.g. here), one of the refrains of the review is that Lewis fails to mention lots of important matters (Easter, Kingdom of God, etc). But I do like his main criticism that the book plays down the personal historical Jesus, in favour of a more Platonic theism.

This criticism of Lewis led me to engage in some self-criticism, when he discussed Lewis’s famous argument that "Jesus must have been bad or mad or God". Wright comments:

What Lewis totally failed to see—as have, of course, many scholars in the field—was that Judaism already had a strong incarnational principle, namely the Temple, and that the language used of Shekinah, Torah, Wisdom, Word, and Spirit in the Old Testament—the language, in other words, upon which the earliest Christians drew when they were exploring and expounding what we have called Christology—was a language designed, long before Jesus’ day, to explain how the one true God could be both transcendent over the world and living and active within it, particularly within Israel.

Lewis, at best, drastically short-circuits the argument. When Jesus says, "Your sins are forgiven," he is not claiming straightforwardly to be God, but to give people, out on the street, what they would normally get by going to the Temple.

For Wright, understanding "Judaism’s incarnational principle…enables [the claim of Jesus to be God] to be at once nuanced into a proto-Trinitarian framework".

The 'claim' of Jesus to be God in Mark 2:5 is familiar territory for anyone who has run evangelistic courses on the Gospel of Mark. It is clear to most participants that Jesus is not "claiming straightforwardly to be God", because God to them is Unitarian – and as Jesus talks to, and about, God as distinct from him, he can’t be God as well. But to the Jews of the time, which did not have a Unitarian view of God, Jesus was clearly claiming to be God in such a straightforward way that the scribes felt he was blaspheming.

But was Lewis wrong to short-circuit this Jewish/OT background? Wright feels that if you don’t first lay the Jewish/OT background "you will inevitably put him in a different one, where he, his message, and his achievement will be considerably distorted." That is no doubt true, but is that an irredeemable distortion? As you fill modern Brit’s concept of ‘god’ with Jesus Christ, couldn’t the God-who-is-there slowly redefine the word/framework as he refuses to be contained by our false concepts?

I’m sure there has to be a balance found, and I tend to think that simply reading the Gospels is the best way to get that balance. You can’t read the Gospels without discussing the Jewish/OT background, but equally you’re not spending limited time and energy studying that background directly before you hear about Jesus himself.

That’s one reason why I like introducing non-Christians to Gospels, courses based on Gospels (e.g. Christianity Explored on Mark), and books based on Gospels (e.g. Mike Cain’s Real Life Jesus).

But that’s something to reflect on more.

Contextualization and names for God

The BBC News website brings out a concrete question, of wide-significance, on how we communicate the gospel. It reports that:

The interception by Malaysian authorities of thousands of Bibles bound for Christians in the country has produced the latest flashpoint.

The reason - the Bibles use the word "Allah" to described God, and that's been banned by the government...

Muslim groups claim that Christian use of a word so closely associated with Islam in Bibles and children's books could be aimed at winning converts.

That sparks off lots of connexions in my head. Firstly it reminds me of a quote from Lesslie Newbigin I read yesterday about his time in India:

When I preach in a village where Christianity is not known, and where the name of Jesus is not known ... I have to begin by using the word Kadavul. But of course when I use the word Kadavul they're thinking of Vishnu or Shiva or some other Hindu God. I know that, but I can't help it. It's only when I begin to tell the stories of what God has done that they begin to say, 'Kadavul is not what we had thought.'

Secondly, it reminds me of the Old Testament use of the word 'El' to describe God.

God's name is important to him. But I don't know quite when contextualization becomes accommodation. A difficult question I think, but I suspect we may be too cautious.

Theocentric or anthroprocentric?

Reading Tom Torrance is great because he gets how exciting and shocking it is that God became man in Jesus Christ. He has taught me to see that this is central to everything, while never losing what PT Forsyth says is 'the true seat of Incarnation — a Christ made sin' ("Immanence and Incarnation"). This post is a bit of an application of that...

Listening to a recent discussion on Wright and Piper's debate I was reminded about how both see much contemporary Christianity as too anthroprocentric, and not theocentric enough. I've never been completely happy with drawing a sharp distinction between the two as humanity is made in the image of God. Therefore to be truly anthroprocentric is to be theocentric.

But we can go further in rejecting this dichotomy.

Both Wright and Piper are part of the Reformed tradition and so this also reminded me of John Halton's post quoting Herman Bavinck saying that 'the Reformed Christian thinks theologically, the Lutheran anthropologically' (RD 1:177). John says that he would like to say that 'the Lutheran thinks Christologically' and to be Christocentric is to combine the two in the God-man.

In Christ the true God is revealed, but we are less familiar with the idea that he also reveals our true humanity. For some reason we have focused on all the NT statements that Jesus is the image of God (e.g. 2 Corinthians 4:4; Colossians 1:15; Hebrews 1:3, cf. John 1:18; 12:45; 14:9) as just referring to his divinity and missed the implication that this shows his humanity as well.

As Tom Smail comments:

Christ is both the divine prototype that is stamped on to our humanity and so imparts to it the divine image, and is also the human being who has received that image and is the perfect expression of it. In the rest of us, in our over-flexible human nature, that image has been eroded and distorted but in Christ it is fresh and new, authentic and complete.

(p. 59, Like Father, Like Son)

So if we want to be free to be ourself we have to look to Christ. But not by following his example, because we cannot be the image of God, but by being in the image of God by his gracious identification with us in our sinful twisted humanity.

Adam is, as is said in [Romans 5:14], the type of Him who is to come. Man's essential and original nature is to be found, therefore, not in Adam but in Christ. In Adam we can only find it prefigured. Adam can therefore be interpreted only in the light of Christ and not the other way round.

(p. 29, Karl Barth cited in Tom Smail, Like Father, Like Son)

Who's side is God on?

I have been refamiliarising myself with Tom Wright's stimulating reading of Paul in recent days by listening again to his series of lectures on Romans. I think I am clarifying more in my mind where I think he occasionally takes wrong turnings, and reminding myself again how I need to read Paul with much more focus on the OT background.

The most important wrong turn I think Wright makes is in deciding who's side God is on in the metaphorical law-court and is summarised in this quote:

...in Daniel chapter 7 you have exactly this scenario of God as the judge surprisingly vindicating Israel as his oppressed people and judging the wicked beasts who have been attacking her. That is the apocalyptic scenario of the covenantal law-court. Or if you like, the covenant scenario interpreted as a great law-suit. Now of course there are passages in the Old Testament which also speak of God and Israel being at law with one another, but that is essentially a secondary thing.

(Romans in a Week, Lecture 3: Romans 1:1-3:20, Part II)

Again and again, as I read the Prophets I am struck by the opposite. The Prophets, unlike so many other religious people, do not focus on condemning those outside their group and argue how God is on their side against those outside, but rather the opposite. Israel is singled out for the harshest criticism and the most devastating judgements.

Yes, God does promise to take Israel's side against her enemies, but only after he has judged them.

Wright in the same lecture helpfully draws attention to how the Isaiah/Ezekiel quote in 2:24 functions in Paul's argument. Paul backs up his argument that those 'who boast in the law dishonour God by breaking the law' by quoting the Prophets' statement that 'the name of God is blasphemed among the Gentiles because of you' (Ez 36:23; Is 52:5). When you consider their original context we see that Paul is arguing that the Jews should know that they broke the law because they were sent into exile as judgment by God upon them. But in quoting this passage he is also alluding to God's message in both OT passages that for the sake of his name God is going to redeem his people from the place of being judged by him, to the place of restoration. There is hope on the other side of judgment which has to be grasped by faith.

In the law-court Paul is clear who's side God is on, and it is not ours. God inflicts wrath on us (3:5) not our oppressors. The 'but' of 3:21 is precious though. For God's judgment (his righteousness) is revealed apart from the law, in Christ who died for our trespasses (4:35). God is now 'for us' (8:31).

God's righteousness is a saving righteousness not because our enemies are judged but because we are judged in Christ who was raised for our justification.

Seifrid says it better than me:

justification comes only through condemnation, life only through death. The way in which Paul connects the opening discussion in verse 18 to verse 17 signals this relationship: '...the righteous one shall live by faith, for the wrath of God is revealed from heaven ...' If he had been thinking of a strict antitheses, one would have expected here a concession, an 'even if'. God's saving righteousness is revealed in the gospel precisely because God himself comes to his own righteousness in the cross of Christ. This simultaneous justification of God and the sinner drives Paul's argument in 1:18-3:26. (p. 48, Christ Our Righteousness: Paul's Theology of Justification, Apollos)

Apologies to those who are fed up of me banging on about the same things. But I don't think I will ever tire of it (by God's grace).

Reflecting again on Tom Wright's Paul

Tom Wright has written a new book on Justification, in part to respond to John Piper.

I was listening to Tom Wright on Romans the other day and he observed that 'Righteousness of God' had three dimensions:

1. Covenant
2. Law-court
3. Eschatology

The key to the current debate is that he makes the covenantal dimension of Paul's Righteousness/Justification the 'fundamental' dimension (to quote his lecture). Most of the focus in debate has been on word studies of the dikaiosune (Righteousness/Justification) word group. There are places where this word group seems to be fundamentally covenantal (e.g. Second Isaiah) but the chips are (in my mind) stacked in the traditional interpretation's favour because the language is from the law-court in the first place (at least). To settle things though the debate has to be far wider and involve the whole of Paul's theology and ask: 'where is the centre of Paul's theology?' Once you have answered that as 'the covenant' then you can do as Wright does and 'translate back into covenantal categories' (p.43, Letter to the Romans) any language which is not covenantal in the first place. Of course if the law-court is central then you can do the same in the other direction.

I am persuaded for the moment to give the law-court pole position in this contest (see here for why) but suspect that the answer may be simpler. If you were to ask the mythical average man in the pew what was the centre of Paul's theology he would immediately answer Jesus Christ, or particularly Jesus Christ crucified. And here perhaps is the answer. Neither the law-court nor the covenant are central, they are both interdependent but separate metaphors which are trying to describe something bigger than both of them, that 'in Christ God was reconciling the world to himself'.

In my head I keep on coming back to Mark Seifrid's comment that only in Jesus is there synthesis when 'the election of Israel and the demand of the Law meet in Christ, the crucified and risen. The tension within early Jewish thought between grace and demand was resolved in an event, not a higher idea' (pp. 5-6, 'The "New Perspective on Paul" and Its Problems', Themelios, Issue 25-2). I don't know if Seifrid would agree with how I spin him but there we go.

Again and again, I learn that theologians (and more often I) sometimes lose the wood for the trees. We do so love to replace Christ with an idea.

I wish I had time to right this post

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:

• The importance of union with Christ
• Justification/baptism as declaring a reality that is already present
• Redemption as involving the whole of creation
• Biblical theology
• The importance of covenant
• The emphasis on the goodness of the law
• The doctrine of Sola Scriptura
• ...and more?

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)

Even more on Justification

• A gentleman called Mark Garcia has written a very helpful review article of two books with different views on justification. It argues that both make the mistake of assuming that there is one Protestant understanding of justification. It's very well written, and can be read here. Many moons ago I posted some quotes by Geerhardus Vos which seem to back up Mark Garcia's argument.

• John Piper has a book coming out on Tom Wright's theology of Justification and a 30min interview with him on the subject of the book can be accessed on Jacob Paul Breeze's blog. Piper seems to echo Howard Marshall in saying that Wright is correct in what he affirms but wrong in what he denies. I agree with Piper on this, although I had some concerns of my own about Piper's expression of the doctrine of justification. But when it comes down to it I'm with Jacob Paul Breeze...

  if you want to talk about who is "right"...that's fine. But, I eventually want to talk about the larger issue: how do we for the sake of unity and mission to the world, work together when we have different interpretations of Scripture (yet because of Justification by Faith [ironically] we are both full participants in God’s family?

Mark Seifrid takes aim at Tom Wright's biblical meta-narrative

In 'The Narrative of Scripture and Justification by Faith: A Still Fresher Reading of Paul' Mark Seifrid says:

The narrative approach can be in its own way just as radically systematic as any doctrinal outline. It is worth reminding ourselves that just as the Scripture has not been given to us as a dogmatic outline, neither has it been given to us as a single, unified story. It is a collection of narratives, which not only complement one another, but also overlap and stand in tension with one another. There are two accounts of creation in Genesis, two accounts of the Davidic monarchy, four Gospels. The psalms tell and retell the story of Israel in ways that are sometimes remarkably different from one another. More significant than the variations in perspective, and often lying behind these variations are the differing ways in which God encounters his people. We no longer live in Eden, yet God’s quiet governance and preservation of the present world preserves the traces of Eden in it. In this fallen world, however, human beings encounter the God who works not only life and blessing, but also death and destruction, and that not in predictable retribution of evil, but seemingly without reason or cause (cf. Isa 45:7; 1 Sam 2:6).

It is strange that in the same essay Mark Seifrid then seems to criticise Tom Wright's for 'three interrelated tensions in Wright’s reading of Scripture':

1) the tension that we already have touched upon between conditionality and unconditionality within the promise to Abraham as Wright construes it; which leads, secondly, 2) to the central and fundamental tension between the purpose of God for Israel in the gift of Torah and God’s saving work in Christ; and finally 3) the instructive tension between the exclusivity of the gift of Torah to Israel and the universality of God’s saving purpose.'

Still I think its fair to ask whether...

One may therefore reasonably ask whether the implicit narrative which Wright proposes is present at all. Reading between the lines has its weaknesses and dangers.