MetaCatholic

I’ve been reading, with some profit, and occasional bafflement, Michael Bird’s The Saving Righteousness of God ¹ and am stimulated to interact with it. This book attempts to carve out something of a mediating position between ongoing Reformed interpretations of Paul, and the range of views associated with the so-called New Perspective on Paul (henceforward NPP).

Just as Bird begins the book with an autobiographical context, placing himself in the Reformed camp, but open to considering the arguments of NPP on their individual merit (though describing himself as innoculated “from catching the NPP bug in any serious way” – p2) so I likewise begin with a personal note. In my first year of coming (back) to an adult faith, I occasionally heard “justification by faith” elaborated as the theme of sermons, or talked about by friends in the Christian Union. Unfortunately it was often (I would now say) both poorly understood and badly expressed by them. While broadly in the Reformed tradition, it was put forward in ways that invited the caricatures of “legal fiction” or “faith as the one work pleasing to God.” It was not long before I read a short but engaging exposition of the doctrine: Tom Wright’s essay in the then newly published The Great Acquittal²

My first proper encounter with the doctrine was with its NPP form, although it was going to be another couple of years before the term was coined. I was well aware that the other essays in the book didn’t seem to mean the same thing as Wright when they spoke of justification, and I found Wright both more engaging, more pastorally relevant (surrounded as I was by many student Christian groups all claiming to be “the real thing”) and making more sense of the Bible. So I got on with adult Christian life, effectively, as an NPP neophyte Christian, although I wasn’t aware there was any such thing, and without any emotional or intellectual attachment to an old perspective. That means, effectively, that I come at Paul from a history diametrically opposed to Bird’s, which made reading the book a particularly interesting exercise.

I will begin here with a couple of general observations, then go on in a second post to look at some specifics, before finishing up with some general questions in the final post.

First, I have found the way in which Bird engages with the perspectives of both sides of the argument helpful, engaging, careful and eirenic. This book provides a much needed interaction that is not simply concerned to score points and win arguments. Wright can’t see a view he disagrees with without taking out a sledgehammer, and some of his opponents have returned the compliment with knobs on. Bird is never less than thoughtful and courteous, which makes it much easier to engage with the substance of his position, and consider his case. As I result, I have found myself far more disposed to assess (some) Reformed interpretations positively.

Second, as is perhaps inevitable with a book most of whose component parts are largely drawn from previously published essays, there is some degree of repetition, but generally the pieces fit together well enough. The initial chapters tackle a number of issues, the meaning of righteousness (2), the relationship of justification and resurrection (3), different ways of conceiving righteousness (4), and an overview of contended issues between the perspectives (5). In my view chapter 6 provides the heart of the book as a detailed narrative exposition of justification in Galatians and Romans, which shows that Bird’s reading is, at the very least, historically and contextually plausible, and rhetorically and theologically coherent in the way it fits the different pieces together. This kind of exercise, which accounts for both details and the whole, is one in which Wright is often at his strongest (even where cavalier and wrong), and often (in my view) some of his opponents are at their weakest (even when roundhead and right). It is good and very thought-provoking to have a different, thought-provoking and coherent reading of this type. Almost, he does persuade me …

The final substantive chapter (7) tries to deal with assessing the argument of Romans 2 in the light of this overall scheme. Then comes a kind of epilogue (8) which is, in the light of the preceding arguments, a plea for peace to break out among evangelicals. In particular he highlights the irony of the way in which some strongly Reformed people are treating (dis)agreement with Tom Wright as a boundary marker of who belongs to the true reformed people of God (p192). (I must say that some of the attitudes he reports here were not only new to me, but quite astonishing.) In the same place he also notes that he has “learnt to be wary of Anglicans bearing gifts.” I don’t know whether, should he stumble across this post — and if he does I hope he will correct any mischaracterizations — he ought to be wary of this catholic Anglican’s take on his work, but I intend to press on.³

1. Paternoster 2007, ISBN978-1-84227-465-1 [↩]
2. Gavin Reid (ed.) Collins 1980 [↩]
3. (As a postscript, I hope Bird encourages his publisher to fire their proof-reader. There were far too many irritating little linguistic errors in the type-setting, which I found generally distracting from the text, of which the most egregious is “Our forefather’s in the faith new the value …” – p191 n29) [↩]