MetaCatholic

I’ve noted before that Tom Wright has become a particular target of concern among many, especially American, evangelicals. This seems to be in large part due to his clarity of expression, overt commitment to Scripture, and vast literary output. Although his opponents express themselves as being against the New Perspective on Paul (NPP) more generally, it is particularly Wright whom they see as the danger: he actually sounds like an evangelical, whereas the others can be safely (if often erroneously) dismissed as liberals.

Last month Nick Norelli noted that John Piper, a preaching heavy-weight of the conservative Reformed tradition, had stepped up to the plate to argue against Wright. To help disseminate his views he had placed his book The Future of Justification online. Chris Tilling gave it a quick look and claimed that he “smelt the wrong interpretive lens all over it.” An amusing comment by Jacob Paul Breeze on his semi-defunct blog implied a similar point:

If you observed the art on the two Dr.’s books you’ll see the presuppositions: Piper has Luther on the cover and Wright has Paul on the cover.

Whatever the merits of the arguments, in one respect both Piper and Wright are to be commended. Piper sent Wright a draft of the book for comment, and received back an 11,000 word essay.¹ This is a much more positive way to engage than one usually encounters.

While I’m certainly not a paid-up member of the Tom Wright fan-club, I do think he’s done some excellent work on Paul, especially in some of his earlier essays in The Climax of the Covenant.² I also broadly identify with NPP views, and think that much of the resistance to them is due to a desire to hold on to Reformation traditions of reading scripture, ahead of actually reading scripture — anomalous and strange though that be for anyone who calls themselves evangelical.

What I want to do, starting in this more general post, but spilling over into several more specific others is look at some of the arguments used against Wright, and try to see if this initial assessment is correct. I shall use Piper’s book as the exemplary case against Wright and the NPP. I am aware of others, such as the more academic collection Justification and Variegated Nomism³ but although that is the work of NT specialists (unlike Piper), it is not only about the concept of “covenantal nomism” more specifically, but in many of its essays(though not in the mind or epilogue of Don Carson, its principal editor) it actually supports much of the NPP case.

This is how Piper describes things:⁴

My conviction concerning N. T. Wright is not that he is under the curse of Galatians 1:8–9, [i.e. for preaching “another gospel”] but that his portrayal of the gospel—and of the doctrine of justification in particular—is so disfigured that it becomes difficult to recognize as biblically faithful. It may be that in his own mind and heart Wright has a clear and firm grasp on the gospel of Christ and the biblical meaning of justification. But in my judgment, what he has written will lead to a kind of preaching that will not announce clearly what makes the lordship of Christ good news for guilty sinners or show those who are overwhelmed with sin how they may stand righteous in the presence of God.

This, I think, sets the tone for the whole book, and is the problem which renders this debate so quickly fruitless. Piper, and those with him, are clear that what he believes is “the biblical meaning of justification”. Therefore, now matter how well Wright or anyone else argues their case from scripture, it is bound to be wrong unless it leads to Piper’s reading. The “biblical meaning of justification” as Piper understands it is a self-given definition: the starting point which must both determine and be the end-point of the argument. Since this “biblical meaning of justification” is self-evident to Piper as the one he has received, it is equally self-evident that any other meaning can’t be biblical. Piper may have gone through the form of a conversation with Wright while this book was in draft. It is hard to believe, when things are expressed in this way, that he has gone through the substance of such a conversation.

1. Future of Justification page 10 – all page references are to the downloaded PDF file. Unless otherwise stated all page references are to this file [↩]
2. T & T Clark, 1993 [↩]
3. Vols 1 & 2 combined, Baker Academic, 2004 [↩]
4. p 15 [↩]