MetaCatholic

(For the earlier posts on Piper’s book The Future of Justification, see, in order, here, here, here and here. I expect this to be the final post in this short series).

Another part of Wright’s summary of Paul that Piper objects to strenuously is his characterisation of the gospel. For Wright, the good news is understood against the background of the Old Testament narrative taken as a whole, but particularly of (deutero-)Isaiah’s proclamation: How beautiful upon the mountains are the feet of the messenger who announces peace, who brings good news, who announces salvation, who says to Zion, “Your God reigns.” (Isaiah 52:7)

For Wright this theological statement is also a political one, that implicitly opposes language of Jesus as Saviour to that of the Emperor as saviour and bringer of peace. So, in Wright’s understanding, the gospel is fundamentally the announcement that God has become the King triumphant. He has broken the power of evil, defeated sin and the devil, and rescued humanity and reconciled us to himself in peace, all through Christ crucified in obedient faithfulness and vindicated by God’s answering covenant fidelity in the resurrection. The good news is a proclamation of God’s triumph to which we are invited to respond. It is not a system of salvation, a set of steps to “get saved” or a doctrine of justification.

Piper’s first objection is somewhat facile, and reveals how little he has either grasped Wright’s point, or been able to free himself from thinking in older individual terms:

The summons “Believe the gospel of Jesus’ death and resurrection” has no content that is yet clearly good news. Not until the gospel preacher tells the listener what Jesus offers him personally and freely does this proclamation have the quality of good news.¹

This is, I think, quite extraordinary. the defeat of sin and evil, peace on a cosmic scale, these things are not good news until they have been individualised. But this is precisely Wright’s point, I think. There is only any chance of transformation, reconciliation and obedience for the individual because God has triumphed globally for humanity through the second Adam. It is good news—absolutely—before and without any individual response. It doesn’t become good news when individuals are told how it affects them, any more than VE-day only ended World War II one person at a time as they were told about it.

Then comes a more significant theological objection:

The announcement that Jesus is the Messiah, the imperial Lord of the universe, is not good news, but is an absolutely terrifying message to a sinner who has spent all his life ignoring or blaspheming the God and Father of the Lord Jesus Christ and is therefore guilty of treason and liable to execution.²

Well, I guess it depends what picture you have of God. Wright’s, and Paul’s, is of the one who gifts salvation to the undeserving, of the God who “proves his love for us in that while we still were sinners Christ died for us.” (Romans 5:8). The good news of Christ’s triumph is good news precisely because it is the crucified one who is the risen Lord and no other. It is good news because it demonstrates just how far God goes for us, and who he truly is: not the vengeful deity seeking to punish, but the merciful deity seeking to restore.

Piper follows this up with a psychologising approach to Paul, suggesting how he must have felt:

I do not think it would be wild speculation to suggest that when Saul, who had hated Jesus and his followers, fell to the ground under the absolute, sovereign authority of the irresistible brightness of the living Jesus, his first thoughts would not be about his concepts, but about his survival. His first thoughts would not be about a new worldview and a new vocation, but whether he would at that moment be destroyed.³

This, of course, is indeed “wild speculation”. There is nothing to encourage such thinking in either Paul’s own words, or in the three accounts of this Luke portrays. This attempt to psychologise Paul has lain at the root of rather too many expositions of justification. Whether Paul the man with the nagging conscience (see the earlier criticisms of Stendahl that anticipated some aspects of NPP views) or Paul the absolutely terrified, this line of argument has little basis in the text.

But Piper goes a step further:

The good news was not that Jesus died and was raised—that was emphatically bad news at this moment! What turned that bad news of death and resurrection into good news was the teaching—the doctrine—that by faith alone this life and death of Jesus could be the ground of the justification of the ungodly, not condemnation. And this good news came before Paul ever thought through his new worldview with Jesus as the King and himself as his ambassador.⁴

This is as extraordinary an argument as anything else Piper offers. It is precisely God’s identification of Jesus—who as the crucified one was cursed by the Law— as his Messiah through the resurrection which turns Paul’s world upside down. And Paul experiences this news as powerful in its merciful address which summons him to be a herald of the same good news. There is, notably, in none of the accounts of this “conversion” any call to repentance or faith, conventionally understood, but instead a summons to obedience and a new vocation. Paul’s experience of Jesus’ proclamation of his victory later leads to his understanding of justification and the outworking of God’s mercy. To say, however, as Piper says, that this doctrine is the basis of the good news Paul hears is eisegesis apotheosised.

The only possible explanation for Piper’s rejection of Wright, here as in the rest of the issues this brief series has looked at, is that he is so accustomed to his doctrinal spectacles, that he has entirely forgotten that he is wearing them. There are a number of places where one can take issue with Wright, both in the detail and in the development of some of his major themes. But on these points where Piper chooses to engage him – issues perhaps especially significant for the evangelical constituency – it is fairly clear to me that it is Wright who engages the text, for better or worse, and Piper who reads his tradition into it.

1. p86 [↩]
2. p86 [↩]
3. p87 [↩]
4. pp 87-88 [↩]