The New Perspective in action

All Christian teaching has implications for Christian living. Likewise all doctrine works itself out, one way or another, into a pattern of Christian practice. Having examined the ‘New Perspective’ on justification in the two previous Briefings (#228, #229),¹ in this article, we want to explore the ‘cash value’ of the ‘New Perspective’ on justification—that is, its impact on Christian experience and ministry. Once again, we will focus our attention on the teaching of Tom Wright— partly because of the significance of the challenge he poses and partly because he (more than others) has taken the time to articulate what he sees as the practical outworkings of the ‘New Perspective’ on justification.

Having critiqued Wright's view of justification fairly strongly in our previous issue, I want to state again that there are many things to appreciate in Wright and much to affirm (e.g. his clear affirmations of the cosmic Lordship of Christ and his strong defence of Jesus' deity). Wright also has a number of commendable concerns (e.g. for historical accuracy, for theological coherence, for social justice and for the unity and holiness of the church) which give his views great appeal. However, if his teaching on justification is significantly off-target (as we have argued it is), then it will have unfortunate consequences, and may not in fact lead to the positive outcomes that Wright assures us it will.

What then are the consequences of the Wright position on justification?

A diminished gospel

The first is that Wright ends up with a diminished view of what the gospel is. How so? By the simple fact that Wright excludes justification by faith from the gospel itself. Wright is quite definite on this point. “Justification by faith”, he says, “is not what Paul means by ‘the gospel’ ... the gospel is not an account of how people get saved”.² What, then, is the gospel for Wright? It is simply “the proclamation of the lordship of Jesus Christ”. The problem here is subtle, and it's not in what Wright affirms but in what he denies. In removing justification from the gospel, Wright sets himself in conflict with the Apostle Paul on at least two counts.

First, it is quite clear from the argument of Galatians that in defending the fact “that a man is not justified by the works of the law but by faith in Jesus Christ” (2:16), Paul is defending “the truth of the gospel” (2:14). In other words, as far as Paul is concerned, the debate about justification is a debate about the gospel. This equation is confirmed not only by his teaching elsewhere (e.g. Rom 3:23-26 [cf. 1:16-17]; 4:23-25), but also by the account of Paul's preaching in Acts 13, where justification by faith is very much part of his gospel proclamation (vv. 38-39).

Second, it is also clear (particularly in the light of Acts 15:1) that the debate in Galatia over the question of justification was a debate about the way of salvation. In other words, contrary to Wright, the gospel is all about ‘how people get saved’. What this means in practice is that the proclamation of Jesus' lordship (which is clearly at the heart of the gospel message) cannot be separated from a proclamation of what the Lord has accomplished through his death and resurrection (e.g. our justification) and how his saving gifts are to be received (i.e. by faith). It is all part of the same announcement.

By removing justification from ‘the gospel’, and by insisting that neither justification nor the gospel message speak directly to the question of how people are saved, Wright has not only distorted the meaning of justification, he has also diminished and altered the gospel message. This has serious ramifications in four other areas: the practice of ministry, the nature of church unity, the foundation for holiness and the experience of assurance. We shall tackle each of these in turn.

A different ministry

The gospel for Wright is not about announcing to the world the promise of forgiveness for those who repent and turn back to God, but about ‘confronting the powers’ with the lordship of Jesus. This is an important theme in Wright's writings. What it encapsulates is his belief that the church's central task is to issue a decisive challenge to paganism (in all its various forms).³ Wright spells out what this would mean for today's gospel preachers:

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They would need, for a start, to do what Paul did, namely, to confront the powers of the world with the news that their time is up, and that they owe allegiance to Jesus himself. This is not so much a matter of telling individual politicians and powerbrokers that they need to acknowledge Jesus as the Lord of their own lives, though of course that is important as well. It is more a matter of telling them, in the name of Jesus, that there is a different way of being human ...⁴

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When Wright outlines this agenda in even more detail,⁵ it is clear that what he is talking about is socio-political action—Christians challenging and influencing society. This emphasis is commendable, and a useful corrective to much individualistic, privatized Christianity. But is this what Paul did? Is this gospel ministry? There is no doubt that Christians are commanded to do good (Gal 6:10), to pray for those in authority (1 Tim 2:1-2) and, like the Israelites in exile, to “seek the peace and prosperity of the city” (cf. Jer 29:7). But this should not be confused with the call of the gospel, which is a call to be reconciled to God on the basis of Christ's saving work (2 Cor 5:20). Paul's focus was not upon transforming the social structures of the kingdoms of this world, but upon releasing men and women from the guilt of sin and calling them into the kingdom of another world (Phil 3:20).

In fairness, Wright does not deny that “God has dealt in Jesus Christ with sin, death, guilt and shame”⁶. But what he means by this is far from clear. All the emphasis seems to fall on Christ's victory over the enslaving powers of paganism; nothing is said about Christ coming between the sinner and God's wrath.⁷ Consequently, gospel ministry is about calling and helping people out of the dehumanizing effects of sin, rather than proclaiming an already accomplished redemption from sin's condemnation. Of course, these two ought not to be in conflict. But the first is impossible without the second—a fact which gives (theo)logical, practical and temporal priority to the second!

Here is where a correct understanding of justification—particularly in regard to the problem of the judgement of God, which is both raised and resolved by it—is clearly indispensable for comprehending and exercising both authentic gospel ministry and Christian social responsibility, as well as understanding the relationship between them. But this is precisely where Wright's approach fails us.

Inadequately defined unity

In making justification an “implication of the gospel”, Wright has removed it from the category of ‘that which must be believed’, and put it (despite his claims to the contrary) in a place of secondary importance. Consequently, he is disapproving of those who have divided over the issue. As Wright puts it, “Because what matters is believing in Jesus, detailed agreement on justification itself, properly conceived, isn't the thing which should determine eucharistic fellowship”.⁸ But once again, such a view is in sharp conflict with Paul.

Disagreements about justification (because they are disagreements about the gospel and about how people are saved) are profoundly serious. Why else does Paul pronounce eternal condemnation upon those who, by promoting a contrary view of justification, are preaching another gospel (Gal 1:8-9; cf. 5:2-4)? As far as Paul was concerned, the fact that his opponents believed in Jesus was largely irrelevant. Their denial of justification by faith cut them off from Christ and put them outside of both Abraham's and God's family (Gal 5:2-4; 4:21-31). Justification is clearly worth fighting about and fighting for (Gal 2:11-14; cf. Acts 15:2) precisely because it determines who is and isn't ‘in the family’.

Wright is no doubt correct to make the point that a person can be justified by faith without realizing it or having a full understanding of the doctrine. However, this point should not be pushed too far, given that the essence of Christian faith is trusting the “God who justifies the ungodly” (Rom 4:5). Certainly once a person denies that faith alone is sufficient to justify, by insisting that something in addition to faith is necessary, they have nullified the grace of God and so fallen away from it (Gal 2:21, 5:4). Here then is a real point of division. For Paul, those who have been justified by faith cannot have fellowship with those who seek to be justified on some other basis; they belong to two different families (Gal 4:21-31).

Wright's view of Christian unity—that “all those who believe in Jesus belong at the same table”⁹—is good as far as it goes. But given the fact that even within the New Testament period there were those who preached “another Jesus” (2 Cor 11:4), the matter cannot be left there. For Paul, one of the tests of authentic Christianity was a right understanding of justification by faith. True Christian unity, then, has everything to do with this issue. Clearly petty and pointless controversies ought to be avoided at all cost. But the unity of the church must be a unity based on the truth of the gospel; otherwise it is a false unity. This means unity on the question of justification.

Ill-founded holiness

Wright's diminished view of the gospel also has adverse implications for Christian holiness. The problem is not that Wright is unconcerned about holiness. On the contrary, he asserts that if we grasp the gospel and the doctrine of justification in the way he has outlined, “there can be no danger, in our theory or practice, of a clash between ‘justification by faith’ and the Christian obligation to holiness”.¹⁰ What then is the problem? It is that in redefining justification and distancing it from the gospel, Wright has severely weakened the ground from which holiness springs.

The problem stems from the fact that Wright (as we saw last issue) understands justification as having two ‘grounds’—the one objective (Christ's work for us), the other subjective (the Spirit's work in us). More than that, he sees the Spirit's ongoing work of sanctification as the reason why the present verdict of justification correctly anticipates the future verdict. In theological terms, present justification is (partially) based on regeneration, and future justification is (partially) based on sanctification. This is not only contrary to the New Testament's teaching (cf. the arguments in our the last issue), but undermines the foundations of holiness. James Denney pinpoints the issue at stake:

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An absolute justification is needed to give the sinner a start. He must have the certainty of “no condemnation”, of being, without reserve or drawback, right with God through God's gracious act in Christ, before he can begin to live the new life.¹¹

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In other words, the question of justification must be settled before the process of sanctification can get under way. As Horatius Bonar once put it: “[t]he sinner's legal position must be set to rights before his moral position can be touched”.¹² If we ask why this must be so, the answer of Romans 8:1-4 would seem to be that sin's penalty must be removed before sin's power can begin to be broken. As Douglas Moo comments, “the Spirit can liberate the believer from sin and death only because in Christ and his cross God has already ‘condemned’ sin”.¹³ Love, then, is both the natural outworking of justification (for he who is forgiven much loves much) as well as being its commanded outworking (“Accept one another, then, just as Christ accepted you” [Rom 15:7]). In this sense, “[j]ustification is not merely a past event that inaugurates the process of sanctification; it is the enduring event that we must constantly draw upon as we live out the Christian life”.¹⁴

One of Wright's concerns with the traditional Reformed understanding of justification appears to be that it doesn't immediately answer the question as to why Christians ought to be moral. However, it is telling that this seems to have been a problem for the Apostle Paul too! His gospel of free and total justification through faith in the Lord Jesus Christ, seems to have begged the question (at least for some): “Shall we go on sinning so that grace may increase?” (Rom 6:1). Paul's answer is straightforward enough: “We died to sin; how can we live in it any longer?” (Rom 6:2). But the very fact that such a misunderstanding was possible, tells us something about Paul's preaching; that it so accented the objective nature of our justification and the consequent freedom of faith, that it sometimes required a later corrective word to be spoken, to make sure that this freedom was not misused (Gal 5:13).

In reconfiguring justification and distancing it from the gospel, Wright has been able to emphasize the importance of holiness, but in so doing he has also (unwittingly) weakened its theological and practical basis.

Undermined assurance

Finally, Wright's view of the gospel affects the believer's assurance of final salvation. The Reformers were unequivocal in their assertion that assurance was the natural reflex of saving faith. Otherwise put, assurance is confidence in Christ and the love of God demonstrated in him (Rom 5:8; 8:39). For Calvin, what this meant in practical terms was that “[w]e must seek peace for ourselves solely in the anguish of Christ our Redeemer” (Institutes, III. xiii, 4). This was not to deny the need for faith to issue in works, or the fact that works function as an evidence of genuine faith, but simply to affirm that “the certainty of faith depends on the grace of Christ alone” (Commentary 1 John 2:3). In all this the Reformers were saying no more than the apostle Paul: present justification assures us of future salvation (Rom 5:9).

Wright's presentation of Paul's doctrine of justification (and that of the New Perspective generally) undermines this assurance in two ways. First, the corporate and historical dimensions of Paul's gospel are so accented that the personal and existential aspects are virtually eclipsed.¹⁵ In fact, as part of his attack on Western individualism, Wright explicitly denies that “one is justified or saved first and foremost as an individual”.¹⁶ But what then are we to make of Paul's statement that God ‘justifies the one who has faith in Jesus’ (Rom 3:26)? Wright's communal approach to justification seems to issue in a very different message; as one writer has put it: “join our community, and you too will become righteous”.¹⁷ This is not Paul's gospel and it is disastrous for assurance. Like the apostle, each and every believer ought to be able to say, “the Son of God loved me and gave himself for me” (Gal 2:20).

Second, in carving up the ground of justification between Christ's work for us and the Spirit's work in us, and then giving sanctification an instrumental role in procuring final salvation, Wright has effectively destroyed the objective nature of our justification. The objective basis of assurance is thereby undermined, as “Christian assurance becomes entirely hostage to Christian obedience, and is not established as a constituent element of saving faith itself”.¹⁸ This is pastorally disastrous, as it drives sinners to look to themselves (and the evidence of the Spirit's work in us), rather than to Christ (and his work for us).

All of this leads to an adulteration of the grace of the gospel. Calvin speaks harshly of those who made a similar error in his own day, as well as pointing us to the only true ground for hope:

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[T]hose who prate that we are justified by faith because, being reborn, we are righteous by living spiritually have never tasted the sweetness of grace, so as to consider that God will be favourable to them ... Therefore, we must come to this remedy: that believers should be convinced that their only ground of hope for the inheritance of a Heavenly Kingdom lies in the fact that, being engrafted in the body of Christ, they are freely accounted righteous. For, as regards justification, faith is something merely passive, bringing nothing of ours to the recovering of God's favor but receiving from Christ that which we lack. (Institutes, III. xiii, 5).

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Conclusion

At the beginning of this series of articles, we noted the fact that Luther regarded justification by faith not simply as the centre of Romans, nor even of Paul's theology, but as the centre of the whole Bible. Can such a view still be maintained? My contention is that when rightly understood it can and indeed must! The reason for this, as Moo explains, is because “[j]ustification by faith is the anthropological reflex of Paul's basic conviction that what God has done in Christ for sinful human beings is entirely a matter of grace”.¹⁹ In other words, if God is going to have anything to do with sinners, it must be completely by grace on his part, and nothing but faith can be our required response.

This is not to say that justification by faith is Paul's only way of describing the grace of God in Christ. Clearly it is not. Alister McGrath is right, therefore, to suggest that “the center of Paul's thought does not lie with justification as such; rather it lies with the grace of God”.²⁰ Nor is it to play down the fact that Paul's doctrine of justification has a clear polemical thrust (appearing mainly in passages where Paul is countering Jewish boasting in the law). However, I would argue that it is precisely this combative function of the doctrine of justification that reveals its central importance for Paul's gospel. That is, when the grace of God is most under threat, the weapon for which Paul reaches in order to guard and defend it is ‘justification by faith’.

Tom Wright (and other advocates of the ‘New Perspective’ on Paul), whilst not relegating justification to the periphery of Paul's thought, have—due to their consistent socializing of Paul's doctrine, and the introduction of works into the arena of justification—effectively gutted it of its saving power and its theological centrality for Paul. What all this amounts to is an attack (albeit unintended) upon the grace and sufficiency of the gospel of Christ! This is a problem which cannot be ignored. Therefore, whilst the opportunity to rethink these issues (and be forced to re-examine what Scripture actually says) should be welcomed and some insights of the ‘New Perspective’ gratefully received, the dangers and distortions which we have noted ought to warn us against any uncritical acceptance of its claims, or any wholesale abandonment of the traditional Reformed understanding of Paul's doctrine of justification. The consequences are too many and too serious.

Endnotes

¹ For readers who are interested, more substantial and referenced versions of these first two articles will appear in the first two issues of the Reformed Theological Review in 1999.

² What Saint Paul Really Said. (Oxford: Lion, 1997), pp. 132-3 (cf. pp. 114-118).

³ New Tasks for a Renewed Church. (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1992), pp. 84-100.

⁴ What Saint Paul Really Said, p. 154.

⁵ New Tasks, pp. 124-160

⁶ What Saint Paul Really Said, p. 157

⁷ New Tasks, pp. 71-73. Wright's present understanding of Christ's death is strong on the victory aspect, but weak on any notion of penal substitution. However, from the New Testament's point of view, the first is only made possible by the second (cf. Col 2:14-15; Heb 2:14-15)

⁸ What Saint Paul Really Said, p. 159.

⁹ Ibid.

¹⁰ Ibid, pp. 159-160.

¹¹ J Denney, The Death of Christ. (Connecticut: Keats Publishing, 1981. 11902), p. 290.

¹² H Bonar, God's Way of Holiness. (Welwyn: Evangelical Press, 1979. 11864), p. 33.

¹³ DJ Moo, The Epistle to the Romans. (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1996), p. 477

¹⁴ DG Bloesch, Jesus Christ: Savior & Lord. (Downers Grove: IVP, 1997), p. 180.

¹⁵ MD Thompson, “Personal Assurance and the New Perspective on Paul”, RTR 53:2 (1994), pp. 83-84.

¹⁶ What Saint Paul Really Said, p. 158.

¹⁷ G Bray, “Justification: The Reformers and Recent New Testament Scholarship”, Churchman 109:2, 1995, p. 121.

¹⁸ DA Carson, “Reflections of Christian Assurance”, WTJ 54 (1992), p. 3.

¹⁹ DJ Moo, The Epistle to the Romans, p. 90.

²⁰ AE McGrath, “Justification”, in Dictionary of Paul and his Letters (eds. GF Hawthorne, et al). Leicester: IVP, 1993, p. 523.