Phil Johnson - A New Perspective on Paul?

A number of you who are in attendance today are having some time in a certain worldwide chat channel that I happen to be the owner of. You should be very thankful to our next speaker because if it were not for him, that would not exist.

The man who got me into doing that is our next speaker. He has never had that used as one of his introductory statements before, but we always like to try to do new things here. Phil Johnson, of course, is an author in his own right, but also has probably edited more pages of text than most of us will ever read in our lives.

Editors are very important people, but they don't get a lot of the kudos that they really deserve. If you have found materials online regarding Charles Spurgeon, if you've ever jumped on Google and jumped onto Phil's site to read something from Spurgeon, his site looked that good before any of the rest of us knew how to make websites look good.

I'm not sure how he did that, but he managed to pull that off. In the midst of all this, he truly enjoys the study of theology and the teaching of theology, and so I'm very thankful to have Phil Johnson with us today.

I hope you are listening to these issues because I know Phil's heart. I certainly know my heart in the sense that these issues of imputation, the nature of justification, these are not just theoretical issues.

These are not things where theologians just sit around and ponder how best to publish a new paper or a new viewpoint on this. This is the very basis upon which we have peace with God, as was just said.

It defines the proclamation of our gospel, and so these are vitally important issues. I hope that you're aware of that, and that as you have the opportunity of hearing these fine speakers presenting this information, that you're taking good notes and that you'll avail yourself if you have the opportunity of speaking with them further.

So without any further ado, I'd like to ask Phil Johnson to come and speak with us. Thank you.

Reviewing N.T. Wright’s *What St. Paul Really Said*

Thank you, James. My assignment in this hour is to give a critical review of an influential book by Anglican author N .T. Wright, who is the Bishop of Durham. The book is titled, What St. Paul Really Said, and it's a fairly thin paperback, fewer than 200 pages, won't even stand up, and although Wright is a prolific author, best known and most influential because of his massive scholarly works, this little book, which is written in a simple style for the layperson, the serious layperson really, this book has undoubtedly been the most influential and perhaps the most controversial of all his published works.

One of its aims is to explain the so-called new perspective on Paul in a clear and concise format so that lay readers can grasp the main ideas. The book is easy to read, it's thought-provoking, Wright is a gifted writer, his style in this book is warm and winsome, and in fact he no doubt anticipated that he would have critics when he wrote the book and so throughout the book he makes every effort to disarm his critics.

Evangelical readers who know Wright by reputation are likely to read him with great sympathy. In his other works, Wright has skillfully defended the historicity of Jesus, the truth of the resurrection against the skepticism and the liberal scholarship of people like the Jesus Seminar, and lots of evangelicals therefore know Wright best from his excellent work in this realm of scholarly apologetics, and we do owe him a great debt for the clarity and the force with which he has answered the left wing of contemporary scholarship.

But it is my strong conviction that the position Wright lays out in what St. Paul really said is not an evangelical position at all. It's a faulty and dangerous reinterpretation of Paul and it misunderstands scripture in a way that fatally undermines the doctrine of justification by faith and the principle of sola fide, which is what our conference is about this weekend.

Now I'm going to show you why I believe that, and at the end of my message I want to give you as many biblical reasons for rejecting the new perspective as I can possibly sort of pack into the hour that I have.

I'm going to edit my notes as I go because we're short on time and I don't want to go over time like everybody else has done. But let me just start by explaining the basics of the new perspective on Paul according to N .T. Wright from this book, and then I'll give you some biblical arguments for why I think Wright's perspective is the wrong perspective.

Now I'll try to give you a thumbnail overview of this book as we go, what St. Paul really said. I'll highlight for you six distinctives of the new perspective according to Wright. I'll be quoting a lot from Wright and I've tried to limit my quotations to what he says in this one book so that when I quote him and simply give a page number, that's a reference from what St. Paul really said, published in the United States by Erdmann's, copyright 1997.

The same book is published in England by Lion Publishing Company. Now, here, according to N .T. Wright, is what St. Paul really said. He begins by giving us a sketch of the pedigree of 20th century scholarship on Paul.

I'd intended to give you a sort of summary of that, but I'm going to edit that out for time's sake. Let me just say that he names a number of significant scholars, starting with Albert Schweitzer and going all the way up to E .P. Sanders and James D .G. Dunn.

And virtually every name that's associated with the pedigree of the new perspective is non-evangelical. Most of them would repudiate many of the doctrines you and I would deem essential to Christianity, starting with the authority of Scripture.

Wright's point seems to be that the new perspective on Paul has an impressive scholarly pedigree. What I want to point out is that these views are rooted in the kind of scholarship that has historically been hostile to evangelical distinctives, such as the authority and the inspiration of Scripture.

And it's ironic, I think, and not without significance, that the earliest exponents of this new expertise on Paul were all men who were happy to discard whatever portions of the Pauline writings didn't fit their theories.

And so you have these experts on Paul at the foundation of this system who frankly reject a large portion of what the Apostle Paul really wrote. In short, that is not the kind of pedigree that ought to inspire the confidence of evangelical scholars.

And I rather suspect that evangelicals would frankly have very little interest in the new perspective on Paul at all if it were not for the work of Wright, who many evangelical scholars respect for the work he has done in defense of the historicity of the Resurrection.

First Distinctive: A Misreading of First-Century Judaism

Now here are six distinctives of N .T. Wright's perspective on Paul, and I'll give them to you in a somewhat logical order. First of all, Wright begins with the assertion that New Testament scholars have badly misunderstood first century Judaism.

This misunderstanding, according to Wright, actually dates far back, at least to the early fifth century, during Augustine's battle with Pelagius. Wright also claims that this growing sort of misunderstanding of Judaism reached its zenith with Luther and the Reformers, in other words, historic Protestantism.

Wright thinks evangelicals in particular have perpetuated a misunderstanding of Paul because of our systematic and theological approach to the Bible. And we're guilty, he says, of thinking in Greek categories rather than Jewish ones.

We've been too prone to read Augustine's conflict with Pelagius back into the Apostle Paul, and Luther's conflict with Rome, same thing. And that has corrupted, he says, our understanding of the text and prejudiced our reading of the Apostle Paul and twisted up our understanding of Jewish culture during the time of Paul.

But according to Wright and all the other proponents of the new perspective on Paul, Judaism in the time of Paul and Jesus did not teach any form of works righteousness. That's the claim they're making.

Judaism, they say, had nothing in common with Pelagianism. Instead, according to Sanders and Dunn and Wright, who are the three most prominent living exponents of this view, all of them agree that if you study the records of Second Temple Judaism, there is a strong emphasis on divine grace and there's a covenantal focus that rules out the notion of works righteousness completely.

In fact, here's how Wright says it from page 32. He says, I'm convinced Ed Sanders is right. We have misjudged early Judaism, especially Phariseeism, if we have thought of it as an early version of Pelagianism.

And he goes on to say, still page 32, this point is clearly of enormous importance, but I cannot do more than repeat it in case there's any doubt, Jews like Saul of Tarsus were not interested in an abstract, timeless, ahistorical system of salvation.

They were not even primarily interested in, as we say today, going to heaven when they died, unquote. And so, according to Wright, we have badly misunderstood Judaism and that leads to a second key idea of the new perspective.

Having misunderstood Judaism, we have therefore misinterpreted what Paul was saying against his critics, against the Judaizers. We've misunderstood all of Paul's polemics. Because obviously, if the Pharisees were not legalists, Paul could not have been arguing against legalism per se.

He wasn't even primarily concerned with the question of how an individual can be right with God. Page 20, Wright says this, despite a long tradition to the contrary, the problem Paul addresses in Galatians is not the question of how precisely someone becomes a Christian or attains a relationship with God.

He says in parentheses, I'm not even sure how Paul would express in Greek the notion of relationship with God, but we'll leave that aside. He says the problem he addresses is this, should ex-pagan converts be circumcised or not?

Now, he says, this question is by no means obviously to do with the questions faced by Augustine and Pelagius or by Luther and Erasmus. On anyone's reading, but especially within its first century context, the problem has to do, quite obviously, with the question of how you define the people of God.

Are they to be defined by the badges of the Jewish race or in some other way? Now, Wright is explicitly acknowledging that if the new perspective is correct and first century Judaism had no issue with works righteousness, then all the traditional interpretations of Romans, Galatians, and all the other Pauline epistles must be thrown out the window and we have to go back to square one in our exegesis of the Apostle Paul.

That's what the new perspective is all about. Now, Wright's critics, including me, have pointed out that this is a pretty audacious claim. Wright is claiming, in effect, that he is the first person in the history of the church, or at least since the time of Augustine, who has correctly understood the Apostle Paul.

He doesn't really even agree with Sanders and Dunn. So he thinks he's the first person who's really understood the New Testament. Now, Wright is pretty careful not to ever state explicitly that he thinks this would require a complete overhaul of Protestant confessional standards.

Never comes out and says that. And some of Wright's Presbyterian advocates in America have denied with great passion that Wright's beliefs pose any kind of threat whatsoever to the historic Protestant creeds.

But it would seem patently obvious to me that if the whole foundation of our Pauline exegesis is brought back to square one, then you can also throw out every creed and every systematic theology ever written by anyone who adhered to the old perspective on Paul, and start all over in our theology as well.

If Wright is correct, I think that's what we need to do. And in practice, that is exactly what's happening. That is the very upheaval you're beginning to see, and that's being addressed in this conference because it's arisen in various controversies that have come up because of this new perspective on Paul.

But let's move on. Here's a third idea in the logical flow of Tom Wright's new perspective. According to Wright, Protestant scholars have historically mistaken what Paul meant when he spoke of the works of the law.

The works of the law. Of course, the Apostle Paul used that phrase repeatedly. In fact, in one verse, Galatians 2 .16, he uses it three times in that one verse alone. Galatians 2 .16, knowing that a man is not justified by the works of the law, but by faith in Jesus Christ, even we have believed in Christ Jesus, that we might be justified by faith in Christ and not by the works of the law.

For by the works of the law, no flesh shall be justified. According to Wright, when Paul wrote that, and whenever he spoke of the works of the law, he didn't have in mind the moral requirements of the law.

He had in mind a very narrow segment of Moses' law. According to Wright, what he had in mind was the badges of Jewish nationalism, circumcision, the dietary laws, the priesthood, the holy days, and whatnot.

In other words, he's talking about the ceremonial law. Quoting again from page 120, Wright says this, that the question, he says, the question Paul is addressing in Galatians is, quote, the question of how you define the people of God.

Are they to be defined by the badges of the Jewish race or in some other way, unquote. And so according to Wright, Paul is not deliberately ruling out works as an instrument in justification. Instead, by Wright's understanding, Paul was merely saying that the distinctly Jewish elements of Moses' law, the ethnic badges of Judaism, those things that we think of as the ceremonial law, those things do not guarantee covenant membership and they cannot be used to exclude Gentiles from covenant membership.

Or to put it as concisely as I can, Wright is suggesting that Galatians 2 .16 and other texts like it are not intended to deny that meritorious human works have any role whatsoever in justification. And that brings up a fourth major idea Wright sets forth in his book, and this one is huge.

It's the source of most of the controversy surrounding Wright's book. He says this, he says that we have utterly misconstrued Paul's doctrine of justification by faith. He says we've let, read Luther back into Paul and in Wright's words, page 117, this way of reading Romans has systematically done violence to the text for hundreds of years and it's time for the text itself to be heard again, unquote.

Wright goes on, he says this, Paul may or may not have agreed with Augustine, Luther, or anyone else about how people come to a personal knowledge of God in Christ, but he does not use the language of justification to denote this event or process, unquote.

But Wright insists that in the true Pauline theology, justification by faith has almost nothing to do with a person standing before God, but it has everything to do with the corporate makeup of the covenant community.

Listen to Wright again, page 119, justification in the first century was not about how someone might establish a relationship with God. It was about God's eschatological definition, both future and present of who was in fact a member of his people.

In Sanders' terms, it was not so much about getting in or indeed about staying in as about how you could tell who was in. In standard Christian theological language, it wasn't so much about soteriology as about ecclesiology, not so much about salvation as about the church, unquote.

And so in Wright's view, justification is not about how we relate to God. It's about how ethnic and cultural groups relate to one another. Page 122, justification is the doctrine which insists that all who share faith in Christ belong at the same table, no matter what their racial differences, unquote.

And so in Wright's estimation, justification is an ecumenical and ecclesiological doctrine. It's not a soteriological one. Page 158, Paul's doctrine of justification by faith impels the churches in their current fragmented state.

He's talking about people today. This impels us in our current fragmented state into the ecumenical task. It cannot be right that the very doctrine which declares that all who believe in Jesus belong at the same table, Galatians 2, should be used as a way of saying that some who define the doctrine of justification differently belong at a different table.

The doctrine of justification, in other words, is not merely a doctrine in which Catholic and Protestant might just be able to agree on as a result of hard ecumenical endeavor. He says it is itself the ecumenical doctrine, the doctrine that rebukes all our petty and often culture-bound groupings, and which declares that all who believe in Jesus belong together in one family.

The doctrine of justification is in fact the great ecumenical doctrine.". Now we might ask, having read that, regardless of what your view on ecumenism might be, you read that and ask, is there no soteriological or personal dimension in Wright's understanding of justification?

Well there is, and this is one of the most troubling aspects of his work. Like many today who are proposing new understandings of the doctrine of justification, Wright bifurcates justification into immediate and future aspects, and he pushes the personal and salvific dimensions of justification into the eschatological future in a final judgment.

Page 129, present justification declares on the basis of faith what future justification will affirm publicly on the basis of the entire life.". Now that's troubling for two reasons, deeply troubling.

First, notice it makes a person's covenant faithfulness, obedience, the basis of his entire life, he says. That is the basis of final justification. Thus grounding the ultimate declaration of righteousness in the believer's own works rather than grounding justification completely in the finished work of Christ on our behalf.

And second, by dividing justification into immediate and future aspects, Wright has unwittingly made justification into a process. Now it would be simplistic and unfair to characterize Wright's view of justification as the precise equivalent of post-Reformation Roman Catholicism.

I'm not saying that. But I am saying, and I think it's a fair point to make, that there is a definite Romanizing tendency in that view. It does have more in common with Trent than it does with Geneva.

And even though Wright's defenders have tried desperately to exonerate him from charges like that, it seems clear to me that throughout his book, he is self-consciously and deliberately rejecting the main distinctive, the material principle of the Protestant Reformation.

In Luther's words, this is the article by which the church stands or falls. In Calvin's words, as we heard this morning, this is the principle hinge of religion. But Wright misses no opportunity to dis or downplay or caricature Luther and the Reformers.

Their views are regularly dismissed as Western. Wright says on page 113 that the classic Reformed understanding of justification, quote, does not do justice to the richness and precision of Paul's doctrine and indeed distorts it at various points, unquote.

And while he carefully avoids saying so explicitly, Wright's main point, the direction in which his book consistently pushes readers, is a flat-out renunciation of the view of justification that sparked the Protestant Reformation.

Wright's notion of justification is clearly at odds with the doctrine of justification as understood by Luther and Calvin and every significant writer in the lineage of the Reformation. And you see this most clearly in the fifth distinctive of Wright's position I want to highlight for you.

Here's idea number five if you're making a list of these. According to Wright, Protestant and Reformed exegetes in the mainstream of evangelical theology have all misread what Paul meant when he spoke of the righteousness of God.

According to Wright, divine righteousness is not an asset that can be imputed from God to the believer. It has nothing to do with virtue or excellence or moral rectitude that can be imputed. Instead, God's righteousness is simply His covenant faithfulness.

And when Paul speaks of the believer's righteousness as a righteousness that comes from God, according to Wright, he is talking about covenant membership, our status in the covenant, which ultimately must be maintained by our own faithfulness.

Now, those ideas may seem to contain an implicit denial of the classic doctrine of imputation, and I believe that is precisely what Wright is saying. He downplays or denies or redefines the principle of imputation at every point.

Listen to this quote from page 98. If we use the language of the law court, it makes no sense whatsoever to say that the judge imputes, imparts, bequeaths, conveys, or otherwise transfers his righteousness to either the plaintiff or the defendant.

Righteousness is not an object, a substance, or a gas which can be passed across the courtroom. And according to Wright, page 123, 1 Corinthians 1 verse 30 is, quote, the only passage I know of where something called the imputed righteousness of Christ, a phrase found more often in post-reformation theology and piety than in the New Testament, finds any basis in the text, unquote.

And Wright then goes on to argue that if we're going to claim 1 Corinthians 1 verse 30 as a proof text about the imputation of Christ's righteousness, then, quote, we must also be prepared to talk of the imputed wisdom of Christ, the imputed sanctification of Christ, and so on.

Say what you will about Wright, he himself makes it abundantly clear that he does not like the notion of imputation because he doesn't believe divine righteousness is something that can be reckoned or put to the account of the believer.

And he is equally silent, ominously silent, about the biblical teaching that the believer's guilt was imputed to Christ and paid for at the cross. Now that's a longer summary than I wanted to give, but I think it's all important ground to cover to review in case you were taking notes and you missed anything.

These are the five key distinctives of Tom Wright's perspective on Paul. One, he says that we've misunderstood first century Judaism. Two, he says we've misinterpreted Paul's argument with the Judaizers.

Three, he says we have mistaken what Paul meant by the expression, works of the law. Four, he says we've misconstrued Paul's doctrine of justification by faith. And five, he says we have misread what Paul meant when he spoke of the righteousness of God.

And therefore, he says, we haven't got the gospel right at all. And he says this repeatedly, page 60, the gospel is not for Paul a message about how one gets saved in an individual and ahistorical sense, page 41.

And here's how Wright describes what he is convinced is a misunderstanding of the gospel, quote, in certain circles within the church, the gospel is supposed to be a description of how people get saved, of the theological mechanism whereby, in some people's language, Christ takes our sin and we his righteousness, unquote.

Some people's language? Well, Wright himself disdains to use such language. He is careful to insist that he's not intolerant of people who do use that language. He goes on, page 41, I'm perfectly comfortable with what people normally mean when they say the gospel.

I just don't think it's what Paul means, unquote. But you know what? If that's not what Paul means, then it's not what scripture means. Is Wright suggesting that Protestants historically have proclaimed a different gospel?

It would certainly be uncharacteristic of Tom Wright to anathematize anyone. But he does rather clearly imply that he thinks Protestants have been getting the gospel wrong since the 16th century. He says he has no problem with what people mean when they say the gospel, and he also seems to try to stop short of explicitly denying the imputation of Christ's righteousness, the idea of propitiation, and the principle of penal substitution.

He never comes right out and denies those things, but he does say that he cannot find those truths in scripture. And if you'll permit me to think in Greek categories for a minute, it seems to me that that's tantamount to saying those doctrines are untrue.

If we can't find them in scripture, then they're not true. Now maybe that's too harsh a conclusion to draw. But frankly, if Wright really has no agenda to undermine the heart of historic Protestant theology, then I would think he ought to do more to affirm the central principle of Protestant theology, the truth that Paul himself so succinctly states in 2 Corinthians 5 .21 that God made Christ who knew no sin to be sin for us that we might become the righteousness of God in Him.

The Apostle Paul himself teaches everywhere that no sinner can stand before God on any ground other than the work of Christ who, according to the Apostle Paul, came into the world to save sinners, of whom I am chief.

And that is the very principle of individual justification and forgiveness of sin that Tom Wright claims he can't find in Paul's teaching. Now I promise to give you as many biblical answers to Tom Wright's new perspective as time allows, and in the time that remains, that's what I want to do.

Let me try to answer each one of these five ideas that I've outlined with at least one or two biblical arguments. I could give you more, but we've got to hurry for time's sake. So let's deal with these one at a time, each of these five distinctives.

First Biblical Answers: Judaism, the Judaizers, and the Works of the Law

First, there's the notion that we have misunderstood first century Judaism. I answer that Tom Wright has erred by lending more credence to secular scholarship than he does to the testimony of Scripture itself.

We ought to draw our understanding of first century and the religious climate in the Jewish world of that time from the New Testament itself, and not from the disputed conclusions of a handful of skeptical 20th century scholars who refuse to bow to the authority of Scripture.

And what does Scripture say about the religion of the Jews and the Pharisees in particular? Scripture clearly teaches that their central error was that they trusted too much in their own righteousness rather than resting their faith in the Old Testament truth that God would cover them with the garment of His own righteousness.

And Paul says this explicitly in Romans 10, verse 3, they being ignorant of God's righteousness and seeking to establish their own righteousness have not submitted themselves to the righteousness of God.

Jesus also said it repeatedly. He constantly criticized the Pharisees for trying to justify themselves. Remember the parable of the Pharisee and the publican? Luke 18, verse 9, Jesus told that parable, Luke says, unto certain who trusted in themselves that they were righteous and despised others.

They trusted in themselves that they were righteous. That's the very perspective, Tom Wright says, didn't really exist in first century Judaism. And the whole point of Paul's testimony in Philippians 3 was to show that he had once had confidence in the flesh.

Those are Paul's precise words in Philippians 3, 4. But he says he turned from that, jettisoned his own self-righteousness, came to regard it as dung, testified now that his one hope as a Christian and a believer was to be found in Christ, not having my own righteousness, which is from the law, but that which is through faith in Christ, the righteousness which is from God by faith.

And Wright tries to do away with the force of that text by removing the word righteousness from it completely. He gives a paraphrase that suggests what Paul was really talking about there was covenant membership.

But both the context and the very words of the passage prove that what Paul was describing was the difference between two contrasting ideas of righteousness. One he calls my own righteousness, and the other an alien righteousness, the righteousness of God in Christ.

Wright is simply wrong, egregiously wrong, when he suggests that self-righteousness was not a problem in first century Judaism. By the way, Wright is making a caricature of the historic Protestant position when he suggests that most interpreters have equated first century Judaism with Pelagianism.

I don't know of anyone who would do that. Pelagianism, as Wright describes it, is the notion that sinners can pull themselves up by their own bootstraps. Pelagius, you know, denied original sin, and therefore said that sinners are not totally unable to make righteous decisions or to save themselves, and so Pelagius ended up teaching a kind of self-salvation, where people would save themselves through their own works and their own righteous choices.

It was the ultimate sort of free will religion. Now of course Judaism in the first century was not like that. Of course Judaism had a major emphasis on grace and the mercy of God. The Pharisees knew the Old Testament, and the idea of grace was plainly prominent in the Old Testament.

But the religion of the Pharisees and the bulk of first century Judaism had corrupted the Old Testament idea of grace, watered it down. And so their religion wasn't like Pelagianism, which is utterly devoid of grace, but it was much like semi-Pelagianism, which has a watered down notion of grace and still places too much stress on human works.

Whereas semi-Pelagianism suggests that grace is enough to get your foot in the door, but you have to maintain your salvation or your covenant membership by your own faithfulness or your own obedience to the law.

And even in the way Tom Wright himself describes first century Judaism, it is clear that there was a semi-Pelagian tendency in that religion. And frankly, one of my great concerns with Wright and others who have followed his lead such as Norman Shepard and the Auburn Avenue Movement, one of my great concerns with them is this, their notion of covenant faithfulness, where a person maintains his membership in the covenant by legal means through obedience and looks for a final justification that is at least partly grounded or based on their own life of obedience, human works, that smacks too much of neo-Nomian legalism for my tastes because it turns the gospel into a new law.

And indeed, one of the things these men have tried to do is obliterate any distinction between gospel and law. Classic neo-Nomianism, a toned down legal system where the requirements are diminished, the requirements of the law are diminished so that imperfect obedience counts as true obedience.

That's neo-Nomianism and it makes the sinner's own works either the ground or the instrument of final justification. And that kind of thinking, frankly, has the stench of semi-Pelagianism all over it.

It's a subtle form of works righteousness. But because, frankly, that is Wright's own theology, he can't seem to discover the error of it in the New Testament's condemnations of the Pharisees' works religions.

Now not to get sidetracked, what about the second of Wright's distinctives here? What about this charge that we have misinterpreted Paul's argument against the Judaizers? My reply is that if Wright is correct and the only issue Paul was concerned about was racial and cultural divisions in the Galatian churches and elsewhere, then the force of Paul's response is a little bit hard to understand.

If Paul's plea was merely an echo of Rodney King theology, you know, why can't we all just get along? It's hard to see why Paul himself pronounced such harsh anathemas against the Judaizers in Galatians 1.

In effect, Paul banned them from the table Wright insists ought to be open to everyone who acknowledges Jesus as Lord. And why does Paul refer to the teaching of the Judaizers as another gospel if the gospel is only a proclamation of Jesus' Lordship?

There's no hint whatsoever anywhere in Scripture that the Judaizers' doctrine contained any deliberate denial of the Lordship of Christ. I'm convinced Wright would have been happy with what the Judaizers were proclaiming.

But what they corrupted was the truth that justification is by faith alone, sola fide. And if Wright is right, Paul might have corrected their error, but he would have had no reason to anathematize them.

He's not right. And what about this third distinctive? Wright says we've mistaken what Paul meant by the expression, works of the law. Well, Romans 3 verse 20 alone blows that argument to smithereens.

I could quote many more verses, but listen to Romans 3 .20. Paul says, "...by the deeds of the law there shall no flesh be justified in his sight, for by the law is the knowledge of sin.". It's the moral law, not the ceremonial law that puts our sin under a bright light and condemns us.

Paul is not talking about ceremonial law here. He's not talking about ethnic badges. He's talking about the moral demands of the law. And he's saying as plainly as possible that the law, with all its high moral standards, can't possibly justify us because it condemns us as sinners.

Not only is Paul contrasting the law with our sin, making it clear that he's at least including the moral law when he says the law can't justify us, but he also implicitly, notice, contrasts justification with condemnation.

Which makes it clear that when Paul speaks of justification, he's talking about an individual's standing before God at the bar of justice. And that's as good a place as any to move on to this fourth idea of Wright's new perspective.

Justification by Faith and the Righteousness of God

Number four, he says we've misconstrued Paul's doctrine of justification by faith. I reply that it is he who has twisted and deformed the biblical concept of justification almost beyond recognition. Remember that the starting point of the Apostle Paul's gospel is Romans 1 .17, the wrath of God against sin.

This is the dilemma Paul sets up. And when Paul goes through two chapters, two and a half chapters, proving that everyone is guilty of sin, and so when he launches into his discussion of Romans 3, that is what he's still talking about.

That's the context demonstrates that. It's about our sinfulness. Wright's definition of justification as covenant membership downplays and frankly almost completely eliminates the ideas of sin and forgiveness from the doctrine of justification completely.

But forgiveness and redemption from guilt are the very issues Paul is dealing with in Romans 3 and 4. And Paul's illustrations and the Old Testament proofs he adduces make it clear that what he is talking about is first of all individual, not corporate justification.

He's dealing with guilt, not merely covenantal status. Romans 4, verses 4 and 5. Now to the one who works, his wages are not counted as grace but as debt. But to the one who does not work and believes on him who justifies the ungodly, his faith, his faith is accounted, reckoned, imputed for righteousness.