St. Paul & Justification

Well, good afternoon and welcome along to Unbelievable with me, Justin Briley. It's the programme every Saturday afternoon here on Premier Christian Radio that aims to get you thinking. And we've got a wonderful pair of guests coming up today, James White and N .T. Wright.

They're going to be talking about justification, a special programme today that I know a number of people have been looking forward to since I announced it last week. But before we get their full introductions and get into today's programme, can I tell you that Unbelievable The Conference 2013 is coming on Saturday the 25th of May.

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Well, because of the theme of the conference, Unbelievable The Conference 2013, Jesus, Liar, Lunatic, Legend or Lord? And as you might be able to tell if you are into apologetics, a little bit of a reference to the Lewis trilemma, C .S. Lewis's trilemma, although I've added another category there.

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So premier .org .uk slash Jesus is the place to go. Well, let me introduce today's guests.

You're unbelievable.

Well, I've really been looking forward to having N .T. Wright. Tom is, as he's often known, Tom Wright, N .T. Wright, joining me on the programme today. Research Professor of New Testament and Early Christianity at St. Andrew's University.

And we're here to talk about what did St. Paul really say about justification? That's the question that we're looking at on today's edition of Unbelievable. Tom has, in many ways, been at the forefront of looking into the historical Jesus, the resurrection.

He's well known for some of those books he's written in those parts. Also, the nature of Paul and Paul's writing has been a major focus in the last few years. He's got a new book coming out later in the year, Paul and the Faithfulness of God.

And a lot of the arguments, though, that have been raging in the academic world, in the theological world, have been to do with what he wrote about the nature of justification, what's sometimes called the new perspective.

So we're going to get to all that. Also on the programme joining me today, a show regular he's been on a number of times before. James White joins me, Director of Alpha and Omega Ministries out in Arizona in the States.

He himself is a Bible scholar and he's part of what you would call generally the reformed tradition. He's a Calvinist. What does that mean, though, when it comes to this debate? Why particularly have some of the more influential voices in that world?

John Piper is a specific example. Today, we're talking about justification. Welcome along, Tom, to the programme.

Thank you very much. Good to be with you.

Well, as I say, I've long wanted to have you on. So when I saw that there was a possibility of you coming in, I thought, let's nab him. Let's call him at last. We're going to go with Tom, but NT Wright is how many people will know you as an author.

You seem to be able to produce more books than I've had hot dinners. What is the secret to your prolific.

Output, Tom?

There's no secret. It's simply I spent the first 20 years of my adult life doing a lot of reading, studying, praying, thinking, discussing. And sometime around just when I turned 40, I thought, you know, I've been doing this a long time.

It's time I started writing some of it down. And happily, the whole word processing thing had taken off. And I find I can use computers. I can write very fast. And so in a sense, I was planting a lot of seeds for 20 years, which have then in the last 20 years been bearing fruit.

They certainly have. And many people would see you as at the forefront of modern scholarship, especially around the person of Paul. But at the same time, doing anything new often means that people will disagree with your thesis.

Not least, as I mentioned, people like out in the States, John Piper. But what is it exactly that you've said, if you can condense it into a nutshell, that has got people both very interested, but also some people rather skeptical?

It's hard to say one thing, because there's three or four different things which kind of rush together at a certain point. For instance, one of the things that I and many others have become convinced is that many first century Jews really were living out of a long story, which goes back to Daniel nine, which says that there is a sense in which the exile hasn't finished yet, and that God needs to do something new, which will finish it.

This is based in Daniel nine. And for many people, that's very scary, the idea of a continuous story, which is now reaching fulfillment. That's not how they've seen Paul at all. But then at a quite different level, it's to do with what did first century Jews really believe that they were doing when they were keeping the law?

Were they earning favor with God or something like that? And in a sense, yes, they were in a sense, no, they weren't. My real problem is that I think I have glimpsed in the first century, a sense that they are much more concerned as Jesus himself was with God's kingdom come on earth, as in heaven.

And Western Christianity has been concerned with how to leave earth and go to heaven. And the justification debates have often been framed in that latter context. And so when I've said no, actually, this is about new creation, it's about resurrection, it's about God's new world, and how you tell in the present, who is going to be part of God's new world, people get very scared.

And so it's a combination of several different things, as well as particular texts, which have been favorites for for exegetes and preachers, and which when I've looked at them, some of them I've said, looks to me really, as though that doesn't mean what we all thought it meant.

And then that is that is very upsetting to.

People naturally, you know, well, this is what drives you, isn't it going back to the text, going back to the background of the context of those texts. And in this debate that we're having today about justification, your feeling is that very often people are looking to the sort of debates in the medieval church more than the debates that were going on in Paul's day.

Yes. Without wishing to be picky, let me just pick you up. This isn't something I feel it's something I think this is a major problem in contemporary discourse that we say feel when we mean think so sorry about that.

No, it's fine. But no, I think that the way that the reformers were addressing the question came to them naturally from the 14th and 15th century from the theories of justification of the Latin justitia, which was very powerful and prevalent in the medieval church.

And the way I say it as a sort of shorthand is that the reformers are doing their best to give biblical answers to the wrong questions, or at least not entirely the wrong questions, but at least questions that were significantly flawed.

And I'm really interested in getting back and saying, what were the questions that were out there in the first century that Paul was giving his answers to? And part of the trick here is to see how the whole of Paul's letters fit together.

In other words, you can't stop Romans three at verse 26. And you can't omit Romans nine to 11. You can't pull apart bits of Galatians three and just concentrate on verses 10 to 14 and forget other bits and so on and so on.

So I'm really concerned about the whole flow of each letter. I have a sense that if Luther and Calvin were listening to that claim, they would say, yeah, that's the thing you have to do go for it. They might disagree how I did it.

But that's.

My agenda is to go back to the text and get it right. I know you've got another. Well, your opus opus magnum, really, if that's the right word, is coming out later in the year. That's the big volume on Paul.

And so we look forward to that where you'll presumably give be given people even.

More cause to potentially find fault with millions of hostages to fortune there, but hopefully also some some evidences and answers as to what's going on. So we'll lay out exactly what you say about.

The way Paul really means justification, what he really meant when he used that word. Before we get to laying that case out, let's introduce our other guest for today's program. That is, of course, James White.

James, no stranger to this program. Last on, I think, James talking with a Muslim guest in the light of stuff going on around the film of the Prophet Muhammad and so on. You're coming back to the shore soon, I think, aren't you, to do a few more discussions, debates.

And talks? Actually, I'll be in Dublin at the end of this month, Trinity College and UCD, I believe, both two different two different nights discussing the Quran as the word of God with some Muslim representatives there.

So just just a couple of weeks, but I won't actually be getting to London at that point. I'll be teaching in Berlin in June, so I may get through London at that point. We'll we'll see. It's still sort of up in the air.

Oh, great stuff. Well, if you're in the island area.

Or can make it over there, do check out the details and of course, details for both my guests and their websites with the podcast of today's program. That's premier dot org dot UK. Slash. Unbelievable.

James, thank you so much for coming on today. We should say from the outset, you haven't had much time to prepare for this. I asked you at very late notice once I'd found Tom was coming in and so on. So with that sort of addendum, tell us a little bit about what you've made of Tom's work as you've interacted with it over the years.

Well, yeah, I did want to contrast when I when I debated John Dominic Croson, an incredibly intelligent man. I had six months to immerse myself in his lectures and books, his autobiography and everything else.

Seventy hours, not quite the same thing. But actually, the new perspective was a focus of my studies back around 2003 to 2005, and I laid them aside primarily because that's when I really began my serious study of Islam and the Quran and the Hadith and picking up Arabic and all that wonderful, fun stuff.

Not really a whole lot of overlap there, though. I think we will see that there are some questions that arise that I want to raise at some later point. But in this subject, I'll be honest with you. The past couple of days has been very interesting because I have a very well-worn copy of what St. Paul really said in my hands and very well marked and lots of lots of comments and notes and things like that.

But there have been developments since then. And so looking at the exchange between Dr. Wright and Dr. Piper in their published works was somewhat helpful, though not as helpful as I had hoped it would be, to be perfectly honest with you.

And so I'm going to ask, and again, I was just raised in such a way that you use honorific titles. The right Reverend Dr. Bishop, I don't know what terms we should use there, but.

Just call me Tom.

It just grates against my brain. But anyways, what I found, and I'd like to ask if this would be really representational of where Tom feels himself to be today, is your JETS article from March of 2011.

That's about as close as I can get. A justification yesterday, today, and forever. See, I am an apologist. And so when I, for example, deal with Islam, I don't know who drummed this into my head years ago.

Really, it was a conviction of mine before my education. You go to the original sources. And one of the things that has really concerned me just over the past couple days is I hear a lot of talking past from both directions.

There's a lot of language problems. We're using the same words, meaning different things by them. This is nothing new. You go back to the early Trinitarian controversies, East and West, we're constantly talking past each other, partly because of Greek and Latin and so on and so forth.

But I've just sensed a lot of miscommunication between both sides. And especially in listening to people attempting to summarize new perspectivism, I just don't think that's even a possible thing to do.

There are so many different new perspectives. I mean, there are so many different nuances between yourself and James D .G. Dunn or Sanders or whoever else it might be, that I tried to find a way of really focusing upon you individually because, for example, you have a much higher view of the consistency and inspiration of Scripture than many others who would call themselves new perspectivists.

And that has to be brought out. If it's not brought out, there's going to be a flattening out. There's going to be a misrepresentation. And that's something I think you've complained about many, many times in different contexts.

So my background as an apologist primarily drove me to this article. And that's really where I'm going to be focusing my comments, if that's useful to you. That is certainly useful. And in many ways,.

Because of the constraints of a program like this, we won't be able to barely graze the surface of many of the issues here. But what we will hopefully do is lay out the perspective on justification, allow you some time to make some critiques, ask some questions yourself, James, and see what Tom has to say in response and let people go away and look up more things if they.

Want to. But perhaps I could just say that Chet's article would be a good place to start. That was a recent short statement in a conference where I was in debate with Frank Thielman from Beeson Divinity School and Tom Schreiner from Southern Seminary.

And both are scholars that I've enjoyed engaging with. I've used their work on other occasions. We're not head to head on everything. There's a lot we agree on. But let me just very firmly say yes to what was just said about the new perspective.

There is no one thing called the new perspective. There are several different scholars with very, very different views. And indeed, ever since the publication of Ed Sanders in 1977, which really got this thing going, I've spent as much time attacking or modifying or pulling away from Sanders as I have agreeing with him.

He kind of alerted us all to one particular phenomenon, namely a misrepresentation of first century Judaism. I don't think he got it right either. And the task is to go on beyond that and see now where can we all work on this.

Well, that's the topic of today in general terms, the new perspective, even though it's a hard thing to pin down. But particularly within that new perspective, we're asking today, what did St Paul really say about justification?

We're going to get Tom to explain why he thinks the church has misunderstood what Paul meant by justification for quite a long time. If you want to get involved, if you want to respond to anything you hear on today's programme, I would welcome your emails.

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I'm going to get confused between those two. They're all available from the show page premier .org .uk slash unbelievable. You're listening to the show.

That aims to get you thinking. Unbelievable with Justin Brierley.

So coming back to you then, Tom, and then we'll allow James to sort of start to question you on this. In a nutshell, what did St Paul really say about justification? What have we often assumed he was saying?

And what do you think he actually said? Let me try and make this as brief as I can,.

But it's not as straightforward as it's often made. And indeed, one of the main problems is oversimplification. I am committed to understanding each of the biblical texts in their proper context and in trying to say what do they specifically have to say.

Galatians is the first major statement. And in Galatians, Paul is really concerned about the fact that you do not have to become physically Jewish by males getting circumcised in order to belong to the covenant people of God.

However, ever since the medieval period is not didn't start with Martin Luther. People pulled away from the idea of the covenant people, the people of Abraham, that wasn't what the Middle Ages wanted to know about.

They wanted to know, how do I go to heaven? And so they took Paul's arguments about belonging to the historic people of God, the children of Abraham, and they translated that into language about going to heaven, which actually Galatians doesn't have anything to say about, doesn't mention salvation, certainly doesn't mention all that dimension that is now so familiar to us.

And so there's been a major misunderstanding there. It's about how we know that all those who believe in Jesus are right now members of the same family at the same table. This is not something other than forgiveness of sins, etc., because in order to create this family out of a sinful humanity, God has to deal with their sin.

But the emphasis of Galatians and of what the language of justification is of people coming into that family. Then in Philippians more briefly, chapter 3, verses 2 to 11, Paul sets out his stall. This is the kind of Jew I was.

I was the real zealous type, the hardliner, but I have discovered that in the Messiah Jesus, all that has been stood on its head, and by dying and rising with the Messiah, I have a status of righteousness, which is not my own, based on the law, but is a status which is God's gift.

It's a righteousness from God upon faith. Here again, it's about covenant membership. There's nothing in Philippians 3, 2 to 11, about sin and being forgiven. Now, that's really important. We have to do justice to that.

When Paul expands that language in Romans, he expands it by using the law court language, which goes with justification as well, in a way which he doesn't in Galatians and Philippians. And in the law court, there are two different things going on.

I'll be as quick and brief as I can about this, but it really is quite tricky. In Romans 2, he talks about a future justification, that is the time when God will judge the whole world and declare that some people really are his people, and that's what's going to be.

There's a line from that in the letter, which goes all the way to chapter 8, when he says there is no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus, and at the end, it is God who justifies who is to condemn.

So the line from Romans 2 to Romans 8 is all about the ultimate future justification. Then in Romans 3, he describes how the verdict which will be announced on the future date is brought forwards into the present when someone believes in Jesus.

And that's quite a complicated scheme for us to grasp, but it was very easy for Paul, because that's how first-century Jews thought. There is that great coming day. How do we know in the present who is going to be among God's people on that day?

So Romans 3 is about the fact that on the basis of the death of Jesus, and because of people coming to faith, God declares in the present that they are in the right, that their sins are forgiven, that they are part of Abraham's family.

There, I think it was about two and a half minutes.

Very well.

I'm not sure it can be done any quicker.

A lifetime scholarship there. If I can try and spell this out, and you will have to correct me, but can we say that justification then, as far as Paul was concerned, is about membership more than personal salvation, if you like?

This is precisely the either-or that we have to avoid. Because the membership question is the membership in the family of Abraham, and the purpose of Abraham's family was to undo the sin of Adam. That is the huge thing which, once you put that in the middle of the picture, everything becomes clear.

Why do you want to belong to the family of Abraham, for goodness sake? Answer, because they are the people in whom the Adamic entail of sin and death has been dealt with. So it's got to be both.

And did the reformers get it wrong then? I mean, did they get the wrong end of the stick, essentially, about what justification is?

They came with a meaning for the word justificatio in Latin, justification, which was about the medieval doctrine of justitia, justice, and they screened out, by and large, I think Luther more than Calvin, all the Jewish emphasis, all the Abraham emphasis, all of that, because, for Luther, the Jews were teaching justification by works, therefore, this couldn't be a Jewish idea, because that would slide you back.

Many scholars make that same mistake today.

Now, we'll get James to respond to this, but again, a lot of people seem worried that you're somehow undermining the, we're saved by grace, because many people have said, when Paul talks about his past life as a Jew, a law-keeping Jew, that says to us today that you're not going to get to heaven by your good works, it's all about what God has done for you in Jesus Christ, and that you are somehow undermining that core doctrine, that core aspect of Protestant Christianity.

Part of the difficulty is the New Testament is not terribly interested about going to heaven, it's interested in the new heavens and the new earth, and in the kingdom of God coming on earth as in heaven, and as long as we persist in talking about how we get to heaven, we are reversing what the New Testament is really all about.

Now, I've often said heaven is important, but it's not the end of the world. Yes, when we die, if we're Christ, we go to be with Christ, which is far better, but actually, this isn't a separate discussion, this affects how you talk about present justification, in terms of how you see the future.

All right, well, we've had it spelled.

Out there. James, just some initial thoughts. What are your main concerns with the way Tom, the News Perspective, deal with this issue of justification?

Well, what's fascinating to me is, as I approach this, just a word from my own experience. When I was in seminary, again, because I had this go to the original sources, I found a local Christian bookstore.

I personally purchased the Mishnah and the Sincino Talmud. This is back before you could do that electronically, anyways. I have always recognized that there is a spectrum of Jewish belief. I think one of the issues that has to be addressed, and one of the reasons this is such a complex issue, is because there's so many underlying issues in regards to Tanientic Judaism, and what does Second Temple Jews believe, and of course, there are all sorts of different kinds of perspectives amongst them, and all the rest of this stuff.

But I've just never been in a position where, like, I guess, as Tom will put it, certain especially Lutherans would view it, where I viewed the Jews in this monolithic, pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps mode, anyways.

It was just never how I've understood it. In the best of Reformed theology, you have union with Christ, you have the covenant of grace, you have justification having its proper place in the midst of all of this, and it just seems to me that the things that I hear, especially in Tom's presentation, that resonate with me and that I see as being biblical, I already had.

I don't think that it's addressed to me, because I didn't view it in that way. And the questions that then come up, though, that many people have repeated over and over again, have to do with this. What is the grounds and the basis of my standing before God, and does that change between now and the future?

In other words, when you say that justification is primarily an ecclesiastical, ecclesiology issue, who's in, how can we know now? What is the grounds that I have as an individual in having peace with God?

However we understand Romans 4, and this will be one of the issues, I don't know if we'll get to it, but Tom's understanding of Romans 4 .1, he will have to admit, is outside the normal range of exegesis.

They're the same as 2 Corinthians 5 .21, Romans 10, and how we understand some of the things there. There's some issues we can get into there, and that's where it becomes somewhat complicated. But how do we know?

Not just from the external sense of how do we know who's in the covenant now, but the big issue that there's a lot of concern about is when we get to the end. And Tom says that the final declaration of justification will be based upon the life lived.

The issue of based upon, according to, these are all issues that the people become very uncomfortable with. I think I understand, I'm trying to understand in distinction to other New Perspectivists, what Tom is saying at that point.

But my concern is that when I think about the Jews, I don't see them as moralists trying to pull themselves up by their bootstraps. But I do see, and I can't see how Paul can be read in any other way than speaking of a synergistic righteousness on their part.

That's the New Perspective, even as Tom enunciates it, I don't see how it closes the door on that synergism. And in fact, maybe one of the things we can bring out.

Just explain what you mean by synergistic.

What I mean by that is, as I see what the Jews were saying and as I see Paul's concern, it's not just, and the thing I appreciate about what Tom Wright is saying is, there is clearly a national and ethnic aspect to their concerns.

But I don't think it's just that, because a person who would, for example, limit God's blessings to just our ethnic group, that doesn't speak well of their entire moral character. And clearly, when we read Matthew, when we read all that Paul says, there was an ethical and moral aspect to what the Jews were saying as well.

And so the kind of law-keeping that they were doing partook of both of these aspects. And hence, the meritorious standing before God comes from their fulfillment of these things. It's both ethical and moral.

And I don't know how the New Perspective, or at least let's leave that terminology aside, how Tom's position in light of his statement that the final verdict of justification would based upon the life lived, how it can close the door on that cooperation where you have a mixture of God's gracious extension of the covenants and bringing people into the covenant graciously and all those things.

But you see, the issue of the Reformation was not the necessity of grace. I mean, the Council of Trent condemned anyone who said that you can be saved apart from God's grace. The issue of the Reformation has never been the necessity of grace.

The issue of the Reformation has always been the sufficiency of grace. And that's really where the issue is. The discomfort exists, shall we say. It also, by the way, I've just got to mention this and I'll just throw it out there because we're going to have to cover it later.

Also, the issue of grounds touches on the issue of imputation. And imputation has to be discussed a little bit later on.

We will talk about imputation. We're right now going to go to a break. It's already time for our first break, believe it or not. And then we'll let Tom respond to some of James's concerns there. We're talking about St. Paul and what he really said about justification.

My special guest with me in studio today is Professor N .T. Wright. Tom, as he's also known, Tom Wright, a research professor of New Testament and early Christianity at the early church at St. Andrews University, author of many, many books.

And of course, this issue has been one that he's written on a few times. Well, James White, director of Alpha and Omega Ministries, is on the line from the States and we're getting their conversation on this whole area of what Paul really meant about justification.

Come back in a couple of minutes time and we'll be continuing. Welcome back to Unbelievable with me, Justin Brierley, back into our discussion between N .T. Wright and James White in just a moment's time.

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Tom, so we heard James in that section, laying out some of his concerns. And essentially what it sounded to me like is he is worried that you are getting away from the fact that Paul was also talking about works righteousness and the idea that there was some kind of issue he was addressing around people trying to earn their way and so on.

He talks about this synergy that exists. So he's saying it's both and. He's not denying everything you're saying, but he's saying.

Yeah, let me first say I'm delighted and not surprised because I know that James is a reformed theologian. I've often said that if the predominant mood of Pauline scholarship had been reformed rather than Lutheran, the new perspective would not have been necessary because that would have been what we'd all believed.

In other words, it's a positive view of Judaism, a positive view of God giving the law to Moses, a positive view of the covenant, which is now fulfilled rather than as with Lutheranism and some other schemes, a negative view that was a bad thing, the wrong sort of religion and Paul has blown it away.

So James and I are clearly on the same page here. And actually this conversation is an inner reformed conversation rather than other sorts. Anglicanism classically is a variety of reformed theology. Not everyone knows that, but there it is.

It's also other things. The real issue here is scripture. For me, as for the reformers, sola scriptura is the watchword. And what really worries me about the importation of medieval categories like synergism, which is not something that's discussed in the Bible, is that it then strikes out certain bits of the Bible.

And I'm committed to not striking out those bits of the Bible. And I'm thinking of Romans two, where Paul says he will give to everyone according to his works to those who by patience in well-doing seek for glory and honor and immortality, he will give eternal life.

And he emphasizes that glory and honor and peace for everyone who does good, the Jew first and also the Greek. And he then says, it's not those who hear the law who will be righteous, but those who do the law who will be justified.

That's Romans two, 12 and 13. So I want to stress to James, this isn't Tom Wright who's saying this, this isn't Paul who's saying this. Now, of course, many theologians have said, oh, well, Paul sets up that category.

But then later on, he declares that it's null and void, that nobody actually fits into it. But that is a mistake, an exegetical mistake based on a dividing of Romans sharply between Romans one to four and five to eight.

Because in Romans eight, as I said before, Paul comes back and uses exactly the same language about judgment, about condemnation, and about righteousness, about justification, as he did before. Because this is talking about the future justification.

And it's very striking in Romans eight, that he actually says that those who mind the flesh, think of the things of the flesh, those who have the mind of the spirit, think of the things of the spirit, etc.

And the mind of the flesh cannot submit to God's law. And then he says, if you live according to the flesh, you'll die. But if by the spirit you put to death, the deeds of the body will live. And again, this is not Tom Wright, this is Paul, what is the place of Romans eight, 12 to 16, in final justification?