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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.
It's a conference for anyone interested in apologetics, evangelism, theology, thinking through your faith and how to present it rationally, reasonably to other people. It is, I would say, the major apologetics event of the year in central London.
So if you can come along on Saturday the 25th of May, why not register your interest now? We've got a website up and running. Go to www .premier .org .uk/.jesus. That's www .premier .org .uk/.jesus. Why Jesus?
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.
Because we are talking about Jesus, he asked his disciples, who do you say that I am? That question resounds today. We're going to be looking in some depth with special guest speakers, Alistair McGrath, Amy Orr Ewing, Peter S. Williams, Fuz Rana, Trevor Stammers and other guests besides at the question of Jesus, who he was, how we can transmit that truth to other people.
We'll also be looking at C .S. Lewis and his continuing legacy after 50 years from his death. And also Faith on the Front will be tackling some of those controversial ethical issues like abortion, euthanasia, what science has to say.
So if you can join us, I'd love to see you there. It is always a fantastic thing. This is the third year we've been running it, Saturday the 25th of May 2013 in central London. Do go and register your interest and we'll be able to do full booking once that becomes live.
But you can, if you register your interest, give us your email address, you'll get the full details of what's happening at the conference. And of course, you'll be the first to know when the booking lines do open.
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 N .T. 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 been.
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 sceptical?
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 say it's 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. And 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 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 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 magnum 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 people even more cause to.
Potentially find fault with millions of hostages to fortune there, but hopefully also 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 you 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. Well, 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 .org .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 debated John Dominic Cross and an incredibly intelligent man. I had six months to immerse myself in his lectures and books, his autobiography and everything else, 70 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 a 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 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. So the right Reverend Dr. Bishop, I don't know what terms we should use there, but just call me Tom. It's just great against my upbringing.
But anyways, what I found, and I'd like to 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.
OK, a justification yesterday, today and forever. Would that 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. And really, I 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 of days is I hear a lot of talking passed 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 were 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.
And there are so many different new perspectives. I mean, there's 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.
Okay, well, 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.
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.
That's unbelievable at premier .org .uk. You can equally find me on Twitter at Unbelievable JB if you want to tweet me, and facebook .com slash Unbelievable JB if you want to like the Facebook page. Don't forget all the links, including to both my guests today, James White and Tom Wright.
I'm going to get confused, aren't I, 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 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 chapter three, or briefly, chapter three, verses two 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 my own, not a state of 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 three, two 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 two, 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 eight, 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 two to Romans eight is all about the ultimate future justification. Then in Romans three, 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 the 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 three 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.
I think it was about two and a half minutes. You did very well. I'm not sure it.
Can be done any quicker. You condensed 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. Okay. 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 New 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. And I have always recognized that there was 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 the stuff.
But I've just never been in a position where, like, I guess, as Tom would 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. And 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 in, 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, has 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 be able to 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 saying in 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 be 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 bring 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 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, Research Professor of New Testament and Early Christianity at the Early Church at St Andrew's 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 Briley, back into our discussion between N .T. Wright and James White in just a moment's time. Just a quick reminder that you can now register your interest to attend Unbelievable, the conference 2013, Jesus, Liar, Lunatic, Legend, or Lord, happening on Saturday, the 25th of May.
Just visit the website, premiere .org .uk slash Jesus, and you can leave your email address with us. You'll get, in return, the full details of the conference, what the seminars are, who's going to be speaking about what, and of course, you'll be the first to know once you can finalise your booking.
Premiere .org .uk slash Jesus is the place to go. We're going to be joined by some amazing speakers. Alastair McGrath, one of the apologists, Professor of Theology, Ministry and Education at King's College London.
Amy Orr-Ewing, travels the world as a speaker and trainer for Our Zim. Fazal Rana, fuzz to his friends, Executive Vice President of Research and Apologetics at Reasons to Believe. Peter S. Williams, Christian philosopher.
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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 2 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 2, 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 1 to 4 and 5 to 8 because in Romans 8, 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 8 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 will live.
Again, this is not Tom Wright, this is Paul. What is the place of Romans 8, 12 to 16 in final justification? The answer to this, and this has been missing from many accounts of justification, though not from Calvin, is the spirit.
The doctrine of justification is a Trinitarian doctrine from top to bottom. It's the grace of God which is the basis. It's then the accomplishment, the unique soul one-off death and resurrection of the Messiah, which is, and the words like ground and basis have been very slippery in this discourse actually, but it's the grace of God, it's the unique accomplishment of Jesus, but then again and again in Paul it's the operation of the spirit.
That's why he says in Philippians 1, the one who began a good work in you will bring it to completion at the day of Christ. Now, when the spirit works in you, first to produce the faith by which you are then justified, but then to produce not only the fruits of character, but also ultimately the resurrection because that's the work of the spirit.
Is this synergism or do we say it's all the spirit doing it and none of me? Somebody wrote a book a while ago saying, sort of like an extreme Calvinist thing, saying it's entirely the spirit and we have nothing to do.
But actually when the spirit works, Paul would say that's when your mind has to be engaged, you have to be making moral decisions about all of which you will say, as Paul himself did, yet not I, but the grace of God that was with me.
That's the paradox of Christian spirituality. And to be afraid of that because of the danger of something called synergism is to import a medieval roadblock right into the middle of what is a large Pauline highway.
And I just hope we can.
Avoid that. James? Well, I don't think that it's a matter of being afraid of something. Obviously, what I'm concerned about, I want to be, and I believe are the same concerns that the Apostle Paul himself had.
And when we look at, for example, Romans 2, I think Tom would admit his exegesis of the application of Romans 2 .13 following was not Calvin's. His understanding of that text, I think, is pretty much the same way that I've understood it.
And that is that Paul turns to the Jews. He closes the door on any ground of self-righteousness, whether it's national or ethical or both. He closes the door, demonstrates that if you're going to possess the law, you have to be a doer of the law.
But what's the conclusion of all this? It's the great catena of passages in Romans 3, drawn from the Jews' own scriptures that say, no one does this. We need someone to do that for us, which takes us then into Romans 4.
And you have one of the major areas, and this is one of the things, I'm just going to lay it out. There's no way in the amount of time we have we can even try to talk about the issues of Romans 4 .1. Or I do hope we can talk about 2 Corinthians 5 .21, if we can at least talk about it briefly, to try to throw these things out so that people can look at these things.
But he goes into Romans 4, and he talks about Abraham. And there's a very different way of reading that in his commentary on Romans, that basically says, well, does this mean that we have Abraham as our forefather according to the flesh, in a covenantal sense?
The vast majority of interpreters have understood this in a very different way, and that is, what did our forefather Abraham discover according to the flesh, and specifically the assertion that even Abraham, righteous Abraham, why was he righteous?
Well, Genesis 15, a most signal important passage on justification in the New Testament. How was Abraham justified? He was justified by faith. And then the contrast is drawn between the kind of faith that justifies the kind of faith that does not justify, specifically in contrasting to the one who works his reward is not reckoned according to grace, but as what is owed to him, categories of debt.
Now, Tom would attach that due to misthos there back to Genesis 15. I think the closest contextual connection there between misthos is the concept of owing or debt that has been introduced by Paul there.
And then he contrasts that with the one who does not work, and he uses the exact same even word order, and just puts in the negation to show that he's giving you a 180-degree opposite concept here. The kind of faith that saves is the empty hand of faith that can fit into the hand of God's grace.
And then he makes application, not merely in a covenantal sense, which is still, it's always there. All of this is always in Christ, it's always in the covenant of grace, it's always there. But it's intensely personal because he goes to David, and he goes to Psalm 32, and he says, you want to talk about the blessed man?
Who is the man? The blessed man is the one to whom the Lord will not impute his sins, which brings us to legitimi, and imputation, and all the rest of the stuff. We do have covenant themes here, it's always only in Christ.
But my concern is, and it becomes a very pastoral concern, and hopefully we can ask this, maybe I can ask this question now, and we can get to it later, but let me go ahead and throw this out. As I stand, Lord willing, I'm going to have the opportunity of debating again in East London Mosque.
As I stand there dialoguing with men that you know, Justin, men have been in there, in the studio with us, as I speak the gospel to them, and I'm talking to them about having peace with God, Romans 5 .1, therefore having been justified, we have peace with God.
What, true shalom, what is the ground or basis for that? How is it, and this is very important in talking to Muslims, because the whole issue of jihad and sharia and things like that comes in here, and one of the things I say to them, and I'd be interested in what Tom would think about this, one of the things that I present, that's part and parcel of the gospel I present, is that the reason I have peace is nothing in myself.
The reason I have peace is because I possess something, and this is something that hasn't come out yet, this is where Tom and I have to discuss the righteousness of God. Now I think I understand what Tom understands, he says this is the covenant faithfulness of God, even when you talk about belief in the faithfulness of Christ, it's his faithfulness to his role as Messiah, so on and so forth, I understand where he's coming from, we can talk about subjective and objective genitives until the cows come home, but from my perspective, central to the gospel proclamation is the fact that the reason I have true shalom with God is because of the fact of the non -imputation of sin.
Well how can he do that justly? This is where the death of Christ comes in, it's because my sins have been laid upon him, imputation, Isaiah 53. Tom and I believe a lot about the same things in Isaiah 53, but this is where I see it all coming together, and that's why again we come back to this issue of what is the final, what's the final.
Basis? What is the final basis, as it were, and we're talking about salvation here, we're talking about grace, and 2 Corinthians 5 .21 has already been mentioned in this context. Let's talk about that then, in 2 Corinthians 5 .21, do you want to respond first of all and then we'll get to.
Imputation and things? Just briefly, we don't have time to go anything like hard enough into Romans 4, it's obviously too complex and technical, it's a very interesting little bit, our disagreements are oblique.
I'm not saying no to everything James has said, and I don't think actually he's saying no to everything I've said. I'm struggling with the Greek, and it's very difficult Greek, to see how the whole chapter makes the sense it makes, and I noticed that people who emphasize what James emphasizes, and many translations do, then have to put brackets around part of verses perhaps 16 and 17 in Romans, which are actually the climax of the chapter, but which if you take the main theme to be what James thinks it is, are actually sort of falling off the edge, they're an aside about something else.
Now we haven't got time to go into that, just to put down a marker, that actually I've got an article coming out about this, there's various things going on, but I really do want to go back to Romans 2, because all sorts of things happen there, which are normally swept aside in exactly the way James did, by saying, oh well you go to the catena in chapter 3, which shows that in fact nobody ever makes this, but actually in Romans 2 25 to 29, Paul sets up in advance a category of Gentiles who keep the law, the people who are by nature uncircumcised, but who fulfill the law, and they will judge you, the Jew who has the letter but breaks the law.
Paul is clearly here talking about Christian Gentiles, who in some sense or other keep the law. Now this is a tease, Paul hasn't told us how they keep the law, and he teases us again at the end of Romans 3, when he talks about the law of faith.
He does it again in Romans 8, when he talks about the mind of the flesh doesn't submit to the law, but the mind of the spirit by implication does. It's only when we get to Romans 10 that we discover he has redefined what he means by keeping the law, namely it is by believing that Jesus was raised from the dead, and by confessing him as Lord, and he aligns that with a passage in Deuteronomy 30, which is about the new covenant, which is about the true new covenant redeemed post-exilic keeping of the law.
So now we know who these people were in chapter 2. It's all because of the spirit, and it's all because of grace, and so at the end of the day, yes, if anyone thinks I was saved by grace to begin with, but now I have to do a bit of working of myself on the side, of course that's absurd.
That's like taking a ladder into a lift, or into an elevator as the Americans would say, so that while the lift is going up, you can do some climbing yourself. That's utterly ridiculous. Why would you want to do that?
But actually, when the spirit works, we are caught up in that mysteriously, and Paul says I worked harder than them all, yet it was not I but the grace of God. It seems to me that is exactly the sort of statement that we expect people to make.
As for the pastoral implications, yes, of course, if somebody says how can I know peace with God, I'll say cling onto the cross where Jesus died for you, and he took your sin, and you keep your eyes on the cross, and you won't go wrong, and then you will find that you are standing on resurrection ground, but what is imputed in Paul is not righteousness, but according to Romans 6, the death and resurrection of Jesus.
Well, let's talk about imputation, righteousness, and so forth. Just before we get to that, if you're listening and you'd like to respond yourself to either James or Tom on today's programme, then the email address is unbelievable at premiere .org .uk.
Do check us out online as well, where you can find links to the Facebook and Twitter account, and indeed links to both my guests today. Premiere .org .uk slash unbelievable. Premiere .org .uk slash unbelievable.
This is the show that aims to get you thinking quite high-level theology going on. I'm just about keeping abreast of what's happening. I'm desperately sort of, you know, doing my doggy paddle while these guys are sort of doing front crawl down the straights of the New Testament, but it's funny.
I don't think I've had anyone, you probably do this James, but Tom's here reading as though he's reading from an English Bible. He's actually got a Greek Bible in front.
Of him, but just translating on the go as we go. Well, Justin, I really do hope, I hope there's synergy, shall we say, on the programme today, because honestly, this issue is so vital and so important, and unfortunately, I do think there's a lot of talking past, and I think there's a lot of excess really on both sides.
In fact, Tom, I'll just have to tell you, you know, I read John's book, and I read yours, and I'm not a geocentrist, you know, and I suppose now you're gonna have to explain that. I shouldn't have done that, but you know what I mean, and I hope you can hear that I am, you know, one of the things that John Dominic Croson really appreciated about our debate was I spent six months listening to him, and he could tell that, and as a result, it was one of the best debates we ever had.
That's not happening enough here, and partly because you are touching a live wire. You're touching something, and my suggestion to you, Tom, would be that you don't describe it as fear on our part, as if we are just, there are people who have a knee-jerk reaction, I understand that, and I understand being in your shoes, you've gotten a lot of people attributing things to you that you then say, that's not what I believe, because they're not hearing you.
I understand all of that, but at the same time, from my perspective, if it's helpful to you, I'm hearing you saying certain things like, well, you know, low-level Protestant interpretation, or fear of these things, or really questioning our commitment to solo scriptura, and that's what raises some of the hackles, it really does.
I understand, we need to make sure we're.
Being fair to each side in this discussion. We try to do that on the program. If you want to find out more, as I say, do follow the links to both James and Tom's material. This is Unbelievable, the show that aims to get you thinking.
Unbelievable with Justin Brierley. So coming back, gentlemen, let's talk about imputation righteousness. 2nd Corinthians chapter 5 verse 21 has these famous words, this is, I think, from the NIV, God made him who had no sin to be sin for us.
Why are you looking askance at the NIV there, Tom? Because the NIV always gets Paul wrong by definition. I should have got Tom's translation with me, really, shouldn't I? But anyway, you can correct this.
God made him who had no sin to be sin for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God. Often used as a text, Tom, to suggest that this is about a righteousness alien to us from God, imputed to us at that moment of salvation, of accepting Christ, and so forth.
That this is what the righteousness is, this is what justification is. It's a special thing that happens when you become a Christian, and this is what James was saying in that last section, that he needs to be able to tell those who need to accept the gospel that this isn't about something we do, this is about something God imparts, imputes to us.
James, just let me give you the option. Am I correctly sort of, more or less, spelling it out right there?
More or less, yes. The point is that when I'm speaking to my Muslim friends, what I'm presenting to them, or anyone for that matter, what I'm presenting to them is the fact that when I stand before God, I will stand before him perfectly righteous, not because of anything that I have done.
Now, I believe, and Tom, hear me here, I stand firmly against anti-lordship proponents who say that there's no repentance, there's no godliness, and I believe that everything I do is the work of the Spirit of God, it all rebounds to the glory of God.
All that is part and parcel of what I believe. But when they ask me, how is it that you continue to experience sin in your life, and yet you have peace with God right now? The answer I give to them is because I possess the righteousness of God through faith in Jesus Christ, and that is why I have peace with God.
That's the issue. There are a thousand issues here. The content, the substance of what James has just said, I totally and utterly affirm. The language, I think, is misleading because it isn't Pauline.
I regret the possibility that the strong pastoral concern, and I'm a pastor too, I have these same concerns, but we cannot let pastoral concerns dictate how we read verse by verse in the New Testament.
Actually, I believe everything James has just said is firmly stated in the New Testament in all sorts of ways, actually stated even more sharply and excitingly than that, but that the texts which are now used simply don't refer to that.
My teacher George Caird, we used to fight about Romans 7, and frequently he would say, I don't think Paul would disagree with what you just said, but I don't think that's what he's talking about in Romans 7, and finally, after about five years, we came to a common mind eventually, and we both actually changed our minds, and it seems to me that we have to pay attention, and I'm sorry, James, I'm not maligning you, but I have been to America a lot, and actually, I have to say a lot of these debates are American rather than anywhere else, which is interesting.
Why is that culturally? I don't know, and that's quite a serious point, but let's not pursue that, but I have experienced the fear of people who react in this gut reaction thing. You've just taken away my favorite toy or whatever.
That's what it comes across at again and again. This is not once or twice. This is dozens of times. Likewise, I have experienced again and again people who actually resist things which are in the text and will expound something and will cut off just at the point where Paul is going to say something else, which balances.
So, I mean, the question of is a very live one for me, but so going to 2 Corinthians 5, 2 Corinthians 3, 4, 5, and the first half of 6 are all about Paul's apostolic ministry, and it's a defense of that.
That's what the whole thing is about, and the last three verses before 521, he keeps on doing this balancing thing. Something has happened because of Christ. Therefore, something is now true of my ministry.
God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself, not reckoning their trespasses against them. Fantastic, of course, yes, and entrusting to us the message of reconciliation. So, he's going on. This is what God has done in Christ once and for all, and this is the ministry we now have, and the natural way of reading verse 21 is then the one who was who did not know sin, he made to be sin for us so that we might have this covenant faithfulness of God as the thing which we are embodying in our ministry, and when you go on immediately, there's no chapter break for Paul.
You find two verses later a quote from Isaiah 49, which in context says, I have given you as a covenant to the peoples, and that's the basic argument, but the subsidiary argument is that the phrase, the righteousness of God, demonstrably in the Old Testament in the thing called the Bible, Isaiah and the Psalms, means the faithfulness of God to his covenant, not a status which God imputes to his people.
We do have a righteous status that is stated in Philippians 3, but Paul does not call it the righteousness of God. He calls it a righteousness from God. That may sound like a technical distinction, but if you don't take this, then there's all sorts of good things which Paul.
Is saying which will never be heard. And for you, it doesn't make sense then of all those other references to where righteousness is used, which mean faithfulness, and it doesn't make sense to say that God somehow transfers his faithfulness to us.
That's not what's being spoken about.
God gives us the status of righteous in Christ. That's clear in Philippians. It's actually clear in Romans. It's clear all through. We have that righteous status, but this is not the same thing as the righteousness of God, and actually this is a concern.
It's a John Piper-like concern for the utter glory of God and the utter sovereignty and majesty of God. God is faithful to his covenant, and therefore all those who believe, he gives them a righteous status, which is exactly what James was talking about, but that is not what this verse is saying.
Okay, a couple of minutes to respond, James.
Yeah, well, just right there at the end, if we are united with Christ, then we have what he has. We are united with him, and why the incarnation? The incarnation, why 33 years of life? See, this is where Reformed theology has very strongly emphasized not only the active and passive obedience of Christ, and yeah, those are post-biblical words, but they are descriptive of what the Bible itself is teaching, and obviously Tom and I would probably defend the Trinity in very similar ways.
You have to allow the text to speak, but you have to also hear all of what it's saying. When we go to 2 Corinthians 5, what is Paul talking about? I would agree. For example, I've dealt with this in dealing with apostolic authority with various groups and things like that.
There is obviously that emphasis. However, he then starts talking about reconciliation. He starts talking about very personal issues regarding sin, the preaching of the gospel to the world, and so when it talks about we are ambassadors for Christ as though God were making an appeal through us, we beg you on behalf of Christ, be reconciled to God.
This, of course, is deeply soteriological language. I'm not sure if Tom has said this directly, and he's very careful about this in his book. He says, I don't like taking this perspective in the sense I don't like disagreeing with what has pretty much been the universal interpretation of this text, but he is taking a very unusual perspective, and I think when you do take a very unusual perspective, that puts a greater burden upon you as far as exegesis and demonstration of it is concerned.
When it says, he made him who knew no sin, that knowing of no sin on Jesus' part is intensely personal. I mean, he was the spotless lamb of God. That is why he sweat, as it were, drops of blood, because it wasn't fear of death.
It was this exchange that was coming up. He made him who knew no sin to be sin on our behalf so that we might, and I would be interested maybe if Tom could just comment briefly on how he translated gnomatha there.
Did you say obtain or something.
Like that? The normal translation is become. I was actually going to ask you that, because if Paul meant what you said, I don't think he would have written gnomatha. Why is that? Because it means become, and you're not talking about becoming.
You're talking about a status, and likewise, if he'd meant what you meant, he should have said dikaios une Christu, the righteousness of Christ, not the righteousness of God. There's a very slippery thing going on here where you're transferring from the supposed righteousness of God to the supposed righteousness of Christ, and then this word become.
How do you translate gnomatha? Well, a couple things. The category.
That has already been introduced in the first part of the verse is he made him. Obviously, does not mean that the son became sin in the sense of an ontological transformation, and so since there was a legal recognition on the part of the father that the son has taken a particular role, that's the only way the gnomatha, that's the only context in which we can translate that.
And secondly, as to the righteousness of God, the righteousness of Christ, to distinguish between them in this context, I'm not trying to say that there's not the personal union with Christ here or something like that, but it is the father who is the one who makes the judicial statement, and it's the triune action that provides this righteousness for us.
So, by the way, my point is that the righteousness of God very frequently does have the meaning that you have, but the I think, and I'm certainly not the only one that said this, to limit it to only God's covenant faithfulness so that there cannot be, for example, the expansion of the law court language that we find in Romans 8, where it's not just a judge and the person before the judge, but there is an intermediary.
This enriches and hence expands the category. Quick response to Tom, and then.
We're going to go to our break, and we're going to have to go to our final thought. I fully agree.
That what happens in Romans is the expansion of the law court category, and I think that that happens because right from the beginning, the law court category was an expression in the Old Testament of the covenant, and so what you have at the end of Romans is the seamless transition from God, who is the judge, who is the one who will justify, to the love of God and the love of the Messiah, and they do flow together.
I'm just very concerned first about the specific meaning of this phrase, which everywhere else in Paul and everywhere else in the Old Testament means what I just said it meant, but also about the resonances of that Isaiah 49 quote in Romans in 1 Corinthians 6, where Paul, as so often, quotes one verse but has the whole passage in mind, and the whole passage is about, as you would expect because Paul is talking about ministry of the new covenant in 2 Corinthians 3 and throughout, that this is about God giving these apostles as covenant ministers, as a covenant to the people, a light to those in darkness and so on.
So I suspect theologically we are just not that far apart. I'm really concerned that we commit ourselves to working at the exegesis in its detail as well as its broad.
Sweep. We are going to have to go to a break, and we'll allow James to respond, and we'll have some time for getting together our final... We've obviously just touched on these issues, just a few of the issues that come about in this discussion, but we'll try and start to draw our thoughts together to a close in the next section.
You're listening to Unbelievable, quite a high-level theological discussion today as we ask the question, what did St Paul really say about justification? My guests today, Professor N .T. Wright and James White, Director of Alpha and Omega Ministries, come back in a short moment's time as we conclude today's program.
Welcome back to the third and final part of today's Unbelievable with me, Justin Briley. It's the program that aims to get you thinking, and we've got a conference that we've been running now for the last two or three years.
It's the third edition of the conference this year, Saturday the 25th of May in central London. Hope you can join us for that because we've got some fantastic speakers coming along. Alistair McGrath, who is of course a well-known theologian and apologist in his own right, scientist by background, debated a number of high-profile atheists, best-selling author too.
Amy Orr-Ewing also joins us. She's part of the Oxford Centre for Christian Apologetics. Wonderful speaker. Fuz Rana, from Reasons to Believe, will be with us, a biochemist by background himself. Peter S. Williams, Christian philosopher, is there, and Dr Trevor Stammers, who's a practicing GP, going to be talking about issues like abortion and euthanasia, and other guests too.
Find out more and register your interest at premier .org .uk slash jesus. That's because the title of this year's conference is unbelievable, the conference 2013, Jesus, Liar, Lunatic, Legend or Lord?
How do we make the case for Jesus to people who are sceptical around us? Find out by attending, get yourself equipped, premier .org .uk slash jesus. You can register your interest there, and as soon as booking lines are open, we'll be sending you an email if you've registered your interest, and indeed full details of the conference itself.
So that's the place to go. Next week on the show, I'm going to be joined by Randall Rausser. I think that's how you pronounce his name. I've never actually asked him specifically, but I think that's Randall Rausser, who's a Christian apologist out in the States.
His new book, The Swedish Atheist, The Scuba Diver and Other Apologetic Rabbit Trails, was recently published. How's that for a title? He's going to be telling us about that, and he's going to be in conversation with atheist Ralph Jones, who was recently published in Christianity Magazine.
They do a little column, an occasional column called Why I'm Not a Christian. Well, Ralph was very adamant about the reasons for his not being a Christian. He'll be presenting some of them to Randall, and I'm sure they'll have a fascinating discussion.
Back to the normal format, Christian, non-Christian next week. Today, though, we've been doing an inter-Christian discussion, and what a discussion it's been.
So welcome back to this discussion between Tom Wright and James White. It's Wright and White today on the programme that aims to get you thinking unbelievable. Tom has just been describing his understanding of this phrase.
I'm not going to try and repeat the Greek again, but it's all to do with whether Christ became sin for us and what was imputed, was this righteousness of God imputed to us. That's the way James sees it.
Tom doesn't feel that does justice to the text and the way that these words are used elsewhere and so forth. James, are you holding on? I think this is kind of the implication of what Tom's been saying so far.
Are you holding on to this understanding of justification and righteousness and imputation because that's how it's been understood, you know, classically from the reformers? Do you have the biblical grounds for it, though, Tom asks?
Is it time for a reformation of your reformation at this point?
That does seem to be what a lot of people are hearing Tom saying, and given some of the examples that he's used regarding Luther and punitantiam agitate and metanoiate and the time of the Reformation and things like that, that does seem to be the categories in his mind.
I'll let him comment upon that. Obviously, as a person who has defended Sola Scriptura repeatedly and for decades in many, many contexts against all comers, from atheists all the way through the entire spectrum, I feel that criticism very strongly and I have to hear what Tom is saying.
That's why I hope he will at least give to me the credit of looking for his most current statement and trying to represent it as best I can in the brief amount of time that we have. But I really do believe that when we look at a passage like 2 Corinthians 5, there is something that I think it's appropriate to say, if a person comes up with a brand new interpretation that has not been known before, I'm not saying that, well, I've got 1 ,500 years or I've got 2 ,000 years.
That's not my argument. But my argument would be, if the Spirit of God has been active in pastors and teachers for all that period of time, how did everybody miss it for so long? That's the other side of the equation that I do think needs to be addressed.
You're saying we need to be very cautious. Yeah, I think that's a fair and appropriate thing. But in regards to 2 Corinthians 5 .21, when we talk about reconciliation, see, I hear Tom saying this all the time and I want him to hear me saying this all the time.
I do think you have to listen to everything that not only Paul says, but all the New Testament says. And both sides think the other side's not doing that. And I see, when you talk about reconciliation, what's the basis of it?
In light of the reality of sin and the alienation of God based upon that, in the sense of the wrath of God that is poured out and the fact that man is catechonto and he's suppressing the knowledge of God, all these things.
Reconciliation, what's the basis of that? And that's what Paul's saying, is that he made him who knew no sin. We know sin. Jesus had to be different. He made him who knew no sin to be sin who per haemon, in our place.
What does that mean? That concept of substitution, what does that involve? In order that we might become, we might be made the righteousness of God in him. And the categories of the law court, I love because I love Romans 8.
But in Romans 8, there's something more than just the judge and the person being judged. There is the one, there is the intermediary. And so I go to Hebrews and I see the one standing before the throne and interceding.
And I bring all these things together. And that's why I have to emphasize where I'm coming from. And that's why I do believe that we have this dialogue and the.
Discussion going on. I hear all that. And obviously, I want the rest of the New Testament in there. And that's why I've spent my life teaching it and writing about it and trying to hold it all together, particularly against those who try to pull it apart.
And I do, I mean, James, you will forgive me for saying that it is still slightly amusing to hear somebody from coming from where you're coming from, saying that basically, the tradition has spoken and who do you think you are to bring this new idea?
That's exactly what they said to Luther and Calvin in the 16th century. And now I hear, of course, if it's different, let's argue it. I have argued millimeter by millimeter. And I hope you'll see in my most recent work that 2 Corinthians 521, I've gone into it line by line.
And I think gnometha doesn't mean be made, it means become. May I just take you to another place? The place where Paul gives us the answer to the question that I think you're asking is Romans 6 verses 9, 10, 11, but particularly 11.
Likewise, you should reckon yourselves dead to sin and alive to God in the Messiah, Jesus. This is the reckoning. This is the status. We reckon that because of Jesus, and yes, his substitutionary death, people have accused me of not believing in substitution.
That's because they just haven't read what I've written. But I'm sure you wouldn't accuse me of that. And this is clear, I believe in substitutionary atonement. So all that imputation of our sin to Christ, yes, absolutely fine.
We're on the same page. But the thing that is then reckoned to us, according to Paul in Romans 6, 11, is that we are alive to God in the Messiah. That is, because we are in Christ, we stand on resurrection ground.
That is the place we stand. And that's where we start. That's not because we have struggled against sin and finally won a victory. That's where we start, because of which we are then commanded to struggle against sin.
I suspect you will agree with that. But for me, that is the center of the reckoning. And it's a funny thing that we've gone to reckoning righteousness when Paul really wants to say reckoning the death and resurrection of Jesus.
And that's where I stand as a Christian, on the ground that I have been put in through my baptism, through faith, on the ground of Jesus'.
Resurrection. Well, let me just say in response to the assertion that I'm saying, well, you're going against the grand tradition. That's not what I said. I tried to be very clear. I said, I think when we come up with an interpretation that's never been seen before after all this time, that there needs to be some examination of that.
But I would never say that, well, the traditional interpretation is this, therefore you somehow can't be right about this. I'm not.
Making that argument at all. I can't be right. I hear that. Can I just say, I do understand, though, why in the Western Church the interpretation I'm proposing has not been brought out at all. Because the Western Church has been so stuck on the medieval language of justicia, justice, justification, that it has seen that, misunderstood, declares, you know, through the righteousness of God in, say, Romans 117 and Romans 321, and then has read that into Second Corinthians.
We have to read the whole thing, ironically, in the light of a fully biblical.
Theology, i .e. Isaiah and the Psalms and so on. And if I could respond to Romans 6, I do see Romans 6 as the exhortation as a Christian in light of the person standing to reckon themselves as dead to sin.
In other words, if this has happened, if this great transaction, as I would see it, has happened, then this is the fulfillment of what Jesus said. Deny yourself, take up your cross, join the death march.
There has to be a ethical and moral response to a changed nature. If we have died to sin, we can no longer live therein. There's no question that that is the message in the New Testament. But I think that a lot of folks are still frustrated because we still need, I think, to ask the question, and if I can get anything to come out of this, it might be good along those lines.
When you say, Tom, that the final statement of justification will be based upon the life lived, you say you could never live that life apart from grace. Okay, I hear that. You're saying it's all of grace.
It's the work of the Spirit. The Spirit works within us to conform us to the image of Christ, to bring forth the fruits of righteousness. Again, everything that's a part of my Reformed tradition, God has a purpose in saving his people, and he is conforming those people to the image of Christ, and this is the essence of the New Covenant.
I will write my law upon their hearts. From the least to the greatest, they will know me. All these things, part and parcel of what the New Testament teaches, we agree about that. But when you say at the end, the life lived, and you already raised the term basis, here's the question everyone has, and that is, when you stand before a holy God and you talk about the life that you've lived, from your perspective, can you start along those lines and then lose that at some point down the road?
Or what is that final basis? Is it a grace-inspired body of sanctifying work based on Romans 2 and saying, you know, it's the life that's lived toward seeking after, seeking after immortality? Could you address that?
Let's make this the final question, and we'll have to sort.
Of start to conclude things. I understand the question, and as far as I'm concerned, when I think about, if I take a funeral and think about it in relation to somebody else, so if I'm thinking about it in relation to me, no, this shall be all my plea.
Jesus has lived, has died for me. You know, all those hymns come back into their own. However, I also read in Romans 8 verses 12 through to 17 something very similar, actually, to what I read in Romans 2, and I read the same thing, and if anyone's listening to this who just wants to check out these passages, what does 2 Corinthians 5 .10 mean?
We must all stand before the judgment seat of Christ that we may each receive what was done in the body, whether good or bad. What does Romans 14 .10 mean, which says something very similar? We can't escape the fact that we are summoned to be holy, to be spirit-led, spirit-driven holy people, not by some synergistic, I do this bit, God does that bit thing, but purely from the grace of God, which is operative within us.
This is part of the mystery of spirituality, as I said before, but at the end of the day, we go before our Maker, grasping onto the cross where our sin was dealt with, grateful for the Spirit which has enabled us to believe, and hopefully, what Paul says, the one who began the good work in you will bring it to completion.
And when that happens, we don't say, here is something, by the way, that I've done on the side, we say, everything that has happened has been the work of God, the work of grace, and all I'm trying to do is to hold together these different statements of Scripture and not let one oust the other.
James, thank you for joining us today.
Do you just want to conclude with a few final words and we'll say goodbye? Well, yeah, you know,.
I do think that that is what both of us are trying to do. We want to hear all of Scripture, we're trying to hold it all together, and each one of us has our worldview, our system for doing that, and we need to be aware of what that system is.
I just think that there is a real concern for a lot of folks, and I still continue to have a concern, about the role that overriding presuppositions might have. We all have them, I recognize that, Tom Wright has them.
Hopefully, we have at least gotten to the real issue here, and that is that we're talking about issues of what the righteousness of God means, what imputation means, and hopefully, as a result, there will be at least a little more clarity, maybe a little less of the anger and more of real discussion that needs to be taking place in regards to this vitally important topic, because look, we have a world that is looking to us, and it needs a clear message, it needs a very.
Clear message. If you're listening and you're an atheist listener, lots of atheist listeners and agnostics listen to this program,. Tom, they may be thinking, well, Christianity is very complicated, isn't it?
Goodness me. When it boils down to it, what is so important about this in the end, when it comes to people's lives, God, how they live them? I want to say first, human life is.
Complicated. Any look at any person, life is very complicated. However, there is an essential simplicity to it. And the simplicity at the heart of the Christian faith is simply Jesus, that basically, when it all comes down to it, it's looking long and hard at Jesus, for which you need the Gospels, you need Paul, you need Hebrews, you need everything.
But then realizing something about what his death was about, something about the new world that began at his resurrection, something about the God we see in this Jesus. And I think most people, even little children can.
Actually grasp that. Tom, thank you for being with us. Thank you for talking about this very complex, but stimulating sort of subject. What did St. Paul really say about justification? We look forward to your new book coming out, hopefully around November time this year on St. Paul and the faithfulness of God.
But for the moment, thank you for joining me on the programme today. Thanks also to James White. Well, as ever, if you want to get in touch and leave your thoughts on today's programme, why not get in touch by email?
In the first instance, that's unbelievable at premier .org .uk. You can call the phone line and leave a voicemail message that way. If you're listening, 08456 525252 and select the option for Unbelievable.
Don't forget, I'm sure a lot of chat about this will be happening on the Unbelievable Facebook page and via Twitter. So if you want to follow on Twitter, it's at UnbelievableJB and facebook .com slash UnbelievableJB for the programme page on Facebook.
All the links and of course links to my guests, Tom Wright's material and indeed James White's Alpha and Omega Ministries from the website, from the podcast of this programme. You can find that at premier .org .uk slash Unbelievable.
Links also there to the website we've just put up about our new conference coming up in May. Saturday the 25th of May is when Unbelievable, the conference 2013 takes place. I'd love to see you there. If you're interested in apologetics, defence of the faith, theology, evangelism, presenting the claims of Christ to sceptical people, then this is the conference for you.
We're so pleased to be joined this year by Alastair McGrath. Alastair of course is at King's College London where he's Professor of Theology there. A scientist by background, he has debated numerous high-profile atheists, author of best-selling books like The Dawkins Delusion.
Amy O' Ewing, another of our key speakers, travels the world as a speaker and trainer for Arzim, as well as being involved in local church ministry with her husband Frog. She's now the Curriculum Director at the Oxford Centre for Christian Apologetics.
Fuzz Rana from Reasons to Believe joins us. They're partnering with us again in the conference this year. A biochemist by background, he became actually convinced from his scientific work that life requires a creator, who he found was revealed in Jesus Christ.
Peter S Williams, Christian philosopher, works with the Damaris Trust, great speaker, published many books critiquing atheism, defending Christianity. He's going to be with us. Dr Trevor Stammers is a practicing GP.
His Christian faith has led him to refuse to personally refer women for abortion. He's a lecturer in bioethics at St Mary's University College, Twickenham, former chairman of the Christian Medical Fellowship.
So a great range of speakers for this conference and we're going to be looking at Jesus, how we, whether we can trust the biblical account of Jesus, other issues. C .S. Lewis, 50 years on, his contribution to apologetics, how it can inspire us today.
Faith on the Frontline, dealing with ethical issues, science, abortion, euthanasia. Full details can be yours if you go to the website and register your interest and then we'll send you the full conference schedule.
Premiere .org .uk slash Jesus because the conference title is Jesus, Liar, Lunatic, Legend or Lord and we'll send you the details and as soon as the full booking becomes enabled you will be sent a link for that as well.
Premiere .org .uk slash Jesus is the place to go. Before we run out of time let me bring at least a couple of emails from people who have been getting in touch the last few weeks. This is Morgan in Tennessee says, love the show this is exactly what the first Christians did which is interact with the ideas around them not run into a corner and hide.
Excellent work. Having said that I would love to hear a show on the current Adam and Eve genetics debate. I've read a fair amount of material and John Collins has a great book as I'm sure you're aware but how does one of his suggested views square with Acts 17?
I know these scholars haven't overlooked the passage but I've not seen it explained very well. Without looking at Acts 17 and the particular arguments you mentioned Morgan I am at a loss to tell you anything about that but yes it is something that I've been thinking we should do and there may be an opportunity coming up to do something on the long the lines of genetics Adam and Eve and so forth.
I think that is probably something in the pipeline for the next couple of months at some point. Thanks to Jay who is an atheist I believe has emailed me quite a bit this week actually but wanted to say that he really enjoyed the Keith Ward and Arif Ahmed discussion from last week.
Those were the Christian and atheist philosopher. They joined me for a discussion and debate in Cambridge. It was a Veritas event and we heard the recording of that last week. You said great exchange between two thoughtful intelligent compassionate men.
You did a fine job in facilitation. I was excited that they touched on some of my comments on a previous email. Just to draw a sharp contrast between the two to illustrate my points from yesterday. I'm quite sure Arif doesn't believe that Keith will suffer in hell for all eternity for not taking his point of view.
However the scriptures are quite clear about Arif. This thinking about fellow human beings can only be offensive to those who don't believe. These are the views that underline fundamental Christian theology.
We have a tendency now to downplay and sanitize this as Christians but it is core to what they believe. So you finish up by saying Arif clearly had the better of the debate I felt. These are tough issues that deserve discussion before we talk about the God of love and moral high ground and so on.
So your concern seems to be that Christianity talks of a hell and you feel that that is fundamentally offensive to those who don't believe. Obviously I don't know if you've listened to any of the discussions we've had about hell Jay.
I know you're a relatively new listener having discovered the podcast. Different Christians obviously will tell me maybe take a different view on what hell is. I can't speak exactly for what Keith Ward himself would actually say about that and you may I doubt that he would probably say that that Arif would suffer in hell for eternity for not taking his point of view but I don't want to put words into his mouth.
Thank you for getting in touch though. Derek another atheist wants to comment on the story of a couple of weeks ago the program where we looked at the Sunday assembly what's sometimes been termed the atheist church.
Sanderson Jones one of the comedians who set it up a meeting for atheists on a Sunday morning with songs and sort of sermon of sorts says I'd like to wish him all the best for the Sunday assembly. Long may it thrive and form into a real community.
On the same show David Roberts and your Christian guest talked dismissively of atheist baptism so I'd like to inform listeners that there are humanist celebrants up and down the country who will carry out baby namings as well as marriages and funerals.
You can find out more on the British Humanist Association website. There are plenty of other places to go says Derek. I think we should do a show that actually on on Christian versus humanist sort of celebrants and you know christening versus you know a naming ceremony how a humanist does a funeral compared to a Christian and so forth.
I think that'd be an interesting show. Avril says on the atheist church great program enjoyed it very much particularly David Robertson's remarks about churches in the past i .e social clubs and today's often still the same.
Strip God and Christ out and what are you left with possibly not even a great social club compared to the atheist assembly. David Robertson hit the nail on the head when he mentioned what happens when suffering and pain are in your life.
What about Christians poor persecuted imprisoned facing death for their belief and refusing to deny Christ. What does that say to us. If this atheist assembly does anything I think it's a wake up call for Christians.
Again thanks for the program. Thank you very much Avril for listening. Glad you enjoyed it. That's all we've got time for today and so many other emails that I haven't got to in the last few weeks. So I'll try to leave more time next time but you can understand if we went a bit over on today's show.
Great guests. Thanks again to Tom Wright and James White for joining me. Just a reminder if you want to find out as I mentioned more about them the website is the place to go premiere .org .uk slash unbelievable.
Equally you'll find links there to the website that's gone up for you to look at what's happening at unbelievable a conference 2013 Jesus liar lunatic legend or Lord hope you can visit that register your interest and come back again at the same time next week.
I'm going to be joined by Randall Rouser. He's associate professor of historical theology at Taylor Seminary in Edmonton Canada. He's an apologist and his new book The Swedish Atheist the Scuba Diver and other apologetic rabbit trails imagines a conversation between himself and an atheist and fascinating reading it is too.
We'll be finding out more about it and he'll be in conversation with atheist a very forthright atheist to Ralph Jones. Come back for that same time next week. Until next week I've been Justin Briley and I'll see you then.