Future of Justification 1
Chapter One
Caution:
Not All Biblical-Theological
Methods and Categories
Are Illuminating
A Common Caution
Most scholars are aware that methods and categories of thought taken from historical and systematic theology may control and distort the way one reads the Bible. But we don’t hear as often the caution that the methods and categories of biblical theology can do the same. Neither systematic nor biblical theology must distort our exegesis. But both can.
For example, suppose one took the category of “eschatology” from a traditional systematic theology textbook. It typically would be treated in a final chapter as “the doctrine of last things”—events that are yet future and will happen during and after the end of this age. If someone takes that understanding of eschatology and makes it the lens through which one reads the New Testament, it is possible that it would conceal or distort the truth that in the New Testament the end of the ages has already arrived in the coming of Jesus the Messiah, so that the “end times” began with the first coming of Christ.[1]
Biblical theology, as over against systematic theology, sometimes is acclaimed as the discipline that has set us free from these possible distortions of systematic theology. Biblical theology aims to read the authors of Scripture along the trajectory of redemptive history in light of the authors’ own categories which are shaped by the historical milieu in which they lived. In principle, this is a good thing. Those who submit their minds to the authority of Scripture, as N. T. Wright joyfully confesses that he does,[2] will want to understand what the authors originally intended to say—not what they can be made to say by later reinterpretation.
A Not-so-common Caution
But, as far as I can see in these days, a similar caution about the possible distorting effect of the categories of biblical theology is not commonly sounded. The claim to interpret a biblical author in terms of the first century is generally met with the assumption that this will be illuminating. Some today seem to overlook that this might result in bringing ideas to the text in a way that misleads rather than clarifies. But common sense tells us that first-century ideas can be used (inadvertently) to distort and silence what the New Testament writers intended to say. There are at least three reasons for this.
Misunderstanding the Sources
First, the interpreter may misunderstand the first-century idea. It is remarkable how frequently there is the tacit assumption that we can be more confident about how we have interpreted secondary first-century sources than we are of how we interpret the New Testament writers themselves. But it seems to me that there is a prima facie case for thinking that our interpretations of extra-biblical literature are more tenuous than our interpretations of the New Testament. In general, this literature has been less studied than the Bible and does not come with a contextual awareness matching what most scholars bring to the Bible. Moreover the Scripture comes with the added hope that the Holy Spirit will illumine it through humble efforts to know God’s mind for the glory of Christ.
Yet there seems to be an overweening confidence in the way some scholars bring their assured interpretations of extra-biblical texts to illumine their less sure reading of biblical texts. Thankfully, there always have been, and are today, competent scholarly works that call into question the seemingly assured interpretations of extra-biblical sources that are sometimes used to give biblical texts meanings which their own contexts will not bear.[3]
We all need to be reminded that the last two hundred years of biblical scholarship is the story not just of systematic categories obscuring the biblical text, but, even more dramatically, of a steady stream of first-century ideas sweeping scholarship along and then evaporating in the light of the stubborn clarity of the biblical texts.[4]
Assuming Agreement with a Source When There Is No Agreement
A second reason why an external first-century idea may distort or silence what the New Testament teaches is that, while it may reflect certain first-century documents accurately, nevertheless, it may reflect only one among many first-century views. Whether a New Testament writer embraced the particular way of thinking that a scholar has found in the first century is not obvious from the mere existence of that way of thinking.
As an analogy, one may only think about all that flies under the banner “evangelical” in our own day—and hope that no historian in a thousand years will assign any of those meanings to us simply because we bore that label. Therefore, one must be cautious in saying on the basis of one’s interpretation of extra-biblical texts that this is “how first-century Jews understood the world.”[5] Sweeping statements about worldviews in first-century Judaism are precarious.
Misapplying the Meaning of a Source
A third reason why external first-century ideas may distort or silence what the New Testament teaches is that while the New Testament writer may embrace the external idea in general, a scholar may misapply it to the biblical text. Paul may for example, agree that one important meaning for gospel (euvagge,lion) is the announcement that God is king over all the universe (Isa. 52:7) but not intend for this meaning to govern or dominate what he means by the gospel in every context. Indeed, Paul (or any other biblical writer) may also intend to go precisely beyond the common use of any term and expand its meaning in light of the fuller revelation of God in Christ Jesus.
It will be salutary, therefore, for scholars and pastors and lay people, who do not spend much of their time reading first-century literature, to have a modest skepticism when an overarching concept or worldview from the first century is used to give “new” or “fresh” interpretations to biblical texts that in their own context do not naturally give rise to these interpretations.
Energized by What Is New
N. T. Wright is explicitly energized by finding “new” and “fresh” interpretations of Paul. But one does not find in Wright an appreciation and celebration of the insights of older interpretation that glows with similar exuberance. It is sobering to hear him say, for example, “The discussions of justification in much of the history of the church, certainly since Augustine, got off on the wrong foot—at least in terms of understanding Paul—and they have stayed there ever since.”[6]
Wright’s confidence that the church (Catholic, Protestant, and Orthodox) has not gotten it right for 1500 years explains in part his passion for seeing things in a fresh way. Thus he says,
It is, I think, a time for exploration and delighted innovation rather than simply for filling in the paradigms left by our predecessors. . . . I have to say that for me there has been no more stimulating exercise, of the mind, the heart, the imagination and the spirit, than trying to think Paul’s thoughts after him and constantly to be stirred up to fresh glimpses of God’s ways and purposes with the world and with us strange human creatures. The church and the academy both urgently need a new generation of teachers and preachers who will give themselves totally to the delighted study of the text and allow themselves to be taken wherever it leads, to think new thoughts arising out the text and to dare to try them out in word and deed.[7]
That last sentence is a way of writing that summons us to something good while in the same breath commending something that may not be good. To be sure, we need preachers who 1) give themselves to the text and 2) allow themselves to be taken wherever it truly leads. But when Wright continues the sentence by saying we need pastors who “think new thoughts” and “dare to try them out,” he implies that this is what allegiance to the text will result in. In fact, allegiance to the text may as often awaken joyful gratitude and worship over insights that have been seen clearly and cherished for centuries.
My own assessment of the need of the church at this moment in history is different than Wright’s: I think we need a new generation of preachers who are not only open to new light that God may shed upon his word, but are also suspicious of their own love of novelty and are eager to test all their interpretations of the Bible by the wisdom of the centuries.[8] Of course, Wright and I would agree that the biblical text itself is the final authority, not novelty or tradition, but there is in our time a profound ignorance of the wisdom of the centuries and a facile readiness to be “fresh.” N. T. Wright is certainly not facile. He is a disciplined, thoughtful, rigorous handler of biblical texts and lover of the church. The point here is simply to caution that his celebration of “delighted innovation” may confirm a neophilia of our culture that that needs balancing with the celebration of the wisdom of the centuries precisely for the sake of faithfulness to the biblical text.[9]
Do the Large Frameworks Illumine Justification?
One of the impressions one gets in reading N. T. Wright is that large conceptual frameworks are brought to the text of the New Testament from outside and are providing a lens through which the meaning is seen. Wright would say that these larger frameworks illumine the text because they are faithful to the historical context and to the flow of thought in the New Testament. That is possible. But I have offered the caution above so that there may be a careful weighing of this claim. This book exists because of my own concern that, specifically in the matter of justification by faith, Wright’s approach has not been as illuminating as it has been misleading, or perhaps, confusing. I hope that the interaction that follows will help readers make wise judgments in this regard.
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[1] See 1 Corinthians 10:11: “Now these things happened to them as an example, but they were written down for our instruction, on whom the end of the ages has come.” Hebrews 1:1-2a: “Long ago, at many times and in many ways, God spoke to our fathers by the prophets, but in these last days he has spoken to us by his Son.” First Peter 1:20: “He was foreknown before the foundation of the world but was made manifest in the last times for your sake.” This emphasis on the eschatological nature of the whole New Testament is expressed in the title and substance of George Ladd, The Presence of the Future (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1974).
[2] “Out of sheer loyalty to the God-given text, particularly of Romans, I couldn't go back to a Lutheran reading. (Please note, my bottom line has always been, and remains, not a theory, not a tradition, not pressure from self-appointed guardians of orthodoxy, but the text of scripture.” N. T. Wright, “The Shape of Justification,” accessed 6-24-06 at http://www.thepaulpage.com/Shape.html. For a fuller statement of Wright’s view of Scripture, see also N. T. Wright, The Last Word: Beyond the Bible Wars to a New Understanding of the Authority of Scripture (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 2005), which has been helpfully reviewed and critiqued by D. A. Carson in TrinJ Spring (2006): 1-63. Carson’s review also was made available at http://www.reformation21.org/Past_Issues/2006_Issues_1_16_/2006_Issues_1_16_Shelf_LIfe/May_2006/May_2006/181/vobId__2926/pm__434/.
[3] For example, specifically in regard to matters relating to justification, see especially the D. A. Carson, Peter O’Brien, and Mark A. Seifrid, editors, Justification and Variegated Nomism: The Complexities of Second Temple Judaism, Vol. 1 (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2001); see also Simon Gathercole, Where Then Is Boasting? Early Jewish soteriology and Paul’s Response in Romans 1-5 (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2002); Mark Elliott, The Survivors of Israel: A Reconsideration of the Theology of Pre-Christian Judaism (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2000); A. Andrew Das, Paul, the Law, and the Covenant (Peabody, Mass.: Henrickson, 2001); Friedrich Avemarie, Tora und Leben: Untersuchungen zur Heilsbedeutung der Tora in der frühen rabbinischen Literatur (Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr, 1996); Timo Laato, Paul and Judaism: An Anthropological Approach (Atlanta: Scholars, 1996).
[4] N. T. Wright documents this story in part with regard to the interpretation of Paul. What Saint Paul Really Said: Was Saul of Tarsus the Real Founder of Christianity? (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1997), pp. 12-19. The same story can be told of the ever-changing interpretation of the quest for the historical Jesus. For example, see the surveys in Ben Witherington, III, The Jesus Quest: The Third Search for the Jew of Nazareth (Downers Grove: InterVarsity, 1995); Larry Hurtado, “A Taxonomy of Recent Historical-Jesus Work,” in Whose Historical Jesus? ed. William E. Arnal and Michel Desjardins (Waterloo, Ontario: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 1997), 272-295; Jonathan Knight, Jesus: An Historical and Theological Investigation (London: T&T Clark International, 2004), 15-56; The Historical Jesus in Recent Research, ed. James D. G. Dunn and Scot McKnight (Winona Lake, Ind.: Eisenbrauns, 2005).
[5] N. T. Wright gives his understanding of the covenant and the law-court images of Israel’s future judgment and then says, “Learning to ‘see’ an event in terms of two great themes like these is part of learning how first-century Jews understood the world.” What Saint Paul Really Said, p. 33. This seems too sweeping. He gives the impression that there was a monolithic standpoint. But Wright does agree with the principle that the biblical context of the New Testament writer must confirm any interpretation suggested by external sources. Yet his esteem for the importance of the extra-biblical context seems to give it a remarkably controlling role for his interpretation of the New Testament. Within this context, the New Testament writers may build in “nuances and emphases.” He writes, “We can never, in other words, begin with the author’s use of a word; we must begin with the wider world he lived in, the world we meet in our lexicons, concordances, and other studies of how words were used in that world, and must then be alive to the possibility of a writer building in particular nuances and emphases of his or her own.” “The Shape of Justification.” The problem with that emphasis is that it obscures the facts 1) that “the author’s use of the word” is the most crucial evidence concerning its meaning and 2) that all other uses of the word are themselves other instances that are as vulnerable to misunderstanding as is the biblical use. There is no access to “how words were used in that world” other than particular uses like the one right there in the Bible.
[6] What Saint Paul Really Said, 115.
[7] Paul in Fresh Perspective (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2005), pp. ix-x.
[8] See John Piper, “Preaching as Expository Exultation for the Glory of God” in Preaching the Cross (Wheaton: Crossway, 2007), pp. 103-115.
[9] Wright would want it pointed out that this assessment of his bent toward newness would be news to most of his colleagues in the church of England who see him as “a dyed-in-the wool traditionalist on everything from Trinity to sexual ethics” (his own words from personal correspondence). Indeed we may be thankful that Wright has defended great doctrines of the historic Christian faith. That is not inconsistent with our observations of the new way he has constructed Paul’s teaching—new, he would say, over against tradition, not over against Paul.