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Posted by on Feb 17, 2011 in Soteriology |

Bavinck on the Benefits of Reconciliation

One of the charges that N.T. Wright makes repeatedly in his discussion of the Reformation tradition on salvation is that the tradition has restricted the meaning of salvation and the atonement to only one aspect when it really encompasses much more. In particular, he charges that it has forgotten the renewal of all creation and the work of the Spirit.

In reading through Herman Bavinck’s discussion of Christ’s work, particularly the work of reconciliation, he lists many “benefits that accrue to us from the reconciliation of God-in-Christ”:

the juridicial, that is, the forgiveness of sins; justification; adoption as children; the right to eternal life and the heavenly inheritance; also redemption, which, however, sometimes has a broader meaning as well;

the mystical, consisting in being crucified, buried, raised, and seated with Christ in heaven;

the ethical, that is, regeneration, being made alive; sanctification, being washed, cleansed, and sprinkled in body, soul, and spirit;

the moral, consisting in the imitation of Christ, who has left us his example;

the economic, that is, the fulfillment of the Old Testament covenant, the inauguration of a new covenant; the freedom from the law; the cancellation of the bond with its legal demands, the breaking down of the dividing wall, the reconciliation of Jew and Gentile and all other existing sets of opposites into unity in Christ;

the physical, that is, the victory over the world, over death, over hell, and over Satan.

In a word, the whole enterprise of re-creation, the complete restoration of a world and humanity, which as a result of sin, is burdened with guilt, corrupted, and fragmented, is the fruit of Christ’s work. [Sin and Salvation in Christ, Vol. 3 of Reformed Dogmatics, 452 (Scripture references not included for the sake of space)]

In other words, the very points at which Wright criticizes the Reformed are points that Bavinck makes sure to include in his summary of what Christ accomplished in his work.

The point of all of this is not to criticize Wright. The point is this: we ought to be thankful for the tremendous amount of reflection that the Reformers and their heirs put into their understanding of Jesus’ person and work. His work of reconciliation was far greater than we are accustomed to thinking, and it ought to remind us that God’s global mission is far more dazzling than our small imaginations often take us.

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Posted by on Feb 16, 2011 in Theology |

“Wrighting the Wrongs of the Reformation?” by Kevin Vanhoozer

At the 2010 Wheaton Theology Conference, Kevin Vanhoozer delivered an incredible paper entitled, “Wrighting the Wrongs of the Reformation? The State of the Union with Christ in St. Paul and in Protestant Soteriology.” I found it to be incredibly thought-provoking, nuanced, and–surprisingly–funny. His address has been described as “punny” as he shows that he is a true master with words. But beyond the manner in which he presented the paper, the content is also quite helpful. In particular, I found 3 points made by him to be particularly stimulating as I thought through the theology of N.T. Wright:

(1) The problem is not so much in what Bishop Wright affirms as in what he denies. This is evident through much of Wright’s work. For example, Reformed theologians would eagerly agree that justification–one’s new status before God–means that Jews and Gentiles now belong in the same body, and that therefore there is a basic unity in the church. But they would be very careful also to affirm that justification is not restricted to that meaning, but that the unity of the church follows from the eradication of all human achievements from justification, whether they be ethnic or meritorious.

(2) He argues that union with Christ is the proper home for justification. Wright criticizes the Western tradition for emphasizing the “bank-like” imagery about justification (particularly imputation), but Vanhoozer reminds us that justification properly fits underneath union with Christ in the ordo salutis.

(3) Vanhoozer also points out that adoption is an important category that seems to have been overlooked by Wright. In the Westminster Shorter Catechism, adoption immediately follows justification, and they properly belong together. And when we do discuss the importance of adoption, we bring together justification and what Wright perceives as a lack of emphasis on one’s family-member status in the Reformed tradition.

You can view all the videos from the Wheaton conference here, or watch Vanhoozer’s address below.

[flv:http://espace.wheaton.edu/media/wetn/BITH/100417Vanhoozer.flv 400 250]

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Posted by on Feb 15, 2011 in Academic Papers |

Seeking Balance: The Reformed Tradition, N.T. Wright, and False Dichotomies

For my Systematic Theology III class, I wrote a paper analyzing the theology of N.T. Wright. In some ways, it was one of the harder papers that I’ve written, because it required deep wrestling with the carefully nuanced approach of Bishop Wright to some important doctrines: justification, imputation, the role of the Spirit, the role of works in the Christian life, the definition of “the gospel,” and the formulation of covenant theology. But as I’ve been wanting to understand N.T. Wright and the so-called “New Perspective” for some time, it offered me a great chance to delve into the topic.

One of the supreme difficulties in writing a paper on N.T. Wright is that one paper simply cannot do him justice. He is an original, nuanced, and provocative writer that deserves detailed interaction. Seventeen pages cannot deal with even one strand of his thought sufficiently.

So I chose for my paper to look at one area that popped up in reading his works repeatedly: false dichotomies. Regularly, he seems (to me, at least) to drive a wedge between two ideas (whether they be biblical, historical, or systematic), when they properly belong together. I argue in the paper that these false dichotomies (often based on misrepresentations of the Reformed tradition) drive his thought forward, when instead balance can be found within Scripture and the Reformed tradition. I look at four dichotomies in his work: (1) “righteousness” as covenant faithfulness and covenant status versus moral virtue, (2) Christ’s active obedience versus his passive obedience, (3) the gospel as announcement of Christ as King versus the gospel as the way of salvation, and (4) the traditional doctrine of justification versus the work of the Spirit. I conclude that “these false dichotomies can be resolved by exegesis of key Pauline texts and explanation of traditional Reformation doctrines, and that Wright’s understanding of justification, though certainly creative and carefully nuanced, undermines the message that Paul himself was so careful to convey.”

Download the Paper

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Posted by on Feb 1, 2011 in Reformed Theology |

Why N.T. Wright Might Make Us Pause

While I am not yet ready to offer any sort of fully coherent examination of N.T. Wright’s claims about justification–that will have to wait for my upcoming paper for Systematic Theology III–I have found a couple of things in reading through his books that make me pause. This pause is not the “That’s a good point that I’ll have to think through more” (though he has given me a few of those), but the “This makes me really skeptical about his entire enterprise” kind of pause.  Here’s why:

Bishop Wright repeatedly argues that the Western tradition–particularly the Reformed and Lutheran traditions–have misread Paul regarding justification. He says that they have missed Paul’s overarching themes which guide his understanding of justification. He argues that the traditional Reformed teachings have caused eisegesis and misconstruingl of key Pauline texts. Consider the following examples:

It is ironic that some within the ‘old perspective’ on Paul, by continuing to promote the wrong view of justification as conversion, as the moment of personal salvation and coming to faith rather than God’s declaration about faith, have reinforced as well a polarization between Jesus and Paul which a more historically grounded and theologically astute reading can and must avoid. [Paul: In Fresh Perspective, 160]

The point is that the word ‘justification’ does not itself denote the process whereby, or the event in which, a person is brought by grace from unbelief, idolatry, and sin into faith, true worship, and renewal of life. Paul, clearly and unambiguously, uses a different word for that, the word ‘call’. The word ‘justification’, despite centuries of Christian misuse, is used by Paul to denote that which happens immediately after the ‘call’… [Paul: In Fresh Perspective, 122]

What has been lacking in much of the tradition has been the interlocking Pauline features of (a) the renewal of creation and (b) the indwelling of the Spirit. [Justification: God's Plan and Paul's Vision, 236]

The tragedy of much Reformation reading of Paul is that, by using up the language of “God’s righteousness” on the unnecessary project of “finding someone’s righteousness to impute to the believer” as though “righteousness” was that sort of thing in the first place, and as though the theological point were not already taken care of “in Christ,” this entire point was not just sidelined but binned. And with that the entire single narrative, the entire Jewish narrative, was lost from view. (Which was the chicken, and which the egg? Did the church, and exegesis, first reject the Jewish narrative and then ignore “God’s righteousness,” or did it first misunderstand that key phrase and then reject the Jewish narrative?) No wonder chapters 9-11 [of Romans] were stranded at the time, like an oceangoing vessel high and dry in the harbor after the tide has gone out. [Justification: God's Plan and Paul's Vision, 217]

I could continue for quite some time with similar quotes, but the point is this: N.T. Wright thinks that Reformed–and more broadly Protestant–theologians and exegetes simply missed the big themes that Paul couched his discussion of justification in, leading to massive exegetical problems.

But when you read the above quotes, you may–as I did–get the impression that Bishop Wright is not accurately portraying the Reformation understanding of justification and the Pauline texts associated with it. He paints in broad strokes regarding the Reformed tradition, but sometimes the resulting picture does not seem like the same one that we actually confess.

Is there a reason for this? One cannot say for sure, given that we don’t know for sure what all N.T. Wright has read, but he offers a fairly large clue in Paul: in Fresh Perspective:

Like too many New Testament scholars, I am largely ignorant of the Pauline exegesis of all but a few of the fathers and reformers. The Middle Ages, and the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, had plenty to say about Paul, but I have not read it. [13]

It’s probably best not to make too much of this statement, but nevertheless, I do find it quite astounding. On the one hand, he broadly and regularly critiques the Reformed tradition for its exegesis of Pauline texts, but on the other hand, he admits that he hasn’t really read their exegesis. He regularly wishes that his critics would read him carefully and understand his whole thought-map before critiquing, and yet here he seems to admit that he hasn’t really read the exegesis of those whom he critiques.

And thus even aside from the specific issues related to his understanding of justification and other doctrines, perhaps a careful pause is warranted. Perhaps we ought to take with a grain of salt a “fresh” reading of Paul that is almost entirely disconnected from how pastors and theologians have understood Paul in the centuries since the Reformation. Perhaps we ought to consider more carefully the doctrines and exegesis of writers such as Turretin, a’Brakel, and Olevianus, and later ones such as Bavinck, Kuyper, Berkhof, and others, before we jettison hundreds of years of Christian understanding as “centuries of Christian misuse.”

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Posted by on Jan 20, 2011 in Book Reviews |

Gospel Clarity by Duncan and Barcley

Gospel Clarity: Challenging the New Perspective on Paul is an up-to-date, carefully nuanced, yet brief summary of and response to the New Perspective on Paul.  Ligon Duncan and William Barcley have listened carefully to what some of the primary proponents (including Stendahl, Sanders, Dunn, and of course, N.T. Wright) have explained about their views on Paul, the law, covenant, and justification, and they have written this brief work to give guidance as church leaders and members are confronted with the ideas of the New Perspective on Paul (NPP).

Overview

Barcley and Duncan began with a careful summary of the NPP.  They first identified the central concerns of the NPP: (1) That Paul had a robust conscience, rather than a Luther-like plague of guilt, (2) that “Paul was ‘called’ to be the apostle to the Gentiles, and this became his primary concern,” (3) that “first-century Judaism was not a religion of legalistic self-righteousness,” (4) that Paul was not refuting Jewish legalism, and (5) that “Paul’s problem with the law was not that it could not save,” but rather that Gentiles did not have to follow Jewish boundary markers.  It is from those 5 points that the NPP stems.

But those 5 points lead proponents of the NPP to some other conclusions. First, the NPP proposes a redefinition of justification by faith, arguing that for Paul, “justification is not how someone becomes a Christian.  It is a declaration that they have become a Christian” (26).  This leads to a denial of the imputation of Christ’s righteousness as well.

In response to these central concerns of the NPP, Duncan and Barcley interact with several components of the NPP.  In chapter 2, they examine the origin of Paul’s Christian life and gospel, that is, what his guiding theological concern was. They conclude–after continued interaction with the proponents of the NPP–that the NPP has missed Paul’s primary concern in favor of secondary concerns.

In chapter 3, they discuss an extremely important question: was Paul battling against Jewish legalism? They evaluate Sander’s thesis that Paul Judaism in Paul’s day was characterized by covenantal nomism (getting into the covenant by grace but staying in by works in obedience to the law) rather than by total works-righteousness and conclude that while it describes part of the picture in Paul’s time, it is not the whole picture.  Further, they make a crucial point: whether one gets in by works or stays in by works, the issue is the same, namely, that man has room for boasting, which must be taken away by the gospel. Additionally, they examine the New Testament and find much evidence for the existence of Jewish legalism in Paul’s milieu.

In chapter 4, the authors address several important terms in Scripture and in the literature of the NPP: covenant, law, and works.  This is an extensive chapter that addresses what the authors believe are serious deficiencies in the NPP understanding of how Paul uses those terms.

Chapter 5 finally comes at what is generally considered the heart of the debate about the NPP: the Reformation doctrine of justification by faith.  But before jumping directly into the systematic question of justification, the authors do what Wright has continually begged his critics to do: to read his thoughts on justification in light of his description of the total narrative of Scripture.  This chapter alone is worth the price of the book, for here the authors meet Wright on his own turf and carefully challenge his rendering of the biblical story.  In particular, their challenge rests on two foci: Wright’s definition of covenant and his neglect of the covenant of works in his theology.  Those two elements were particularly helpful in understanding why Wright approaches the question of justification as he does.

The 6th chapter approaches the doctrine of justification more directly, examining both Wright’s teaching on it and providing exegesis of key biblical passages on imputation.  The exposition of these passages–with the operative principle of Scripture interpreting Scripture–is also quite helpful in thinking through the questions raised by the NPP.

Summary

At 173 pages, this is hardly a detailed critique or examination of the NPP.  But several factors make it a careful read: (1) It approaches NPP authors with a great deal of grace, noting places where their ideas have been helpful and attempting to accurately represent their teaching.  (2) It is grounded solidly in the Reformed tradition’s teaching on justification, without being unwilling to listen to areas in which it can be further refined.  (3) It highlights carefully the key problem areas of the NPP, particularly those areas in which Wright and others have pleaded for careful consideration.  I would highly recommend it as a helpful introduction to the current debates over the New Perspective on Paul.

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