Simon Gathercole's Review of N.T. Wright's "Paul and the Faithfulness of God"

In the very near future I plan to wade back into N.T. Wright with a view towards giving him a less jaundiced reading than I have before.  This is partly because I am becoming more attuned to the latter of what Gathercole calls here the "juridical versus incorporative approaches to Pauline soteriology", and partly because some trusted friends have argued that I haven't fully understood Wright.  So, I will start with this book, since it contains Wright's most recent  and apparently revised thinking on the matter.  That being said, I will be relying on the work of critics such as Gathercole to provide the necessary peer review and to help me digest Wright's massive work in Pauline studies.  

On Gathercole.

Paul and the Faithfulness of God: A Review

From the review:

Righteousness/Justification 

First, a point of confusion, which I freely admit may be one in my own mind rather than in PFG. In his discussion of dikaioō ('justify' - pp. 945-946), Wright states - contrary to what I have always assumed him to be saying - that God's justifying of the believer is 'not a description'; it is rather a declaration, which 'creates and constitutes a new situation, a new status' (p.946). I am puzzled partly because Wright has always polemicized sharply against the idea that justification is 'how one becomes a Christian' (What Saint Paul Really Said, p.125), or the like. Rather, '"Justification" is the doctrine which insists that all those who have this faith belong as full members of this family, on this basis [sc. "faith"] and no other' (What Saint Paul Really Said, p.133). This sounds to me to be something like an emphatic description, a (public) confirmation, a matter of definition - another term which Wright very frequently uses in connection with justification. To take one example: 'For Paul, "the gospel" creates the church; justification defines it' (What Saint Paul Really Said, p.151). Perhaps part of the difficulty here is that the word 'define' very often means 'describe exactly the way a thing is', but can also mean something like 'fix' or 'decide' something not yet fixed or decided. But less ambiguously, Wright has stated: 'Justification is not how someone becomes a Christian. It is the declaration that they have become a Christian' (What Saint Paul Really Said, p.125). I do not see how this can refer to anything but a description. Again, in a discussion of Gal. 2.15-16 in Paul and the Faithfulness of God, Wright defines justification: 'At a stroke, Paul has told us what it means to be "declared righteous". It means to have God acknowledge that you are a member of "Israel", a "Jew", one of the "covenant family"... Justification is all about being declared to be a member of God's people' (PFG, p.856; italics original). Again, the natural reading of the language of divine 'acknowledgement that you are X' is that it refers to recognition of what is already the case.

What confuses me, then, is that the event of justification 'creates and constitutes a new situation, a new status' but at the same time is not the event in which one moves from not being a Christian to being a Christian. Or to put it differently, if justification emphatically does not refer to the event of 'becoming a Christian' (as Wright clearly states it does not), but emphatically is the event of God granting someone the status of covenant membership or the event of being 'reckoned to be part of the covenant family' (PFG, p.930) (as Wright equally clearly thinks), then this seems to drive an unfortunate wedge between becoming a Christian and becoming a covenant/family member. I feel slightly embarrassed to have to write here that, despite considering myself a reasonably intelligent person and having read almost everything Wright has published on the subject of justification, I remain slightly puzzled as to what kind of event justification is on his view.

Second, and more importantly, I still remain unconvinced about Wright's interpretation of 'righteousness' language in Paul. In PFG as in Wright's previous work, the verb 'justify' means 'declare to be a member of the covenant', and the noun 'righteousness' therefore is 'covenant membership': to both of these, glosses about the family are frequently added, so that righteousness means something like a certificate of adoption. To cite one clear example, in his interpretation of Gal. 2.16:

'Words mean what they mean within their sentences and contexts, and dikaiōthōmen here must refer to God's declaration that all believers are part of his family' (p.968).

I will touch here upon (i) a historical-theological point, (ii) an apparent inconsistency in Wright's treatment, (iii) the Jewish background, and (iv) the Pauline usage.

(i) First, Wright appeals, here as elsewhere (e.g. Justification, p.80, and frequently in Pauline Perspectives), to Alister McGrath's authoritative history of the doctrine of justification as grounds for the claim that the meanings of justification in Paul and in the history of dogma, are quite different: 'the word has long since ceased to mean, in ecclesial debates, what it meant for Paul itself' (PFG, p.913). At one level, this of course is a truism: 'justification' has meant so many things that it is hard to see how Paul could be even in theory consistent with all the various proposals in the history of the church. It could be said, however, that all that Wright's appeal to McGrath amounts to is that each of them understands the New Testament differently from what one might call the broad areas of agreement in the Protestant tradition. In fact, they each disagree with this Protestant tradition for different reasons. This is readily apparent when one compares McGrath's account of justification in the Bible immediately prior to the publication of his Iustitia Dei, and Wright's work on justification from the same time.(1)

(ii) Second, there is a matter of consistency in Wright's treatment of 'righteousness'. I don't intend here to quibble with the understanding of dikaiosunē Theou as covenant faithfulness or covenant justice. But it does seem to me an inconsistency to identify human dikaiosunē in second-temple Judaism and Paul as covenant membership without reference to (or certainly without emphasis upon) faithfulness - in particular, without containing the element of 'doing', i.e. very different in its semantics from the divine version. (Cf. the insistence in What Saint Paul Really Said, p.124, that God's righteousness is covenant faithfulness; ours is covenant membership.) Why not translate dikaiosunē consistently as 'covenant faithfulness', whomever it belongs to? I would argue that this makes perfect sense in Paul, who saw the event of justification as God reckoning to the believer the status of one who had fulfilled all the covenant stipulations of the divine will. 

(iii) Third, the sense of righteousness in Jewish literature. Here I have serious reservations about understanding 'righteousness' as 'covenant membership': the problem is with the latter part, not the covenantal nature of righteousness. Righteousness is something you do (as well as being about not doing certain things), and also the status you have when you have done it. This is apparent in OT passages such as Deut. 6.25: 'And if we are careful to obey all this law before the LORD our God, as he has commanded us, that will be our righteousness.' 'Righteousness' is often paired with words such as 'justice' (1 Kgs 10.9), 'integrity' (Ps. 7.8), 'cleanness of hands' (Ps. 18.20). Its frequent antonym is 'wickedness' (Deut. 9.4-5; Job 35.8; Ps. 45.7; Prov. 10.2; 11.5; Eccl. 3.16; Ezek. 18.20; 33.12; cf. Rom. 6.13; Heb. 1.9). Of course 'righteousness' is as Wright points out, relational and covenantal, but it is about doing what the Lord has instituted in the covenant, obeying its (and therefore his) terms. The 'doing' that I have mentioned above is not general 'doing good' in some abstract sense, as if about amassing merits, but the 'doing' specifically of what God has commanded. At one point Wright gives as a sense of righteousness, 'covenant behaviour' (p.802; cf. pp.796-798), but this has no impact on his wider Pauline discussion of passages in Romans and Galatians. It seems to me to be just an impossibility at the philological level to see dikaiosunē as meaning 'membership within the covenant'. I am not aware of any OT or postbiblical Jewish writing where dikaiosunē has this sense. (Wright often quotes the Phinehas parallel between Num. 25.12-13/Ps. 106.31, but this commits the fallacy that parallelism means synonymy.) If there is no substantive evidence for this meaning in the OT and Judaism, it should surely be abandoned. 

(iv) In consequence, it is hard to see that Pauline usage of 'justification' and 'righteousness' can be about family membership. Of course in Galatians membership of God's (and Abraham's) family is an important theme, but this cannot easily be read backwards into the justification discourse in Galatians 2. Table-fellowship at the Antioch incident does not necessarily imply that what was at stake was a family eating together: then as now, lots of different groups share table-fellowship. In Cambridge today, many academics - rightly or wrongly - eat just as frequently with other college fellows as they do with their families. In the Roman empire in Paul's day, cultic meals, including meals with other members of one's guild, were part of the fabric of society. Family language only appears in two places in the surrounding context of the justification language in Galatians 2: in connection with the 'false brothers' (Gal. 2.4) and Jesus being Son of God (Gal. 2.20).

This concern with 'definition' relates too to 'works of the Law'. As mentioned above, Wright occasionally makes reference to 'covenant behaviour' and related ideas, but much more influential upon his wider discussion is the role of works as defining. 

There is an interesting passage in PFG in which Wright defines 'what a first-century Pharisee would have meant by "justification by the works of the law"' (PFG, p.184, italics original). The four components are as follows: (1) God will judge the world and reckon some people in the right; (2) certain works in the present define those who will be acquitted at that judgment; (3) those works mark out loyal members of the covenant from disloyal ones; (4) 'as a result, those who perform these things in the present time can thus be assured that the verdict to be issued in the future, when the age to come is finally launched, can already be known, can be anticipated, in the present' (p.184). These elements are then applied very closely to the specifics of the document '4QMMT' from the Dead Sea Scrolls (p.185).

I may of course be criticised for being simplistic at this point, but this seems to me to be overly convoluted. This four-fold scheme seems to me to over-complicate matters by importing a concern with definition which is not of direct concern in the texts. We can look at the particular case of 4QMMT here, where Wright's application of item (4) above reads: 'therefore you can tell in the present who will be "vindicated" or "justified" in the future, because they are the people who, here and now, are performing this "selection of works of the Law". Do these things, and "it will be reckoned to you as righteousness"' (p.185). My objection to this sort of language is that 4QMMT does not claim to be talking about how you might - from a bird's eye view, as it were - be able to see in the present who will be reckoned as righteous in the future. What it says is: the things we have written about are good for you; reflect on them; you will find at the end of time that they are true; 'do what is upright and good', and it will be reckoned as righteousness to you (cf. again Deut. 6.25). 

As a result, on Wright's (correct) assumption that this framework in 4QMMT is a more widely held scheme, it seems to me that one could more easily gloss 'what a first-century Pharisee would have meant by "justification by the works of the law"' as follows: (1) God will judge the world and reckon some people in the right; (2) the criterion of judgment will be obedience to the Torah ('works of the Law', 'doing what is upright and good'); (3) therefore obey the Torah! 

Certainly 4QMMT is engaged in a debate about what how rightly to interpret what the works of the Law really are. In fact, though, it is only concerned with giving the correct interpretation of some of the works of the Law (miqsat ma'ase ha-Torah). The shared assumption of author and reader alike is, presumably, that obedience to the Law (which of course needs to be understood correctly) leads to being reckoned as righteous.

I am actually rather happier with the way Wright puts it elsewhere: as for example, in the discussion of Leviticus 18.5: 'Torah insists on obedience as the way to "life" (as it was bound to...). But where this obedience has not been forthcoming the Abrahamic promises are blocked. It looks as though Jews will not inherit the promises, because of their failure to keep Torah, and gentiles, because Torah excludes them anyway.' (PFG, p.973). However, when it comes to defining justification, it is cast differently, along the lines of Wright's (I would say, overconvoluted) interpretation of 4QMMT: 'That model (the signs in the present which tell, already, who will inherit the coming age) remains in Paul. His doctrine of "justification" has a similar shape' (p.930). Here it is precisely the element which is introduced against the grain of 4QMMT which defines the shape (though not the content) of justification in Paul.

Comments

[Roger du Barry]

No-one beats Luther on justification. Get his lectures on Galatians from Concordia.

[Embryo Parson]

I have his commentary in my Kindle. I understand those volumes from Concordia on his lectures are priceless.

[Trent Whalin]

I have had a more nuanced view of Wright recently but, I still believe him to be in error. By far the best quote of him is by Doug Moo. "He foregrounds what the Bible backgrounds and backgrounds what the Bible foregrounds." It ultimately comes down to was Judaism works righteous, even slightly? If so the whole NPP thesis falls and either Luther was right or the early EP Sanders was right and Paul is merely caricaturing Judaism. Wright, Dunn , et. al want the cake and to eat it too and ironically enough both have back tracked from their earlier zeal of the NPP. Dunn is actually a better exegete than Wright so I agree with his quasi retractions more while Wright is a big picture guy and he would be less controversial had he stayed there.