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Wilson takes a shot at NPism
Obviously, Doug Wilson has become tired of being
connected with the New Perspective on Paul (aka, NPism), so, a
special edition of Credenda Agenda has come out, replete with
a fairly lengthy article on the subject. I have had a couple
of folks write and complain that I have noted the confluence
of Auburnism (aka the loose movement associated with the past
few meetings of the Auburn Avenue Presbyterian Church
conference in January, which we just learned recently will
feature N.T. Wright, the chief proponent of NPism amongst
conservatives, in 2005) with NPism. Obviously, for those who
have listened with any amount of care to my comments, I have
pointed out the difference in background of both movements,
Auburnism flowing from a staunchly conservative viewpoint,
NPism flowing from a liberal background. I have likewise
noted the differences in emphases as well. However, anyone
who has read Wright cannot help but pause and take notice when
Steve Schlissel stands before the gathered congregants at the
AAPC conference and asserts that justification is nothing more
than the truth that Jews and Gentiles are part of one
covenant, and that by faith. If Wilson disagrees, he has yet
to be plain about it. When I see in print, “Steve Schlissel
is wrong in what he said,” the issue will be concluded. But,
having read this special edition, I found no such rebuke of
Schlissel’s assertion.
In any case, it is obviously important for Wilson to
comment upon the controversy, and this he has done, first in a
small appendix to Reformed is Not Enough, and now in
this special edition of Credenda Agenda. For some reason,
rather than using Wright as his standard, he chooses a small
booklet distributed by John Armstrong, written by Michael
Thompson from Cambridge. Now, I am a bit hampered by the fact
that I’m stuck with Sanders, or Wright, and not this little
booklet, and that may well explain my basic disappointment
with Wilson’s response, for it seemed to me that the most
important elements of NPism’s assertions seemed to be missing
from this little booklet by Michael Thompson. Or at least I
have to assume so, since the heart of the matter was not
addressed, at least not clearly, by Wilson, based upon
Thompson’s booklet.
That is not to say there are not some good things in the
article. There are. For example, one of my chief concerns
with NPism is its rotten root: it comes from that
all-too-popular spectrum of scholarship that long ago gave in
to the lordship of the human mind. Its originators do not
hold to that bulwark of truth that long guided Christian
belief: the absolute authority and inerrancy of the
Scriptures. I have often voiced my amazement that those who
profess conservative, high views of Scripture can embrace
systems that flow clearly from the polluted waters of
less-than-truly-inspired Scriptures. At one point Wilson does
take aim at such “scholarship,” though, and with his
trade-mark style of sarcasm:
While I
am at this point, I would beg the reader to allow a brief
excursus for just a moment. I have just unwittingly revealed
that I naively hold to the Pauline authorship of the
pastorals. This I gladly affirm, and will throw in the book
of Hebrews to boot. Call, and raise you ten. And on top of
that, I will assert that serious theology cannot expect to
get anywhere until we knock off the urbane silliness that
characterizes so much theological discussion today. The
Scriptures say the fear of the Lord is the beginning of
knowledge; some have taken this to mean that unbelief and
autonomous rationality must be the beginning of knowledge.
In light of this, the ache that some conservative scholars
have to be taken seriously in the unbelieving academy is a
pitiful thing indeed, and so I would like to take this
opportunity to give the whole thing the universal raspberry.
What Princeton, Harvard, Duke and all the theological
schools in Germany really need to hear is the horse laugh of
all Christendom. I mentioned earlier that proud flesh bonds
to many strange things indeed, and I forgot to mention
scholarship and footnotes. To steal a thought from
Kirkegaard, many scholars line their britches with journal
articles festooned with footnotes in order to keep the
Scriptures from spanking their academically-respectable pink
little bottoms.
I just
think I am afraid to type “pink little bottoms,” and I
generally am not extended the freedom to blow raspberries in
public. Maybe that is why I don’t say things that way. In
any case, that was my favorite part of the article. Apart
from that, I was left without a lot to cheer about, mainly
because 1) the exegetical issues were left almost completely
untouched, and 2) the NPism Wilson responds to doesn’t look a
whole lot like the NPism I’ve read from Wright. The key issue
of the nature of justification, along with the imputation of
the righteousness of Christ, and the reading of imputational
texts in light of the assumed background of Second Temple
Judaism, just didn’t get much of a response from Wilson in
this article. I guess we can blame Thompson, if we need to,
but the end result is the same: little of the important issues
of NPism have been given a meaningful conservative response in
this article. How about some counter-exegesis of the key
texts regarding the imputation of the righteousness of Christ,
rather than the ever-present, on-almost-every-page shots at
the mainly unnamed critics of Wilson, “the Pharisees of ‘true’
heart conversion” as he calls them at one point? Yes, the
story of the Pharisee and the publican is relevant, but, don’t
you have to establish the over-all need of viewing Scripture
as an inspired whole before aiming that howitzer toward NPism,
which does not share that foundational assumption? NPism, at
its heart, atomizes the text of Scripture, begins with a
fundamental denial of the relevance of the gospel accounts
(and especially their testimony to Second Temple Judaism).
Such has to be addressed, and it really isn’t in this
article. There are good observations of Paul’s own witness
concerning Judaism, all very well articulated, and very
important. But what of the nature of justification itself?
At this point the closest approach to NPism is seen in
Wilson’s Auburnistic hyper-covenantalism, and it is just here
that many have seen the “connection.” And though Wilson does
speak of the imputation of Christ’s righteousness, he does not
seem to see it as one of the key issues relevant to NPism (it
is). NT Wright’s constant denial of this divine truth passes
without a whisper, while numerous positive things are said
about him instead. Instead we have the rather benign
conclusion, “By no means can I give unqualified support to the
New Perspective, even to the conservative wing of it
represented by men like Wright. But neither can I work myself
into a lather over it.” But then again, I guess Wright’s
emphasis upon eschatological justification fits well with the
same emphasis in Auburnism. I guess it means I’m one of those
“true conversion” Pharisees that I get just a tad worked up
over such statements as these (page numbers refer to What
Saint Paul Really Said):
“Most
Protestant exegetes had read Paul and Judaism as if Judaism
was a form of the old heresy Pelagianism, according to which
humans must pull themselves up by their moral bootstraps and
thereby earn justification, righteousness, and salvation.”
(19). (It is breathtaking how often Wright completely
misses the most basic elements of historic Reformed or
Protestant theology and exegesis).
“Many
New Testament scholars use detailed exegesis as a way of
escaping from heavy-handed and stultifying conservatism; any
attempt to articulate an overarching Pauline theology looks
to them like an attempt to reconstruct the sort of system
from which they themselves are glad to be free.” (21)
Wright
speaks often of the Jewish law court as the context of
justification, and to a point, that is correct. But
amazingly, he completely misses the fact that the law court
presented by Paul does not have the bare “judge/parties in
dispute” set up he repeatedly presses in his presentation. He
misses the advocate that is plainly presented by Paul
in Romans 8. But by ignoring that glorious addition to the
law-court scene, Wright can come up with this “new
perspective” on Philippians 3:9:
… and
may be found in Him, not having a righteousness of my own
derived from the Law, but that which is through faith
in Christ, the righteousness which comes from God on
the basis of faith,
The key
phrase here, importantly, is not dikaiosune theou,
‘God’s righteousness,’ but dikaiosune ek theou, a
righteousness from God. All to often scholars have
referred to this passage as though it could be the yardstick
for uses of dikaiosune theou; but this is
impossible. Thinking back to the Hebrew law court, what we
have here is the ‘righteousness’, the status, which the
vindicated party possesses as a result of the court’s
decision. This is ‘a righteous status from God’; and
this is not, as we saw, God’s own righteousness. (104)
Likewise,
it would be nice to hear someone else pointing out the holes
in the following:
2
Corinthians 5:20-21
2
Corinthians 5:20 Therefore, 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. 21 He
made Him who knew no sin to be sin on our behalf, so
that in Him we might become the dikaiosune theou.
I have
left the last, critical phrase untranslated. This time it
is certainly ‘the righteousness of God’; and generations of
readers have taken it to be clear evidence for a sense in
the lower left half of the diagram, most likely B1a. I have
pointed out in detail elsewhere [n.b.: this discussion is
found in Pauline Theology, ed. David M. Hay, Fortress
Press, 1993], however, that Paul is not talking about
justification, but about his own apostolic ministry; that he
has already described this in chapter 3 as the ministry of
the new covenant; that the point at issue is the fact that
apostles are ambassadors of Christ, with God making his
appeal through them; and that therefore the apostolic
ministry, including its suffering, fear and apparent
failure, is itself an incarnation of the covenant
faithfulness of God. What Paul is saying is that he and
his fellow apostles, in their suffering and fear, their
faithful witness against all the odds, are not just talking
about God’s faithfulness, they are actually embodying it.
The death of the Messiah has taken care of their apparent
failure; now, in him, they are ‘the righteousness of
God’, the living embodiment of the message they proclaim.
This reading of 2 Corinthians 5:21 ties the
verse so closely in to the whole surrounding context that it
thereby demonstrates its correctness. If, however, you
insist on reading 2 Corinthians 5:21 with a meaning in the
second half of the diagram – presumably B1a, ‘imputed
righteousness’ – you will find, as many commentators have,
that it detaches itself from the rest of the chapter and
context, as though it were a little floating saying which
Paul just threw in there for good measure. The proof of the
theory is in the sense it makes when we bring it back to the
actual letter. (105)
“Briefly
and baldly put, if you start with the popular view of
justification, you may actually lose sight of the heart of
the Pauline gospel; whereas if you start with the Pauline
gospel itself you will get justification in all its glory
thrown in as well.” (113
If you
respond that the entire epistle to the Romans is a
description of how persons become Christians, and that
justification is central there, I will answer, anticipating
my later argument, that this way of reading Romans has
systematically done violence to that text for hundreds of
years, and that it is time for the text itself to be heard
again. Paul does indeed discuss the subject-matter which
the church has referred to as ‘justification,’ but he does
not use ‘justification’ language for it….Paul may or may not
agree with Augustine, Luther or anyone else about how people
come to a personal knowledge of God in Christ; but he
does not use the language of ‘justification’ to denote this
event or process. (117)
“In
standard Christian theological language, it wasn’t so much
about soteriology as about ecclesiology; not so much about
salvation as about the church.” (119) (Those who have
listened to the AAPC’s emphasis upon “corporate election”
and baptism can see the connection here.)
“First,
within the law-court setting, the ‘righteousness’ which
someone has when the court has found in their favour is not
a moral quality which they bring into court with them; it is
the legal status which they carry out of court with them.
Second, we saw that this legal status, the ‘righteousness’
of the person who has won the case, is not to be confused
with the judge’s ‘righteousness.’ These implications have,
ironically, been missed often enough by the very theologians
who have tried to insist on the forensic (law court) nature
of the doctrine.” (119)
Referring to 1 Corinthians 1:30 Wright opines, “It is the
only passage I know where something called ‘the imputed
righteousness of Christ,’ a phrase more often found in
post-Reformation theology and piety than in the New
Testament, finds any basis in the text.” (123)
One is
not justified by faith by believing in justification by
faith.
One is justified by faith by believing in Jesus. It follows
quite clearly that a great many people are justified by
faith who don’t know they are justified by faith. The
Galatian Christians were in fact justified by faith, though
they didn’t realize it and thought they had to be
circumcized as well. (159)
Forgive me
for thinking that maybe, just maybe, these statements present
a form of NPism that somehow managed to get a “pass” in the
most current edition of Credenda Agenda.
For one of the best articles on NPism,
click
here. |
