reviewing Wright

A few choice moments from John M.G. Barclay's review of N.T. Wright's Paul and the Faithfulness of God. Freely available here

“Wright develops his claim that Paul’s theology constitutes an unspoken but persistent challenge to the claims of Caesar, such that Paul saw all the ‘powers’ of the cosmos ‘coming together and doing their worst precisely in and through Rome itself’ (1311). Paul of course never says this, and the thesis requires that Paul left unspoken in all of his letters his real analysis of the world.”

“A crucial move, on which ‘a good deal hangs’ (775) is the claim that Paul reads the election of Abraham/Israel as designed to undo Adam’s sin and its effects (784), to deal with evil (907), in short, to save or to rescue the world (814, 839, etc.). This hypothesis is advanced by a reading of Genesis, where parallels between the creation story and the story of Abraham are taken to suggest that Abraham is called to undo Adamic sin, a reading which Wright confesses is unsupported by most commentators on Genesis (785n27). The assertion that this reasoning is evidenced in Second Temple Judaism is unconvincing: apart from a citation from Genesis Rabbah (794), a text written many centuries after Paul, Wright produces no Jewish texts which suggest anything like the claim that Israel was the means by which God would rescue the world. And, crucially, there is nothing in Paul to substantiate this claim… a central load bearing pillar in Wright’s edifice looks dangerously weak.”

“Wright’s reading of the justification of the ungodly (4:5) as the justification of the Gentiles (despite the immediate context in Rom 4:1-8, the backdrop of 3:10-20 and the parallel in 5:6) reflects a persistent failure to grapple with the radicality of Paul’s gospel of the unconditioned gift. A wholistic reading of Romans 4 reveals that Paul tells the story of Abraham not only to show that the Abrahamic family includes Gentiles but also that its origin is incongruous grace.” [NB this is new reading of Rom 4 that Wright's been offering since 2013. More to follow on this...]

“Those who know the Reformers and their writings will wince at some of the generalisations (to put it generously) articulated here.”

"According to Wright, Lutherans tend to say ‘that God has cut off the Israel-plan and done something completely different’ (499). Reformation thought is divided: ‘is the law a good thing (Calvin) or a bad thing (Luther)?’ (514). This is so crude, and so misleading with regard to Luther, that one wonders what level of readership Wright expects."

God does not treat us like that

In the last post I was recommending F.F. Bruce’s book on the relationship between Paul and Jesus. In it he helpfully distinguishes the ways in which Paul’s gospel is traditional and yet also involved fresh revelation from Jesus concerning the significance of his death, resurrection and ascension.

Having teased out those distinctions Bruce then shows that Paul and Jesus have a common theology of what he calls ‘the way of salvation.’ Interestingly, one of his main arguments is their agreement on justification by faith.

“Nowhere has Paul more fully entered into the heart of Jesus’ teaching about God and man than in his insistence on justification by faith.” (Bruce, Paul and Jesus, 52)

The language of justification is there in Luke 18 of course: the tax collector and not the Pharisee goes home justified. But Bruce argues that the content of justification is taught far more frequently by Jesus than we might think simply by counting the number of times the language appears. Consider, for example, of the parable of the prodigal son:

“When the black sheep of the family came home in disgrace and started off with the fine speech he had so carefully rehearsed, his father might easily have said "That's all very well, young man we have heard fine speeches before.   Now you buckle to and work as you have never worked in your life, and if we see that you really mean what you say we may let you work your passage.  But first you must prove yourself; we can't let bygones be bygones as though nothing had happened."  Even that would have done the young man a world of good, and even the elder brother might have consented to let him be placed on probation.  And that is very much like some people's idea of God. But it was not Jesus' way of presenting God - nor was it Paul's.

For - and here is where the Pauline doctrine of justification comes in - God does not treat us like that.  He does not put us on probation to see how we shall turn out - although, if he did so, that in itself would be an act of grace. But then we should never be really satisfied that we had made the grade, that our performance was sufficiently creditable to win the divine approval at the last. Even if we did the best we could - and somehow we do not always manage to do that - how could we be sure that our best came within measurable distance of God's requirement? We might hope, but we could never be certain.  But if God in sheer grace assures us of our acceptance in advance, and we gladly embrace that assurance, then we can go on to do his will from the heart as our response of love, without constantly worrying whether we are doing it adequately or not" (F.F. Bruce, Paul and Jesus, 54)

Although he doesn’t have the parable of the Prodigal Son in mind John Barclay develops this a bit further. He argues that the similarity between Jesus and Paul extends beyond an emphasis on grace to the sense in which their view of grace is offensive as well as inclusive. They both “enact and express a paradigm of God’s grace that is simultaneously welcoming to the lost outsider and deeply challenging to the insider – challenging to the point of scorching away the secure marks of a bounded system” (John M.G. Barclay, “‘Offensive and Uncanny’: Jesus and Paul on the Caustic Grace of God,” in Jesus and Paul Reconnected: Fresh Pathways into an Old Debate (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2007), 17).

That, of course, is exactly what we see in the parable – the prodigal son, the lost outsider, and the tax collectors and sinners with whom Jesus kept company, they are welcomed by God’s lavish grace. And yet the same grace deeply challenges the self-righteousness of the elder brother and the Pharisees who lamented the breadth of Jesus’ social circle.

So, what unites Paul and Jesus? Among other things, the message of the offensively inclusive grace of God.