Third Way Thursday: Justification
To take a little break from the liturgical ponderings and happenings surrounding me, my mind, and all of us, I am instituting Third Way Thursday, when each Thursday I will post two clashing views on a certain theological or spiritual subjects and then ask: "what’s the third way out of this?"
I want this to be a regular occurance, so if next Thursday I forget to do this yell at me.
The first topic is one that came up recently among some friends because they know I am a big N.T. Wright fan and he has been in a amiable back and forth with John Piper over justification. So what follows is a Piper quote, a Wright quote, and the question: "what is the third way out of this?"
Piper says:
This is my interpretation. Later we’ll get at whether he agrees with
this. In the New Testament, justification is the moment or the event
when you put your faith in Jesus Christ and at that moment God is no
longer against you—he’s for you, and he counts you as acceptable,
forgiven, righteous, obedient because of your union with Christ. You
are perfectly acceptable to God and he is totally on your side.At that moment you are declared and constituted just, even though you’re ungodly. Romans 4:4 talks about the justification of the ungodly, and Romans 3:28 says that “we hold that one is justified by faith apart from works of the law.”
So that’s the general gist of the doctrine, and I regard it as a matter of life and death.
Wright responds to the question: What is at stake in this debate over justification? If one were
to adopt Piper’s view instead of yours, what would they be missing?
What’s missing is the big, Pauline
picture of God’s gospel going out to redeem the whole world, all of
creation, with ourselves as part of that.What’s missing is the big, Pauline view of the church, Jew and
Gentile on equal footing, as the sign to the powers of the world that
Jesus is Lord and they aren’t.What’s missing is the key work of the Holy Spirit in enabling the
already-justified believers to live with moral energy and will so that
they really do ‘please God’ as Paul says again and again (but as
Reformed theology is shy of lest it smack of smuggling in
works-righteousness again).What’s missing is an insistence on Scripture itself rather than tradition . . .
So, dear readers, what is the third way out of this problem of traditional versus new perspective on justification?
Third Way Thursday is the weekly discussion that invites readers to think out side of the box and explore alternatives to the status quo views of theological and spiritual topics.
4 Comments
Submit a Comment
SUBSCRIBE:
I Support
Interesting you bring this up. I was discussing salvation models the other day with someone and how another scholar holds on to one salvation model as the salvation model–in other words, if you don’t believe in the penal substitution model, you’re not a biblical Christian (although I’d like to know what an unbiblical Christian is). The irony is, beside the fact that so many of the models work together, the idea of a penal substitution model being the defining model of salvation is clinging to this scholar’s particular tradition.
Re: the above, I don’t see how those can’t work together. I see it as a spiral. It starts from the big picture (Wright’s perspective) and spirals inward to the individual (although I think Wright agrees with this–it seems to me that he’s not saying Piper is wrong but incomplete) then it spirals back outward to how this Christian, as now part of the corporate new man, participates in God’s kingdom work of redeeming all of creation.
I’m not sure we need a third way, as much as a wider perspective — just as Wright says. We can’t build a foundational doctrine on a few verses stripped of context. We need to look at the whole of Scripture.
Romans 3:28 in context says:
Where, then, is boasting? It is excluded. On what principle? On that of observing the law? No, but on that of faith. For we maintain that a man is justified by faith apart from observing the law. Is God the God of Jews only? Is he not the God of Gentiles too? Yes, of Gentiles too, since there is only one God, who will justify the circumcised by faith and the uncircumcised through that same faith. Do we, then, nullify the law by this faith? Not at all! Rather, we uphold the law.
So Wright is right when he says “justified by faith” is about putting Jews and Gentiles on equal footing. Paul specifically says this in the very next sentence.
If we take “justified by faith” as a standalone principle, a foundation of “biblical Christianty”, we’ll run into a major roadblock with James 2:24
You see that a person is justified by works and not by faith alone.
To support his view, James uses the same example of Abraham’s obedience that Paul uses in Romans. So if we’re truly going to have a biblical understanding of justification, we need to understand the context for Paul and for James. That’s where the New Perspective on Paul has the advantage.
I don’t come from the Calvinist tradition, so I guess I just don’t see a need to reconcile this with Piper’s view.
I agree Heather. I was talking to a friend about this the other day, and said really many Calvinists like to push toward the end of the spectrum with individuals and some of the New Perspective people push all the way toward the opposite end concerning community. How about having individuals in community and communities of individuals. It’s a both/and not an either/or.
Thanks for the great comment Bruce. In my own personal theological growth I made a huge leap into the New Perspective and agree with it whole heartedly on paper. What I do have some concerns about is that the New Perspective could be distorted in practice to let individuals off the hook. I don’t think Wright or many other New Perspective proponents have this in mind at all, and that their is an integral place for the individaul within the new perspective. I do think that the Calvinist tradition is a healthy reminder that we cannot just ditch the question of the individual.