Justification: God’s Plan and Paul’s Vision by N. T. Wright (review)

“Tom” Wright wrote Justification in 2009 as a quick response to John Piper’s book The Future of Justification: A Response to N. T. Wright. Wright is part of the so-called New Perspective on Paul examined by Erik Heen in this journal in 2010 (24: 263–91). After his short treatment in Justification, the prolific Wright published Paul and the Faithfulness of God (2013), Pauline Perspectives (2013), and Paul and His Recent Interpreters (2015). The reissuance of Justification with a new introduction provides a “short and sharp statement of some vital elements” (2) of the larger contemporary debate about Paul. Although the reader steps into the middle of the discussion in Justification, the summary of the issues and the exegetical work on Galatians and Romans are more accessible than the other works (above) targeting academics.

Wright’s new perspective criticizes Protestant and especially Lutheran interpretations of Paul on justification. He argues rather that all along God has been seeking to bring about a new creation “through Abraham/Israel and, as the fulfillment of the Abraham/Israel-shaped plan through the Messiah, Jesus” (99). In this plan, dealing with sin and rescuing people from it are part of what God is about, but it is not the whole matter. Quoting from his discussion of Galatians 3, “salvation from sin on the one hand [and] a united people of God on the other … [are] part and parcel of the same thing” (127).

Wright definitely has a bias toward Calvin (73) and Heen, as the focus of his essay, has addressed shortcomings in the characterization of the Lutheran use of Paul by those of the new perspective. However, Wright takes a hermeneutical turn in the book that is more important than his particular new perspective or his less-than-fair analysis of Lutherans on Paul. It is the same move made by E. P. Sanders and James Dunn among others: they seek to understand Paul in view of late second-temple Judaism. For Wright, this move began when, in the reading of Josephus, he realized that “most Jews of the time were not sitting around discussing how to go to heaven … [but] were hoping and longing for Israel’s God to act, to do what he had promised, to turn history the right way up once again as he had done in the days of David and Solomon” (55–56). Their first question was not about “my relationship with God” but “When is God going to do what he promised?” (61). From this insight, Wright has developed what he believes is central to Paul, that “God had a single plan all along through which he intended to rescue the world and the human race, and that single plan was centered upon the call of Israel, a call which Paul saw coming to fruition in Israel’s representative, the Messiah” (35).

Wright’s critique of Protestants on Paul and his offer of a new perspective raise awareness of the influential role of context in the interpretive task. When one reads Paul with the help of Luther and the reformers, one must attend to the role of sixteenth-century issues in that interpretation and be cautious not to project that context back on the first century and the writings of Paul. Likewise, when reading Paul, one must be more attentive to his context and to the longer biblical tradition behind him. Such awareness enables one to embrace “the truths the Reformers were eager to set forth” (252) and at the same time to “stop thinking in terms of ‘perspectives’ and start thinking in terms of Paul” (140).