Bible & Tech
Said at Southern points to a video interview with N. T. Wright that took place at Asbury Seminary in November of 2007. (Here’s the announcement about Wright’s visit.) Several minutes in Wright shares some brief thoughts on Piper’s book The Future of Justification: A Response to N. T. Wright.
The audio from Wright’s chapel talks is also available:
I recently read a response from N. T. Wright (Wikipedia) to an individual with concerns about Wright’s views on a variety of subjects. Toward the beginning of Wright’s response appears this statement, which piques my curiosity and strikes me as odd:
I believe firmly and passionately in scripture, and even more firmly and passionately in Jesus himself.
Guy Prentiss Waters. Justification and the New Perspectives on Paul: A Review and Response. P&R, 2004. 273 pp.
[rate 3]
I just recently came across Perrin’s evaluation of Waters’s Justification and the New Perspectives on Paul (WTSBooks).
“Whatever the merits of Justification and the New Perspectives as a primer on twentieth-century Pauline scholarship, the author has been less than successful in his interaction with the NPP. Indeed, assuming that Waters’s primary goal is to construct a convincing argument against the NPP (and N. T. Wright in particular), the book must be judged to have failed at a fundamental level.”1
[Read more…] about Justification and the New Perspectives on Paul | Guy Prentiss Waters
I found this selection from Wright (see the whole lecture) to be helpful in clarifying his view on imputation:
The covenant plan of God has what may loosely be called a ‘participationist’ aspect, and this, too, is part of the glorification of God, as I have already shown from Romans 15. Abraham’s true family, the single ‘seed’ which God promised him, is summed up in the Messiah, whose role precisely as Messiah is not least to draw together the identity of the whole of God’s people so that what is true of him is true of them and vice versa. Here we arrive at one of the great truths of the gospel, which is that the accomplishment of Jesus Christ is reckoned to all those who are ‘in him’. This is the truth which has been expressed within the Reformed tradition in terms of ‘imputed righteousness’, often stated in terms of Jesus Christ having fulfilled the moral law and thus having accumulated a ‘righteous’ status which can be shared with all his people. [Read more…] about Wright on Imputation
I just finished reading what is probably the best summary and most mature exposition of the contours of N. T. Wright’s theology of justification that I have read so far: “New Perspectives on Paul” by N. T. Wright, the final essay in the new volume Justification in Perspective: Historical Developments and Contemporary Challenges (2006), edited by Bruce L. McCormack. Wright responds to the numerous critiques that have been leveled against him over the past several years. The result is a more carefully nuanced and cogently expressed discussion of the central issues.
One thing I found very interesting was Wright’s assertion that the essence of his views on Paul was pre-Sanders. In other words, Wright didn’t rely on Sanders for his ideas. Rather, Wright came to his convictions independently—many of Sanders’s central points merely confirming what Wright had already been thinking (245–46).