Here are just a few quotes from his The Climax of the Covenant that show that he is definitely looking at justification differently than the traditional reformed view (but I think it is a far stretch for Waters to say he is Semi-Pelagian)…
Justification by faith is “covenant membership demarcated by that which is believed.” (2) In other words it’s about Gentiles not needing to follow the Torah and it’s boundary markers (circumcision, kosher food, and Sabbath) to be a member of the covenant (3).
Paul’s purpose is missed when Romans is understood as about “individual salvation rather than as a treatise on the nature of the people of God.” (252)
“Here is the doctrine of justification, as it appears in Romans 9-11: Christian faith alone is the index of membership (10.4ff; 11.23).” (255)
With monotheism (God) and election (people of God) the core beliefs in the Jewish worldview, Paul inherits these and reinterprets them in light of Christ. Such that Wright states: “I have argued that christology is, for Paul, a means of redefining the people of God, and also a means of redifining God himself.” (266)
…but I didn’t come across (yet) any of his statements about the role of works in a christian’s life.
However, Wright definitely thinks that Christ came to deal with sins that we couldn’t. Referring to Rom 5.12-21, he writes: Christ “had to deal with the ‘many trespasses,’ and the consequent judgment, which had resulted from the sin of Adam. Thus there comes about also in v.16 the further contrast of judgment and justification. The work of Christ does not merely inaugurate a new race of humanity, as though starting from scratch. It effects a favourable verdict for those who, left to themselves, would be in the dock, unable to find a defence (3.19f.)” (37)
Saturday, 27 January 2007 at 4:02 pm
Ben, though you are right to point to Wright’s strong propitiatory theology (often missed, but clear in his Romans commentary on chapter 3), you should check out his definition of justification in New Dictionary of Theology (eds. Ferguson, David Wright, Packer) where he claims that justification is a eschatological declaration that someone is in the right based on the whole of their life, but which is brought foward into the present on the basis of faith. Also see his comments on Romans 2.
But as for the question your title raises (Semi-Pelagian?) i would say absolutely not! The reason why is his theology of Spirit and call. Though eschatological justification is based on the whole of one’s life and the world justification does not itself denote the process whereby, or the even in which, a person is brought by grace from unbelief, idolatry and sin into faith, true worship and renewal of life; Paul, clearly and unambiguously, uses a different word for that, the word ‘call’” (Fresh perspectives, 121). And thus justification happens “immediately after call” ( Fresh Perspectives, 122). The Spirit, which is a gift of grace given at the call, vouchsafes the assurance that one will live the life God requires so that the future verdict can still be based on an entire life led by the Spirit. Thus, we have do not have old idea of justification by process, nor to we have the idea of justification based on an anthropological view of the inate goodness of man.
Saturday, 27 January 2007 at 4:20 pm
In further support of my point the following exerpts are from some papers by Wright:
Justification takes place on the basis of faith because true Christian faith—belief that Jesus is Lord and that God raised him from the dead—is the evidence of the work of the Spirit, and hence the evidence that the believer is already within the covenant. If a man believes this Gospel, his religious stance is clear… Faith is not an achievement which earns salvation, but the evidence of saving grace already at work. Only the renewed heart can believe in the resurrection; on the penitent heart can submit to Jesus as Saviour and Lord.
… regeneration and sanctification are acts of grace to change the heart and life, whereas justification is the declaration, anticipating the verdict of the last day, that the believer is in the right. Justification results in holiness because it presupposes the new birth. It is therefore also the basis of Christian assurance, the certain hope of eternal life. Assurance is not an extra blessing over and above jusification, but simply the outworking of justification itself, the realization that the Spirit who inspired faith and now inspires love will continue until, in the resurrection, he has produced the full harvest of which he himself is presently the first fruits.
I would suggest that Calvinism or Augustinianism does not hang on Justification, it hangs on regeneration–though justification is the historic battle field where most of those wars have been fought.
The statement Wright often makes, “No one plots themselves on God’s map” and his view of holistic eschatological redemption, essentially puts him in the calvinistic (soteriologically and culturally) camp; albeit a very nuanced and significantly altered one (especially in regards to Justification).
Friday, 18 May 2012 at 7:27 am
Kyle wrote:
“The Spirit, which is a gift of grace given at the call, vouchsafes the assurance that one will live the life God requires so that the future verdict can still be based on an entire life led by the Spirit.”
Kyle, this is the granting of a favourable verdict on the grounds of Spirit-inspired living. Oh dear. After 45 years of the Spirit’s leading me, working to get me willing and working his way, I am still way way short of God’s minimum standards on love, and coming up to that mark is the requirement for eternal life, according to Jesus – Luke 10 25-29: “Do this and you will live.” Have the grounds for a “life” verdict changed since the days of the good Samaritan? Has the bar dropped from “Do this and you will live” to “Try to do this”, or “be headed in the direction of doing this”, or ” make a good fist of dong this, and you will live”? (cf Romans 2:13, and Lev.18:5).
Thankfully, quite contrary to what my Spirit-enabled living would merit, I am already judged to have lived (from birth to death) a life of beautiful, perfect love. I am judged to have come up to the required mark. I am judged “righteous”.
I am judged clean in the eyes of God’s good standards, quite “apart from” my works or my living in keeping with those standards (Ro.3:28). The first “boundary” in Romans1-3, that we are all on the wrong side of, whether Jews or Gentiles, is not the national boundary. What makes the national boundary and boundary markers irrelevant is that Jew and Gentile alike are short of the moral boundary which is the first subject under discussion subject right from chapter one. And moving on 4:1-8, Abraham and David were not acquitted and forgiven “apart from” their transgression of nationalistic boundary markers – they WERE circumcised. The legal boundary in focus here is God’s moral law – e.g. re adultery, murder. It is transgression of that boundary that occasions the wrath of chapter one. it is moral transgression which, in 3:10ff, renders Jews too, and not just and Gentiles, liable to a death judgment. In light of our common failure, irrespective of nationality, to be found on the right side of that boundary, that our only hope is a justification “apart from ,,,” that is the subject of 3:21ff. The issue is that there is no-one that “does good”. No-one, circumcised or uncircumcised, comes up to the mark of having the “patience in well-doing” that is the requirement for a life verdict in the judgment of 2:5-13.
If the verdict is based on meeting that requirement, albeit in the power of the Holy Spirit (so I can’t boast), I am still in trouble. But no, I am justified – given a life verdict – by Christ’s blood, not by, or on the grounds of, or based on, the life I live by the Spirit. Of course, since my debt to the law is paid by that wrath-diverting sacrifice of that love-perfect life, I am judged – and it will be so announced at the last day, in a judgment of works, to be as clean as the Judge himself. Moreover, in that works judgment, it should be no great surprise that the morality of the acquitted is in more in accordance with (i.e.”according to”) what we would expect from people led by the Spirit. But that is not what Wright et al. are saying. They tend to leave us under the law, not the law of Jewish boundary markers, but the law of love – the moral law. Granted, it is not the hard legalism that Paul is supposed to have attributed to second temple Judaism, according to the caricature of Paul by Sanders. Sanders’ earth-shattering discovery that the morality of Paul’s contemporaries was worked by grace, leaves me cold – deathly cold. I’m still way short of the life boundary, as were they, and Paul is perfectly justified in pointing that out.
If not hard legalism, theirs was at least a soft legalism – still light years away from free acquittal “choris” (apart from) the moral law – i.e. the law of love. Thanks to the sacrifice of Jesus, I have been GIVEN eternal life and will not come under condemnation (Jn5:24). Since, in spite of my failure to do so, I have been judged to be one who “does the commandments” (Ro.10:5), I am judged to have met the requirements for life. The law cannot condemn me, simpy because whatever the law requires of me I am judged to have done it. Of course, I haven’t, and apart from Calvary, I would be so judged. But in light of Calvary, I am judged innocent, perfectly obedient, apart from the huge gap between the law and my life in the Spirit. The legalism of Tom Wright is a soft legalism, that still leaves us fearful, wondering if we are sufficiently Spirit-led to be in the covenant. Pastorally, it’s a nightmare. In terms of mission, it’s a nightmare – not least where I am here in East Africa, where the vast majority of pastors, who may never have heard of Sanders or his modifiers, strongly insist that one gets in by grace, through faith, but stays in by holy living. Anyone out there who is clear on this, contra NPP, please, “come over and help us!”
John Rowse, Tanzania.