The Long-Awaited NT Wright Interview
NT Wright is an insightful and somewhat controversial New Testament scholar. His views on the so-called New Perspective on Paul, and its implications for the doctrine of justification, have drawn criticism from many circles. At the same time, however, many thoroughly orthodox pastors and theologians have found Wright’s writings to be a breath of fresh air.
In all the debate surrounding his views, it seems like it has taken way to long for some basic questions to be asked and answered. I have no idea why it has taken so long to for someone to simply ask him some very basic questions, but Trevin Wax finally did:
Trevin Wax: You have said in many of your books that justification is not how one becomes a Christian but a declaration that one is a Christian. What language do you use to explain how one becomes a Christian?
N.T. Wright: Let’s be clear about this because many Christians in the evangelical tradition use words like “conversion,” “regeneration,” “justification,” “born-again,” etc. all as more or less synonyms to mean “becoming a Christian from cold.” In the classic Reformed tradition, the word “justification” is much more fine-tuned than that and has to do with a verdict which is pronounced, rather than with something happening to you in terms of actually being born again. So that I’m actually much closer to some classic Reformed writing on this than some people perhaps realize.
Let me put it like this. In Paul (and this is really a Pauline conversation, after all), what happens is that the word of the gospel is announced. That is to say, Jesus Christ is proclaimed – one-on-one or in a large meeting or out on the street or whatever, and even though that message is crazy (and Paul knows it’s crazy; he says it’s folly to Gentiles and a scandal to Jews), some people find that it grabs them and they believe it. This is bizarre. I shouldn’t be believing this. A dead man got raised from the dead and he’s the Lord of the world. I really shouldn’t believe this, but it does make sense. And it finds me and I can feel it changing me. Paul’s analysis of that is that this is the power of the word (he has a strong theology of the word), and another equal way of saying it for Paul is that this is the Holy Spirit working through the gospel. He says, no one can say that Jesus Christ is Lord except by the Holy Spirit.
So, the Holy Spirit is the One who through the Word does the work of grace which is the transformative thing, and the first sign of that new life is faith.
Now then, the point of justification is not God making you right. The irony is that some of my critics at this point have accused me of a sort of semi-Pelagianism. But that’s precisely what I think I’m not doing. The verdict of justification is God saying over faith, “This really is my beloved child.”
Now part of the difficulty we face is that because different Christian traditions have used the word “justification” to denote either different stages within that process or sometimes the whole process itself. (Hans Kung’s book on justification is really a book on how to be a Christian from start to finish. And so for him, justification means the entire process: from being a total pagan to being a finally saved Christian, and that’s really not helpful in Pauline terms, but there’s been a lot of slippage.) So when people say, “he says that justification is this, but I’ve always thought it was that” it’s probably because we’re denoting a different point in the process.
My only agenda here is to be as close as I can possibly get to what Paul actually says. And I really don’t care too much what the different later Christian traditions say. My aim is to be faithful to Scripture here.
Read the whole interview here.
To summarize…
What is the gospel? The declaration that Christ is lord.
What is justification? The declaration that a person is in the right as far as God is concerned. This is God’s future verdict, which is brought forward into the present.
How does a person become a Christian? By responding to the proclamation of the gospel with faith. But, technically speaking, this is not the same thing as justification, which is God’s declaration.
I haven’t read any of Wright’s academic works or his works on the NPP, so I may be missing something, but all that he says in this interview sounds pretty darn orthodox to me.
