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| Filling Out Our Understanding of Justification | | Date Created: Jun 08, 2005, 03:31 PM |
We Reformed people have always thought we've understood at least one part of the New Testament pretty well: Paul's teaching on justification.
Calvin and Luther found a much-needed antidote for the "works righteousness" sickness in the church of their day in Augustine's writing, who in turn had reclaimed Paul's teaching for his day. Following generations have found "Christ's righteousness for our unrighteousness" strong medicine for the same ailment.
During the past thirty years some New Testament scholars have intensely reassessed Paul the apostle. One of a host of notions (that together are often referred to as the "new perspective on Paul") that have emerged is this: by "justification by faith," Paul was not as interested in helping individuals find a relationship with God, as in demonstrating that the "people of God" consists of all who belong to Christ. Rather than teaching a "righteousness from God" that comes to individuals, justification by faith is about the "righteousness of God" in keeping covenant with Abraham for the "creation of a single worldwide family, composed of believing Jews and believing Gentiles alike," as N.T. Wright, Anglican bishop and leading advocate of a "fresh reading" of Paul, puts it.
Some in the Reformed community welcome the newer idea of a more corporate conception of justification. They see it as truer to the way the story of Israel pervades Paul's theology. They think it offers Reformed Christians a corrective for Protestantism's flirtation with Western individualism.
Others in the Reformed community see a dangerous turning back of the clock, a return to the very sort of self-redemption that Paul opposed in Galatia, and that Augustine and Luther and Calvin opposed in their time.
Before the older and newer readings of Paul get too quickly set against each other, however, we need to see how the language of "righteousness" and "justification" (in Greek, the same word serves for "justification" and "righteousness") actually works. When it comes to the apostle Paul, we'll find that a logic of "not only, but also" helps us much better than one of "not that, but this."
- This is just the beginning of Reggie Kidd's helpful little article "Did the Reformers Get It Right on Justification" in the current By Faith online PCA magazine. Read the rest here. |
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