“Imagine asking a jeweler to describe a watch-spring. He might simply talk about the spring itself; he might demonstrate how it was related to the rest of the mechanism; he might even explain the value of knowing the right time, and the significance of the watch-spring as part of achieving that end ... There is no point in the jeweler telling you what a marvellous thing a watch is and leaving you with the impres­sion that the spring is used to hang it on your watch chain.”

You might be wondering: why would I begin an article on N. T. Wright and the doctrine of justification by faith by talk­ing about watches and springs? For one simple reason: the above analogy comes from Wright himself, and illustrates some of the ways he believes Protestants have got it wrong about justification.

We may, for example, confuse the “watch-spring” of justification with the “winding mechanism” of God’s mercy. More significantly, Wright argues that many Christians have confused justifica­tion with salvation. Justification, as understood by the apostle Paul, is simply God’s pronouncement that we’re in the right — whereas salvation is our actual res­cue by God from sin and its consequences. The watch-spring is but one component part of a much larger mechanism — the watch itself.

Tom Wright’s view of justification arises from his engagement with the “new perspective(s) on Paul”. It’s a signif­icant departure from the Reformed understanding that has dominated Protestant thought from the 16th century to the present day. I think Wright is wrong — but I don’t believe we should dis­miss his entire argument too quickly.

Although we may have significant reservations about the conclusions he draws, Wright is attempting to address what he sees as an imbalance in the think­ing of Reformed evangelicals. I want, therefore, to set Wright’s view alongside the view we’ve inherited from the earliest Reformers, and to ask: what can we learn from Wright’s attempted corrective? And where does Wright himself take things too far?

From the earliest days of the Reformation, the doctrine of justification of faith has been considered central to the Protestant understanding of the gospel — the definitive answer to the question: how can sinful human beings stand in the pres­ence of a holy God? Martin Luther declared it “the basic and chief article of the faith with which the church stands or falls, and on which its entire doctrine depends”. Calvin, likewise, claimed that justification was “the main hinge on which religion turns” — without it “you have no founda­tion on which to establish your salvation, nor one on which to build piety toward God”.

The doctrine of justification by faith, as the Reformers understood it, lay at the heart of their conflict with Rome. Against the merit theology of medieval Catholicism, which said God saves us at least in part through our efforts to save ourselves, Luther and Calvin contended salvation was the work of God alone. Sinful humanity cannot save itself: God must declare us righteous in his sight. For the Reformers, justification is “the Great Exchange”: God imputes to us the right­eousness of Christ, even as Christ bore our sins in His body on the cross.

Tom Wright, along with other propo­nents of the new perspective(s) on Paul, has attacked this traditional understand­ing of justification as inadequate — labeling it a distortion of Paul’s theology. They argue that Luther was guilty of read­ing his own experiences — his pre-conver­sion struggles of conscience, and (along with Calvin) his battles with the merit theology of medieval Catholicism — back into the text of Romans. It is time, they say, to return Paul’s argument to its origi­nal context — the clash between Christianity and first century Judaism — and read it afresh against that backdrop.

Wright accepts the argument of E. P. Sanders that the Judaism Paul was “con­verted” from did not believe in “salvation by works” — at least, not of the kind the Reformers were contending with in medieval Catholicism. Therefore, Paul’s critique of Judaism — the well from which his doctrine of justification springs — can­not be viewed as an attack on legalism. Paul’s target is the Jewish obsession with “works of the law” (particularly circumci­sion and food laws) as boundary markers that define the limits of the covenant family.

This revised understanding of first cen­tury Judaism leads to a radical reinterpre­tation of Paul’s argument in Romans 1-3. For proponents of the new perspective, Paul’s primary concern in these chapters is not how sinful humans can stand before a holy God, but the basis on which Jews and Gentiles both can be included in the covenant family of God. Paul’s teaching on justification, says Wright, is therefore “not directed against those who attempted to earn covenant membership through keeping the Jewish law (such people do not seem to have existed in the first century) but against those who sought to demonstrate their membership in the covenant through obeying Jewish law.” The doctrine of justification simply “declares that the way is open for all, Jew and Gentile alike, to enter the family of Abraham”.

Where does this novel understanding of justification come from? Wright would, of course, argue that it’s not novel at all: he’s simply recapturing Paul’s origi­nal understanding of justification. And he would point us back to the Old Testament categories of righteousness that Paul’s theology was based on. This, I believe, is Wright’s strongest contribution to the overall debate — and where we can most profit from his argument, even if we reject the conclusions he reaches.

Tom Wright is one of the few propo­nents of the new perspective who still accept that Paul’s language of justification is forensic. The term “righteousness” and the verb “to justify” (dikaiosynẽ and dikaioõ, respectively, in the Greek; tsedeq and tsâdaq in the Hebrew) are borrowed from the law courts. When God justifies us, He is making a legal declaration, that we have no case to answer before the heavenly court. We are not guilty, not subject to God’s judgment, free from the penalty and stain of sin.

That said, the Old Testament concept of righteousness on which Paul’s understanding was built was not primarily legal or forensic — it was covenantal and rela­tional. God’s righteousness consists in His mercy and His absolute commitment to covenant faithfulness — what He has promised, He will fulfil. Likewise, when applied to human beings, righteousness in the Old Testament is understood primar­ily in terms of covenant obedience: so, for example, Moses instructs the people of Israel that,

if we are careful to obey all this law before the LORD our God, as He has commanded us, that will be our right­eousness. Deut. 6:25

On what basis, then, does God justify us? Here is where Wright differs from the historic position of the Reformers: in his books, justification “doesn’t describe how people get in to God’s forgiven family; it declares that they are in. That may seem a small distinction, but in understanding what Paul is saying it is vital.” Wright categorically rejects the notion of imputation — the idea that righteousness is “an object, a substance or a gas which can be passed across the court­room”. God’s righteousness remains God’s righteousness — it is not transferred to us. Moreover, he claims, a judge is not acting justly if he declares the guilty to be innocent. He asserts that God can only justify us — that is, hand down a “not guilty” verdict, because we are already just.

So, if justification is God’s declaration that we are already just, at what point do we actually become just? According to Wright, that occurs when we hear the message of the gospel, and through the gospel God’s word works in our hearts to bring us to faith — when we believe and respond to the message that the “the cru­cified and risen Jesus is the Messiah, the Lord of the world”. Justification is the result of saving faith, and therefore subse­quent to it.

There is much to appreciate about Tom Wright’s approach to the question of jus­tification — he is an articulate and thought-provoking scholar with an apparent com­mitment to the Scriptures as the Word of God. His driving concern in re-evaluating Paul’s theology is to understand the New Testament in light of the Old.

I believe that his critique of much evan­gelical theology is correct: we are too prone to think in forensic terms, at the expense of a covenantal understanding of the work of Christ. And this is in large part because we fail to see how the gospel is fundamentally a fulfilment of God’s covenant promises to His people in the Old Testament era. Wright has done us a favour in reminding us of the fundamen­tal continuity of the old and new covenants: Christ “did not come to abol­ish the law, but to fulfil it” (Mt. 5:17-20).

The problem is that his attempted cor­rective becomes an over-correction, which ends up radically downplaying the forensic aspects of justification. It leads Wright to set up a false antithesis between soteriology and ecclesiology: justification is no longer about who is saved (soteriol­ogy) but about who belongs to the covenant community (ecclesiology) — as though the two can be separated. We can only belong to the covenant community if God first saves us, by dealing with the consequences of our sinful rebellion.

Moreover, Wright’s redefinition tends to diminish the link between justification and the problem of human sin. For Wright, the heart of the gospel message is not that “Christ died for our sins, according to the Scriptures” (1 Cor. 15:3), but that “the crucified and risen Jesus is the Messiah, the Lord of the world”. Although he acknowledges our need for rescue from sin and death — and affirms that our salvation is achieved through the sacrificial, atoning death of Christ — the cross becomes displaced from the centre of his understanding of the gospel.

Any assessment of the new perspective must finally be based on the question: does this revised understanding do justice to the argument of Paul in, say, Romans 1-4? For Wright, Paul’s main aim in these chapters is to demonstrate that covenant membership is open to all. But is that really all that Romans 1-4 seeks to establish? In the end, the reason I have to dis­agree with Tom Wright is that his understanding of justification robs this passage of its power. It turns the primary thrust of Paul’s argument into a sideline.

Is Paul at all concerned to address the problem of Jew-Gentile relations? He most certainly is — and returns to this issue in chapters 9-11 of the same epistle. But is that his primary concern? No, I do not believe so. The immediate context of his teaching on justification is his exposition of the wrath of God, poured out on human sin — and our utter incapacity to establish a righteousness of our own. We need God to do far more than tell us who’s in and who’s out of God’s family — we need Him to cleanse and pardon us. And according to Paul, that is what God does in justifying us: at one and the same time He declares us righteous and effects our righteousness, on the basis of the atoning sacrifice of Christ.