Gospel Prism

A friend alerted me to Tom Wright’s page, and I thankful for it. In reading NT Wright, I am amazed how much I can shake my head and say, “Yes, I believe that.” It sounds good. It sounds right one, but as earlier when I commented on his view of the resurrection, he leads you along and then instead of going with the curve of the road, he just drives off the edge of the cliff. Listen to his view of the the Gospel and justification. There are some good points here:

The central point that Barnett makes has to do with the relationship between ‘the gospel’ and ‘justification’. I have just finished writing a popular commentary on 1 and 2 Thessalonians, and it was interesting to do so, this last month, with Barnett’s questions in my head. Let me make it clear that I do not, in any way, drive a wedge between ‘the gospel’ and ‘justification’. They belong intimately together, like fish and chips or Lindwall and Miller (I am trying, you see, to contextualise myself in the world of my readers). But they are not the same thing. ‘The gospel’, for Paul, is the proclamation that the crucified and risen Jesus is the Messiah, the Lord of the world. When Paul arrived in Thessalonica, or Athens, or Corinth, or wherever, we know what he announced, because he tells us: The Messiah died for our sins and rose again (1 Cor. 15.3-8; cf. 1 Thess. 4.14, where he is summarizing the same thing). Again and again in the Thessalonian correspondence Paul declares that this word, this gospel, worked with power in his hearers’ hearts, with the result that they came to faith: just as, in Rom. 1.16, the gospel (which Paul has summarized in 1.3-5) is God’s power to effect salvation. This moment is what he describes frequently as God’s ‘call’. Paul’s own ‘ordo salutis’ goes like this: God loved, chose, called and glorified (2 Thess. 2.13-14), or, in the fuller terms of Romans, God foreknew, foreordained, called, justified and glorified. This sequence is very interesting. The ‘call’, for Paul, is what happens when the gospel is preached: God’s word in that gospel works powerfully upon hearts and minds, and people find that they believe it — the crucified Jesus really is Israel’s Messiah, the world’s Lord! But — and this is my central point here, an exegetical point with large theological implications — Paul does not call this event ‘justification’. ‘Justification’ is the declaration which God at once makes, that all who share this faith belong to Christ, to his sin-forgiven family, the one family of believing Jews and believing Gentiles together, and are assured of final glorification.

I do not, then, ‘interpose’ extraneous elements between the effectual call and God’s declaration ‘righteous’. I never have, never would, never (please God) will. I merely insist on Paul’s scheme rather than our traditional evangelical ones, because I believe in the primacy of scripture rather than that of tradition. In Paul’s terms, ‘call’ and ‘justification’ are not the same thing. If centuries of theological tradition have used the word ‘justification’ to mean something else, that is another matter; but if that tradition leads us to misread Paul (as, in my view, it manifestly has), then we must deal with the problem at the root, and not be scared off from doing so by those who squeal that this doesn’t sound like what they heard in Sunday school. Barnett of course doesn’t do that, but he certainly misstates my point when he says that, according to me, ‘justification’ is ‘a badge of membership’. It isn’t, and I never said it was. Faith is the badge of membership, and, as soon as there is this faith, God declares ‘justified’. For Paul, faith is the result of the Spirit’s work through the preaching of the gospel (read 1 Cor. 12.3 with 1 Thess. 1.4-5 and 2.13); this is not driving a wedge between gospel and justification, but explaining how the gospel works to produce the faith because of which God declares ‘righteous’.

and yet…

And the classic Pauline way in which God makes this declaration, stating publicly and visibly that this person is indeed within the family, is through BAPTISM [my emphasis and my Caps]– which obviously, in the situation of primary evangelism, follows at a chronological interval, whether of five minutes or five years or whatever, but which simply says in dramatic action what God has in fact said the moment someone has believed. Nothing is ‘interposed’; no ‘wedge’ is driven between the gospel and justification. You might as well say that because I declare that the starter-motor of the car is not the same thing as the petrol engine I am driving a wedge between the one and the other. The two are designed to work in close correlation; but if the mechanic doesn’t know the difference between them he won’t be able to fix your car.

The declaration is through baptism? I always thought that Paul makes the declaration of justification publicly and visbily revealed was through the cross of Christ. So Paul writes in 1 Corinthians 1:17-18:

For Christ did not send me to baptize, but to preach the gospel—not with words of human wisdom, lest the cross of Christ be emptied of its power. 18For the message of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God.

In fact, Paul says that it was not about baptism but instead it was about preaching the gospel. And this gospel centers on the cross according to verse 18 and not baptism. To shift justification and its declaration to baptism as its public representation is to miss the point of justification in the first place, that we are declared righteous because of His great mercy on the cross and not because of the sacrament of baptism or any other act of work. I know NT Wright is not directly saying this, but the implications and possible misreading of his words here leads one down that dark path.