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Letter from AmericaThe good, the bad and the uglyA movie that few men of my generation have not seen at least once, if not multiple times, Clint Eastwood’s Spaghetti Western The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly makes a fitting summary of the conclusions reached by a stellar panel at Southern Theological Seminary. There’s a link to the hour-long discussion at Justin Taylor’s http://theologica.blogspot.com/ posted on Friday September 4 2009. New PerspectiveModerated by Al Mohler, with Denny Burk, Tom Schreiner, Mark Seifrid, and Brian Vickers, the panel discussed N.T. Wright’s contribution to the so-called ‘New Perspective on Paul’ from a wide range of vantage points (I almost said ‘perspectives’). All the participants leant over backwards to say clearly that Wright had made important and appreciated additions to, for instance, a defence of the historical resurrection, and that he was also someone who held to a high view of Scripture. But, having said that, they were also equally clear that Wright — to fail to refrain from using a surely overused pun — was wrong on Paul. His response to Piper’s criticism of his position in Piper’s book Future Justification was judged to be a response that did not really even attempt to engage with Piper’s critiques. And, in general, by sneaking in works into the doctrine of justification, making justification an ecclesiological matter not a salvation matter, putting it into the mode of the future judgment of God, dependent upon our performance, all this left Wright formulating a doctrine of justification utterly foreign to the tradition of evangelicals and, more to the point, foreign to the teaching of Paul. They could not square Wright’s teaching on justification with the Bible’s. Trojan HorseThat is the good (Resurrection defence, high view of Scripture), the bad (wrong on the doctrine of justification), but then there was — entirely in my somewhat crass caricature and not at all in the language of any of the participants — the ugly. Wright was deemed to be a charming, charismatic, and very gifted communicator. He was also, unlike Dunn and Saunders who hold similar views, someone who seems closer to evangelicals on other matters and therefore is attractive to some evangelicals. He mischaracterises important ideas of his opponents (that imputation is the idea that righteousness passes like a gas across the room, a view never held by anyone who holds that position). And he has positioned his view to be on the side of all the trendy ethical issues of our day — environmentalism, communitarianism, not ‘modernism’ — so that holding to his view feels positively, well, positive. To switch metaphors, Wright seems to have, unwittingly, positioned his doctrine as something of a Trojan Horse for evangelicalism. One participant told how he had discussed with Wright how Wright had managed to teach a whole week series at a small town in England during Easter without ever preaching the gospel. They seemed to feel that it showed that his leading concern was not salvation but social change. Against the ReformationI suppose a fitting summary of the concerns might be expressed in that well-known text, ‘I do not set aside the grace of God, for if righteousness could be gained through the law, Christ died for nothing!’ (Galatians 2.20). Of course, Wright would say he had a different, better, and correct view of that text. But then Wright — standing against the whole Protestant Reformation at the most foundational issue of the heart of the gospel — seems pretty sure he is right. In the end, Wright is either Luther mark II. Or he’s wrong. We need to pray for him, and be faithful in preaching the biblical gospel of the apostle Paul. Josh Moody,
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