Deep and Wide

“I like what I do poorly better than what you don’t do at all.”

I don’t know who said it, or even if I got the quote correct but that message was dancing around in my head almost the entire time I was listening to, and disagreeing with, Andy Stanley’s latest book Deep & Wide.

To say that Stanley’s vision of what church is, and should be is different than mine would be an understatement. He is a mega church pastor with mega church pedigree, running a Willow Creek style seeker sensitive model in the southern US, and he is very good at what he does. His presentations are slick his church is trendy, his budget is enormous and after listening to him tell his story in great detail in the first part of this book it seems at times that he almost falls into success. I am not that guy. I pastor a small church in the great white north, I am not trendy, photogenic, relevant or entirely comfortable with the attractional ministry model that Stanley shamelessly adheres to. At least once per chapter Stanley challenges his reader (listener in my case) to give his model a chance even though he’s well aware that a great many of them will strenuously object to his methods and practices and I admit that I frequently fell in to that group – yet I couldn’t get past that quote in my mind.

Does God prefer what Andy Stanley does poorly to what I don’t do at all?

That’s the question that this book raised for me. I have been heavily influenced by the small organic church model in the last number of years, a model that focus more on doing things right than doing things effectively. It’s about preaching an ‘authentic’ Christianity, and organising an ‘authentic’ church – one that is stridently countercultural in many obvious ways. My model of ministry has been about ruthlessly eradicating cultural syncretism from the church whenever I was confronted by it (and knowing that there is far more syncretism than I will ever likely be aware of), the biggest and most obvious source of which in my culture is consumerism. Yet in his first or second chapter (the problem with audio books is referencing quotes and ideas) Stanley boldly proclaims that since the culture he is in is full of consumers that he will win them with consumerism. He maintains that that was how Jesus preached. And he’s got chapter and verse to support his claim.

It’s funny though – the other people (pastors, scholars, philosophers) that I have been listening to claim the opposite. That Jesus was ruthlessly countercultural and that the hard words of the Gospel demonstrate a Messiah who had little tolerance for the status quo; and they have chapter and verse to support their ideas too!

And that’s where another famous quote comes to mind: “What you win them with, is what you win them to.” And I don’t want to be winning people to some watered down consumer Christianity.

But as a consequence I’m not winning very many. I’d like to believe I’m planting a lot of seeds but if I’m honest, I’m not pulling in much of the harvest. Perhaps that’s not my calling; I do better with helping the garden grow (or is that God’s job? Too many metaphors get intertwined).  And so I’m left at the end of Andy Stanley’s book with more questions than answers. I can’t write him off as some misguided false prophet because he is passionate about the gospel, and because his method and strategy for living it out is so well constructed and thought out. If he is erring, he is erring with a heart chasing after Jesus and the best of intentions. And God is blessing his ministry. And in truth there was a lot of great stuff in the book that I did find myself agreeing with, but it was more the peripheral issues at the core I’m still not sold.

Perhaps this is the type of stretching that God wants to accomplish in my life. Perhaps these are the types of questions that I need to be asking. I don’t know exactly but for now my heart is unsettled and I’m not sure I like that feeling. That’s it. No real application. No real axe to grind or challenge to issue, just good honest wrestling with things. I thought I’d share my musings with you.

Until next time,

Blessings.

"Paul" in a Fresh Perspective - Chapter Eight Summary

In this final chapter Wright attempts to tie up loose ends and address some common criticisms of his approach - particularly with regards to the common Christian juxtaposition of Jesus and Paul as dissonant voices. Wright rejects both of the common threads used to connect Jesus and Paul - the first being the the idea that Paul was like a second generation rabbi seeking to pass on as much of his master’s original teaching as possible; and the second being that Paul was like a second generation reformer, seeking to reframe and refine the work of Jesus. Instead Wright proposes that their relationship “was much more like that between a composer and a conductor; or between a medical researcher and a doctor; or between and architect and a builder.” (p. 155) Jesus saw himself the same way that Wright insists that Paul saw Jesus, but their roles and responsibilities in light of that messianic calling that was upon Christ were different; they occupied different roles in the story that was being told and lived out.

Wright things that one of the reasons that we so frequently get this relationship between Jesus and Paul wrong is because of the eschatology we inherited from the Enlightenment. He says:

“The Enlightenment, in fact, offered an alternative eschatology to that of Jesus and Paul: world history didn’t after all reach its climax with the death and resurrection of the Messiah, but with Voltaire, Rousseau and Thomas Jefferson. The guillotine, not the cross, provided the redemptive violence around which the world turned. No wonder thinkers within this framework of though found it hard to see Jesus with his genuinely first-century Jewish world, and to understand the way in which Paul was explicitly honouring Jesus by not saying and doing the same things but by pointing people back to Jesus’ own unique achievement.” (p. 157)

Specifically, Wright identifies a few common areas of trouble for people when trying to align Jesus and Paul. The first and probably loudest objection being the language of the Kingdom of God. Part of the answer lies in the fact that Jesus was addressing an audience (Jewish) for which the language of ‘kingdom' or ‘reign' of God were powerful and familiar ideas. Jesus was giving people the message of God in the language and idioms they could understand, whereas Paul, preaching to a primarily Gentile audience spoke of Gospel and Lordship - the language usually reserved for Caesar to communicate the same, authentically Jewish idea, to his audience who would largely be lost in the Jewish idioms. (p. 158) Another area Wright touches on (or more specifically, returns to again) is the idea of Justification not being about conversion (truly Jesus says little to nothing about Justification) but about demonstrating a belonging to the people of God. This idea of justification comports nicely with Jesus own redefinitions of circles of belonging with his questioning of family in Mark 3, and appropriate socializing in Luke 15. Thirdly Wright touches on the issue of circumcision, a topic which Paul speaks volumes about and Jesus is completely silent on. Again, since Jesus limited his ministry by and large to the Jews, this wasn’t an issue that Jesus was ever required to confront, but as soon as the church was driven out into the Gentile world it became an issue for which Paul (and the whole Church) needed to contend with.

In the end, what Wright claims to be attempting to do through his work is to “carve out a pathway to a nuanced and satisfying historical integration, complete with full appropriate differentiation, of the respective and very different work of Jesus and Paul.” He believes that, “[t]hey were not intending to do the same sort of thing, not because they were at loggerheads but because they were at one in the basic vision which generated their very different vocations.” (p. 161)

In the next section, Wright attempts to outline what he believes Paul saw as the central focus of his ‘vocation’ as the Apostle of Messiah by first identifying that Paul saw himself in light of the servant language of Isaiah. That’s not to say that Paul saw himself there standing in the role that we usually think of belonging to Jesus, but that Paul saw himself as one called to a complimentary and similar servant ministry. Specifically he saw himself as a royal emissary of sorts - one who would proclaim the name of Messiah where it has not yet been heard. Wright also describes his self-understood role as that of a pioneer for the gospel.

Practically this vocation worked it self out through many familiar pauline stories. Paul would stand before many crowds in the Gentile world and declare to a world full of idols that there was a “living God who had made heaven and earth and who now called all people to account.” (p. 163) He even would proclaim this to people for whom idolatry was an economic necessity. Paul’s vocation worked itself out in his admonition to the Thessalonians that they continue to love (agape) one another even more than they already do; redefining social and economic responsibility around the family of God rather than the household or business. Paul continually tell the church that they represented a “new model of what it meant to be human;” (p. 165) and that more than anything, being being in Messiah, being in the Church, meant a commitment to unity within the body. For Wight, one of the best examples of this commitment to unity lay in Paul’s collection. By asking Gentiles to give to support Jews (who they hadn’t even met) was the most ambitious plan imaginable for fostering unity. Especially knowing that “at the end of the day, the church in Jerusalem might well refuse the gift, since it had come precisely from uncircumcised people, and might well be reckoned to be tainted, to have the smell of idolatry still upon it.” (p. 167)

The practical outworking of Paul’s end times outlook show up in several places too. The first one Wright mentions is his admonition to lazy Thessalonians to get back to work. The imminent arrival of Messiah was no excuse to stop being productive and mooch off the labour of other brothers and sisters in the faith - Paul modelled that in his own tent-making enterprise. It also shows up in 1 Thessalonians 2 which Wright sees as a reference to Roman judgment on Jerusalem akin to what is seen in Mark 13. Paul’s urgency in building unity between Jewish and Gentile Christians stems from the understanding that he has less than a generation before the greatest test of that unity comes upon them with the Roman persecution that will be blamed on the church. (p. 170)

Before he wraps things up, Wright returns to his '5-Act Play' model of God’s unfolding story, in which we (and Paul) are actors in the fifth and final act. This act begins with the resurrection and Pentecost and ends (as we already know) with the return of Messiah - but until that ending comes, we are called as actors to improvise the script that will get us to that end. Specifically Wright makes the point about improvisation that “no musician would ever suppose that improvising means playing out of tune or time. On the contrary, it means knowing extremely well where one is in the implicit structure, and listening intently to other players so that what we all do together, however spontaneously, makes sense as a whole.” (p. 172)  Wright then ends by deconstructing three central planks of modernity and redefining them around Paul’s understanding of reality. The self becomes less about thinking (I think therefore I am) and more about loving (Wright says, I love therefore I am); knowledge becomes less about objectivity (or the postmodern trend toward subjectivity) and more about love. Knowing and being known are defined around affirming Otherness with love. (p. 173) And then finally Wright challenges the grand narrative of modernity of progress and claims, once again, that Paul changes that narrative to one of love.

So ends, N.T. Wright’s “Paul in Fresh Perspective”. Thanks for following along with me in these chapter summaries. It’s been helpful for me in preparing for my upcoming course and I hope it’s been helpful for you as well. I promise in the coming weeks to get back to something more akin to my usual blogging habits. Until then, be blessed.

"Paul" in a Fresh Perspective - Chapter Seven Summary

This is part six in an ongoing series of chapter summaries of N.T. Wright’ book, Paul in a Fresh Perspective. Today we conclude the section of the book on structures and tackle eschatology in chapter 7:Reimagining God's Future

Wright begins by recapping the reasons we end up with eschatology as the third plank of Paul’s theology. Namely that eschatology is the question that demands to be answered by the other two planks of monotheism and election. “If there is one God, and if this God is the God of Israel, then - granted the present state of the world, and of Israel - this God must act in the future to put things to rights.” (p. 130) But this is not just about the future of the world - of God’s good creation - this is the future of God himself. Wright argues that because this eschatological vision of Paul’s is built around Messiah and Spirit, that God has bound himself up in this forthcoming reconciliation of all things.

This eschatology, of course, begins with the established pattern of Jewish eschatology. Paul is not inventing something new here, he is reimagining something that for him has always been. Traditional Jewish eschatology is fundamentally about God reversing the story of Genesis 3 and undoing the damage of the fall. The means by which the Jews expected YHWH to do this was through the routing of pagan religions, their idols and their worshippers. It was a view that YHWH would take up his quarrel over and against the pagan world and deal a decisive victory blow that would finally set the world to right and elevate his chosen people. But even Israel’s own prophets were not always so optimistic about Israel’s role in the forthcoming “day of the Lord.” (p. 131)

The prophet Amos for example, turned the lens of anti pagan sentiment in Jewish prophecy and turned it back on Israel itself. The chosen people, he declared, are not innocent in this matter and the day of the Lord will be a terrifying day for Israel - a day of darkness and not light. Even after the exile, when Israel (Judah) had served their punishment and been restored to the land, there was still the paradox of understanding that although Israel had been redeemed, she had not been redeemed yet. There was a painful awareness among the prophets that although the Temple was restored and worship had resumed, that YHWH had not returned to dwell in that place. (p. 132) Wright contends that this resulted in an understanding of extended exile, despite geographic return to the land that they were still cut-off in some way from the presence of God. Wright sees that Paul and his contemporaries looked at this much the same way - that the continuing pagan oppression of the chosen people constituted an ongoing reminder that things are still not as they ought to be, and that the real exile will not end until God’s Messiah comes to once and for all set things to rights. The point that Wright is trying to make in all of this is that the arrival of Messiah was not expected to be a “bolt from the blue,” something that would surprise all who were patiently waiting for him, but rather it was seen as the natural next event in the ongoing story of Israel and creation. The people were waiting for his arrival precisely because the saw the writing on the wall and understood the eschatological context. They saw themselves on the edge of history and were anxious to see YHWH write the next chapter with the climax of Messiah. (p. 134) The people of God were looking for the story of Exodus to play out again in their generation - for God to lead them out of captivity and into a restored kingdom complete with God’s reappearance in the Temple.

When Wright starts to reveal how Paul has “reimagined” this Jewish eschatological formula he finally tips his hat to his inaugurated eschatology position which he will now explain for the remainder of the chapter. For Wright, “[i]naugurated eschatology, framed, explained and given depth by the reworking of monotheism and election, is one of the most central and characteristic notes of Paul’s whole theology. The still-future events of which he frequently speaks are themselves reworkings of the same Jewish expectations. And the creative tension between the two, between what has already happened in the Messiah and what is still to happen at the ultimate end, is where we must locate some of his most characteristic themes.” (p. 136)

The main thrust of what Wright sees as Paul’s redefinition of Jewish eschatology through Messiah is that “what Israel expected God to do for all his people at the end of time, God has done for the Messiah in the middle of time.” (p. 136) As Paul says in  Corinthians 15, the Messiah is the first fruits of our resurrection and this has implications for the arrival of the Kingdom of God as well. Wright admits that Paul is light on kingdom language in his writings but he pushes back against the assertion that it is absent from his writings. for Wright, Paul’s brevity on the topic should be seen not as a disdain for the idea, but as a sign that he takes the concept for granted. (p. 137) Paul references the Kingdom of God as a future reality in 1 Corinthians 6:9, as a present reality in Romans 14:17 and as both present and future in his fullest explanation in 1 Corinthians 15. This already/not yet tension is one that Paul fully embraces in his writing and one that is central to his eschatology redefined around the Messiah. Wright then goes onto rehash some of what he’s already said a few times about Paul’s eschatology being grounded in a new exodus paradigm modelled after Deuteronomy 30 before he dives headlong into the controversy that has garnered him possibly the most criticism from evangelical Christians. The return of Christ.

Wright has been accused by many over the years of being someone who either outright denies the second coming, or who significantly neuters the doctrine so as to make it almost unrecognizable. [Truly, even in the C&MA where Wright’s masterpiece (my words - but I think they are apt) Surprised By Hope is required reading for the ordination track, ordinands are warned not to take the requirement of this book as an endorsement of Wright’s controversial eschatology. I personally fail to see what is so controversial about it myself, as I think it lines up with a historical understanding of God’s plan for new creation and merely eschews many of the unsavoury doctrines of dispensational premillenialism that began to first appear on the scene in the 19th century. But enough commentary, back to summary.] Wright denies these allegations outright and spends the next section of the chapter mounting a defence for his doctrine of ‘inaugurated eschatology’. He begins where many of his critics focus their complaints, with Wright’s denial of the rapture. Wright’s main point is fourfold: 1.)That the “Day of the Lord” described in Daniel is, for Paul, redefined around the Messiah; 2.)that Paul does not use parousia in the way that many people think of it; 3.)that we misunderstand the meaning of God’s judgment; and 4.)that the goal and purpose of Christ’s return is not destruction but renewal.

With regards to the "Day of the Lord,” Wright makes the point, consistent with his general argument about Paul’s theology and worldview, that “for Paul ‘the Day of the Lord’ by no means denoted the end of the world. Just as in Amos or Jeremiah the really appalling thing about the ‘Day of YHWH’ was that there would be another day after it…so in Paul the ‘Day of the Lord’ is clearly something which might well happen during the lifetimes of himself and his readers.” (p. 141-2) The point that Wright is arguing is that Paul’s theology and understanding of the narrative of what god was doing didn’t allow for the ‘Day of the Lord’ to be the end of days. He more than likely had a day of judgment akin to (and Wright hypothesizes that this is the actual event) the destruction of Jerusalem and the temple during the year of four emperors in AD 70. This makes Wright at least a partial preterist, but it does not make him wrong.

Next Wright revisits his earlier arguments about parousia which I summarized in posts 3 and 4 in this series. In short, parousia for Wright refers not to “coming” as it is often translated, but “presence” as opposed to “absence.” Wright makes this argument on the basis of the imperial usage of the word, noting that this was not a word from the sacred vocabulary and that Paul intentionally borrowed from the language of the empire to make his point. Logic should follow then that he wanted us to understand the word in the context that he took it from. Paul is drawing a contrast between the parousia of Jesus and the parousia of Caesar. The fuller understanding of parousia unlocks the mystery of 1 Thessalonians 4 and our meeting him in the air, by expelling the way a city would go out and meet their future king as he approached his city, his realm and escorted him toward it. This imagery is of us joining with Christ in a second triumphal entry of sorts, re-enacting the events of Palm Sunday with a very different result. When you combine that with the fact that Paul speaks of us as citizens of Heaven means “despite many misreadings, not that we will in the end go off to heaven, but that the one who is presently in heaven will come back and transform the earth, where we have lived as a colonial outpost of heaven waiting for that day.” (p. 143)

When speaking of judgment Wright insists that for Paul, judgment was not only a future event, but an event that would be in accordance with the entirety of a life led. What is important for Wright in this area is that Paul was unapologetically Jewish in his application of this doctrine. That judgment was not in the here an now as many Pagans saw it to be, but was an event that happened after all had been completed.

And when speaking of renewal it is important to note (as many Christians seem ignorant on this front) that God’s plan is not in any way to destroy the world - or even to replace it with a new one, but rather Paul is consistently preaching and teaching about reconciliation and renewal. The act of making old things new. God, through Messiah, is taking the old matter of the cosmos and applying the power of resurrection to it to make it new and glorious and incorruptible. (p. 144)

Shifting gears to the eschatological implications of Paul’s doctrine of the Spirit, Wright makes the argument that the Spirit serves as the down payment of what is to come in God’s future. That the presence of the Spirit in the live of the believer acts as a seal (Ephesians 1) declaring that the person is “already a part of God’s new ago and his renewed people, part of that inaugurated-eschatological family who have been delivered from the present evil age — and, as such, you are ‘not under the Torah’.” (p. 146-7) This, Wright adamantly claims, is where so much debate on the ‘new perspective’ gets stuck. Paul is not simply saying that Christianity is a religion of grace while Judaism is a religion of law, nor is he saying that since Paul found salvation in Christ so therefore it was not available in Judaism, rather for Paul:

“The preaching of the gospel was the means whereby the Spirit worked in the hearts and minds of both Jews and Gentiles not just to give them  a new religious experience, not even just to bring them salvation, but to make them the people in whom the new age, the Age to Come of Jewish eschatological expectation, had come to birth.” (p. 147)

This is why Christian ethics is so much more than keeping law, it is about living in a new world. Living life under the rules and realities of the Kingdom to come rather than the world we know! This is the exciting reality of Paul’s reimagined eschatology; that we are not just the bearers of God’s glorious promise of new creation, but in Christ and filled with the Spirit we are the agents of God’s good work in this world that is being reborn - being remade according to the good and perfect will of it’s creator. This is the good news Paul preaches and this is what Wright is trying to uncover.

In the next chapter Wright will make his final applications of the theology he has spent the last seven chapters laying out. Check back in a few days for the final summary.

"Paul" in a Fresh Perspective - Chapter Six Summary

This is part six in an ongoing series of chapter summaries of N.T. Wright’ book, Paul in a Fresh Perspective. Today we continue a section of the book on structures and tackle the sticky issue of election in chapter 6: Reworking God’s People.

"The belief that Israel was the chosen people of the creator God is everywhere apparent in the Old Testament and the second-Temple literature, and indeed in all that we know of the praxis and symbolic world of both ancient Israel and first century Judaism.” (p. 109)

Wright says that the Old Testament frames the entire story of God’s people as God’s answer to the problem of Evil. Through choosing a people for himself, God intends to make right what went wrong with the whole of creation and in particular to make right those creatures who bear his image. Israel is chosen to be God’s holy nation and royal priesthood who were chosen and appointed for the sake of the world. This whole theology of election is born out in the story of the Exodus and reinforced by regular repetition and multiple allusions. It is tested in the events of the exile but is still reaffirmed in those events despite the hardships faced by the chosen people. Along the way, it becomes clear - to anyone listening to God’s prophets at least - that the chosen people are themselves, part of the problem. As this becomes more abundantly clear, the Old Testament writers “find ways of declaring that YHWH will nevertheless fulfill both the original purpose through Israel and the contingent purpose for Israel.” (p. 110)

But as Wright continually insists, God’s plan was never just for Israel - it always had a wider scope than just one family, than just one people. God always had a plan (through Israel) for all peoples. There was never a doubt that when God did for Israel what God planned to do for Israel the out workings of that plan would include the Gentiles; perhaps in blessing, perhaps in judgment, perhaps in both, but they would be involved, and God’s ultimate plan to root out evil in the world through Israel would be fulfilled.

Now Wright makes the cogent point that Paul never contested Israel’s election, even when redefining it he consistently reaffirmed it. As in Romans 9:4, to them belongs the sonship, the glory, the covenants, the giving of the law, the worship, the promises, the patriarchs and even the Messiah himself. For Paul this was never in question even as history has frequently tried to paint him as someone who gave birth to a theology where Israel’s election was either ignored or overthrown, Paul refuses to dance to that tune. One of the reasons, Wright maintains, that Paul keeps going back to Abraham when he’s explaining election in his letters is to reaffirm Israel’s election from the patriarch’s forward. (p. 111)

To make his point, Wright heads to Galatians 2 and the exchange between Peter and Paul over the table division of the Jewish Christians and the Gentile converts. Wright repeatedly throughout the book affirms the belief that Galatians is among the earliest Pauline documents that we have access to, and as such makes the bold statement here that in this story we have the first ever explanation of Paul’s doctrine of justification by faith. Now Wright invokes several caveats here with regards to that well known (but I think he would say, poorly understood) doctrine: First for Wright it is important that pistis Christou does not refer to faith in Christ (as is frequently translated), or even the faith of Christ (as if Jesus had faith in something), but rather the faithfulness of Messiah to God’s plan for Israel. Secondly, it is important to note that justification is not a statement about how someone becomes a Christian, but about who is a part of the family of God and how you can tell that in the present (this is the issue for which Wright and John Piper have had their now famous disagreement). Thirdly, Wright maintains that the works of Torah are not, as is commonly taught in Christian circles, about works that lead to your justification, but rather they are works that are a result of your justification that demonstrate how you are a member of God’s people. The nuances appear small, but for Wright they are tectonic in nature. (p. 112)

For example: in Paul’s famous statement about being crucified with Christ in Galatians 2:20, becomes the turning point of his redefinition of election as Paul claims his participation in the family of God - the very life he lives, not on the basis of flesh (or ethnicity) but on the participation in the life of the Messiah and his faithfulness to the purposes of God through Israel. This is a life that all ethnicities have an equal share in if they, like Paul have their lives in Messiah. Wright then makes the exciting connection to his earlier statement about Israel’s election being a product of the love of God by saying, “The energy driving this redefinition is nothing other than the love of Messiah himself, just as in Deuteronomy the reason for election was simply the love of YHWH for Israel.” (p. 113)

Still in Galatians 2, a few verses later when Paul begins to speak of grace, Wright makes the point that when Paul says that if dikaiosyne (traditionally translated righteousness) came by the Torah then Messiah died in vain, what he is really talking about there in terms of righteousness is ‘covenant status’ or ‘covenant membership’. What Paul is saying here is not about law keeping through good works (as is so frequently taught in churches) but rather whether one’s status as a member of the covenant community was defined by the limitations of the Torah; an idea that Wright insists Paul rejects. Wright then identifies a correlation at the end of Galatians that harkens back to this idea and reinforces it: in Galatians 6:14-16 Paul extends this new type of election to a cosmic scale when he says that ‘the world is crucified to me, and I to the world.’ Mirroring his words in 2:20 Paul “hereby locates himself on the larger map of the purposes of God, which always stretched out through Israel to the restoration of the whole creation: ‘what matters is neither circumcision nor uncircumcision but new creation.’” (p. 114)

Jumping around the Pauline corpus a little further, in Philippians (particularly chapter 3) Wright notes that this idea is further developed in Paul’s famous claim to being able to boast in his Jewishness. From his “contemptuous pun” against circumcision to his counting all of his status as rubbish, Paul radically redefines what it means to have “covenant membership” (another of Wright’s favourite phrases) around the person of Messiah. Here he also again finds evidence that Israel, the chosen solution for the world’s ills has become infected withe the sickness itself and needs the cure as well. Wight makes particular note of the way that "he ek theou dikaiosyne” is frequently mistranslated and misapplied by Christians as ‘God’s own righteousness’ rather than ‘the covenant status that comes from God’. Wright sees this as a key point of Paul’s theology and not parallel, as many others assert, with Paul’s word’s in Romans 10:3. (p. 116)

Wright also makes much of Paul’s use of puns (contemptuous or not) in Colossians 2 where he believes that the verb Paul employs for ‘lead away captive’ (as in don’t let anyone lead you away captive back into the regulations of Torah) is a very intentional choice of a very rare word because of it’s puntastic qualities. The word in greek ‘sylagogon’ is only one stroke of the pen away from ‘synagogon’ which would have been picked up by his readers. Leading to the understood intent: “Don’t let any one en-synagogue you” or drag you into the Synagogue. (p. 117)

Finally Wright gets back to Romans and sticks his neck out for his redefinition of (and he would argue Paul’s original intent of) justification around the idea of covenant belonging rather than the act of conversion, as it is most commonly used. Wright insists that justification by faith is a sub-doctrine of election rather than something fundamental in and of itself. True justification, Wright insists, is spoken of in Romans 2 and has to do with the final justification of God’s people based on the entirety of their life lived. It is a part of God’s final judgment but justification by faith happens in the here and now for those who have responded to the “call” (Romans 8:30). “In other words, those who hear the gospel and respond to it in faith are then declared by God to be his people, his elect, ‘the circumcision’, ‘the jews’, ‘the Israel of God’. They are given the status dikaios, ‘righteous’, ‘within the covenant’.” (p. 122)

“Thus the point of human beings being called by the gospel to turn from idolatry and sin to worship the true and living God is both that they might themselves be rescued and that through their rescue, and the new community which they then form, God’s purposes to rescue the whole world might be advanced… And this is why, too, the coming together of Jews and Gentiles in the one family is so central to justification… It is, as Ephesians 3 saw so gloriously, that through this creation of a Jew-plus-Gentile family the living God might declare to the principalities and powers that their time is up, and might launch the whole project of new creation.” (p. 122)

After this Wright turns his attention to probably the most significant passage on this topic of election in all of his writings, Romans 9-11. The first amazing thing about this section is that there is a tangible absence of Messiah or Spirit language in Paul’s argument. Some have suggested that this is an indication that Paul is trying to find a way to include unbelieving Israel in God’s future plans apart from Messiah and Holy Spirit, but Wright rejects this notion outright based upon the logic of 10:4-13. Wright instead, continues to insist that behind Paul’s words are the deep conviction that “the events concerning Jesus are the fulfilment of the promises in Deuteronomy 30, and that those who wish to be a part of the covenant renewal spoken of in that passage - the return from exile, no less - must come to faith in the Messiah.” (p. 125) Moreover the usage of Joel 10:13 by Paul in this section would strongly imply a well-developed theology of the Spirit’s role in election as well.

Wright goes on to insist that the entire three-chapter section is a intentionally crafted retelling of the whole story of Israel framed from the perspective that Israel’s inadequacy to serve as the hope of the nations themselves was always a component of God’s plan; that YHWH knew from the beginning that Israel would not be able to be the solution on their own because of the very fact that they too were ‘in Adam’ and were consequently part of the problem. In chapter 10 Paul says that the Messiah was God’s 'plan A’ all along. This is an exciting turn of narrative but it still leaves us with the question posed by Paul: what now is going to happen to ‘Israel according to the flesh?’ (p. 126)

Despite the risk of being accused of supersessionism and even anti-Semitism by advocating such a view, Wright believes that Paul’s response to that rhetorical question is not, as is commonly held, that there is a separate and special salvation plan for unbelieving ethnic Israel, but rather that they have every opportunity to get back into God’s redefined people of God, centred around the Messiah, by the same means that the Gentiles now have access. It is not that Israel has been replaced, but expanded and that everyone’s membership (to make use of a crude metaphor) has been put up for renewal. There is a guaranteed place in the newly redefined covenant people for all of ethnic Israel but they must sign on to the new terms of membership. This is what Wright says Paul means in 11:23 when he tells them at the climax of his rhetoric that “they can be grafted in if they do not remain in unbelief.” Wright maintains that had Paul said what many claim that he has said throughout the ages on this matter (namely a special means for salvation outside of Messiah) then he could not have made that claim about unbelief. (p. 127)

In the end what Wright is trying to communicate is that we need to stop looking at this theology through western, 21^st century eyes, we need to not see this teaching through the lens of centuries of horrible anti-Semitism and mistreatment of the Jews because this was not the world Paul was writing to. Paul’s main ideological sparring partner was not Judaism (as many have believed) but Roman paganism, and here he is contesting a certain type of Roman proto-Marcionism that believed that the promises of God had simply been transferred from the Jews to the Gentiles now and that the Jews had been left out in the cold in this new movement of Messiah. Against that philosophical backdrop it is easy to see how Paul was fighting hard for the continued inclusion of the Jews in God’s redemptive plan through the Messiah – something that we miss when we read these passages through modern eyes.

But all of this is building to something – and in the next chapter Wright explores what Paul believes that something is as he examines Paul’s eschatology. Check back in a few days for the summary of that chapter as well.