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,
21st 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.
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