Paul Helm on Tom Wright's "Justification: God’s Plan and Paul’s Vision"

There are four articles providing an extensive review of Tom Wright's new book on justification (which is bound to be important to Evangelicals) at Helm's Deep, the blog written by Paul Helm, Professor of Theology, Highland Theological College.

This gives a flavour of Helm's approach to Wright:

[According to Wright] Are believers justified now? Or are they only justified at the last, on the basis of a whole life? In the new book he writes that the 'future judgment.... corresponds to the present verdict which... is issued simply and solely on the basis of faith’ (165) See also 179, 207-12, 223. But it has to be admitted that Wright wobbles on this, as in 166-7 ‘the verdict on the last day will truly reflect what people have actually done’. The vagueness of the language irritates: 'corresponds to', 'anticipate', 'reflect'. How corresponds to, anticipates, reflects?, one vainly asks.

Nevertheless, despite the wobbles in stating his position, wobbles that could be given a good and a bad sense, this is a change from his Edinburgh paper on justification in which he was clearly striking a different note. There justification was reserved for the final judgement, giving his account a moralistic flavour, which invited one to draw a comparison with Richard Baxter. (See here) [And see also my own post here and the internal links] But this has to be said: the relation of faith to actions badly needs a clarificatory word from the Bishop’s cathedra to settle this vital question: are Spirit-imbued virtues a sign of faith (à la Epistle of James)? Or do they complete faith, supplement it, fulfil it? These questions cry out for an answer, but answer is there none. A clear sentence of two would have done it. It is this sort of gap that holds up the discussion and the meeting of minds. So where, according to the Bishop, (one is left to wonder) does Paul stand on this issue? And where does the Bishop himself stand?

The four articles are at these links:

Wright in General
Why Covenant Faithfulness is not Divine Righteousness (and cannot be)
Wright and Righteousness
Wright and the Reformation

Here is a quote from Helm's conclusion:

While holding to a law-court view of justification Wright has at the same time failed to recognize that the Reformed view of Christ’s alien righteousness is also a law-court view. Because of this his historical analysis, such as it is, is flawed, and his exegetical tour de force of Paul’s view of justification is largely beside the point, for the Reformed outlook expresses its main claims: the law-court point, the central position of the Abrahamic covenant, and the counting of the believer as righteous for Christ’s sake.

This is where Wright’s competitiveness, his insistence of always having the last word, and his failure to provide a clear theological framework, or even to write clearly, saying what he means and what he does not mean by certain terms such as ‘moral righteousness’, and ‘legalistic’ and ‘impart’ and ‘infuse’, prove to be so frustrating.

Ouch! But then his last words are these:

Were Wright to follow through the logic of his position then, I believe, it would approach even more closely to the classical Reformed view than it has already.

So there is hope of reconciliation! There's some heavy reading here, but (given the Evangelical divisions of the present) it is important to try to understand the issues involved.

John Richardson

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