Greg Beale’s magnum opus, A New Testament Biblical Theology: Transformation of the Old Testament in the New (Baker Academic), will be published next year. I eagerly await it. Few things have influenced my understanding of the NT like his Gordon-Conwell course on NT Theology. (You can buy the audio here.)
Beale’s chapter in For the Fame of His Name [or eBook version]—”Resurrection in the Already-and-Not-Yet Phases of Justification”—is an adaption of a portion of his NT Theology chapter on justification.
Here’s a taste:
Our Vindication Is Definitive. On the one hand, this vindication is once for all and definitive. It is definitive in the sense that believers are declared not guilty from God’s perspective because Christ suffered the penalty of their sin. And, just as definitively, they are also declared righteous, and accordingly righteousness is imputed to them because Christ achieved representative righteousness for them in his resurrected person and was vindicated from injustice (showing he had been righteous all along), a vindication with which the saints are also identified.
Our Vindication Is Incomplete. But on the other hand, there is a sense in which this vindication is not completed, especially in the sense that the world does not recognize God’s vindication of his people. Just as happened to Jesus, the ungodly world has judged the saints’ faith and obedience to God to be in the wrong, which has been expressed through persecution of God’s people. As was the case with Christ, so with his followers, their final resurrection will vindicate the truth of their faith and confirm that their obedience was a necessary outgrowth of this faith. That is, though they had been declared righteous in God’s sight when they believed, the world continued to declare them guilty. Their physical resurrection will be undeniable proof of the validity of their faith, which had already declared them righteous in their past life.
This follows the pattern of Christ’s own vindication from the unjust verdict pronounced against him. He had already been perfectly innocent during his life leading up to death and before his vindicating resurrection.
Here is an interesting chart Beale includes in his essay:
| Action | Means | Location |
| justification/vindication | bodily resurrection of believers | publicly displayed |
| justification/vindication | God’s announcement | publicly announced before all the world |
| justification/vindication | good works by believers | publicly demonstrated before the entire cosmos |
It’s a very interesting essay, well worth your time and consideration.
