Paul and the Faithfulness of God

Written by N. T. Wright Reviewed By Guy Prentiss Waters

N. T. Wright’s Paul and the Faithfulness of God (PFG) is the bibliographical equivalent of a European basilica or cathedral. PFG is imposing, cavernous, and breathtaking in its scope and ambitions. In just over 1,500 pages of prose that is paradoxically both dense and engaging, Wright surveys a millennium of Jewish history and literature, half a millennium of Greco-Roman philosophy, first-century Hellenistic religion, the fall of the Roman Republic and rise of the Roman Empire, and dozens upon dozens of Pauline texts. And he does so all the while engaging the relevant secondary literature.

This survey is a capstone to thirty-five years of Wright’s published research in the theology of the apostle Paul. Not only does PFG present Wright’s understanding of Paul’s teaching, but PFG stands as the fourth installment in his broader Origins and the Questions of God project, now in its third decade of life. Wright liberally cites not only the first three volumes of this series, but also his many previous publications on Paul. Readers looking for major retractions in PFG will be disappointed. On a few occasions, Wright concedes that he has changed his mind on a question of exegesis, but rarely with consequence for his project at large (cf. pp. 511–12). The impression left upon the reader is that PFG synthesizes a life’s work in NT history and theology and that, so far as Wright is concerned, this synthesis has emerged unscathed from the fires of criticism.

While PFG is lengthy and given to repetition, it is not disorganized. In Part I (“Paul and His World”), Wright attempts to set Paul in the context of the first century. He first relates Saul the Pharisee to the Second Temple Jewish worldview in which he was said to have been nurtured and that provided the raw materials from which he constructed his Christian worldview and theology. Turning to Paul as Apostle to the Gentiles, Wright then explores Paul’s Gentile world in three lights: philosophy, religion, and empire.

In Part II (“The Mindset of the Apostle”), Wright addresses the architecture of what he calls Paul’s worldview (pp. 24–36, 351–54). Worldviews, Wright argues, contain four components—symbols, praxis, a story, and questions. Worldview, Wright maintains, is something that is “presuppose[d]” and consists of “prior commitments” that subsequently come to be formally articulated (p. 28). It therefore undergirds Paul’s theology. There is, however, a reciprocal relationship, Wright contends, between worldview and theology (p. 609). Paul’s theology depends upon his worldview, but his theology also sustains this worldview in Paul’s churches.

It is in Part III (“Paul’s Theology”) that Wright devotes the bulk of PFG to summarizing what is said to be Paul’s theology. For Wright, Paul has reworked the Jewish worldview bequeathed to him by Second Temple Judaism around the conviction that the crucified and risen Jesus is Israel’s Messiah. The resultant Pauline theology in PFG is a coherent, integrated whole, and may be summarized under three headings. The first is monotheism (pp. 619–773). While Paul never abandoned Jewish monotheism, he has freshly reconfigured this Jewish conviction around Jesus and the Spirit. The second is election (pp. 774–1042). Paul similarly reconfigures election around Jesus. Jesus is the faithful Israelite that the people of Israel failed to be. In Jesus, God has inaugurated the fulfillment of his purpose to restore the creation both by dealing with the problem that Torah posed for sinful Israel and by reconciling the world to himself. Since God has redefined his people around this faithful Messiah, it is their faith or faithfulness that marks them out as belonging to the faithful Messiah and as those who will receive final vindication on the day of Christ’s return. The third heading is hope (pp. 1043–1265). Paul has reconfigured Israel’s hope around Jesus and the Spirit. In Christ’s glorious return, God’s saving purposes for the whole creation will be consummated. In the meantime, Paul appeals to this redefined hope in order to shape the character of believers’ lives and in order to chart the future of ethnic Israel.

In Part IV (“Paul in History”), Wright explores how “Paul’s theology, his revised monotheism, election and eschatology would relate to the three worlds in which he lived, those of the Jews, the Greeks and the Romans” (p. 1269). He does this by investigating the way in which Paul brings his theology to bear on empire, religion, philosophy, and Judaism, respectively. Paul’s theology was a decisive, if implicit, challenge to the imperial claims of Caesar. Paul’s praxis would have been understood in terms of an alternate religion that stood opposed to the existing religions of the Roman world. Considered in terms of epistemology, ontology, or ethics, Paul’s theology made claims that confronted the philosophical systems contemporary to him, even as it recognized and affirmed those truths that these systems had captured. Finally, Paul did not see himself and believers as Jews simpliciter. Paul’s theology had, rather, taken the “consistent and . . . Jewish line of ‘fulfillment’” (p. 1413). Paul saw himself as a “Messiah man,” a conviction that entailed both continuity and discontinuity with Judaism (p. 1471).

When viewed in the context of the historical-critical tradition with which it is in dialogue and of which it is part, PFG has some notable strengths. First, Wright contends that Paul understands the OT to be a “single . . . coherent narrative still in search of an ending” (p. 116). This narrative begins with God creating the world and placing Adam in the Garden of Eden. It continues with the promises that God makes to Abraham, the giving of Torah at Sinai, and comes to an unresolved conclusion in the exile of Judah. It is this narrative that provides the context within which Paul speaks both of the person and work of Christ, and explains passages from the OT.

Second, Wright argues that Paul is a covenantal theologian. Covenant, for Paul, “always envisaged God’s call of Israel for the sake of the nations” (p. 1263, emphasis original; cf. pp. 804, 814–15). God’s covenant came to “fulfill[ment] in the death and resurrection of the Messiah, and . . . was being implemented through [Paul’s] own apostolic mission” (ibid.). Covenant is not only the framework within which Paul speaks of righteousness and justification (pp. 933, 1013), but it is also said to integrate both the forensic and participatory lines of Paul’s teaching generally (pp. 846, 875, 900).

Third, Wright argues that Paul’s theology is thoroughly eschatological. In the death and resurrection of Israel’s crucified Messiah, the age to come has dawned in history (cf. pp. 476–77, 550–55, 1068). Pauline eschatology is inaugurated but not yet consummated. That believers stand in the overlap of the ages has profound and radical implications for the way in which they live in the present (pp. 1095–1128), and perceive both the past and the future.

Fourth, within this framework, Wright advances some suggestive exegetical arguments and claims. He argues, for instance, that Paul speaks of the Spirit in terms of New Shekinah and New Exodus, thereby indicating that Paul identified the Spirit with the God of Israel (p. 727, cf. pp. 711–27). Wright also proposes a chiastic structure not only to Rom 11:1–32 but also to Rom 9:1–11:36 that yields a coherent if not altogether satisfying reading of a portion of Romans that has long puzzled interpreters (pp. 1156–1258).

However, PFG also raises some troubling concerns. One relates to justification, a central component of Wright’s project of Pauline theology. Wright explicitly sets justification in the context of the inaugurated eschatology for which he argues in PFG. Justification, then, is both already and not yet; present and future. How, for Wright, do present and future justification relate to one another? There is a genuine “difference” between them, although the two are said to “correspond” to one another (pp. 938–39). “In the present . . . the verdict to be announced on the last day [is] anticipated” (p. 942; cf. p. 766). This latter statement helps us to see what, for Wright, justification is. Justification is fundamentally a divine verdict regarding a human being, a declarative act and not a process of transformation (cf. p. 946).

This construction naturally poses two questions. First, what does justification declare? For Wright, present justification preeminently concerns one’s membership in the people of God. “Justification by works” is “the marking out in the present, by Torah, of those who would be vindicated in the future” (p. 760). On the contrary, Wright argues, justification for Paul “is all about being declared to be a member of God’s people; and this people is defined in relation to Messiah himself” (p. 856, emphasis original). The covenant member is, therefore, declared “in the right” (pp. 948–49). Future justification will take place on the day of judgment, and “will consist, in concrete terms, of the resurrection of all the Messiah’s people, and hence the divine ‘declaration’ about them” (p. 939).

Second, what is the ground or basis of the verdict? With respect to present justification, Wright argues that the Reformational doctrine of imputed righteousness is not true to Paul (p. 951; cf. pp. 841, 881). The phrase “the righteousness of God” denotes rather God’s own covenant faithfulness. For Wright, the Messiah is the faithful one (Wright repeatedly argues that the Greek phrase πίστις Χριστοῦ should be translated “the faithfulness of Christ,” cf. pp. 836–51). Those who have been “incorporated” into the faithful Messiah have pronounced over them the “declaration ‘in the right,’” a declaration that is “rooted in the Messiah’s death” and resurrection (pp. 950–51; 948). The “badge” of that belongingness to the Messiah and of their sharing in his own justifying verdict is “faith” (p. 952). The “basis” of their present justification is therefore “faith” (pp. 832, 847). But while Wright can speak of faith in this connection as receptive of Christ and his work (cf. p. 952), it is not altogether clear that faith in this connection is exclusively receptive. Wright stresses that Messiah’s “faith” is his faithfulness or his covenant obedience, and proceeds to set believers’ justifying faith in the closest proximity to Messiah’s faithfulness (cf. p. 847). One may therefore be forgiven for understanding a person’s justifying faith as inclusive of his faithfulness and obedience (cf. 951), even as Wright commendably stresses that this initial verdict “is not dependent upon . . . work . . . subsequent [to faith]” (p. 955).

With respect to future justification, Wright speaks of one’s final vindication as both “according to” one’s works (pp. 938, 1031) and on the “basis of works” (pp. 940, 1028). He obliquely acknowledges criticisms that the latter form of expression (final justification on the basis of works) is counter to Paul’s teaching that justification is through faith alone (p. 949). But he dismisses the concern that the terms “ground” or “basis” are problematic in this connection (p. 949). In doing so, he regrettably sidesteps the opportunity to bring clarity to one of the most contested facets of his previously published statements on justification.

Wright’s statements on justification in PFG, then, synthesize but do not modify what he has argued in earlier works. PFG provides a full and exegetically-argued statement of justification. It does not, however, bring clarity or modification to dimensions of Wright’s understanding of justification that have come under sustained scrutiny.

A second troubling dimension of PFG is the way in which it depicts the saving purposes and work of God in Christ. Wright frequently stresses that God’s saving purposes are for the world. God’s intent is not simply to rescue a people, nor even to rescue that people from the world. His purpose rather is to rescue a people, and through that people, to rescue the world (cf. pp. 525, 734–35). The narrative of Adam-Abraham-Israel-(Torah)-Jesus represents the unfolding of that one purpose in history. These main lines of Wright’s proposal are salutary. It is the details and mechanics of Wright’s construct that raise certain questions. Wright, for instance, properly depicts the world’s “plight” in both Second Temple Judaism and Paul in terms of sin (p. 747), and properly understands Paul’s pre-Christian conception of that plight to have intensified in light of the cross (p. 750). But Wright overwhelmingly depicts Paul’s conception of sin in terms of the power, pollution, and bondage of sin without laying corresponding emphasis upon the guilt of sin (see especially pp. 752–72). In like fashion, Wright’s keenest interest in Paul’s exposition of Christ’s death is as that death liberates its beneficiaries from the power and captivity of sin (pp. 1068–70). There is in PFG, furthermore, no discussion of Paul’s teaching on hell, much less hell as a place of the eternal punishment of the wicked (cf. 2 Thess 1:8–9).

The emphasis in PFG’s discussion of sin and salvation, therefore, is upon the way in which sin and salvation play out within human experience and the creation. These points of themselves are, of course, true to Paul. The problem comes in what is attenuated or even omitted. Personal sin as subjecting the individual sinner to the eternal wrath of God, and salvation as delivering the sinner from that wrath and restoring him to a right relationship with God—these grand Pauline themes either do not register at all in PFG or register only as faint echoes. Wright’s interests in Paul lie elsewhere as evidenced by his characterization of the proposition that “God acts to restore humans to a ‘right relationship’ with himself” as a “drastic truncation of Paul’s narrative world” (p. 490); his animadversions against “soul-saving and soul-making” (p. 1485); and his chiding of Western Christianity for its alleged preoccupation with heaven (p. 1485). The absence of hell and the eternal punishment of the wicked in PFG raises, in turn, serious and unanswered questions about its understanding of the character of God, the work of Christ, and the fate of human beings—three of the most fundamental concerns of PFG.

In conclusion, PFG is at once fascinating and frustrating. In highlighting Paul as a covenantal, narratival, eschatological, and coherent thinker, the core of whose theology is Christ, crucified and raised from the dead, Wright has captured the outlines of the apostle Paul’s teaching. In its formulations on justification, and in the way in which it speaks of sin and salvation, PFG raises serious, material concerns that it does not satisfactorily resolve. Taken as a whole, PFG is less like Paris’s Notre-Dame than Barcelona’s unfinished Sagrada Familia—imposing, singular, and ingenious. And, like Sagrada Familia, PFG will probably be around for quite a while, exciting puzzlement, admiration, and consternation—all at the same time.


Guy Prentiss Waters

Guy Prentiss Waters
Reformed Theological Seminary
Jackson, Mississippi, USA

Other Articles in this Issue

Too often people think of the Reformation in terms of an abstract theological debate...

Abstract: Evangelical Faith and the Challenge of Historical Criticism, edited by Christopher Hays and Christopher Ansberry, argues that evangelical scholars have failed to embrace historical criticism to the extent that they could and should...

Thomas Prince, editor of The Christian History—the first religious periodical in American history—could hardly have invented the Great Awakening, as Frank Lambert argues...

Theology is first and foremost about who God is and then about what he has done...

I would like to consider several elements in reviewing Bray’s work...