One Response to “The Judgement According to Works - The Application - S3”

1. Hopeful Says:
   May 2nd, 2008 at 2:12 pm

   Pastor Reese

   I really did appreciated your messages (heard online) delivered at the recent men’s retreat. I agreed with your statements on faith and justification and sanctification. (Sorry there was no time for you to cover “adoption”.) However, I sense that perhaps you could benefit by diving more deeply into the words of N.T. Wright. Your statements such that N.T. denies the imputation of Christ are not consistent with his views or statements which Wright himself has made clear, time and again. Moreover, it may not be quite fair to lump the FV in with the NPP when critiquing the NPP. FV (or Covenantal Theology) and the NPP (which certainly has implications with far more complex areas with which one might disagree or require further study) do not overlap theologically in the manner in which you seemed to present to the casual listener. The one should not be used to automatically malign the other. They are separate matters for discussion. (Operative word here is “discussion”.)

   Wright is clearly not a Pelagian nor a semi-Pelagian. Wright is on record so many times now as having repudiated the idea of works-salvation that accusations to the contrary could be viewed as, well, respectfully, a tad sloppy.

   Of course, I can understand how some of Wright’s biblically-driven paradigm-shifts could raise some eyebrows in confessional circles (e.g. double declarations), but I so seldom see people actually interact with Wright *within the text* of Scripture. Therefore, the confusion, controversy, and accusations over certain matters continue. Again, some of Wright’s views (e.g. certain social and ecclesiological views) need to be scrutinized, as is the case with some of our own NAPARC churches. But I don’t think that his theological views are the dangerous “perspectives” many are expressing; and I wish our spiritual leaders would be willing to engage the Bible, each other, and research better the definitions used. But this takes time and interaction among brothers of different stripes. Not much fun in that, unless done via Internet, over thousands of impersonal words.

   So with that said, and using N.T. Wright’s own words below, I hope the discussions will soon begin some day (cutting some slack for these paradigm-shifts, and embracing our common belief that God alone calls us, once and for all, from the beginning, with Christ’s righteousness imputed to us, as we are made for His glory and unto good works throughout our lives, thanks to the work of the Holy Spirit):

   “’Justification’ is thus the declaration of God, the just judge, that someone is (a) in the right, that their sins are forgiven, and (b) a true member of the covenant family, the people belonging to Abraham. That is how the word works in Paul’s writings. It doesn’t describe how people get in to God’s forgiven family; it declares that they are in. That may seem a small distinction, but in understanding what Paul is saying it is vital.”

   And also:

   “Moving to the particular point about ‘righteousness’ and ’salvation’, Barnett in fact hits his own wicket when he says they are synonyms. That’s the sort of trouble you get into if you insist on not seeing what words mean lexically. They do not mean the same thing, and actually the passage Barnett quotes from Romans 10 shows Paul making a careful distinction between them, as he does throughout his writings. ‘Righteousness’ in Paul is partly a courtroom status and partly a covenantal status, the former being a metaphor to help understand the significance of the latter. ‘Salvation’ in Paul means, of course, rescue from sin and death. Of course the two go hand in hand, but they are not synonyms, and nobody is helped by suggesting they are.
   Is justification then a ‘process’, as Barnett says I say — with the result that he suggests my view ends up destroying ‘assurance’? Absolutely not! What seems to have happened here — and, to be blunt, in more than one North American attempted rebuttal of my work — is that criticisms regularly made by Protestant evangelicals against either Catholics or Liberals have been wheeled out as though they somehow ‘must’ be applicable to me as well. This is bizarre. My short sketch of justification above should put the matter straight.”

   And then:

   “1. It’s best to begin at the end, with Paul’s view of the future.
   (a) The one true God will finally judge the whole world; on that day, some will be found guilty and others will be upheld (Rom. 2.1-16). God’s vindication of these latter on the last day is his act of final ‘justification’ (Rom. 2.13). The word carries overtones of the lawcourt.
   (b) But not only the lawcourt. Justification is part of Paul’s picture of the family God promised (i.e. covenanted) to Abraham. When God, as judge, finds in favor of people on the last day, they are declared to be part of this family (Rom. 4; cf. Gal. 3). This is why lawcourt imagery is appropriate: the covenant was there, from Genesis onwards, so that through it God could deal with sin and death, could (in other words) put his creation to rights.
   (c) This double declaration will take the form of an event. All God’s people will receive resurrection bodies, to share the promised inheritance, the renewed creation (Rom. 8). This event, which from one point of view is their ‘justification’, is therefore from another their ’salvation’: their rescue from the corruption of death, which for Paul is the result of sin. The final resurrection is the ultimate rescue which God promised from the beginning (Rom. 4).”

   Finally:

   “What then is this vindication, this dikaiosis? It is God’s declaration that a person is in the right; that is, (a) that their sins have been forgiven, and (b) that they are part of the single covenant family promised to Abraham. Notice that opening phrase: God’s declaration that. Not ‘God’s bringing it about that’, but God’s authoritative declaration of what is in fact the case. This is the point, of course, where some have accused me of semi-Pelagianism. That might be so if I intended to denote, with the word ‘justification’, what the tradition has denoted. But I don’t. Paul, I believe, uses vindication/justification to denote God’s declaration about someone, about (more specifically) the person who has been ‘called’ in the sense described above. Vindication is not the same as call.
   And we now discover that this declaration, this vindication, occurs twice. It occurs in the future, as we have seen, on the basis of the entire life a person has led in the power of the Spirit – that is, it occurs on the basis of ‘works’ in Paul’s redefined sense. And, near the heart of Paul’s theology, it occurs in the present as an anticipation of that future verdict, when someone, responding in believing obedience to the ‘call’ of the gospel, believes that Jesus is Lord and that God raised him from the dead. This is the point about justification by faith – to revert to the familiar terminology: it is the anticipation in the present of the verdict which will be reaffirmed in the future. Justification is not ‘how someone becomes a Christian’. It is God’s declaration about the person who has just become a Christian. And, just as the final declaration will consist, not of words so much as of an event, namely, the resurrection of the person concerned into a glorious body like that of the risen Jesus, so the present declaration consists, not so much of words, though words there may be, but of an event, the event in which one dies with the Messiah and rises to new life with him, anticipating that final resurrection. In other words, baptism. I was delighted yesterday to discover that not only Chrysostom and Augustine but also Luther would here have agreed with me.”

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