Torah Torah Torah

Now that we are into the exegetical portion of Wright’s book, I am not going to try to get through the chapters at one go. I am just going to work in each chapter until I have enough to write about, which will not be the whole thing, and we will see when we get done. The first exegetical chapter is on Galatians.

Wright begins by mentioning the solemn anathemas that have been hurled against him on the basis of Gal.1:8-9, and not, he hastens to add, “by John Piper” (p. 92). This is a good qualification, and a good way to begin this section. Piper believes Wright to be confused on some significant points, but does not accuse him as lightly as some apparently have felt free to do. It might go without saying, but I need to make a point of saying the same thing again. “The gospel is at stake” is too often an invitation to stop thinking, and start behaving as though it were not the gospel at stake at all, but rather the honor of Diana of the Ephesians.

At the same time, these issues are gospel issues, and preachers of the gospel need to work through them and get it right. But in reply to the question, “what must I do to be saved,” the answer ought to be the apostolic one of telling people to believe in the risen Christ, as Wright plainly does. The answer ought not to be to hand them a list of study questions to help them prepare for an ordination exam. And of course, this is not to disparage ordination exams in their place — those who are ordained to the gospel do need to get these things right.

And, that said, here are what I see as some significant errors in Wright’s overstatement of his case. As with most of what he writes, there is much of value here. So before getting off to the interesting parts that have my readers captivated, let me note my sympathy with his treatment of pistis Iesou Christou. I might also state that, as far as it goes, I roundly agree with his insistence that justification refers to a status, and not to a moral condition. Good show.

However, comma . . .

“Or rather, the first statement of the its negative pole, that one cannot be justified by works of ‘the law’ — which, by the way, for Paul, always means ‘the Jewish Law, the Torah” (p. 95, emphasis his).

This is what I mean by “overstated.” This is simply wrong, and for someone who knows Paul like Wright does, it is bewilderingly wrong. Examples could be multiplied, but in some places it is just wrong in passing, in others it is significantly wrong, and elsewhere it is wrong in thesis-shattering ways.

“But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, longsuffering, gentleness, goodness, faith, meekness, temperance: against such there is no law” (Gal 5:22-23).

Does Wright really want us to think that Paul is arguing that the Torah does not prohibit love, joy and peace?

“And the law is not of faith: but, The man that doeth them shall live in them” (Gal. 3:12).

The Torah is not of faith? The Bible says that the Torah is all of faith. Or perhaps this would be better stated as the Torah as misread by the sons of Hagar.

But then there are places where the word simply cannot mean Torah, and which demonstrate the apostle’s delight in jumping from one meaning of a word to another. Further, it is used in ways that cause Wright’s thesis to fail.

“. . . for not the hearers of the law are just before God, but the doers of the law shall be justified. For when the Gentiles, which have not the law, do by nature the things contained in the law, these, having not the law, are a law unto themselves: which shew the work of the law written in their hearts, their conscience also bearing witness, and their thoughts the mean while accusing or else excusing one another . . .”(Rom. 2:13-15).

This cannot be referring to the Torah throughout. Paul is jumping back and forth between Torah and natural law. The Gentiles here are doing the essence of the law, keeping the heart of the law, which they learned from nature and not from revelation, and Paul explicitly says that they “have not the law,” meaning that they have not Torah. Nevertheless, they have a law which is consistent with the heart of Torah. Wright here has at best overstated his case by a long shot, and at worst his case is simply wrong.

Another problem is a related one. Wright tends to see Torah simply in terms of its external boundary markers. For example:

“What, then, are the ‘works of the law’, by which one cannot be ‘justified’ in this sense” Again, the context is pretty clear. They are ‘living like a Jew’ of 2.14, the separation from ‘Gentile sinners’ of 2.15. They are not, in other words, the moral ‘good works’ which the Reformation tradition loves to hate. They are the things that divide Jew from Gentile” (p. 96).

The problem here is that the Torah divided Jew from Gentile in more ways than simply giving them circumcision and the sabbath. The Torah also prohibited sleeping with your aunt, for example. The sexual license of the Gentile world was notorious, and (despite the hypocrisies among the Jews noted by Tacitus) the Torah established more of a difference between Jew and Gentile than simply giving the Jews the equivalent of a differently colored T-shirt. When a particularly gross form of fornication showed up at Corinth, Paul expressed his disgust by saying that even the Gentiles, the people without the Torah, don’t do that kind of thing (1 Cor. 5:1). The Torah was as much a moral code as it was a system of ritual distinction. The Torah, when followed, was intended to make Israel the object of a moral admiration (Dt. 4:7). It was as morally distinctive as it was external badge-distinctive.

Wright makes a strong point that this was simply a matter of ethnic boundaries being overcome, but it is also pretty clear that he does not have a clear conception of how ethnic hostility actually works. In an ethnically charged situation (of a kind which I have lived in), the hostility which may originate in simple ethnic prejudice based on the simple visible differences very rarely stays put. A racial bigot does not just assume that the other skin color, let us say, is somehow “dirty” or “different.” That bigot is also an easy sell for the proposition that the other group is deeply and profoundly immoral. It is the most natural move in the world. Ethnic hatreds that have lasted centuries are based on a conviction that the other group is wicked, and are not based on the trivial liberal wish to have them based on a paper-thin distinction . . . “the star-bellied Sneetches” view of prejudice.

Now when you have a situation as existed in the New Testament with Jew and Gentile, where the Gentile world really was deeply and profoundly immoral, you had a recipe for a really deep antipathy. The apostle Paul was not just trying to get Brooklyn boys to take off their yarmulkes for a minute.