Tea Kettle Charges of Heresy

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One of the things I appreciated about John Piper’s critique of Wright was that he didn’t go straight to tea-kettle charges of heresy just because he encountered something in Wright on the subject of justification that he thought was unclear, for whatever reason. And after looking at it closely, Piper concluded that Wright was a Christian brother who was dangerously muddled on certain specified topics. Fair enough.

As I have been working through Wright’s reponse to Piper (which contains very little response to Piper’s arguments, as it turns out), I have had the nagging feeling, increasing as the pages go by, that Wright does not really have a clear conception of the view that he is trying to answer. But in this section it became astonishingly clear that Wright does not even have a clear take on his own view. Muddle really is the word for it.

Ancient rhetoricians used to use stasis theory to find the point at issue, as they sought to identify the point upon which everything turned. Their goal was to be able to echo Bertie Wooster (not that they knew about him), when he would say rem acu tetigisti. “You have touched the thing with a needle.” Suffice it to say that is not going on here.

In this section, I want to interact with one quotation from Wright, simply because it reveals pretty much the whole muddle in one place. So here it is.

“But, as we noted earlier, the thing that is made is not a moral character, not an infused virtue, but a status. God really does, by virtue of his declaration, create this status for all those who belong to the Messiah . . . Notice what has not happened, within this lawcourt scene. The judge has not clothed the defendant with his own ‘righteousness’. That doesn’t come into it. Nor has he given the defendant something called ‘the righteousness of the Messiah’ — or, if he has, Paul has not even hinted at it” (p. 180, emphasis his).

There is more to interact with in the surrounding pages, if one wanted to, but there is plenty of material right here to keep me busy. Two points to make about this, one briefly, and the other I will treat at a little more length.

The brief point is one I have made before. I really wish that Wright would cite the people who think that the righteousness of God the Father as judge gets imputed to the sinner. I don’t know who these people are, and I would like to have a list of their names — if I had their names I could write limericks about them. “There once was a priestling of Nunce . . .” Who is Wright talking about here? He keeps saying that “the judge does not give his own righteousness to the defendant, and oh yeah, there is this other quaint view that thinks that the righteousness of Jesus is the way it happens, but that’s not true either.” But in orthodox circles, it has always been about the righteousness of Jesus Christ. We maintain that it is the righteousness of Jesus that is credited to us, giving us a new judicial status. Whoever has thought it was the righteousness of the Judge, instead of the righteousness of the Advocate? I mean, really? Who?

But the second point is where the muddle really comes to the front of the stage and takes a bow. Wright maintains that because of the righteousness of the Messiah, God declares that all who belong to Him have a new status, that of being “in the right.” Wright then, without taking a breath, denies that God has given us something called “the righteousness of the Messiah.” Now, for pity’s sake . . .

There are two ways this could go. If Wright is simply denying that justification is God infusing the righteousness of the Messiah into us, then he is quite right, and in educated Reformed circles, he would get nothing but resounding applause. Let me say it again. If by “given,” Wright is referring here to some kind of infusion, then there is nothing for us to say but, “Go, fight, win! Push ’em back, push ’em back, waaay back! Go, Bish!” But if that is what he is saying then why does he persist in acting like he is bringing a fresh new perspective to the old perspective? This is the old perspective. Imputation is not infusion, and nobody here in Reformedville thinks otherwise. This scenario would be as though Wright had taken up writing letters to Robert E. Lee, inviting him to check out the doctrine of states’ rights.

So here is the second way this statement could go. Wright could be saying that he affirms “all x are y,” but that he also feels that it is important to deny that “all x are y.” But you can’t really do that. According to the old perspective, what exactly is given in justification? Justification occurs when God declares, on the basis of the righteous obedience of the Messiah, that we who belong to Him are “in the right.” But this is just what Wright is saying. When we say that the righteousness of Jesus Christ is given (or imputed) to us, we are saying that we receive the status of that righteousness. We don’t get it in buckets. To say the “righteousness of the Messiah is imputed . . .” is exactly the same thing as saying that “we receive the status of the righteous Messiah.”

Wright affirms: “On the basis of the faithfulness of the Messiah, God by His declaration creates a righteous status for those who belong to the Messiah.”

But Wright repudiates: “On the basis of the faithfulness of the Messiah, God by His declaration imputes a righteous status to those who belong to the Messiah.”

I don’t get it either, and it is pretty clear that Wright doesn’t really know how to fight in the clinch. Give him space to stand and a full auditorium, and he can describe the grand sweep of God’s redemptive design like nobody else. I really wish he would stick to that, instead of misunderstanding, misrepresenting, misconstruing, and misinterpreting the positions of numerous non-existent theologians.

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