The next article in Tabletalk, by Paul Helm, was quite good. He was responding to Wright’s following statement: “People like Saul were not primarily interested in the state of their souls after death; that was no doubt important, but no doubt God would have the matter in hand. They were interested, urgently, in the salvation which, they believed, the one true God had promised to his people Israel.”
Helm answers this about the only way you can. First he gathers a bunch of passages that indicate that Paul was indeed concerned about the state of his soul after death (e.g. 2 Tim. 4:8; Phil. 1:23; 2 Cor. 5:6). But he also notes, and concludes his article by noting, that the whole thing is a false antithesis. Why can’t we say that Scripture teaches both? Because, after all, it does.
It is this trait or tendency in Wright that causes, in my view, a lot of unnecessary commotion. The verses that Helm cited do not, after all, refute Wright’s central claim, because Wright did say that personal salvation was no doubt important. It does deal with his implication that matters of personal salvation sort of “went without saying.” They do not in fact go without saying in the New Testament.
But whether Paul thought about it or not, Wright is raising the question of what he thought about the most. So how are we supposed to determine that? What is that word primarily supposed to mean? This would remain true if Paul, for example, had 60eu (emotional units) invested in the corporate salvation of Israel for every 40eu he had invested in his own salvation. But what does that get us, exactly? I read something by the late Greg Bahnsen (somewhere, beats me where it was) that attacked this lamentable tendency. We would be spared a lot of theological pother if we talked a lot more about true and false, and a lot less about emphases.