An Adam is Never Off the Clock

Almost done with Wright’s book. Just one more installment after this.

One of Wright’s arguments is that righteousness is not imputed to us because righteousness “is not that kind of thing.” But this is just modernist reductionism. And because Wright is an orthodox Christian, he refuses to give way to that kind of reductionism elsewhere. And here is a place where he capitulates and does not capitulate in the brief compass of two sentences.

“It is not the ‘righteousness’ of Jesus Christ which is ‘reckoned’ to the believer. It is his death and resurrection” (p. 205).

The problem is that a death and resurrection is not “that kind of thing” either. Wright talks about righteousness not being able to “float” across the courtroom. But Jesus died and rose two thousand years ago. How does that death and resurrection “float” across history to me? And if God can credit the death of Jesus to me as though it were mine, and He can credit the resurrection of Jesus to me as though it were mine, then why on earth can He not credit to me the obedience of Jesus Christ throughout His life when He was the one true Israelite? For the life of me, I cannot see the point of Wright’s rejection of one half of this, unless it is because he cannot separate the imputation of Christ’s obedience from the medieval scheme of moralistic merit-points. But forget the merit points! Did Jesus live as faithful Israel, and is that faithful life something that I can glory in as mine? Yes or no?

In another confusion, Wright believes that the classic Protestant position opposes the active obedience of Christ to His passive obedience on the cross. He says that John Piper, for example, in line with some (not all) of the Protestant Reformers, grounds the truth that God sees us in Christ in “the perfect obedience of Jesus Christ.” But the problem for Wright is that this is “his ‘active obedience’ as opposed to the ‘passive obedience’ of his death on the cross” (p. 204). Now (without even asking) I know that Piper would say that without the cross and resurrection, we are all of us still in our sins. So how can he be opposing the active obedience of Christ to his passion on the cross and His subsequent resurrection?

In the course of this section, Wright says something that is quite a sound principle.

“I cannot stress too strongly the point of principle. We must read scripture in its own way and through its own lenses, instead of imposing on it a framework of doctrine, however pastorally helpful it may appear, which is derived from somewhere else” (p. 206).

Yes, and amen. But Wright doesn’t do what he urges upon us. In this same section Wright mentions a critical passage for this discussion in Romans 5, but he just breezes right past it, without discussing the ramifications of Paul’s larger argument at all. Paul is talking about the impact of two Adams. He is talking about how the disobedience of the first Adam in the Garden plunged all his descendants into sin. How is this possible? So is unrighteousness something that can float from one person to another?

Wright places Romans 5:15-21 in the context of his own argument, not in the context of Paul’s. Anything I say here will be inadequate because volumes could and should be written about this. Paul is talking about two races of humanity, with the federal actions of these respective Adams each establishing the spiritual realities for their descendants. This being the case, you cannot take the life of Christ and say that one small slice of that life (covering about three days total) is what gets imputed to us. He was not an Adam for three days, and on His own for the rest of the time. Sure, when Adam took the fruit he was disobeying for us all (Rom. 5:17). But he was also obeying for us all when he took a wife (Matt. 19:4-6). He was an Adam, and an Adam is never off the clock.