Chapter Six of Piper’s book is about whether or not justification determines our standing with God, or whether, as Wright argues, it is God’s formal declaration that this standing has already been established. According to Wright, the declaration of the gospel of Christ’s kingship is “very much the means” that God uses to transform individuals, but at the same time justification is “not part of becoming a Christian. It is the declaration that one has become a Christian” (p. 94).
I sympathize with the reaction that says a dispute over all this is splitting hairs, and that to get all worked up over it is to get worked up over a split hair. I sympathize with this reaction, but I don’t agree with it. It seems that more is going on than it might appear at first. And I bring this up simply to note that Wright was the one who split this hair first, and did so declaring it to be a crucial point. As Wright put it, “The word ‘justification’, despite centuries of Christian misuse, is used by Paul to denote that which happens immediately after the ‘call’.” (p. 94, emphasis mine).
Wright insists on this while recognizing a point I made earlier in this series, which is that God makes the declaration that one has become a Christian just as soon as one has become one, that is, a nano-second after one has crossed the border. Faith is awakened instantaneously after the call. So Piper asks a reasonable question. “What is driving this peculiar vigilance to make such a fine distinction between the temporally and causally inseparable events of divine calling/faith/justification? . . . Something unusual seems to be at stake here” (p. 95). The apostle Paul clearly distinguishes between the effectual call, and justification, and salvation, and so on, but all of them are plainly part of the cluster of events at one’s conversion, and Christ is clearly preached as the salvation of man, as the justification of man, and so on.
It is important to note that this difference is not over the objective/subjective issues of gospel proclamation and personal response to that proclamation. “Jesus died so that you might repent” is an objective statement of a portion of the gospel. “Repentance” is an appropriate response to the gospel, but this repentance is not part of the gospel itself. Everyone agrees with this. As Piper puts it on a related point, “Agreed — justification does not consist in the changes of the human heart in conversion” (p. 97).
It is worth noting in passing that Piper remarks in a footnote that he does not know how to reconcile Wright’s insistence that justification is the declaration that all the converting work has already been done, on the one hand, and his statement in his commentary on Romans that “justification results in peace with God,” on the other. If justification results in peace with God, then how can justification be the declaration that I already had peace with God?
This chapter concludes with a brief discussion of how Wright might reconcile his insistence that present justification is declarative only while our future justification is more than declarative. At the same time, our present justification is anticipatory of our future justification. This means the present justification does nothing, but is rather a declaration that something has been done, and at the same time present justification anticipates the final resurrection, which is our ultimate justification, but this final justification consists of something which remains to be done. For Wright, “the final declaration will consist not in words so much as in an event, namely, the resurrection of the person concerned into a glorious body like that of the risen Jesus” (p. 100).
This chapter of Piper’s is not so much an extended argument against Wright’s position as it is an identification of certain tensions in Wright’s position, and a raising of questions that will presumably be addressed later.