Good News, Lord Caiphas!

N.T. Wright sometimes overstates his case. By this I mean that he says things like “X is not Y” when it would perhaps be more helpful to say “in addition to Y we must also be careful to say X.” For example, he maintains that the gospel is not about how to get saved, but is rather the proclamation that Jesus is Lord and King of the cosmos.

John Piper responds to this with two lines of argument, both of which are quite effective critiques. But before getting to that, it is important to note that he does not have a problem with the expansiveness of Wright’s vision, but rather is concerned that Wright has gone “big” in a way that neglects some important factors in the details of the gospel. “But Wright’s way of highlighting the global sweep of the gospel has the effect of marginalizing, and perhaps even negating, some aspects of the gospel that are precious, and without which all talk of rescuing the world from chaos is hollow” (p. 81).

Piper’s first response to the claim that the gospel is not primarily about personal justification or salvation is to appeal to a passage where the apostle Paul is doing precisely what Wright says we should not do in our preaching. But before developing this, it is important to emphasize here that Wright does believe that personal transformation occurs as a result of preaching the gospel — which is that Jesus is now Lord — but he maintains that drawing that element of personal transformation into the proclamation of the gospel itself is misguided.

The text that Piper points to is in Acts 13:

“Then Paul stood up, and beckoning with his hand said, Men of Israel, and ye that fear God, give audience . . . Be it known unto you therefore, men and brethren, that through this man is preached unto you the forgiveness of sins: And by him all that believe are justified from all things, from which ye could not be justified by the law of Moses” (Acts 13:16, 38-39).

If Wright were simply saying that we should be preaching much more than personal forgiveness of sin, this is undeniable. We in evangelicalism have taken a narrow slice of the gospel and have acted for more than a century as though it were the whole pie. Somebody should call us on it, and having an Anglican bishop be the one to do it is just the sort of thing that God would do. But when the good bishop goes on to say that this narrow slice of the pie is not part of the pie at all, really, but just the result of having eaten the pie, and that result should be discussed at some other time, he has badly overstated his case. And all that is necessary to reject his claim is to produce a passage like this (and there are others). Paul preached forgiveness of sins as a clear part of his gospel message, and Paul preached personal justification as a clear part of his gospel message. Case closed.

The discussion would not be over if Wright were willing to say that “in addition to personal forgiveness, evangelicals must learn to go on to place that message in the context of the universal lordship of Christ . . .” The discussion would not be over because there are countless evangelicals who need to hear Wright on that point. I say this because on that aspect of the scriptural description of the gospel, he has a much better grasp of the gospel than they do. But when it comes to the personal come-to-Jesus message, the average fundamentalist hedge preacher has a better grasp of that aspect than Wright does.

Piper’s second argument is a theological one. Unless personal forgiveness is entailed by the message of the lordship of Jesus, and is necessarily part of that message, there is no way that the triumph of Christ over death can be considered as good news by any sinner. Imagine the first of the tomb guards getting to Caiphas to tell him what happened. Angels coming down, the Lord rising, the great earthquake, the blinding light, the whole deal. When the guard first burst through the door, did he begin with “Good news, Lord Caiphas!”? No possible way.

Unless forgiveness, cleansing, and justification for sinners are bound up in the passion event, and included in a comparable way in the proclamation of that event, the preaching of Christ’s resurrection is deadly, terrible news. This is because the one returning from the grave has been vindicated as ultimately holy, and here I am, still unholy and sinking deeper. Unless God has accomplished some deep magic for sinners in that death and resurrection, and unless I am told about it, there is no way that the proclamation would make any sense to me as good news.

Having said all this, Wright still has an important point to make when he says that we are not justified by believing in justification by faith, but rather by believing in Jesus. Piper responds to this by saying that, of course, we must believe in Jesus, but we should believe in Him with a particular end in view. Everything else being equal, this response is quite correct, but everything is frequently not equal. All kinds of people get justified and saved under dubious circumstances, and they never even hear the word justification until five years after they were saved. This isn’t the way it should be, but thanks to the grace of God, He isn’t too particular about us as we come through His door. Good thing.

This is actually something Piper understands clearly, as was seen by his treatment of Edwards and Owen earlier in this book. But if someone can be justified by faith alone even when they are all tangled up in their minds about what it means, then this means that we should take Wright’s point on this as a given. The demand for tiny doctrinal perfection in us before a man can be the recipient of Christ’s perfections (from men who claim to understand Reformed soteriology) is one of the most amazing features of the recent doctrinal controversies roiling the Reformed world.

So Piper is correct that to speak of personal forgiveness, personal justification, and personal salvation in the midst of gospel proclamation is part and parcel of a faithful New Testament declaration of the gospel. And Wright is correct that even if this is all left out (or mangled) by a poor preacher, God can still use the fact of Christ’s kingship and a declaration of Christ’s dying and rising to bring a person to genuine faith.