I am listening through a series of lectures by N.T. Wright on Jesus, and am enjoying them very much. I am working through this book of his on justification, and am frequently bewildered at how someone as astute as Wright could be missing the kinds of things he is missing. I have said something like this before, but I find Wright to be provocative, extremely helpful, and indispensable on Jesus, and dodgey, confused, and unhelpful on Paul.
In this section (pp. 190-197), Wright takes up the question of Romans 4, and I feel like I have walked into a roaring debate between those who believe that George Washington was the first president of the United States and those who, on the other hand, believe that Washington had a mother. Wright persistently, and quite embarrassingly, sets things at odds with one another that simply don’t belong at odds.
“The tragedy of much Reformation reading of Paul is that, by using up the language of ‘God’s righteousness’ on the unnecessary project of ‘finding someone’s righteousness to impute to the believer’ as though ‘righteousness’ was that sort of thing in the first place, and as though the theological point were not already taken care of ‘in Christ’ . . . (p. 191).
First, it is not so much a question of finding somebody’s righteousness to impute to the believer for the sake of theological tidiness as it is a pressing need to
obtain a righteousness that I do not in fact have, along with the underlying need to
get rid of an imputed unrighteousness that I do in fact have plenty of. This is not a theological puzzle. It is the kind of problem that needs to be solved to keep me and others like me from going to Hell. Second, the theological point is not taken care of simply by saying that phrase
in Christ. How does being “in Christ” work? When I am in Christ, is Christ’s righteousness
then considered or reckoned to be mine? But I thought that righteousness was not that sort of thing.
Wright wants to set this question of imputation (was GW the first president?) over against the question of whether Abraham was the founder of a new race of people made up of Jew and Gentile (did GW have a mother?). It seems to me, though I am but a novice in these things, that both can be true. I think that both could be true for the underlying reason that both are.
But Wright wants a false either/or.
“Again, the point of this whole chapter is not about how Abraham got saved, or justified, but about the single promise through Abraham for the world” (p. 195).
“The best translation of the normally puzzling first verse is a question, not about something that Abraham (who happens to be our father) had ‘found’, but about in what sense we have found Abraham to be our father” (p. 192).
Now I happen to believe that Abraham is our father, and I also know that Paul makes quite a big deal of it. I am with Wright on that point. What I cannot quite fathom is why Wright is so adamant about denying certain descriptions of that family line. For example, he emphatically does not want Abraham getting the righteousness of another imputed to him, but, as it happens, this is a distinctive trait of all Abraham’s line. When Abraham was told the glorious truth about all his descendants (Gen. 15:6), he looked forward in faith to the day of
Christ (John 8:56). He was looking forward to the arrival of a
righteous one, one who could be righteous
on behalf of those who are not.
We could grant Wright’s distinctive translation of the first verse, and if we did, it would give us an undeniable biblical truth — Abraham is the father of all who believe, both Jew and Gentile. But why on earth would that exclude what Paul says elsewhere in this chapter? And why do we need to prove that he says in verse 1 something that he undeniably argues for throughout the whole chapter? But what makes us think that a chapter like this can only carry one strand in the argument? This is Paul, remember.
“What follows in 4:4-8 makes it crystal clear that ‘reckoned it as righteousness’ means that although Abraham was ‘ungodly’, a ‘sinner’, God did not count this against him” (p. 193).
But this is to play Hans Brinker with the text. Paul does talk about the non-imputation of sin, but he does so right alongside his discussion of the imputation of righteousness. In resisting this, Wright fights hard for the retranslation of a verse that has nothing to do with the essential points at issue. Okay. Let’s go with that rendering of verse 1, and so we now grant that Abraham our father did not “find” out that we are saved by grace apart from works, but rather that we Jews and Gentiles have “found” Abraham to be our joint father. We are still in the possession of Paul’s teaching throughout the rest of the chapter that: Justification by works was a logical option for Abraham, even though he lived before the Torah was given (v. 2). Since Abraham is the father of both Jew and Gentile believers, this means that his rejection of works was a paradigmatic rejection of Pelagianism, among other things. The alternative to faith is always works (Rom. 4:2-3), regardless of what era you are living in, and regardless of whether you have ever heard of Torah.
Abraham believing God was imputed to him as righteousness (v. 3). Any ungodly person can have faith imputed as righteousness the same way (v. 5). David distinguishes the blessing of an imputation of righteousness apart from works from the gracious non-imputation of sin (vv. 6-7). There is grace both in covering sin, and grace in not reckoning sin.
Faith was reckoned to Abraham as righteousness (v. 9, 22). This characteristic of Abraham’s, which we are invited to share, is what makes him our father. This is the family resemblance we are commanded to have, and which Jesus said the Jewish leaders of His day did not have (Jn. 8:39).
And this leads to a crucial matter, one that I think Wright is overlooking. Throughout this chapter, Paul does not talk about “the righteousness of Jesus being imputed as righteousness,” but rather about “faith imputed as righteousness.” That is the language at any rate. The question is whether this is yet another position (God counts a believing stance as though it were obedience), or whether Paul is using a form of theological shorthand, to be unpacked later. It has to be the latter, and the unpacking begins by the end of the chapter. This unpacking is what brings the Reformed confessional stance into line with Paul.
“Now it was not written for his sake alone, that it was imputed to him; but for us also, to whom it shall be imputed, if we believe on him that raised up Jesus our Lord from the dead; who was delivered for our offences, and was raised again for our justification” (Rom. 4:23-25).
Faith is not a stand alone attitude for Paul; faith is shorthand for
faith in the risen Jesus with whom I am now identified. He says faith earlier, but this is shorthand for faith together with its object, faith not understood apart from its object. Here he tells us what that faith is, when we have the true faith that imitates the faith of Abraham. When Jesus died, we died. When Jesus rose, we rose in Him.
That is what I am believing in, and that is why the object of my faith, the Lord Jesus and all that He is and did, is being imputed to me — the heart of this being the death, burial and resurrection of the representative, federal head of this new race of humanity.
Someone might say, “But aha! Even on this reckoning, don’t you have to say that faith is at least part of what is reckoned to you?” No, because the confessions have simply isolated the direct object. Abraham didn’t believe in God plus Abraham believing in God. He believed in God, and God is the one who fulfilled His word. We believe in the obedient life and death of the Lord Jesus, which means that we don’t believe in that along with our believing in it. We have faith in Jesus, not faith in our faith. And although Paul uses the shorthand earlier, by the time it is all unpacked, we see that it had to have been the object of faith that was imputed to Abraham. Why would we believe that it was Abraham’s faith in faith, when Abraham didn’t have any faith in his faith?
