I don’t really have a lot to say about Wright’s next section (pp. 158-168), a section focused largely on Romans 2. Just a few things.
Wright makes some worthy points about the general neglect of Paul’s eschatology of justification. The doers of the law will be justified (Rom. 2:13). Might not mean what it appears to mean. Okay, so what does it mean? Wright rejects every form of merit and earning of salvation, and yet he at least tries to do justice to Romans 2, Romans 14:10-12, 2 Cor. 5:10, and others. I am not persuaded by his harmonization here, but it is a worthy attempt and really worth discussing. I really appreciated Wright’s emphasis on Paul’s teaching that we are called to live lives that are pleasing to God (pp. 162-163).
The one significant place where I took issue with Wright in this section was his riff on the Gentiles in Romans 2:26-29. He takes them to be the Christian Gentiles. While acknoledging that there are good reasons for taking this as a reference to the “moral pagan,” Wright rejects this in favor of the judgment that they are Christians, a judgment that must be “regarded as decisive.” “These people are Christians, on whose hearts the spirit has written the law” (p. 167).
Two quick points. First, there is more than one alternative to Christian Gentile than “moral pagan.” I wouldn’t call Melchizedek, or Jethro, or Naaman, or Job, moral pagans. They were God-fearing Gentiles. The Temple had a court dedicated to them. When Jesus drove the clean animals out of that court (because the animals representing the Jews didn’t belong there), He said, “My house shall be called a house of prayer for all nations. But you have made it a den of thieves” (Mark 11:17).
The reason I believe this cannot be referring to Christian Gentiles is three-fold. First, these Gentiles are described as knowing what they know about morality from nature (Rom. 2:14). This could be true of Gentiles from chapter 1, but not of Christians who had more special revelation in their hands than the Jews did. Second, the thoughts of these Gentiles usually accuses them and occasionally (perhaps) excuses them. This is not a description of Christians who are no longer under condemnation (Rom. 8:1). And this leads to the last point. It would be truly odd for Christian Gentiles to be described as carrying within them “a Torah unto themselves.” But it would not be odd to describe Gentiles in the time of the old covenant grasping the essence of the Torah as they prayed to the God of Israel from a distance — just as Solomon had made provision for them to do.
Just in passing, this passage is, I believe, an outstanding example of how a thoughtful Gentile could extract from nature the essential teachings of Torah, what we would call the moral law. This is Pauline natural law. Almost as though the Torah were distinct from the timeless truths it was carrying. Wright wants the Torah to be radically situated, all of it, but I think Paul is more nuanced than that.