The third chapter is on the context of first-century Judaism, and the necessity of understanding Paul in his context. As is so often the case, I enthusiastically endorse Wright’s points, and am mystified by his applications. I particularly appreciated his contrast of historic Lutheranism, with due apologies to my Lutheran friends, and historic Calvinism. I think his observations were right on the money, so far as they went.
His main points were three. First, many first-century Jews thought of themselves as living in a continuous narrative that began in ancient times, and which would culminate with God’s deliverance which could come at any moment (p. 41). Second, they tended to think of themselves as still living in a state of exile, from which God would deliver them (pp. 41-42). And third, they were in this sad condition because they were in covenant with God, and they were in the covenantal wrong and God was in the covenantal right. But this was also the basis for their hope because God had promised to deliver them under such circumstances (pp. 43-44).
Now I happen to agree with Wright on all three of these, and I agree wholeheartedly. But I am left scratching my head at his applications. I simply do not see how his strange views of imputation follow from these observations. I feel like Wright bounds up the stairs three at a time, and this is one reason why others cannot keep up with him. But then Wright confuses things enormously by denying that the steps he missed are actually in the staircase. But when I go up the stairs in my laborious way, the creaky noise they make sounds to me like
WRIGHTpiperpiperWRIGHTpiperpiperWRIGHT.
The central place where he and Piper differ is on this matter of the imputation of Christ’s righteousness. Wright’s view is this:
In Paul’s argumentation, this kind of covenant family is created by imputation. The sin of Adam was imputed to all his descendants, an ungodly family. So the obedience of the last Adam was . . . what? His obedience is either mine or not mine. If not mine, then what good is it to me? If mine, then how?
I would go so far as to say that a covenant family is impossible without a covenant head. And another way of saying covenant head is imputation head. What my federal head says or does is mine, somehow, someway. How? What way?
Wright states something here that is very true, but which is only half of what Paul is arguing for. He says the righteousness of an acquitted defendant is “simply not the same thing as the ‘righteousness of the judge who tries the case” (p. 50). That is entirely true — unless the judge does something remarkable, about which more in a minute.
Wright tells a fictious story to illustrate his point — Azariah and Bildad go before the judge Gamaliel. “Azariah accuses Bildad of stealing a sheep” (p. 50). Gamaliel hears the evidence, and decides in favor of Bildad. Bildad is now judicially righteous or vindicated. But this does not mean that Gamaliel’s righteousness as a judge wafted over to him. “But that status, though it is received from the judge, was not the judge’s own status” (p. 50).
If Gamaliel simply declares it to be so, then far from his righteousness floating across the courtroom, what actually happens is that unrighteousness goes the other way. The judge is now conniving with the guilty defendant, and comes to share in his guilt. But Gamaliel really is righteous, so this option is out. Suppose he wants, to use the language of Romans, to be just and the one who justifies. What can he do?
Gamaliel has to figure out a way to become identified with Bildad in some way, take his penalty on himself, fully satisfy the penalty due, return to the bench and then declare sentence. In Romans, the judge who declares us “not guilty” is the same one who died and rose. Why did He do that? He did that so that His payment of the penalty might become our payment of the penalty, and imputation is the way this happens. When God declares us not guilty He is just and the one who justifies.
Wright says that his understanding of the judge’s righteousness “works completely, satisfyingly, and thoroughly across the entire range of Pauline exegesis and theology” (p. 51), which it most emphatically does not. Wright acknowledges (in the quotes above) that Jesus died for His people, and that Israel finally did it right, but he utterly fails to connect this with the all-important question of imputation. Jesus died “for” His people, and that word cannot really function at all without imputation. Israel in Jesus finally did it right, but that’s no good to us unless His obedience is ours. And how can that be, apart from imputation?
All this indicates that it is Wright who is seeing Romans in bits and pieces.
One last related point. Piper had in one place warned against an undue reliance on extra-biblical sources, and so Wright asks him, “how does he know from these sources that second Temple Judaism was after all a legalistic, works-righteousness sort of religion” (p. 55). And the answer here is that Piper, and I, and anybody else, can learn about rebellious works-righteousness Judaism from Jesus and from Paul. These are the people who rejected Jesus, nailing Him to a cross, and that was not exactly what I would call an honest mistake. There was a category of Jew living in that time described for us as consisting of “dogs,” “evil workers,” “mutilators of the flesh,” “whited sepulcres,” “blind guides,” not to mention “fools and blind.” Just for starters. None of this needs to be teased out of the second Temple literature. And it all goes right back to the heart of what Paul is arguing in Romans. Let us say that the sum of all these corruptions is found in our man Bildad. Bildad is this corrupt and evil man, and yet the righteous judge is somehow going to find him “not guilty.” But how?