it never possessed. Israel was never expected to keep the covenant even to secure temporal blessings, let alone anything related to the spiritual realm. Joshua was under no illusions about Israel’s position, telling the people that they were “not able to serve the LORD” (Josh 24:19).
Continuing Exile and the Law
One of the central planks of Wright’s position is the idea that the Israel of Jesus’ time was still in exile.94 If he means the nation was disqualified from those blessings we read of in Deuteronomy 27–30 because of its disobedience he is unquestionably correct. Wright, however, goes further, believing that when Jesus became a curse, as we read of in Galatians 3:13, he did so with only the Jewish exile in mind. He sees Jesus as having brought to an end Israel’s exile, and in so doing misses the essential fact that any exile Israel may have been under was but a type of the exile which all humanity is born into as a result of Adam’s sin. Holland correctly distinguishes between these two exiles:
The Jews when sent into exile received fully what they deserved. Once they suffered what God saw was appropriate (Isa 51:17), then he delivered/redeemed them. But Paul is not talking about salvation at a temporary level where it was possible to be punished and the past put behind. Rather he means an eternal exile from the presence of God, a totally different exile from anything depicted in Israel’s history . . . The nature of the exile caused by Adam is of a different dimension and order, and required an act of cosmic redemption. The nature of this exile is of such significance that the offender cannot possibly make atonement.95
Although there is no longer any need for typical Israel, humanity’s exile under the covenant of works has not gone away. All people remain, unless they believe in Christ, under God’s condemnation because of their transgressions and sins.
It was only a minority from within the nation, the remnant, who saw beyond the various sacrifices and believed in the one promised. Only these knew justification. The country they looked forward to in faith was a different country from that promised to earthly Israel. They desired a “better country, that is a heavenly country: wherefore God is not ashamed to be called their God, for he hath prepared for them a city” (Heb 11:16). They looked not to those conditional promises as found in Deuteronomy 27–29, that were part of the old covenant and spoke only of the type, rather, they looked to the new covenant expressed in the promise, and benefited from the spiritual and eternal blessings secured by Christ, the antitype. True Israelites, the true children of Abraham, “all died in faith, not having received the promises, but having seen them afar off, and were persuaded of them, and embraced them, and confessed they were strangers and pilgrims on the earth” (Heb 11:13).
Concerning “the works of the law” Wright takes the same position as Sanders in regard to covenantal nomism, and adopts Dunn’s understanding that the works of the law are concerned with boundary markers, i.e., the apostle does not have in mind a legalistic keeping of the law in an attempt to gain God’s favor, but those aspects of the law that certain Jews were using to exclude Gentile membership of the covenant, namely, dietary laws, circumcision, the Sabbath and other holy days. One of the problems with this view, although not what Wright articulates, but his references to Israel certainly imply it, is that it assumes that Israel of old was a justified people and that these boundary markers marked them out as such. The Jews were all circumcised, they kept their holy days and the Sabbath, and this marked them as being in the covenant. Again, because of Wright’s mono-covenantal position, it seems that he deems the new covenant to be a continuation of the old covenant, only in the new covenant Jesus, as the faithful Israelite, has kept the covenant that Israel was supposed to keep but didn’t. It is a position that fails to appreciate the fact that these external regulations marked Israel out as being a people under, not the covenant of grace, or new covenant, but the temporal and conditional old covenant.
The law’s function was not to vouchsafe acceptance before God but to show that without perfect conformity to its moral demands there could be no acceptance. To quote Holland, “The law is not evidence of acceptance, but of separation. Israel was a prisoner of sin.”96 The apostle advised the Jerusalem Council in Acts 15:6–11, saying that the law should not be imposed on the Gentiles, Why? because it was a yoke that they were unable to bear. Clearly, he is not speaking of “boundary markers” because these could hardly be considered as being too difficult to bear, as Holland tells us, “It would have been inconceivable for a Jew not to be circumcised, so it would have been meaningless to say that the Jews were not able to bear it. The same would be true of the other boundary markers, dietary law, and Sabbath keeping.”97
The problem with Wright’s position, as with all new perspectives on Paul, is that he relies on Second Temple Judaism to understand justification and the role of the law. It may be an extreme example, but if a thousand years from now one wanted to know about the Triune God one would not go to those documents provided by today’s Jehovah’s Witness to explain it. By the same token, in wanting to understand the New Testament and the place of the law, one should not go to Second Temple Judaism. This is because there were a variety of different views being propounded by the Judaism of the time. As I said in the case of Sanders, the danger is that one might take one of these views, perhaps the wrong one, and seek to interpret the Scriptures accordingly. I’m not saying that we cannot learn much from Second Temple Judaism, but I am saying that great care must be taken when one tries to interpret the Scriptures in the light of this.
Wright, Calvin and, the Reformation.
Before moving on, I want to briefly examine what Wright has to say about Calvin and the imputation of righteousness. He clearly believes his position on justification to be something akin to that of the Reformer:
As with Calvin himself, and many subsequent Reformed theologians, Sanders saw that Paul’s doctrine of justification meant what it meant within the idea of ‘participation’, of ‘being in Christ’.98
The irony is that at this point Sanders and others, including the present writer, are standing firmly in line . . . with Calvin himself, though it is from would-be Calvinists that some of the sharpest criticism has come.99
The idea of imputed righteousness’, whether of God himself or, as some constructs, of Christ himself, is not the only way of addressing the question. The idea of ‘imputed righteousness’ was in any case, a latecomer to Reformation theology.100
So is Wright’s position “firmly in line with” the great Reformer? In regard to the believer’s “participation” and “being in Christ,” one would have to say yes. One must be fair to what Wright is saying, he maintains that because of believers’ union with Christ, they are in possession of all that Christ’s work achieved.
The sticking point concerns the meaning of justification, and one would have to say that Wright’s position is far removed from that of Calvin. This is because he fails to acknowledge imputation; something that lay at the heart of the Reformer’s understanding of justification. He tells us that contemporary Calvinists consider justification as a first-order doctrine in our salvation, when, in fact, it is of secondary importance. He states that “from reading many today who claim Calvin’s heritage but would be shocked to find ‘justification’ as a ‘secondary crater.”101 Calvin, however, does not consider justification as a secondary anything, rather, he sees being “in Christ” and justification as soul mates. Yes, one can correctly say that justification is the result of the believer being in Christ, however, one cannot be saved without being justified, and one
