is the source of the believer’s justification, as Venema tells us, “the believer’s justification on the basis of the imputation of Christ’s righteousness is but a way of saying that the believer is justified by virtue of his or her judicial connection with the work of Christ. Imputation is a corollary of union with Christ, not an alternative to it.”20
Good works within the old perspective are always the result of salvation and never the cause. The believer was once a slave to unrighteousness, “to impurity and lawlessness” (Rom 6:19), however, following his salvation in Christ, “having been raised with him through faith in the powerful working of God” (Col 2:12), he is now a slave to righteousness that leads to his sanctification (Rom 6:19). The believer now walks in Christ, “rooted and built up in him, and established in the faith” (Col 2:7).
Although the believer’s spirit has already been raised to newness of life (Rom 8:11), his mortal body is still in its sinful state and will not be renewed until the last day, when all past and present believers will be given a body like unto Christ’s glorified physical body. The believer’s journey in this world is marked by a tension between his resurrected spirit and sinful body.21 As the apostle says, “For the desire of the flesh are against the spirit, and the desire of the spirit22 are against the flesh, for these are opposed to each other, and keep you from doing the things you want to do” (Gal 5:17). I have, written spirit with a lower case, this is because in this text Paul is speaking, not of the Holy Spirit, but his own resurrected spirit. The believer is therefore called upon to put to death the deeds of the body (Rom 6:19). He is in this life to produce good works in presenting his body as a slave to righteousness that leads to sanctification (Rom 6:19).
As will be shown later, Wright caricatures the old perspective, implying that it embraces a view of life after death that amounts to some kind of vague, nebulous existence where eternity will be spent in an immaterial realm.23 Nothing, however, could be further from the truth. We look forward to a time when our spirits will be reunited with our glorified bodies, bodies that will dwell upon a new earth in a new heavens.
Concerning any future judgment, the believer will never be judged in regard to his justification. Justification is past-tense. It is something that is once and for all true for all those who are in Christ. Any future judgment will concern not the believer’s position, but certain prizes for those already saved. There will never be, as Wright believes, a future justification based on the believer’s post-salvation works.
6. Bainton, Here I Stand, 49–50.
7. Calvin, Institutes. 3:11.1.
8. Wright, What St Paul Really Said, 113. (subsequently referred to as WSPRS).
9. Murray, Redemption Accomplished and Applied, 15.
10. Ibid., 22.
11. Turretin, Institutes of Elenctic Theology, 448.
12. Witsius, The Economy of the Covenants 402.
13. Shedd, Dogmatic Theology, 2:539–540.
14. Calvin, Institutes, 2.17.5.
15. Luther, What Luther Says, 703.
16. Calvin, Institutes III. XI.2.
17. Buchanan, Justification, 299.
18. 1689 Baptist Confession of Faith 11:1.
19. Although Wright does not see those passages that speak of justification in terms of a righteousness secured by another and then imputed to the believer, he does, nevertheless, adopt more of a Reformation view of the believer’s union with Christ from passages like Romans 6.
20. Venema, The Gospel of Free Acceptance in Christ, 245
21. One must not confuse this with what the Gnostics believed. They considered matter to be intrinsically evil. Christianity, on the other hand, sees our present physical body as being polluted by sin, and we look forward to a time when it will be replaced by a glorified sinless physical body.
22. In the ESV Spirit begins with a capital.
23. Wright, I believe, does believe in the intermediate state, but this is surprisingly missing from his latest book, The Day the Revolution Began.”
The New Perspective(s)
In regard to the NPP, I want to briefly look at the works of Krister Stendahl, E.P. Sanders, and James D.G. Dunn before I examine Nicholas Tom Wright’s position in more depth. There are others who have directly or indirectly contributed to the NPP, for example, Claude Montefiore, George Foot etc. One of the difficulties with this subject is that there are many new perspectives, and they tend not to agree with each other. As J. Ligon Duncan put it: “There is no such thing as ‘the New Perspective on Paul’ if you mean a unified, uniform, comprehensive theory or mode of interpretation about which there has come to be a broad consensus of agreement.”24 It is because of this concern raised by Duncan that I will address only Wright’s position.
Krister Stendahl
In 1963 Stendahl delivered a very influential paper entitled The Apostle Paul and the Introspective Conscience of the West. According to Stendahl, the Western church started to go off the rails in its approach to Paul from the time of St Augustine, and this was very much compounded in the Protestant Reformation, as he puts it, “The Augustinian line leads into the Middle Ages and reaches its climax in the penitential struggle of an Augustinian monk, Martin Luther, and in his interpretation of Paul.”25 Error crept in because the wrong questions were being asked; questions that had to do with the individual’s conscience and what the individual needed to do in order to be saved. He believes that “the West for centuries has wrongly surmised that the biblical writers were grappling with problems which no doubt are ours, but which never entered their consciousness.”26 The old perspective had been guilty of misreading Paul. According to Stendahl the “Reformation interpreters have read Luther’s experience back into the writings of Paul, rather than comprehending Paul on his own terms,” believing that “our conception of Paul is the product of medieval thought in the
