N. T. Wright on the Messiah and the People of God

[Music] [Music] our topic this evening is who are the people of god and this has to do with paul's redefinition of the jewish doctrine of election the central of the three doctrines monotheism election and eschatology and in case you only just joined us my central thesis throughout all of this is that the best way we can understand what paul was on about throughout his writings is to see him as a jewish thinker whose jewish thought has been turned upside down and inside out in and through and around and by jesus the crucified and risen messiah and the holy spirit who has been poured out now one of the foundation principles of all biblical theology this is the point when i say that kind of thing when students in an undergraduate class grab their pens and think better get this down so you might be able to do the same one of the foundation principles of all biblical theology can be stated quite simply god called abraham to undo the sin of adam of course it isn't quite that easy but that's a great place to start i like to quote a third century rabbi who put into god's mouth the words i will make adam first and if he goes wrong i will send abraham to sort it all out that's actually a good reading of genesis 1 to 12. but of course for the jew as well as anybody else this claim will then appear absurd if abraham's family are as they seem to be how on earth can they be the means of accomplishing this goal that is a problem to which judaism ancient and modern gives a variety of answers so for that matter does christianity ancient and modern but i believe and i'm going to try to show in this lecture that paul has a consistent and clear view which emerges in a variety of ways throughout several of his letters this is all the harder because of course much christianity of many varieties has relegated the election of israel to a side issue it wouldn't be a caricature to say that for a great many christians the story goes like this we sinned god sent jesus we get saved and if anyone says uh what about the old testament the answer would be well it's a book of types and prophecies signposts pointing forward but we could do without them if need be they're not really load-bearing and if somebody then said but didn't paul say rather a lot about abraham the answer would be oh well his opponents forced him to do that because they were talking about abraham and so he had to drag abraham in go and look up the passages in genesis and think what he's going to say this is not a caricature there are theologians writing today who say more or less exactly that that from time to time paul wants to look up in a scroll a passage of the old testament that he may need for a controversial argument give me a break paul knows this stuff you know he's he's soaked anyway um i i when i was lecturing in oxford many years ago i would be lecturing on romans at 11 o'clock on mondays wednesdays and fridays and ed sanders will be lecturing on poor line theology on monday wednesdays and fridays at 10 and the students would come from sanders class to mine and more than once i would say something quite innocently and a ripple of laughter would go through the room and i'd say okay what's that about then and somebody would say sanders just said the exact opposite in the previous hour and and one of them was on that point that sanders believed that when paul discovered justification by faith he ran his mental concordance through the septuagint and he found two passages in which righteousness and faith are put together genesis 15 and habakkuk too so he dropped them into his argument from time to time to help the party go whereas i was arguing that paul knows exactly what those contexts are and he is arguing positively from those contexts not simply looking back at them as proof texts anyway my basic argument as with monotheism and indeed dovetailing with it at every point is that paul doesn't see god's answer to the plight of the world as a totally radical new action without a backstory musical illustration you have a concerto and the soloist finally enters in the concerto on the piano or the violin or whatever something radically new is happening but we realize and only then perhaps do we realize what the earlier music that the orchestra was playing have been all about without the soloist it's not going to mean anything but the soloist actually is playing the solo in relation to that earlier music you can't push that illustration too far but it shows you the kind of thing i mean there's a subtle process of mutual interpretation going on between the ultimate revelation of god's solution jesus and the spirit and the long previous years of promise and pain and puzzlement the messiah died for our sins and was raised in accordance with the scriptures says paul and that doesn't mean oh i can find a few proof texts here and there if you give me a few minutes to hunt through my scrolls he means that there is after all a single continuous narrative stretching back all the way to abraham and indeed ultimately to adam in which the appearance of the messiah and the gift of the spirit are the long-awaited climax and fulfillment now as i said last night that position has been under heavy attack in recent years by those who want to say that the gospel is a vertical invasion of god which has nothing to do no preparation it smashes into the world to take back the world for god because it's been under alien occupation any backstory for such a theory is a dangerous diminution of that unique uh vertical event actually i find playing off vertical and horizontal and indeed imminent and transcendent a dangerous oversimplification of the basic biblical cosmology in which heaven and earth are related not as vertical and horizontal but as the overlapping and interlocking spheres of god's good creation with temple and torah as the places where they most obviously come together and in the new testament jesus himself and the spirit being the places where in the means by which heaven and earth come together and do not cancel one another out we need a new geomet geometry if only at the level of metaphor you see paul is recapitulating and developing and drawing to a climax the ancient jewish tradition of telling the story of israel it's going on throughout the old testament not only in the prophets and the history books but in the psalms and so on and then likewise in the second temple literature but here's the problem most protestant christianity has been used to telling the narrative of church history with a big hole in the middle we had 500 good years then a thousand bad years then we started up again in 1500 or whatever the 16th century that's actually how i learned church history i did the fathers and the reformers i missed out the medievals that was how the syllabus worked when i did it but actually and there's a deep theological point there we we kind of want to believe something new was happening which didn't have a back story we believe in god doing new things not simply a historical process going on and on and on and then we eventually get there no we don't want that actually paul would agree with that but he also seems to believe that the radical new thing which god had done in jesus is the thing which he promised abraham he would do in the first place that story is told in dozens of ways in different jewish texts and paul's various tellings of this story in bits and sometimes as a whole belong on this map although as with many of those jewish tellings he has allowed the new thing that's occurred to shape the way he then tells the back story it isn't just that he's got the whole backstory and then plonks jesus on top of it no because of jesus he now sees for the first time really how to tell that story i hope you see the point i'm making i don't want to labor it but this has been extremely controversial particularly in america over the last 20 years and i think it's important to try as we can to get it right now for a clearer and perhaps sharper point you'll have noticed that when i quote paul i regularly talk about jesus as messiah not christ when paul calls jesus christ in greek he knows that this is the regular greek word for messiah and the way he uses that word i believe indicates that he wants that meaning to be heard and that he wants it to have a specific focus namely that the messiah is the one in and through whom the divine purpose for israel is at last realized most exegetes and poor line theologians have either ignored or marginalized any sense of jesus messiahship in paul it seemed to them oh that's a jewish political title which has all the wrong overtones bears no relation to paul's sense of what jesus is all about so they've said well by paul's time it's obviously become basically a proper name oh it may carry a few messianic overtones here and there but normally he's just using it as a name that would be very odd if that's so because actually we can track messianic meanings of christos in early christianity right through to ignatius of antioch it doesn't become a proper name elsewhere but for paul particularly the messiah represents israel so that what is true of israel is true of him and vice versa put it more sharply it is in the messiah and his fate that paul sees at last what was always true of israel as the people of god this sense of incorporation is at the heart of paul's language about in christ and so on which again people have worried about i think this is the clue to it now of course we don't have second temple jewish evidence that people thought of the messiah as in some sense an incorporative figure so that does create a historical problem there are hints of that in the old testament here and there particularly in the figure of the servant in isaiah who both is israel and stands over against israel there's an odd to and fro there and since paul draws on isaiah 40 to 55 that may well be significant but i'm now inclined to think that paul's train of thought here seeing the messiah as israel's representative stems basically from jesus resurrection look at it like this saul of tarsus the pharisee had expected that at the end of the age god would raise all his people from the dead instead what he's come to realize is that god has raised one person from the dead in the middle of history completely unprecedented and unexpectedly what does paul conclude from that that what god was going to do for all israel at the end he's done for jesus in the middle and since jesus was put to death as a messianic pretender if god has raised him from the dead maybe he is israel's messiah and maybe the destiny of israel has been brought forward into the middle of history in and through and around him now there's all sorts of other things we could say at this point but then it seems to me that paul's language about christos means what it means because he is the one who sums up his people in himself i believe that explains passage after passage in paul sheds light in different directions the redefinition of election can then be seen to great advantage in romans chapter two chapters two and three i don't know if you've got a bible with you but maybe like paul you've already got it in your head so that'll be all right here we face a problem about the strong exegetical tradition it is widely thought many of you will have led bible studies on romans many of you will have preached on it some of you may even have read or even written commentaries on it it's widely thought that romans chapters 1 18 to 320 is simply saying all people are sinful jew and gentile alike and it's certainly true that that is the overall point that paul is making but then and i i've come to regard this passage as a highly significant turn in the argument in chapter 2 verse 17 he turns to the jew explicitly if you call yourself a jew boast in god and prove and know his will because you've studied the law and if you're sure that you're a guide to the blind a light to those in darkness a corrector of the foolish a teacher of children having in the law the embodiment of knowledge and truth well then if you're teaching others isn't it time you took the lesson yourself you who say you shouldn't steal do you steal and so on and so on now this is normally read as paul saying well you are a jew you think because you've got the law you are exempt from sin well i'll show you you're not and then that runs into puzzles because in fact there were lots of jews who didn't steal committed archery robbed temples and so on but that's not the point the passage is explicitly about israel's vocation to be the light of the world see paul is echoing and endorsing the well-known and biblically warranted view of israel's vocation which says not that israel is a people without sin but that israel is the answer to the problem god called abraham to undo the sin of adam well here we are we call ourselves jews we're the teachers of the foolish we're the light to the darkness and so on the point is not you think you're a sinner and i'll show you that you you think you're not a sinner and i'll show you you are after all the point is rather you think you're the solution to the problem of human sin and i will show you from your own scriptures that it hasn't worked out like that and that it can't work out like that the scriptures themselves including isaiah 52 which comes not long after the passage about israel being a light to the nations indicate that the name of god is being blasphemed among the nations because of you and then in verses 25 to 29 of chapter 2 paul hints strongly if obliquely that there might after all be a renewed people a people to whom the word jew might actually be applied a new covenant people we might say but that's a hint that he doesn't yet develop what he does instead this is vital for the whole understanding and you know people i don't know how many of you know romans this well but if you've ever studied romans i bet you found chapter 3 verses 1 to 9 really tough going they're very dense odd jerky little questions what about this what about that and many exegetes just kind of skip over them really to get to 3 19 and 20 so that you can get into justification but actually what he does then is to say well so what's the point of being a jew what's the point of being circumcised that's the question to which many christians have given and would give the answer none whatever it was a failed first attempt on god's part to do something and god has now swept that aside and given us jesus instead paul would be horrified this is where we come up against paul's central belief the flowering of his jewish monotheism god is faithful god said he would save the world through abraham's family and that's what he will do let god be true though every human be false but how chapter three verses two and three the jews were he says entrusted with the oracles of god in other words if i entrust you with a letter the letter is not for you the letter is for the person you're supposed to take you to the jews were entrusted epistotheism with the oracles of god that means they were indeed the people who were supposed to bear god's good news to the nations but they have been faithless not that they haven't believed that may be true as well they've been unfaithful to their commission they haven't done the job i i'll tell you for me the most moving moment of the lambeth conference in 2008 jonathan sachs the chief rabbi of the united kingdom was invited by rowan williams to lecturers on covenant it was an amazing lecture and he then took question and answer from a group a bit bigger than this one maybe two thousand with ron williams sitting on the platform fielding the questions and passing them on it was quite a sight one of the questions was how do you see the christian mission to the world typical rabbi he answered a question with a question he said how many jews are there in china of course nobody had the slightest idea he said at the last count there were seven jews in china he said when i heard that i knew two things first there'll be eight synagogues and said and second pretty soon somebody will be saying they're running the country then he said how many christians are there in china and i forget what the answer was in 2008 it'll be even more now it's millions and then he said you have done what we were meant to do he said you have i can hardly believe i'm saying this i sat there with two thousand people we heard him say this he said you have taken the news of this covenant god to the ends of the earth i thought there's a man as a humble wise noble rabbi bless him so how will god do what he's promised how will he save the world through israel paul leaves the question hanging but not for long first he will complete the framing argument in 3 10 to 20 all the human race are guilty that's the way it is but then the very text paul uses to ram this point home psalm 103 143 provides the clue to the answer in your sight he quotes shall no one living be justified yes but the psalmist immediately at the same point calls on god deliver me in your righteousness from many texts we ought to know what this means footnote sorry if you've got the new international version you will never understand romans 3. that's just the way it is ask me about that afterwards if you if you want i'm serious god's righteousness the you know is his faithfulness to the covenant the covenant through which he had promised to redeem israel and so to rescue creation from its adamic entail and that is what god has now done the problem was universal human sin but then the second order problem that god had promised to save the world through israel and israel had let him down what is now required is for god to reveal his covenant faithfulness in action through a faithful israelite and paul declares in romans 3 21-22 that that's precisely what god has done but now god's own righteousness his covenant faithfulness has been unveiled it's that curtain being torn back again thing god's righteous has been unveiled apart from the torah though the torah and the prophets bear witness to it the righteousness of god the covenant faithfulness of god through the faithfulness of the messiah for the benefit of all who have faith i know that's a different translation to what some people have and the phrase pisces christian is much controversial but that argument from romans 3 1 2 and 3 through to 3 21 and 22 means i think this is absolutely certain the argument requires a faithful israelite what we've got is the faithful messiah he has done what israel was supposed to do and didn't do and the faithfulness of the messiah is paul's subtle way which he needs for his argument now of referring to jesus saving death and investing that death with the sense of his fulfillment of israel's covenantal vocation so the argument of romans continues as we shall see but just notice what has happened in the previous lecture we saw that for paul jesus was to be seen as the one in whom israel's god yahweh had become personally and savingly present one god the father one lord jesus christ he is the returning yahweh now we see that this jesus the messiah is also the living and dying embodiment of israel itself the people of god he sums them up in himself and does for them in the world what nobody else could do this is one of the reasons why i reject that false antithesis of vertical and horizontal in jesus these two meet and merge as we find it in ephesians 1 10 a text i go back to again and again god's eternal purpose was to sum up in the messiah everything in heaven and on earth i suppose you could make a nice preacher's point of it retaining the geometry in the messiah and his death the vertical and the horizontal become one on the cross i wouldn't like to let that happy accident if that's what it is solidify forever that prevalent dichotomy between vertical and horizontal the point is that in jesus they are one the divine initiative breaking into the wounded and broken creation and the fulfillment of israel's vocation bringing the light to the world at last these are not two but one that is the mystery of christology what older dogmaticians called the person of christ and the work of christ monotheism and election meet in jesus and indeed only in the light of that meeting can we properly understand what they had meant all along so for paul the purpose of god in election is radically redefined through the gospel revelation that on the cross sin was at last condemned obviously we could have an entire course of lectures on paul's vision of what was accomplished on the cross but let me just say three things about it first it's true that each time paul mentions the cross he says something different about it this is really annoying for systematic theologians but it's just how he writes there is no single passage which gives us a theology of atonement pure complete and entire nevertheless the critical thing is that in passage after passage the cross stands at the center of his argument or perhaps we should say the center of his narrative he tells the story this way and that but it comes through the cross again and again this leads me to suggest that among his most crucial statements are ones like galatians 6 14 that through the messiah's cross the world has been crucified to me and i to the world paul is constantly drawing upon a large implicit narrative about god and the world god and humankind god and israel god and ourselves and again and again the cross is the means by which the narrative moves from negative to positive from tragedy to triumph so the cross is never simply a mechanism which paul brings in to do one or two key jobs here and there he can't avoid it whatever he's talking about second thing to say about the cross i have come to the view that although all the classic theories of atonement find their yes in paul it may be easier from our perspective to understand how they fit together if we see some kind of christus victor motif as central that is through jesus christ god overcoming all the powers of sin and death but that doesn't allow us if some have tried to do to play off that theory against others for instance classically to set substitutionary atonement and victory over against one another they need one another what happens when the non-human powers enslave humans is that the humans commit actual sin and the humans therefore in their idolatry and sin are unable to be the people for god's world that image-bearing humans were supposed to be the combined force of all this gene generates arrogance and human structures of wickedness these all go together so paul can speak in first corinthians 2 or colossians 2 of the cross as the means by which god defeated the usurping powers he can also speak of it as the way in which sin was finally condemned as the paradoxical overthrow of the rulers of the age i note in particular that spectacular passage romans 8 1-4 it's one of the ones where again when one is lecturing to undergraduates one is inclined to say um this is absolutely at the heart of paul if you learn these four verses you will understand everything else there's no one passage in which that's actually true but romans 8 1-4 gets quite near how does this work in romans 7 controversial passage paul has carefully built up his argument that sin sin with the capital s the suprahuman power that is unleashed through actual human sin and then generates more actual human sin sin has used the good and god-given torah to aggrandize itself even further but paul says what was actually going on watch this that god was drawing sin onto one place through the torah what was that one place it was israel under torah what was the point of that to draw sin onto israel's representative the messiah himself there is therefore now no condemnation he says because god has condemned sin in the flesh torah has drawn sin onto that one place so that it can be condemned right there this is certainly penal it is definitely substitutionary and it is all about god's victory over sin as a power these things go together in paul and must not be separated that's the second point about the cross that the theories all need one another for completeness but third again and again in paul we hear or sense his vision of the cross as the astonishing act of divine and messianic love we were singing about this just now the son of god loved me and gave himself for me the messiah's love constrains us since one died for all out of the great love he had for us he made us alive together with the messiah god commends his love for us in that while we were still sinners the messiah died for us nothing in all creation shall separate us from the love of god in the messiah jesus our lord now where is this theme come from it's not nearly so prominent in ancient jewish literature as it is in paul i think paul has taken this as one of the great themes of the scriptures think of deuteronomy think of hosea think of malachi 1. think of isaiah 40 55 think of the psalms and paul has seen that the cross is the ultimate moment of god's covenant loyalty and love not only to israel but through israel to the world paul meanwhile knows in himself that of which he speaks in romans 5 5 that the love of god has been poured into our hearts through the spirit or in romans 8 28 all things work together for good to those who love god that's shema language but the love with which gods israel love their god is not an initiating love it is always a responding love and for paul that love bubbling up in the hearts of god's gospel transformed people is the response to the overflowing love of god on the cross so that paul sees then in the astonishing existence and mutual love of the gospel-generated community what the cross means in practice as in philippians 2 and his vision of that cruciform community of love plays back again into his vision of what the cross was actually all about in other words the scriptural story of god's covenant love met up with the personal and communal experience of cruciform love and paul with the shema in his head and his heart and with the upstaging of the philosophical tradition in his mind then speaks of love as the greatest of the virtues that which he knew in practice was anchored in his belief that the ancient theme of god's covenant love for his people had found full expression on the messiah's cross election then has been rethought around the messiah whose death and resurrection have become the turning point for world history by the way the western enlightenment reckoned that world history turned its crucial corner in the 18th century with the discover of modern science and modern democracy and modern this that and the other that's why there has always been a particular polemic against the resurrection oh we've got modern science so we've disproved the resurrect excuse me modern science yeah it didn't take voltaire and russo and newton and jefferson and so on oh my goodness we've suddenly woken up and realized that dead people don't rise of course not plato knew that socrates did that homer knew that seneca knew that this is not news my friends what's going on if jesus of nazareth came out of the tomb on easter morning that is the turning point of world history there cannot be two such turning points the denial of the resurrection is functioned in our culture as a way of legitimating the idea that the world that world history turned its crucial corner in the 18th century leaving us as its beneficiaries we the special ones the enlightened ones who can look down on the rest of the world and drop bombs on on them if we like and it doesn't really matter heaven help us anyway sorry that was an aside um election has been rethought around the messiah and his death and this leads us now to the second half of this already overcrowded lecture how is this accomplishment made a reality in human lives the answer is that election is also rethought around the spirit and this is where we meet paul's theology of justification this is actually my hardest task this week to sum up with the right balance topic which is not only extremely complex both in paul and in later interpretation but also as some of you will be aware somewhat contentious that's a british understatement i would urge i would urge anyone who wants to take this topic on not to rest content with what it's possible for me to say in the next 25 minutes but to study the relevant part of chapter 10 of paul and the faithfulness of god because it's actually got to be laid out millimeter by millimeter exegetically and systematically anyway three preliminary remarks i know i'm doing a lot of sets of three and so on that's just the way it is um sorry this next bit has to be a bit dense and technical hold on to your seats or or you know play with your ipads for a moment or whatever you need to do um first on the exegetical basis apart from a couple of one-liners in the corinthian letters paul sketches justification in three places briefly in philippians 3 more fully in galatians spectacularly in romans but we need to take care at this point neither in philippians nor in galatians nor indeed in romans 10 6 to 8 where he also mentions justification does paul develop the law court imagery which is so prominent in romans 2 and 3. because neither in philippians nor in galatians nor in romans 10 is he talking about sin sin is not mentioned there i believe we need the law caught picture for any complete statement but i just note that paul can summarize and develop justification without it but it is vital to note as well that in romans the exposition of justification is not just chapters one to four it is chapters one to eight huge massive mistakes are made within the exegetical tradition that say romans one to four justification then romans five to eight something else sanctification or glorification or the church or whatever and then people get puzzled why paul goes on talking about righteousness in romans 5 to 8. this is an important exegetical point but it's a hugely important theological point because you cannot understand justification without on the basis of romans one to four without five to eight as well particularly because to understand justification you have to understand the spirit which isn't mentioned except for one brief flicker in one to four that's the exegetical context second preliminary remark the historical context paul's context and ours interestingly justification is not a major discussion topic in second temple judaism or in the bible actually old testament as with resurrection and as we've just seen with love this is a subject which suddenly moves from the periphery of vision right into the center and these are not unconnected something has happened something is now going on which has caused paul to highlight this topic in a new way and when we examine the context in philippians and galatians and romans we discover that the thing common to all of them is the redefinition of the people of god both the long-awaited transformation of israel and the inclusion of believing gentiles paul's context is eschatological what he's saying about justification means what it means because with the messiah's death and resurrection god has inaugurated the long-awaited age to come that's paul's context our context i'm with aleister mcgrath on this one who says that since augustine's day 1500 years ago whenever it was the church has used the word justification and its cognates to denote the whole process by which sinners are rescued by the grace of god i do not think and i'm agreeing with mcgrath here that paul uses the word in that way it is much more precise and focused this has caused endless confusion for which the only cure is careful exegesis do not mistake the steering wheel for the whole car third preliminary point on the language paul uses the greek word dikaiozune and its cognates that's righteousness or justice or whatever going to translate it that's the problem he uses this word in a series of dense and complex passages it's well known that we don't have a single english root which will cover it we have the righteous root and the justice root and we must constantly remind ourselves that it's the same greek root for paul which resonates in ways that english just can't do nor can german nor can french by the way but there is a further problem when paul writes this word dickhousine he is on the one hand heir to the traditions of greek thought in which this word means justice or right behavior that's already a tricky one because it's used of ethical behavior and what happens in a trial when somebody is declared by the court to be in the right which isn't exactly the same as just saying that they have behaved properly those two have to be held in careful balance but paul is also heir to the septuagint in which the word regularly renders tavakar and its cognates which means relationship particularly the covenantal relationship between god and israel we don't have any good words that will do all the stuff that paul gets dikaizune to do but this complex of meaning justice right behavior law court covenant is all there together in various key old testament passages isaiah psalms but particularly daniel chapter nine and since a strong primo facie case can be made for seeing at least some of this as the background to what paul's doing we have to live with the fact that paul can hold together within a single word set stuff that we flail around trying to say which is why translators are reduced to paraphrase now if you i know this is complex but if you oversimplify it and people regularly do no matter how well intentioned your motives the exegetical ship is going to run aground long before you get to the opposite shore how then does this combination of ideas come into effect here we have to put together with care and difficulty things which for paul presented themselves on good biblical grounds as a single compact hole i was recently rereading c.s lewis's book on milton's paradise lost louis is always worth reading on any subject of course and when he's talking about milton who's only 300 and some years ago he says that for milton this particular idea i can't remember which one it was was for him one single idea but we have so lost milton's perspective that we have to assemble that idea painstakingly out of bits and pieces of other things which seem to us quite different and lewis says we'll never understand paradise lost unless we see that for milton this was a whole it's exactly like that with paul and justification take first the idea of righteousness as ethical behavior there is in many circles a highly popular understanding sometimes called a covenant of works which could be simplified by saying okay it's how it goes first god creates humans and tells them they've got to obey certain laws so that they will be righteous and have life they break those laws then god sends jesus who did manage to keep god's law thus he acquired righteousness and so life and then god transfers imputes reckons whatever that righteousness of christ to believers so though they don't have any righteousness of their own they now have christ's instead that view is a caricature of paul's doctrine now a caricature may be better than nothing if you're supposed to meet a stranger at a particular location and you've never seen them before it might help if somebody just draws a quick caricatured sketch of them so that you can see that shall we say he's bald and bearded or whatever it may be um then you but it may not actually be a full picture that would do for say a passport photograph or a portrait this sketch of justification this covenant works so-called simply won't work exergetically partly because paul never talks about the righteousness of christ this is where a slide occurs and people say well he does talk about the righteousness of god that's not what the righteousness of god means the righteousness of god is god's own righteousness as throughout the old testament it's his faithfulness to the covenant and to creation how then does the complex biblical language work think first of the ethical and the law court meanings if someone in scripture is said to be righteous the normal meaning is that their behavior corresponds to the proper standards but then if you have a trial and at the end of the trial someone is declared by the judge to be righteous that doesn't just mean i think he's behaved appropriately it means that the court has found in their favor they have a new status of course the verdict at the end and the behavior beforehand ought to correspond but there's a subtle difference after the verdict the person is in the right legally justice has been done and their status is secure it's not always easy to hold this distinction in mind throughout the relevant passages but when we transpose this scenario of behavior and law court into the covenant relationship between god and israel we find the same thing at this larger scale important passages i've mentioned psalm 143 and especially daniel 9. israel is the covenant people of god but israel has failed to keep its side of the covenant so israel is brought to the court to face the covenant punishment of exile deuteronomy 27-29 but because god's righteousness is not only his justice as the judge but also his covenant faithfulness as the covenant god daniel chapter 9 like the psalmist appeals to god for rescue and restoration thus the promised return from exile will be the covenant vindication the verdict that says you really are my covenant people and in case you'd not realized the whole point the whole point was that israel's exile like adams from the garden was the result of sin so that the return from exile means that sins have been dealt with comfort comfort my people says your god speak comforting words to jerusalem and cry to her that her warfare is accomplished her iniquity is pardoned she's received from the lord's hand double for all her sins the forgiveness of sins and the return from exile absolutely go together and in isaiah 40 to 55 not by coincidence we have the highest concentration in the bible of references to god's own righteousness and also not again by coincidence the sharpest focus in the bible on the atoning suffering of the people's representative the servant paul is therefore drawing on a rich and multi-layered biblical theme in which behavior law court and covenant all come together in the promised eschatology in which forgiveness of sins and return from exile constitute the single great act of divine covenant faithfulness and this is what he sees as having happened in the messiah sins have been dealt with new covenant and new creation are launched the cross and the resurrection so how does it then work it goes to work through the power of the spirit effective through the gospel several times paul says that the very beginnings of christian experience are the result of god's powerful initiative by the spirit and he couples this with what he'd seen on the street on the road in the lecture hall again and again that when you announce the good news a power is unleashed which makes the unbelievable believable which makes the foolishness into wisdom which makes the scandal of the cross the dynamic of new life all of that comes into focus with the word faith for paul when the gospel is proclaimed and people come to believe it that is the sign that god is powerfully at work by his spirit there can be no other explanation because this stuff is nonsense it's foolishness it's scandalous it's a weak and silly message but when it's proclaimed it is the power of god and because for paul the messiah's saving death can be summarized to his saw in terms of his own in greek pistes his faithfulness to the covenant he's succeeding where israel had failed the pistes the faith of the believer is the sign that he or she is indeed enfolded in the pistes of the messiah faith is not an arbitrary badge of membership it is not the right kind of religion as opposed to some sort of wrong kind it is the evidence that the spirit has been at work through the gospel of the messiah's faithful death the work of the gospel therefore in producing precisely this faith produces messiah-shaped people cruciform people a cruciform people a united and holy people all of that is there in paul's theology of justification that's why he can speak in the same breath of justification and being in christ ever since albert fights actually ever since long before albert schweitzer pauline theologians have pulled apart justification and being in christ law caught language and incorporative language and said these are different systems of thought and paul says one here and the other there and never the twain shall meet that is rubbish here's how it works baptism marks out the community of messiah people whose badges this faith these things belong with one another justification being in the messiah and the internal transformation of the spirit or indeed the internal transformation of the messiah's own presence the messiah lives in me he says paul can deploy different bits of this package in different points we look very briefly at philippians and galatians and then turn at last properly to romans philippians 3 verses 2 to 11 which by the way is structured very carefully on top of as it were philippians 2 6 to 11. paul warns the philippians against the danger he'd encountered in galatia people may try you to try to lure you into the world of judaism he says that's not the way something has happened through which that world has been transformed and you belong to the transformed version so don't think you have to go back to the original so he tells his own story circumcised on the eighth day the race of israel the tribe of benjamin a pharisee regards to the law a church persecutor when it comes to zeal blameless when it comes to righteousness under the law in other words when it comes to covenant status i've got it so what he now says is about the redefinition through the gospel events of the covenant people whatever gain i had i counted as loss for the messiah's sake i count it all as garbage that i may gain the messiah this is about the identity of god's people israel and if the messiah has come then obviously israel is defined in relation to him if you're an israelite and then somebody says the messiah has come either they're lying possibly even blaspheming and you stay as you are or you jolly well better join in because this is what god is obviously doing with israel and so paul says in verse 9 my aim is that i may be found in him not having a covenant status of my own based on the torah but the covenant status which is from god and it comes upon faith that i may know him and the power of his resurrection and the fellowship of his sufferings conformed to his death to share the resurrection of the dead this is the redefinition of the people of god the status of righteousness here basically means covenant membership and it is given in the messiah because god's saving purposes have reached their fulfillment in him now all of this comes out in more detail in galatians the key point to note is that the the debate in galatia and the debate in antioch to which paul refers in chapter 2 were not about how people get saved that's not mentioned the key thing is as i said this morning does god have one family or two does abraham have one family or two do gentile family christians have to get circumcised to belong to that family or is god now doing a new thing that's what paul is talking about in galatians 2 15 and 16 we jews by birth not gentile sinners yet we know that one is not justified declared to be part of the covenant family that's what the conversation's about on the basis of works of torah but through the messiah's faithfulness all those who believe in the messiah belong at the same table that's what this argument is all about even so he says we have believed in the messiah that's who we now are and then he says if seeking to be justified in the messiah we ourselves are found to be sinners does that make god the ancient of sin the point i'm drawing attention to here is justification takes place in the messiah what does that mean it means that god has vindicated jesus as messiah in his resurrection and all those who belong to him are vindicated along with him and belong to the same family and paul explains how this came about i through the law died to the law that i might live to god i am crucified with christ christos nevertheless i live yet not i but the messiah lives in me and the life i live in the flesh i live by the faithfulness of the messiah who loved me and gave himself for me spectacular passage another of those passages which sum up so much that's going on the people of god are turned inside out through the messiah's cross and resurrection and the nations of the world are brought into this renewed people by the same means this is not something other than paul's doctrine of justification this is not simply an implication of justification which is something else this is justification god's declaration in the present that all these people who have messiah faith are part of the forgiven family of abraham what paul adds in galatians that wasn't in philippians is chapter three about abraham abraham believed god and it was reckoned to him as righteousness what does that mean here and in romans 4 this is the point that i made against and make against ed sanders and many others paul is explicitly expounding the covenant with abraham in genesis 15. i feel myself wanting to say this is the most important thing i'm saying all evening it probably isn't that's probably the point about the love of god but this is pretty darned important when paul quotes this verse genesis 15 6 he has the whole chapter in mind what's going on in that covenant in that chapter god establishes the covenant with abraham the covenant through which the childless abraham was promised an enormous family and the nomad abraham was promised an inheritance do you see the paradox of grace and the psalmist then extends that promise to the whole world psalm 2 you are my son this day have i begotten you ask of me and i will give you the nations for your inheritance in the utmost parts of the world for your possession that the abrahamic promise is already seen as a foretaste of god's eventual sovereignty through the messiah over the whole world paul latches on to that the promise to abraham and his seed he says in romans 4 13 was that they should inherit the world that runs all the way through to romans 8 as we'll see tomorrow morning one of the reasons that i insist we should read it was reckoned to him as righteousness in terms of the covenant is the light in the light of the other biblical use of that phrase you might like to look this up psalm 106 31 phineas acted to stop the plague and quote it was reckoned to him as righteousness hmm what's that mean well in numbers where the story comes and in the post-biblical references to phineas it always says phineas did what he did and god established a covenant with him that's what that phrase it was reckoned to him as righteousness means so in genesis 15 abraham believed god and it was reckoned him as righteousness and god made the covenant in other words it was reckoned him as righteousness means god established his covenant with him and for the avoidance of doubt i remind you again that the point of belonging to abraham's family is that abraham is the means of undoing what happened through adam or rather as paul sees in the gospel abraham is the beginning the promise which points forward to jesus and the spirit who are the means of undoing what happened with adam this is not substituting a horizontal for a vertical this is biblical soteriology at work generating the new community all of which leads us back at last to romans and i hope some of you are going to sleep because this is where i'm going to say the really heretical bits neither philippians nor galatians are dealing with sin and salvation but romans clearly is however in this great letter paul builds into his picture of sin and salvation the necessary elements of god's people and his covenant faithfulness indeed the overarching theme is the dikaiozuna ooh the covenant faithfulness of god when the gospel is proclaimed remember romans 1 16 and 17 the curtain is pulled back and what we see is that god has been faithful to his covenant and so to the whole creation after the initial statement of the theme as we saw this morning paul declares that with the gospel is also unveiled the full horror of the world sin sin has wrong actions and also sin as a power and he declares that god's going to sort it out he'll put everything to right romans 2 1-16 the vital start of the exposition of justification and here it is please please note future justification those who buy patience in well-doing seek for glory and honor and immortality he will give these people eternal life this will be their final justification in line with the whole life they had led this point some people take fright and say paul can't possibly mean that and so this is just a hypothetical category because he's then going to go on to prove that all are actually sinful no the narrative arc from romans 2 goes all the way to romans 8 where paul returns to the final justification the future justification the verdict of the last day and he explains how it is that there is no condemnation for those in the messiah because the spirit who brought them into the family in the first place through the gospel will continue to work in their lives putting to death the deeds of the body until finally the spirit gives life to the mortal body also resurrection and final justification are the same event seen through two different narratives this larger arc is summed up in philippians 1 6 when paul says that the one who began a good work in you will bring it to completion at the day of the messiah in romans 2 and romans 8 we have for the only time in paul justification spelt out in terms of the law court in which sinners are to their surprise to be declared in the right and gentiles the ungodly are declared to be children of abraham and these two things turn out to be intimately related so romans then sharply distinguishes between the future justification which is in accordance with the totality of the life that has been lived and present justification what we normally think of as justification by faith which is the anticipation of that final verdict when someone believes the gospel it is true gloriously true that the vilest offender who truly believes that moment from jesus a pardon receives that this is not because true believing is just the kind of activity that jesus happens to like but rather because that faith demonstrates that the spirit has been at work through the gospel and that the person in question is in the messiah the messiah who has himself already been vindicated by god thus the verdict of present justification is held in place between two things the death and resurrection of the messiah in the solid past of god's covenant faithful act and the full and final justification in terms of resurrection in the future paul then explains present justification in romans 3 21-425 in terms of the revelation of god's covenant faithfulness god has done what he always promised to abraham namely to give him a global family who will inherit the world and for that to happen he had to deal with their sin and that is what was done on the cross the present verdict of in the right which we hear gloriously when we believe is thus also the radical application of the covenant promises to get the whole picture you have to have law court and covenant together and that's what paul gives you we need the legal language and the in christ language together and that's what paul gives us and we need particularly the strong sense of eschatology look just as god to paul's surprise had raised the messiah from the dead in the middle of history anticipating the resurrection of all the dead so god has declared in the middle of history that all who belong to the crucified and risen messiah are the people of god promised to abraham which means among other things that their sins are forgiven indeed the surprising resurrection and the surprising anticipated verdict go exactly together partly because the resurrection is god's verdict on jesus himself and partly because the sign that says people belong to this family is that they believe in their hearts that god raised him from the dead justification by faith is thus rooted in the covenantal law court scenes of the old testament not least passages like daniel 2 and 7 but it ultimately looks back to the covenantal intention of the abraham stories which themselves look back to the original purpose of creation and show god's intention to get that purpose back on track and that's how romans 5 to 8 play out this is not something other than justification this is the explanation of how the present verdict announced in romans 3 is the true anticipation of the final verdict promised in romans 2 reaffirmed in romans 8 and this points on to 9 to 11 which i'm not going to try to summarize at this time of night but that's got to be played through now this is not of course a full explanation of justification you'll have to go to the big book for that and i'm sorry if i've scrunched it so tightly for this lecture that it may not be entirely clear but i hope i've at least made it clear that paul's theology of justification is his radical modification of the ancient jewish doctrine of election or as he would say that it is the full discovery of what the scriptures had promised all along and it is the spirit in particular clearly in galatians clearly in romans 5 to 8 that drives this radical modification try to explain justification without the spirit and it won't work it'll be like trying to sing all creatures of our god and king to a four chord harmony it won't fit if you have ears then here by the same token by the same token try to explain it without the covenant and all you will do is make abraham a distant advance proof text of justification rather than the one to whom the promises were made and so on and all this flows from the covenant faithfulness of god the love of god in other words at this point dikaiozune and agape righteousness and love actually meet and merge that is what is revealed in the gospel and with that revelation there come at once our old friends unity and holiness listen the major problem of the older protestant doctrines of justification is that they were because of the way they did it they ignored the question of unity which was central to galatians and romans and they made very difficult the challenge of gospel holiness which covenantal and spirit-led justification necessarily entails i know of course the official reason why many people reject the so-called new perspective that by the way there are many different varieties of new perspective and it's now not so new as it once was people worry about a loss of assurance if we link the present if we link the present verdict then to a final judgment which is going to be based on works you'll have to take that up with paul himself it's paul who says that stuff in romans 2 in 2 corinthians 5 10 and so on about all appearing before the judgment seat of the messiah so that we may each receive what was done in the body whether good or bad i didn't make that up paul said it but when you put the spirit back into justification the problem disappears the one who began a good work in you will complete it at the day of messiah jesus and here's the point about theology the present verdict does guarantee the future one not because we cease to be responsible agents and become mere puppets of the spirit but because the spirit enables us to be transformed by the renewing of our minds so that we can discern and discover what god's will is what is good and acceptable and perfect that is the direct result of paul's redefinition of election and since i have now mentioned the future verdict and the day of the messiah several times i must point forward to tomorrow morning which is when we shall be exploring those themes a lot more fully thank you for your patience [Music] you

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Published: Mon Oct 12 2020