The following was initially a blog post. I have refrained from editing out matters of informality etc.
Disclaimer: While I am a reasonable typist, I nonetheless cannot type at speech-speed at the best times, much less on a laptop keyboard. Consequently, these notes vary from word to word to close summary, and much of the ground in between. To be sure of precise wording, you will of course need to consult the tapes or CDs.
Q/A Session #3
Brief reminder: The Q/A sessions gave opportunity to the speakers to query one another, followed by a moderator reading questions from the audience.
Intramural questions
Gaffin to Wright: What happened to the redemptive-historical background - your question is a fair one of my presentation. [Note: Gaffin is alluding to comments made by Wright which I have not recorded. I believe Wright made them during the "asides" at the opening of his final lecture - TG.] I have felt the force of Ridderbos's redemptive-historical emphasis, but I have thought the contrast with the ordo is too sharp. [I may be missing something here - I don't think Gaffin was saying the contrast was too sharp in Ridderbos himself.] So how, in honouring that redemptive-historical element, does that impact upon these questions so important to the Church since the Reformation. [There is a] redemptive-historical background that I don't mean to deny.
Wright: I don't want to imply that the Reformers asked the wrong questions, or that we should marginalize them. But if Luther's question was "How can I find a gracious God?" Paul's question was "How will the gracious God solve the riddles of the problems of Israel and the world. I feel like you've found the cricket field, but are still playing baseball.
Gaffin: I can't see I'm playing cricket! [Gaffin obviously didn't quite follow Wright's metaphor.]
Wright: Galatians 4.6-7. . . 1-7: it seems to me not helpful to say that adoption really is forensic language - it seems to me it is more incorporation language, and is, more than that, Israel and exodus language. "Israel is My son, let him go so that he may serve Me. . . ." What we are talking about with salvation is a final event which will be the gift of the new world, and risen bodies like Jesus' risen body. It will be rescue (salvation). From another viewpoint, it will be sanctification - we will be what we were meant to be. It will be a vindication/justification, because the judicial victory over death is achieved. Thus one event is all of these, viewed from various angles. What we are trying to do is pull together what happened [i.e. in salvation history - Christ's resurrection specifically, I think - TG] with what will happen here in what happens at the in-between, in the giving of faith.
Gaffin: I'm happy - yes, but let me qualify. Denoting a single event with varied connotations. But what I hear. . . that preserves a distinction between sanctification and justification. I would not in any way want to diminish that adoption is bound up with the incorporation. But the forensic cannot be set over against that. Adoption does carry a forensic - or, a declarative - dimension.
Wright: I thought I heard you trying to save the extra nos by saying forensic. . . The event in the middle that holds things together is baptism - the concrete event which actually says and does these things.
Gaffin: You don't want to disassociate faith from that.
Wright: No - absolutely. The trouble in theology is that you have to say everything all the time, or people will say you've deliberately left something out. You cannot say it all at once. When I say baptism, I don't mean "and therefore not faith." . . . Everything is in Galatians 3.26-29: faith, baptism - all is part of the same single paragraph. That's why I resist the pulling apart of the redemptive-historical and the other elements.
Questions from the audience
Question for Wright: What is the relationship of faith to baptism? What of an infant who never comes to faith?
Wright: I simply do not know what I want to say about a baptized infant who never shows signs [of faith], other than it is very sad and in God's hands to deal with. When I baptize, I believe I am taking part of a sacramental moment in which that person actually does become a member of this one family defined by the death and resurrection of Christ. This is a very strong sign of grace. Once that sign has been made that child has two options - become an apostate, or grow and learn. Being a pagan is not an option. What I do believe - John the Baptist in the womb. . . just as I as a parent remember the relationship between parent and child almost immediately - an intimate two-way love from the earliest moments - I fail to see how God the Father of all cannot also enter into a deeply powerful intimate relationship with that same child. Though there are many mysteries going on, I would much rather embrace this - even though there are difficulties down the road - than to say, "Because I can't figure out these things, I would better treat them as unbelievers."
Question for Gaffin: What about infant faith? [Note: this alludes back to an earlier Q/A, when something Gaffin said seemed to imply that faith is not in the picture with infant baptism.]
Gaffin: I would certainly recognize an incipient faith in an infant that is perhaps frequently there. The only qualification is that - infants can have faith - but efficacy is not necessarily tied to the moment of administration. [Gaffin cites the Westminster Confession of Faith.] I just want to be careful of baptismal regeneration.
Wright: Fair enough, given past controversies regarding that term.
Question for Gaffin: Wright has made clear that Christ's work on the cross is reckoned to believers, but not "imputation" - what is at stake in denying that particular doctrine?
Gaffin: As I sought to bring out - as you look at sin in its liability, it involves a basic irreduceable profile: guilt and power. It reflects back on God and the concerns of His person, as well as subjectively reflecting back upon the person of the sinner. So the question is how does the death of Christ effect the removal of guilt? It's clear that Christ died for sin - but how can Paul, confident that Christ died for his sins - how can he say that he has moved from (judicial) wrath? How does that removal of guilt, in terms of application, take place? Here, it seems to me that imputation is critical.
Wright: Let me ask what you mean by guilt. Is there one technical term in Paul - or is it a summary? I'm perfectly happy with that [i.e. a summary] - but is it a summary of one particular strand; if so, which strand?
Gaffin: Romans 5, for example - sin incurs condemnation; it is thus a judicial liability which translates to guilt.
Wright: Thus guilt is what puts a person in a position where God must condemn them.
Gaffin: Yes, with the reality of God's wrath rooted in His person.
Wright: Good, and I can argue through Romans how Paul deals with that through the propitiatory sacrifice - Romans 3 - that God has already dealt with - thus a past dealing with guilt. And also a future wrath which could have come, from which we will in fact be saved. I don't see any need to invoke the idea of imputation of the positive merits of the active obedience of Christ. God condemned sin in the flesh of Christ. God drew sin into one place - Israel - and as her representative Messiah, His death has borne that. If that's what people mean by imputation, that's what I mean. But I don't see the need to read other passages that mean something else. . . . [In this last sentence, Wright is likely referring to passages such as Romans 4 and 2 Corinthians 5.21, which he reads differently from most Protestant interpreters. He is saying that he does not see the necessity of reading them as imputation passages; the concern is already met in his own construction.]
Gaffin: Let's leave active obedience out of the discussion, although I would want to argue for that. . . . I appreciate how you argue for propitiation. But how does that become effective in my life as an individual? . . . Again, Ephesians 2.3, that transition from a child of wrath, judicial wrath, to grace, in his own experience - it seems to me that is a reckoning of Christ's righteousness. . . .
Wright: That's where I say thi s is the death of Jesus - dying to sin - reckoned to us [as?] crucified and risen with Christ. That's what I think the Reformed doctrine of imputed righteousness was always trying to get at. And I've never intended to deny that. The trouble comes that people think if you adopt a different exegesis, you are denying the theological substance. I think something does get reckoned: Jesus' death and resurrection.
Question for Wright: You say that justification means covenant membership. That is not the lexical meaning of the term; how do you arrive at that?
Wright: Romans 4.11. Wright explains that the term sign of the covenant in Genesis 17 because sign/seal of the righteousness of faith in Paul's reading. Paul substitutes covenant membership with righteousness. That is just the tip of the iceberg in the argument; tzedequah [Hebrew word usually translated righteousness in OT] regularly denotes God's own righteousness as faithfulness to the covenant. The righteousness of God is what determines that He will be faithful and true. Wright goes on to mention Judah's statement that Tamar is righteous, by which he means: "she is in the right, I in the wrong." The question of who is in the right in God's sigh is one of who is a true member of the covenant. Bad luck on the lexicons. . . .
Gaffin: If righteousness constitutes covenant fidelity, what is the standard of fidelity, or of infidelity?
Wright: The obedience of faith. What is the sign of your being faithful to the covenant [in the Old Testament]? The Shema. The obedience which consists in faith. This is the Israel-obedience or fidelity: confessing Jesus is Lord. . . . We need to be unshackled from this works-righteousness view of obedience. The gospel is a command: bow the knee and obey this Lord - [that is] submit to the statement that Jesus is Lord. It's an obedience - not meritorious, but the badge of believing.
Gaffin: When I ask what constitutes fidelity, some notion of God's law must come into play. . . .
Wright: Fine, but the law's time came to an end when Christ died on the cross. But not Marcionism. Romans 3: "boasting is excluded; by what Torah? the law of faith." Romans 2.27: the uncircumcision fulfills the law. Paul has got a view what it means "really" to fulfill the law. The doing of the law means, in Romans 10.6 and following, to believe that Jesus is Lord and raised from the dead: this is "doing" the law. The markers of Jewish ethnicity are set aside and we fulfill the law, not abolish it, through this faith.
Gaffin: Listening to you and the emphasis in your points on the law, and I appreciate the appeal you're making. . . . at its core [i.e. that of the Mosaic law] there are moral principles reflective of the person of who God is as Creator, and this defines righteousness. . . .
Wright: I'm not unhappy with that, but then I will be attacked with viewing the law as righteousness!
Question for Gaffin: Is the ordo the same before and after Christ? Were the Old Testament saints united to Christ? If not, how central [can union with Christ be]? Is union with Christ infallibly salvific? What about John 15 and such texts?
Gaffin: I think it is redemptive-historically anachronistic to say that old covenant believers were united to Christ. The Christ in view is specifically the exalted Christ, who is what He is now by virtue of His death and resurrection, and did not exist as such at that time. But there is a continuity - Paul can establish his case in Romans 4 through David and Abraham. This continuity is via covenantal fellowship with the God of Israel. Old covenant believers experienced justification and a renewing work of the Holy Spirit in a covenant fellowship that finds its eschatological form in union with Christ.
With regard to John 15, etcetera, 1 Corinthians 10: Paul holds together a covenantal identity that falls short of regeneration and faith, so. . . . Colossians 1.23: you have been reconciled, if you continue in faith. This is critical to the efficacy of the salvific benefits conferred. Election and covenant - there is danger on both sides of a head-for-head equation.
Wright: I go back again and again to 1 Corinthians 10 and Romans 5-8. In the latter, the argument is very clear: If you are justified by faith, you have secure hope in the glory of God. Romans 8.30 is the sheet anchor of all doctrines of assurance. But Paul has his feet firmly on pastoral ground; many seem to be in, but their faith may not be genuine, and the only way you can tell is genuine Christian living.
Question for Wright: How much does your view rest on critical realism? [Note: In his first volume of his series on Christian origins, The New Testament and the People of God, Wright adopts a sort of philosophical epistemology by this name. Hence the question of how foundational it is to his thinking.] How does your view of Scripture differ from inerrancy?
Wright: [Begins with the inerrancy question.] I have seen those battles going on in America. . . it's an American question. The way those questions are framed hook into dozens of other cultural and contingent and misleading ways of framing questions - a bundling of issues. So I have fought shy of those technical terms. But I have been pretty clear about my commitment to Scripture. If I find myself thinking a passage must be wrong, then I know I have taken a wrong turn. What I really object to is those who make a trumpet sound about giving attention to every syllable, and then drive coach and horses through Galatians because Paul must have been saying what we want him to have said. [Wright alludes to the NIV.]
Critical realism - that happened to be my formal starting point for the questions at the time. . . . If I finish the project, I may need to rewrite the starting point. We get reshaped. I don't want to see it as a fixed platonic form.
Gaffin: Would you be comfortable with this: "In what the Bible intends to affirm, it does so without error, with entire truthfulness"?
Wright: Again, I see that way of putting it as abstract. I'm really more concerned with how we allow Scripture to be authoritative within our communities. But it's because I believe something like what you said that I want that. Scripture is the given; it is God-breathed.
Gaffin: Isn't something like this question involved with the way you started out the other night, in your comments on sola scriptura?
Wright: The question easily becomes left-wing versus right-wing rationalists. I'm not accusing you of being a rationalist. I resist putting a tick. [I.e. he avoids putting a check mark in the "inerrantist" box.] I respect and honour the Warfield tradition, but I think we need to go beyond that.
Brief Thoughts
1. Wright put things neatly near the beginning when he compared Luther's question to Paul's. People frequently assume that people such as Wright must be discarding Luther's concern altogether when they read Paul differently. But in truth, Wright presupposes the fundamental validity of Luther's theology in his reading of Paul's concerns. The issue is not whether Luther was wrong to seek a gracious God. The issue is whether the reality of a gracious God should even be in doubt.
2. Gaffin gave a pretty good answer to a tough question regarding whether the Old Testament saints experienced union with Christ. I'm not sure his appeal to Romans 4, however, entirely works, in the sense that in that chapter, Paul is saying that God reckons faith as righteousness; he isn't talking about union with Christ. Still, fair enough to say that covenantal fellowship with God under the old covenant anticipated union with Christ in the new.
3. I think Wright's approach to the imputation question pretty much hamstrung Gaffin, who simply was too set to think in terms of very narrow categories. Notwithstanding differing exegesis of various passages, however, it still looks to me that in substance (as opposed to terminology) there is very little difference between Wright's view and Gaffin's. While Gaffin, as he noted but did not explore, affirms the imputation of Christ's active obedience, Wright too holds to what could be called an "indirect" form of imputation: what is true of Christ is true of the believer. While Wright's primary concern with that thought is Christ's death and resurrection, he presumably holds that Christ's righteous life is what bears the weight of the significance of Christ's death and resurrection.
4. Gaffin and Wright sounded virtually identical on the apostasy question regarding John 15 and 1 Corinthians 10. It may have surprised some people to hear such a traditionally Reformed-sounding answer from Wright. (Something similar could be said regarding his view of baptized people who never show signs of faith.) I'm not entirely convinced, however, that either fully "grasped the nettle" here. It is fine to speak of regeneration and true faith, but in one of his lectures Gaffin identified the union with Christ as "indissoluble," while John 15's explicit language suggests otherwise. It is unnecessary, to be sure, to claim that all union is equal in order to be true to John 15. But it still looks like there has been a failure to deal with the exegetical and theological issues.
5. Finally, Wright on inerrancy. I sympathize somewhat with his predicament, in that the particular debates have sometimes been framed in unhelpful terms. Given his interaction with the community of critical scholarship, it is easy to see that Wright does not want the big black mark on him from the outset. And as he said to Gaffin, his own concerns and practical approach do indicate that he believes "something like" what Gaffin put forward. The proof of the pudding is in the eating, and I frequently find that Wright respects the text far more than a lot of open inerrantists. That being said, I am more than happy to affirm that Scripture contains no errors, being the Word of an error-free God, and I do wish that Wright would be more straightforward on the issue.