A final wrap-up
My reporting on the sessions of the 2005 Pastor's Conference is now complete. Congratulations to the Auburn Avenue Presbyterian Church for a well-hosted event, which was successful in virtually every respect. Many thanks to all those who works so hard to make the conference so enjoyable and beneficial.
What I wish to do in this final piece is to reflect upon some of the matters that were either raised or further discussed in the context of these sessions. They vary in weight of importance, and I don't claim originality for everything I will say here; and I have at least touched on much of it before.
Justification as "entry language"
I remain unconvinced by Wright's denial that justification is "entry language." In truth, the term entry by itself is too imprecise to be all that valuable here, because entry can be looked at in varying ways. Wright says that the call is the term Paul uses for entry - and that is true enough. But that does not negate the fact that justification is also about entry, just in a different way. Saying that justification is entry language is not at all the same as collapsing justification into the call, as Wright suggests.
The call refers to how God draws the sinner to respond in faith and obedience to the gospel. That certainly is "entry language." But the verb justify in Paul frequently occurs in the aorist tense, with the idea of an event which occurred at a given time in the past. When? At the point of entry. That does not place justification in competition with the call, nor make an equation between the two. Rather, the call draws one by faith into union with Christ, and the initial coming into union with Christ involves the judicial declaration of "not guilty," of "righteous." Justification is entry language, not in the sense of causing entry, but in the sense of what is entailed in that entry. It involves the forgiveness of sins, after all (as is clear from Rom 4.5-8 and elsewhere), and that is something that is requisite in order for the relationship to commence.
Imputation
Listening to Wright deny that justification is entry language, and Gaffin speak on imputation, leaves me wondering whether either side in the justification debate is entirely clear, not only on the position of the other, but on their own positions. Now, perhaps I am misunderstanding both of them, but I don't think so. And the truth is, I question whether they genuinely differ in substance in any significant fashion.
I find it interesting that Wright will not use the term imputation - but he is willing to use the term reckon - Christ's death and resurrection (and indeed, Christ's whole history) are reckoned to the one united to Christ. Why that should be not be called imputation, I'm not sure. The only real reason Wright avoids the language, as far as I can tell, is that it originally seems to have been rooted in Romans 4, which he reads differently. But I still cannot see that his view differs in genuine substance from people who are saying imputation, particularly those (like Gaffin) who recognize that justification is a fruit or aspect of union with Christ.
Gaffin struggled to see how Wright got from historia salutis (the accomplishment of redemption in the propitiatory self-offering of Christ) to ordo salutis (the application of redemption to the believer, specifically with reference to justification). In one sense, I do not see where the difficulty lies: Christ has accomplished redemption and has been justified; when the believer is joined to Christ, that accomplishment necessarily becomes his. There is thus no difficulty in moving from historia salutis to ordo salutis in Wright's scheme.
On the other hand, Wright's denial that justification has to do with entry confuses the issue, in my view. If you say justification isn't about "getting in," but rather is a declaration concerning who is in, as Wright is given to say, then that does, after all, raise the question of the ordo: how has one (already!) moved from wrath to grace? The call cannot accomplish that; it can only act subjectively, causing the individual to turn to God. The call does not itself provide the new status of righteous; it does not itself provide the forgiveness of sins.
I thus maintain that the difficulties in Wright's view of justification would be resolved by abandoning his stance regarding entry. Gaffin, for his part, needs to recognize that there are various ways of construing how the righteousness of Christ is applied to the believer. And since Gaffin himself roots justification in union with Christ, Wright too may be forgiven for being somewhat puzzled regarding why Gaffin seems to insist on some sort of separate imputative act.
And for what it's worth, before I leave off the subject of justification, I see that one delicious quotation from Wright didn't make it into my notes. I believe he said it among his "asides" at the beginning of his final lecture; if so, this would explain why they went missing, since I recorded relatively little of those scattered thoughts. In any case, Wright spoke to the issue of justification (and, if I remember correctly, the final judgment), and concluded, "And if you still think that's 'works righteousness,' you don't need to see an exegete - you need to see a psychiatrist." It was unquestionably Wright's most polemical moment of the conference. And pretty funny too.
Judgment according to works
I for one deeply appreciated Gaffin's judicious analysis of the difficult subject of the final judgment according to works. While I can understand Wright's hesitance to make Paul more precise than he is, on this point I have to side with Gaffin. If Paul wanted to say "basis," or some similar thought, he certainly could have done so; yet he repeatedly uses language along the lines of "according to" (kata). To be sure, that does not mean the matter is simple, and there are facets of the theme which Gaffin did not explore. Paul's language of receiving back in the body for what one has done (2 Cor 5.10) is robust indeed, and as Protestants we spend most of our time explaining what such statements cannot mean, rather than what they do. And Gaffin did not address that particular statement either.
But what Gaffin did work with was very helpful, and I cannot say that he over-systematized. It is sound to pay attention to Paul's prepositions, and likewise, it is a sound insight to say that the basis of final justification cannot differ from the basis of initial justification since, after all, they are one justification, not two. It seems to me that on this particular point, at least, Gaffin's approach is exemplary in how it weds exegetical concerns with those of confessional and historical theology, while Wright's handling of the question looks unnecessarily minimalistic.
Epiphenomena
The dialogue between Wright and Gaffin regarding whether the Jew-Gentile issue is "phenomenon" or "epiphenomenon" is a striking instance where two people are both essentially right, and yet feel the need to make the point in differing ways. Gaffin's language here safeguards the fact that the vertical is constitutive of everything else; reconciliation between God and fallen man is the ground of the reconciliation of all things - a point with which Wright would scarcely disagree.
Wright's language, on the other hand, safeguards against thinking of salvation as having to do with a sort of noumenal realm, with everything else merely being "implications." The redemption in Christ is cosmic, it is objectively real in the realm of human relationships. New creation is not an addendum, much less an option. And therefore the Jew-Gentile relationship cannot be extracted out of Paul's gospel, since the gospel for Paul is the execution of this age and the inauguration of the new, and it is precisely matters such as Jew-Gentile division that have been put to death in that grand cosmic act of execution. Furthermore, as Gaffin himself acknowledged, this "ecclesiological" dimension of Paul's concerns really has been greatly neglected, and has come into its own with the NPP contribution.
Adam and Israel
Another point of discussion (and divergence) was the significance of Israel within Paul's theology of redemption. Gaffin is right to point to Adam and Christ as paradigmatic, but it seems to me that he goes too far in suggesting that Israel simply falls out of sight ("below the line"). To the contrary, I think Wright has largely developed the lines along which we may negotiate the issue: Israel does not pop into history independently, but as a people called to take up the role of Adam. Thus the particular shape that is given to Christ's role as second Adam, or last Adam, derives directly from Israel's history and calling. Hence I see no need to pit Adam against Israel and claim that the latter falls off the map when it really counts. Rather, Christ's last Adam work is accomplished precisely as the representative and embodiment of Israel. As I have indicated elsewhere, Christ could not have carried out His last Adam work as a Belfast Irishman, or as an Inca. He needed to be an Israelite, born under Torah.
Theology with feet
It is difficult, in a brief conference which covers such a great deal of ground, to deal with matters of putting Paul into practice. Consequently, I was grateful that Wright spent one of his five lectures moving from what Paul's theology meant "on the ground" for him and his churches, to some of what it means for us in our historical context. It was all too brief, but I thought that the session was helpful.
The great challenge of the ecclesiological discoveries of the NPP is the challenge of catholicity and ecumenicity. Doctrinal matters have, of course, been greatly complicated in the two thousand years intervening between Paul's day and ours, and it has proven difficult to maintain a sense of proportion. The smaller the group, the more doctrinal minutiae tend to be seen as very significant. It is a truism that it is difficult to draw the line between appropriate acceptance and fatal compromise, between healthy vigilance and obsessive witch-hunting.
I don't claim to have any more answers to these problems than anyone else. But I will say that we desperately need the implications of the Pauline vision to impact our way of thinking. We need to break the pattern of drawing smaller and smaller circles and painting everyone else outside of it. The congregation of the saved will be a multitude that no man can number, not a paltry handful who remained "really truly pure." That congregation is the new creation, the new humanity, and it is a mockery to the cosmos-renewal that occurred in Christ's death and resurrection that this new humanity still maintains so many of the divisions which earmarked the old.
Wright on apostasy
One of the interesting things that was made even clearer to me at this conference is the irony of one of the charges I have heard about so-called "Auburn Avenue theology" or "the Federal Vision." Sometimes critics link appreciation of Wright to ("aberrant") "Federal Vision" views of apostasy. This is about as absurd as the frequent link that is made between Norman Shepherd and the New Perspective on Paul. Frankly, in my reading of Wright, I had never sensed that he had a developed view of apostasy; to the contrary, his exposition of various passages indicated to me a very standard and typical Reformed reading of the believer's security. That sense was confirmed in Monroe, where Wright's position appeared to be indistinguishable from Gaffin's (and interestingly, neither took up the challenge of dealing with John 15).
What is the point in the observation? Simply a reminder that, for most people I know, appreciation of Wright is appreciation of exegetical and biblical-theological labours. Such appreciation does not arise out of an "agenda," it does not turn people into lemmings, and neither does it commit one either to Wright's best moments or his worst. I realize that we often find it convenient to pigeon-hole people, but life just isn't like that. The life of faith is a life of wrestling with God's Word - wrestling to understand it, wrestling to be mastered by it. Thank God for men such as N. T. Wright and Richard Gaffin, whom He has given His Church to assist us in our wrestling.