The Upper Register

N. T. Wright's reformulation of justification

N. T. Wright’s long-awaited Paul and the Faithfulness of God is out now. It is so big the publisher had to break it up into two volumes totaling 1,696 pages. I haven’t bought it yet, much less read it, but I plan to do both as soon as possible. I’m sure everyone will be talking about it at SBL in Baltimore in two weeks.

In this post, I’m focusing on Wright’s view of justification as expressed in his publications up to this point, obviously not taking his latest book into account. He may have modified or clarified some things there.

It’s important to keep in mind that justification is only one aspect of his thought. I’m sure he gets frustrated when people only nitpick at that one issue and ignore the rest of his “grand narrative” proposals regarding Jesus as the Messiah (= true Israel) who fulfills the Abrahamic covenant. That theme is obviously far more important to him than getting the technical details of justification right.

But the details of justification are important because they directly relate to assurance, the question of how I as a sinner can be accepted before a holy God. The Bible teaches that we must be righteous in order to stand accepted before a holy God (Rom 2:13), and lacking such righteousness (Rom 3:9-20), it is only to be found in Christ who is our righteousness (Rom 3:21-26; 10:3-4; 1 Cor 1:30; 2 Cor 5:21; Phil 3:9).

But for Wright, the question of righteousness – how can a sinner be righteous before God? – is irrelevant. To use Stendahl’s phrase, it stems from the introspective conscience of the West and has little to do with Paul’s concerns. The search for assurance before a holy God is a subsidiary crater to the much more massive crater created by God’s faithfulness to his promises to Abraham, and the resulting formation of the multiethnic people of the Messiah who embody and extend God’s faithfulness to the world.

I have a theory that I would like to throw out there, but I think the best way to understand Wright is to take the classic Reformed definition of justification and see what Wright does with it. My theory is that he affirms the first half of the definition, rejects the second half, and replaces the second half with the issue of covenant membership in order to tie it into his grand narrative of God’s covenant faithfulness.

The classic Reformed definition is summarized by Calvin: “Justification consists in the forgiveness of sins and the imputation of the righteousness of Christ” (Institutes 3.11.2). The same two-part definition is given in the Westminster Shorter Catechism (Q. 33):  “Justification is an act of God’s free grace, wherein he pardons all our sins, and accepts us as righteous in his sight, only for the righteousness of Christ imputed to us, and received by faith alone.”

My theory is that Wright affirms the first half of justification – the forgiveness of sins. But he rejects the second half – the imputation of the righteousness of Christ – and in its place he puts the declaration of covenant membership.

Why does he reject the second half, the positive imputation of Christ’s righteousness? First, he doesn’t accept the interpretation of the classic proof texts used in Reformed theology. But second, he just doesn’t believe that it is necessary. He doesn’t believe that we need a positive righteousness to be accepted before God. As long as we are forgiven, our acceptance is by his grace, without the need for the law to be fulfilled positively so that we might be reckoned as perfectly righteous in his sight.

Here are some quotes by Wright to provide evidence for my theory.

What Saint Paul Really Said (1997)

“If we use the language of the law court, it makes no sense whatsoever to say that the judge imputes, imparts, bequeaths, conveys or otherwise transfers his righteousness to either the plaintiff or the defendant. Righteousness is not an object, a substance or a gas which can be passed across the courtroom” (p. 98).

“If we leave the notion of ‘righteousness’ as a law-court metaphor only, as so many have done in the past, this gives the impression of a legal transaction, a cold piece of business, almost a trick of thought performed by a God who is logical and correct but hardly one we would want to worship” (p. 110).

“Justification in this setting, then, is not a matter of how someone enters the community of the true people of God, but of how you tell who belongs to that community … It was about God’s eschatological definition, both future and present, of who was, in fact, a member of his people” (p. 119).

1 Corinthians 1:30 “is the only passage I know where something called ‘the imputed righteousness of Christ,’ a phrase more often found in post-Reformation theology and piety than in the New Testament, finds any basis in the text. But if we are to claim it as such, we must also be prepared to talk of the imputed wisdom of Christ; the imputed sanctification of Christ; and the imputed redemption of Christ” (p. 123).

“New Perspectives on Paul” (2003)

This was Wright’s lecture at the 10th Edinburgh Dogmatics Conference in 2003. It was published in Justification in Perspective, ed. Bruce L. McCormack (Baker, 2006).

“What, then, about the ‘imputed righteousness’? This is fine as it stands; God does indeed ‘reckon righteousness’ to those who believe. But this is not, for Paul, the righteousness either of God or of Christ except in a very specialized sense … Only two passages can be invoked in favor of the imputed righteousness being that of God or Christ. The first [1 Cor 1:30] proves too much, and the second [2 Cor 5:21] not enough” (p. 252).

“Is there, then, no ‘reckoning of righteousness’ in, for instance Romans 5:14-21? Yes, there is; but this is not God’s own righteousness or Christ’s own righteousness that is reckoned to God’s redeemed people but, rather, the fresh status of ‘covenant member,’ and/or ‘justified sinner’” (p. 253).

“When we talk of God’s vindication of someone, we are talking about God’s declaration, which appears as a double thing to us, but, I suspect, a single thing to Paul:  the declaration (a) that someone is in the right (his or her sins having been forgiven through the death of Jesus) and (b) that this person is a member of the true covenant family” (p. 258).

“These two things – declaring sinners to be in the right, with their sins forgiven, and declaring someone to be a member of the single multiethnic family – go very closely together in Paul’s mind … Thus God’s declaration of forgiveness and declaration of covenant membership are not ultimately two different things” (p. 259).

“Paul does not say that God sees us clothed with the earned merits of Christ. This would be the wrong meaning of ‘righteous’ or ‘righteousness.’ … I suspect that it was the medieval overconcentration on righteousness, on justitia, that caused the Protestant Reformers to push for imputed righteousness” (p. 261).

Justification: God’s Plan and Paul’s Vision (IVP, 2009)

“It is God’s faithfulness to his promises to Abraham that, as in many passages of the Old Testament, is the key central meaning of ‘God’s righteousness.’ The section which began at Romans 3:21 did not finish at Romans 3:31; it merely sets up the fuller exposition of the same point, the dikaiosynē theou. The tragedy of much Reformation reading of Paul is that, by using the language of ‘God’s righteousness’ on the unnecessary project of ‘finding someone’s righteousness to impute to the believer’ as though ‘righteousness’ was that sort of thing in the first place, and as though the theological point were not already taken care of ‘in Christ,’ this entire point was not just sidelined but binned” (p. 217).

“Forgiveness – the non-reckoning of sin – is thus right at the heart of the larger picture which Paul is sketching, but we must not for that reason ignore that larger picture” (p. 221).

“We note in particular that the ‘obedience’ of Christ is not designed to amass a treasury of merit which can then be ‘reckoned’ to the believer, as in some Reformed schemes of thought” (p. 228). “This is, theologically and exegetically, a blind alley” (p. 231).

His interpretation of Romans 10:4: “The Messiah is the culmination of the Torah, so that there may be dikaiosynē, covenant membership, for all who believe.” This verse “gives off its full resonances not within the Lutheran scheme whereby the law is a bad thing abolished in Christ, nor within the Calvinist scheme whereby the law is a good thing which Christ obeyed and thus procured ‘righteousness’ (works-righteousness, we note) to be then ‘imputed’ to those who believe, but within Paul’s own Jewish framework of thought, the narrative of God and his faithfulness to Israel which has reached its destination in the Messiah” (p. 244).

“Justification is more than simply the remitting and forgiving of sins, vital and wonderful though that is. It is the declaration that those who believe in Jesus are part of the resurrection-based single family of the one Creator God” (p. 248).

“Justification: Yesterday, Today, and Forever” (2010)

I was at the ETS Annual Meeting in Atlanta in 2010 and I heard Wright’s address to the society in which he defended his view of justification. He dismissed as “medieval” the view that humans lack righteousness, but, oh, Jesus has a bunch of extra righteousness lying around, so, here, take some of his and get the righteousness you need to go to heaven. This misunderstanding, he argued, is derived from the medieval mistranslation of “the righteousness of God” as iustitia Dei.

Here is how it came out in the published version: “As applied to humans the best rendering [of dikaiosynē] is ‘covenant membership.’ … What then does it mean, within the lawcourt setting, for someone to be ‘righteous’? Simply this:  that the court has found in their favor. It means that they have been declared to be ‘in the right.’ They have not been granted or imputed a ‘righteousness’ which belongs to someone else … God as the God who made the covenant with Abraham declares that someone is a member of that covenant … To think otherwise—to insist that one needs ‘righteousness,’ in the sense of ‘moral character or repute’ or whatever, in order to stand unashamed before God, and that, lacking any of one’s own, one must find some from somewhere or someone else—shows that one is still thinking in medieval categories of iustitia rather than in biblical categories of lawcourt and covenant” (JETS 54.1 [2011], pp. 56-7 emphasis mine).

In conclusion, it seems to me that Wright wants to affirm the first half of the classic Reformed definition of justification, the forgiveness of sins through the death of Jesus (although even here, his position on how the death of Jesus brings about forgiveness is unclear). But the second half of justification, the positive imputation of Christ’s righteousness, he flatly rejects as a “blind alley.” He thinks this whole project of looking for righteousness is an “unnecessary project,” a medieval error that has been “binned” by his covenantal “grand narrative” paradigm shift. He grants the forgiveness of sins, but the real weight of his understanding of justification shifts to being declared to be a member of the covenant people of God. 

Romans 2:6-13: Response to Sam Waldron, Pt. 3

In wrapping up this series, I'm not so much responding to Sam Waldron as I am simply trying to clarify the issues. I think it is important to note that the phrase "future justification" is used by a variety of theologians but not in the same sense. Some formulations of "future justification" are more orthodox than others. I would distinguish at least three varieties (though there are probably more, I'm just not aware of them):

(1) The view of N. T. Wright and other New Perspective scholars

On this view, "future justification" is acceptance before God in the full judicial and eschatological sense of the word. This future justification will not be by faith alone but by faith and by works, that is, a person's judicial acceptance before God at the day of judgment will be determined on the basis of their obedience to the moral law. Present justification is by faith, which merely means that belief in Jesus is the badge of membership in the people of God. But future justification is on the basis of works. As N. T. Wright puts it:

And in Romans, as elsewhere in Paul, it is present justification, not future, that is closely correlated with faith. Future justification, acquittal at the last great Assize, always takes place on the basis of the totality of the life lived (e.g. Romans 14.11f.; 2 Corinthians 5.10).

[The Law in Romans 2, in Paul and the Mosaic Law (ed. James D. G. Dunn; Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2001), 144.]

(2) Richard Gaffin's view (as I understand it)

Gaffin takes as his starting point the doctrine of mystical union with Christ together with the already/not-yet dynamic of NT eschatology. All of the benefits of union with Christ are equally important, and none has priority, whether logical or temporal, over the others. The benefits of union with Christ can be classified into two primary groups:  forensic benefits like justification and adoption, and transformative benefits like regeneration and sanctification. Both the transformative and the forensic benefits have an "already" and a "non-yet" dimension. For example, the "already" aspect of adoption is that we are now members of God's family and experience his Fatherly love and status as sons. The "not-yet" aspect is the glorification of our body. As Paul himself says, we "who have the firstfruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly as we wait eagerly for adoption as sons, the redemption of our bodies" (Rom 8:23 ESV). 

Now if adoption is both "already" and "not-yet," Gaffin reasons, and if all of the benefits of salvation are enjoyed in union with Christ, then it stands to reason that justification would also have both dimensions. We are used to thinking about the "already" aspect of justification (a past forensic declaration that we are righteous in God's sight only for the righteousness of Christ imputed to us and received by faith alone), but we should also be aware of the "not-yet" aspect of justification. The "not-yet" aspect of justification is not that we are going to be more justified or judicially accepted by God than we are now by faith, but that we will be openly acquitted and vindicated insofar as the transformative benefits of union with Christ will have worked themselves out in our lives as the effectuation of the totality of our salvation in union with Christ. On Gaffin's view, "future justification" is part of justification in union with Christ.

(3) Future vindication of one's faith by its fruits, use of "justification" only in evidentiary sense

This view is different from Gaffin's view in that it applies the term "justification" to future vindication at the day of judgment only in a linguistic rather than a theological sense. Words can be used to refer to a lot of different things because sense and reference, the two aspects of lexical meaning, are distinct. For example, the word "called" in the NT is used with at least two distinct references. When Jesus says, "Many are called, but few are chosen" (Matt 22:14), he is referring to the external, resistible call (or free offer) of the gospel. When Paul says, "Those whom he predestined he also called" (Rom 8:30), he is referring to the internal, effectual, irresistible call that is applied only to the elect. The word "call" in these two verses may have the same sense but widely different, indeed contradictory, referents. That is why we need systematic theology in addition to exegetical and biblical theology, to sort out and clarify distinctions like this.

As applied to "justification," Sam Waldron makes the following distinction,which is pretty much the same as my distinction between sense and reference:

First, when I say that the connotation of the verb, justify, here in Matthew 12:37 is an entirely different connotation than it has in Romans 3 and 4, I have in my mind the important distinction between "connotation" and "denotation."  What a word connotes and what it denotes or two different things.

So Waldron is applying the term "justification" to the future vindication of the genuineness of the believer's faith by the fruit of that faith at the day of judgment only because there are a handful of verses in the NT that use the term in this way -- not to muddy the waters of the systematic locus of justification. Matt 12:37 is the only indisputed instance. James 2:21-25 may also be a case, but the focus is on the vindication of a believer's profession of faith in this life; the future aspect is not clear, although I am willing to concede that the eschatological aspect at the day of judgment may be implicit. Then there is Rom 2:13 which I do not regard as a relevant proof text (since it is part of a larger argument leading to the "empty set" conclusion of Rom 3:10-20), but which Sam Waldron does regard as relevant. That is a minor difference; on the larger point, we agree that the term "justification" is used at least once and perhaps as many as four times in the NT in reference the public vindication of one's profession of faith, a future vindication that is NOT "justification" in the technical ordo salutis sense (the imputation of the righteousness of Christ by faith alone), nor is it the "not-yet" aspect thereof (contra Gaffin). The "not-yet" aspect of justification (if we must speak of such a thing) is bodily glorification, not the vindication of the profession of one's faith on the basis of the fruit of faith, i.e., evangelical obedience.

I disagree with both (1) and (2) and, with Sam Waldron, hold to (3) -- except that I don't take Rom 2:6-13 as one of the proof texts for it as he does.

Hebrew Parallelism and the New Perspective on Paul

“What does Hebrew parallelism have to do with the New Perspective?” you ask. Quite a bit, actually. Let me explain by starting with the New Perspective end of the equation. One of the pillars of the New Perspective on Paul (NPP) is the view that δικαιοσύνη θεοῦ in Paul is a cipher for “God’s covenant faithfulness.” N. T. Wright is a well-known advocate of this interpretation. For example, in his recent book on justification, he writes:

“We can say with extremely solid assurance that ‘God’s righteousness,’ in Paul as in the Psalms and Isaiah, regularly refers to God’s own righteousness, not in the medieval senses which iustitia Dei generated, but in the Old Testament and intertestamental sense of ‘the covenant faithfulness of God’” (Justification: God’s Plan & Paul’s Vision [Downers Grove, Ill.: InterVarsity, 2009], 164).

According to Wright, in the Hebraic mindset, “righteousness” differs significantly from the Western, medieval concept of iustitia. Rather than being about conformity to an abstract norm or justice, it has to do with “covenant faithfulness.” Wright bifurcates Hebrew and Roman concepts of “righteousness.” The Western, Reformation tradition from Luther on got it all wrong because it interpreted “righteousness” in Roman rather than Hebraic categories.

But what is the basis for this view that “righteousness” in the Hebraic way of thinking has to do with “covenant faithfulness”? There are a number of arguments for this theory, but Wright appeals to the Psalms and Isaiah as the chief exegetical basis of this interpretation. Following Hermann Cremer, he is referring to the many passages in the Psalms and Isaiah where “righteousness” is used in parallelism with “salvation” or “faithfulness.” Wright argues that “the righteousness of God” contains a reference to both concepts, but the emphasis is on the latter; a fuller definition would be that it refers to God’s faithfulness to the Abrahamic covenant, which results in salvation, i.e., the defeat of evil and the restoration of creation.

Here are two examples, one from Isaiah and one from the Psalms, where these terms occur in Hebrew parallelism:

“My salvation is about to come;
and my righteousness is about to be revealed” (Isa 56:1 NASB).

“Hear my prayer, O LORD;
give ear to my pleas for mercy!
In your faithfulness answer me,
in your righteousness!” (Ps 143:1 ESV)

Thus, Hebrew parallelism – or, rather, a certain theory of Hebrew parallelism – lies at the root of one of the foundational pillars of the NPP. I say, a certain theory of Hebrew parallelism, because, as Old Testament scholars know, there are a variety of theories as to how Hebrew parallelism works. Let me briefly sketch the history of interpretation of Hebrew parallelism.

In the 18th century, the Anglican bishop, Robert Lowth, in his lectures “On the Sacred Poetry of the Hebrews” (published in 1753) argued that there were three types of Hebrew parallelism:  synonymous parallelism, antithetical parallelism, and synthetic or constructive parallelism. The first two types are exemplified in Psalm 2:5-6:

A1 “Therefore the wicked will not stand in the judgment,
A2 Nor sinners in the congregation of the righteous;
B1 For the LORD knows the way of the righteous,
B2 But the way of the wicked will perish” (ESV).

A1 and A2 are a good example of synonymous parallelism, while B1 and B2 are clearly antithetical parallelism. Lowth’s third category was a kind of catch-all for the many instances that did not seem to be either synonymous or antithetical.

Although Lowth’s analysis was widely accepted for two centuries, in the 1980s, James Kugel and Robert Alter challenged the received Lowthian orthodoxy. They rejected Lowth’s category of synonymous parallelism, pointing out that even when the two lines seem to be saying something roughly similar, they are never perfectly equivalent, and that the difference, however small, when viewed in light of the similarity of the two lines, produces a new meaning that goes beyond what each line contributes individually.

James Kugel's label for this was “subjunction,” i.e., line B is subjoined to line A. To explain this, he invented the formula, “A, and what’s more, B.” The first line (A) is the primary statement; the second line (B) adds new information or a new perspective. (James L. Kugel, The Idea of Biblical Poetry: Parallelism and Its History [New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981].)

A few years later, Robert Alter took Kugel’s approach and moved the ball down the field a few more yards. He fleshed out the specific ways in which the B line heightens, intensifies, focuses and even dramatizes the A line. Alter speaks of “parallelism of specification” and “parallelism of intensification,” although he does acknowledge that, occasionally, one finds “static synonymity.” Alter’s main point is that “literary expression abhors complete parallelism … usage always introducing small wedges of difference between closely akin terms.” He quotes Viktor Shklovsky who wrote that “the purpose of parallelism … is to transfer the usual perception of an object into the sphere of a new perception – that is, to make a unique semantic modification.”  (Robert Alter, The Art of Biblical Poetry [New York: Basic Books, 1985], 3-26).

More recently, the Dutch scholar J. P. Fokkelman vividly explained the Kugel-Alter theory of parallelism with the helpful metaphor of binoculars. Just as binoculars provide depth perception by bringing two nearly identical but nevertheless distinct pictures together to form a new unity, so in Hebrew parallelism the similarities and the differences between the two lines complement one another, and the result is that whole is greater than the sum of its parts. Parallelism helps us to see in stereo. (J. P. Fokkelman, Reading Biblical Poetry: An Introductory Guide [transl. Ineke Smit; Louisville: WJK, 2001], 78-79.)

As you can see, the New Perspective claim that “the righteousness of God” is a cipher denoting “God’s saving faithfulness to his covenant” rests on the outdated Lowthian theory of Hebrew synonymous parallelism. Rather than equating “righteousness” with “faithfulness” (or “salvation”), it is better to see the instances in the Psalms and Isaiah where these terms are used in parallelism as “binoculars” in which these different concepts mutually interpret one another and lead to a picture that is larger than the sum of its parts.

God’s salvation is the result of his faithfulness to his covenant with Abraham. God’s salvation is also an expression of his righteousness, because he executes salvation in a manner that is consistent with his justice and holiness; indeed, salvation itself is an essentially judicial activity, for salvation comes through judgment. For example, at the Exodus, God’s deliverance of his people was accomplished by judgment on the Egyptians. At the cross, salvation was accomplished because the judgment we deserved was borne by Jesus as our substitute.

In other words, when “God’s salvation” or “God’s faithfulness” and “God’s righteousness” are found in parallel, the conclusion we are to draw is not that the word “righteousness” itself means “salvation” or “faithfulness,” but that God’s saving activity comes in fulfillment of his covenant promises and is an expression of his righteousness. Especially in those cases where “salvation” and “righteousness” are parallel (see, e.g., Psalm 98:2; Isaiah 51:5-8; 56:1), the point is that God’s salvation has a strongly judicial dimension.

To conclude, the static Lowthian theory of synonymous parallelism has been superseded in the last 30 years by a more nuanced understanding, and this scholarly shift in the interpretation of Hebrew poetry undermines one of the pillars of the NPP. When properly understood, Hebrew parallelism provides no support for the theory that δικαιοσύνη θεοῦ is a cipher for God's faithfulness to his covenant.

Dissertation update

I was originally hoping to finish my dissertation by the end of this year, but things got really busy for me at work. So I have had to recalibrate. Now I'm aiming to finish by the end of next year, 2010. However, I have managed to write the first four chapters.

The fourth chapter is critical, because here I examine all occurrences of the two nouns for "righteousness" in the Hebrew OT (276 occurrences), as well as the translational equivalent in the Septuagint. I just submitted chapter 4 to Professor Seyoon Kim (my second reader) and he had some encouraging things to say. Although I need to beef up my argument in a couple of sections, he said, "You have put the needle to the balloon of the relational theory of righteousness." 

Next up are chapters on the use of righteousness in Jewish literature, such as the Dead Sea Scrolls, but especially Jewish Greek literature like the Letter of Aristeas, the Wisdom of Solomon, and Philo. My focus in these chapters will be to show that "righteousness" in Greek-speaking Judaism was not fundamentally different from its usage in the Hebrew OT or in extra-biblical Greek. In all three cases, it is fundamentally a norm concept rather than a relational concept.

Having critiqued the the NPP's interpretation of "the righteousness of God" as "God's covenant faithfulness," I will then make the positive case for the traditional Reformation interpretation of "the righteousness of God" in terms of the gift of righteousness (judicial status) from God, with a secondary meaning in Rom 3:25-26, namely, God's attribute of justice demonstrated via the propitiatory sacrifice of Christ.

Review of Wagner, Heralds of the Good News, Pt 2

I mentioned in Part 1 of this review that, while I liked J. Ross Wagner's approach to Paul's use of Isaiah, I had some disagreements with other aspects of Wagner's thesis. My disagreements were triggered early on when I came to his view that Romans 1:16-17, as the thematic statement of Romans, asserts God's covenant faithfulness toward Israel, and through Israel, to the Gentiles. He writes:

In this compact sentence, Paul asserts that the "righteousness of God" -- that is, God's faithfulness to rescue his covenant people Israel and to vindicate them before their oppressors -- is revealed in what God has now accomplished in the death and resurrection of Jesus. The promises of redemption and restoration for Israel are at long last being realized. Moreover, the benefits of Israel's redemption are available to Jew and Gentile alike on precisely the same basis. Paul unpacks the significance of these claims in the chapters that follow (p. 44).

Wagner does not attempt to prove this definition of "the righteousness of God" in Paul but relies on other scholars whom he cites in a footnote, including James D. G. Dunn, E. P. Sanders, Richard B. Hays, Ernst Käsemann, and Peter Stuhlmacher. 

Now one can have a legitimate disagreement over the proper exegesis of Romans 11, especially the phrase, "all Israel shall be saved" (Wagner takes it, unsurprisingly, as a future large-scale conversion of Jews to Christ), without making the additional major claim that Wagner and other scholars identified with the New Perspective on Paul (NPP) generally make. This additional major claim is that the entire Epistle to the Romans is to be subsumed under the thematic statement of God's covenant faithfulness. So not only does Wagner interpret Rom 11:26 as predicting a future conversion of national Israel, because of his take on Rom 1:16-17, he reductionistically makes this the theme of the whole epistle! 

At this point, I should point out something that really annoys me. Wagner, like many NPP scholars, quotes Rom 1:16-17a but leaves out 17b, which says, "... as it is written, 'He who is righteous by faith shall live.'" He literally has ellipses (...) at the end of 17a ("for in it the righteousness of God is revealed from faith to faith ...") (p. 44). As Francis Watson points out in Paul and the Hermeneutics of Faith, the statement of Paul concerning the righteousness of God in 17a is generated by the Scripture quotation in 17b, and the lexical linkage between the two (the noun "righteousness" [dikaiosyne] and the adjective "righteous" [dikaios]) demands that the verse be read as a whole and in fact constitutes rather strong evidence against the "covenant faithfulness of God" interpretation. For how, on this view, should the adjective be interpreted? "For in it the covenant faithfulness of God is revealed from faith to faith, as it is written, 'He who is covenantally faithful by faith shall live'" just doesn't make any sense. The only way it could perhaps be given a shred of tolerable sense would be to interpret "he who is dikaios" as a reference to Christ himself, a view that was held by some commentators but which is generally not considered to be a truly likely option given Paul's emphasis in Romans on sinners being "righteous by faith." In other words, if Rom 1:16-17 is the thematic statement, then it should correspond to the way that thematic statement is explained later in Rom 1-5, which clearly has to do with individuals being justified by faith, i.e., "righteous by faith."

The NPP approach to Romans makes the issue of Israel's corporate future in chapters 9-11 the climax of the argument to which the individual soteriological concerns of chapters 1-8 are subordinated. The central concerns that Luther and Calvin saw in the text -- how can unrighteous sinners be accepted before God and escape divine wrath? -- are regarded as less interesting and less important than the corporate questions of God's faithfulness to his covenant people and the redefinition of that covenant people in Christocentric terms so as to allow for Gentile inclusion without the need for observing the Jewish ceremonial law.

Wagner's indebtedness to the NPP is also evident throughout this work in other ways. For example, he says that he agrees with E. P. Sanders's claim that Judaism was not a legalistic religion and that therefore what Paul was concerned with in his polemic against "works" was not legalism but Jewish exclusiveness as evidenced in its insistence on the "boundary markers" of the Sabbath, the kosher laws, and circumcision (pp. 122-23 note 10).

Accents strongly characteristic of the NPP also come strongly to the fore in Wagner's exegesis of Rom 9:30--10:4 (pp. 152-55). He argues that what Paul faults is not Israel's pursuit of the Law, but her pursuit of the Law in such a way as to miss the telos (= goal) of the Law, which is Christ. Israel failed to see that the goal of the Law was Christ, and so they pursued the law in the wrong manner, that is, by works (i.e., with a spirit of excluding Gentiles by being zealous for the boundary markers), rather than by faith. They were attempting to establish "their own righteousness," in a corporate sense, a righteousness that Israel could boast in as a corporate entity in distinction from the Gentiles, rather than submitting to "the righteousness of God" revealed in Christ, that is, God's plan of being faithful to his covenant people through the death and resurrection of Christ and thereby extending covenant inclusion to the Gentiles.

This is all standard NPP stuff -- see Dunn and Wright. Wagner's unique spin is to see these themes adumbrated in Isaiah's call to Israel in Isaiah 8 and 28-29 to trust in God rather than enter into treaties with foreign nations to stave off God's judgment. In fact, God, according to Isaiah, would bring ultimate deliverance to Israel only as she submitted to God's strange ways (e.g., being punished temporarily by oppressive Gentile regimes such as the Assyrians). According to Wagner, Paul's explicit use of Isa 28:16 + 8:14 ("Behold, I am laying in Zion a stone of stumbling") in Rom 9:33 is calculated to spark an implicit allusion to these broader Isaianic themes:

Just as God's dealings with foreign nations -- particularly his choice of Assyria as an instrument to discipline his own people -- scandalized the majority of Israel in Isaiah's day, so now the gospel Paul proclaims to the Gentiles has caused Israel to stumble badly. Whereas Israel had long associated God's righteousness with the markers of the covenant (pursuing the Law ex ergon), Paul now proclaims the news that in Christ God's righteousness is extended to Jew and Gentile alike on the same basis of faith. For Israel to hang on to its covenant markers now and to refuse to recognize God's acceptance of Jews and Gentiles solely on the basis of pistis would be to reject God's righteousness in favor of "their own righteousness" (pp. 154-55).

The Isaiah insights aside, this is a strongly NPP reading of a key text, Rom 9:30--10:4. Perhaps the Isaiah insights could be rescued and reformulated along more Old Perspective lines, but that is not my concern in this review.

In sum, Wagner's dissertation has some valuable and helpful things to say about Paul's use of Isaiah, not just the explicit quotations but Paul's allusions to broader Isaianic themes. Yet the book is marred by Wagner's reliance on the NPP as a grid for interpreting key texts.