Salvation Re-Imagined through the Spirit (NT Wright)

Last updated on: December 19, 2013 at 12:02 am by Scot McKnight

Salvation Re-Imagined through the Spirit (NT Wright) 2013-12-18T20:02:10-06:00 Scot McKnight

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One of the more (I predict) focused-upon sections in NT Wright’s Paul and the Faithfulness of God will be what he says about salvation, but he draws a set of narrowing circles: first we must think election, then salvation, and only then justification. All reworked “in Christ” and “in the Spirit” (which Wright always writes “spirit”). Today’s post will focus on election and Spirit and our next post on justification.

If the election of Israel was the solemn and unbreakable divine promise to save the world through Abraham’s seed, Paul sees that promise as accomplished in the Messiah and applied through the spirit. And ‘justification’ is something that happens, as it were, right in the middle of that work (912).

And he takes a shot across the bow of theological history by observing that justification has become something it never originally was:

It is important to note, before going any further, that the word ‘justification’ has itself had a chequered career over the course of many centuries of debate. As the major historian of the doctrine has noted, the word has long since ceased to mean, in ecclesial debates, what it meant for Paul himself – which is confusing, since the debates have gone on referring to Paul as though he was in fact talking about what they want to talk about. It is as though the greengrocer treated you to a long discussion of how onions are grown, and how best to cook with them, when what you had asked was how much he would charge for three of them (913).

The setting for connecting Spirit to election (and salvation, and justification) is gospel, and here’s yet one more NT Wright summary of the gospel:

But when Paul spoke of ‘gospel’ he thereby denoted a message which, in fulfilment of the scriptural prophecies and in implicit confrontation with the newer imperial realities, declared the ‘good news’ of God’s kingdom in and through the life, messianic achievement and supremely the death and resurrection of Jesus. This gospel message far transcended the individualistic message of ‘how to be saved’ which the word ‘gospel’ has come to denote in much contemporary western Christian expression. It remained intensely personal in its radical application, but only because it was first cosmic and global in scope: the world had a new lord, the Jewish Messiah, raised from the dead. That is why, as we saw, for Paul ‘the gospel’ even included the news of the just divine judgment against all human wickedness. In a world of moral and social chaos, ‘judgment’ is good news, as the Psalms insisted repeatedly.389 Now, for Paul, the ‘good news’ of Jesus told a story which (a) stretched backwards to Abraham and the prophets, (b) looked on to an eschaton in which the creator God would be all in all, (c) focused on the crucial events to do with Jesus as Messiah and (d) challenged its hearers to respond with hypakoē pisteōs, ‘faithful obedience’ (915-916).

You might see in some of this why I’m excited to teach Paul this winter at Northern Seminary, as we will be probing some of Wright’s proposals in our class. Wright continues with more of the same, and very importantly so:

The gospel’ is not itself ‘how to be saved’ or ‘how to be justified’. ‘The gospel’ is God’s good news, promised long ago, about his dying and rising son, the Messiah, the lord of the world. When this message is announced, things happen: (a) the creator God is shown to be ‘in the right’ in that he has kept his promises, (b) people of all sorts, Jew and Greek alike, receive ‘salvation’ as a result of the divine power, (c) Paul is not ashamed (as he might have been, announcing a message which he knew to be folly to Greeks and a scandal to Jews) and (d) he is the more eager to preach the same message anywhere and everywhere, not least right under Caesar’s nose in Rome (916-917).

Now Spirit and we land where he wants us to land:

But how then does this ‘power’ function? Paul is in no doubt: when he tells the story of Jesus as the long-promised crucified and risen Messiah of Israel, and announces that he is now the world’s true lord, God’s spirit is at work. Gospel and spirit go tightly together in his theology. Paul does not envisage a sequence of events in which first he tells people about Jesus, then they decide whether or not they are going to believe his message, and only then does the spirit descend upon those who have already believed. For Paul, belief itself is something which is effected on the one hand through the spirit and on the other through the word of the gospel – which he can also summarize as ‘the word of the cross’, especially when he wants to rub his hearers’ noses in the shocking reality of that shameful event (917).

This means a revised people of God and a revised sense of circumcision:

If the work of the spirit, producing the reshaped family, is thus one of the immediate and necessary correlates of Paul’s gospel, we should expect to see in his writings statements about that family which reflect this view. One of the most dense and powerful, and decisive for understanding several other debates and especially for framing his doctrine of justification itself, is Romans 2.25–29, especially the final verse. Here, in the middle of what is normally but misleadingly thought of simply as a demonstration of universal sinfulness, Paul sketches the spirit-shaped version of ‘election’ which con- tinues to resonate throughout much of the letter:

Circumcision, you see, has real value for people who keep the law. If, however, you break the law, your circumcision becomes uncircumcision. Meanwhile, if uncircumcised people keep the law’s requirements, their uncircumcision will be regarded as circumcision, won’t it? So people who are by nature uncircumcised, but who fulfil the law, will pass judgment on people like you who possess the letter of the law and circumcision but who break the law.

The ‘Jew’ isn’t the person who appears to be one, you see. Nor is ‘circumcision’ what it appears to be, a matter of physical flesh. The ‘Jew’ is the one in secret; and ‘circumcision’ is a matter of the heart, in the spirit rather than the letter. Such a person gets ‘praise’, not from humans, but from God.

This is as clear a statement of election-reworked-by-the-spirit as any we find in Paul. Following on from the dismissal of the ‘boast’ of ‘the Jew’ in 2.17– 24,408 Paul is here anticipating his later arguments in order to show, at the present moment in the letter, that the covenant God is not going to be restricted in his purposes by the failure of ‘the Jew’. The covenant God has not given up on the category of ‘circumcision’, on the idea of there being an elect people; he has merely redefined it, as in Philippians 3.3 (921).

Next post: what Wright says about justification as a dimension of salvation, which is a dimension of reworked election.

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