Wright's goal in his teaching and writing is to massively revise the way Christianity has been articulated for generations. Christian faith, for Wright, is not about going to heaven when you die. It is not about the triumph of grace over the law of the Old Testament. He says its key doctrine is not justification by grace alone, the cornerstone for the Protestant Reformers. The church has misread Paul so severely, it seems, that no one fully understood the gospel from the time of the apostle to the time a certain British scholar started reading Paul in Greek in graduate school.
The reader is faced with a number of interpretive questions: is Byassee's description of Wright accurate? If so, what exactly is Wright presenting as long-lost core of the Christian faith? Is Wright arguing that recent centuries have misplaced the real meaning Christianity? If so, what is that real meaning?
According to Byassee, Wright's examination of the Pauline epistles is a historical one. Wright invented a phrase, the "new perspectives on Paul" approach, to emphasize that he would work from primary documents and historical data, and read Paul in manner which deliberately attempt to avoid two millennia of accumulated commentary and theology. Wright claims to peel back the layers of tradition and find the real historical Paul.
Historians can identify a long line of thinkers, dating back at least to Martin Luther, and arguably as far back as the later prophets of the Old Testament, who have stated that their task was to uncover the original and forgotten meanings in sacred texts. In this way, Wright is not new. Byassee summarizes some of Wright's work this way:
Theology, argues Wright, is something Paul pioneered. Jews and Romans could talk about spiritual matters such as fortune, or unseen powers that require our placating. But theology does work among the earliest Christians (and us) that it never had to do for their predecessors. Theology does the work for Paul that circumcision, food laws, and Sabbath did for the old Paul, the zealous Jew Saul of Tarsus. It marked out a community as distinct from the world. It still does — just not nearly as biblically in most cases as Wright thinks it should.
Arguing that he's uncovered the real Paul, Wright's thoughts become more interesting when he states what Paul's real theses are. According to Byassee's analysis of Wright,
Paul was not worried about where believers' souls would go after death. Christians of the late medieval period were worried about hell and felt they had to earn entry to heaven with works. This is the theology Martin Luther taught and wrote against, helping to ignite the Protestant Reformation.
Luther rejected the notion that individuals had to work and earn salvation. If we accept Byassee's interpretation, Wright rejects the notion that individual salvation is the central topic at all. Byassee continues:
But Jews of Paul's time were nowhere near so individualistic, so obsessed with the next life, so unfamiliar with grace as were the late medieval Christians. Instead of teaching about souls being saved from hell, say Wright and others, Paul is centrally teaching about God's faithfulness to Israel. He is showing that Yahweh is a God who keeps his promises, and so can be trusted to fulfill his promises in history.
Wright and those who've gathered around the rubric "new perspectives on Paul" offer a proposal about what Paul's main point is. Neither the 'individual' nor 'salvation' capture, Wright and his fellows claim, Paul's central topic.
In the long view of the Heilsgeschichte, Wright believes, according to Byassee, that
the works commanded in the law are good gifts from God. Paul doesn't say not to do them because you'll go wrong and think you're earning salvation. He says not to do them because the Messiah has come and the world is different now. All people can worship Israel's God and should do so together without ethnic division.
Wright seems to argue that Paul's message is not about individual salvation at all, and only secondarily about corporate salvation. Wright's Paul presents a type of salvation by belonging - Jews are saved because they are God's chosen people; Gentiles are saved because they have been adopted into the family of Israel. But salvation, of whichever type, is not the main theme of Wright's Paul.
Some readers have accused Wright of denying the immortality of the soul, because he argues that salvation is not the main message of the New Testament. Other readers see Wright as leaving the immortality of the soul intact, but simply asserting that it's not important.
Wright seems to be pointing us toward our calling as God's people, whether we are genetic Israelites or ingrafted Gentiles. Wright's Paul is telling us what our mission is, not how to be saved. Wright emphasizes the corporate, but, he says, he does not exclude individual considerations. Speaking of those readers who accuse him of collectivism, Wright responds that
it is simply not true, as people have said again and again, that I deny or downplay the place of the individual in favor of a corporate ecclesiology. True, I have reacted against the rampant individualism of western culture, and have tried to insist on a biblically rooted corporate solidarity in the body of Christ as an antidote to it. But this in no way reduces the importance of every person being confronted with the powerful gospel, and the need for each one to be turned around by it from idols to God, from sin to holiness, and from death to life.
If we strive for a sympathetic reading, we can note that it's not an either/or matter; it's not a case of binary opposites. Rather, it's a questions of emphasis. God deals with humans as individuals, and He also deals with them as groups. Both are always in play. The question is the mix or balance. When is God dealing individually? When corporately? Commenting on the third chapter of Paul's letter to the Romans, Wright notes that
Paul makes what most commentators in the reformation tradition regard as a strange shift in verse 29, when he asks ‘Or is God the God of the Jews only?’ (Notice how the NIV, for instance, omits the word ‘Or’.) If he had been talking all along simply about individual sinners being put right with God, we should indeed regard this as a sudden intrusion of ethnic questions. But he hasn’t. As chapter 4 will reveal, when we allow it to play its full role, he has been talking about God’s faithfulness to the covenant with Abraham, and about God’s creation of a single family from both halves of sinful humanity. God’s declaring that sinners are now in a right relation to himself and God’s declaring that believing Jews and believing Gentiles belong in the same family are inextricably bound up with one another.
Another way to understand the controversies surrounding Wright is to ask, what is the definition of the word 'gospel'? Wright's answer does not deny, but de-emphasizes, the notion of salvation:
When Paul refers to ‘the gospel’, he is not referring to a system of salvation, though of course the gospel implies and contains this, nor even to the good news that there now is a way of salvation open to all, but rather to the proclamation that the crucified Jesus of Nazareth has been raised from the dead and thereby demonstrated to be both Israel’s Messiah and the world’s true Lord. ‘The gospel’ is not ‘you can be saved, and here’s how’; the gospel, for Paul, is ‘Jesus Christ is Lord’.
The closer one examines both Wright and what others say about him, the more numerous and complex the questions become. If right sees salvation in a corporate light, what does that do to grace? It's possible to formulate a theology of unmerited favor in a corporate setting as well as in an individual setting. A field of investigation lies in the fact that the English words 'you' and 'your' cover, rather than disclose, the distinction between singular and plural, while the Hebrew and Greek words make explicit this difference.
Imagine if English-speaking Christians had to choose between singular and plural versions of 'you' and 'your' when they uttered formulaic expressions like "for you" and "for your sins."
Paul's words to the Ephesians make some of Wright's assertions plausible and perhaps even persuasive:
For by grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God, not a result of works, so that no one may boast. For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand, that we should walk in them.
Note first that the occurrences of 'you' and 'your' are plural in verse eight of chapter two. Note secondly that conjunction 'for' indicates that we were created and saved in order to do good works. Salvation was merely a preliminary move on God's part: first, He saved us; then, He puts us to work. Wright's books and articles are too numerous, too long, and too complex to be easily sorted out. Generations of scholars will probably examine his work for years to come, and endless numbers of debates will be organized to attempt to finalize what Wright meant.
N.T. Wright has authored texts which are long, complex, and numerous. A detailed analysis of his work would take years, and such analysis would itself be long and complex. We can, however, identify two directions in which such analysis would proceed: first, the definitions of 'salvation' and 'gospel'; second, the interplay between individual and corporate. Such an analysis would ask whether Wright sees more than 'entry into the afterlife' as belonging to the definitions of 'gospel' and 'salvation' and, if so, what that "more" might be. An analysis would also ask to which extent each of the two dimensions - corporate and individual - figure in the definitions of 'salvation' and 'gospel' and conceptual framework which each of those words represents.
Is salvation, for Wright, more than simply getting into heaven? Is the gospel more than simply the information that one is getting into heaven? And does that "more" - whatever it may be - perhaps figure around our corporate identity as much as, or even more than, our individual identity? If being 'saved' means being used by God to work out His plans on earth, could it be that we do that work more corporately than individually? Is eternal life merely the first part of the gospel, in which Jesus tells us that we don't need to worry about getting into heaven and then tells us about how He wants us to live as His people on earth?
The lasting value of Wright's work has yet to be established, but it will depend on this: to which extent does Wright drive his reader back to the actual text of the Old and New Testaments? To which extent does Wright nudge his reader closer to Jesus? These questions will determine the final net worth of Wright's activities.
