Journal: Reformed Baptist Theological Review
Volume: RBTR 01:2 (Jul 2004)
Article: What Saint Paul Really Said: Was Paul of Tarsus the Real Founder of Christianity?
Author: N. T. Wright

RBTR 1:2 (Jul 2004) p. 196

What Saint Paul Really Said:
Was Paul of Tarsus the Real Founder of Christianity?

N.T. Wright

(Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1997),
reviewed by Tom Hicks

N.T. Wright’s book mounts a direct assault against the biblical doctrine of justification. It denies both the imputation of Christ’s righteousness and the saving significance of free justification by grace through faith alone. By doing this, Wright’s volume cuts the ground from underneath the gospel itself. Let there be no mistake – his denial of the cardinal doctrine of the Reformation is not just an “alternative reading” of Paul. It is a perilous error that may have disastrous effects in the church if it is not corrected. The great and only hope of poor sinners is that God declares them to be righteous by pure grace on the sole basis of the righteousness of Christ.

Wright arrives at his wrong conclusions about justification as a result of forcing Paul’s theology into conformity with Judaic covenant theology. He

RBTR 1:2 (Jul 2004) p. 197

basically agrees with E.P. Sanders, who argued that Judaism was not a legalistic religion of works, but a religion of “grace” (18–20). What Sanders meant by this is that God’s people enter the covenant by grace, but they stay in the covenant by their own works of covenant faithfulness (18–20). Sanders says that Paul’s arguments against legalism are incorrect because Paul was wrong about the true nature of Judaism and the Old Testament. But, contrary to Sanders, Wright says that Paul not only understood the Judaism of his day, but also embraced it. According to Wright, Paul does not oppose works-salvation or legalism in any of his letters because there was no such Jewish legalism to oppose. Rather, Paul’s polemic was primarily directed against Jewish nationalism and ethnocentrism. According to Wright, therefore, Luther and the Reformed tradition blundered badly in their interpretation of Paul.

Wright also says that a major aspect of Paul’s message was church unity. However, Wright’s appropriate concern with the unity of the church drives him inappropriately to interpret justification in terms of church unity rather than salvation. He believes that the true doctrine of justification should encourage an ecumenism in which differing theological traditions join together in fellowship under Christ.

The Righteousness of God

Wright explicitly denies the classical Reformed doctrine of the imputation of Christ’s righteousness. He insists that the term “the righteousness of God” never refers to God’s gift of imputed righteousness but always to God’s own covenant faithfulness. That is, when Paul uses the phrase “the righteousness of God,�...