Comments on: A book review of the Wright book on justification

By: pduggie

pduggie — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 18:19:18 +0000

Yeah, there is a lot of suspicion in the review I didn’t like.

“Is Wright creating a space” for some nefarious evil doctrine to be put in later? (maybe by SOMEONE ELSE) makes Wright out as a Machiavellian calculator.

By: Andrew

Andrew — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 17:17:40 +0000

I guess my response to that would be it’s holding Wright to an unrealistic standard of “technical term”. It’s “technical” in the sense that it assumes a high degree of background knowledge (though I think the plain sense of the term, that of “doing the right thing” is obvious enough, and logically requires both God’s covenant faithfulness (if he makes a promise, the right thing to do is to keep it) and his just judgment (if he makes a law he must enforce it)), but not that it only ever has that one technical meaning. A technical term, too, can have shades of meaning.

Ultimately, it seems like Wright’s critics have to take his statements in the most uncharitable (and absurd, given even Wright’s Romans commentary, let alone his entire corpus) way possible to be able to criticize him in that manner.

By: pduggie

pduggie — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 16:46:10 +0000

@andrew: The argument would seem to be that claiming “technical term” status for something in Paul should lead us to expect it’s technical use to be consistent throughout the work.

If I was talking “infusion” in the technical theological sense, but then digressed to use it in the sense of a tea bag, that would be odd.

I guess the upshot is that Wright would need a rationale for why the term might not always be technical when it isn’t being used in a clearly technical way. If its a bad rationale, that would be special pleading.

I think Wright does a good job of something like this with “doing the law” which Paul uses in the “technical sense” of keeping the law that none can do, but then switches gears and fills with new meaning = “having faith” (though not in a contractual way, but in a way that, since it gets you the same end as the Law promised but could never fulfill. Nowadays you can’t say that, because everyones afraid of ‘confusion’ over what RCs say.

By: Mark Horne » Blog Archive » You are misunderstood by people who hate and despise you; so there must be something wrong with you

Tue, 17 Nov 2009 16:08:58 +0000

[...] Another comment: A third disappointment is Wright’s lack of clarity. He says that he has been misunderstood, but is the list of readers who are misunderstanding him, in addition to Piper, really this impressive: Don Carson, Stephen Westerholm, Doug Moo, Mark Seifrid, and Simon Gathercole? (And should we assume that the list now includes Doug Wilson, Gerald Bray, Paul Helm, Dan Wallace, and Michael Horton, who all have registered weighty concerns with this new title?) Perhaps it is Wright who is creating the fog and not producing clarity. [...]

By: Ron Dodson

Ron Dodson — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 14:18:42 +0000

Good stuff, Mark. Thanks.

By: Andrew

Andrew — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 06:04:12 +0000

“Wright cannot maintain “righteous” as “covenantally faithful” throughout his exegetical chapters, as his treatment of a key text like Romans 3:25–26 demonstrates (p. 206).”

I don’t get it. Do words have to mean the same thing in every context?