This review is worth interacting with. It would be better to review Gordon’s essay myself, but I don’t yet have a copy.

But the three criticisms Lane lists are each rather interesting.

The first is

“Wright understands the New Testament primarily as a fulfillment of the promises made to Abraham, not as a fulfillment of the redemptive pledge imbedded in the Adamic curse” (pg. 61, emphasis original).

I have to say this is a rather amazing statement coming from Gordon. In 1994 he said something different about Wright. He wrote:

The recurring argument of Wright’s thesis is that Paul follows an Adamic theology, in which God’s “servant” is first Adam, then corporate Israel, then Israel’s Messiah. Where the first two fail, the last succeeds. The first two become servants whose disobedience causes their respective stories to be stories of sin and wrath, each depicting the state of the race as a whole in a single, focused servant. The last Servant is one in whom also sin is focused, indeed, even more so than the previous two, but for the purpose of bearing it obediently and vicariously, and thereby providing redemption: “The theological structure I have proposed shows that Servant-christology and Adam-christology belong well together, and cannot be played off against each other. Both, in the last analysis, are Israel-christologies” (p. 61, emphasis his; cf. also pp. 21, 25, 46).

Gordon was reviewing a series of essays by Wright on Paul. I find it strange that Gordon would take a brief tract and decide simply on the basis of what the author does not say explicitly therein, that this constitutes a denial of “the Redemptive pledge imbedded in the Adamic curse.”

Is there any evidence that Wright has made an about-face on this issue? Here is Wright from 1998:

After the summary statement of Romans 5:1-11, … Paul tells an overarching version of the biblical story from Adam to Christ, in which the whole human race prior to the coming of the Messiah is enslaved to sin as Israel was to Egypt. Shockingly, the arrival of the Torah (the Law) (Romans 5:20) only intensified Israel’s state of Adamic sinfulness. Within that narrative the problem is, How is liberation then effected?

Does one see here any hint that we are expected to chose between the story of Adam and the story of Abraham? Not at all. The delivery of the promises to Abraham is a “liberation” from being “enslaved to sin” which happend “to the whole human race” “from Adam.” Furthermore, “Israel, despite her great vocation, remains ‘in Adam’ (Romans 7:1-6, 13-25). God, however, has dealt with sin and given new life, to those who share the resurrection of Christ through the Spirit (Romans 8:1-11).”

When I found out that Bob Cara had passed off the same criticism of N. T. Wright to a captive audience of RUF ministers, I assumed it was a mistake–that Cara had only hastily read one book (“hastily” since he announced the book denied Pauline authorship to some books in the Pauline canon when it did no such thing). I am completely lacking any such understanding of Gordon’s claims.

And then there is this in 2005 long after What Saint Paul Really Said, was published,

I have argued elsewhere that the book of Genesis demands to be read in this way: the promises to Abraham echo the commands to Adam, and the whole argument of the book, the whole point of the narrative, is that God has called Abraham and his family to undo the sin of Adam, even though Abraham and his family are themselves part of the problem as well as the bearers of the solution.

How does this compare to the claim that, “Wright understands the New Testament primarily as a fulfillment of the promises made to Abraham, not as a fulfillment of the redemptive pledge imbedded in the Adamic curse”?

More later.