Michael at the BHT recently linked to this post, which discusses John Piper’s critique of N.T. Wright’s definition of righteousness. Wright has long held that righteousness is best understood as God’s covenant faithfulness; the covenant being God’s promise to deal with sin finally and set the world right. Piper, on the other hand, calls Wright’s approach reductionistic, and has this to say in response (from his book, The Future of Justification):
“The essence of the righteousness of God is his unwavering faithfulness to uphold the glory of his name. And human righteousness is the same: the unwavering faithfulness to uphold the glory of God. (64)â€
Piper’s statement is typical for his brand of thoroughly reformed theology, which sees God’s glory and sovereignty as the fundamental principal from which all time and history springs. Unfortunately, this kind of thinking often leaves Christ in the role of gatekeeper to God’s glory. In this model, the person and work of Christ is important because He allows us to get in line with God’s glory. God’s glory has become this disembodied thing, an other-worldly standard which must be maintained.
A better reading of scripture, in my mind, is to start with Christ first, then re-imagine ideas like glory and righteousness through Him. Re-read Piper’s statement on righteousness through the fulcrum point of the cross, he ends up a lot closer to Wright. It goes something like this:
- The essence of God’s righteousness is his unwavering faithfulness to uphold the glory of His name.
- He accomplishes this only through the cross and resurrection.
- Throughout the New Testament, the cross and resurrection are explicitly for the life of the world.
- Therefore, God’s righteousness is his unwavering faithfulness to uphold (and resurrect!) the life of the world.
- … and in Wright’s book, that’s pretty much the covenant.
Piper’s approach goes awry when it begins considering God’s glory as an object somehow separate from the communion of the Trinity. We’re headed for trouble any time we try to divorce an attribute of God from the person of Christ.
Well done. A doctrine of God without Christ as its beginning, middle and end is nothing but philosophy. Unfortunately, that is exactly what a lot of Reformed theology is.
A quibble: in your second bullet point, you emphasize ‘only’. This exclusivness may be right, but it isn’t obvious. If you said something like ‘climactically’, then I don’t think it’s nearly as controversial (although it may shift the significance of what you wanted to say).
Have you ever read any of Piper’s writings on Trinity? A really good one is in “The Pleasures of God.” It seems in your post that you think Piper minimizes the person & work of Jesus Christ, which I believe is VERY misleading for readers of yours who may not be very familiar with Piper.
I didn’t read either of the original articles, so I can’t say much about Wright and Piper’s viewpoints on the subject of righteousness. :)
Kristy
Mr. Hunter,
“Without Christ as its beginning, middle, and end … ”
“As” makes your point reductionistic. We’re trinitarian. “Christ Alone” is NOT our doctrine of God. The fourth gospel’s prologue has Christ exegeting not himself but the Father. Our doctrine of God has to be interreferential (is that a word?) and inter-exegetical (that’s hyphenated, so it doesn’ thave to be a word) in order to be trinitarian and not Christomonic (is that a word?)
And you also used that hideous “nothing but” in the same sentence. Again, reductionistically obnoxious. And in context, it doesn’t actually say much since you don’t use it substantially, but only in an ad homenim.
That said, I think that what you all are fighting for here is really important, if often less than adequately articulated. No one has seen the Father. We’ve only seen Christ. No one knows the Father but the Son, and the Son has made him known. So we know the Son primarily as a Father-knower and Father-exegete. And of course the Son is the one who has both seen and shared the glory of God. So I agree that whatever we want to think of as the glory of God (a very difficult concept, of course), we must look to the one who was sent, to glorify him and to glorify those he makes partakers of this glory-sharing relationship that our triune God had before the world was made.
Also, we have to keep in mind that though Christ’s first advent was as suffering servant, the bible also teaches his return in glory. There was glory in his first advent, but we can’t reduce our concept of glory to act one, especially when the same sources that narrate act one to us make it absolutely clear that act two is on the horizon, and has already dawned in the resurrection.
Anyway, just some thoughts. I think this is a pretty important discussion, and we have to keep working at not talking past one another, and not reducing each others’ intentions to the worst of each of our traditions.
Oh, and the point of all my reflections above on John’s gospel and its trinitarianism is this–which I should have made explicit: Jesus is a whole lot like the Father! When we see love and grace and compassion and longsuffering and covenant faithfulness in Jesus, it’s because he’s doing the Father’s bidding. This is, I think, where those of us in this little thread agree. What we get when we look to Christ to find out what the Father’s like is a Father who has all the stuff that we like about Christ. And the Spirit, of course, is on board with all this, too. So we don’t have to be Christomonic, but allow Christ to both exegete and BE a gesture coming straight from the bosom of the Father.
I agree. And that’s part of what I was getting at–Wright and Piper have quite a lot in common, but their emphases are different. As Kristy points out above, Piper is heavily Christ-centered in many of his other works; he’s in no way trying to leave Jesus in the margins.
My question is this, however: Which definition of righteousness (and more broadly, which framework for understanding redemption) are you going to carry around and live inside every day? The answer cannot be purely doctrinal; it must also be pastoral. And in that, Wright wins this one hands down. As you say, Jesus is a whole lot like the Father, and the Father a whole lot like Jesus. Wright’s approach gives a fuller picture of this relationship than Piper’s.
I guess I’m not sure what you mean. That’s probably just because I’m not following the discussion that closely.