N.T. Wrong Part II

I think some clarification of yesterday's post is in order.

A covenantal view of God's people entails continuity between the nation of Israel and the Church, which is Christ's body. I embrace that view wholeheartedly, both as a student of Scripture and a Reformed Presbyterian. Dispensationalism is nonsense; there is no dividing line between Old and New Testament believers, we are all saved by the blood of Christ and faith in God's promises. In that sense, there isn't much discernible difference between Jewish and Christian doctrine, as far as both are presented in Scripture.

As far as both are presented in Scripture being the critical clause. The doctrine of first century Jews was not demonstrably orthodox; while proponents of the New Perspective often argue otherwise, they also interpret "orthodox" differently than most Reformed Christians. More importantly, they flip the order for determining what's orthodox and what isn't. In other words, the views of first century Jewish theologians are used as the rubric for reading Paul's theology, and what Paul is saying is determined from the context of his Jewish contemporaries.

The traditional approach is to use Scripture as the guide for orthodox doctrine. Inasmuch as N.T. Wright has abandoned that approach, he's in error. I'm not saying the attitudes and ideas of first century Jews can't shed some light on our interpretation of Scripture, but I am saying that Paul's project was to develop Christian doctrine from the Old Testament scriptures, not the Jewish systems he would have been familiar with.

As for Wright's article, I think he makes a fatal mistake I didn't mention in the previous post. He assumes that because certain ideas didn't exist in complete form previous to Paul's writing, that Paul would or could not have developed them himself. He says (as if this proved anything) that Jewish thinkers had no real concept of the individual immortal soul, and extrapolates from that to say Paul would have had no similar idea, either.

Does Wright reject the doctrine of the Trinity, too? That word didn't show up till around AD 120, but it's now accepted as central to our doctrine of God Himself, and indeed to our whole system of orthodox Christian theology. What kind of argument is that? It seems beneath as able a thinker as Bishop Tom has showed himself to be elsewhere. Maybe he was tired when he wrote his article. Maybe (as he hints at one point) the whole thing is just a thought experiment.

Whatever else it may be, the essay is wrong. Not only from a doctrinal perspective, but from a logical and philosophical standpoint. A friend recently warned me not to harbor pet doctrines; maybe Wright's particular understanding of bodily resurrection has become his pet doctrine, and he uses it to interpret every other doctrine, idea and passage of the Bible. At any rate, the solution to noumenal/spiritual disjunctions and modern Gnosticism isn't to swing into the overly-physical reverse Gnosticism that most people mistake for agnosticism. And the solution to Dispensational anti-theology isn't to embrace everything grouped beneath the heading "Jewish" without reference to biblical and doctrinal precedent.