For we hold that one is justified by faith apart from works of the law. Or is God the God of Jews only? Is he not the God of Gentiles also? Yes, of Gentiles also, since God is one. He will justify the circumcised by faith and the uncircumcised through faith (Romans 3.28-30; emphasis added).

We ourselves are Jews by birth and not Gentile sinners; yet we know that a person is not justified by works of the law but through faith in Jesus Christ, so we also have believed in Christ Jesus, in order to be justified by faith in Christ and not by works of the law, because by works of the law no one will be justified (Galatians 2.15, 16: emphasis added).

I recently quoted Dr. Richard Gaffin from these lectures. I can’t help but add now an excerpt from N. T. Wright’s opening lecture which included an exposition of the implications of those monosyllabic words I emphasized in the texts above.

I’ve thus discovered that my reformational call to be a faithful reader and interpreter of Scripture impels me to take seriously the fact, to which many writers in the last hundred years have called attention, that whenever Paul is talking about justification by faith he is also talking about the coming together of Jews and Gentiles into the single people of God. I didn’t make this up. It’s there in the God-given texts. I do not draw from this observation the conclusion that some have done—I think of Rader and Schweizer, namely, that justification is therefore a mere secondary polemical doctrine but not at the very center of Paul’s thought—on the contrary—since the creation through the preaching of the gospel of this single multiethnic family promised to Abraham,

• the family who were justified,
• declared to be in the right,
• declared to be God’s people on the basis of faith alone,
• the family whose sins had been forgiven through the death of the Messiah in their place and on their behalf,
• the family who constitute the first-fruits of the new creation that began with Jesus’ bodily resurrection

—since the creation of this family was the aim and goal of all Paul’s work, and since this work was by its very nature polemical over against the pagan world that resisted it from top to bottom, and against the Jewish world which resisted it for quite other reasons but equally fiercely—since all of that, it was natural and inevitable that Paul’s apostolic work would itself involve polemical exposition of the results of the gospel and that justification by faith as a key polemical doctrine would find itself at the center when he did so.

That which God has joined, joined not least through the single little syllables which serve as the tiny rudders for the large ship of His Holy Word, let us not put asunder. And since these little words join together whole arguments, let us pay attention to the actual arguments Paul mounts, not to three or four verses snatched here and there out of their real-life God-given context. This is my first appeal to you, an appeal which is for the Reformation principle of Sola Scriptura to have its way over against all our human traditions.

If you haven’t bought these lectures, I highly recommend them.