Today’s interview with N.T. Wright (Bishop of Durham) concerns his new book: Justification: God’s Plan and Paul’s Vision.
Justification represents Wright’s response to John Piper’s The Future of Justification (see my commentary here) and is scheduled for release in the UK in February by SPCK and in the U.S. in May by IVP.
My previous two interviews with Bishop Wright can be accessed here and here.
Trevin Wax: How does this robust discussion on justification between you and John Piper help the church to better fulfill its purpose in the world?
N.T. Wright: How does the robust discussion between me and Piper help the church better to fulfil its purpose in the world? Well, I hope it will, and that’s part of the main point of what I’m saying.
My anxiety about what has now been seen as the traditional Reformed view (though there are many traditional Reformed views!) is that it focuses all attention on ‘me and my salvation’ rather than on ‘God and God’s purposes’, which – as we see in the Gospels, and in e.g. Romans 8 – are much wider than just my salvation. This book, for me, thus follows from Surprised by Hope and the other things I’ve been writing in the same vein.
More generally, I hope that the book will alert people to the fact that the underlying discussion is really about taking Scripture seriously – (a) the whole Scripture, not just selected parts, and (b) Scripture as the final arbiter, over against all human traditions including our own! That cannot but help the church in its purpose in the world . . .
via Interview with N.T. Wright – Responding to Piper on Justification « Kingdom People.
Should be an interesting read. The quote from NTW rings a bit odd though. One of the things that I found most attractive about Reformed theology was precisely that it was not just about “me and my salvation” but rather “God and God’s purposes.” So one wonders if NTW might be setting up something of a straw man here or perhaps he is attacking a species of Reformed theology that may be ripe for criticism.