Continuing my thoughts on this review…

The second major criticism Gordon makes against Wright, according to Lane, is

“Wright’s Christus Victor language of defeat of enemies does not mention God’s wrath as a serious threat that has been deflected by the death and resurrection of Christ” (pg. 62).

I’m really not sure, at this point. What book Dr. Gordon has been reading. I will concede that page 62 may not mention God’s wrath, but what about page 48 where Wright declares that “death of Jesus” was “the moment when God executed judicial sentence on sin itself (Romans 3.24-26; 8.3)…”

To repeat: Wright says that the death of Jesus was “the moment when God executed judicial sentence on sin itself.” There is no way to get around it. Here, N. T. Wright says, by any known use of the English language, that God punished sin in the cross of Christ. Indeed, Wright uses forensic terms. God passed a “judicial” sentence. He punished sin in Christ’s death. Furthermore, the texts that explain that God did this include Romans 3.24-26.

Later Wright revisits Romans saying,

All humankind is thus in the dock in God’s metaphorical law court. In terms of the law-court diagram [i.e. the triangle of Judge, Plaintiff/Prosecutor, and Defendant], it is no longer the case of Israel coming before God as the plaintiff, bringing a charge against the pagans. Gentile and Jew alike are now guilty defendants” (p.106).

So Jew and Gentile alike are under condemnation and that condemnation is dealt with by passing judicial sentence on sin in the death of Jesus. It is especially interesting that this statement about Jew and Gentile comes from Wright’s brief overview of the content of Romans 3.21-26. there he also writes that “the death and resurrection of Jesus” is “the point at which, and the means by which, God’s covenant purpose for Israel, that is, his intention to deal once and for all with the sin of the world, would finally be accomplished.” He also writes:

…the gospel of Jesus reveals God’s righteousness, in that God is himself righteous, and, as part of that, God is the one who declares the believer to be righteous. Once again we must insist that there is of course a “righteous” standing, a status, which human beings have as a result of God’s gracious verdict in Christ… He has been true to the covenant, which always aimed to deal with the sin of the world; he has dealt with sin on the cross; he has done so impartially, making a way of salvation for Jew and Gentile alike; and he now, as the righteous judge, helps and saves the helpless who cast themselves on his mercy (p. 107).

Since I don’t have the essay, I can’t know why Gordon feels he is in the right to simply criticize a motif as not doing justice to the serious threat of God’s wrath. I would also like to know if Gordon has listened to Wright attack the NIV for not using the word propitiation in translating Romans 3.25. In his commentary on Romans he insists on this due to the fact that the context demands a solution to the problem of God’s wrath which has been described from Romans 1.18ff.

The fact is that Wright has consistently talked about God’s wrath and the role of the cross in satisfying it. From 1985 (PDF):

Hence, the irony; claiming to represent Israel, he is cast out by those who themselves claim to represent Israel; in urging Israel to forswear rebellion, he is himself executed as a rebel by the Romans. The death he dies is Israel’s death, and the pattern of healings and welcomes which make up so much of the gospel narratives indicates the motive: he dies Israel’s death in order that Israel may not die it. He takes the wrath of Rome (which is, like the wrath of Assyria or Babylon, the historical embodiment of the wrath of God) upon himself so that, in his vindication, Israel may find herself brought through the judgment and into the true Kingdom, may see at last the way to life and follow it while there is yet time.

Or consider this from his entry on Paul in the New Dictionary of Theology (David F. Wright, Sinclair B. Ferguson, J.I. Packer (eds), 496-499. IVP):

These ultimate enemies had been overcome in the cross and resurrection. As the innocent representative of Israel, and hence of the human race, the Messiah had allowed sin and death to do their worst to him, and had emerged victorious. Sin’s power had exhausted itself by bringing to his death the one human being who, himself without sin, could properly be vindicated by God after death (2 Cor. 5:21). The cross thus stands at the heart of Paul’s theology, as the basis of his mission (2 Cor. 5:14-21), and of his redefinition of the people of God. The fact of universal sin (Rom. 1:18-3:20) demonstrates the necessity for a saving act of pure grace (3:21-26): the divine wrath (1:18 – 2:16) is turned aside, as at the exodus, by the blood of sacrifice (3:24-6).

And then this from 2005 on Ephesians 2.11:

indeed Ephesians, which I take to be by Paul in the teeth of the scholarly fashion of the last hundred years, provides as a whole an excellent study in how to take seriously not only the bits of Paul which sustain our particular traditions but the bits which challenge us to go deeper. In this instance, the word connects together the two halves of the chapter, 2.1–10 and 2.11–21. The first half provides a classic statement of the fact that all humankind, Jew as well as Gentile, is enslaved to sin in body and mind, and of the fact that it is by God’s mercy and love that we are forgiven our sins and saved from wrath. ‘By grace you have been saved, through faith; and this is not of your own doing, it is the gift of God; not because of works, lest anyone should boast’. A central statement of a great Pauline theme to stand beside anything from Romans and Galatians.

So, in all of this, why has Gordon changed from his positively glowing review of The Climax of the Covenant in the 1994 Westminster Theological Journal? There, in singing Wright’s praises, Gordon saw the victory over the powers and the truth of God dealing with sin punitively as all consistent and consistently proclaimed by Wright:

as a covenant-administration with its curse-sanctions, it [the Mosaic covenant] served to concentrate and focus sin on a single people, and finally upon that people’s Messiah. In the Messiah’s triumph over sin, redemption appears, but the concentration of sin upon Messiah was a critical first stage, and that stage began in the concentration of sin upon the earlier servant of God, corporate Israel: “God has deliberately given the Torah to be the means of concentrating the sin of human kind in one place, namely, in his people, Israel—in order that it might then be concentrated yet further, drawn together on to Israel’s representative, the Messiah—in order that it might there be dealt with once and for all” (p. 196, cf. also pp. 39, 167, 181, 182, n. 28).

This is exactly the theology of What Saint Paul Really Said, so why is it now a source of criticism rather than praise?

More later.