logos redux

“Scripture is the school of the Holy Spirit, in which, as nothing is omitted that is both necessary and useful to know, so nothing is taught but what is expedient to know…Let us, I say, permit the Christian man to open his mind and ears to every utterance of God directed to him, provided it be with such restraint that when the Lord closes his holy lips, he also shall at once close the way to inquiry. The best limit of sobriety for us will be not only to follow God’s lead always in learning but, when he sets an end to teaching, to stop trying to be wise.”

John Calvin, Institutes 3.21.3

Wright’s response to Piper and elucidation of his understanding of Paul’s writings on Justification is available here on sale.

… this presentation of Paul is only a little better than the one rejected. There remains something very odd in Paul’s attitude to his ancestral faith. The Lutheran Paul has been replaced by an idiosyncratic Paul who in arbitrary and irrational manner turns his face against the glory and greatness of Judaism’s covenant theology and abandons Judaism simply because it is not Christianity.

Speaking of the shift toward understanding Paul’s writings within an implicit narrative framework Wright says:

It is not simply that Paul alludes to a number of well-known narratives. Some critics of narrative readings of Paul have reacted as though this is just embroidery around the central theological points, which are taken to be non-narratival. I want to insist that Paul’s whole point is precisely that with the coming, the death and the resurrection of Jesus the Messiah a new chapter has opened within the story in which he had believed himself to be living, and that understanding what that story is and how this chapter is indeed a radically new moment within it provides one of the central clues to everything else he says, not least the questions of justification and the law upon which the ‘perspective’-battles have been so often fought out. Refusing to admit narrative into this debate is therefore like refusing to put petrol in a car because you know that what you need to drive is tyres and a steering wheel.

A few pages later he says:

… so Paul invokes the great stories of God, Israel and the world because his view of salvation itself, and with it justification and all the rest, is not an ahistorical scheme about how individuals come into a right relationship with God, but rather tells how the God of Abraham has fulfilled his promises at last through the apocalyptic death and resurrection of his own beloved Son.

My favorite:

One sometimes meets, among biblical scholars, an innate suspicion of systematic theology which derives more, I fear, from memory of the little systems of the Sunday school than from direct acquaintance with the rich and subtle world of actual contemporary systematics. One sometimes meets the opposite, too: a suspicion of situationalism generated more by a fear of moral chaos than by a working knowledge of actual historical exegesis.