Justification: Piper vs. Wright

I recently finished reading N.T. Wright's book entitled Justification. I was mainly curious to see what all the fuss was about since I had heard that John Piper was upset with Wright's presentation of the doctrine of justification. I have to admit, at first I couldn't understand what Piper's beef was with Wright's view of justification, but after awhile it became very clear.

Piper's primary concern seems to be centered around Wright's framing the concept of justification in the jewish understanding, namely the covenant. Piper believes that Wright does a great injustice to the concept of justification by "limiting" it to the law-court, i.e. we have been granted the status of being righteous, not that we have been made righteous, per Augustine. Wright believes that Augustine made a subtle but important (but incorrect) shift in our understanding of justification when Augustine says that "in justification God actually transforms the character of the person, albeit in small, preliminary ways. The lawcourt scene is now replaced with a medical one, a kind of remedial spiritual surgery, involving a "righteousness implant" which, like an artificial heart, begins to enable the patient to do things previously impossible." (Justification 91)

Wright continues: "But part of the point of Paul's own language, rightly stressed by those who have analyzed the verb dikaioõ, "to justify", is that it does not denote an action which transforms someone so much as a declaration which grants them a status." And then a bit further on Wright states, "But what is the effect of simply granting someone a status? If that's all it is, how will they become good Christians? (Justification 91)

The issue then seems to me that Piper believes that justification must impart Christ's righteousness to us or how else are we to get it since we have none ourselves? But Wright argues that the basic idea of "righteous" as Paul uses the term is that we have "the status-of-being-in-the-right", but that does not include "morally good character" or "performance of moral good deeds", but "the status you have when the court has found in your favor." This makes perfect sense to me. We are undeserving of receiving either justification or righteousness from God, but we are declared justified based on what Christ did for us by dying and rising. As a side note, many Christians tend to leave out the resurrection by saying that Jesus died for our sins, which is true, but if we leave it at that then we are the most to be pitied for if He didn't rise from the dead, thereby conquering death, then we are still in our sins. (1 Cor. 15).

Piper, along with D.A. Carson, believe that Wright is leading people astray by this concept of justification being so closely associated with the covenant God set up with Abraham. But this, Wright argues, is exactly why Paul referenced Genesis 15 in Romans 4. Abraham is not simply an "example" of someone who is justified by faith. Romans 4 is not just an "illustration" of the theological point Paul is making in Romans 4. Wright believes that we need to see the whole picture of God making a covenant with Abraham and then Paul's references to that covenant found in Galatians and Romans. I have long held that we will understand more of the New Testament by understanding more of the Old Testament and this is all that Wright is arguing for. The actual process of "becoming righteous" happens after we have been declared justified, not in the act of being declared righteous. Wright lays out in the second half of the book many examples of exegesis from the relevant biblical passages, namely Galatians, Ephesians, Philippians, Corinthians, and Romans. This is an excellent book and I highly recommend it!