Featured Wright is Wrong on Justification

But if you, he, or anyone else comes up with a supposed "biblical definition" that's exactly what is being done.

Koine Greek = Common Greek
Not Christian Greek, not biblical Greek, not religious Greek, etc.

It's the same exact language spoken store clerks, blacksmiths, spiritists, harlots, etc. And if you were to ask a Greek-speaking harlot what does justified mean, she would not have any definition relating to being acquitted by God or receiving credited righteousness from Him.

What did Paul write that leads you to believe he had a "very well defined doctrine of justification" ??

If I've read Wright correctly, he wrongly assumes the same thing. Only thing is he correctly sees your "definition" as wrong, but is/was also trying to conjur up some definition which can then be pressed onto every use of the word.

That's flat wrong, and virtually everybody involved is doing it.

I get what you're saying, and in large part agree. But I'm not sure you're considering all the varying elements.

If I can make a somewhat rudimentary comparison, Wright "seems" to espouse a view of justification somewhat akin to Seventh Day Adventists and their warped Investigative Judgment.

He seems to be taking all the varying aspects of grace - from conversion, through sanctification, into resurrection and all the way past the Bema Seat - and call the whole thing justification.

It also seems I saw where Wright had made mention of Abraham being justified AFTER his faithfulness in James 2:21-24

That's a very valid point. It's biblical. Only problem is he has justified in a completely different manner and context

Wright seems to be trying to make James' use square with Paul's use. Then if he can create a single definition of justification which can then be equally pressed upon James and Paul....

To be fair, Protestants have either done the same thing differently, as in the heinous idea of root/fruit concept (by faith alone, but faith is not alone) - or take Luther's approach and call James an epistle of straw.

 

I was baptized in water a few weeks after I was baptized in the Holy Spirit and became a new man in Christ. I had not been previously baptized. However, neither my experience nor the experience of most Baptists changes what Peter is recorded in the Book of Acts as having said (Acts 2:38) or what he wrote in his epistle (1 Pet. 3:20-21). Moreover, neither my experience nor the experience of most Baptists changes the history of the interpretation of Acts 2:38 and 1 Pet. 3:20-21 throughout the history of the Church.

In the community where I live, the word “Baptist” now conveys the concepts of arrogance, disrespect for others, and intolerance of opposing theologies. Indeed, the problem has become so intense that a number of our Baptist churches have found it necessary to delete the word “Baptist” from their church’s name! Is not this same problem also found throughout the United States, and to a growing extent throughout the world?

Should we Baptists base our theology upon our personal experiences and criticize W.T. Wright for basing his theology upon the Scriptures and the syntax employed in them. Should we Baptists not respect the interpretation of the Greek New Testament by the Greek Church Fathers who were born, raised, and educated in virtually the same Hellenistic world in which the New Testament was written, and especially so in the cases in when the Latin Church Fathers interpreted them in the same manner?

Should we Baptists not rejoice in the fact that God is more than able work in human lives as He did in both Acts 2 and Acts 10 without the confines that so many people like to place upon Him? Should we Baptists not refrain from judging our brothers in Christ by accusing them of teaching another gospel or a damnable heresy?

 

Certainly, there is much to rejoice about in both the Scriptures and how God has worked throughout history.

However, do not assume that the standards of "the church" for centuries is immaculate, or that it should not be questioned. Too often, believers merely accept what teaching they can gather from those who had the most ungodly agendas relating to power of politics and person. Too often, truth was nothing more than the mingling of traditions with agenda driven means of self preservation and glorification.

If is in the interest of every believer to sift all items through the truth of Scriptures, and especially any item dealing with the "sacraments" and the connections some want to make to salvation, as if the last supper has anything to do with one being saved.

If the OP is factual, then it is important that the false teaching be published and corrections be made so that believers who care will be warned.

 

What??? Paul is NOT condemning anything in Romans 4. Throughout the entire chapter Paul is explaining, through the example of Abraham, that a man is justified through faith rather than works of the Law. W.T. Wright does not disagree with this biblical truth.

Paul taught the gospel that men are justified by faith apart from works prescribed by the Law (Rom. 3:28); and that the teaching that men are justified by works prescribed by the Law is another gospel. The occasion of this teaching was the teaching by the Judiazers that a man must be circumcised in order to be saved (Gal. 2:3-5).

 

This post is a filthy, a shameful, malicious, and radically false castigation of the very men whom God chose to use to formalize the doctrine of the Trinity and to establish the New Testament Cannon!


Are we to assume that the Greek Church Fathers who were born, raised, and educated in virtually the same Hellenistic world in which the New Testament was written were so pitifully ignorant and incompetent that they were unable to understand what the Bible teaches concerning the relationship between water baptism and salvation? If so, perhaps the doctrine of the Trinity is some more of the fruit of that pitiful ignorance and incompetence.

Indeed, if what the Bible teaches concerning the relationship between water baptism and salvation is so difficult to understand that no one was able to understand it until some Christians came along in the 17th century and explained it to us, the Bible was written by some men with pitifully poor writing skills! So much for the doctrine of inspiration!

 

this is the same bunch of "scholars" who came up with Traducianism, Theotokos, Preexistence, and some other gems too...right?

 

On pages 518-519 of Volume X in the Cyclopedia of Biblical, Theological, and Ecclesiastical Literature edited John McClintock and James Strong* we read,

Traducianism is the belief that the souls of children, as well as their bodies, are propagated from their parents, and is opposed to Creationism (q.v.) and the doctrine of the Pre-existents (q.v.). According to Jerome, both Tertullian and Apollinaris were advocates of this opinion, and the opponents of Pelagianism, in general, have been inclined to it. Since the Reformation, it has been more approved than any other in the LutheranChurch, and that not by philosophers and naturalists merely, but also by divines. Luther himself, though he did not declare distinctly in its favor. was also inclined towards this theory; and in the Formula Concordiae it is distinctly taught that both soul and body are propagated by the parents in ordinary generation. What has rendered the hypothesis more acceptable to theologians is its affording the easiest solution of the doctrine of native depravity; and it seems to receive confirmation from the psychological facts that the natural disposition of children not infrequently resembles that of their, parents, and that the mental excellences and imperfections of parents are inherited nearly as often by their children as any bodily attributes. But, after all that can be said, we must be content to remain in uncertainty respecting the subject. As thou knowest not what is the way of the Spirit, nor how the bones do grow in the womb of her that is with child, even so thou knowest not the works of God who maketh all” (Ecc_11:5). See Buck, Theol. Dict. s.v.; Delitzsch, Bibl. Psychology, p. 128-131; New-Englander, July, 1868, p. 475. SEE SOUL, ORIGIN OF.​

*McClintock died very early in the preparation of the fourth volume, and Strong [the compiler of Strong’s Exhaustive Concordance] finished editing the rest of the work.


For additional information, including the biblical foundation of the doctrine, please see here:

http://www.theopedia.com/traducianism

 

That's what I was getting at. And there is no biblical foundation for the doctrine, it was contrived in the futile mind of a "father" because he couldn't make heads or tails of Romans 5:12 after the church went silent on the distinction between spirit and body. No thanks. I'll weigh doctrines against scripture, not "fathers".

 

I assume, based upon the context, that you meant “Pre-existents.”

On pages 503-504 of Volume VIII in the Cyclopedia of Biblical, Theological, and Ecclesiastical Literature edited John McClintock and James Strong we read,

Pre-existents (or Preexistiani) is the name given to those who hold the hypothesis of the preexistence of souls, or the doctrine that, at the beginning of creation, not that of this world simply, but of all worlds, God created the souls of all men, which, however, are not united to the body till the individuals for whom they are destined are begotten or born into the world. According to this theory, says Schedd, “Men were angelic spirits at first. Because of their apostasy in the angelic sphere, they were transferred, as a punishment for their sin, into material bodies in this mundane sphere, and are low passing through a disciplinary process, in order to be restored, all of them, without exception, to their pre-existent and angelic condition. These bodies to which they are joined come into existence by the ordinary course of physical propagation; so that the sensuous and material part of human nature has no existence previous to Adam. It is only the rational and spiritual principle of which a preadamic life is asserted.”

The doctrine of pre-existence first found its advocates In the Christian Church in the 2nd century. The fathers Justin Martyr, Origen, and others espoused it, particularly Origen, who became its principal exponent and advocate. It was a belief very prevalent anciently, and is still widely spread throughout the East. The Greek philosophers, too, especially those who held the doctrine of transmigration (q.v.), as the Pythagoreans, Empedocles, and even Plato-if with him pre-existence is not simply a symbolical myth-were familiar with the conception; and so were the Jews, especially the cabalists. It is generally received by the modern Jews, and is frequently taught in the writings of the rabbins. One declares that “the soul of mall had an existence anterior to the formation of the heavens, they being nothing but fire and water.” The same author asserts that “the human soul is a particle of the Deity from above, and is eternal like the heavenly natures.” A similar doctrine is believed by the Persian Sofis (q.v.). With the pre-existents should also be classed the metempsychosis, for pre-existence is connected with the idea of metempsychosis (q.v.), according to which doctrine the soul was, in a former life, in punishment for sin, united with a human body, in order to expiate, by the miseries of earthly existence, anterior transgressions. Therefore St. Augustine, invoking Cicero's authority, says (Contrat Julianu. 4, 15): “Ex quibus humanae vitae erroribus et aerumnis fit, ut interdlum veteres illi sive vates sive in sacris initiisque tradendis divinae mentis interpretes, qui nos ob aliqua scelera suscepta in vita superiori paenarum luendarum causa esse natos dixerunt, aliquid vidisse videantur.” Nemesius, as a philosopher, and Prudentius, as a poet, seem to have been the only defenders of the pre-existence theory, which was condemned formally in the Council of Constantinople, in A.D. 540. But the doctrine has been embraced by mystics (q.v.) generally, both in ancient and modern times; and has since been revived, in a modified form, in German theology, by Julius Muller, and forms the basis of his work on The Christian Doctrine of Sin, one of the deepest works in modern theology. In American theology it has its able advocate in Dr. Edward Beecher (The Conflict of Ages), but the Christian Church generally has thus far failed to give its assent to it. In the domain of philosophy, direct intellectual interest in this doctrine has nearly ceased in modern times; yet the dream-for, whether true or false, it is and can be nothing but a dream in our present state, and with our present capabilities of knowledge-has again and again haunted individual thinkers. Wordsworth has given poetical expression to it in his famous ode, Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood:

“Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting.
The soul that rises with us— our life’s star,
Hath had elsewhere its setting,
And cometh from afar.
Not in entire forgetfulness,
And not in utter nakedness,
But trailing clouds of glory do we come
From God, who is our home.”

The latest philosophy of Germany-that of Hegel and of the younger Fichte (Psychologie [1864])-has moderately revived the doctrine, and, with the alliance of such theologians as Muller, may crowd it into prominent consideration upon the Church. It remains for us to say here that the name Preexistianti was given to the advocates of this belief to distinguish them from the Creaticaii, those who hold to the immediate creation of the human soul at the moment of the production of the body; and to distinguish them from the Traducianists, who held that children received soul as well as body from their parents. See Cudworth, Intellectual Development of the Universe; Delitzsch, Biblical Psychol. p. 41-43; Lawson, Church of Christ; Goodwin, Works; Register, Studien un. Kritiken, 1829-37, s.v. Seele; Westminster Rev. April, 1865; Bibliotheca Sancta, Jan. 1855, p. 156; Methodist Rev. Oct. 1853, p. 567. (J. H. V.)​

 

These statements are not true.

 

Theotokos is an ecclesiastical term adopted at the councils of Ephesus and Chalcedon to assert the doctrine of the divinity of the person of Christ. Although Jesus is God, in His incarnation He inherited very human genes from His mother. In this sense, His mother became the mother of God—not of the fullness of the Godhead, but of Christ our Lord who is God in human form. In my opinion, calling Mary “the mother of God” is inappropriate—but that is probably because I am a Baptist rather than a Roman Catholic or a member of the Eastern Orthodox Church.


However, as unbiblical as some beliefs of other Christians appear to be to us Baptists, our belief that water Baptism is “an act of obedience symbolizing the believer's faith in a crucified, buried, and risen Saviour, the believer's death to sin, the burial of the old life, and the resurrection to walk in newness of life in Christ Jesus” (The Baptist Faith and Message) appears to other Christians to be ridiculous nonsense that not only has absolutely no biblical support, but explicitly contradicts the Biblical doctrine of salvation!


My point in this thread is that for any Baptist to judge W.T. Wright as a false teacher is an evil and disgraceful act that brings shame, not only to all of us Baptists, but to every Christian everywhere—not to mention bringing shame to the head of the Church, Christ Jesus our Lord!

 

A bit reactionary?

Either you don't know your church history very well or you assume that there was some exultation of understanding and wisdom no longer possessed. Perhaps your not understanding that starting early in the fourth century the "church" began a steady systematic decline into apostasy. Various God given teachers of influence recognized the heretical errors and pushed back against the errors and most summarily martyred. The early martyrs after the apostles, men such as Justin Martyr and Polycarp and up to would have very little in agreement with the modern RCC or the Greek Orthodox for these men and those that followed in the great persecutions by the church's attachment to political systems were men who stood upon the teachings of the Apostles, not upon the heratics of men who took pleasure in political power and authority. The time of shifting started (imo) during the Arian heresy and the followers of that thinking. As a result that first inner church conflict resulted in political alliances which continues to this day in nearly EVERY denominational grouping.

Here is a direct quote of when and how the "established church" accepted heretical teaching.

The author of the Arian heresy was Arius, a native of Lybia, and a priest of Alexandria, who, in A.D. 318, began to publish his errors. He was condemned by a council of Lybian and Egyptian bishops, and that sentence was confirmed by the Council of Nice, A.D. 325. After the death of Constantine the Great, the Arians found means to ingratiate themselves into the favor of the emperor Constantinus, his son and successor in the east; and hence a persecution was raised against the orthodox bishops and clergy. The celebrated Athanasius, and other bishops, were banished, and their sees filled with Arians.
In Egypt and Lybia, thirty bishops were martyred, and many other Christians cruelly tormented; and, A.D. 386, George, the Arian bishop of Alexandria, under the authority of the emperor, began a persecution in that city and its environs, and carried it on with the most infernal severity. He was assisted in his diabolical malice by Catophonius, governor of Egypt; Sebastian, general of the Egyptian forces; Faustinus, the treasurer; and Heraclius, a Roman officer.
The persecutions now raged in such a manner that the clergy were driven from Alexandria, their churches were shut, and the severities practiced by the Arian heretics were as great as those that had been practiced by the pagan idolaters. If a man, accused of being a Christian, made his escape, then his whole family were massacred, and his effects confiscated.
(taken from Foxes Book of Martyrs, "Persecutions Under the Arian Heretics")​

Again, reactionary?

It seems that you place great stock in the thinking that the "Hellenistic world" had some great influence over the Apostles and their early disciples. It was not. The earliest church fathers were Jews, raised in the traditions and teachings of the OT Jews. This is part of the battle in which Paul remarks about when some of the Jews wanted to cling to the rituals and work of the OT temple culture law and insert them into salvation.

This is exactly the problem being addressed in the OP. That place which "sacraments" have in the salvation.

The "Arian heresy" was not started in Greece, but in Lybia, and extended throughout the "empire" as Fox documents. Far earlier church fathers flatly rejected "Hellenistic" teaching which brought them into conflict with the Roman leaderships and the people. So there was no great "Hellenistic world influence over the Apostles and their early disciples." That sort of view is misguided because of the early churches stand against such an influence, documented both by Paul's writing to the Corinthians, and by the accounts given of the character and living of the disciples of the apostles.

Who has bewitched you into that thinking?

Do you not know that there is a stream of truth that was taught, and folks were willing to die for from the time of Christ until now?

That same truth of salvation is not by some human effort and works but by the gift of God's grace performing a work in the heathen humankind that would cause such a person of God's choosing to believe. Such a work that could not be purchased by indulgences, or given by sacraments, or accepted by the will of man imposing some authority over others by the vain power of some politically interbreed authorized church.

It isn't some big massive rock that causes one to trip, it is that little stone, that small rock that offsets the balance and so one topples over.

Salvation given by the unmerited favor of God to those in whom He chooses. That same salvation which was presented by the apostles, the disciples of the apostles and those true to the faith that gave their lives for that teaching even to this day. It is that small stone that makes all the difference in eternity.