Righting Wright

In a post last week, I suggested that there is at least a tension, perhaps an internal contradiction, in Wright’s view that justification is both a declaration that creates a legal status and a declaration regarding a preexisting fact; it both creates the status “in the right” as a speech-act, and declares the fact that the person who believes has already entered the people of God.

I hinted cryptically that my idea of justification as a “deliverdict” might help resolve the tension. How? In a couple of ways.

First, for all his very welcome emphasis on ecclesiology, Wright seems to be operating with an implicitly individualist anthropology. Being and status are still too strictly distinguished. But if being is communion and relation, then a change in relation or status, especially relation or status before God, is a change in being. In this sense, justification is a declaration that creates a new man just because it creates a new status. This is not a Tridentine formulation, since the Tridentine formula assumes that being changes only if there is some act of “making-just” added to a declaration of status. No; the declaration of status changes the person ontologically, because what we are before God is what we are . We are what the Father sees us to be in Christ. We might say that being and status are perichoretically intertwined. Wright’s work would benefit, in short, from a dose of Zizioulas.

Second, and building on the first point: Wright gets knotted up because justification as status-declaration is seen, as it were, as “merely” a status-declaration. For Wright, when the Spirit begins to work faith in the person, and that constitutes the badge of new covenant membership, which justification declares to be true. Wright does not say (so far as I’ve found) that the status-declaration is itself the cause of a change in the person’s condition. Here is where the deliverdict comes in. If we take Jesus’ resurrection as the paradigmatic justification (Romans 4:25; 1 Timothy 3:16), we have a model of justification where a status declaration also changes the facts of the situation. Before justification, a sinner is counted and regarded by God as a sinner; after justification, the person is counted as righteous before the court. And by the same token: Before justification, a sinner is under the dominion of sin and death; after justification, the justified person is justified from sin (Romans 6:7). This has some of the same effects as Wright’s formula: In this view, as in Wright’s, justification involves both status and fact. But where on Wright’s view justification creatively declares a status and factually describes a person’s condition, on the deliverdict view the declaration creates both the status and condition, just as the Father’s declaration “He is Just” both declares the status of Jesus and raises Him from the dead. (Again, this does not verge in a Roman Catholic direction, since the declaration is thoroughly forensic.)

Third, the deliverdict incorporates the Spirit’s work into justification and thus makes justification a thoroughly Trinitarian, yet entirely forensic, act. The Father, we might say, declared Jesus just by raising Him from the dead by the breath of the Spirit; when the Father declares us just in Christ He pronounces that verdict by the same Breath, and so condemns sin and death in the flesh in the same act that He justifies sinners.