Paul: A Biography

by N.T. Wright

That is what Paul’s gospel and ethics are, at their heart, all about. God will put the whole world right at the last. He has accomplished the main work of that in Jesus and his death and resurrection. And, through gospel and spirit, God is now putting people right, so that they can be both examples of what the gospel does and agents of further transformation in God’s world. This is the heart of Paul’s famous “doctrine of justification,” which is so important in Galatians, Philippians, and Romans, though remarkably inconspicuous (until we realize how it is integrated with everything else) in the other letters. Once again the problem has been the wrong framework. If we come with the question, “How do we get to heaven,” or, in Martin Luther’s terms, “How can I find a gracious God?” and if we try to squeeze an answer to those questions out of what Paul says about justification, we will probably find one. It may not be totally misleading. But we will miss what Paul’s “justification” is really all about. It isn’t about a moralistic framework in which the only question that matters is whether we humans have behaved ourselves and so amassed a store of merit (“righteousness”) and, if not, where we can find such a store, amassed by someone else on our behalf. It is about the vocational framework in which humans are called to reflect God’s image in the world and about the rescue operation whereby God has, through Jesus, set humans free to do exactly that.