Appendix: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5
Back in 2007 I completed a brief, four part series on N.T. Wright’s book entitled, What Saint Paul Really Said. This then became the seed form for a book entitled – Indeed, has Paul Really Said? [A Critique of N.T. Wright’s Teaching on Justification]. Since the completion of this work, I have withheld it from distribution for a few reasons:
1. I wanted to give Mr. Wright an opportunity to respond to my own critique – correcting any misunderstandings that I may have conveyed in the process; and …
2. I also wanted to read some more contemporary works by Wright to see if he had altered his views in any way.
Now, three years later, I can say that I have availed myself to both of these objectives. Concerning the latter, I have consulted Wright’s “big commentary on Romans” in the New Interpreter’s Bible in order to see if his nuanced views of justification have been altered in any way. Concerning the former, I emailed Wright in December of 2007 with an attached copy of the earliest transcript of my book, giving him the opportunity to critique what I had written up to that point. In summary, I must say that his comments seemed rather odd to me, and yet they did unveil a strangely familiar form of strained logic which actually comports with what I have seen in his other writings.
In other words, I wasn’t terribly surprised by his response.
Having come to this point in my labors, I hope to complete my Critique of N.T. Wright’s Teaching on Justification by adding an Appendix to it, and first publishing it here (in summary form) on The Armoury. The final form of it will be more thorough in the printed book, but most of it will be annexed here (online) as a final production of the original weblog series. My development of the Appendix will be fairly simple: Wright’s email response to me was delivered in five points, which included an appeal from him that I consult two of his more recent works: 1. Paul, In Fresh Perspective; and 2. The New Interpreter’s Bible (Romans). Thus, I will segment Wright’s five responses in an order that will enable me to structure an analysis of these two works of his, with the objective of answering this important question:
Has Mr. Wright altered his views in any significant way?
[For more information on the publication and release of Indeed, Has Paul Really Said? go here].