I’ve posted before on the debate, so I won’t summarise it here. Suffice it to say that, for those of us who have benefited enormously from Wright’s writings and Piper’s papers – those of us who, for example, might jump from John For Everyone to The Pleasures of God in their quiet times, or from Jesus and the Victory of God to What Jesus Demands from the World when studying the gospels – there has been a need for someone to articulate how the strong points of both Wright’s and Piper’s views on justification can be integrated. Surely, we have reckoned, it must be possible to hold a position that incorporates the benefits of perspectives old and new on Paul? Surely, if we think carefully, we can avoid the unnecessary extremes of (a) ignoring the corporate and covenantal dimensions of justification so evident in Galatians, and denying that the future judgment of Romans 2 is according to works, as the ‘old perspective’ is accused of doing, and (b) arguing that the imputation of Christ’s righteousness is unbiblical bunk, and implying that justification is in some way earned by works, as the ‘new perspective’ is accused of doing. Can’t we?
 
Enter the KJV. Lucid, quotable, beautifully crafted, eloquently structured, politically nuanced, and worthy of celebration in 2011. Ladies and gentlemen, I present to you the Blanchard Professor of Theology at Wheaton College: Kevin J. Vanhoozer.

 
In this lecture, which is by turns perceptive, creative, irenic and hilarious, KJV walks us through Tom Wright’s view of justification, and the responses to it, and proposes a way of integrating all the concerns I just mentioned. His proposal centres on Paul’s (much-neglected) theology of adoption, in which it is possible, in fact necessary, to hold together both forensic/legal dimensions and participationist/relational ones. What if, he asks, the lawcourt picture we should think of with Paul is not so much a civil court (as per the new perspective), or even a criminal court (as per the old), but a family court? What if God’s declarative speech-act (a bit of jargon for ‘saying something that does something’, like ‘you’re fired’, or in this case, ‘you’re adopted’) actually changes both our legal status and our relationships within the family? What if God ‘imputes filial status’ to us as he incorporates us into Christ, such that we become both ‘in’ (‘new perspective’) and ‘innocent’ (‘old perspective’) at the same time? Would that, or would it not, make it easier to see how to fit together justification and union with Christ, Romans 1-4 and Romans 5-8, Luther and Schweitzer, Piper and Wright?
 
I found that an extremely helpful proposal. I couldn’t imagine that Piper would be concerned by it, since KJV was so clearly affirming imputation and justification by faith alone, but I wasn’t sure if Wright would think he had given away too much. Then I found myself at the Society of Biblical Literature in London yesterday, looking through a new book (Jesus, Paul and the People of God: A Theological Dialogue with N T Wright, edited by Nick Perrin and Richard Hays) in which Vanhoozer’s lecture had been included, and which was followed by a brief response from Wright, in which he came across as very positive about it.
 
And then just now, I was standing by the bookstall, talking to Tom Wright – a real ‘Dear Diary’ moment! – about the fact that I was doing a seminar on him and Piper at Together on a Mission, and when I said that I’d found Vanhoozer’s lecture extremely helpful, he said that he ‘absolutely agreed’ with it, and that it made a lot of sense of (among other passages) Galatians 3. That’s why, as I said above, I began to wonder whether the debate had effectively been resolved. A colossal overstatement, of course – disagreements over exegesis, and second-temple Judaism, and terminology, and all sorts of things will no doubt continue – but it feels like KJV has shown that it’s now possible to broadly agree with both Wright and Piper in what they affirm, even if not in everything they deny.
 
So I scuttled excitedly across Waterloo Bridge to Starbucks and immediately wrote a blog post about it.