"The Day the Revolution Began" - Wright or wrong? (13)

Chapter 12

In this, and the next, Wright looks at Romans. His primary thesis is to take everything as a whole, and look at things in terms of the whole Bible plan of God. Wright raises the question of if the wrath of God has been dealt with in Rom 3:24-16, then why does Paul speak in Rom 5:9 of being saved from the wrath that is still to come. There are two or three points I would like to make. First, neither NIV nor ESV talk about a “wrath that is still to come”. Wright seems to use his own translations in a number of places, and there doesn’t seem to be any future tense in the main translations. Leaving that aside, I still don’t see any problem. God’s wrath is being revealed against all mankind (Romans 1) and there will be a future judgement when God’s wrath is revealed (His righteous judgement against sin). Those in Christ are not subject to that wrath because of what Jesus has done.

Wright spends quite a lot of time on chapter 7 and the key point seems to be that (loc 4098) “in Romans 7 Paul is telling two stories, the story of Adam and the story of Israel, weaving them together ...” Now chapter 7 is usually taken as Paul talking about himself, and the great debate is whether he is talking about his pre or post conversion experience. Wright’s view seems to have little to commend it. One of the essential ingredients of chapter 7 is the desire to do good. Now I think it is fair to say that in the Old Testament Israel does not express much in the way of desire to do good.  He then goes on to say (loc 4147) that God condemned Sin on the cross, he did not punish Jesus. Now this seems very dodgy to me, and as I have said before, Wright seems to be making us out be victims rather than guilty. The problem with all this is that it leaves the question of “what about my guilt?”. In the next paragraph write talks about the cross being penal in the sense that it is the “punishment of Sin”. This does not seem Biblical to me, and fails to address the fact of our guilt. Nor does it really explain why Jesus needed to die.

Wright talks a lot about “telling the story”. Maybe it is because I am a mathematician and engineer by training, but I prefer a few hard facts, a bit of reality, not Wright’s airy-fairy stories. At loc 4182 Wright says “we have to choose between a proto-trinitarian framework for understanding Paul’s view of Jesus’s death and a quasi-pagan one”. This is nonsense. Then he says “it would be a mistake to think that the animal presented as a sin offering was being punished for the sins of the worshipper.” I wonder what the animal was thinking! Next he talks about “unwitting sins”. Now Leviticus has a lot to say about unwitting sins, but there it is sins that the person was unaware they had committed. In Romans 7 Paul knows full well that they are sins. This is a false parallel.