God-centered resources from the ministry of John Piper

Listen to John Piper discuss what damage he believes Wright's view could cause to the church (9 min).

[The following is an edited transcript of the audio.]

Bob Allen: What do you see as the damage to the church that could come from what N.T. Wright is saying here?

John Piper: Justification—being counted by God as righteous with the perfect obedience and righteousness of Jesus Christ credited to my account—is, I think, a key to the doctrine of assurance and a key to what it means to preach the Gospel. I don’t think we’ll preach the Gospel fully and faithfully if we don’t offer this gift in the preaching of the Gospel. And I don’t think we’ll help people who struggle with sin if we can’t point them backward to the moment of justification, when God moved from being against them to for the. So the Gospel seems to be at stake in how you preach it and how you offer salvation. And the ongoing enjoyment of fellowship with God is at stake.

Let me mention two other things. One is the glory of Jesus Christ and how we honor him. And the other is the ground or the foundation of our sacrificial acts of love.

N. T. Wright rightly so, really cares about the engagement of the church in the social issues of our day—from the environment to poverty. You name it, he’s there, and I’m saying Amen. And I think the way he deals with justification will undermine the very power that God is offering through justification to enable the Christian church to engage sacrificially with the injustices of the world.

I’m assuming, and I argue for it in more than one book, that the God we are to glorify—the Christ we are to glorify—is the one who justified us on the basis of his perfect sacrifice in our place (by taking our punishment) and his prefect obedience in our place (by living out our righteousness). So we have a perfect sacrifice; we have a perfect righteousness; and in union with him, by faith alone, we stand with God totally on our side.

In order for me to glorify God as I ought, I need to know that he is totally on my side on these bases—not mine. Christ is my sacrifice, Christ is my obedience. Now if you deny that Christ’s obedience is counted as yours, then when it comes to glorifying the Christ that you live for, you will only glorify him partially.

I think the New Perspective on Paul and other kinds of theologies flowing from it are giving God only part of the glory he deserves. They are missing the glory of Christ as our substitute obedience and our substitute sacrifice and punishment, and the glory that on the basis of those two things, we have God totally on our side.

So if we miss out on those aspects of God’s glory, we won’t worship him as we ought. He won’t get the glory that he should if we deny that he is the one who performed our obedience and that it’s imputed to us. The other thing that I believe this view of justification is damaging is this source and ground of obedience and love.

There’s a great irony here. N.T. Wright and others really want obedience to count—our obedience. We must do acts love, and to that I say Amen. There is an obedience without which we will not see the Lord, according to Hebrews 12:14. And there are things you do that you will not enter the Kingdom of Heaven if you continue to do those things. And Jesus said, “Why do you call me ‘Lord, Lord’ and do not do the things that I demand of you?”

So I’m saying, our obedience really counts; it really matters. The question is, how does it matter? What’s the function of my good works, my works of love, my acts of obedience at the last day when I’m judged? And how does it relate to my being right with God or God being totally for me right now?

I want to say it as clear as I can: the function of those necessary good works of love is not to move God to be totally for me. His being totally for me is what moves me to do those works. If we reverse that, we undermine the very power by which we can do the works. And I fear that’s what’s happening. Not intentionally—sometimes just because the language leans so hard in that direction.

N.T. Wright says things like we will be justified in the last day on the basis of the whole life lived. Now he may not mean what that sounds like it means. But it sounds like it means, and will be taken to mean, what Roman Catholicism really says it means, namely that justification is our becoming righteous ourselves, so that our acts of obedience are part of the ground by which God accepts us.

What I want to say is that at the moment when we put our childlike faith in Jesus Christ, he became our punishment and our obedience. That is, at that moment he became the obedience required for God to be totally for us.

The rest of our lives are lived to show the glory of that Christ. If we begin to describe our obedience in a way that it becomes a competitor with the obedience of Christ as the basis of how God is for me, then we undermine the sufficiency of what Christ did for us. And if that gets undermined, then the ground and the power of our obedience are destroyed in the long run.

Therefore, the very thing that N.T. Wright and others are wanting to accomplish, namely an engaged, bold, loving, sacrificial, mission-oriented church will cease to be that, just like the mainline churches have ceased to be dynamic forces in the world, because they threw away the essence of certain crucial doctrines. You don’t see it now, because N.T. Wright himself is such a good embodiment of engagement, but I’m saying that some of the things he says have the trajectory that if they’re followed out, are going to in fact undermine the very thing he wants to accomplish, namely, a sacrificially loving church.

So that’s what’s at stake. It’s a huge issue for me, and I hope the book will have some influence on him to get him to say some things better and more clearly. And I hope it will have influence on those who are reading him, so that they are not as inclined to follow his way of thinking about justification as they might have been.

This is the sixth question in a 7-part interview that John Piper did in preparation for his forthcoming book The Future of Justification.

• Part 1, Who is this book for?
• Part 2, Who is N. T. Wright?
• Part 3, What do you believe about justification?
• Part 4, How is Wright's view of justification different than yours?
• Part 5, What's the problem with Wright's view of imputation?