Byrnesys Blabberings

This is a hard one for me, I agree and enjoy Pipers writings and I agree and enjoy NT Wrights writings, but if what Piper is saying here about the new perspective is true, then I may loosen my embrace of the new perspective just slightly, though I think it says some true and valid things. Full Piper transcript here

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.