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Soli Deo Gloria said:
onefear, i take it you like NT Wright. Am i correct?
I think he is saying a lot of very valuable things and many erroneous things. Certainly this will ultimately be proven true of every piece of non-God-breathed writing (although by then we'll be too overwhelmed with the glory of Christ to care about anything but worship). So instead of some thumbs up or thumbs down vote on him, I'd like to see the gold in his work mined and refined, and the slag discarded.

I haven't read enough of his work to give a thumbs up or down on his view of justification, for example, though reasonable people whose grasp of the Gospel I know and respect disagree on it. That always gives me pause.

I posted Barlow's piece on theological language, because I think that people who read Wright or anyone else should interpret what they read most favorably (charitably, if you prefer) to the author until given conclusive evidence that such a reading is not warranted. Most often this involves learning the language of the author, which can be very different from the language of the reader, even if the same words are used. I think (and would expect) Wright is bound by the conceptualization of the Gospel in his own tradition, and so we should expect his language to be a bit different and strive to understand what he intends by it, rather than automatically glossing his writing with the meanings of words from our own little theological pond.

It seems to me that many in the Evangelical Reformed camp also fall easily into an either-or trap where both-and is a possibility (this is one of the points in Meyers's piece). By advancing his thesis on justification, Wright isn't necessarily denying the veracity of our traditional Reformed thesis.

Having said that, from what I have read of Wright, I think he is guilty of using theologically loaded terms intending a different meaning than the traditional meaning. The burden is on him to define his terms, and he fails to do this effectively sometimes.

Wright's writing is complex and subtle, and it is often hard work to discern his understanding of the concepts and ideas he writes about. I think many critics of Wright in the Reformed camp have missed an opportunity to learn truth about God by failing to respond to Wright in the way described above. Thus, in my posts I hoped to offer some resources that would encourage a balanced and thorough consideration of the topic, even though I haven't yet had the time to consider it myself.

onefear