Answering N. T. Wright's Critics

I've only read about 2,000 pages of N. T. Wright books so far, and only listened to a handful of podcasts and videos - which is only a small proportion of his works. So I can't claim to be an expert on what he believes.  But my very non-academic impression so far is that Wright doesn't seem to flat disagree that there is an action which God does to individual human hearts which saves them (what we might have called 'justification'); only, he seems to think Paul's main focus when using the term 'justified' probably wasn't mainly to describe that individual, spiritual action. Rather, I think Wright may think that in using the term 'justified', Paul was probably mainly reassuring the early community of believers in Jesus that they were indeed the people whom God deemed to be 'in the right' - even ahead of the ultimate Day of reckoning - without them needing to become proselytes to Judaism - a body of people identified simply by the faith of Jesus. And I think Wright seems to understand Paul as a person who came to understand that the Lord Jesus Christ - and His cross and resurrection, and second coming - was and is the fulfilment of the hope of first century (in Paul's case, Pharisaic) Judaism (a hope which extended beyond the salvation of individual souls to include also the resurrection of the body and even the restoration of God's good creation itself).  So the 'gospel', I think Wright believes Paul to have been saying, was the glad announcement that that larger hope or story - Israel's story - the story of a fully restored creation, was now being fulfilled. It was a story in which, as it turned out, the cross and resurrection of Jesus indeed was central - a story which indeed had individuals being acted-upon inwardly and spiritually and then becoming themselves actors in the bigger story. It had a personal and spiritual plot, yes; but the plot also had a corporate plot, and will ultimately include the physical body and even the whole created world in its plot. The 'gospel' was the announcement that the glad ending to that long story had now been inaugurated in a sense, even though it is yet to be culminated at Christ's Second Coming. All of that was the 'gospel', in Wright's understanding of Paul. So it was indeed a bigger story than just how individual souls got saved - but at the same time it didn't deny that individual salvation was intrinsic to the story. So none of that, as I understand Wright, seems to me to be a denial that there is an action which God takes to and in an individual which saves him in the present (what we might call 'justification') with a salvation which will be seen full-bloom at the last Day. Only I think Wright perhaps might want to suggest that that personal, spiritual action wasn't what Paul was mainly discussing when he used the term 'justified'. I've heard Wright say that his only goal is to be true to what Paul was saying in context: not to deny that there can't also be a more particularly-focused view of a mountain-peak that one can take than the more panoramic view which Paul for his own purposes may have been taking of the wider mountain-range (the 'mountain-view' is my own metaphor, not Wright's). I've even heard Wright suggest a term which might better describe that inner, individual experience or action which God takes - and it was a Biblical term! (Don't quote me, but I think it may have been 'atonement'.) So Wright isn't denying the reality of such an experience: he's just wanting to identify what Paul was mainly having to deal with and what he was discussing and his use of terms in answer to the issues his first-century readers were facing. I personally think it might help to understand Wright's interpretation of Paul, if we imagine that we are countering the modern Hebrew Roots movement (because that's the closest thing we have today to the type of issue which Paul was constantly having to respond to for the sake of the early churches). The modern Hebrew Roots movement - like the early 'Judaizers' whom Paul was constantly contending with - have somewhat different issues and questions to those which Martin Luther was grappling with. And if we were to answer their specific rethink of the message of the New Testament and its relationship to the Old, we might have to deal with questions of eschatology, ecclesiology and soteriology, etc. in a broad, corporate sense, as Paul did - but that wouldn't be a denial of any individual aspects and experiences within those themes. Same with Paul, perhaps. Maybe the term 'justified' itself can aptly describe both a particular mountain-peak that's part of a larger mountain-range, and a more panoramic view of the whole mountain range? Include both what God says about the redeemed community; and the action which God initially does for an individual to bring him into that community in the first place. Both. Perhaps. Or maybe there really is another Biblical term which describes that initial individual experience more aptly. I don't know. I haven't read enough of Wright yet, and I'm not as academic as many of his more avid readers.