Last night I listened to this fascinating debate about justification by Tom Wright and James White. They discuss the ‘New Perspective on Paul’ and the role of synergy in salvation. What came across was N.T. Wright’s faithfulness to scripture vs. James White’s faithfulness to a tradition, as well as White’s willingness to interpret the scripture in light of pastoral concerns, which is a very slippery approach – i.e., “my interpretation will generate these pragmatic results, therefore my interpretation must be correct.”. (In fairness to White, that wasn’t his only argument though, although it was an undercurrent to everything he said. I agree with Wright that you should not allow pragmatic pastoral concerns to drive your verse by verse exegesis.) Because Tom Wright is trying to stick so closely to scripture he can be unsystematic at times (by modern Western standards) rather like Saint Paul. Altogether this was a very enjoyable conversation to listen to between two very smart and Biblically-informed gentlemen.
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