Summarizing Some Brief Reading About Paul from N.T. Wright

I spent part of my day off reading further into N.T. Wright’s book, Paul and the Faithfulness of God, Vol. 2. Allow me to summarize the main argument Wright made in the pages I went through.

Paul, like everyone else, believed that there is a problem with the world, that evil persists in what should be a good creation. Like a good first century Jew, zealous for the Law, he believed that the problem stemmed from idolatry and paganism. Humans did not follow

Torah, the Law of God. Furthermore, as a good first century Jew, he believed that the solution to this problem was the return of Yahweh to his people to judge the world through the Messiah. The Messiah would establish the Kingdom of God, defeat the enemies of Israel, and bring justice to the world.

The resurrection proved that Jesus was the Messiah and that Yahweh had indeed returned to his people. However, the fact of the crucifixion and its necessity in the purposes of God suggested to Paul that the problem that was dealt with by the Messiah was much more severe than anyone had known. If God had to allow the crucifixion to occur in order to fulfill his purpose of solving the problem of evil in the world, then the problem of evil went much deeper than the lack of Law-observance. Paul realized that the real problem that was being dealt with by God was sin and its affect upon the heart – a problem going all the way back to Adam. This was a problem that affected both Jew and Gentile, regardless of Torah. That faith brought the Spirit and the evident radical change of the heart in both Jew and Gentile confirmed this.

This realization led Paul to reexamine his thoughts about the purpose of the Law, what it meant to be a Jew or Gentile, the purpose of Israel, and how God was fulfilling his purposes to redeem Creation.

I think there is a real elegance to argument Wright is making here. It would explain quite a bit about Paul’s thought patterns and put this theology in ordered relation.