Identity, ethics and apologetics

Posted by Paul | Filed under apologetics

Over on Adrian Warnock’s blog, Andrew Wilson has written some ‘guest posts‘ on Tom Wright’s book Justification. This got me thinking about this whole debate again. So, here’s a random thought…

I want to come at it from a different angle. And, as happens for me often right now, that angle is in Tim Keller-like direction.

In his article The Gospel in All it’s Forms, Keller says:

I take a page from Kierkegaard’s The Sickness Unto Death and define sin as building your identity—your self-worth and happiness—on anything other than God. That is, I use the biblical definition of sin as idolatry. That puts the emphasis not as much on “doing bad things” but on “making good things into ultimate things.”

OK, so what he is doing here is moving the focus in gospel presentations from ethics to identity. But it seems to me that this is exactly what Tom Wright has been doing in his ‘new perspective’ of justification. His reading of Paul is that the Law was a ‘good thing’ that had become ‘ultimate thing’; that the Judaism of Paul’s time had come close to treating the Law as an idol. More than this, and famously, he interprets the big issue that Paul is addressing as the separation between Jews and Gentiles. And that separation being based on observation of the Law. That is, that the issue was that the Jews were building their identity on the Law rather than faith in God. Which, of course, is precisely Keller’s working definition of sin.

In the spirit of Andrew Wilson’s post (‘we can have our cake, and eat it’), we should remind ourselves that this doesn’t require us to reject a gospel presentation that is concerned with ethical questions. This is a big gospel, with deep and wide implications.

Going back to Tim Keller:

…there must be one gospel, yet there are clearly different forms in which that one gospel can be expressed.

And perhaps we can go further. Perhaps, for us, to miss the identity aspect is to miss something important. In a culture where identity floats, it possible to get the beliefs right, get the praxis right and still miss something important.

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Read more | Comments (0) | March 3rd, 2010