Justification
so the gospel writers told the story of Jesus in order to undergird and reinforce the Christian determination to follow him, to go on following him, to live as he lived and, if necessary, to die as he died, believing that God’s kingdom, established through his work, was becoming a reality in more and more of the world through their own lives, work,
... See moreN. T. Wright • How God Became King: The Forgotten Story of the Gospels
for the moment we may simply note that the question of abstract moralism, in which human beings try from scratch to make themselves good enough for acceptance with god, or to earn his favour, is not something that would have been particularly familiar to Paul, Jesus, or their hearers. For a Jew, the context of behaviour was of course the covenant.1
... See moreN. T. Wright • Jesus Victory of God V2: Christian Origins And The Question Of God
It has everything to do with understanding human renewal as the beginning, the pointer toward, and even the means of, God’s eventual eradication of evil from the world and the bringing to birth of the new creation itself. Thus, so the early Christians believed, God’s word was at work by the Spirit within the community, to put Jesus’s achievement in
... See moreN. T. Wright • Scripture and the Authority of God: How to Read the Bible Today
It is the “although [x] not [y] but [z]” that makes justification central to Paul. It bears this form and plays this song; to put it simply, although [x] God is righteous, this righteousness does not [y] leave God to abandon us but [z] becomes sin for us so that God might minister to us (2 Cor. 5:21).