Book - The Future of Justification

Back in college, I had some run-ins with a few over-zealous hyper-Calvinists who really bothered me. They were intellectually arrogant, theologically lazy, and pretty obnoxious in their desire to convert everyone they met into hyper-Calvinists like themselves. 

John Piper was their pope. 

John Piper is not himself a hyper Calvinist, or anywhere near as annoying as these guys in college, but they hung on every word he wrote. So, I didn't read much Piper until seminary. And, my reading of him has always been colored by the bad taste in my mouth I received from the zealots in college. 

But, in the process of weeding through resumes for a role McKinney was attempting to fill, I kept coming across people who were reading NT Wright. The more I read about the Emergent Church, the more I read about NT Wright. So, I went out and picked up some books by NT Wright, and was pretty disturbed by some of what he wrote. 

I was really excited to find John Piper's book "The Future of Justification," which is a response to NT Wright's thoughts on the meaning of justification in the New Testament. 

Piper's work is superb. Plain and simple. It's written with grace, Truth, and as clarity. It's theologically heavy - not  easy reading - but is a tremendously important work. Piper successfully points out the flaws in Wright's position without making Wright himself the enemy, which is a tremendously difficult thing to do in debate. 

The doctrine of justification by faith is at the heart of the Christian faith. Wright is willing to throw out millenia of scholarship in view of something he feels is clear from Apocryphal literature and the Qumran scrolls - as if the Qumran community is more representative of the average Jewish person alive in the first century than the letters in the New Testament. 

Emerging generations need careful theologians. Careful theologians should read "The Future of Justification."