[*] So I'm reading this blog entry ...

... which, for the sake of saving fireworks for the 4th of July, shall remain nameless. And I'm reading it in the context that I have just listened to 3 hours worth of lectures on the pluriformed body of work known as the "New Perspective on Paul" from D. A. Carson -- who, you might not be surprised to find out, thinks the NPP has value only to the extent that it challenges reformed thinkers and believers to actually think about and to actually believe what we say we think and believe.

Carson was charitable and critical, and in those three hours he cited at least a dozen sources in the current theological literature which underscored and supported his criticism of NPP.

OK -- so I'm reading this blog after Carson has just placed me in the position to have both a basic understanding of NPP and a basic understanding of its critics (of whom he is one), and I find this person on about how N.T. Wright is so misunderstood because Wright's view of justification is not either/or (which is a modernist epistemological trap) but both-also. Well, here's what was said:

Take, for example, the question of whether justification is forensic or participatory, whether it is transformative or declaratory, whether it is about soteriology or ecclesiology, whether it has regard to the inner or outer life, the status or the being of the sinner. Many of us feel that such questions are quite the wrong ones. If you start with the questions that modernity brings to the debate, you will end up with misleading answers.

And then this:

Unfortunately many of Wright’s Reformed critics are a bit naïve here and fail to appreciate the manner in which the questions in terms of which the debate is being approached have changed. Consequently Wright is treated as if he were a Roman Catholic, even though he unequivocally rejects the position held by the RC opponents of the Reformers.

Whatever one thinks about Wright's critics (and let's be honest: everyone who has an opinion has a critic; the question is whether the critic{s} offer meaningful criticism and whether the opiner ever bothers to listen to said critic{s}), it seems a little weird to, on the one hand, say that the grounds of the discussion have changed from Modernistic categoricalism to something else (God forbid we call it "post modern") and then to go on and establish the categories by which the critics of one's heroes are apparently dismissed.

But the worse problem for the opiner here is that Wright does in fact establish categories, expanded from his foundational presuppositions found in Sanders and Dunn. Wright is not creating any kind of pomo (oh shoot: I said it) narrative but is in fact arguing in favor of new categories of meaning in the texts of Paul based on the assumption that he is speaking from or to (or both) second temple Judaism. Wright’s reasoning is Modernist reasoning. How he allows himself to be seen in public we shall never know.