The Future of Justification: A Response to NT Wright by John Piper

This is the first book that I have started reading by John Piper. (I know I did a review of his fasting book two weeks ago, but I started this long before that.)  I have read some shorter works, pamphlet length things.  And I am fairly impressed.  The introduction has a wonderful section on how to properly disagree with another Christian.  I didn’t make it through the whole book, but the introduction should be required reading for all Christians.

I really appreciate how Piper is trying to make sure he accurately reflects what NT Wright believes, not only by using a very well cited quotes, but also a pretty generous reading.  His intent is to make sure that Wright would not have any issues with the way that Piper explains what Wright believes. (In fact Piper gave Wright a copy of the manuscript before it was published so Wright could clarify or correct anything that Piper misunderstood.)

However, so far all it has done for me is to make me think that Piper just doesn’t get at least some of it.  He repeats back the words well.  But then the issues that he has seem either so trivial as to not be issues.  Or he want to draw a line of either/or when I think both/and are more appropriate.  Or I just flat out disagree with Piper and agree with Wright.

All that to say, I really respect Piper for putting together a pretty academic responce to Wright and keeping it pastoral in concern and at least so far, bending over backwards to tell people that Wright is one of us (Christians, and maybe even an Evangelical).

After about 9 months and not really touching it for about 6 of those months I am going to officially hang it up and put it back on the “to read” list again.  I got about half way through and got distracted and never made it back.  I do want to finish because I want to read NT Wright’s response back to Piper (Justified) and I think that I really need to finish this to be fair to both sides.

Just to make sure you know, almost all of John Piper’s books are free on his website.  They are mostly in PDF format but if you have a Kindle or other ebook reading you can convert them into a friendly format (they do not have DRM) and read away.