Wallace reviews Wright

Wallace weighs Wright's latest book and finds it lacking.

But some of the best scholars on Romans—including F. F. Bruce, Joseph Fitzmyer, Otto Kuss, Otto Michel, Douglas Moo, Sanday and Headlam, Adolf Schlatter, Tom Schreiner, and many others—are not mentioned at all. And C. E. B. Cranfield, whose linguistic work on δίκαιος and its cognates is some of the strongest defense of the ‘old perspective’ of Paul’s view of justification, is mentioned twice (pp. 16, 54 [33, 73]), both off-handed comments that involve zero substantive interaction with Cranfield’s exegesis. Wright is of course right to emphasize that there is more to the gospel than individual salvation, but what he puts above it is so abstract and so politically oriented that it really does not answer some of the basic questions we as human beings have about our standing before God, let alone our potential relationship to God.