Tom Wright says centuries of Protestant and post-Reformation debate have often framed Paul around the wrong question. Galatians is not about “going to heaven when you die”.
For centuries, Christians have read Paul’s rejection of “works of the law” as if the apostle were mainly attacking people trying to earn their way into heaven.
Tom Wright thinks that misses the point.
In a recent bonus episode of Ask NT Wright Anything, Wright tells Mike Bird that Paul’s phrase “works of the law” is not primarily about moral ladder-climbing, legalism, or trying to impress God. It is about the visible markers that defined Jewish covenant identity in the first century.
“When Paul is talking about the works of the law,” Wright says, “he’s talking about the things which first-century Judeans did as badges of membership in the covenant people, and these were particularly Sabbath, food laws, and circumcision.”
That may sound technical, but the implications are huge. For Wright, Paul’s letter to the Galatians is not chiefly asking, “How can my soul get to heaven when I die?” It is asking a much more immediate and explosive question: who belongs at the same table?
“Galatians is not about how can I go to heaven when I die,” Wright says. “It’s about how do we know now who ought to be sitting down at the same table and eating with one another.”
In other words, justification is not simply a private spiritual transaction detached from community. It is God’s declaration of who belongs to the renewed family of Abraham, now redefined around Jesus the Messiah.
Wright sets himself apart by insisting that Paul must be read in his own first-century Jewish world, not simply through later debates between Augustine and Pelagius, Luther and Rome, or Calvinists and Lutherans. He points to the Dead Sea Scrolls and early Christian readings of Paul as evidence that “works of the law” referred to practices that marked out a covenant community, not generic good deeds done to earn salvation.
“When you look at the second-century fathers,” Wright says, “when they meet the idea of works of the law, there’s not even a debate.”
For Wright, one of the problems is that centuries of later argument have made it harder to hear Paul on his own terms.
“You’ve got layer upon layer upon layer of philosophical, cultural, theological, historical memory,” he says, “which I think is making it harder and harder to hear what Paul is saying.”
His most memorable challenge is this: “We have to stop giving 19th century answers to 16th century questions, and start giving 21st century answers to first century questions.”
But Wright is not saying Christians can ignore ethics. Far from it. Paul’s rejection of “works of the law” does not mean that obedience, holiness or moral transformation are irrelevant.
“This isn’t a bit of legalism sneaking back in,” Wright says. “It’s a way of saying, actually, if you’re following Jesus… you will find that en route you won’t be committing murder, adultery, theft, et cetera.”
For listeners who have only heard Paul framed as “grace versus works”, this episode opens up a bigger, richer and more historically grounded picture. Paul was not abolishing the moral life. He was announcing that, in Christ, the covenant family had been thrown open.
Related listening
For more on how Tom Wright reads Paul and the New Testament in context, subscribe to the new Tom Wright clips channel, listen to recent episodes of Ask NT Wright Anything on Paul and circumcision, who counts as Abraham’s children, whether Paul invented Christianity, and why biblical words like ekklesia are so often misunderstood.
