"Justification"

Having finished N.T. Wright's recent book "Justification", all I can say is: "Wow." Of course, I say that with most of what N.T. Wright says. The book is all about the Christian doctrine of justification, and is also a response to John Piper's book "The Future of Justification." Regarding justification itself--what it means, it's background in Jewish thought from the law-court, covenant, and eschatology--Wright doesn't really give any new information than he did previously in his chapter on the subject in "What Saint Paul Really Said." The beauty of the book is found in its second half, where Wright does exegeses on several prominent texts dealing with the righteousness of God and the righteousness given to believers. His exegesis on Galatians is phenomenal, though he leaves a bit of ambiguity regarding the function of the Law in 2nd-Temple Palestinian Judaism as well as the detailed convictions of the agitators infiltrating the church there. He deals with this some more in his exegesis of Philippians, and after an exegesis of two critical texts in the Corinthian Correspondence, he looks at how justification isn't about soteriology vs. ecclesiology as some have proposed, using Ephesians, as it were, as a template for this (an interesting choice, since Ephesians has long been used to propose said argument). The final chapter of the book is by far the best: Wright's exegesis of Romans. Romans is one of my favorite texts (I wrote my own exegesis on it about 1 1/2 years ago), and Wright really brings to light some things that were confusing in my own study of the text. While I don't agree with what Wright proposes as the rhetorical situation of the letter itself, his arguments regarding various passages and how to ease some of the strain that even the most skilled exegetes (and I do not in any way consider myself skilled in the art) find difficult. All in all, it's basically a fuller expose on the doctrine of justification by faith than the one given in "What Saint Paul Really Said," but you won't find anything in this book that you didn't find foundational in the other (which is a good sign, showing that Wright probably understands his argument through-and-through).