This book is a great breath of "Biblical air" after reading N.T. Wrights works on his view of Pauline Theology. What Piper's thesis is is NOT a "well the tradition has been....so we MUST go with that." If you want that then this is the wrong book and you have NOT even read beyond the fist two pages. The problem with N.T. Wright is that he strives so hard to be orthodox in his theology, but like Barth, and cannot seem to do so. He is a "Roman Catholic in Protestant clothes" per se. Wrights thesis, and lifes goal, is to disprove the reformation based off of a very twisted view of scripture and a dangerous helping of a select few Judaic 1st century documents that support his claim. Piper on the other hand takes a big helping of Scripture and states his case very plainly and shows that you cannot view the Bible through the lens of 4QMMT or any other book from 1st century literature without looking at the WHOLE of it all. E.P. Sanders(is it just me or do all the "NPP" people have initials at the beginning of their names?) sought to disprove the fact that the religious leaders in Israel were NOT legalistic, and in fact, quite orthodox. This of course throws my mind into a spiral, but it would be like taking a few of the history books about the civil war and basing your whole view on it. Plus, we are talking about 2000 years. Will we have all the books from Jewish leaders? No. Well, Piper aptly deals with this in the book and pleads for a Biblical approach to the scriptures and not a "word swap" which is what Wright does with scripture. I will not settle for a works based salvation and never will. But I did look at all the literature and "tested everything" to see if it was Biblically tried and true. Thank God for both men, but I will choose to defend Sola Gratia.