This is a really helpful section where Wright in Justification quotes from Alister McGrath in Institia Dei: A History of the Christian Doctrine of Justification from 1500 to the Present Day (Cambridge University Press 1986)

BOQ

I begin with some remarks of Alister McGrath, whose remarkable two-volume history of the doctrine is required reading for anyone who wants seriously to engage with it.’ Having proposed that the heart of the Christian faith is found in “the saving action of God toward mankind in Jesus Christ,” stressing that this larger saving activity, rather than a specific doctrine of justification, is the center of it all, he proceeds with some enormously important observations:

“The concept of justification and the doctrine of justification must be carefully distinguished. The concept of justification is one of many employed within the Old and New Testaments, particularly the Pauline corpus,to describe God’s saving action toward his people. It cannot lay claim to exhaust, nor adequately characterise in itself, the richness of the biblical understanding of salvation in Christ.”-2

This is already highly significant. McGrath is creating hermeneutical space in which one might say: there are many equally biblical ways of talking about how God saves people through Jesus Christ, and justification is but one of them. This (for instance) enables us at once to note that the four Gospels, where the term “justification” is scarce, are not for that reason to be treated as merely ancillary to, or perhaps preparatory for, the message of Paul—as has sometimes happened, at least de facto, in the Western church. But there is more:

“The doctrine of justification has come to develop a meaning quite independent of its biblical origins, and concerns the means by which man’s relationship to God is established. The church has chosen to subsume its discussion of the reconciliation of man to God under the aegis of justification, thereby giving the concept an emphasis quite absent from the New Testament. The “doctrine of justification” has come to bear a meaning within dogmatic theology which is quite independent of its Pauline origins.”3

EOQ