Listen or read the following transcript as D. A. Carson speaks on the topic of the apostle Paul in this address from The Gospel Coalition Sermon Library.
The main thing to say about the new perspective is that there isn’t one. There are many new perspectives or many versions of the new perspective. There are many different stances that are held together by certain commonalities that are then loosely called The New Perspective on Paul. Most people say the movement was more or less kicked off, though still not in a self-conscious way, by a 1963 article by Krister Stendahl called “The Apostle Paul and the Introspective Conscience of the West.”
His argument was that since the Reformation, we have been afflicted with too much moral guilt. Dear ol’ Luther throwing inkwells at the Devil and wrestling with personal guilt. We don’t need any of that, but that heritage has so affected our exegesis that we wrestle with senses of guilt and then read our guilt back into the New Testament to find a salvation that will address the guilt, whereas if you read the New Testament in its own terms it’s not nearly so interested in all of this guilt. So was his argument.
It was thought to be a breakthrough at the time, although there were many in a more biblically Reformed tradition who thought it was a bit of a travesty. The crucial work, however, was not Stendahl. Stendahl was a kind of shot across the bow.
The crucial work was that of E.P. Sanders.
Sanders is an interesting man, an international class debater.
He has written in quite a number of areas. His book on the synoptic problem in the SNTSMS (Society for New Testament Studies Monograph Series) is still, in my judgment, one of the best out there. He’s a very capable scholar. It is his 1977 book that kicked off this round of debate: Paul and Palestinian Judaism.
The book is about 450 pages, of which around 300 are devoted to Second Temple Judaism, the last 150 or so to Paul. What he is challenging is a consensus that was pretty strong up until then in Lutheran circles, in confessional Reformed circles, in broad-stream evangelical circles, all the way from conservative works like that of Edersheim, The Life and Times of Jesus the Messiah, to massive research volumes like Strack-Billerbeck.
What he was criticizing was the reconstruction of first-century Judaism that both Jesus and Paul confronted by appealing to much later sources. To take one of his many examples, the picture of an individual coming to the last judgment and having all of the good points on one side of the balance and all of the bad points on the other side of the balance, and which way it tips determines whether you get in or not, you can’t find before the Babylonian Talmud.
In other words, it’s fourth or fifth century. You can’t find it in Jewish circles any time earlier. So why are we ascribing to first-century Judaism much later Jewish theology? It would be a bit like trying to analyze the thought of the late Puritans by reading twentieth-century literature. It’s that kind of time gap. It’s just bad history.
So, he argued, when you strip away all of the late sources from the Palestinian and Babylonian Talmuds and try to be careful with the oral traditions that show up in the Midrashim and even in the Mishnah, AD 200 in written form, and you try to be careful with all of these things and ask, “What is characteristic of first-century Palestinian Judaism?” then, he says, you do not find this massive legalistic religion that our reading of Paul has taught us to find. So he argues.
What you find, instead, is a pattern of religion across all of the different literary strata, which he calls covenantal nomism: an approach to law, nomism, that is determined by a certain covenantal relationship. He says the main thrust of covenantal nomism, which he insists covers all of the branches of first-century Judaism, is determined by eight points.
- God has chosen Israel.
- God has given Israel the law.
- This law implies God’s promise to maintain his election of Israel.
- This law implies their requirement to obey or the requirement on them to obey.
- God rewards obedience and punishes transgression. (So-called Deuteronomistic theology.)
- The law also provides for means of atonement so that when there is transgression there is a way to be reconciled to God, which God himself has given.
- This results in the maintenance and reestablishment of covenantal relationships.
- All who are maintained in the covenant by obedience, atonement, and God’s mercy belong to the group that will be saved at the end.
That is his understanding of covenantal nomism. He says that way of looking at religion is found amongst the rabbis. It’s found in apocalyptic groups. It’s found in Qumran. It’s found everywhere in first-century Palestinian Judaism, so far as our sources go.
If this is the background Paul necessarily understands his theology against, the background against which Paul is contending, then, he says, you cannot imagine that Paul is setting up grace against law. After all, the Jews themselves saw themselves as chosen by grace. They believed Deuteronomy 7 and Deuteronomy 10, which insist that the people of Israel are chosen by grace, but although they’re chosen by grace, there is a sense in which they are maintained by obedience.
It’s obedience that is still empowered by God and his mercy and the covenantal atonement structures and the like, but nevertheless, it is an obedience of faith that is still required to be maintained in the covenant. He says there is a sense in which Pauline theology is very similar. Of course you’re chosen by grace, he says, but on the other hand, Paul jolly well expects believers to obey. Their faith must work out in obedience, and if it doesn’t, then Paul is quite prepared to question whether they’re really in the covenant or not.
In one sense, therefore, Paul’s own theology is a form of covenantal nomism. Then if you say, “Yes, but look at Romans, all this guilt and blame and shame at the beginning before you get to the atonement. What do you do with that? That sounds very non-Jewish.” Well, he says, yes, but the problem with Paul is that he does not use his own conversion as a paradigm for his own theology. As you read Romans, you move from plight to solution. First you have the problem (Romans 1:18–3:20). Then you get the solution (Romans 3:21 and on).
In Paul’s own conversion, he says, that’s not what happened. Dear ol’ Paul is trotting up the Damascus road quite chuffed with himself as he is about to go and persecute another batch of Christians. Then he confronts the resurrected Jesus, and he has a problem. He now believes Jesus is alive and well, and he has to reconstruct all his theology. Jesus, thus, is the answer. So having found that Jesus is the answer, you have to figure out what the problem is.
So in his own conversion, he moved from solution to plight. It worked the other way around. Because he began with the resurrected Christ, began with the solution and then went to the plight, then he had to figure out what Jesus was for in all of that, and eventually he developed a deepened theology of sin that rather goes beyond what the Jews thought of because he had to make sense of what Jesus was doing on the cross, but in terms of his own experience, that’s not how he himself got there. So Sanders argues.
That means he has to reread a lot of Paul’s texts in rather different ways from the ways in which you have customarily read them. Occasionally, he finds he can’t reread them in the pattern he would like, and then he says, quite frankly, that Paul has the analysis of Judaism wrong. He is so strongly reading his solution in Jesus back into his plight, now newly developed and redefined, that he’s actually projecting onto Judaism some elements and characteristics of legalism and the like that, quite frankly, Sanders says, simply weren’t there.
So if you ask Sanders, “Fair enough; then what is the difference between Paul and Judaism? After all, Paul does change. So he changes. What is the basis of the change? What is the essence of the change?” He says the heart of the change is not faith versus works or grace versus law. The heart of the change is Jesus really is the Messiah. The heart of the change is Christology. Then this Messiah had to die and rise again.
Everything else filters down from that fundamental conviction to which he arrived on the Damascus road. That’s the heart of his book. When his book appeared, it was a bombshell on the political and theological scene; partly, it needs to be said, because we live this side of the Holocaust. Anything that appears sensitive to Jewish concerns after the odious atrocity of the Holocaust has to find a certain kind of attractiveness.
So instead of having all of these nasty images of legalistic Jews and their funny hats and strange sideburns, now suddenly they’re just like us, especially like us liberal Protestants, Sanders would say, in effect. Therefore, if there’s something in the Christian heritage that makes them look bad, it’s the Christian heritage that must necessarily be at fault, whether that Christian heritage is Paul himself or, later, Lutheranism or the like.
Sanders, as I mentioned, is a very interesting debater. You catch him out in a public debate, and he’ll take the hide off you first and ask questions later. I have seen him in SBL debates, for example, say something like this when some really penetrating question comes: “Does that spring out of your reading of the primary sources in the original languages? Because unless you’ve read all of the Targums, and so forth, in the original Aramaic, you’re not really qualified to ask the question.” Talk about the gift of intimidation. Whoa!
Now you understand why we wrote 600 pages of primary-source stuff in Volume 1 of Justification and Variegated Nomism. Sooner or later, if you’re going to tackle Sanders, you have to tackle him on his own ground. But he’s a very engaging man.
Jimmy Dunn is something else.
He’s an engaging man too, but he’s still something else. He was just ahead of me at Cambridge, and occasionally we debated on this or that, usually on matters Johannine, across the years.
You need to understand what Dunn is interested in. I don’t think he would deny what I’m about to say. We’ve had long conversations on what he’s trying to do. He sees himself as a kind of new Harnack. Harnack was attempting an entire history of earliest Christianity that put it all together to explain how we got from Jesus to the early patristic period. In some ways, that’s the kind of role Dunn has adopted for himself.
He’s interested in the rise of Christology. He’s interested in Pauline theology, and now he’s moving away from Pauline theology and focusing on the historical Jesus, and so forth. One of his earlier books, Unity and Diversity in the New Testament, begins by trying to show what diversity there is and what minimal unity there is in order to use the diversity as ways into trying to analyze the development of New Testament thought.
His early book on Christology begins with the assumption that first-century Christian Jews could not have accepted the deity of Christ. Therefore, acknowledgement of the deity of Christ must come pretty late in the whole business. He finds other ways of explaining Philippians 2, for example, and sources like that, which are pretty early, and doesn’t want explicit confession of the deity of Christ until John’s gospel, which he dates not earlier than AD 90. So he has a certain kind of agenda that comes out of a Harnack tradition too.
Now once he was influenced by Sanders, his Pauline thought went in a certain direction. If Sanders is right, then you still have to explain why the Jews and the Jewish Christian church separated. What accounts for what came to be called, out of Dunn’s terminology, the parting of the ways?
What accounts for their division? Why did they separate? If it’s not, according to Sanders, faith versus works, grace versus law, and gospel versus merit theology, then what is it? Yes, you have to say with Sanders that there’s this huge element of Christology there. Yes, we understand that, but in addition, what else is it?
He has modified it a bit since then, but what he argued for years was that the heart of the issue for Paul was not legalism but a kind of nationalism. The bits of the law Paul found most difficult were not the moral categories but what he called the boundary markers: Sabbath, food laws, circumcision … the things which, in the public domain, marked the people of the Jews off from other people. That’s what made them different.
What made them different in a Roman Empire that worked largely on a 10-day week was a 7-day week. What made them different was all this kosher food stuff, which meant they couldn’t have the friendship and fellowship and move into the homes of and make close friends with pagans unless they themselves became fairly secularized. What made them different was not only Sabbath and food but things like circumcision, which from a Greek point of view was viewed as mutilation. Those were the boundary markers.
So, Sanders says, when you come to a book like Galatians, think of how much time is devoted to things like food. The conflict between Paul and Peter in Galatians, chapter 2, is certainly tied, in some sense, to a food issue. Circumcision keeps re-circling and re-circling until, in chapter 5, Paul can go so far as to say, “I wish they’d go the whole way and castrate themselves.” It sounds as if Sanders is right. It’s the national boundary issues.
In other words, he argues that what Paul is combating is not legalism but nationalism, because Paul wants one people, Jew and Gentile, a unified church, and to get a unified church you have to get rid of the boundary markers. That means, then, that Paul is less interested in questions of guilt, to go back to the issues of Krister Stendahl, less interested in matters of moral shame, personal guilt before God, and much more interested in these boundary markers.
In fact, he goes so far as to argue that the expression erga nomou or ta erga tou nomou, the works of the law, does not refer to the works of the law by which you gain salvation in some moral sense but simply these boundary markers works. Now in all fairness to the man, in recent years he has modified that position, partly because scholar after scholar, exegete after exegete, started picking up individual texts that just don’t fit into that paradigm.
He has had to broaden his categories and acknowledge, “Well, sometimes the works of the law really aren’t talking about boundary marker things. Sometimes they really are talking about moral issues.” I’m told that he has now written a 60-page response to Volume 2 of Justification and Variegated Nomism, which I have not yet seen.
It is reported to me that the heart of it is to say that all he’s trying to defend is that within Paul’s understanding of justification there is some element of nationalism that he is confronting and that we have gone way over the top by writing 1,200 pages on something like this. This is what is called historical revisionism, because the dear man really was making boundary markers the center of absolutely everything.
It is he who has changed, and now he’s revising his own history to sort of bail himself out. If all he had been doing from the beginning was to say that there is an element of nationalism within Jewish approach to the law and Paul had to confront that too, we would have all said, “Amen” and spared you 1,200 pages of assigned reading. So if you don’t like those books, you know whom to blame.
Now we come to Tom Wright.
Tom and I were exact contemporaries, he at Oxford and I at Cambridge, and we used to meet up in the summer and have long discussions. At that time, believe it or not, he was a traditional five-point Calvinist. His first book, The Grace of God in the Gospel, defended that stance. He held to inerrancy. He was a very conservative person in the Reformed heritage.
I remember him reading a technical paper at the Tyndale Fellowship one summer about 1973 or 1974. It was on Romans 9:5. He took exactly the view of that passage then that I still take. He has changed since then, but I can remember those technical papers and those discussions at the time. He still says today that he has not changed any of his fundamental views, but this would come as a surprise to most of us who knew him.
In the early 80s, when John Woodbridge and I were laying out the plans for the two volumes we did on Scripture, Scripture and Truth and Hermeneutics, Authority, and Canon, we laid out the whole series of topics we wanted to address on paper, and we wrote to various friends around the world and said, “What we’re trying to do is articulate a historic, biblically faithful doctrine of Scripture that addresses contemporary questions rather than questions of yesterday and the day before. Choose one. You’ve held this view for a long time. Pick a topic and join us.”
At that time, he was lecturing at McGill in Montreal, which was my old alma mater. Tom wrote back and said, “I’m glad you and John are doing this. Well done. Keep up the good work, but I’ve decided myself that I don’t want to write on that sort of topic, because it might queer any chance I have for getting into Oxbridge.” Oxbridge is Oxford or Cambridge.
My response to that is, “Well, by the time you get into Oxford or Cambridge, you’re not going to believe this stuff in any case. You have to keep working with it and teach it and work it out or else, eventually, if you keep silent on it forever, you won’t believe it anymore,” which is what happened. Now if you bring up the subject of inerrancy, it’s one of the few things that makes him really angry, and he dismisses it as that “stupid American doctrine,” which indicates a certain lack of historical savvy, I think, but we’ll let that pass. It’s not our topic today.
He, too, is a brilliant debater like E.P. Sanders, a brilliant communicator, and we must say that he has been the writer of some wonderful books too. I don’t know how many copies of his little book Who Was Jesus? I’ve given away, a fine response to some of the more way-out approaches, the really silly left-wing things. It’s a wonderful book. The ability to write reviews.… If you want to see one of the funniest academic reviews I have ever read in my life.… Normally, you don’t have belly laughs when you’re reading academic reviews, but with Tom Wright you might.
It’s when he wrote a review in 1993 of John Dominic Crossan’s The Historical Jesus. The essay is called Taking the Text with Her Pleasure: A Post-Post-Modernist Response to J. Dominic Crossan’s The Historical Jesus. It’s published in Theology, and it is outrageously funny. He wrote that at SBL overnight before he delivered it the next day to 800 people, and people literally fell off their chairs laughing.
You don’t normally go to Society of Biblical Literature to fall off your chair laughing, but this is what Tom could pull off. He really is a charmer, very funny and very capable and very often on the side of the angels too, and you thank God for him. His most recent book is on the resurrection of Christ. It’s a kind of 800-page work of supererogation in the line of Frank Morison’s Who Moved the Stone, which was a 150-page thin thing about 80 years ago.
In many ways it is a brilliant book, very helpful indeed, although in my judgment it also has some really deep theological problems with it. For this, see the review by Stephen Williams. I’m not going to go into that subject here. He has embarked on.… Well, it was supposed to be a five-volume work, now a six-volume work on the origins of Christianity and the question of God. The first was The New Testament and the People of God. The second was Jesus and the Victory of God, and now he has come out with this book on the resurrection of Christ.
He has also written extensively in the area of Paul, some of it popular, some of it semipopular. Probably his most influential book is The Climax of the Covenant. He argues, amongst other things, that Jesus had no consciousness that he was God. That is part of his presupposition as he approaches texts. There is a lot that is excellent in his historical books, especially when he’s taking on people on the far left. He really is a very interesting man. Now I can only focus on those elements of his thought here that directly impinge justification. I simply don’t have time to wrestle with larger issues.
At the heart of his thought as it impinges on justification is this: The exile, he says, is not over when that first group of 43,000 go back to Jerusalem, nor when the temple is rebuilt, because after all, the promises God gives through the prophets regarding the end of the exile anticipate something far more spectacular, far more generous, far more sweeping, that ultimately, according to Isaiah and according to Psalm 87, brings in the Philistines and Assyria and the Egyptians, and it brings respite to the land and great godliness, and you don’t see that.
You see the Jews coming back, and they’re a little battered bunch. It’s not long before the Persians give way to the Greeks, and the Greeks give way to the conflict between the Seleucids and Ptolemies, and eventually they beat up on the Seleucids, and they have their own land after the Maccabean Revolt in 167 to 164 BC, and then it’s only another century before the Romans take over. They really haven’t seen the fulfillment of all of those promises. Thus, the Jews understood themselves still to be in the exile during first-century Judaism.
Within this framework, then, Jesus comes along to end the exile. The Deuteronomistic pattern, laid out in Deuteronomy 28–30, of blessing and cursing had not been brought to completion. The people still waited for promises of restoration. For Paul, faith in Christ resolved that issue and satisfied Paul’s deepest longing. As a result of his Damascus Road experience, Paul came to believe that the exile had ended in the death of the Messiah.
The corporate guilt of the covenant community had been paid by Christ. It’s a corporate thing. He has paid for this guilt, and that’s what brings the exile to an end, but by his resurrection, he brings in not only the Jews but Gentiles as well. He brings in Jews and Gentiles to constitute a new covenant community, so that for Sanders as well, he thinks of some of the concerns that so energize Dunn, and he thinks that part of what Paul is trying to do is get rid of these boundary markers.
Jesus’ resurrection, then, implies the ushering in of the nations to share in the blessings of the covenant. The end of the exile is here, the blessings for the nations are here, and people are reconciled to God. Thus, Jesus directs our attention away from Torah and temple and kosher laws to himself, and he claims, thus, to constitute the locus of the true Israel that has now come to the end of the exilic period.
Tom Wright has the ability to see something that is partly true. There is some truth in a lot of his analyses, and then he tends to get on his white horse and ride it off merrily in all directions. As a result, texts that don’t seem to be talking about this get squeezed into the paradigm, so that even, for example, the parable of the prodigal son, Luke 15:11–32, becomes, in Wright’s understanding, one more way of getting at the question of the exile.
It’s not really about individuals being accepted by God; it’s rather about Israel as a whole being brought back in and being accepted before God. It’s really an announcement of the end of the exile. One of the effects of this is that all of God’s victory (after all, we shouldn’t forget the second volume in the series, Jesus and the Victory of God) is bound up in Jesus. So he tends to downplay references in the Gospels to the parousia or the end of the age or the like. It’s all bound up in Jesus right now.
That means Jesus does not so much ask for individual repentance in the ordinary sense that you and I have received but in a sense of turning away from revolutionary zeal, turning away from dependence upon the temple, turning away from nationalism, and turning to Jesus. Faith becomes loyalty or trust in the leader, Jesus himself. The sinners are the notoriously wicked, and even they are admitted. That’s his reading of Jesus.
Now you come to Paul. The way this works out in Wright’s thought in Paul is that justification, for him, is God’s declarative act to the effect that you are in the covenant. There are two differences between that definition, that reading of things, and what is understood this side of the Reformation, and earlier too. You must constantly remember that justification by grace alone through faith alone was not invented at the time of the Reformation.
The book by Tom Oden, The Justification Reader, shows how widespread this view was in the patristic period, though it was not the only view. The Reformers were recovering something not only Pauline but patristic and trying to set it out in its biblically faithful place rather than inventing something brand new, which is sometimes the impression you would get reading Krister Stendahl.
That aside, the Reformed view, the Protestant view, the heritage of justification, the Pauline view, in my judgment, of justification has two points of difference from this new definition of justification advanced by Wright. He sees justification to be God’s declarative act, all right. It’s a declarative act, but there are two differences.
For most of us in the Pauline Reformation heritage, this declarative act takes place at the beginning of our Christian experience. It is what marks the denouement, the beginning. You are justified, and then after that there is progressive gaining of holiness by obedience, repentance, the ministrations of the Word, the power of his Spirit within us, and so forth.
So you are declared just before God because of Christ’s substitutionary death on your behalf. You are reconciled to him. God is satisfied by the offering Jesus has made, and as a result, you are declared just before him. In Wright’s view, this declaration is an ongoing declaration. It has nothing particular to do with the beginning of your Christian experience. It’s God’s ongoing declaration of your status before God.
Because the exile has come to an end and Jesus has borne the sins of his people and has risen to embrace all of these people, then as these people are embraced before God, they are declared to be in the covenant too, not only at the beginning of their entrance into this covenant but beyond. In all of your life, in all of your walk, God declares you to be in the covenant, to be part of the covenant community. It is removed, therefore, from this point of entrance.
The second difference is this: There was already in play a certain interpretation of justification that had to do with covenantal loyalty rather than with justice. Its roots go back to Ernst K‰semann and beyond. He has toyed with this. He has played with this. Justification is now God’s declarative act not that you are just but that you are in the covenant.
He’s not denying that there is a sin thing that has to be overcome and that the cross overcomes it, but justification itself now is God’s declarative act that you are in the covenant. Thus, justification becomes one step removed from dealing with sin and being declared just before God. It’s a covenantal thing.
To put this matter in the categories of historical theology, this has the effect of raising ecclesiology above soteriology, whereas in the Reformed view of the hierarchy of things, soteriology comes first and your ecclesiology flows out of it. That’s a major difference. Now he would still say that his understanding of the total work of Christ includes the payment for sins achieved by the cross, but justification itself is God’s declarative act that we are in and continue to be in the covenant, and it is removed, thus, from questions of justice per se.
A number of years ago, when I was acting warden of Tyndale House in Cambridge, I had an old Septuagintal scholar come by and spend some time in the library, a lovely man, a chap called David Gooding, who has done many, many years of work in Spain and behind the Iron Curtain (the curtain was still up then). He was not a technical biblical scholar but vastly informed in matters Septuagintal and a fine Christian man who was constantly doing a lot of good work.
He came to me one day and said, “I would like you to explain what Tom Wright’s views are,” so I tried to lay them out as evenhandedly and carefully and accurately as I could. His first question after I got to the end of this definition of justification was, “Does Tom know any Greek?” Now Tom, in all fairness to him, would be aghast at the suggestion.
It is true that you cannot determine the meaning of words by simple reference to etymology, but you do have to remember that the whole dik- word group (dikaiosune, dikaioo, dikaios, adikia) is bound up with some notion or other of justice. To make justification God’s declarative act that you are in the covenant without reference to justice and, thus, one step removed from questions of guilt and injustice is precisely what prompted the question in Gooding’s mind, “Does Tom know any Greek?” It was an innocent question.
That means one of the things you have to do when you approach this question is some decent word studies, which is why dear ol’ Mark Seifrid has endless pages in those two volumes on the tsadaq word group from the Old Testament and the dikaioo word group from the New Testament. Those are technical questions, but they simply cannot be avoided if you’re going to get at the heart of this sort of issue.
Moreover, you do have to understand that there are pastoral implications to all of this. This is not merely an airy-fairy discussion for theologians who have far too much time on their hands. A friend of mine, an Aussie by the name of Peter Bolt, listened to Tom give a lecture in Cambridge a number of years ago (I wasn’t there at the time) with the title Justification: Can We Finally Get It Right? The title itself is inviting, isn’t it?
Peter Bolt, bless his Australian socks, managed to keep quiet the whole time, which is proof positive that the age of miracles is not dead. At the end, however, he went up to Tom privately and said, “I have a question for you. It’s the middle of the night. The phone rings. You look at your watch. It’s about 2:30 in the morning. You hear the quivering voice of an old lady in your parish. ‘Tom, the doctor says I only have a few minutes to live. I’m scared. Come and see me.’
So you hastily get dressed and jump in your car and drive over to her place. The doctor backs away and leaves you alone. The doctor whispers as he goes out the door, ‘She surely only has about 10 minutes to live.’ You go in, and she takes your hand in her two trembling frail old hands, and she says to you, ‘Tom, what must I do to be saved?’ What will you say?” Tom said, “That’s a good question. I’ll have to think about that.”
My friend, being Australian and, therefore, more notoriously perverse than otherwise, said, “Let me offer some suggestions. Would you say, ‘You must be a member of the right covenantal community’?” Well, Tom is far too shrewd a debater to get in that sort of trap. He could see right away where that was going, and they went around several cycles.
Now I’m sure that if you asked Tom the same question today, he’d have a snappy answer right back in your face. Precisely because he is a good debater, he’s not going to get caught by the same trick question twice. Nevertheless, I would still want to say there’s something wrong with a system that makes you come back and have second thoughts about how you lead people to Christ 10 minutes before they’re dying.
In other words, you’re not playing around with something peripheral. You’re playing around with something jolly close to the heart of the gospel here, and you need to understand that as you start working these things out. Let me take a more moderate position now. Some people don’t even consider these chaps in the so-called new perspective camp, but others do.
I’m thinking of people like Don Garlington and his book The Obedience of Faith, and his more recent one as well, and some of Scott Hafemann and others. These positions are more subtle. In some ways, Norman Shepherd is in this camp too, although there are subtle differences as well. It’s hard to nail down all of the details of the Auburn movement, but some of that movement is in this camp as well, although, again, there are subtle differences.
Let me stick with Don Garlington and Scott Hafemann as sort of exemplars of this subdivision.
What they argue, Scott Hafemann and Don Garlington in particular, is that although you are justified by grace alone through faith alone at your conversion, there is, as it were, a kind of further justification that is required when you come before the pearly gates.
When you come to the final judgment and God asks, in effect, “Why should I let you in here?” then you must show not only that you trust Christ and Christ alone, but the works that have flown out of your salvation and are the product of grace must serve not only as attesting evidence of the reality of salvation but, in some sense, usually fairly ill-defined, as ground.
In other words, you are justified not only by the finished cross work of Christ but also, in some sense, by works. Not when you’re converted. That’s by grace alone through faith alone. But when you stand before God on the last day, this future justification is, in part, they would say, a justification of works.
Now they would be very quick to add that these works you can do only because of the grace of God working in you. This is not because of something you yourself bring intrinsically to the table. All of these things would be set in place. On the other hand, a decent Catholic would say the same thing.
The issue is whether or not these works are attesting works (that is, they attest to the grace that is actually there, but the ground of your salvation is exclusively the finished cross work of Christ and the satisfaction that he alone achieved before the Almighty), or is there some additional requirement that goes beyond attesting evidence to actual ground in your works? They go so far as to insist there is.
Now you push them hard enough and they start getting slippery, but nevertheless, that’s what they’re saying, and that’s where the point of division is arising in some of these voices. It, too, belongs, in some way, to the new perspective. Usually, these people say that in the Old Testament God did not require perfection. He required broad-stream covenantal capacity, faithfulness.
Therefore, they understand Romans 2, which is a difficult passage on any reading, to say, in effect, that faithfulness to the law was a live option and achieved by some. That makes it very hard, in my judgment, to integrate Romans 2 with Galatians 3, but we’ll worry about some of these exegetical details in the second hour.
Now this is a bit of a potted survey, in some ways not fair because of the speed. If you want to get a really fine view of the whole field of the relationship between Old Testament and New, law and grace, the whole field of Pauline studies in the law, the best one-essay survey is certainly that of Stephen Westerholm, the lead volume in Volume 2 of Justification and Variegated Nomism.
If you’ve never read anything on this whole debate and your teachers here are threatening you with perdition unless you get it under your belt, I strongly suggest you do not read the two volumes of Justification and Variegated Nomism, because they are too long and too technical and too complicated.
Read, instead, Stephen Westerholm’s book Perspectives Old and New on Paul. If, on the other hand, you want detailed interaction with text after text after text, then I do think those two volumes are the best things available. I can say that because I didn’t write them; I merely edited them.
