The New Perspective on Paul (part 2)

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.

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You will know the issues are sufficiently complicated there is simply no way they can be treated adequately in the course of an hour or two. What I’m going to do, instead of attempting an evenhanded swing through the whole lot, I’m going to hit down and survey a few bits and pieces here and there.

Then every once in a while, I’ll stop on a particular text or a particular point and expatiate at length. This will be an entirely arbitrary selection. You might have preferred another selection, but invite me back again. We’ll give you another selection. This is the selection you’re stuck with this time. What can I say?

First, one of the things that becomes obvious in this debate is the number of different domains that are touched.

For example, one domain is the domain of historical theology. I started off with Krister Stendahl and his essay, “The Apostle Paul and the Introspective Conscience of the West,” but is it Luther and Calvin and the West who have this so wrong, or is it Stendahl?

One of the things many of the exegetes in the new perspective do is cast their views over against Luther and Calvin and say they’re trying to reform the Reformers in the light of the Word of God, and so forth. With all respect, if you read their works carefully and the footnotes, their understanding of Luther and Calvin both is very often dependent on remarkably derivative works.

I remember one painful conversation with one of the leaders, who shall remain nameless to protect the guilty, who clearly was unable to distinguish between Pelagianism and semi-Pelagianism. How you can talk on matters of law and grace and not make that distinction is past calculation. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, then make sure you find out before you start talking about it, because they’re pretty fundamental questions about how grace and merit, and so on, work out.

He was reading Pelagianism into one of his sources where it really was semi-Pelagian, which is part of the reason why we did include in Volume 2 of this set a really quite lovely essay by Timothy George on Luther, trying to get Luther straight and show where, in fact, some of the polemics have gone awry.

You can shape a discussion by framing it a certain way. If you stereotype another person’s position and show how it’s bad, then you can say what you’re doing is good. If the other position doesn’t really hold that and actually says a whole lot of things you’re trying to say but puts them in a more believable framework, then suddenly you’re the one who looks a bit silly. The historical-theological questions really are very important indeed.

Let me take an analogy right away from this one so it’s not freighted with so much weight. I have a book coming out this month on the emerging church movement. There are lots of good things to be said about some elements of the emerging church movement and some pretty negative things to be said as well.

One of the things that strikes me about the positive elements in the emerging church movement is the most positive things that can be said about the emerging church movement (and there are quite a lot of them) you could also say about other segments of broader confessional Christianity without all the negatives that go with it.

In other words, I could show you the strengths of the best parts of the emerging movement in a church like Tim Keller’s in Manhattan without all the nasty stuff you sometimes get in other parts of that movement. If you can show, for example, some of the great strengths of this new perspective theology are, in fact, already there in Luther and Calvin, then the stereotype of what’s bad with them and what’s good with you gets twisted.

Then you start asking what is it exactly you’re introducing and are you saying something now that is moving you away from Scripture or closer to Scripture? The whole frame of the debate gets changed, and it’s in that sense detailed knowledge of the historical-theological categories really becomes very important. Do not believe what most of these writers say Luther and Calvin believed. They far more often than not get it wrong than right. You just have to read the primary sources before you make judgments in that sort.

Secondly, you also have to know something about the domain of Second Temple Judaism.

Clearly, a lot of this debate has been cast against the background of E.P. Sanders’ work. That’s why in this two-volume project we spent the whole first volume on the literature of Second Temple Judaism.

Let me warn you, that is a hard book to plow through because it has all this unpointed Aramaic and this untranslated Greek all from sources most of you have never read and never will read. If you do get that book, don’t buy it. It’s too expensive. Go and borrow it from the library. That’s what libraries are for. Just read the first chapter and the last chapter.

In this case we provided a long summary chapter at the end so you wouldn’t have to read the 550 pages between the two, and you will get a summary of the whole argument of the book and spare yourself all the pain of reading 3 Baruch in the original. If, of course, you want to become a scholar and understand this literature, sooner or later you have to wade through it all, but in order to understand the bearing of Second Temple Judaism on this debate, that’s the way to get into it in a survey sort of way.

Having said that, I still want to say E.P. Sanders is partly right. He does introduce some major corrections where a lot of people got it wrong, especially Lutherans but not only Lutherans. That is, there was a tremendous tendency to read a lot of relatively late Jewish sources back into the first century.

He is calling, therefore, Christian scholars who approach the Jewish sources to account in some very healthy ways. It is important not to be guilty of anachronism when you are doing your historical work. We really would not appreciate people doing that to American history. You don’t try to find out what George Washington thought by reading the New York Times in 2005. It’s that kind of time gap you’re talking about. It’s just not the way you do history.

Having said that, it is important to recognize he has now introduced a new reductionism. The old reductionism was seeing advanced systematic merit theology in all the Jewish sources everywhere in the first century. He has introduced a new reductionism he calls covenantal nomism. He has one pattern that controls everything.

The strength of Sanders’ influence turns on saying covenantal nomism operates everywhere in the first century. If you can show it doesn’t operate everywhere in the first century, that it might be there but it’s not everywhere in the first century, then suddenly the background against which you are doing your work on Paul, the background against which you are reading Paul is going to be far, far more diverse. Therefore, you are less likely to read this unique created background into Paul. The background becomes far more diverse.

Let me give a couple of examples. Quite a number of years ago just for the fun of it, I worked through all of the instances in Josephus where the word charis appears, grace. You can do this very easily yourself either by the TLG database, or there is an excellent concordance to Josephus that’s now available as well, edited by Rengstorf. I assume it’s in your library, but if not you can easily get it. You can look up all the examples of grace in Josephus. I encourage you to do so. Go look them all up.

What you discover is in half a dozen major instances when Josephus talks about God pouring out his grace, he himself actually raises the question, “Is this grace poured out on those who deserve it or on those who do not deserve it?” It sounds like a good Pauline question, but Josephus’ answer is, “Well, obviously on those who deserve it, because otherwise God would be unjust.”

There is no way on God’s green earth you’re going to persuade me that’s roughly the same theology as Paul’s, and we’ll just call it all covenantal nomism. Suddenly, you have major conceptual distance between Josephus and Paul. This is not dependent upon a simple word. I’ve used the word to get into Josephus, but in fact, I read right through Josephus working on this stuff many years ago.

You are in a different conceptual world. To tie the whole thing under this rubric covenantal nomism is to hide too many distinctions under a rubric. There is a sense in which first-century Palestinian Judaism really did believe you were saved by grace, but when we think of being saved by grace, we’re thinking of all being sinners and God’s grace coming to us individually to constitute us a new corpus, a new body, and God’s grace continuing to work out in us as manifested in faith and works.

The grace that is manifested to the Jews is not the grace, in Sanders’ construction, of individual salvation or bound up with the remnant. It is bound up with the initial call of corporate Israel back in history as found in passages like Deuteronomy 7 and Deuteronomy 10. That’s very different even in its conception of beginnings and origins.

Moreover, Paul’s unambiguous statements about grace being poured out on Abraham while he was yet a sinner and things like that in Romans 4 mean he’s working in a very different conceptual field than is Josephus. The whole point of our first volume was to say although there are some things in Second Temple Judaism that could usefully be called covenantal nomism, the patterns of religion are far more diverse than that.

Jimmy Dunn, when he reviewed my closing essay of that first book, said, “Why is Carson so upset? He himself acknowledges covenantal nomism is found there. That’s all we’ve been saying.” I want to say, “Jimmy, it’s called historical revisionism again, because the whole tenor of the debate was not that covenantal nomism is found there but that covenantal nomism is the only thing that’s found there. Therefore, you have to interpret Paul against that background.”

Once you show there is a far greater diversity of patterns, then you have to make your case for what sort of background Paul is making his argument against (if you will allow me to end with a preposition). In that connection, then, you have to say my dear friend Jimmy Dunn is engaging a little bit of historical revisionism in order to protect his derriËre. Pardon my French. I was brought up in French Canada, so it does slip out now and then. I think Joe was brought up in Rome, so his Latin slips out now and then.

There is a third methodological question that has to be raised here.

It’s quite a tricky question. It has been developed in recent years around two terms, parallelomania and parallelophobia. The term parallelomania was coined by the great Jewish scholar Samuel Sandmel in about 1965 in an essay by that name in the Journal of Biblical Literature.

What he was saying was it’s possible to come to a biblical passage and then read all the ostensible parallels all around it and then interpret the passage in the light of the parallels. The parallels then dictate what the passage must mean, because all of those parallels show the weltanschauung, the worldview, the frame of reference in which this is operating. Then you read the parallels into the text.

He calls this parallelomania. It’s a lovely expression, isn’t it? It’s often done. Do you want a fine example of that? Go and read Betz’s commentary on Galatians in the Hermeneia series. It’s a commentary of massive, wholly admirable learning and almost complete irrelevance for the text. He doesn’t seem to know the Jewish sources very well, but he’s superb at finding the Greco-Roman ostensible parallels to anything you can find in Galatians.

Then when you read through Galatians, he’s reading Galatians in the light of all of these sources. It’s a case of parallelomania. The best at taking a Betz to the woodshed in this regard is a book in the SNTSMS series by Philip Kern, which basically is simply saying this whole book is guilty of parallelomania.

The obverse difficulty is parallelophobia, where you’re trying to read a text so much out of its historical context you’re afraid of parallels. In fact, part of good exegetical and historical rigor is trying to figure out what you should do with parallels. That’s going to take us too far away to probe here in detail.

What I would say is the whole Sanders approach is breaking down now, but the whole Sanders approach seemed to foster a lot of parallelomania. The argument really was Second Temple Judaism is controlled by covenantal nomism. That’s the only Jewish background. Therefore, you must read Paul in the light of it. Thus, Paul gets domesticated by these ostensible parallels, all of which are supposed to reflect covenantal nomism.

Quite apart from the fact that in my judgment covenantal nomism covers only a much smaller part of that literature than he thinks rather than the whole, even so, you still have to say, “Just because that’s the background, are you really suggesting dear ol’ Paul never had an independent thought in his head?” At what point does somebody say, “Well, that might be the background, but I think the background is right up the creek without a paddle. I think the revelation of God says something quite different”?

So far from merely being domesticated by the background, the text may well take on the background, confront the background, revise the background, challenge the background, say the background is wrong. I don’t think this as a methodological matter has been adequately explored in this debate at all.

This is especially important, I think, in the matter of sin. There are some exceptions, texts like 4 Ezra, but by and large, Second Temple Judaism takes sin much less seriously than Paul takes sin. If you try to develop a whole Pauline theology on the basis of Second Temple Judaism’s view of sin apart from some texts like 4 Ezra, then you simply will have a much more domesticated theology.

It seems to me one of the reasons why Paul goes on and on at it in a text like the first three chapters of Romans is precisely because he is trying to insist his own confrËres in the Jewish heritage haven’t got that quite right, and he’s trying to show from Scripture you have to take sin much more seriously than, in fact, he himself took it in the days when he was a Pharisee. I’ll come back to that question with some exegetical comments this afternoon.

Fourth, clearly something must be done in the domain of word studies, words and expressions, and there are several of these, not just the dikaiosune word group but also pistis, as we’ll see this afternoon.

Is pistis IÈsous faith in Jesus Christ or the faith of Jesus Christ? I’ll deal with that one this afternoon. Are ta erga tou nomou, the works of the law, merely referring to boundary markers or are they referring to all works that are done in conformity to the law, and how do they function in Paul’s thought?

All of those sorts of things must be done, and I don’t have time to do them here. I am sure your New Testament faculty are pointing you in the right direction of studies along these lines. Nowadays there are a lot of them. The most sophisticated now in the area of righteousness, justification, is certainly the pair of essays by Mark Seifrid in Volumes 1 and 2 of this pair of volumes. Let me just mention a couple of things he has brought to light.

I indicated justification language, since K‰semann, has been tied in a lot of people’s thought to God’s faithfulness to the covenant, God being just because he’s faithful to the covenant. Then Tom Wright takes that one stage farther and says justification is God’s declaration you’re in the covenant, but it has antecedent work.… God is faithful to his covenant … often seen in a very positive sort of way.

Seifrid, working through the Old Testament texts, draws attention to a number of points I mentioned too.

First, he shows how often God’s righteousness is tied in the Old Testament to judgment as well as to faithfulness to the covenant to bring blessing.

His bringing blessing in line with the covenantal promises is part of his justice, but so also is his bringing of judgment.

In it all God himself is the one who must be just. God is in contention with us, and he is the one who must be vindicated in text after text. That sets up a different expectation of what the atonement brings. If there is a judgment that must be accounted for somewhere, then the way you are going to approach the question of the atonement is going to be very different than if you see justification as simply tied to God’s covenantal commitment to bringing the blessings he has promised in the covenant. We’ll deal with that in a particular passage this afternoon as well.

The second detail Seifrid brings out, I had never observed it before. I was already familiar with the sort of thing I’ve described now, but this second point I had never even thought of until Seifrid brought it out.

There is a domain of word studies that looks at what words any word is associated with. In other words, when you get one word group, what kind of words are called up around it?

You would think, granted the way Tom and Jimmy Dunn and others use justification to refer to God’s covenantal faithfulness or God’s declaration you’re in the covenant, this tsadaq word group would be tied very often in the Old Testament to beriyth; that is, to covenant. It just never is, or stretch it two places maybe, depending on how you read the text. That’s it.

Whereas it is tied scores and scores of times, 150 approximately, to matters of creational justice that is not to the covenant but to whether or not God holds his created beings to account both for blessing and for curse. That then takes it out of this realm of covenantal faithfulness. It’s just not tied to the beriyth word group. It’s tied to this notion of justice, such that at the end of the day it seems to me there has been a lot of misconception in this arena. I could give you many texts, but I think I’m going to pass on at this juncture.

Let me say at least a little bit about the exile in the fifth place, because some of this debate, at least in Tom’s reconstruction, turns on the place of the exile. Let me repeat what he says and then begin a response. What he says, if you recall, is Judaism in the first century was still in exile. The Deuteronomistic pattern of cursing and blessing, Deuteronomy 28 to 30, had not been brought to completion. The people are still waiting for the promise of restoration.

For Paul it is faith in Christ that resolves the issue and satisfies Paul’s deepest longing. On the Damascus road he came to the conviction Christ meant the end of the exile. The end of the exile had occurred in the death of the Messiah because the Messiah took on the guilt of the corporate people so the Messiah’s death meant the end of the exile. He bore the Old Testament curses of the law for Israel on the cross. Jesus’ resurrection then implies the ushering in of the nations to share in this blessing of the covenant. That’s the structure of his thought.

Exile questions are very complex, but let me at least raise a few questions. First, is this the best reading of Deuteronomy? There is a great deal of Old Testament thought that speaks of the Deuteronomistic history, which ostensibly is a history and theology that is a kind of merit theology. Do good and you get blessing; do bad and you get clobbered.

It all comes from this blessing-cursing antiphony in Deuteronomy 28 and following. Paul teaches us, and we’ll look at some passages shortly, to read the Old Testament in the whole flow of redemptive history. When you do that, you find something a little different. How does Deuteronomy end? It ends with Moses himself not getting into the Promised Land.

What comes next? The people do get into the Promised Land. Then you have these endless cycles going down and down until you come to the end of the Judges period. The last three chapters are so revolting you can scarcely read them in public. Even the good guys are morally obscene. That’s Judges.

Then you get the period of the kings. Saul had a lot of promise, but he didn’t end too well, did he? David was a man after God’s own heart. He ended up committing adultery and murder. One wonders what he would’ve done if he hadn’t been a man after God’s own heart. Then in a few centuries, the Davidic dynasty had driven itself into the ground. The whole Old Testament narrative comes again and again, not to give you the impression if you’re just good enough you can be faithful to the covenant, and sometimes we make it and sometimes we don’t.

The whole impression, rather, is much closer to the way Paul reads it; namely, it has the effect of multiplying transgression and teaching us what a wretched bunch of sinners we are and how much we need grace. In other words, I’m not sure the reading of Deuteronomistic history is right in the first instance. Nowadays there are some find pieces of research by Paul Barker and others on how to read Deuteronomy that call in question this whole thing in any case.

Secondly, “To shift from speaking of the burden of personal guilt to that of the nation represents no real movement away from psychologism.” That’s a direct quote from Seifrid, and I think he has it right. He is constantly saying our talk of individual guilt is guilty of psychologism. That’s sort of in the heritage of Krister Stendahl and “The Apostle Paul and the Introspective Conscience of the West,” whereas Paul is understood in corporate guilt.

“There is none righteous, no, not one.” That sounds pretty individualistic to me. In any case, to move to corporate guilt doesn’t escape psychologism. Now you’re just dealing with the psychology of the nation rather than with the psychology of the individual. That doesn’t address the question about whether there’s moral guilt, which must be met whether of the individual or of the nation or of both.

To be an adequate explanation, it must suppose Jews generally understood the nation was in exile and they regarded this situation to be a result of corporate guilt in which they shared. That’s the only way you can make the exile theory work. The extrabiblical sources on the exile are, in fact, very mixed.

In many of them Israel is divided into the pious and the wicked. The former adhere to the law and will be prepared for the restoration when it comes, and the latter will suffer punishment along with the enemies of God’s people. Just read a lot of the Qumran’s documents, for example. This means the sin of Israel is not absolute.

It’s not corporate in that sense as the exile reading demands. The obedient await the future with confidence. Here’s Baruch 3:7. “We praise you from our exile because we have turned away from our hearts all of the unrighteousness of our fathers who sinned before you.” In other words, “We’re the good guys.”

In other words, these people, though they thought of themselves in exile in 3 Baruch, didn’t think of themselves in exile because they were part of corporate guilt. They thought it was despite the fact they were very righteous and it was about time God did something about it. In which case, how do you say it is Christ who removes the guilt? There’s no guilt to be removed.

Moreover, the piety of some within the nation is decoupled from its outward condition. Many sources speak of the exile as having ended in some sense even if it is continuing in some other sense. I have a doctoral student who is about to submit a dissertation on this area. His work is superb. When it comes out, I think it will put a lot of this exile stuff to rest. He just worked through all of the texts one by one and shows the various ways in which the texts do speak of the exile.

The Qumran community tended to think of itself as the faithful remnant. It was not in exile; except it was in exile from the temple because the bad guys had it, but apart from that they were not in exile, thank you very much. Thus, Mark Elliott’s book on the remnant theme is very important in this regard for overcoming some of this.

Tobit appears to think of a two-stage return: Some return and rebuild the temple, and they’re not in exile. All who are still in the Diaspora are in exile. So the exile is ended for some and not for others. The times of fulfillment are still ahead when they’re all back, and so on. There is a still more important factor. Do you remember the Galatians controversy? What is the attraction of the Galatian Christians toward Judaism?

Clearly, some in the Galatian church are being attracted to Judaism. What’s the attraction? Is the attraction, “Oh, I’d love to be in exile”? In other words, the exile theory presupposes the Jews themselves thought they were still in exile, and Christ meets that. If all the Jews thought of themselves as being in exile, then where’s the attraction of the Gentile Christians to join the Jews in Galatians?

The attraction of the Gentiles to join the Jews is because the Jews constitute some sort of “in” group. They have an inside track with God. Somehow to be a part of the covenant and to obey the law, as kosher or otherwise, is somehow to commend you to God in some special way. Thus, the exclusive sufficiency of the cross of Christ is jeopardized.

There is no way you could understand the Gentile Christians in Galatians are saying, “Oh, I really must become a Jew so I can be part of the exile.” If they’re not saying that, then here you have a whole lot of Jews who aren’t thinking of themselves as part of the exile. In other words, the emphasis on the universality of this self-consciousness in Jewish circles of being still under the exile, which need can only be met by Christ, is called in question by the evidence in text after text.

Moreover, there is no hint Paul in his pre-Christian days saw himself suffering as part of a nation in exile for its guilt. What does he say in Philippians 3? He was before the law, blameless. That doesn’t sound like somebody who’s suffering under some deep, deep consciousness of corporate guilt because he’s in the exile.

Fifth, let me turn now for a few minutes to a number of passages we should try to think about together. Let me pick up one from Galatians 2, one from Galatians 3, and then we’ll see how our time gets on. Years ago, Jimmy Dunn wrote some essays on Galatians 2:11–14, the conflict between Peter and Paul, and tried to point out it turns on food; therefore, it’s a boundary marker thing. The question is how you understand this conflict.… Is this conflict finally really about boundary markers? That’s the issue.

Let’s work at this text for a bit. Galatians, chapter 2, verses 11 and following: “When Peter came to Antioch, I opposed him to his face, because he was clearly in the wrong. Before certain men came from James, he used to eat with the Gentiles. But when they arrived, he began to draw back and separate himself from the Gentiles because he was afraid of those who belonged to the circumcision group. The other Jews joined him in his hypocrisy, so that by their hypocrisy even Barnabas was led astray.”

What is going on in this scene? What is it Peter has done? What is he guilty of? What is Paul charging him with? Part of your reconstruction of this passage depends on whether or not you identify certain men from James in verse 12 with the circumcision group at the end of verse 12. I suppose the most common reading is to identify them, in which case this is what’s going on:

Peter is in Antioch. He’s quite comfortable eating with Jews and Gentiles alike. He’s gotten over his shtick on kosher food. “Before certain men came from James …” That is, Jews of a more conservative stamp who are still more comfortable eating by themselves. “… he used to eat with the Gentiles. But when they arrived, he began to draw back.” Presumably they were off at a private table.

The church met together for a meal before they had the Eucharistie. Before the Eucharistie they would eat, and all the church would meet over here, except these Jews from Jerusalem who still had a conscience in this area. They had a special table over there with no pork and no mixed bowls with both meat and milk and that sort of thing, a nice kosher table over there. They ate over there.

Then as the days progressed, Peter would sometimes eat with them and sometimes with them and began to wonder what they would say when they went back to Jerusalem and what people back there would think about him. It’s a bit dicey, isn’t it? Eventually, he has a few more meals over there, and pretty soon he’s eating only over there.

That means others in the congregation are thinking, “Well, if Peter himself, the hero of Pentecost, thinks it’s important to eat over there, maybe we should eat over there too.” Gradually, more and more Jews slip over to that table. They have to lay out another table or two. Now you have two sets of Gentiles over here and the Jews over there. Even Barnabas sidles over there. That’s what presupposed by all of this.

Certain men came from James, and Peter was afraid of those who belonged to the circumcision group, namely those who came from James. That’s the argument. Eventually then, Paul gets up and charges him with heresy. With the best will in the world, I believe that reconstruction is … let me use a theological term … a load of balderdash! I know it’s very common, but for the life of me I can’t imagine Peter being quite so stupid.

On any reconstruction of the history, we’ve already seen Peter get through Acts 10 and 11. He has already seen this vision. “What God has made clean, let …” Then he has gone back to Jerusalem and defended it, for goodness’ sake. He has defended it before the whole church. “If the Holy Spirit is fallen on them, then who are we …” He’s been there, he’s done that, and bought the tee shirt. Why should he be going back at this juncture? It doesn’t make any sense.

Not only so, but depending on what the date of this is with respect to the Jerusalem Council, if this is after the Jerusalem Council, it makes even less sense. On my view this is considerably before the Jerusalem Council, but some date it a little differently. In any case at this point, it’s very difficult to imagine at this point in the conflict Peter has no sense at all in this area and his theology is as weak and as fickle as that.

Supposing these two references, certain from James and the circumcision group represent two different people, then what takes place looks very different. The expression, certain from James, in Greek suggests, though I acknowledge it doesn’t prove, they were actually sent by James. That is, they were not merely from the Jerusalem church. If they were merely from Jerusalem church, why didn’t the text say, “Certain from Jerusalem”? Certain from James sounds as if they were sent by James.

The expression at the end, the circumcision group, is used by Paul in several different ways. I won’t bore you with all the references, but sometimes it refers to unconverted Jews. Sometimes it refers to Christians who are Jews and are circumcised. They’re the circumcision group, and that depends entirely on the context. Whether they’re converted or unconverted Jews depends entirely on the context.

If this refers to converted Jews, then these converted Jews could be the same ones as those from James. Supposing it’s referring to unconverted Jews, which I rather suspect, then another entire reconstruction is possible here. Peter is happily eating with Jews and Gentiles alike. The church has gotten by that one. Now there might be some individual Christians who haven’t gotten by it, but they’ve gotten by it in principle, down even in Jerusalem judging by Acts 10 and 11.

Then certain people are sent by James to the church up here. What are they sent for? What’s the message? If they’re sent, what’s the message of these messengers? Here I indulge in a little bit of historical speculation. I acknowledge it, but any reconstruction involves some speculation. If this is taking place in the early 40s, there are successive waves of persecution against Christian Jews in Jerusalem, brutal waves of persecution.

I can well imagine stories of Peter’s eating with Jews and Gentiles have filtered back down to Jerusalem. The oppression coming from the stricter zealots and from the stricter Pharisees.… They’re saying, “Even your leaders are eating with nonkosher people. How can we trust you? We don’t want you around at all. You’re polluting the temple. You’re talking against us.”

The persecution gets up, and James writes to Peter and he says, with these messengers, “Peter, we both believe in the exclusive sufficiency of Christ as the basis on which we’re accepted before God. We’re not challenging that, but be careful what you’re doing. The sensitivities down here are really tough, and we’re not only causing a lot of offense, but you’re such a high-profile character … you do what you’re doing, and it means some more Christians, brothers and sisters in Christ, down here are going into jail. Just be careful.”

So Peter is afraid of the circumcision group. That is, not the Jews who have been sent by James. He’s afraid of the circumcision group down in Jerusalem that’s doing all this damage. Moreover, he might have even thought himself justified in this adaptation, because what do you read just a few verses over? This follows on from the preceding verses.

In the preceding verses.… Don’t forget Paul puts this together now. He doesn’t say, “Now I’m starting on a new topic. This is verse 11.” He didn’t have verses to play with. Chapters and verses came much later in the history of the Canon. He’s just running along with the argument. What he has just established in the preceding verses is Peter was primarily responsible for outreach to Jews, and Paul was primarily responsible for outreach to Gentiles.

So Peter might well have thought, granted that was already the agreement, he had a primary responsibility for the well-being of his Jewish brothers and sisters in Christ down in Jerusalem, and the report from James said Peter’s conduct was giving them extra trouble. Afraid of the circumcision group, he decided he’d quell some of these stories, eating with the Jews a little more. Then a few more Jews did, and then a few more Jews did.

Even Barnabas is led away by this. Can you believe Barnabas actually thought somehow it was more righteous before God to eat only kosher food? That’s against everything we know about Barnabas. Barnabas has proved the most flexible and international and farsighted of the Christians from the very beginning, hasn’t he? You can believe dear ol’ Barnabas, compassionate as he is with all those friends and relatives back in Jerusalem, starts worrying about what’s going on back there too. So he moves across too.

I can well imagine midnight discussions between Peter and Paul, with Peter saying, “Look. You yourself have agreed I’m primarily responsible for the Jews. They’re getting clobbered back there. If I could do something to ease their pain, I’m going to. You’re responsible for the Gentiles. Look after your Gentiles here. They’re not the ones who are getting clobbered.”

Paul is saying, “Wait a minute. You’re still introducing a double-standard church, a Jewish church and a Gentile church. There are entailments here. You can’t live with this.” The tensions rise until finally Paul speaks out in public, because Paul understands that despite the good motives of Peter there is a fundamental issue of justification that is at stake.

You go down this track sooner or later, and inevitably you have two churches, a church that conforms to the law and finds it necessary to do so, not because of the Christians in Jerusalem but because of the pressure being put on the Christians in Jerusalem by the circumcision party. The effect is still the same.

To be a Jew and a Christian, you still have to remain under the law of Moses. As long as you have a segment of the church that thinks that, then the rest of the church, the Gentile church, will inevitably be forced to reflect, “Well, maybe to be really on the inside track, maybe to accept the Jewish Messiah properly, you should become a Jew to accept the Jewish Messiah.”

Suddenly, what is in jeopardy is the exclusive sufficiency of Christ. That’s the issue. Paul sees it because he has a longer vision. He has thought these things through in an integrated way a little more than Peter. Peter seems to go from crisis to crisis and sort of expands his theological horizon a bit with each crisis but doesn’t have it all put together.

Paul sees where this is heading, so what does he say? “When I saw they were not acting in line with the truth of the gospel …” That’s the issue. It’s a gospel issue. For Paul in the following verses, that means a justification issue. Not in line with the gospel because we should all be one in some sort of new humanity. That’s not quite the issue. It’s a gospel issue bound up with whether or not you’re reconciled to God. On what basis are you reconciled to God?

“I said to Peter in front of them all. You are a Jew, yet you live like a Gentile and not like a Jew. That is to say, you’ve already been eating with nonkosher people. You’ve already made those breaches. How is it then you force Gentiles, that is, by your example, to follow Jewish customs? We who are Jews by birth and not ‘Gentile sinners’ know …” That is, we Christian Jews. “… that a man is not justified …” There it is: justification. “… by observing the law, but by faith in Jesus Christ.”

That’s what makes us Christians at the end of the day. We’ve already crossed that bridge. We know that’s the case. We weren’t justified by observing the laws of Moses. Notice this is not just talking about food laws but the whole law of Moses. We weren’t justified by that means. In fact, don’t forget later on in Galatians, chapter 5, Paul himself understands circumcision is not merely something in itself but a commitment to obey the whole law.

It’s not just a boundary marker. It’s a commitment to obey the whole law. It is the covenantal sign that commits you to obedience to the entire law covenant. “We’ve gotten that. We know, in fact, we’re justified not by obedience to the law but by faith in Jesus Christ.” “So we, too, have put our faith in Christ Jesus that we may be justified by faith in Christ and not by observing the law, because by observing the law no one will be justified.” That’s what the issue is about in Paul’s mind.

“If, while we seek to be justified in Christ …” That is, we Jews. “… it becomes evident that we ourselves are sinners …” That is, by now stepping aside from the stipulations of the law, by saying we are not under the law covenant so we don’t have to obey those stipulations, which is what you yourself, Peter, have been doing by eating this nonkosher pork pie with Gentiles. If we have done that. “… does that mean that Christ promotes sin?” Do you really want to go down that track, Peter? “Absolutely not!” “By your conduct you’re rebuilding what you destroyed,” he says.

“If I rebuild what I destroyed, all I’m proving is that when I destroyed in the first place I was actually a lawbreaker.” “I was wrong. I was breaking the law. The law has to remain in place. The law as the law covenant under which I am bound, is it not raising now deep questions about what points of continuity there are between the old covenant and the new covenant?” Those things Paul addresses elsewhere.

The question is.… Are you under the law covenant or under this covenant by which you are saved by grace through faith by trusting in Christ under this new covenant? If now you go back and by your conduct rebuild what you broke by stepping away from it, all you prove is you’re a lawbreaker. Paul says in verse 19, “In fact, it was through the law that I died to the law.” That is, “The law showed me,” as Paul will explain in the next chapter, “my guilt, my condemnation before God, that the law could not save me by itself. I died before it so I might live for God.”

Verse 20 then, I think, has often been misunderstood in evangelical circles. It’s often read this way: “I have been crucified with Christ. I no longer live, but Christ lives in me.” That is, “He takes up residence in me, perhaps by his Spirit in some way so as to animate me and strengthen me and be intimate with me.”

That truth is taught elsewhere in Scripture. That’s part of the Paraclete passages, for example, in John 14 through 17. I doubt that’s what it means here. It just is ripped out of context. Begin with this little phrase, “but Christ lives in me.” The Greek is en emoi. En plus the dative of the personal pronoun often is not spatial. In about a third of its instances, it’s referential. Christ lives with respect to me. Look, for example, at the end of Galatians 1, verse 24.

“And they praised God …” The NIV has “… because of me.” It’s literally en emoi. “They praised God in me.” It’s not saying, “They praised God. God was in me.” They’re not saying, “They were in me, and they were praising God.” Paul is saying, “They praised God with reference to me. They praised God with reference to my case.” So the NIV paraphrases it, “They praised because of me.”

So also here. “I have been crucified with Christ.” That is, “When Christ was crucified, I died. Before God, I died.” Paul is not saying he’s dead in every conceivable sense. Obviously, he speaks of “the life I now live.” He’s still alive, but forensically before God he died because Christ died for him, because Christ was crucified for him.

In God’s eyes Paul was dead. “I have been crucified with Christ. So before God I no longer live, but Christ lives with reference to me, not in me.” The idea here is not animation or spatiality. “Christ lives with respect to me. Christ dies with respect to me, and Christ now lives with respect to me so the life I live in the body I live by faith in the Son of God.” That’s the point. It’s not a question of animation here.

“I am alive in some sense, but the life I live in the body I live by faith in the Son of God who loved me and gave himself for me. Christ’s death was mine, and Christ’s life was mine. I was crucified with Christ; now Christ lives with reference to me.” That’s the idea. “I do not set aside the grace of God, for if righteousness could be obtained through the law …” Which is what is being hinted at if you go back to articulating the necessity of coming under the law covenant. “… then Christ died for nothing!”

My point in going through the passage like this is simply to show this conflict between Paul and Peter is not over boundary markers alone.

It’s not just a nationalistic sort of thing. It’s a fundamental issue over how you’re accepted before God, how you’re justified before God, what makes you acceptable before God. That’s how the whole flow of the argument goes.

To argue this can be reduced now to issues of how you can construct one people before God so as to eliminate boundary markers and have a unified church is not completely wrong. Paul does want a unified church, but it’s putting the focus in the wrong place. It’s not listening closely enough to the text. It’s not putting the emphasis where Paul puts the emphasis.

Which brings me to another exegetical observation. Are you familiar with Gordon Fee’s really quite magnificent book, God’s Empowering Presence? It’s a major treatment of the Holy Spirit in Paul. What he does really is work through all of the Pauline passages on the Spirit and exegetes them all and puts them all together.

Last week I was in Australia speaking at a conference, and the subject that was given to me in this conference was The Holy Spirit in Acts. I worked through not only the big passages like Acts 2 and Acts 10 and 11 … the passages that are just flooded with references to the Spirit.… I worked through every single one of them. As I got to the end of this series on The Holy Spirit in Acts, I began to ask myself, “I think what I have said is in one sense accurate, but I think without meaning to I’ve just distorted the whole book of Acts.”

I don’t think Luke sat down and said, “Now I’m going to write all about the Holy Spirit.” That’s not Luke’s theme as he’s writing Acts. It’s merely one of the supporting themes that’s interwoven throughout the whole book. It’s there all right, but the book isn’t about the Holy Spirit. Thus, if you start in a series where you’re talking about The Holy Spirit in Acts, you may say everything that is individually true and somehow miss the point. You get a distorted picture of Acts.

So I spent the last talk or two deconstructing my own sermons to reconfigure them so they became part of supporting themes for what was central to Acts rather than the heartbeat of Acts. The heartbeat of Acts is still the extension of the gospel. It’s not the Holy Spirit. It’s by means of the Holy Spirit.

To speak about the Holy Spirit in Acts is a way of quietly distorting Acts if you’re not careful. So also I’ve come to think even though there’s a lot of brilliant exegesis in Fee’s book, there’s a sense in which he manages to distort all of Paul even while saying an awful lot of true things because it’s focusing not quite where Paul focuses. That’s the danger of any such study.

If you come to me and say, “Out of close, sympathetic interaction with the new perspective there is an element in which cultural barriers are being brought down. Paul is concerned in Ephesians to knit Jew and Gentile together.” Those are big themes in Paul’s study. He is interested in knocking down these barriers. Shouldn’t we be considered interested in that too? After all, the whole Bible moves to a new heaven and the new earth where there are people joined together from every tongue, tribe, people, and nation. Yes, yes, yes.

So also here. There is something here that is breaking down the barriers, all right, but there’s something also intrinsically distortive about the approach, because what you’re doing is foregrounding that which is in the background and backgrounding that which is in the foreground. That phrase I swiped from Doug Moo, but he has it exactly right.

It’s not that all of the analyses of Jimmy Dunn are wrong; it’s that somehow he’s losing what justification is about and what’s in the foreground by emphasizing what’s there in the background as if it were in the foreground. When you read the passage, isn’t this really primarily about justification and who’s saved and who’s not and the ground of it and the place of Christ with respect of the old covenant rather than simply questions of one people because we got rid of the national boundaries and yet the national boundaries are there?

The question is.… What’s foreground and what’s background? If you work through all of the Pauline material with that sort of question in mind when you’re reading Dunn and you’re reading Tom Wright then I think you get a rather different picture than you do if you read them just by themselves. This afternoon I’m going to take you through one passage briefly and then one passage at length and then we’ll open it up for questions and answers.