Listen or read the following transcript as D. A. Carson speaks on the topic of New Perspective in this address from The Gospel Coalition Sermon Library
Lord God, as we begin to probe this difficult and complex subject, help us to have clarity of thought and good understanding, both of various position and of your most Holy Word. Forbid that we should be mere traditionalists. Forbid also that we should be immediately intoxicated by every new fad but come back again and again to test things by your most Holy Word. In Jesus’ name, amen.
In one sense, the expression the new perspective on Paul is a bit of a misnomer because it sounds as if it is one thing. In fact, the new perspective on Paul embraces something like 20 different positions. You may know two or three of us are writing and editing a two-volume set, Justification and Variegated Nomism. Volume 1 is out, and Volume 2 on Paul is on the way. It should be out in another eight or nine months.
The first chapter in the second volume is by Stephen Westerholm, where he distinguishes, believe it or not, 39 separate positions on these matters. Those are fine points we don’t need to worry about here. That’s merely a way of saying, nevertheless, I will sometimes resort to generalities that are true for some people who hold to the new perspective and not true for others. There are quite a lot of distinguishable positions in the so-called new perspective on Paul.
There are certain things that are common. Many of them go back to a couple of very important essays, not least Krister Stendahl’s essay on “The Apostle Paul and the Introspective Conscience of the West.” That essay, written in the 60s, argued we have come to read Paul in the light of Reformation notions of guilt but Paul himself shows no sign of guilt before he becomes a Christian. In other words, Paul does not show himself to be laboring under deep anxieties. He’s going off, after all, to persecute Christians.
Then suddenly he’s converted, convinced Jesus really is alive, and he’s forced to reconsider a lot of things, but we have sometimes, Stendahl argues, misunderstood what Paul’s theological arguments are about because, he says, we have been far too interested in Reformation categories that read the debates between Protestantism and Catholicism as if they were exact mirror images of the debates between Christians, Jews or otherwise, and Jews who were unconverted in the first century.
The crucial volume that set the agenda for the new perspective, however, was written by E.P. Sanders in 1977, Paul and Palestinian Judaism. The book is about 450 pages, and 300 pages of it are given to Second Temple Judaism and then the last 150 pages to Paul. The argument of that book, in brief, is a great deal of Protestant and especially Lutheran writing has handled texts very poorly.
He argues we have often appealed to fourth- or fifth-century AD Jewish writings in order to paint a picture of first-century Jewish thought. In other words, you can find fourth- and fifth-century Talmudic sources, which picture people coming to the judgment with long lists of both strong points and weak points, of both good deeds and bad deeds and how they all balance out in the balance of the scales of God’s justice, that all works out according to God’s perfect justice on the last day.
Yes, you can find that sort of thing in fourth- and fifth-century Talmudic sources, but he says you cannot find such language or depictions in the first century. So, he says, a great deal of the picture of first-century Judaism we’re familiar with from popularizing books like Alfred Edersheim, The Life and Times of Jesus the Messiah, and so on, are based on sources that are massively out of date.
Would you want to create the worldview of Shakespeare by appealing to twentieth-century literature? That’s the kind of time gap you’re dealing with. So he says our creation of a certain kind of Judaism that is steeped with merit theology and that sort of thing is, in fact, massively out of date. After all, there were some huge changes that slowly developed in Judaism out of the destruction of the temple, but in the first century, before AD 70, the temple was the place where sins were atoned for.
By the time you get to the Tannaitic period, up to about 200 or so, then Jews this side of the destruction of the temple had to start developing notions about good deeds being the equivalent of sacrifices because they didn’t have a sacrificial system that was left anymore. Yes, of course, but before AD 70 you don’t find Jewish sources talking in exactly those lines.
So, he argues, if you come to understand first-century Palestinian Judaism … he’s not even talking so much about Philo and Alexandrian Judaism, just first-century Palestinian Judaism … then the entire construction of Jews steeped in merit theology and Christians preaching a doctrine of justification by grace is, in fact, merely a construction of the post-Reformation West, he argues.
In this connection then he invents a term which has become the standard-bearer for what he understands first-century Judaism to be, covenantal nomism. That is nomism, to do with nomos, the law, an approach to law that is essentially framed by the covenant. In his view what was typical of all forms of first-century Jewish Judaism was an approach to covenantal nomism by which we are saved by grace and maintain ourselves by works.
That is, we are saved by virtue of God’s covenantal grace, reaching out to the Jews (Deuteronomy 7, Deuteronomy 10, passages like that), and now the Jews have to maintain themselves by obedience to the covenant. Hence, there is a covenantal nomism, an approach to obeying the law as prescribed by a certain reading of Deuteronomy.
This, he says, you find in Josephus, you find in apocalyptic literature, you find in the earliest levels of the targumim. You find them in rabbinic traditions that go back to the pre-70 period, pre-Tannaitic traditions, and so forth. In every case this is the pattern and, he says, the same pattern you find in Paul.
After all, he says, we’re saved by grace in Paul too, aren’t we? But you still have to behave. If you don’t behave in Paul, he starts putting a big question over whether you’re truly saved. So he says at that level you analyze the text that way, and you have covenantal nomism even in the early Christians. That’s not the distinction.
What then is the distinction between unconverted Jews and converted Jews and converted Gentiles in the early church? He says the fundamental distinction is, at the end of the day, Christology. Some people believe Jesus is the Christ, and some people don’t. Some people believe Jesus is the Messiah, the Christ, and others don’t. Those who do are Christians, and those who don’t aren’t.
Once you believe Jesus is the Christ, then eventually other things have to be worked out. If you believe Jesus is the Christ, then eventually come to believe he died on the cross for your sins, then eventually that’s going to reflect some judgments about what you think the temple does. So it begins to reconfigure Christian understandings of the sacrificial system and reconfigure Christian understandings of Judaism.
At the end of the day, Sanders goes so far as to say Paul actually sometimes wrongly configures his opponents simply because he’s trying to prove the correctness of his Christology. The dividing difference between Paul and his Jewish opponents is not grace versus works. It’s Christology.
If you say, “Yes, but what about Paul’s entire doctrine of sin?” Well, he says, look at how Paul got to his position. He was heading off on the Damascus road in order to persecute Christians when he suddenly becomes convinced by this revelatory appearance of the glorified and risen Christ that Jesus really is alive. That’s a christological conclusion.
Then he has to work things back. So he runs in his own development from solution to plight. In Romans that’s not the way it’s presented. You have two and a half chapters of plight. That is, you begin with 1:18, “The wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all manner of unrighteousness,” and so on, all the way up to 3:20 to prove both Jew and Gentile are alike under sin, and then a great atonement passage. So you move from plight to solution.
In Paul’s own psychology, in the account of Paul’s own conversion, E.P. Sanders argues you move from solution to plight. You begin with Christology, and then Paul has to work out what difference that makes in order to support the Christology. Eventually, therefore, you get certain kinds of theological arguments. After the fact, Paul makes the whole thing look like plight to solution, but that’s not the way it was in Paul’s own experience.
That was the argument in E.P. Sanders’ book in 1977. It is extraordinarily important. He can summarize his argument with the following eight points. You can look them up yourself, but this is his own summary of what covenantal nomism embraces. He refers to covenantal nomism as a pattern of religion, not so much a series of theological proposition, but as a pattern of religion.
First, God has chosen Israel. Second, he has given the law. The law implies both, third, God’s promise to maintain his election and, fourth, the requirement to obey the covenantal stipulations embodied by the law. Fifth, God rewards obedience and punishes transgression. Sixth, the law itself provides for a means of atonement, whether the morning and evening peace offerings or Yom Kippur or whatever which, seventh, results in maintenance and reestablishment of the covenantal relationship. Eighth, all who are maintained in the covenant by obedience and by atonement and God’s mercy belong to the group that will finally be saved.
So that is his understanding of what the pattern of covenantal nomism is. In large part Christianity does exactly the same thing. It’s simply that it replaces the law bits in there by Christ and his death. The issue then becomes not law versus grace or merit versus unmerited favor; it becomes Christology. So far, E.P. Sanders.
This was then developed by several influential people, not least James D.G. Dunn. I should say most emphatically almost all the development in this area after E.P. Sanders was first and foremost by British writers, especially James D.G. Dunn and then by Tom Wright. Since then it has stretched out to people who were influenced by them, like Don Garlington and others. Now it is extended more broadly.
There are relatively few defenders of this stance in the German world. There’s the odd one, not many. Now even in the British world it’s now increasingly being attacked, actually, and there are more and more volumes that are actually calling this whole reconstruction itself into question, but we’ll come to some of those works in due course.
James D.G. Dunn is a professor at University of Durham. He was just ahead of me at Cambridge. We’ve known each other for a long time and have clashed in various interesting debates, a very personable chap, a Methodist background, influenced by C.F.D. Moule and then eventually moved farther left than Moule on all kinds of things.
Moule, for example, defends the deity of Christ in the strongest possible terms, whereas Jimmy Dunn developed a whole theory of Christology that pictured Christ as truly God only as the latest strand of Christian tradition, not before John’s gospel and so forth. He has moved in all kinds of interesting ways. He largely buys into E.P. Sanders’ assessment of things, but the intriguing thing about Jimmy Dunn is what his real interest is, it seems to me, is not so much theology per se but reconstructing earliest Christian history.
He sees himself in some ways as a von Harnack, except that von Harnack moved much more from the New Testament times into the second century, into the early patristic period, the subapostolic church, but Dunn is primarily interested in the reconstruction of early church history. For years and years he has focused on Paul and Acts and those matters, and now he’s reflecting one stage further back and all of his interests now are gospels and so forth, a very interesting man.
The nature of his argumentation with respect to Christology, however, is itself very interesting. He argues Jewish monotheism, Jewish belief in one God, was so strong the thing you have to explain about Christianity is how Jesus could come to be worshiped as God. That he finds really difficult, which is one of the reasons why he has the highest affirmations of Jesus’ deity in only the latest streams of first-century theology. It’s part of his reconstruction.
Although he wants to say with E.P. Sanders that Christology lies at the heart of the distinction between Christianity and Judaism, nevertheless in this parting of the ways (that’s his expression) between Judaism and Christianity, the rise of Christology was not quick. It took many decades of careful plodding development.
Meanwhile, divisions were taking place between Judaism and Christianity that turned on what he called boundary markers. If you talk to Tom Wright in private, Tom will tell you Jimmy Dunn swiped the notion of boundary markers from him. I’m not going to pretend to adjudicate that one, who got it first. I don’t know, and I really don’t care, but the person who first promoted it extensively was certainly Jimmy Dunn.
He argues Paul, precisely because of his more global vision, wants to break down those distinctive characteristics of Judaism which in fact keep Gentiles out. Although the Jews under the old covenant are the locus of the people of God; nevertheless, with Christ and the new covenant, although the same covenantal structures apply, they’re bringing in all kinds of other people.
The question is how to bring down those barriers so they don’t get in the way. The kinds of things that are most telling to Jews to preserve the social identity of Jews then are circumcision, the food laws, Sabbath, and such other public observances. So, he says, when you come to a book like Galatians just think how important a place circumcision plays.
Thus Jimmy Dunn writes a commentary on Galatians, which is an extension of the trajectory from E.P. Sanders. It’s a reconfiguration of the Galatians book that is a long way removed from, let’s say, Luther’s reading or Calvin’s reading of it and much more in terms of social identity, of the marks of social self-identity by Jews and by Christians during the Pauline period.
These boundary markers then are bound up with the law in all of his earlier writings, but in fact James Dunn eventually changes a bit. He argues the expression, the works of the law, itself is an expression that refers to these boundary markers, not to legalism, not to merit theology, not to keeping the whole law, but the expression, the works of the law, refers in particular to those works which are in fact boundary markers. Jimmy Dunn himself has backed off that one just a wee bit now. He thinks now most of them run along those lines.
Challenged as he has been by Douglas J. Moo in his commentary and an important article in NTS and elsewhere and by Joe Fitzmyer and a lot of other people, the result is he now acknowledges in a few crucial passages, not least in Romans 4 and some other passages, works of the law can take on a more comprehensive notion of obedience to the law, not merely in the domain of boundary markers but comprehensively. In some sense Jimmy Dunn is now self-correcting a wee bit in his more recent writings in this regard. He has written, of course, a major commentary on Romans as well.
That brings us to Tom Wright, N.T. Wright. He and I were exact contemporaries. He was at Oxford, and I was at Cambridge. We used to get together in the summer and talk about all kinds of things. He did not always hold this position. In fact, he started off with what might be called a traditionally Reformed position in all kinds of areas, in fact, a traditionally Reformed Calvinistic position as opposed to a Lutheran position on all kinds of issues.
He is a very capable speaker and writer. He couldn’t be boring if he tried. He is engaging and extremely effective in debate and very quick. On many, many fronts he has done the church an enormous amount of good. He has taken on some of the strongest voices in the Jesus Seminar, which is deeply, deeply committed to a philosophical naturalism.
His little book Who Was Jesus? takes on such extreme people as Barbara Thiering and people like that and is one I’ve given away to students myself. It’s a very helpful book, and it’s quite stinging in its creative dismantling of Jesus Seminar skepticism. So Tom Wright, you must understand, has done a great deal of good in many, many domains.
Then when in Britain a certain writer who created an unbelievable Paul got a lot of publicity, he promptly came out with a book called What Saint Paul Really Said: Was Paul of Tarsus the Real Founder of Christianity? This is what had been argued in this other book. That’s a 1997 publication. In many ways it’s a very good book, although there are some points of it where I would disagree.
If you want to see a really clever, outrageously funny essay taking on John Dominic Crossan and the Jesus Seminar folk, I refer you to an essay that is titled “Taking the Text with Her Pleasure: A Post-Post-Modernist Response to J. Dominic Crossan, The Historical Jesus.” That’s only a brief essay. It first appeared in the journal, Theology, in 1993. It was outrageously funny. It pictures the text talking to John Dominic Crossan. It is the best kind of satire I’ve seen in theological circles for a long time.
He wrote it.… He was supposed to give a critical review at SBL, the Society of Biblical Literature, at a plenary session in the United States. He hadn’t done it when he arrived the night before, and he stayed up all night to write it. He wrote a manuscript overnight and then read it the next day and eventually polished and published it. It is outrageously funny. People were rolling in the aisle. Even if you disagreed with the man, it was so cleverly put.
It’s not often at Society of Biblical Literature that you get people laughing, but he is an extremely capable man. If you want to see really good satire on some of these debates, then I do strongly recommend you get to a good library and look up Theology. It’s published at Cambridge. In 1993, the essay was “Taking the Text with Her Pleasure.” So Tom is a very interesting man.
On the other hand, in more recent years he has adopted a nexus of positions that are all tied together. He would argue Jesus had no consciousness that he was God. He doesn’t want to deny Jesus was God, but he does deny Jesus had any consciousness that he was God. He’s working on a five-volume set at the moment. Volume 3 has just appeared. He has also written an important book, The Climax of the Covenant, which is his thought in brief form.
Much of what he does, especially on the Gospels, is really very helpful indeed. For example, with respect to the historical Jesus, he asks these questions and comes out with solid responses in every case. Did Jesus’ aims remain consistent throughout his life? Did he go to Jerusalem to die? Did he intend to found the church? Why did he die? How and why did the early church begin? Why are the Gospels what they are? In every case he has solid, responsible, constructive, thoughtful, engaging answers that take on the most extreme forms of the new perspective.
The heart of Wright’s programmatic agenda, I think, can be put like this: The exile is not over. At some superficial level you’ve come to the end of the 70 years, but you take a look at the pre-exilic promises of what God would do at the end of the exile and they seem far too extravagant for what actually took place.
When the people actually returned … 43,000 of them … there was no restoration of the monarchy. There was no land flowing with milk and honey. They went back and built a two-bit temple, and even that took a long time. Then on top of that, they were variously under the Persians and then under the Greeks and then squeezed between the Seleucids in the north and Ptolemies in the south. Then the guerrillas took over. Where is the sense of fulfillment from the pre-exilic prophecies?
So he cites the Jewish texts, which point out that in some ways there are pre-exilic promises of restoration that have not been fulfilled. So all the way down to Jesus’ day there is, he argues, a large consciousness the exile has not ended. Jesus then comes along to end the exile and bring in Yahweh’s promises of restoration. In so doing he directs attention away from Torah and temple to himself and claims, in effect, to constitute the true Israel, and that claim brings in Jews and Gentiles alike.
Much of this historic Christians would agree with. That is to say, Jesus is the locus of the true Israel and constitutes the true continuity of the people of God and Jew and Gentile are alike, one in him. That is common ground. Now it is all primarily cast in terms of bringing in the end of the exile, the restoration of all things, except it is now ratcheted up, as it were, into a larger framework in which Gentiles are also included and the locus of Israel is, in fact, Jesus himself.
This thematic of the end of the exile he sees everywhere. A lot of people have seen there is some level of Judaism that does talk about the end of the exile. People have seen that for a long time. In my 1981 commentary on Matthew, for example, I appeal to those Jewish traditions as part of the background behind Matthew 2’s Rachel weeping for her children passage. People have acknowledged that’s part of the background.
He makes it so important a hermeneutical key for understanding what is going on in the Gospels, even the parable of the prodigal son, Luke 15:11–32, is to be read this way: It is not about wayward individuals, sinful individuals rebelling against God, who are now coming back in repentance and who are being received by the heavenly Father. Rather, it is about Israel’s homecoming. So everything now becomes a function of end of exile.
One of the effects then is all of God’s victory … after all, the title of the book in which this is most clearly laid out is Jesus and the Victory of God … is bound up in Jesus. Thus, he reads the Gospels as not having any reference at all to the parousia or to the end of the age or all the like. It is all tied to Jesus’ victory, whether in the cross at AD 30 or to the victory of Jesus as exemplified by the fall of the temple in AD 70.
Thus, Jesus does not ask for repentance as customarily understood; that is, sorrow and rejection of and turning away from sin. That’s not what Jesus goes on about, but rather in the sense of turning away from revolutionary zeal and turning to Jesus, turning away from self-identity as the people of God and turning to Jesus as the locus of the true people of God. Faith then becomes loyalty to or trust in the leader, Jesus himself, and the sinners are the notoriously wicked. Even these can, of course, be admitted.
How then is this tied to Paul? This is still being worked out in his work, but eventually it comes to this: Because of these structures and this vision of Jesus as the true locus of Israel, and so forth, justification is, in Tom Wright, redefined. This is not so for all of the new perspective people, but Tom’s influence here is very significant.
Tom understands justification to be God’s declaration that you are in the covenant community. Not God’s declaration that you are just entering the covenant community. It is an ongoing status thing. In other words, you are ongoingly justified as God ongoingly declares you to be in the covenant community. So it is not bound up with the beginning of your Christian experience as it is in traditional Protestantism. In Tom it still is declarative. It’s not quite that way in other new perspective people, but with Tom it’s not declarative that you are just.
It’s declarative, rather, you are in the community, you are in the covenant bond. In a certain sense, therefore, ecclesiology is now being raised above soteriology. There are further developments we could take with Don Garlington and Scott Hafemann and others, but I think I’m going to stop there for a few moments and ask if there are questions you would like to raise merely about what the new perspective is before we press on to start thinking about how to understand it, how to respond to various parts of it, and so forth.
Questions? Comments? This is merely by way of information. At this point I’m not trying to either judge it or condemn it or justify it. I’m merely trying to describe it as neutrally and as carefully as I can. You will see in due course I do not think all of it is wrong, although I think substantial parts are.
Male: What are the long-term implications of placing ecclesiology above soteriology?
Don Carson: In all fairness to Tom, he does not like me to say.… We still talk about these things, occasionally have a breakfast together or something at SBL. So I’m not saying anything behind his back. He does not like me to say he’s placing ecclesiology above soteriology. On the other hand, he is.
A friend of mine who shall remain nameless, an Australian with all of the Australian propensities for getting to the heart of an issue, once tackled Tom in a question-and-answer session at Tyndale House, Cambridge, seven or eight years ago after Tom was expounding some of these matters at considerable length.
After the session this brother went up to Tom and said, “Tom, the phone rings in the middle of the night, and an aged woman in your parish says, ‘I’ve just found out I only have a short while to live. Please come and see me.’ You get dressed and rush off. You get to her bedside and discover she has about 10 minutes to live. She takes your hand, and she says, ‘Tom, what must I do to be saved?’ What are you going to tell her?” Tom said, and I quote, “That’s a good question. I’ll have to think about that.”
That already indicates a certain problem, wouldn’t you say? If your reconstructions have not added clarity to something of that sort, there’s a problem there somewhere. In all fairness Tom would be able to answer that one today, precisely because somebody called him out on it and Tom is a very good debater.
My friend, not willing to let it go, said, “Well, let me give you some options. Would you say, ‘You must believe in Jesus in order to belong to the covenant’?” Tom is too shrewd merely to say yes because he could see the nasty implications of that. Meanwhile, Tom himself has written some fine little devotional materials on the cross and so on.
At the end of the day, those materials all have to do with sort of the antecedent preparation to deal with sin so God will declare you perpetually to be in the covenant. So part of it is not denying the importance of the cross, but then no Christian of any persuasion, no one in broad-stream confessional Christendom of any sort, whether you’re Catholic or Orthodox or Protestant of various shapes and sizes and dimensions, would want to deny the significance of the cross.
The question really is how the cross is related to such fundamental matters as justification, coming to faith, how it is related to law. It’s how the thing is configured, how it’s put together. Do you see? Where is the self-identity of the people of God in that frame of reference? This is not quite the same thing as historic Catholicism and historic Protestantism. It is not.
At the end of the day you have a kind of primal importance of belonging to the right group, the church, in order to be saved versus the traditional Protestant understanding which raises soteriology above ecclesiology. Thus, even an apostle Paul can say, “Though we or an angel from heaven preach some other gospel, let him be anathema.”
In other words, the gospel takes a certain kind of priority status, even above apostolic authority, if I may put it that way. Then within that kind of framework that defines who is in or who is out, and your church takes on definition from the gospel rather than the other way around. It’s a bit different here, in all fairness.
Nevertheless, there are some relations. One of the big factors, one of the things I did not go into.… You find it in Garlington, and you find it in some others. It’s pretty strong in Garlington, and you find it, likewise, in Wright. There is one whole strand of the new perspective where the issue then is not that God demands you be sinlessly perfect; God simply demands you belong to the covenant.
Thus, sin tends to be downplayed just a wee bit. It’s not that sin doesn’t exist, that it’s not important, but God is not demanding perfection, just as he didn’t demand perfection of the Old Testament. Rather, he demanded broad covenantal faithfulness, which meant when you did sin you had Yom Kippur, the blood of bull and goats, to look after things.
Now God does not really demand perfection either in terms of covenantal faithfulness. You have the blood of Jesus to look after things. There is a different way of configuring all of these things and the issue of sin gets jiggered a bit. It gets reconfigured in that kind of framework as well. So inevitably how you preach the gospel, how you approach these things, how you appeal to people does all get shifted a wee bit.
On the other hand, I could introduce you to some people who have bought into some parts of the new perspective who are pretty virulent evangelists just the same. There are many different shades. It has to be acknowledged. Life is complex.
Male: [Inaudible]
Don: I think you have three or four questions in your question, and one or two of them I want to deal with a little later. Let me mention one or two things just the same. You are right that there are different domains of discussion, and the categories of systematic theology are not always the categories of the first century. However, as I use Christ and Messiah, I will use them equivalently. I’m not trying to import something surreptitiously.
By Christology I mean messianism. It can be pre-Christian or post-Christian messianism, but it’s the same thing. I acknowledge, in fact I will later insist, some of our discussions on these matters of justification and sanctification and so on have been influenced by reformational and counter-reformational systematic categories we have sometimes read back into the New Testament and some of the questions E.P. Sanders and others have raised are helpful historical questions that must be addressed. I will agree with that.
On the other hand, that does not mean I think they have all the right answers, even if they’ve asked some of the right questions and there are ways of demonstrating ties between some of the things Paul talks about and some of the things Calvin or Luther talk about rather than all the disjunctions the contemporaries want to put in. I will come to that in due course.
In the larger issue of whether or not we can usefully speak of these things in our culture where they don’t matter very much, then I would want to argue the issue can be put this way: Until fairly recently some form of Christendom or another controlled many of the thought structures of the Western world so when you talked about these things you were engaging with broad-scale intellectual history of the West.
Even when I was doing university missions 25 or 30 years ago, if I dealt with an atheist, the atheist was a Christian atheist. That is, the God he or she was denying was the Christian God, which meant the categories were still on my turf. Today if I’m dealing with an atheist.… I have a mission, for example, at Yale this fall. Now if I deal with a mission there, they are completely and utterly and totally biblically illiterate.
Now if you’re dealing with an atheist, you’re dealing with an atheist who does not have Christian categories. We have so far moved away from the heritage of Judeo-Christian givens there is a sense in which our disputes and discussions in these matters do seem to be increasingly abstracted from the world around us.
I am going to be dealing partly with that issue in tomorrow’s seminar on postmodernism, but I would want to argue in every culture, whether Christianity is going into Thailand and is wrestling with Buddhism or it’s going into Japan and it’s wrestling with Shintoism or it’s going into a pre-1989 Communist materialist structure, in every case there are some points where Christianity will overlap with a culture and some points where it will contradict the culture.
If the culture at certain points wants to argue Christianity is irrelevant here or it doesn’t apply here or it has to be understood differently here or anything like that, then my response would be, “You have to change the culture.” In other words, part of mission is precisely to change the expectations and structures as to what’s going on, what’s important, how to look at things.
Otherwise, it seems to me Christianity is always domesticated. At that level I would want to say if the broader culture today does not understand these categories that simply means we have to spend more time doing our job better. I’ll come to some of that tomorrow. On larger issues of Catholic and Protestant, we’ll come to some of that when we get into these. Is that scratching where you’re itching? Yes? Good.
All right. I want to suggest then that it’s useful to think about these matters in these eight different categories I’ve listed on the outline in front of you. All of these eight categories could easily take up two or three hours of lecture time without even beginning to scratch the surface. I will spend more time on some of them and less time on others, but it’s important to begin to understand these matters.
First, it’s very important to see we are inevitably, deeply embroiled, whether we like it or not, in disputes about historical theology. Most of those who subscribe to one form or another of the new perspective have fairly slighting and dismissive approaches to the Reformation or to medieval theology, to both, as being fundamentally dealing with categories that do not interest the apostle Paul, in particular.
What I would want to argue in the first instance is sometimes the domains of discourse, though they are different, if you pay attention you can nevertheless translate. Let me give you a couple of examples. In standard Reformation thought (this is both in Lutheranism and in Calvinism) men and women are justified by grace alone through faith alone and then subsequently are sanctified.
So justification then in this heritage refers to God’s once-for-all declarative act by which we are declared just before him by virtue of Christ’s cross work. Certainly in Calvin and already in principle in Luther, although Luther tweaks things slightly differently, not only are our sins imputed to Christ but Christ’s righteousness is ours and is usually thought to be imputed to us as well within justification.
In the broader stream of things, usually this is understood to be underlaid by a union with Christ. Because we are united with Christ and Christ died but we were crucified with him and Christ rises but we rise with him, this is the underlay for our justification. Then having been justified, we are then sanctified progressively by the transforming work of the Spirit all the rest of our lives. That’s sort of standard Protestant soteriology, is it not? Then we look ultimately for glorification and the transformation of the body on the last day.
John Calvin was not a stupid man, precisely because he was both a systematician writing the institutes and a commentator writing endless commentaries on every book of the New Testament except the apocalypse and on many books of the Old Testament. Therefore, he tended to have his finger on the text and noticed all kinds of things systematicians themselves don’t always notice.
He noticed, for example, there were not a few passages in Paul in which the hagios word group from which we get our word sanctification does not deal with the progress of redemption or the progress of transformation. So Reformed people could speak of positional sanctification or definitional sanctification. That is to say, of sanctification that is as instantaneous and is as initiatory as justification but in a different realm.
Justification on this view has to deal with matters of justice before God. Sanctification has to deal with matters of cult, of ritual, of possession, of ownership before God. Thus, for example, in the Old Testament the shovel that takes out the ash from the high altar is called holy, not because it’s moral, not because it’s divine, not because it is growing in sanctification, but precisely because it is set aside for God. It is peculiarly God’s.
Likewise, for example, the unconverted husband or the unconverted wife in 1 Corinthians 7 is called holy, sanctified, not because he or she is even a Christian, certainly not because they’re growing in holiness, but because in certain ways by being in a home in which one of the adults is in fact a Christian, that person has been set aside for God in some way, thus owned by God in some special way. Do you see?
Likewise, when Paul writes to the Corinthians in 1 Corinthians, chapter 1, verse 2, he addressed them as, “All who are sanctified in Christ Jesus.” Transparently, this is a singularly unsanctified church in a Reformed sense. Then he calls them sanctified in Christ Jesus. Then he says, “Called to be holy.” Thus, there is a sense in which he is saying they are sanctified. Now they jolly well better start acting like it.
It’s part of a fairly common New Testament ethical appeal. “Be what you are.” Thus, they are already possessed by God just as they are already justified. They are already sanctified. They are already justified. Now they are to work out this relationship with God, both in the realm of justice and in the realm of holiness in terms of growth and in conformity to Christ.
Now some have argued, such as David Peterson, for example, an Australian who is the principal of Oak Hill College. In his book, Possessed by God, he goes so far as to argue either all or most of the Pauline passages on sanctification, on the hagios word group, in fact, have to do with positional or definitional sanctification. That is, he’s not convinced any of them have to do with growth in grace.
Suppose, for argument’s sake, he’s right. Even if he’s not right about all of them, he’s certainly right about most of them. Even if you argue he’s only right about most of them, does this mean the traditional understanding of sanctification is overthrown? No, it does not, because Paul certainly speaks of growth in grace in many passages even when he does not use the term sanctification.
For example, in Philippians 3 we find the apostle speaking about forgetting those things which are behind and pressing on toward those things which are ahead. “I do not count myself already to have attained, but leaving these things behind,” and so on. Likewise, Hebrews speaks of laying aside the weight of things that so easily ensnare us.
There are lots of passages in the New Testament that speak in terms of growth in grace and increasing conformity to Jesus Christ even when the hagios word group is not used. In other words, the Reformation doctrine of sanctification is certainly taught again and again in Scripture even when the word group isn’t there to support it.
When you start recognizing you are in a different domain of discourse, you realize sometimes the domain of discourse of systematic theology, influenced as it is by certain forms of historical theology, may in fact not be entirely aligned with the exegetical conclusions of those who are keeping their fingers on the text, but it does not always mean the doctrine itself is wrong. It means it’s attached to the wrong place or it has to be grounded somewhat differently. It can’t merely be tied to a certain set of word groups. Do you see?
That has to be borne in mind in these sorts of discussions, it seems to me. Sometimes even after you have overturned a particular word use, it does not mean an entire doctrine is overturned. It merely means you’re in a different domain of discourse and you have to watch what you’re attaching to what.
There are a lot more things to talk about in that domain, but I would be prepared to argue at some length Jimmy Dunn’s understanding of Luther himself is notoriously misguided. I don’t think he understands Luther. I think he has a caricature of Luther. I think he is caricaturizing Luther at least as badly as he thinks Protestants have caricaturized Paul. So there are different layers of possible misunderstandings as we start rejecting this group or that group. That’s not something I can spend more time on now.
Second, to get back to foundations, we need to come back to E.P. Sanders seminal work. For although there were in fact preliminary works by K‰semann and Stendahl and others before E.P. Sanders, the seminal study that kicked off the new perspective was doubtless Paul and Palestinian Judaism in 1977, which I took some time to describe to you.
How right was that book? That is a question that has to be asked. It has to be said until fairly recently an awful lot of Pauline and other studies have simply argued E.P. Sanders was right. E.P. Sanders is a bit like Tom Wright in this regard. He’s a very gifted debater, very quick on his feet.
I’ve seen him at SBL meetings, for example, where when somebody asks him a really difficult question about some first-century Jewish text that doesn’t quite fit in his paradigm, Ed will snap back, “Have you read that entire corpus in the original? Because if you haven’t, you don’t have the right to ask the question.”
He is a very aggressive debater, so it takes somebody equally aggressive to answer back, “Stop bluffing and answer the question.” You don’t get anywhere with Ed unless you confront him on his own turf. The most you can get him to say in public debate is not, “Oops. I got that one wrong.” It’s, “Hmm, I’ll have to think about that.” He is a very tough-minded debater and a very gifted man.
Nevertheless, increasingly although people began to buy into his construction of covenantal nomism and it affected a lot of the writings of John Barclay and it affected to some extent Scott Hafemann, certainly Jimmy Dunn and all of his protÈgÈs and so on, although the influence has been vast and increasingly found in evangelical confessional circles as well, yet in all fairness I want to say although Ed Sanders gets some of this material right, there is some of it in my view that is profoundly mistaken.
There is a rising recognition that is the case. This is not Don Carson speaking out of turn. I’m certainly not saying I get it all right. The literature is vast and complex. Let me start raising some issues. If you want to look at the literature on it, I think now probably the best refutation is Volume 1 of Justification and Variegated Nomism, certainly not because I’m one of the editors but precisely because the people we got are all experts in the area.
It’s 600 pages of technical discussion where we tried to find the best experts we could find in the area of apocalyptic and the best people we could find on Josephus and so on to do fresh studies of all these areas. The consensus of the entire argument is although covenantal nomism might be a useful category for some of the literature, it really is very distorted for other parts of the literature, and there are other things that are really quite wrong. Let me try to explain where Ed is right and where he’s wrong.
He is admirably right to keep insisting we do not have the right to read fourth-, fifth-, and subsequent-century Jewish sources back into the first century. There is no doubt a fair bit of Protestantism did make that sort of mistake, especially German Lutheranism. It is not a universal mistake, but it was more commonly a mistake in German Lutheranism than elsewhere. In the English-speaking world, it tended to be found especially amongst those who still refer to Edersheim repeatedly.
Edersheim was himself a godly man. He didn’t know how to use his own Jewish sources very well at a historical level. As soon as those questions have been asked, all you have to do is spend 15 minutes with Edersheim and see what his sources are, because he quotes them all. If you have any sense of when the Tannaitic period runs and when the Amoraic period runs and when the talmudim start and then so, first the Jerusalem Talmud and then the Babylonian Talmud and so on, you quickly discover the charge is amply justified again and again.
On the other hand, the whole notion of covenantal nomism and entering by grace and maintaining yourself by works is astonishingly slippery. The notion of entering by grace is for Jews a historic notion that goes back to the very foundation of Israel. It’s not that any particular Jew in the first century enters by grace. He or she is simply born into the covenant.
Whereas when you’re talking about Christians entering by grace, it’s entering by grace into something in which they were not born. Thus the parallel between whatever it means to belong to Judaism under the rubric of covenantal nomism and whatever it means for a Gentile to become a Christian under the same rubric …
In fact, you’re talking about very different things. In the one case you’re talking about conversion. In the other case you’re talking about an entire displacement of a people by God a millennium and a half earlier or, if you want to go back to Abraham, two millennia earlier. Thus the comparisons are not all that apt, but it’s more than that.
You quickly discover even when some of the sources seem at a certain superficial level to be saying the same thing as Paul, closer study shows they’re not. For whatever reason in his 1977 book, E.P. Sanders did not study Josephus. If I recall, he mentions Josephus only three times. That’s astonishing for a start, because whatever else Josephus was he was a first-century Palestinian Jew.
In later writings then he discusses Josephus at some length, so we’ll pull in those other works as well. He points out Josephus himself speaks of grace not infrequently. Take a look at the Rengstorf concordance of Josephus, for example, to discover how often Josephus uses grace. I have looked up every single passage where charis is used in Josephus, and what you discover is something very interesting.
Again and again when Josephus actually appeals to charis and says so-and-so received some benefit from God by God’s charis or the like, then Josephus repeatedly asks the question, “And was this charis given to the man because he deserved it or because he did not deserve it?” Josephus replies, “Well, of course, because he deserved it. Otherwise, God would not be fair.”
Although Josephus is speaking of charis, that is not exactly Paul’s notion of charis. If you have any doubt on the matter, read Romans 4 and this distinction between what is given by merit, as in work, you work for it, or it’s given simply as a gift. When Paul raises, in other words, the similar question, he answers precisely 180 degrees opposite to what Josephus does.
Then there are other books. The precise dating of 4 Ezra to Esdras is disputed, but probably it goes back to the first-century Palestinian world all right. It is very difficult to deny pretty strong merit theology within that frame of reference. The sources go on and on. At this point one wants to start arguing the treatment of the sources is too uniform. They are all made to fit in this category of covenantal nomism without recognizing the enormous distinctions you get within Judaism itself.
This one is a much harder argument to quantify in the very nature of the case, but it needs to be raised. It has to be said our access to ancient religions is often through literature, but we often don’t know what people on the street thought quite. You may have heard of the Annales School of historiography.
The Annales School of historiography in France is very interesting. It stands over against the sort of great thinkers’ school of approach where you study a great scholar, then another great scholar, then another writer, then a dramatist, then an artist, then a great politician, and a great general. This is how you study history.
The Annales School of historiography is really much more interested in what happens amongst locals on one particular day in 1314 somewhere. You have the wonderful book by Le Roy Ladurie, Maredsous. It has been translated into English. I don’t know if it has been translated into German, but you can read it in French or English, in any case. It’s well worth your while reading. It’s really one day in the life of the village, Maredsous, in the High Middle Ages. That’s all it is.
He has used all kinds of records and archives and ancient descriptions to find out what an ordinary housewife is going through and what an ordinary child is going through and what they’re doing on the farm and what the local priest is doing. So instead of thinking about the great religious leaders and movements, there’s an attempt to try to find out what’s going on in one little village in the PyrÈnÈes.
Let me put it this way. If you’re an Anglican, for example, and you read the Thirty-nine Articles, you will have a certain view of Anglican theology. If you’re a Lutheran and you read the Lutheran confessions, you begin with Augsburg perhaps or whatever, then you will have a certain view of Lutheran theology.
Does that mean all Lutherans really understand, believe, toe the line, agree to Augsburg or that all Anglicans act in line, believe in line, confess in line with the Thirty-nine Articles? I don’t think so. At the street level there is a constant move. I don’t care whether you’re a Catholic or an evangelical or whatever you are. There’s a constant drift in one fashion or another to some form of merit theology, isn’t there?
You watch evangelicals. “Will God zap me today because I haven’t had my devotions properly?” Of course, nobody actually goes so far as to put it that bluntly. Nevertheless, some of that’s there, isn’t it? One wants to ask, “What is going on in first-century Judaism?” Do you find out what is going on in first-century Judaism just by reading 4QMMT at Qumran?
In that sense the Gospels themselves become primary sources of debates about what’s going on in Judaism. They are not sources to be disallowed as part of the understanding. So when Jesus describes what’s going on in Pharisees’ lives, on the one hand, yes, the Hasidim, we’re amongst the noblest and the finest and the most religious and the most respected and all the rest, but that’s precisely the group in which you start getting a great deal of self-justification and pride and arrogance.
It’s entirely a world in which you can imagine a publican and a Pharisee going to the temple and one saying, “I thank God I’m not as other men are.” Can’t you find bona fide evangelicals going to church and saying, in effect, “I thank God I am not as other men are … in slums, in poverty, in degradation, with AIDS. I do thank you I am …”? Isn’t that part of the same thing?
Suddenly, the Gospels themselves become powerful witnesses to the dynamic of what takes place at the local level, at the street level, at the lay level, at the common people level, and that must not be overlooked when you start talking about what Jesus was arguing with, because Jesus was not arguing simply with academicians. He was interested in ordinary folk.
Now we get to the third and fourth points on the list. The third I will deal with very quickly. The fourth I will say a little more about. Part of the problem in these discussion, it seems to me, is the danger of what Samuel Sandmel, a Jewish scholar who died a few years ago, used to call “parallelomania.” It’s a wonderful expression. He wrote an article in Journal of Biblical Literature about 30 years ago called “Parallelomania.” What he means by parallelomania is there is a form of exegesis that looks at all the parallels in either the Greco-Roman world or in Judaism, and when you find the parallels you read those parallels into the text you’re studying.
If you want some examples of this.… If you read, for example, Hans Dieter Betz, his commentary on Galatians in the Hermeneia series in the EKK, then you discover Betz, bless his heart, who is interested only in the Hellenistic background, reads Hellenistic parallels into passage after passage in Galatians and domesticates the text of Galatians by the parallels.
In fact, Betz is not even sure Paul actually knew any Hebrew. On the other hand, you find a scholar who is steeped in Jewish background and doesn’t know much about Hellenistic backgrounds, sort of a superficial knowledge, but really knows apocalyptic material well and Jewish stuff and Judaism and so on, then all of the parallels you find start justifying another reading of Paul.
At some point you have to ask at what point are you actually reading Paul in the light of your selected background and end up domesticating Paul. Will you allow Paul to speak for yourself? I would be prepared to argue there are quite a few writers who are quite good at dealing with backgrounds and less able at the level of just straight exegesis.
The backgrounds are important. Don’t misunderstand me. These texts are not abstracted from the world in which they were given. That’s correct. Not every background is as important as every other background. When I was doing a whole lot of work on John’s gospel a number of years ago, I read a very interesting article by Robert Kysar written in the Canadian Journal of Theology, now defunct, about 35 years ago.
What he did was examine all of the writings of Rudolf Bultmann and all of the writings of C.H. Dodd on the Johannine prologue and categorized every single extrabiblical reference. In other words, they had both written extensively on John 1:1–18, the Johannine prologue, and they had both done a lot of work on background studies, the Hermetica and Philo and the Jewish literature and Gnostic sources and so on.
He categorized then all of their appeals of evaluation to antecedent literature. In some cases they raised possible sources only to dismiss them, and others they raised the sources in order to justify them. They evaluated a lot of different sources. One, interestingly enough, had appealed to 306 different extrabiblical texts. The other had appealed to 308 extrabiblical texts. Guess what the percentage of overlap was? Seven percent. Does that tell you something?
The antecedent literature is vast, and you can come out with vastly different readings of the text itself by appeal to a certain kind of parallel. This is what Samuel Sandmel called parallelomania. You can domesticate texts by appealing to parallels. There is a certain kind of parallelophobia as well. In parallelophobia you refuse to anchor texts in their historical contexts. You refuse to learn anything from the surrounding text.
That’s clearly also a mistake, because God disclosed himself in real space-time history. Nevertheless, one does worry endlessly about the danger of domesticating New Testament texts by constant appeal, let us say, to exile or constant appeal to a certain kind of Jewish background or a certain Hellenistic background, or in the case of E.P. Sanders, to a certain kind of covenantal nomism, which is in fact itself a construct. Once the construct is in place, Paul has to be fit within that construct.
The question has to be raised.… Is it possible even if the construct is, in part, right Paul, in fact, himself is doing something else? So even if you have discovered there is an important set of questions regarding the so-called boundary markers of Judaism, you have to ask if Paul is treating those same boundary markers as boundary markers or as something else, or else you will end up inevitably domesticating Paul.
Those are questions I merely raise here. I don’t have time to pursue them more now. Now we’ll come to some word-study issues. Let me suggest to you some sources in this area. In the first volume of Justification and Variegated Nomism, the essay by Mark Seifrid on the tsadaq word group is very important.
He has a follow-up essay in the second volume, which is not off the press yet, in which he looks at how it is handled in the LXX and then at the dikaiosune, the dikaios, and so on, word group that is extraordinarily important. Let me tell you a story in this regard. A number of years ago, I was in Britain, and a senior scholar, a classicist, and an expert in the LXX but no expert in New Testament studies pulled me aside and said, “Look, I’m reading more about the new perspective, and I don’t really understand it. Explain it to me.”
So I sat down and gave him half an hour of what I’ve given to you. Eventually, I then came to Tom Wright’s understanding of justification as God’s declarative act that one is in the covenant. His question was, asked in all naÔvetÈ … he wasn’t trying to be mean: “Does Dr. Wright know any Greek?”
The reason for the question is whatever disputes there are amongst Catholics and Protestants and whatever disputes there are historically and so on, nevertheless, there is a profound recognition by classicists, by Septuagintal experts, by Greek experts all along the line until fairly recently that the dik– word group, dikaios, dikaiosune, adikia, and so forth, has to do with justice, righteousness.
Whether it’s declarative or transformative, all those things are debated, but at the end of the day, it has to do with justice. Now we have a definition that is entirely abstracted from justice, God’s declarative act by which you are in the covenant community. Where’s justice? Where’s righteousness? It’s one step abstracted.
In fact, that particular approach to justification is Tom’s own and those who followed him. It is not common within the broader stream of current Pauline studies apart from in that circle. What is fairly common, however, is the view.… It was pushed by K‰semann and one or two others. It’s the view that God’s righteousness is bound up with God’s covenant faithfulness to Israel. God shows himself to be righteous by being faithful to his covenant. That’s the nature of God’s righteousness.
So the tsadaq word group is bound up on this view with God’s covenantal faithfulness. That is how he shows himself to be righteous. That was argued by K‰semann. W. Pohlmann pushed it. Tom Wright pushes it and then develops it further along the lines I’ve indicated in his 1997 book. Interestingly enough, Adolf Schlatter, who discusses this in 1935, dismisses it as, “a declaration of war against Romans.” In other words, he insists if you take that view of dikaiosune, and before it tsadaq, in fact you cannot possibly understand Romans, which is very interesting indeed. So there is a longstanding debate that is in fact complex in this regard.
It is at this point, it seems to me, some of the studies of Seifrid are very helpful. He argues in the Old Testament God’s righteousness is an act of God that very commonly has both a saving function and a judging function. It is part of a larger contention between God and human beings in which God is vindicated. So it’s bound up, in the first instance, with the righteousness, the vindication of God. In this contention between God and human beings, he may then save his people according to his own covenantal promises, but he may also condemn people.
Thus, in a text like Psalm 98, which many people on the other side quote, “Sing to the Lord a new song, for he has done marvelous things. His right hand and his holy arm have worked salvation for him. The Lord has made his salvation known and revealed his righteousness to the nations,” the other side argues, “Do you see? Salvation is bound up with God’s disclosure of his righteousness, which is part of his covenantal faithfulness. He brings about by his own justice, his covenantal faithfulness that brings salvation.”
Seifrid says, “No, you’re not paying enough attention to the context. He reveals his righteousness to the nations.” That is, the righteousness word group is regularly tied to a larger framework than the covenant. It’s regularly tied in the Old Testament to creation itself. So you read in the next verse, “Yes, he has remembered his love and his faithfulness to the house of Israel. All the ends of the earth have seen the salvation of our God.”
By the end of the passage, you get, “Let the sea resound and everything in it, the world and all who live in it. Let the rivers clap their hands. Let the mountains sing together for joy. Let them sing before the Lord, for he comes to judge the earth. He will judge the world in righteousness and the peoples with equity.”
That is, the righteousness brings condemnation as well as salvation, and it’s not just for Israel. It’s universal. It’s bound up with the contention between God and human beings, and God’s righteousness is bound up with judgment as well as with mercy. He works through passage after passage to show that is the case.
Indeed, God’s righteousness, he points out, is often found in association with creational words and with words of judging. It’s very common. The word tsadaq in this regard is used 142 times and almost never in conjunction with berith, that is, the word for covenant. In the Old Testament you keep the covenant, you remember the covenant, you disobey the covenant, but there is no Old Testament passage of doing justice by the covenant. There’s not an association. The association is with other things.
So Abraham’s question about Sodom and Gomorrah, “Shall not the judge of all the earth render just judgment?” It’s “do right” in our versions. “… render just judgment [righteous judgment]?” The assumption is whether in mercy or in condemnation in the context. Do you see? Righteousness cannot be reduced to matters of proper relationship or the like, not even proper covenantal relationship. It involves condemning the unjust and rectifying a wrong with God being vindicated.
God must be right. That is why in his being right, although it can be in parallel with salvation, because God can show himself right by bringing salvation to his people in line with his covenantal promises, it can’t be reduced to salvation. Thus, in Exodus 9:27 Pharaoh says, “The Lord is righteous. I and my people are guilty.” Over against the people God is righteous. The people are wrong. That’s outside the covenant. This is Pharaoh and his bunch.
Nehemiah 9:33: “You are righteous in everything which you have brought upon us, for you have acted in truth. We have acted wretchedly.” Even, in fact, there is a forensic value to the term, not merely relational. It is God’s declaration of who is right and who is wrong in contention after contention.
There may be some semantic differences between saving righteousness, the hiphil stem of the verb, and retributive justice. That is, punishment and the like in the adjective. It’s not an absolute division, but there is a common associational one between the hiphil form of the verb, which tends to talk about saving righteousness, and retributive justice, which tends to be the adjective, but it’s not an absolute one. They’re all nicely categorized for you in Seifrid.
It’s perhaps this lexical distinction that has contributed to the false conclusion the righteousness of God always signifies saving righteousness. It’s looking at a selection of texts in which the noun can be parallel to salvation, in which it can function in that way because God’s righteousness is manifested precisely in saving people in line with the covenantal promises.
When it’s reduced to that, it is not looking at the sweep of the term or the larger context in which this works out again and again. Other texts to think about are Isaiah 51:16, Isaiah 1:24–28, and so forth. There are many, many other passages in this regard.
Now I want to come to some New Testament passages in which some of these things are worked out. If you have your Bibles with you, let’s begin with Romans 1. I have time here only to dip into a few passages. This is not much more than a priming of the pump, but this may be a way of beginning, at least. Begin with Romans 1:17. “For in the gospel a righteousness from God is revealed, a righteousness that is by faith from first to last, just as it is written, the righteous will live by faith.”
There is no clause, no phrase in this verse that is not disputed, but what can I say? Let me give you a few hints along the line that I would take it, that I would be prepared to justify at much greater length. It is justified in much greater length in one of the essays in Volume 2. There is very little of my broader argument that’s going to depend on a particular judgment here. I just think it might be useful to take you through this verse simply because it is used all the time.
First, “For in the gospel a righteousness from God is revealed.” One of the strong arguments of Luther you find also in Calvin. It is stronger in Luther, and it recurs in not a few of the responses today against this new perspective. Justification, righteousness, dikaiosune, just like te dikaiosune tou theou, is not simply God’s declarative righteousness, God’s forensic righteousness, it’s too narrow.
This is not overturning classic confessionalism, but rather, it is a way of showing God’s righteousness is very often a way of referring to the redemptive event rather than to the declaration. When Paul here says the righteousness of God is revealed from heaven, he’s not talking about the judicial verdict. He is not talking about God’s declarative act by which we are declared just within the covenant. He’s certainly not talking about his covenantal faithfulness.
He’s talking about the gospel. It’s in the gospel that te dikaiosune tou theou is disclosed. After the long passage then from 1:18 to 3:20 that proves we’re all condemned, he picks up in 3:21, which is a passage we’re going to look at in two days in any case, but now dikaiosune tou theou has been made known apart from law.
What that dikaiosune tou theou is in the context of 3:21–26 is in fact the substitutionary death of Christ on the cross. In other words, the dikaiosune tou theou is the great redemptive event itself, the gospel event, Christ’s death and resurrection on our behalf, however that’s configured, however that’s understood, however it’s tied to hilasterion and to the Kataloge word group. We’ll come to some of that in two days’ time.
Nevertheless, it is the event itself. Then out of the event itself comes the declaration that those who have been saved by this event are declared just because of Christ’s work on our behalf. In other words, it is important not to reduce justification to a declarative act. The declarative act emerges from the event, but the dikaiosune tou theou is regularly seen to be the event, not always in Paul but very, very commonly, and certainly in 1:17, it seems to me.
“It has been revealed.” That is again Paul’s understanding of the gospel revealed here in chapter 3, verse 21. It has been manifested. It has appeared. It is part of the gracious self-disclosure of the Christ event, which is not only his coming but then his cross work and resurrection and so forth on our behalf.
Then the expression, a righteousness that is by faith to faith, or a faith from first to last, as the NIV has it, is massively disputed as to what it means. I’ll merely tell you what I think, but nothing I say depends on this. It’s a very minor point. I think it means from the first covenant to the last, that is, from the first to the second, from the beginning to the end. It’s always by faith. I think that’s what is meant, but I acknowledge that one is disputed.
There has been a recent article, in fact. It just appeared in one if the recent journals. I think it was JSNT that argued the same line. Again, this is not a peculiar Carsonism or anything like that. It is one of the traditional interpretations, and I think it’s probably right. Then one of the most disputed texts in the New Testament, Habakkuk 2:4 as it’s cited here and in Galatians especially, an extremely difficult passage, loaded with textual and translational difficulties.
Again, I will give you my conclusion. Nothing I’m going to say depends on it a great deal here, but I want to press on to other passages. “Just as it is written, the righteous will live by faith.” In my view the Old Testament text is not speaking of the faithfulness of the righteous one; that is, the righteous will live by his faith (although many take it that way; I don’t think that’s what is being said) But of the vision to which the preceding text repeatedly refers.
That is, the righteous one will live by the faithfulness of the vision, not the faithfulness of the individual. The LXX has taken it that way, though somewhat paraphrastically by saying, “The righteous one will live by my faithfulness.” That’s paraphrastic. That’s not what the Hebrew says. The question is what the third person possessive refers to in the Hebrew, “will live by his faith.”
What is the his or its? If it’s the person who is exercising the faith, then it’s, “The righteous one will live by his faith,” or conceivably “his faithfulness.” If it’s the vision’s faithfulness; that is, the faithfulness of the vision to which repeated reference is made all the way through Habakkuk to, then paraphrastically that is equivalent to saying God’s faithfulness to maintain the vision he has, in fact, promised repeatedly in the chapter.
So the LXX is formally wrong but substantially correct. That is, it’s referring to the faithfulness of God in maintaining the vision that has been promised again and again since God brings the vision to reality. In other words, the one who lives by the faithfulness of the vision of the coming salvation is in view, that is, by the promise of God. It seems to me Paul understands the text to contain an implicit call to faith based on God’s faithfulness but is not primarily at this point looking at the individual’s faith but at the faithfulness of God as demonstrated in the vision.
Whether you buy into that or not at this point doesn’t really make a lot of difference, and it is, I fully acknowledge, an extremely disputed passage. Now it’s worth coming once again to reflect a little bit on the wrath of God here. We talked a bit about sin this morning, and Paul goes to great lengths to ground his subsequent argument about the atonement of Christ in the universal need. I think it is fair to say Paul was converted so rapidly he did not go through long periods of self-doubt and self-examination.
The only text which suggests he could be struggling with things is found in Acts. It’s a certain reading where God addresses him on the Damascus road and says, “It is hard for you to fight against the pricks,” or “to fight against the goads.” That has often been understood in Reformed circles to be the goads of conscience or the pricks of conscience, which then presupposes although Paul is persecuting Christians, in fact at the same time he’s struggling with a deep conscience matter within himself and the Lord is coming after him.
The expression itself does not speak of pricks of conscience. The context is the goads the Old Testament farmers used, the long goads with the point at the end they used to steer their bullocks. The picture rather is of God steering Paul in all kinds of ways. “It’s hard for you to fight me. I’ll steer you in the direction I want to steer you,” rather than pricks of consciousness. It is very difficult to imagine Paul is wrestling with deep, deep notions of conscience.
In fact, when Paul discusses his own pre-conversion state in Philippians, chapter 3, he doesn’t speak in terms of a terribly guilty conscience. He speaks rather of, “As far as the law was concerned, I was blameless.” This does not sound like a terribly guilty conscience to me. He sounds rather chuffed with himself.
Male: I have a question. Could the passage where Paul is saying, “That which I don’t want to do, I do,” apply in here at all?
Don Carson: That really depends then on whether you understand that to refer to his pre-conversion mode or to his.… That’s Romans 7, and that has three major interpretations given to it. It’s one of the reasons why that one is such a tough passage.
Male: Do you really think Paul was converted to Christianity?
Don Carson: Was he converted? Yes. In fact, in the second volume of our Justification and Variegated Nomism, we have included a 50-page essay by Peter O’Brien under the title, “Was Paul Converted?” I think he was. Very powerfully. You have to define terms pretty carefully, but yes.
This whole question of where Paul is is tied in part to your understanding of Galatians 3. In a fair bit of Reformed thought, Galatians 3 is understood this way, in my view, slightly skewed, but it’s often understood this way. The argument here is Abraham was justified by faith before the giving of the law.
The law cannot annul the promise, and in fact, what the law really does is function as a paidagogos, a servant who leads people to Christ. So the argument is the law, properly taught and preached, brings about consciousness of sin, awareness of guilt in order to lead people to the grace of Christ.
If you asked John Wesley, for example, “How do you preach the gospel in any place?” because, after all, Wesley would get on his horse.… He ultimately rode 50,000 miles on horseback. He would go to a new place and start preaching the gospel. “What do you do when you get there?” He answers in one of his letters. It’s about letter 134 or thereabouts.
He says, “When I go to preach the gospel in any place, this is what I do,” and his answer at this juncture is right out of the Puritans, because Wesley in many ways, although he differed from them in certain major respects, in many respects he was really a late Puritan. In fact, Packer goes so far as to refer to Wesley as an inconsistent Calvinist, but that’s Packer’s take on it. I won’t even comment on that one.
What Wesley says, however, is, “When I go to any place, I begin with a general declaration of the love of God. Then I preach the law forcefully, repeatedly, and powerfully to make people see their need, how deep sin is, how awful is their offense, and to bring people to a place where they have no excuse left anymore and begin to cry to God for mercy.”
He says, “When I see a few people beginning to cry in the assembly, I preach more law. When quite a few are beginning to crack under this regime of preaching the law, then I admix a little grace. Only when virtually the whole assembly is under deep conviction of sin, then I preach grace fully, freely, broadly so men will turn to Christ. Then quickly do I admix law, lest men should presume.”
That is really a Puritan view of what the Bible contains. If you asked a Puritan, “What is in the Bible?” the Puritan would respond, “Law, grace, and illustrations of both.” It’s a self-consistent way of thinking what is in the Bible, and the categories belong to the domain of systematic theology.
Chapter 3 within that heritage becomes further justification for how you then preach the gospel. You preach the gospel as the paidagogos that leads you to Christ. One of the criticisms then of this mode is precisely the criticism that comes out of the new perspective camp, and it’s partly right in my view and partly wrong.
The right part is to recognize chapter 3 is not to be individualized like this; it is actually talking about a reading of the Old Testament. It’s talking about redemptive history. It’s talking about sequence. I’m going to come to that on the last two days where we talk about the use of the Old Testament and the New. I want to spend a lot more time on this complex question.
One of the distinctions between Paul’s reading of the law and that of Judaism is Judaism read the law as a hermeneutical key for understanding the whole. Paul reads the Old Testament sequentially. He reads it in terms of its narrative sequence. I will come back to this question, as I say, on Tuesday and Wednesday.
If you asked a first-century Jew, “How do you please God?” the Jew would reply, “By obeying the law.”
“How does David please God?”
“By obeying the law.”
“How does Moses please God?”
“By obeying the law.”
“How does Abraham please God?”
“By obeying the law.”
“Wait a minute. The law wasn’t given.
“Yes, Genesis says, ‘Abraham obeyed all my statutes.’ What do you think those statutes were, for goodness’ sake. He must have had special revelation from God, a special disclosure, of the law. That’s how you please God. Abraham obeyed the law.”
“How did Enoch please God?”
“He obeyed the law.”
“Wait a minute. He’s only seventh from Adam.”
“Yes, but we know you please God by obeying the law. He must have had special disclosure. After all, already you find Abraham apparently observing the seventh day. That’s before the Sabbath was given, so he must have had the Sabbath structure. He’s paying a tithe before the tithe is prescribed. He must have had the tithing regulations. He pleased God by obeying the law.”
Do you see what is going on there? Hermeneutically, the law is elevated to the place of hermeneutical control, whereas for Paul the proper grid here is sequence … historical sequence, chronology. So Abraham is justified by faith explicitly in the text before the law is given. To Abraham is given the promise in him and in his seed all the nations of the earth will be blessed, before the law is given.
So if the law comes along centuries later, it cannot annul the promise. Paul’s whole argument here is not the function of the law in the individual conscience. Paul’s whole argument in Galatians 3 is the function of the law in redemptive history, and he sees a different place for the function of the law in redemptive history precisely because he is not reading the law as a hermeneutical grid for interpreting the entire Old Testament. He’s reading the law in its sequential place in redemptive history according to the Old Testament storyline.
I think it is entirely correct for the new perspective to point that out. On the other hand, it’s worth insisting other biblical theologians have also pointed that out. Geerhardus Vos points it out. All kinds of commentators have pointed it out in the Reformed tradition and who break from the Reformed tradition on this point, precisely by insisting this is the way this should be read.
Then the question they would ask is, “Why then does God spend centuries using the law to prepare his people for the coming Christ?” Then the argument is, “Yes, there is a whole sacrificial system that’s taught and a priestly system and so on.” We’ll come to some passages of this later on in respect to Hebrews on Wednesday.
At the same time one of the functions was precisely we’re told to multiply sin on account of sin, on account of transgressions. To multiply transgression and show at the end of the day the law is no final solution. It does lead people historically over time to the place where they are without excuse and leads people, in fact, to Christ.
So although Paul would say I think his own conversion happened very quickly and his own perception that the law was inadequate to cope with the fact that Jesus really had died on the cross and risen. That’s all correct. Nevertheless, there is no evidence Paul himself goes through vast periods of time psychologically. Paul is not interested in the individual psychology of getting there. He’s interested in the redemptive historical preparation for bringing the people of God to accept Christ rather than the psychology of the individual conversion.
Within that framework, then, you can understand why this sort of stance does fit in with the logic of Romans. That is to prove all then are under the curse from creation and for the Jews under the curse of the law and for Gentiles under the curse of the law written on their heart, but we are all under that curse. It is the redemptive historical argument rather than the psychological individualizing argument that interests Paul.
A couple of more reflections in this regard, still looking at particular texts.… Think with me for a moment about the musterion passages in the New Testament. There are 26, 27, or 28 depending on textual variance. There’s a textual variant where I don’t think it occurs in 1 Corinthians 2 and a textual variant where I think it does occur in Romans 16, so I take 27 occurrences in the New Testament. Some have argued for 26, and some have argued for 28.
What does musterion mean? Some of these passages are in Colossians and Ephesians, of course, which some will label Deutero-Pauline. I don’t, but it’s not going to make any difference to my argument. Romans 11 and Romans 16 both use the term musterion. What is a musterion? In the past some have argued musterion is bound up with mystery religions and have seen it in terms of Hellenistic background.
The overwhelming majority of scholars today now point out that’s not the way it works. It’s really tied to raz in the Aramaic sections of Daniel. It’s tied to notions of hiddenness in Qumran and elsewhere. It has to do with that which has been hidden in time past and is now disclosed, something along those lines.
This is going to take us as well into arguments I will develop more fully on Tuesday and Wednesday. Let me at least say this much now. There is a stream of the New Testament that argues the gospel is simply the fulfillment of Old Testament prophecy. There is another stream of the New Testament that seems to argue the gospel and its various components is essentially bound up with mystery.
In other words, the gospel in the New Testament.… I think we will see more fully in a couple of days from now … is sometimes presented as that which has been prophesied in the past and is now fulfilled and on other occasions as that which has been hidden in the past and is now revealed. Those are quite different notions, and your understanding of whether Paul was converted is tied to that debate.
For on the one hand, the New Testament writers want to argue who Jesus is and his death and resurrection are all predicted in the past, whether they’re predicted by typology or by the sacrificial system or by Yom Kippur or by Isaiah 53 or whatever. There is a sense in which New Testament writer after New Testament writer wants to argue Jesus’ death and resurrection is the fulfillment of Old Testament passages.
In that sense it would be entirely correct to say when you become a Christian as a Jew in the first century, you’re not converting to something else. You are merely staying in the line in which Scripture has already spoken. In that sense it’s sort of meaningless to talk about conversion. On the other hand, there is passage after passage that speaks of these things having been hidden in time past and now revealed.
In that sense you are moving to a new position. It’s very interesting to observe although the gospel writers insist Jesus’ death fulfilled Scripture they also insist they themselves did not understand it before the event. Despite the efforts of some to argue 4QMMT is an exception, there is no unambiguous passage that connects Isaiah 53 with a suffering substitutionary Messiah before Christ.
When Jesus is on the cross and his disciples are in the upstairs room waiting for the resurrection, they’re not saying, “Yes! I can hardly wait till Sunday.” They still have no categories for it … none. It’s all hidden. Even though they are going to be amongst the first to insist it was all revealed in advance. It was all predicted.
In Luke’s account of things, Jesus comes along after the resurrection in Luke 24 and says, “Oh, fools and slow of heart to believe all the prophets have written.” Does your brain hurt now? Because there are these double streams. I’m going to come back to them, as I say, on Tuesday and Wednesday, because these themes in justification are tied in with how you use the Old Testament.
If we accept the authenticity of the last three verses of Romans, observe how these two strands come together very powerfully, and I would be prepared to argue for the authenticity of these last three verses. They are textually disputed. Listen to this final doxology in Romans 16:25–27. “Now to him who is able to establish you by my gospel and the proclamation of Jesus Christ.” So we’re talking about the gospel, the proclamation of Christ.
“To him who is able to establish you by my gospel and the proclamation of Jesus Christ, according to the revelation of the mystery hidden for long ages past …” There’s the mystery theme. “Hidden in times past but now revealed.” “… but now revealed and made known through the prophetic writings.” So it was there all along. Stick that in your pipe and smoke it. You have to believe both of these axes at the same time or you will get something wrong.
The question is how they can be reconciled, how they can be put together. Do you see? How they can be put together, we’ll come back to that question too in the last couple of days. Those sorts of debates need, it seems to me, to inform more than they have our wrestlings with questions of law and grace.
For if I mistake not, after he has become a Christian, Paul understands the law simultaneously to condemn and to proclaim Christ in advance. On the one hand here in Galatians 3, he can speak of the law being added because of transgressions. I think “because of transgressions” there means to multiply the transgressions, to turn the sin and the idolatry into actual transgression, particular stipulations.
On the other hand, in a passage like Romans 3:21, there we read of a dikaiosune tou theou, a righteousness from God, manifested from heaven apart from law. That is, he means apart from the law covenant to which, nevertheless, the law and the prophets bear witness, he says. Thus the manifestation of this dikaiosune is apart from the law covenant.
It’s apart from nomos, but the nomos and the prophets bear witness to it. They’re proclaiming it in advance. That turns on a certain salvation historical reading of the Old Testament sources, which we’ll come to again, as I say, Tuesday and Wednesday. If I go slowly enough, it might be Wednesday and Thursday. By seeing these sorts of issues, it seems to me we are trying to look at things as Paul sees them.
I have no objection to talking about boundary markers and self-identity issues and so forth, but if you spend all of your time on circumcision and food laws and the like as social boundary markers and not as Paul sees them within the larger framework of how to read the Bible in its salvation-historical sequence, then you are focusing entirely on the horizontal matters of social identification, which concern us a great deal, but not with the issues of most fundamental importance to Paul which have to do with how men and women can be reconciled to God.
Thus he sees the law as multiplying transgressions, not merely multiplying breaking social barriers. The parallel in Romans when you come to Romans 1:18–3:20 is proving the disastrous effect of rebellion, sin, and so on across a broad sweep that touches idolatry, greed, murder, God giving them over to all kinds of debauchery, sexual sin, on and on. These are not your social markers.
There is a much bigger frame of reference in which those things are being worked out. Paul does not then see the cross merely as dealing in some way with sin analogous to the way Yom Kippur dealt with sin so we can all be one people. He sees this as God’s plan from the beginning, attested by the law and the prophets.
Part of the problem of the new perspective, in my judgment, especially in the Jimmy Dunn manifestation, to some extent in the Tom Wright manifestation but certainly in the Jimmy Dunn manifestation, is it is too narrowly configured on the social constructs of self-identity and not on the massive structures of how men and women can be reconciled to God. That is much closer to Paul’s attempt to understand these issues in a redemptive framework.
Let me give you an analogy. It’s not a good analogy, but it’s an analogy. If you read Marxist historiography of the Reformation, let’s say some Christopher Hill and others, then Marxist historiography of the Reformation focuses on the social identification of the German peasants and the structures of suppression and the power structure between church and the German duchies and so forth. It’s cast in social movements, and there is no doubt such things played their part … undoubtedly.
You must still ask the question, “Is that what drove Luther?” Have you given an adequate explanation of the Reformation once you’ve used exclusively Marxist categories? Likewise, I want to say there is no doubt there are profoundly difficult issues connected with circumcision and so on. On the other hand, if all of your categories are bound up with social markers, have you come to terms with Paul?
Let’s come to Galatians 2, verses 11 to 14. We’re focusing more and more narrowly. This, as you may know if you have been studying Galatians for any extended period of time, is one of the most disputed paragraphs in all of the book, and it is extremely complex. Again, I am not going to insist the way I take it is the only way to take it, but I would like respectfully to submit it makes a lot more sense than most of the alternatives. I think it clarifies some of these sorts of issues. Let me read these verses for you.
“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. When I saw that they were not acting in line with the truth of the gospel, I said to Peter in front of them all, ‘You are a Jew, yet you live like a Gentile and not like a Jew. How is it, then, that you force Gentiles to follow Jewish customs?’ ”
What is going on? What is the nature of the dispute? Let me tell you, frankly, that one is a hot potato. At the risk of caricature, let me suggest two ways of interpreting it. First, it is possible to take the expression, certain men from James, and the expression, the circumcision group, to refer to the same people.
Then the argument runs something like this. There are many variations, but something like this. The church in Antioch is mixed race and reasonably well integrated. Exactly what’s going on will depend a bit on whether you date this before the Jerusalem Council or after, and there are fine points, so on I need not explore here.
When Peter first comes up having already lived through the experiences of Acts 10 and 11, he is happy to integrate into this mixed community, and he eats then meals happily with both Jews and Gentiles. Then certain men from James … that is, conservative Jewish Christians from the Jerusalem camp … come up, and when they come up, they are the circumcision group. They’re the more conservative bunch, and they eat on their own. They insist on eating kosher. So when the church meets, they eat at a separate table, as it were.
Initially, Peter might go with them sometime, be with this other group, this larger group on other occasions, but gradually he eats more and more with the kosher group and so identifies with them that he never eats with the rest anymore. That makes some of the other Christian Jews in Antioch, who up to this point have been happy to be more integrated with the Gentiles, a little nervous.
If Peter is going in that direction, maybe Peter the hero of Pentecost, primus inter pares, knows something dear ol’ Paul, second-class apostle, doesn’t quite get straight, and maybe there is a kind of inside track to holiness by being conformed to the law. As a result, some slip over in that direction, and eventually even Barnabas is snookered. That’s the way it’s often read, isn’t it? I don’t think it works. I just find it highly implausible as a reconstruction.
After all, Peter by this point, if you take the Acts account seriously, is already gone through Acts 10, but Acts 11.… In other words, when he was hauled on the carpet in the Jerusalem church for the Cornelius episode, he defends himself, and the Jerusalem church in principle agrees. That doesn’t mean they’re comfortable with it, but they agree. The Holy Spirit has given salvation to Gentiles as well.
So even if some Jews from Jerusalem were eating kosher, why would Peter after those sorts of experiences, after his justification, why would he be afraid of what the Jerusalem crowd thought? That’s what the text says. He was afraid of those who belonged to the circumcision group. The matter is already regulated. Why should he be so afraid at this point? Peter can be a wimp, all right. He can do some pretty daft things, but this one strikes me as a little more daft than usual and not only not courageous but pretty stupid. I don’t think it’s a very reasonable reconstruction.
Let me suggest another reconstruction. Now presuppose the two expressions, those from James and the circumcision group, refer to different people. Note the expression, certain men from James, though it does not prove they were envoys or messengers, suggests it. It doesn’t simply say certain Christians or certain believers from Jerusalem but from James.
If they are from James, what sort of message are they carrying? What are they talking about? What’s going on? The hint then comes along in the expression, the circumcision group. That expression, the circumcision group, is in fact ambiguous in the New Testament. It means different things in different contexts. You have to examine the context.
In some instances, unambiguously, it refers to Jewish Christians. Under the first interpretation, it would be referring to the Jewish Christians who have just come up from James. Supposing it instead refers, as it sometimes does in the New Testament, to unconverted Jews, as it sometimes does, then we might be able to place this historically.
You find this view defended, for example, in the NICNT commentary on Galatians and elsewhere. In the 40s you already find cycles of persecution against the church in Jerusalem. The zealots were rising in power, so there was more and more pressure for Christian Jews to conform to Judaism in Jerusalem.
I think it’s important not to see here merely two groups but an entire spectrum. I think if I had time, I could justify this by referring to various passages in the New Testament, but let me paint a certain kind of spectrum. How does one stand with respect to the law? On the one hand, there are conservative, unconverted Jews who think it is important to obey the whole law of God to be justified before him. You could fill in other spots on the spectrum.
Then there are some who have become Christians in the sense they do accept Jesus is the Messiah. They do accept he really is the promised Messiah, but they nevertheless think to accept Jesus as the Messiah you really have to be a Jew who’s covenantally bound to keep the law in the first place.
Then you have some Jews who really do understand Jesus is the promised Messiah and we’re saved by faith in him alone and it is his death and not the sacrifice of a bull and a goat on Yom Kippur that forgives your sin. Therefore, there is a profound sense in which the law doesn’t have quite the same function anymore. Nevertheless, for Jews it’s important to keep the law even if Gentiles don’t have to.
The next group over would be those who hold the same position, nevertheless, who say, “You don’t have to obey the stipulations of the old covenant anymore, but quite frankly I’m more comfortable doing so.” So pragmatically this group lives like this group, but their underlying rationale is a bit different.
You have the next group out that is saying, “To the Jews I become a Jew. To the Gentiles I become a Gentile that by all means I might win some.” That sounds like Paul in 1 Corinthians 9. Then if you move far enough out, you might get to a bona fide antinomian, “Free from the law—oh, happy condition!”
Now you see there is no constraint anywhere, and then Paul can say pretty nasty things about such a group. “Let sin abound that grace may abound whose damnation is just.” He can be pretty blunt against that group. Clearly those such people are around, or else Paul wouldn’t have to give that sort of pronouncement.
There’s a whole spectrum of position that is meant. So when you find an expression like the circumcision group, what do you mean? To whom are you referring? Supposing then the situation is like this. I can’t prove this. There’s some speculation to what I’m about to say, but it seems to me the speculation that fits this text rather nicely.
Supposing then the message that was being sent up by those from James was something like this. “Peter, we remember the Cornelius episode, and we remember how the church backed you on this one. We agree on what the gospel really is. That’s not an issue.” In fact, Paul has just gone on to insist there was agreement between the Jerusalem three and Paul on the gospel. Although there are a lot of new perspective people who think Paul was not being quite honest about that, nevertheless take Paul at his word for it.
“There is fundamental agreement on the exclusive sufficiency of Christ as the basis for salvation, but Peter, you need to understand you have a high profile. Meanwhile, persecution is breaking out down here. Rumors keep coming back you’re eating with Gentiles, you’re taking the whole church down this Gentile track, and every time you do this sort of thing, somebody else lands in jail down here. Just be careful. For goodness sake, Peter, you have a high profile. Be careful what you’re doing.”
When the text says Peter is afraid of the circumcision group.… That’s what the text says. He’s afraid of them. He may not be afraid of them for his own safety. He’s afraid of them, rather, because of what they’re doing according to James’s report through those from James down in Jerusalem.
From his point of view, he is trying to act wisely to spare Christians too much pain down in Jerusalem. After all, don’t we read just a few verses earlier at the end of chapter 1 there was agreement? Peter was apostle to the Jews, and Paul to the Gentiles. Peter may have felt some special responsibility. After all, he was primus inter pares as far as the Jerusalem lot were concerned.
If there was a message from James, I can’t prove there was, those from James suggest something more personal than those from Jerusalem, and if the circumcision group refers to Jews who are not converted in Jerusalem and Peter is afraid of them, even though quite transparently he’s not afraid of them personally, just look how bold he is in chapter 2, 3, and then later on in chapter 12, “We cannot help but speak the things we have seen and heard, and when the first whiff of persecution breaks out, we have to obey God rather than …”
Personally, he’s not afraid of them. He’s prepared to go to jail for them. Then when he’s persecuted personally, he counts it joy he’s honored to suffer with Christ. He’s not afraid of them personally. No, it seems to me the only way to make sense of this is to say he was afraid because of the damage they were doing in the increasingly persecuted church in the middle-late 40s in Jerusalem.
So he decides to restrict his own behavior for the sake of the Jerusalem crowd, his Christians, Christian Jews, where he has responsibility. Paul sees in the Antioch context there’s a stinger in the tail because Peter’s influence will also shape what is going on in a mixed race church so the Gentiles will increasingly perceive there are two brands of Christians, a Jewish brand and a Gentile brand.
Sooner or later, that will call in question the exclusive sufficiency of Christ, and that is bound up with notions of justification. At that point Paul calls Peter a hypocrite, not with quite the same load that is in the English word hypocrisy. Hypokrisis has to do with play-acting in some way, and it may be as mean and nasty as our English word hypocrisy. In the context here you can see what he’s saying.
Verse 14: “When I saw that they were not acting in line with the truth of the gospel, 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, he has already made it plain he’s prepared to eat non-kosher food. He has done this with Cornelius. He has done this in Antioch. He has already done this. “How is it that now you force Gentiles to follow Jewish customs?” I think force is merely by the diktat of his own example, of his own power.
The fact that he says it publically in front of them all, I suspect, is a very abbreviated form of a lot of private reasoning. I’m pretty sure, again I can’t prove it, a man like Paul would have confronted Peter privately too and didn’t get anywhere with him, but the damage is still being done publically so Paul goes public, and it’s not pretty.
The implication of this is Paul then sees if he’s right Peter should still insist on the unity of the church by his own actions, and if this means persecution in Jerusalem, so be it. It’s the price you pay to defend the exclusive sufficiency of Christ. You do not do anything that jeopardizes the exclusive sufficiency of Christ, not anything.
There is a sense in which that is bringing you back to reformational principles, not because the debates are exactly the same, but because in generation after generation there will always be things, movements, tendencies, historical pressures, to sacrifice the exclusive sufficiency of Christ, whether it’s through indulgences Luther fought or a merit theology or a certain view of the reading of the law or whatever it is.
Paul won’t have it. His whole argument is on the exclusive sufficiency of Christ and his death as the proper ground of our justification. For it is in Christ that te dikaiosune tou theou is revealed. It is in the Christ event. What I have really done now is sneaked into the biblical theology part of the argument. I would want to argue, in other words, the new perspective people are quite right to read this passage in its historical sequencing. You don’t want to impose all the categories of the Puritans on this text and dehistoricize it.
The question is not whether or not the passage has to be read in its own historical sequencing. That’s not the issue. The question is whether their historical sequencing is the most believable, and I don’t think it is. Just as you can have bad systematic theology, so you can have bad biblical theology.
That doesn’t prove biblical theology is always wrong, just as bad systematic theology does not prove all dogmatic theology is wrong. It does mean even when you see the importance of historical sequencing you can still make huge mistakes at an interpretive level. Questions? Comments?
Female: I was reminded of the incident, the reference, of when Paul got Timothy circumcised to please the Jews, and I wondered what aspect of Paul’s motivation was different from Peter’s. The answer I gave myself, personally, on Paul was because Paul’s motivation didn’t affect the exclusive sufficiency of Christ. Am I right?
Don: You’re right, but what you must really do to get that one right, it seems to me, is to compare Paul’s attitude with respect to Titus described in Galatians 2 with his attitude with respect to Timothy described in Acts. I don’t think they’re mutually contradictory the way some people argue. The point is with respect to Titus he says Titus was not forced to be circumcised, even though some in Jerusalem demanded it.
He was not forced to, which means the Jerusalem leaders agreed Titus didn’t have to be circumcised. Then along comes Paul and circumcises Timothy. What’s going on? No wonder then in chapter 1:10 of Galatians he is accused of being a man-pleaser; that is, going with the wind depending on what was going on and not very consistent. In fact, there is a deep principle that is at issue.
If somebody is saying you have to circumcise someone in order for him to be a Christian, Paul will say, “Absolutely no way.” If, on the other hand, Paul thinks it wise to avoid offending Jewish sensibilities by paying for somebody’s sacrifice or by circumcising Timothy so they can get into the synagogues without raising a whole lot of questions, then fine he’ll go ahead and do it. Do you see?
To take an analogy that’s not very good but nevertheless it shows something similar, you know in certain parts.… I’m a Canadian, but in certain parts of the United States, you know many Christians don’t drink alcohol. If I am in one of those parts and everybody is going to be all upset if I drink alcohol, then I don’t drink alcohol. It’s not worth the fight and so on.
If somebody says to me, “You cannot be a Christian and drink alcohol,” I will say, “Pass the Beaujolais,” because you do not ever allow anything to jeopardize the absolute sufficiency of Christ … not anything.
Male: This raises the question why did Paul go to Jerusalem to have a meeting with the apostles? Did he go so they can check his gospel, or did he go to check their gospel for the sufficiency of Christ?
Don: I would say neither. His language in chapter 2 is very interesting. It is very subtle, very careful. Chapter 2, verse 2b: “I went in response to a revelation and set before them the gospel I preach among the Gentiles. But I did this privately to those who seemed to be leaders …”
Even that expression is interesting. It’s as if he does not want to say, “To those who were the leaders,” because that would suggest he was a second-class apostle. That’s clearly what part of the charge is against him, that he’s a derivative apostle in these first two chapters. He says, “No, I got the gospel myself directly from the resurrected Christ. I’m not a derivative apostle.” He’s not bad-mouthing them, but he’s treating them with a certain kind of care.
“… for fear that I was running or had run my race in vain.” I think what he means by that is he is well aware there are some people who are following him around and undermining his ministry, who are claiming to come from the apostles. When he goes to the apostles, he wants to report on all of this for fear he is running in vain.
That is to say, every time he’s doing this kind of stuff, because these people are claiming to be from the Jerusalem crowd, they’re undermining him, and all he’s doing is in danger of being undone all the time. What he wants from the Jerusalem apostles is not merely superficial agreement about whether or not they agree with his gospel. He wants something that will undermine those who are following him. That’s what he wants.
That, it seems to me, is entirely in line then with what eventually does take place, whether you put this just before or just after the Jerusalem Council. It’s entirely in line with what takes place in Acts 15. So when the letter does go out, it’s, “Our dear brothers, Paul and Barnabas, who have suffered many things,” and “We’re in entire agreement on the gospel. We have heard there are certain who have gone out from us without our permission, saying …” and so on.
It seems to me that’s what Paul is after here. He’s after preserving his own ministry, not because he has doubts about his ministry, nor even because he’s sort of checking up on them as if he thinks he’s superior, but because he wants to undermine those who were undermining his ministry.
Male: Then he opposes Peter because Peter said the counsel is not that Gentiles had to become Jews but that we had to become Gentiles.
Don: Yes, we are saved the way they are, not that we all then become Gentiles, but rather we become Christians. Paul sees himself, it seems to me.… This is very clear from 1 Corinthians 9 in what has sometimes been called the tertium quid, that is to say, in the third position.
In 1 Corinthians 9:19–23, he says not, “I am a Christian Jew who then flexes to become a Gentile.” He says, “I am a Christian, and I become a Jew or I become a Gentile.” He says to those who are under the law, “I become like one under the law, though I am not myself under the law, in order to win those who are under the law.” He has to flex to become a Jew.
On the other hand, he has to flex to become a Gentile because he’s in need of position. He’s in the tertium quid. In all fairness that’s not always the way Paul speaks. In certain contexts he thinks of himself quite clearly and unambiguously as a Christian Jew. Thus, for example, in Romans 9 he has great sorrow of heart for his kinsmen according to the flesh.
He’s proud of his Jewish heritage and thankful for it. Likewise in Philippians, he understands he’s from the tribe of Benjamin and so on, so he’s not denying that. Nevertheless, in terms of how he sees himself related to the law, he sees himself in a tertium quid, and he has to flex to win this group and he has to flex to win that group, but he doesn’t quite belong to either group. He’s a Christian, which brings us back to the question of whether he sees himself as converted or not.
Male: He says in Romans the Jews have an advantage.
Don: Yes, absolutely. I’m not denying that for a moment, and neither would Paul. The advantage is first and foremost a salvation-historical advantage. In Paul’s thought, first in grace, first in judgment, but that’s also a Christian disclosure. Peter says the same thing in his first epistle. Judgment begins with the household of God.
There are more things to be said about this, and I haven’t even gotten to the last two points, but my watch tells me it is time to break up. Tomorrow we’ll abandon this subject and we’ll turn to questions of postmodernism. Then the last two days we’ll turn to questions of the use of the Old Testament in the New Testament. In other words, this is a sequence of seminars that does nothing well.
