Best New Perspective Insights

Here is my attempt to capture the best insights of the last sixty years or so since the first rumblings of a revised perspective of Paul in relation to Judaism:

• Paul did not see himself as a miserable failure at keeping the Law before he believed on Christ. If anything, his attitude was more like the Pharisee in the Parable of the Pharisee and the Tax Collector in Luke 18. As far as the righteousness in the Law, he was blameless (Phil. 3:6). Stendahl
• Paul's "conversion" certainly was not a change of religions but a partial modification of his beliefs within Judaism, most significantly the fact that he came to believe that Jesus was the Messiah. (Stendahl would say a call, but that is probably too weak.) Paul is not his Christian name (Acts continues to call him Saul for over a decade after he believes Jesus is the Messiah) but relates to his Roman name. It would be easy to argue that Paul had long suppressed his Diaspora identity--a more generative psychological explanation for his conversion than introspective guilt in the modern sense.
• Paul's turning point centered on a religious experience he had of the risen Christ. (Segal)
• The earliest Christians were thus a messianic sect. They in no way saw themselves as departing from Judaism but saw themselves representing what all of Israel should believe and do, true Israel, as it were.
• Those elements of Paul's theology that the "new perspective" has most impacted largely grew out of the Gentile mission. In these areas, Paul's theology largely developed "from solution to plight." (Sanders) Paul knew that the Gentiles were in through Christ (solution); therefore, he presented arguments for why keeping "works of Law" was not effective for "justification" before God (problem).
• "Works of Law" for Paul referred especially to those aspects of the Jewish Law that were "boundary markers" that separated Jew from Gentile. (Dunn) These stood at the heart of the earliest Christian debate over the inclusion of the Gentiles into the community of faith. Judaizers argued that Gentiles had to be circumcised to be included, and James/Peter argued that they had to observe certain purity rules to have table fellowship. Paul's teaching on justification by faith (solution) grew out of these problems.
• Later interpreters of Paul have understandably misread Judaism in the light of Paul's arguments. For example, Jews did not see themselves as keeping the Law to get right with God. Keeping the Law was not about "getting in" but about "staying in" (Sanders). Indeed, it wasn't even as much about staying in as about responding appropriately to God's covenant expectations (covenantal nomism--Sanders).
• Judaism thus thoroughly presupposed that God was a God of grace, meaning that his favor was not earned by Israel's faithfulness. (Sanders) Once we understand grace against the backdrop of patron-client relationships, we see that there were informal expectations that came with grace, even if grace could not be earned. (Malina)
• It is thus incorrect to accuse either Judaism or interpretations of Paul as "justification by works" if we conclude that there were definite ethical expectations of both Jews and believers. Paul teaches that our deeds are an element of our final justification before God. (Wright) This neither contradicts a proper understanding of grace nor Paul's arguments that keeping the ethnic particulars of the Jewish Law cannot demonstrate one's right standing before God.
• Justification language did not stand at the heart of Paul's theology but was rather a set of lenses Paul used in response to opposition to the Gentile mission from conservative elements within the earliest church. (Sanders, Dunn)
• Paul's arguments about "faith in Christ" begin with statements about how he and the Jerusalem church agree on the necessity of the "faithfulness of Jesus" for a right standing before God. (Schenck, synthesizing both Hays and Dunn)
• Paul's arguments with his opponents are thus arguments over a story (Hays), namely, the story of Christ's death and resurrection. Paul shares with earliest Christianity the belief that the resurrection has enthroned Jesus as Messiah. He shares with earliest Christianity the belief that the cross has functioned as a sacrifice of atonement, that the "faithfulness of Jesus" has made justification possible before God. He agrees that baptism in the name of Jesus is a mystical participation in the death of Jesus (Sanders, Schweitzer). He disagrees on the implications of these affirmations.
• Wright is probably correct on a background narrative at least in this respect. The cross was seen by the earliest Christians as the solution to the problem of Israel's "captivity." Israel should not be under the power of the Romans. God would send a Messiah to deliver it. Jesus' death was likely initially seen as a Maccabean type sacrifice to atone for the sins of Israel.

The New Perspective and the Wesleyan Tradition

If I were to write a chapter or essay on the question, "The New Perspective and the Wesleyan Tradition," it became clear to me this weekend how I think I would structure it. Here is the outline:

1. What is the "new" perspective?

• First, at this point of the game, calling the trends of this essay "the new perspective" is probably unhelpful. All that is meant by the term is 1) the re-appraisal of the nature of Judaism that took place in the late twentieth century in the light of new discoveries and, especially, some harsh political mirrors held up to the West, and 2) the re-appraisal of exactly what Paul was saying in this light.
• Hardly anyone--not even those high level scholars who resist these trends--has been unaffected. Even those who are more "old perspective" have changed. The only ones who have not changed are those who do not really read Paul with a view to what he original meant at all, but almost entirely read him through traditional glasses (e.g., John Piper, who for this reason does not completely count as a scholar of the original meaning).

2. Krister Stendahl, Paul, and Introspective Consciences

• Stendahl's (a Lutheran) main contribution was to show the falseness of the Lutheran model of Paul as so vexed with his guilty conscience that he finally turned to justification by faith alone, understood as having nothing to do with action at all. Rather, Paul had a "robust conscience" both before and after he believed on Christ. His turning to Christ was more of a call to the Gentiles than a conversion and in any case was not in his mind a conversion from one religion to another.
• Romans 7 thus was not Paul's current struggle with sin, an acknowledgement made now even by the most prominent original meaning scholars in the Calvinist tradition (e.g., Moo).
• The end result is that Paul had a much greater emphasis on a blameless life than the primary representatives of Protestantism had allowed.

3. E. P. Sanders, Judaism, and Staying In

• If Stendahl and others opened the door, Sanders gave critical mass to the recognition that Judaism almost always had acknowledged the primacy of God's grace over Jews being able to earn God's favor. The Jews did not understand keeping the Law to get them in but to be the appropriate response to God's grace and essential for staying in the covenant.
• This schema fits well with both Calvinist and Arminian understandings of post-justification righteousness. The Spirit empowers us to keep the righteous requirements of the Law after we have been justified by faith. However, it is the Arminian tradition that correctly understands the importance of blamelessness for staying in after justification by faith.

4. James D. G. Dunn, Paul, and Works of Law

• Dunn correctly has recognized that "works of Law" in Paul are not best understood as bald "works" in general. Most of the time, the phrase "works of Law" has overtones of the Jewish particulars of the Law rather than law-keeping in some general sense. This recognition significantly diminishes the Protestant polarization of faith and works.
• Dunn also has shown the lack of focus in readings of Paul that focus on some supposed absolute moral perfection being God's expectation. This is a reading of a verses like Galatians 3:10 or 5:3 that puts an artificial emphasis on "all" or "whole," as if Paul is painting a picture of God's character in which he must have justice for every last drop of sin. But God's justice is not the centerpiece or fountain of Paul's theology, or of the theology of any part of the New Testament. God's righteousness has more to do in Paul with God's proactive character in saving His people and the world, which fits very well with Wesleyan theology.

5. N. T. Wright and (Final) Justification

• Wright's primarily contribution, in terms of Wesleyan-Arminian theology, is his recognition of the importance of works in final justification, chiefly in passages like Romans 2:5-10; 14:10-12; and 2 Corinthians 5:10. Wright also correctly sees the Spirit as establishing in reality what God does on the basis of faith when one first believes on Christ. The missing piece for Wright is the importance of blamelessness for "staying in."
• Wright follows in the train of the majority who now see Romans 1:16 as a reference to God's righteousness rather than some righteousness from God, which again fits with a greater emphasis on love as the driving characteristic of God in salvation, not a drive to work around His justice.

6. Conclusion

• These developments thus support love (righteousness) as the central character of God in relation to salvation, not God's justice.
• They point out the importance of literal righteousness as a product of the Spirit, essential for final justification, that faith and works are not contradictory.
• They recognize that Romans 7 is in fact exactly the opposite of the situation of the believer. It is exactly the problem that the Spirit solves for the believer.

A Tribute to Krister Stendahl (1921-2008)

Krister Stendahl, former professor at Harvard and bishop of Stockholm, died yesterday. I consider his brief article, "Paul and the Introspective Conscience of the West," the single most important piece of scholarship on Paul since the Reformation. If you think you understand Paul and haven't read this article, go no further until you have read it.

Chiefly, Stendahl argued back in 1963 that the common reading of Paul was anachronistic in the extreme.

1. Paul did not struggle with a sense of moral failure either as a Christian or before he believed in Christ (still a common misreading of Romans 7). Paul had a "robust conscience" that considered himself blameless as a Pharisee (Phil. 3:6), rarely used words like repentance and forgiveness, and regularly admonished his churches to follow the example of his life.

2. Romans is not an abstract theological discussion of how individuals have sinned and need to be saved but about how Gentiles can become part of the people of God. In Romans 3:23 Paul was not thinking "all individuals have sinned" but that "all--both Gentile and Jew--have sinned." Romans 9-11 is not an appendix to the first 8 chapters but in some sense the climax of what he has been discussing all along.

3. Luther read Paul in the light of his own personality struggles and conflict with the Roman Catholic Church. But Paul was a Jew, not a Catholic, and his issues with the Roman Catholic Church were not the same as those Paul had with his fellow Jews.

4. Paul does not have the Augustinian sense that "I" am thoroughly corrupted and thus that sin flows from my sin nature. Rather, the "I" of Romans 7 wants to do the good but is unable to because of the power of sin over me. Paul absolves his "I" of blame for sin--"It is not I that does it but sin that dwells in me."

5. The Law is not a schoolmaster to beat me over the knuckles as a failure but a guardian, a custodian to take me to school and help me learn.

There were some extremes to Stendahl's thought, especially as time went by, but I wholeheartedly agree with all these points from his key article. When I first read them, they seemed so obvious, like a breath of fresh air. My own anachronistic assumptions suddenly seemed so clear.

If you want to understand Paul, read nothing else until you have read this.