Recently in Paul Category

The critics of the new perspective on Paul, and they have tended to focus on the work of N.T. Wright, now have their biggest challenge yet. Until we get Tom Wright's fourth volume, and Tom is now writing it, Douglas A. Campbell hefty tome, The Deliverance of God: An Apocalyptic Rereading of Justification in Paul , will be the benchmark for how to read Paul.

A couple year's back Mark Noll and Carolyn Nystrom co-authored a book with a spiffy little question for a title: Is the Reformation Over?: An Evangelical Assessment of Contemporary Roman Catholicism . They marshalled evidence to suggest the Reformation had had a powerful impact and the Roman Catholic (evangelical types) and Protestant Evangelicals now had huge connections where there was once massive fissures.

If this sketch is accurate to what the Pope says, two questions: (1) is he old or new perspective? (2) is the Reformation over?

Now the Pope, Benedict XVI, has a book that illustrates this all the more: Saint Paul . I want to illustrate this connection by briefly sketching the Pope's view of justification, and his view reveals dramatic connections to the New Perspective as well as to classic (old perspective) Reformation teaching on justification. Now for the sketch, drawn from chp 13 of this fine introduction to Pauline theology:

1. The issues are framed in terms of individual (if not gender inclusive) salvation, as in the old perspective: "How does man become just in God's eyes?" (78).

2. Paul's conversion, as esp emphasized in the new perspective, reshaped his view of the relationship of an Israelite to the Torah. This Torah, as in new perspective, is the 5 books of Moses (and not the law principle). In light of Christ, there is an opposition of Law and Grace, as in the old perspective.

In the second chapter of his book Beginnings: Ancient Christian Readings of the Biblical Creation Narratives Peter Bouteneff discusses the uses of the creation narrative in the New Testament. The most important New Testament references are in the Pauline literature - which Bouteneff takes to include Ephesians, Colossians, and 2 Thessalonians.  He considers the Pastoral epistles separately. 

Paul was an educated Jew of his day and he uses the scriptures in a method entirely consistent with Second Temple Judaism - although his conclusions are distinctively Christian.  He now reads the scripture through the lens of his Damascus Road experience and the corporate experience of the early Christians.  Bouteneff notes:

To Paul - the first Christian interpreter of the OT - the Scriptures speak of, anticipate, typologize, reveal,  Christ, and him crucified. In effect, Paul takes the spectrum of Jewish hermeneutical methods - literal, allegorical, midrashic - and uses these instruments in a completely new way. In so doing, he says things that are revolutionary to the Jews, but in a language and framework very much their own. (p. 36)

One of the revolutionary developments in Paul deals with sin and redemption.  It is suggested by some that  a more traditional Jewish reading sees "sin as an act that can be repented of but Paul sees it as a condition from which we are freed and redeemed in Christ."  Paul uses the creation narratives to tell this story of redemption.

Michael Bird, an excellent young professor, gives us something we really need: a readable, up-to-date, avoid-the-fads approach to the apostle Paul. The book is for students, college and seminary and adult classes. Cleverly, Mike Bird calls his book A Bird's Eye View of Paul. The wit of the title is matched by the wit in the book. It's fun, it's readable, and I hope you buy it. And I hope if you teach Paul that you will use this book.

I've got a backlog of books and I thought I'd use the month of June to get some of these in. I'll be reviewing more books than usual, but you take your pick. We've got a bumper crop of some good, new books.

Well, what's in Bird's Bird's-eye? Good question.

He has a nice panorama of how we approach Paul: persecutor, missionary, theologian, pastor and martyr. Then he has a nice chp on Paul's conversion, the various stories that come to play in Paul's own story and theology, a sketch of Paul's letters (just the right length, too), a wonderful summary of Paul's gospel and his eschatology and his christology, and then two nice chps on ethics and spirituality.

This is a book that I will be recommending all the time.

The crux of the fierce criticism of the New Perspective on Paul is what I will call an Augustinian anthropology. Here me out because I think this is behind nearly every criticism I'm hearing of the NPP, and many times I'm not hearing that it is this that is actually prompting the criticism.

Behind the Reformation is Augustine; behind much of modern evangelicalism, especially in the Reformed circles today, is the Reformation. Therefore, at the bottom of the evangelical movement in the Reformed circles is Augustine and his anthropology. The New Perspective, by and large, probably does not adopt a fully Augustinian anthropology but it is rare that such an issue arises in the discussion. At times I hear the NPP doesn't have an adequate theory of sin -- well, I think NPP would say "Neither does the Reformation. So there!" So, let's dig into this just a bit today and see if we can shed some light on the NPP and help us all.

What is Augustine's anthropology? (I'm no specialist on this, but this is how I understand it. Experts chime in.)
1. Humans are born in original sin.
2. Humans are bound to their sinful natures.
3. Humans have an incurable itch to justify themselves and seek merit.
4. But humans cannot please God because they are bound to those sinful natures that cannot please God.
5. Humans are therefore "naturally" condemned before God.
6. They are in need of God's awakening grace and new life -- through the Holy Spirit.
7. The only way out of this condition of self-justification and merit-seeking is to surrender that selfish, proud self-image and cast oneself on God in the mercy of Christ through the regenerating power of the Spirit.

[A friend and colleague, an Augustinian scholar, reworks my points into this:

I think Augustine would agree to some form of each of the statements you have listed. However, I don't think it quite gets at the core of Augustine's thoughts or concerns. or to put it differently, it identifies Augustine's positions as they emerged in his debate with Pelagians and not so much with the rest of his thought.

I think he always remained a rhetorician rather than a systematic thinker, so the images he employs are often more fundamental than an abstract statement of his doctrine. In the Confessions, the guiding image is that of the prodigal son (kind of overlaid on some semi-Plotinian metaphysics). I don't think Augustine's first word in his anthropology is "sin". I think it is "love." Sin is just love gone bad -- as evil is good gone bad. So maybe to rephrase it, using the vocabulary of the earlier Augustine.

1. Humans, like God, are lovers.
2 and 3. Humans though are bad lovers, redirecting their love from God to the good things God made. This creates in them disordered desires.
4. Humans have become incapable of loving God for himself (instead of themselves) and loving other things "in" God.
5. Humans are incapable of being happy, like the prodigal son who exchanged his father's table for eating husks with the pigs.
etc.]

Each of these elements shapes the Reformers' perception of the gospel, salvation, and how to understand Paul. But there is more...

Standing next to Augustine's anthropology is the way to attack the human [is this too strong?] in preaching the gospel: show that human that they are selfish, merit-seeking people who are in need of seeing their sinfulness and need of grace. Show them they need to trust and give up on their own works. The starting point for Reformed gospel preaching is an anthropology; that anthropology for many is Augustinian; that anthropology is pure selfishness.

The Law factors into this as far as I can tell in this way: the Law is how corrupted humans seek to earn favor with God; they climb the Law to find their way to God.

But, Paul is interpreted to say that's not the way; that way is legalism and death. The gospel, which this view tends to pit over against the Law in the severest of ways, is the way to redemption -- through grace, by faith, and faith alone.

If the New Perspective teaches -- rightly or not -- that neither the opponents of Paul nor Jews in general were merit-seeking humans, then the central foil of the gospel -- how to understand the human condition and how to attack human nature -- is undercut and the entire framework of the gospel is changed. Thus, the critics of the New Perspective are aiming at the soteriological framework of the NPP that they (critics) have assumed to be right, that they have inherited from Calvin-Luther-Augustine, and which they believe was at the heart of Paul's theology. I am not saying that all of the Reformed contention here is what I sometime ago called "grace grinding" (talking about grace but doing so only to grind a human into selfish dust), but what I am saying that the Reformed tradition operates with a self-conscious anthropology that derives from Augustine (who provided an interpretive grid for the NT texts).

Stendahl and Sanders laid blame on Luther for seeing in the Judaizers the Roman Catholic Church. That may or may not be the case. What to me is the case is that the real opponent of Paul for the old perspective is not the Catholic Church but Pelagius. NPP folks need to harp less on Luther and his Catholic polemic and start focusing on Augustine and Pelagius. Did Augustine get it right? Did Augustine get it right when he saw in Pelagius the human condition writ large?

The question is this: Was this the anthropology of Paul? Of Judaism? of the Old Testament? Was Paul's gospel shaped by this anthropology?

There are, of course, other elements, and one of them is central and I'd beg you to listen to this one: if one finds an element or two in the NPP inaccurate that does not mean that the whole thing has to be tossed overboard. I'm seeing far too many "all or nothing" approaches to this issue -- from both sides.

With these three summaries now on the table, and with some fine clarifications by others, I wish now to state what we have to do when we start talking about the "New Perspective" because I'm hearing lots of things that...

The first phase of the New Perspective on Paul was E.P. Sanders; the second was the work of James Dunn; the third phase is the work of N.T. Wright, whose earliest book was a study of Paul and who then...

Today we will look at the second phase of the New Perspective on Paul. The first phase is the work of E.P. Sanders in 1977. The second phase was the work of Jimmy Dunn, and that began in 1982 and...

In the most recent edition of Christianity Today, Simon Gathercole (now) of Cambridge University, has a lengthy and fine study of the good and bad of the New Perspective on Paul. [I don't know if the piece is online yet;...