2015-10-25T19:25:21-04:00

barcl

BEN: On p. 427 you speak about Paul personifying the flesh in parallel to his personification of the Spirit. I am doubting this is quite what Paul is doing vis a vis the Spirit, since he takes the Spirit to actually be personal– having a will, capable of being grieved, offering the same benefits as Christ etc. (see Fee’s classic God’s Empowering Presence). Could you clarify what you mean?

JOHN: I did not mean that Paul had himself personified an impersonal Spirit (who I agree is always taken to be personal in Paul) but that in the flesh-Spirit antithesis, the fact that the second party (Spirit) is personal and spoken of in personal terms, may be one factor that inclines Paul to give the flesh a matching profile, desiring and opposing (Gal 5.16-17), so that Flesh takes on, through this antithesis, a kind of personification.

BEN: You say on p. 428 that freedom for Paul doesn’t mean individual autonomy, it means paradoxically enough that while one has been set free from previous things that could enslave one (i.e. the stoicheia) one has been set free for becoming a slave of others in love and service. Can you unpack this paradoxical concept of freedom and slavery for us?

JOHN: Freedom in antiquity was a relative and relational concept: to be free was not to be owned by, or constantly answerable to, a master, although it does not mean one lived outside all inter-personal relationships. Similarly, ‘free cities’ were immune from the power of others to dictate their political constitution, but had their own laws and regulations. In the modern era, we have made it an absolute concept and pushed it into the way we think about every aspect of each individual person: to be free means to have absolute freedom to be and do whatever I like, i.e., individual autonomy. I imagine Paul knows he sounds paradoxical when he says ‘you have been called to freedom .. and through love be slaves of one another’ (Gal 5.13), but the paradox is not a self-contradiction. What you are free from is the authority of the Torah or the authority of the stoicheia (the natural elements) or any other determining force outside the realm of Christ. But just as the Christian confession is ‘Jesus is Lord/Master’ (Jesous kyrios), so the freedom believers have in Christ is not an absolute freedom but a freedom to live in the new creation on the new creation’s terms: and the core element of those terms is love, which involves a mutual care for the other, amounting to a kind of mutual slavery (there is another paradoxical idea!).

BEN: I agree with your assessment that Paul’s ethics do not have as their primary goal self-control and self-mastery (or self-understanding) but rather participation in one’s social identity, in the body of Christ by other-directed self-sacrificial behavior. I would say that many of the mistaken readings of Paul’s ethics come from approaching the subject from an all too modern concept of individual identity, individual responsibility, etc. Modern individualism has skewed the reading of this material. Would you agree?

JOHN: The primary focus of Paul’s ethics, in Galatians and elsewhere, is the formation of Christian communities, and it follows that most of the instructions are about social relations, and directed to ‘you’ plural. Sometimes, for the good of the community, individuals have to be told, ‘each one’, to do, or not to do something, and Gal 6.4-5 is a good example of that. But that is not because Paul thinks the individual is the basic unit, and the community is a conglomeration of individuals, but because he believes (rightly, I think) that we are formed in community, that is, in our relation to one another. Because we are made for community, and because communities make us what we are, the most central question is not about the self-understanding of the individual, but about how communities do or do not accord with the truth of the good news.

BEN: Since the Christian is not under the Torah, many have puzzled over Gal. 5.14. You say that Paul means that when the Christian loves others prompted by the Spirit they fulfill what the Law had originally envisioned by the great commandment etc. In other words, while they are not observing the Law, the larger aims of the Law are fulfilled by following the leading of the Spirit, manifesting the fruit of the Spirit etc. Right?

JOHN: Yes, I have long felt that is it is important that Paul does not say here, ‘you must observe the Law, and here is what it tells you to do’, but ‘you must walk by the Spirit, and when you do so in love, lo and behold, you end up fulfilling the Law’. So two things are important to observe: i) the direct command is in 5.13: be slaves to one another in love; ii) the verb in 5.14 is not do/obey/observe, but fulfil. It is extremely rare in Jewish literature to use the verb pleroo (fulfil) in relation to the Law (see my Obeying the Truth on this), and Paul is not even telling them to fulfil the Law: he is saying that, when you love, the whole Law is fulfilled in relation to its statement about love. (Note also the intriguing suggestion of Martin de Boer in his commentary on Galatians: does Paul take the Greek form of the command ‘you shall love your neighbour as yourself’ (future tense) as a prophecy, rather than an instruction?)

BEN: In my discussion about the Law of Christ in Gal.. 6 in my commentary, I pointed out that Paul in fact quotes variant versions of two sayings of Jesus in Gal. 6 to make his case for both mutual burden bearing, and for each person carrying their own load if they are able. While I realize we have only a few references to the Law of Christ, here and in 1 Cor. 9, if one actually analyzes in detail the ethics of Paul in passages like Gal. 5-6 and Rom. 12-15 what appears is the following— Paul appeals to the self-sacrificial example of Christ, he appeals to some of the sayings of Christ, he appeals to some of the OT commandments which Christ himself reinscribed, and in some cases even intensified (i.e. the adultery command), and he appeals to some new apostolic teachings as well, for example the notion of adiaphora when it comes to food or which day one observes unto the Lord. This, broadly speaking, is what I think Paul means by ‘the Law of Christ’ not merely some nebulous idea of following the leading of the Spirit and all will be well. There is a concrete content to the Law of Christ. This is also true for the negative injunctions— Paul is opposing anti-social behavior, including engaging in rivalry practices, not merely talking about individual private sins. How would you respond to this suggestion? And one more question— it appears clear to me that Paul is inscribing a communal ethic, not trying to impose one on society in general. Change and the critique of the agonistic culture comes in house, not in the public square. Right?

JOHN: I certainly think ‘the Law of Christ’ has plenty of concrete manifestations and is given plenty of specific examples, as Galatians 5-6 demonstrates very well. Many of these can be traced, verbally and conceptually, to the list of the fruit of the Spirit in 5.22-23 (love, kindness, self-control, goodness etc.), and Hays has argued that if the core of this is love, it echoes the statement about ‘the Son of God who loved me and gave himself for me’ (2.20). So I certainly think that the example of Christ is part of the mix here. Whether the teaching of Jesus is also in view is harder to say, given that a) there is certainly overlap between much of what Paul says and what we find in the Gospels, but b) Paul almost never says ‘as Jesus said’, and c) sometimes when he does cite Jesus, he does not apply the instruction to himself (1 Cor 9.14ff.)! So this is certainly not nebulous and certainly not just about the private sphere. I agree that what he is driving towards is a reshaped community in the church, though whether that could be in some senses a model or spearhead for society as a whole is not impossible.

BEN: Paul’s social ethic seems clearly enough to be radical. Not only does he redefine the meaning of both honor and shame (see e.g. the cross), but he insists on anti-rivalry practices that deconstruct the usual negative reciprocity cycles of behavior, competing for superiority and honor. At one point you talk about (p. 436) the inversion of hierarchy rather than its eradication. I agree. Paul is still the apostle over his converts giving them direction, but he is doing so as their servant, not their master. Can you expound a bit on this inversion of values while not leaving prior concepts and structures entirely behind? When humility, gentleness, deference, burden bearing become general community praxis, then a slave’s ethic becomes the ethic of choice—this is the approved behavior of the lowest on the social pecking order.

JOHN: Yes, I am interested in the ways that Paul submits hierarchy to what I call ‘continual inversion’ – the constant turning of a hierarchy on its head, and then on its head again, etc. This is what Badiou calls ‘reciprocal asymmetry’ – not so much making everything equal, as making an asymmetry in one direction turn into an asymmetry in another, either simultaneously (superior in one respect, inferior in another) or over time (superior at one time, inferior at another). Paul’s call to reciprocity (‘to one another’) extends to such striking phrases as ‘be slaves to one another’ (Gal 5.13), so I am slave to someone (a hierarchical relationship if ever there was one) and they are also slave to me! In the Pauline community, you get the highest prestige by not seeking it, and the result of that prestige is that you submit yourself to the community, not that you lord it over them. This is the Pauline notion of ‘equality’ not as a static ideal but as a dynamic and never-ending process of reciprocation in which power-flows are continually being reversed and power dynamics constantly inverted. It is a challenge to work that out in practice, to be sure.

BEN: I would say that one of the causes for the assumed disjunction between Pauline theology and Pauline ethics is the false premise that behavior has nothing to do with being saved, or with ‘true belief’, which is assumed to be the basis of salvation. At the other end of the spectrum from such an analysis is what you say on pp. 439-40, namely that the relationship between theology and social practice is mutually constitutive. It is in social practice, and the building of a community like that described in the summaries at the end of Acts 2 and 4, that the Christ event takes on new flesh or is actualized in the community. Self-sacrificial love by Christ leads to the same practice in the community. To say Jesus is Lord is to not merely profess allegiance to the Law of Christ, but to live it out in community. The imperative is not merely built on the indicative, it is enabled by the indicative. The converse is also true—if the theology is false (.e.g if Christ is not raised from the dead), then the ethics and praxis are futile, and provide no remedy for sin. Why is it, do you think, that it seems so hard for Protestants in particular to grasp the intertwining of theology and ethics in Paul?

JOHN: Protestants have a special anxiety, stemming from the Reformation, about making ethics the core of theology, or a means to a spiritual end. We are terrified of ‘works-righteousness’, and the more specific the ethical instruction becomes, the more easily it is labelled a kind of ‘legalism’. The Lutheran tradition, in particular, has tended to separate spheres of life (the two kingdoms), and to regard what is true of the soul and of the individual as existing in a different realm to what is true of society or politics. The liberal movement in the 1930s generated what was labelled as ‘the social gospel’, and in reaction against it evangelicalism was very wary of what could be represented as confusing the gospel with social/political ethics. Fortunately, things have changed a lot in recent decades: think how John Stott made action on worldwide poverty again integral to Protestant evangelicalism, picking up the legacy of British evangelicals who spearheaded the campaign against slavery. So I think there have been a series of theological anxieties and cultural blocks, but things may now make it easier to appreciate how the formation of radical communities was not just the result of Paul’s gospel, but integral to it. I make quite a strong claim at the end of chapter 14 that transformed social practice is the necessary realization of grace, not an optional extra: as in Antioch, so in Galatia (and now), the good news is lost altogether if it is not enacted in social relationships that embody the values of the gospel.

BEN: Talk to us about the Pauline concept of apostasy, which you rightly see as referred to in Galatians 5 in various ways. You say “since these warnings are directed to the believing community, it is clearly possible to lose all the benefits of the Christ-gift [i.e. to fall from grace, to use Paul’s language).” “Thus Paul makes clear that the gift that was given without regard to preexisting worth nonetheless requires its recipients to live worthily of its own quality of rule.” (p. 440). A Calvinist would say that those who commit apostasy were not among the elect, were not genuine Christians in the first place. Paul, by addressing the whole community about the dangers of apostasy would not seem to agree with such a theology as inevitable ‘perseverance of the saints’. Can you help us understand this conundrum better? What do you mean by saying that the gift is unconditioned, but not unconditional, it is incongruous but it makes the recipient fit, if lived out, to receive its final benefits. What is energism as opposed to monergism or synergism?

JOHN: Lots of questions here packed into one! The notion of the guaranteed ‘perseverance of the saints’ is an example of the way that Augustine, and then Calvin, perfected what I call the efficacy of grace: if it is grace it must be irresistable and it must be totally effective, otherise our wills could countermand God’s. That has a certain logic to it, but when it runs up so clearly against the evidence of the Pauline texts, with their warnings to Christians that they could fall from grace, we have to ask whether we have latched onto the right perfections of grace, or have pushed this one further than Paul would go. (Of course, I recognize that Gundry-Volf, and others, would read the Pauline texts differently to me, but I can’t go into the exegesis here.) As far I can see, Paul fears that genuine Christians in Galatia might be cut off from Christ and fall from grace (Gal 5.4).

I find that people mean ‘unconditional’ in two senses, often without recognizing the difference between them: unconditional can mean ‘without prior conditions’ or it can mean ‘expecting nothing in return’. For the first meaning I prefer to use the adjective ‘unconditioned’, which is less ambiguous, and it is core for Paul that God’s gift in Christ is unconditioned, or incongruous, taking no regard of previous conditions. But it is not ‘unconditional’ if by that we mean (the second meaning above), expecting nothing in return. Although no gift can demand or force a return, it is given in order to create a relationship, and that relationship is generally and rightly reciprocal. When I give I care about what happens to the gift, and I hope and expect that there will be some return, even if that is only gratitude: that is what God expects with his gifts, since he knows we flourish best when we are in a grateful relationship to him.

On making us fit to receive rewards, I think that Paul figures God’s gifts as transformative: they do not leave us as we are, but make us Christ-like and ‘holy’, fitting for God. Christ died for his enemies, to make them his friends; he died for the ungodly to make them godly. As Luther put it, the love of God does not find, but create that which is pleasing to him. The power of that love is at work within us, in our own energy and enthusiasm: it is not a power that just co-operates with our independent, free will (synergism), nor does it replace our will (monergism), but somehow work in a non-competitive relation within our will. I have tried to navigate my way through this very difficult terrain by using the word ‘energism’ which depends on seeing God’s agency as not in a zero-sum relation with ours (the more God, the less us) but as a transcendent phenomenon that is not creates and energises everything that we, as genuine agents, do.

2015-10-23T09:19:18-04:00

barcl

BEN: Turning now to your discussion of Galatians, I appreciate the way you’ve carefully walked through various landmines in the discussion of this letter and managed to focus on things relevant to your inquiry. I do wonder however about the issue of Judaism as a recognized or licit religion in the Roman Empire in Paul’s day. What I mean by this is, could the appeal to get circumcised and keep the Mosaic Law have been made persuasive if the agitators had argued ‘Judaism is a protected religion, in the sense that one is not required to participate in pagan worship or even Emperor cult, whereas the form of Christ-following advocated by Paul leaves one not only without a religious and cultic calendar and identity, it leaves one open to the criticism that you are following an illicit eastern religion and thus not exempt from things like participation in pagan festivals and the Emperor cult. ‘ Could this be underlying the appeal for these Gentiles to ‘Judaize’???

JOHN: There is no technical category of ‘licit religion’ in the Roman empire, but it is certainly the case that native-born Jews were expected and generally allowed to maintain their own ancestral customs, and it was recognized that this meant that they would not take part in normal ‘pagan’ worship and would offer prayers for but not to the emperor. The question is whether this would apply to pagan converts to Judaism (proselytes) and thus could be a factor encouraging Paul’s male converts to get circumcised etc. Since we have rather few references to proselytes in Roman sources, this is hard to answer, but judging from the reaction of Tacitus (Histories book) and Juvenal, proselytes were heavily criticised (at least in Rome) for abandoning their Roman or ancestral habits in favour of Judaism. In other words, they could be regarded as traitors to their own tradition, and it is not clear that they were accorded any right of appeal to the kind of tolerance enjoyed by native-born Jews. Thus it is not clear to me that becoming a proselyte would necessarily reduce the social pressure coming on those who had abandoned ‘idolatry’ in this respect.

BEN: I agree entirely with your remarks about the crucial role the antitheses or binary polarities play in Galatians. It seems clear that Paul is alarmed enough about the situation in Galatia to throw down the gauntlet and try and force the audience to make a choice between this way or that way of Christian living. And furthermore the polarities are not just ethical or ritualistic, but also theological— there’s only one genuine Gospel, one genuine way of right standing in Christ, one genuine way of walking ethically and so on. It’s this kind of rhetoric of course which has fueled numerous polemical and dogmatic sermons where in essence the preacher says ‘its my way or highway’. Do you think this sort of rhetoric reflects Paul’s sense of just how urgent the situation is in Galatia, and how much he thinks is at stake? I ask this because, despite all the problems in Corinth, 1 Corinthians doesn’t seem nearly as binary and polemical as this document.

JOHN: I think that in rhetorical terms Paul is required to set things up as antithetical opposites partly because what is being presented to the Galatians is made to look like it is just the completion or fulfilment (3.3) of what Paul himself told them. Precisely because it appears so similar to the Galatians Paul has to stress how utterly different it is. But there is more at stake here than a rhetorical strategy. Paul sees the Christ-event as a world- and history-altering event, which reshapes the structures of reality and of the values and norms that reflect that reality. You are either in the new creation, or you are determined by the ‘present evil age’; you either walk in accordance with the cross/the gospel/the Spirit, or you walk in accordance with the flesh. Actually I don’t think this is that different from what we find in other letters: think of the dualisms that run through 1 Cor 1-4 (wisdom of the cross; wisdom of this age; spiritual or non-spiritual) and crop up elsewhere in that letter (world or Lord; idols or Spirit; table of Lord or table of daimonia etc.). It is just that we find these in a particularly concentrated form in Galatians.

BEN: One of the things that has helped me make sense of this letter is the conclusion that it is likely a very early Pauline letter, probably written before whatever form the famous council took, which is summarized in Acts 15. Had there really been a proclamation available to Paul when he wrote Galatians which said ‘Gentiles do not have to get circumcised and keep the whole Mosaic Law’ it is hard to imagine him not playing that trump card somewhere in this letter. He could have simply told his converts that the Agitators were in fact going against the edict of James who was the leader of the Jerusalem church. I realize this is an argument from silence, but frankly some silences shout at you for explanation. It would explain also the polemical and extreme forms of arguments Paul uses including the famous rebuttal allegory. He would not have had to protest so much if in fact he could demonstrate he was on solid footing with the views of James and Peter. One gets a sense of a Paul who feels very much alone, vulnerable, and his whole mission in Galatia is hanging in the balance. He’s even had to endure Barnabas and Peter backing off from prior commitments to table fellowship with Gentiles under pressure from ‘the men who came from James’. I would see this as directly relevant to the case you are making, because it explains the strident emphasis on grace as both the means of ‘getting in and staying in’ in the Christian life. What do you think of this reconstruction?

JOHN: I have deliberately not committed myself to a definite dating of Galatians (except that it is before Romans) because of the complexities and ambiguities in all attempts to fix its date (and precise destination). And the relation between Galatians 2 and Acts 15 is of course notoriously difficult to resolve. Of course Paul does accuse Peter of hypocrisy (2.12-13) and he does seem to regard Peter and James as having gone back in some way on the Jerusalem agreement of Gal 2.1-10. As you say, the more definite that agreement had been about what was, and was not, required of Gentiles, the more he could have appealed to it in his argument. But there was also a limit to which Paul would have wanted to make a political agreement the basis for a theological argument. Ultimately the authority for his gospel, including its unorthodox expectations of Gentiles, rests not in human opinion, even the opinion of the ‘pillars’ in Jerusalem, but in the revelation of God: hence the sharp antitheses of 1.1 and 1.10-12 and the big case Paul makes of *not* consulting the authorities in Jerusalem in 1.16ff. In other words, the lack of an argument along the lines: ‘Peter and James agreed to this, so who are you to say otherwise?’ may be to do with the date of this letter, but it may equally be to do with the kinds of argument Paul prefers to prioritize in this letter.

BEN: One of the persistent problems in dealing with Paul’s letters is what has come to be called mirror-reading, and I would say a closely related problem is the whole approach involving assuming ‘hidden transcripts’. You critique the latter approach, quite rightly in my view, on p. 348 n. 65 by emphasizing that that approach assumes that Paul thinks his letters are being read by spies and informants, rather than Galatians being an example of insiders talking freely with insiders. In both cases there is an attempt to reconstruct ‘the other side of the conversation’ or at least the social milieu which is producing what Paul says. I agree with Jerry Sumney and others that while a certain amount of reading between the lines is necessary, and helpful, that it needs to meet specific criteria to be justified. Yet Paul is not addressing his opponents in this letter, nor is he mainly critiquing some particular religious aspect of pagan culture, it would seem. Can you help our readers understand the problem of over-reading Paul’s Galatians in these ways. What are the warning signs that a reading has gone off the rails?

JOHN: Well, I wrote about the dangers of ‘mirror-reading’ in an article many years ago (JSNT 1987) that people still seem to cite as useful in this regard. Basically, the danger is that we get over-excited about finding out what Paul’s opponents thought by reading Paul’s arguments as in every case the mirror-opposite of theirs, or as picking up their arguments and turning them around his way: if Paul says x, they said non-x; if he argues from this OT text, they must have used it on their side too. Because this is a directly polemical letter, responding to another point of view, there is clearly some justification for this sort of exercise, but we have to apply criteria of plausibility here, which prevent us from jumping to the wrong conclusions. Thus a) do we have multiple evidence for our reconstructions (not dependent on one thing only)? b) does it fit what else we know of early Christian thought? c) is there anything in the text (e.g. emphasis, unusual wording, a context of rebuttal) that makes us think this is Paul picking up things from others? The basic rule is: be very cautious when you fill in gaps, lest you fill them in with your own imagination! In relation to a supposed counter-imperial message in this (and other Pauline) texts, the NT Wright school of thought requires us both to fill in the silence and to explain why there is a silence there in the first place. In a letter as forthright as this on so many things, including some that put Paul’s life in danger, why not come straight out and say: ‘what I mean is that the Roman empire is corrupt and Caesar’s rule is opposed to God’? When you catch yourself finding hidden messages in the text, you are on the path to the ‘Bible-as-code’ and Dan Brown’s fantasies. Stick with what is actually in the text and not between the lines: that is quite challenging enough!

BEN: Certainly one aspect of the New Perspective on Paul is the attempt by Dunn and others to avoid suggesting, as Luther did, that Paul is directly critiquing Judaism. No, says Dunn, he is critiquing ethnic imperialism and so the requirement of Gentiles to become Jews in order to be followers of Judaism. While it’s clear that the latter is part of what Paul is arguing against, it does not seem to be the whole or main purpose of his critique. When he says that Jesus was born under the Law to redeem those under the Law out from under it (Gal. 4) this surely is referring to Jews and the Mosaic covenant. In other words, Paul is concerned with much more than ethnic imperialism and boundary rituals. He’s saying the Mosaic covenant with its 613 commandments should no longer be imposed on Jews much less on Gentiles, as the Messiah has come inaugurating a new covenant with a new Law, the Law of Christ. Why this great reluctance to admit that Paul is offering a strong covenantal critique of Judaism and the Mosaic covenant, which is nonetheless a Jewish in-house critique of these things?

JOHN: In textual terms, Dunn and others appeal to Gal 5.14 (‘the whole law is fulfilled in the love-command’) to react against the view that Paul is ‘anti-Law’; in theological terms it comes (as Dunn admits) from his Reformed assumptions that there is one covenant (Abraham-Mosaic-in Christ), albeit in different dispensations; in political terms, it is an attempt to avoid, for the sake of contemporary Jewish-Christian relations, any sense that Paul is directly opposed to Judaism. My position is this: if by ‘Judaism’ we mean the Jewish people and their covenant relationship to God, Paul is not ‘opposed to Judaism’, as I think the prayer of Gal 6.16 (for ‘the Israel of God’) and Romans 9-11 indicate; but if by ‘Judaism’ we mean (as I think Paul means when he uses the term in Gal 1.13-14: ‘my former life in Judaism’) a pattern of life for which the Torah is the ultimate authority, then I think Paul propounds something radically different. It is not just that the Torah is not to be imposed on Gentiles; it is also that it is no longer the ultimate norm even for Jewish believers. There are lots of circumstances when it is fine for them to adhere to the Torah, but there are also circumstances when they are required to become ‘sinners’ by its lights (e.g. eating with Gentiles in Antioch). That break with its ultimate authority reduces the Torah to a contextually determined custom, and this is what Paul means by saying he has ‘died to the Law’ (2.19), as a paradigmatic Jewish believer. So he does not require Jewish believers routinely to flout the law, but he requires a) that they recognize other believers as equally acceptable to God even though they do flout it; see Romans 14-15); and b) that they are willing to flout it where it is overriden by the higher demands of the gospel (as at Antioch). Paul spells this out a lot more pithily in 1 Cor 9.19-23: I can live like a Jew, but I can also live not like a Jew – it depends on what the gospel and Christ demand.

BEN: In light of the last bit of what I’ve just said and asked you about, it seems to me that this means that Galatians is not: 1) an argument against legalism; 2) an argument against ‘works righteousness’ in Luther’s sense of the phrase; 3) an argument against obedience or keeping the Law (as redefined); 4) nor is it an argument that obedience has nothing to do with final salvation (while Paul is arguing that initial right-standing with God is by grace and through faith). Rather, Paul is reminding those already saved about how they came to have that gift including the gift of the Spirit, and is suggesting that the way they should live going forward is on the basis of the gift which keeps on giving through the Spirit, and in a fashion that reflects the character and life-rule of Christ. Why is it, do you think, that this letter has so often been misread, or become a lightning rod for all kinds of ‘new perspectives on Paul? By all means comment on whether you think my reconstruction of what Paul is actually saying and doing in Galatians is reasonably on target.

JOHN: I read Galatians as an appeal to let the Christ-gift, in all its radicality, determine every aspect of who the Galatians are and what they do. That means that the gospel is their ultimate authority, not the Torah, and this means that their patterns of communal life are determined by the ‘law of Christ’ in love, and not by their competitive instincts, or anything else. In other words, Paul is shaping the Christian movement in distinction from other options on offer outside the new Christian congregrations (whether the Jewish synagogue or the normal patterns of Graeco-Roman life). The polemics are designed to draw a clear line around the church. As this letter gets read in later eras, when Christianity pervades the whole culture, its polemical edge gets turned inwards, and it becomes a way of refining Christianity from within: the polemical line is drawn between different kinds of thinking within the church. Hence the later application of this letter to internal Christian disputes about legalism, the place of works in salvation etc.

There are clear lines of continuity between the original intent of the letter and the Reformers and I don’t want to dismiss them as simply ‘misreading’ the letter: they catch very well the fact that Paul is talking about the incongruous grace of God in Christ. In fact, they offer a brilliant recontextualisation of this letter in 16th-century circumstances. But it can be very beneficial to try to catch again the original context and purpose of the letter, not least because our social and cultural circumstances are not so different from Paul’s. (One thing I would clarify in what you say: grace is not just about initial right-standing, because everything that can be said about the believer, including their ‘sowing to the Spirit’ from which they will reap eternal life (6.8) is the product of the miraculous new life (Christ who live in me) that constitutes the core of their new being. We will return to that topic when we get to Romans.)

BEN: Yes, I didn’t mean to imply salvation doesn’t involve grace from start to finish. Of course it does. I was referring to what Paul means by our ‘working out our salvation….’ where we have a role to play in the matter.

2015-10-21T19:11:07-04:00

barcl

BEN: Chapter 10 is a very helpful summary of the main thrusts of the previous chapters on early Judaism and formulations of grace, with the bonus of a brief direct comparison between Paul’s view and the views in these various other documents. One of the questions that this raises immediately for Christian readers, such as my students at Asbury, is that while it is all very well saying that there were a variety of views of grace in early Judaism, nonetheless, for Christians, the writings of Paul and others are part of the canon of the NT, and therefore part of the God-breathed rule of faith and praxis. This being the case, is it not inevitable that the objection to calling some of these other views ‘grace’ in early Judaism which do not stress incongruous grace, is that it does not pass the Pauline litmus test? That is, if grace, by Christian definition, is necessarily incongruous and has to do with faith in Christ, then of course it will be concluded that at best these other early Jewish writers have deficient views of grace in one way or another, and at worse it may be asked if some of them can be said to speak of grace at all. How do you respond to this push back?

JOHN: I have spoken of varieties of grace, rather than limiting the term ‘grace’ to one particular perfection (even if it is the one characteristic of Paul) for both linguistic and strategic reasons. Linguistically, Paul and Philo use the exact same Greek terminology, and Philo uses it both when he wonders whether anyone can be worth of the charis of God, and when he concludes that God on the whole gives his charites to those who are worthy or fitting recipients. To translate these terms differently in the varying cases, on the assumption that only gift to the unworthy is properly called ‘grace’, would be to load our translation choices with a particular theological judgment, in other words to read and translate the Greek with a particular Christian perspective on the meaning of terms. I think it is better to leave translation as unloaded as possible – but then to make clear that of the various possible understandings of grace, Paul’s is radical and unusual in perfecting the concept in his specific way. That way, it becomes clearer that Paul is not using a special term, but he is investing it with a specific set of connotations. But there is a strategic reason also, to do with the history of interpretation of Paul. If we refuse to use the term ‘grace’ outside of Pauline or Christian texts, we are giving the impression that no-one in ancient Judaism thought that God was gracious – that Judaism was a grace-less religion. We have suffered for centuries with that caricature, and we need to get away from it. My way of representing things is therefore: grace was everywhere in Second Temple Judaism, but not everywhere the same. If my use of the term does anything, then, it makes us ask (as your students ask): what do we mean by grace? Given that a lot of Christian controversies have arisen over this term, it is useful to ask ourselves that question now and again, and I don’t want to load the dice by saying that one biblical voice or one theological tradition has the one and only ‘true’ definition of this term.

BEN: I take it as given that you have shown the deficiencies of Ed Sanders’ stress on the priority of grace in Jewish theology, at the expense of other perfections of grace. You also take issue with him for assuming that grace is necessarily incongruous. I think this is fair if one is only looking at things from a history of religions point of view, wanting to be fair and do justice to the variety of early Jewish views and not treat them in a polemical way, but perhaps Sanders would say he was simply wearing his Christian theologian’s hat, rather than just a historian’s hat when he said such things. In other words, he goes beyond the descriptive approach to a prescriptive approach from a later Christian point of view. The problem with critiquing him for doing this, is that you are perhaps also critiquing Paul’s own critique of early Judaism in the process. How do you respond?

JOHN: I take it that Sanders was trying *not* to import Christian theological categories into his description of Judaism, though Neusner and others thought he did so anyway. In fact, he did tend to assume that grace is necessarily incongruous (as well as prior), which is why he struggled with those texts that clearly argue that it is not. I am trying to bring to the surface what he did and did not clarify for us, in order that we can get beyond generalisations like ‘covenantal nomism’ and get greater clarity about the variety of ways in which Jews in antiquity thought about God’s mercy/grace. I don’t think Paul ever critiques early Judaism of being devoid of grace: he thinks the whole Jewish people depend entirely on the mercy of God, from start to finish (Romans 9-11). What frustrates him is that many of his Jewish contemporaries have not embraced the fulfilment of that grace in Christ. It is not that they have a wrong view of grace, but that by failing to latch onto the grace of God now demonstrated and fulfilled in Christ, they have nothing left to build on except the broken kinds of worth that come from Torah-observance.

BEN: On p. 313, and taking issue with Sanders you say that because of the diverse ways grace is spoken of in early Judaism “to characterize them all as products of a ‘religion of grace’ would hardly be illuminating”. Isn’t this a bit too strident? After all, Sanders did us a good service in eliminating the Christian caricature of early Judaism as a religion of nothing but works righteousness, rather than grace and covenantal nomism. I take it you are right that Sanders over-emphasizes the evidence for the priority of grace in Judaism, and not the other perfections of grace, but at least he mostly got that point right— correct???

JOHN: Yes, Sanders did us all an enormous benefit in insisting that the covenant/election comes before the law and that the observance of the law was not viewed as a way of earning one’s way into election/grace. So his emphasis on the priority of grace was good as far as it went. But because grace is a polysemous term, and can be perfected in more than one way, we risk flattening things out, and failing to see the specific dynamics of each text, if we leave it at ‘religion of grace’. In that sense, the Sanders flashlight only gets us so far down the tunnel: we need more light to be able to see further and deeper.

BEN: Another key conclusion shows up on p. 315, namely that some early Jewish sources stress the incongruity of grace and some do not. You add “this is not because some have a higher or purer view of grace than others. “ Incongruity, you say, is only one of six possible perfections of grace. But would Paul agree? Wouldn’t he say that whatever other aspects of grace you emphasize, its priority and its incongruity are sine qua nons of grace, from his Christological point of view. Isn’t this why in the end Paul sees grace to either Israel or Gentiles as purely a matter of God having mercy on people??

JOHN: Yes, I am trying, however, to put Paul’s view in perspective, to look at it first from a kind of critical distance, so we can understand what he is doing. It was not self-evident that the notion of God’s grace being incongrous was necessarily better or higher: in fact, many had good theological reasons to reject that notion. We can thus see more clearly that Paul’s is not the ‘obvious’ view of grace, but was shaped by a particular set of Christological convictions and experiences. We will see how powerful and significant that is to Paul, in his thinking about the Gentile mission and about Israel, but I want to start from the point of saying: he didn’t have to perfect grace in this way, so why did he?

BEN: Just a brief question about Paul and election. You rightly point out his discussion of such matters in Rom. 8-11, and perhaps this question can be reserved for the Romans chapter, though you raise the issue here in Chapter 10. It seems to me a failure to think along with Paul to fail to notice that there are two things going on in these texts, one has to do primarily with salvation and one with election. Election refers to people being chosen for specific historical purposes, including, surprising people like a Pharaoh or a Cyrus. This says nothing about their individual salvation or lack thereof, indeed I would say the OT passages in question don’t really talk about salvation in the Christian sense of salvation from sin etc. They talk about rescue and redemption of slaves, a rather different and social issue. On the other hand, when Paul does move over into talking about election in a Christian sense, he wants to talk about Christ being the Elect one of God, the Righteous One of God, and believers are only elect in the sense and to the degree they are in that context, have that social or group identity. Salvation, on the other hand, when Paul addresses the matter directly in Rom. 10 is about hearing the preacher, sincerely believing in one’s heart in Jesus as the savior, and confessing with one’s lips the same thing. Salvation is by grace, but through faith in Jesus. Of course salvation and election are inter-related matters, but their basis and grounds and purposes are not identical, it would seem to me, and I don’t think they were identical for Paul either. What do you think?

JOHN: I am not sure I see in Paul the distinction you are making here. If we focus on the language of ‘calling’ (the most common term Paul uses in relation to election), his own calling in grace by Jesus Christ (Gal 1.16) and the Galatians’ calling in grace (Gal 1.6) are both expressions of God’s mercy that put them on the path of salvation. Note also the prevalence of the calling language in 1 Corinthians (1.26-28; 7.17-24) where it means more than being chosen for a specific purpose or vocation. Of course, Paul generally reserves the language of salvation for the final, eschatologial reality, but people who are called (1 Cor 1.24, both Jews and Greeks) are those who are ‘being saved’ (1 Cor 1.18). The two sets of language here seem to go quite closely together.

2015-10-20T20:47:50-04:00

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BEN: Chapters 8 is rather different from the other early Jewish literature you’ve thus far surveyed and it prompts some good questions. Suppose someone were to say to you—‘you’ve demonstrated that grace falls under the category of gift, but it appears you’ve also shown that gift does not necessary fall into the category of grace, at least as usually understood by Christians. By this I mean that the writers of the NT, and Paul in particular, emphasize we are all sinners, and therefore ipso facto unworthy of God’s gracious activity in our lives. If God were looking for worthy recipients of his grace, he’d still be looking. One can perhaps talk about appropriate or ‘fit’ recipients, but not worthy ones. How would you respond to this sort of push back?

JOHN: Your question presupposes that the only kind of grace worth calling ‘grace’ is grace to the unworthy. That is to impose one particular definition on the word grace (that it is, by essence, incongrous). I understand why people do that, and don’t mind if they do so long as they recognise that this is a particular and peculiar definition of the concept. In fact Christians have argued about the meaning of ‘grace’ all down the centuries and lots have thought that it makes perfect sense for God to give grace to worthy and/or fitting recipients. Or, even if the initial grace was to the unworthy (e.g. at baptism), further grace, and any hoped-for grace at the last judgement, can only be given to those who on one ground or another have proven to be at least partly worthy. So, when you say ‘as usually understood’ this might be better glossed: as usually understood in the Reformation tradition. That God helps those who help themselves (or present themselves as worthy, by repentance and its evidence in good works) has been a very common construal of grace. Since Paul is using the same language as others in antiquity who talk about God’s grace (or human grace) to the worthy (he does not have a special word for ‘grace’), I judge it better to apply the term ‘grace’ to all the references to God’s abundant mercy, goodness and loving-kindness, and then to ask: and how did these sources understand (and ‘perfect’) this concept.

BEN: The Pseudo-Philo material in some ways stands at the other end of the spectrum from the Qumran material, in that the author keeps emphasizing that despite bad times, God will not renege on his promises to and his covenant with Israel. This would not seem to be a sectarian document, as grace seems to be for all Israelites— right?

JOHN: Yes, Pseudo-Philo and the Qumran Hymns share a common emphasis on God’s mercy to the disobedient, but for Pseudo-Philo, who traces this all through Israel’s history (e.g. at the Golden Calf), this is the phenomenon that has sustained all Israel all along, and he expects/hopes it will sustain the nation (though not necessarily every individual within it) to the end. In that sense, this texts reads Israel’s story rather like I think Paul reads this story in Romans 9-11.

BEN: To me, perhaps the most interesting aspect of Pseudo-Philo is the distinction between judgment and destruction. Like in the earlier chapters of Revelation, judgment can be seen as discipline, and so is not punitive, whereas destruction would be punitive and final. Thus Israel is regularly subject to God’s judgment when they sin, but not what we would call ‘final judgment’. Right?

JOHN: Yes, I was struck on reading this text that it could talk of judgments on Israel that are temporary (even if devastating) or partial (applicable only to some) – as sin had to be punished in some way. But the covenant and therefore Israel cannot be destroyed in any final or complete sense – or else God’s whole creation project would go down the tube. So there are repeated cycles in Israel’s history of sin, leading to divine judgment, followed by restoration in mercy, followed by sin, etc.

BEN: I’m also fascinated with what this book does with the offering of Isaac in sacrifice, even suggesting that this is why God ‘chose them’, the them I am assuming means Israel. In other words, the author doesn’t see God’s choice of Israel as arbitrary or based on no prior considerations.

JOHN: Well, that is interesting. The author is responding to the way that in Genesis 22, after the offering of Isaac, God gives a sworn oath that ‘because you have done this, I will bless you and I will make your offering as numerous as the stars’ etc. (Gen 22.15-17). That looks like rewarding Abraham and his offspring for the offering of Isaac. So it has God comment on this incident: ‘his offering was acceptable to me, and in return for his blood I chose them’ (Pseudo-Philo, LAB 18.5). This is one of several comments that suggest that the patriarchs and their behaviour and character is in some sense foundational to the covenant (see texts cited on page 273, especially LAB 35.3) – which is indeed one natural way to read Genesis. This may well be a way of ensuring that God’s covenant promises do not look arbitrary. I am not sure this text is as exercised by that question as Philo was, and as Paul was also in his own way, but it does work hard to show that Abraham and Moses (and his father) were heroic figures, and that is at least one explanation for the covenant and its endurance.

BEN: The author seems to have a somewhat developed view of the afterlife, in part because he has realized that justice is not always done in the generation when Israel has been wronged, or exiled or etc. I would say that this idea— that we need an afterlife theology if we are going to continue to affirm the justice of God to his people, arose in part because of the long period of Babylonian exile—and you can see this is the apocalyptic prophecy in the later OT—Ezekiel, Daniel, Zechariah. Surely it can’t be an accident that it is in those contexts, for the first time that we hear about resurrection etc. Would you agree?

JOHN: I think there may be political and social factors like this that encourage the development of belief in an afterlife, but I am cautious about simple cause-and-effect arguments, as beliefs have all kinds of roots. The ancient Egyptians, of course, had vivid and well-developed notions of an afterlife (not the same as a resurrection, of course) well before Israel displays them (as far as we can reconstruct), and there may well be Egyptian or other Near-Eastern influences on the development of Jewish apocalyptic ideas. But it is certainly the case that the more hopeless things look in the present and in the foreseeable future, hopes for ultimate justice are invested in a life beyond this. In the case of this book, good people get swept away along with the bad in God’s punishment of Israel – but something a lot better is in store for them in another world.

BEN: How are the mercy of God and the irreplaceability of Israel in God’s plan inter-related in this book?

JOHN: Mercy is an absolutely necessary mechanism for Israel’s history to continue, given its persistent tendency to go astray. And the reason Israel’s history has to continue (though questions arise at the time of the Golden Calf ) is because there is simply no alternative. Israel is core to the meaning of the cosmos, and if Israel were to disappear, the whole of history, and the whole of the world, would be meaningless. For this author it is either Israel or nothing: God does not have a Plan B up his sleeve. And a God whose only plan for the universe comes to nothing is not worth calling God. Mercy is the life-jacket that keeps the Israel-story afloat.

2015-10-14T19:15:54-04:00

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BEN: In various ways, Lou Martyn seems to have anticipated a few of the themes emphasized in the New Perspective discussions, particularly in regard to ‘pistis Christou’, and in fact, I would suggest he influence Richard Hays when he was writing his dissertation on Galatians at Emory. To what do you attribute the rather huge animus directed against Lou Martyn’s ‘apocalyptic ‘ approach to Paul’s thought from various folks in the Reformed camp, in particular Tom Wright? It’s not like Martyn denies all salvation historical ideas entirely, nor does he really caricature early Judaism per se.

JOHN: Labels are difficult here. Of the key figures in the New Perspective, Tom Wright follows the subjective genitive reading of ‘pistis Christou’ but Jimmy Dunn certainly does not. I think its roots lie in Barth, mediated via the Yale school to Richard Hays and by other channels to Lou Martyn. For them both it represents a strong suspicion of talk of human faith in terms that might suggest it is a condition for salvation, a human move that elicits the divine response in salvation. I have discussed Lou Martyn’s advocacy for this in chapter 12, when we get to Gal 2.15-16, and push back there on his reading and his anxieties about agency. Tom Wright has other reasons for advocating this, not least in his sense that Jesus fulfils the role of faithfulness to God that Israel failed to fulfil (I don’t find that reading of Paul convincing, though it also derives from Barth, perhaps imbibed by Wright via George Caird). Does Tom Wright belong in the Reformed camp: in one sense yes, but I guess John Piper would contest that point, as there are certain shibboleths in the Reformed tradition that Tom has set his heart against (imputed righteousness, etc.)! Lou Martyn’s reading of Galatians (his main work) is critical of notions of salvation history (see the last post on this topic). He uses the category of ‘religion’ (as opposite to apocalyptic) in something like the Barthian sense of that term, and this is wrongly taken by some as implying a denigration of Judaism as such. Lou was extremely respectful of Jews and Judaism; in fact, I can’t think of a NT scholar of the last generation with greater sensitivity on this point (see the early essays in his ‘Theological Issues in the Letters of Paul’). But he is convinced that God has acted uniquely to create a new reality in Christ. If he had written more on Romans 9-11 we would have seen how he connected Paul’s Jewish heritage to that Christ-reality in positive ways, but I don’t think we have a lot more from him on that passage than some comments in the introduction to his Galatians commentary.

BEN: E.P. Sanders has, in my judgment rightly been accredited with wiping out the basis for the old stereotype of Judaism as nothing but a works religion, a graceless religion. The surveying of the early Jewish primary sources was very helpful, even when at points, like with 4 Ezra or Psalms of Solomon he’s not really able to demonstrate the full priority of grace in all respects. Do you think that the critique of Sanders is fair that he brings a Lutheran theology of salvation (getting in, staying in) to his analysis of Judaism, and so skews the data a bit, not least by so singularly focusing on the issue of soteriology?

JOHN: I think it is perfectly proper to ask about the soteriology of ancient Jewish texts (what else is 4 Ezra about, for instance?). My main critique of Sanders at this point is that he is confused about the meaning of grace. He thinks it means largely or primarily that God acts first in generosity (the covenant before the law, election before law-obedience); the stress he puts on sequence shows how he reads things. He then confuses this with another perfection of grace (incongruity), which as my Part Two shows is there is some 2nd Temple texts, but no means in all. What would be really Lutheran would be to talk of the incongruity of grace (God’s mercy on the unfitting) but people who don’t know Luther that well think that just saying that God gives first (the priority of grace) is Protestant/Lutheran in itself.

BEN: In your critique of Sanders, you note that he sometimes muddles together the notion of the priority of grace and the incongruity of grace, whereas the early Jewish literature does reflect the ancient concept of a gift expecting some return….. Could you unpack this critique a bit more?

JOHN: My point is this: there is debate and difference of view in early Jewish literature about the incongruity of grace (see the studies of 5 Jewish texts in Part Two). Some think God is merciful on the unrighteous and unfitting (incongruity); some think, for good reason, that God is not (that would undercut the fairness of the universe) but instead exercises mercy on those who are in one sense or another worthy or fitting recipients of grace. Sanders found the priority of grace everywhere in 2nd Temple Judaism (that God gives first), but he confused this with other perfections of grace (such as incongruity) and thus thought there was no difference between any of the Jewish texts and Paul (or the Reformation). He is right to insist that grace is everywhere in 2nd Temple Judaism; he is wrong to suggest that it is everywhere the same.

BEN: Certainly one of the more important developments in recent Pauline Studies is the so-called ‘New Perspective on Paul’ although, as you and others have pointed out, it would be better talk about ‘the new perspectives (plural) on Paul’. For my money, we really should have recognized that K. Stendahl, reacting to his own Scandanavian Lutheran heritage, was the catalyst for a good deal of this discussion, well before Ed. Sanders, or before Tom Wright used the term, or Jimmy Dunn talked about it. Stendahl (whom I took Romans with at Harvard) certainly provided a detailed critique of Luther’s exegesis of Romans 7, and the whole ‘interiority’ approach to Paul’s notions about human fallenness and redemption. But equally telling was his critique of anti-Semitic readings of Paul of various sorts. I would say this in part prompted Ed Sander’s detailed representation of early Jewish thought in a positive light. Why do you think it is that Stendahl is not given more credit for spawning various of these new developments in Pauline studies?

JOHN: I think Stendahl’s famous ‘Introspective Conscience’ essay has been very widely cited, and his essays in ‘Paul among Jews and Gentiles’ were certainly very influential when I started studying Paul in 1979. He stood in that wave of new and proper sensitivity in the 1970s that the Christian tradition had all too often supported anti-Judaism. He thus made scholars willing and eager to hear a reading of Judaism that did not result in a caricature or negative judgement. But he did not do the hard graft of a new reading of Jewish texts himself: he softened the ground for Sanders whose massive work in actually reading the texts outside the normal channels of interpretation caused scholarship to think differently.

BEN: One of the themes that arises multiple times in New Perspective discussions is the notion not only that Paul is addressing specific situations in Galatians and Romans, but that in fact his theology of grace and God’s righteousness is quite specifically tailored to his dominant audience— namely Gentiles. To me, this insight can be overplayed, because Paul is not just saying that ‘justification by grace through faith’ is how Gentiles get into the body of Christ. He is saying that that is how everyone gets in, including himself, surely. For example, in Romans 1 he stresses that the Good News about righteousness and faith in Christ is for ‘the Jew first’ and also for the Gentile. My point is that I don’t think a two track model of salvation works as an analysis of Paul’s thought, especially when Rom. 11.25ff. seems to make clear that ‘all Israel will be saved in the future’ ‘when the Redeemer comes forth from heavenly Zion and turns away the impiety of Jacob’. You don’t talk about the impiety of Jacob if you think they are already saved by some other means than Christ, and you don’t talk about Jewish branches temporarily broken off from the people of God, so they can be reintegrated into that group by grace through faith in Jesus, if you are touting a two track model of salvation. In short, it seems to me that very few of the New Perspective folks, going all the way back to Stendahl, really grasp the nettle when it comes to the radical nature of Paul’s thought when it comes to how exactly non-Christian Israel is and will be saved. Do you agree with this line of thinking, or does it have some flaws in it?

JOHN; You are right that Stendahl, in consort with Gager and Gaston in his day, and followed now by the ‘radical new perspective’ (Stowers, Zetterholm etc.) were/are very unwilling to find in Paul anything that suggested that Paul expected Jews to change in practice or belief, and one way to argue that is to say that his negative comments about the authority of the law are only as it relates to Gentiles (his only audience). A forthcoming book by Matt Thiessen will argue precisely this point as well. You will have to wait till part III (on Galatians) and part IV (on Romans) to see my take on this, but basically I agree with you that Paul does expect Jews like himself to be challenged, and reconstituted, by the gospel, even if he finds a deep connection between what God has done in Abraham etc. and what he has done in Christ. In my reading of Romans 9-11 (chapter 17) I agree with you that Paul expects ethnic Israel to be saved by faith in Christ – though this will be not an addition to, and certainly not a denial of, their Jewish Scriptural heritage, but rather its fulfilment, since God has constituted Israel all along by an incongruous grace (which I take to be the root of the olive tree in Romans 11).

BEN: Let’s talk a bit about the phrase ‘works of the Law’ which is so prominent in the discussions by the New Perspective folks. Dunn, among others wants to argue that the phrase refers to the boundary defining rituals which separate Jews from Gentiles— namely circumcision, kosher laws, and Sabbath keeping. Paul is combatting nationalistic chest thumping and hubris.

The assumption behind this assumption seems to be that Paul couldn’t possibly be suggesting that ‘all possible works of the Mosaic Law’ are passé, or no longer binding on any of God’s people. And behind that is the assumption of Reformed theology that Paul held to a ‘one covenant in various administrations’ view of covenant theology. Yet Paul quite clearly in Gal. 4, 2 Cor. 3-4, Rom. 9.1-5, and Rom. 10.1-5 in fact tells us that Christ is the end or fulfillment of that Mosaic law covenant, and that the new covenant is connected through Christ with the Abrahamic covenant, not the Mosaic one which was a ‘paidagogos’ a temporary child minder until Christ came. In short, Paul affirms multiple covenants given by God to his people, not one covenant in many administrations. In short, what is at stake is not a Lutheran reading of the Mosaic Law, but a Calvinistic and Reformed one. Why do you think this part of the discussion has become so heated, so often? Why does it seem, at least to me that Dunn and Tom Wright ‘protesteth too much’ on these sorts of issues? What is your take on all this?

JOHN: I have a discussion on ‘works of the law’ in chapter 12 (when we get to Gal 2.15-16) and think on exegetical grounds that it means just ‘the practice of the Mosaic Law’ and does not single out, or prioritise, any particular works like circumcision etc. In that respect I disagree with Dunn, who, influenced by his Reformed training (he refers to the Westminster Confession), is not inclined to allow any general critique of the Mosaic law, or any sense that its era may have come to an end. Of course how to read ‘telos’ in Romans 10.4 (as ‘end’ in the sense of cessation or ‘end’ in the sense of fulfilment) is at the exegetical heart of this whole debate, which has divided Lutherans and Calvinists from the very start. As you say, in Galatians 3 Paul makes clear that the Mosaic law had an authority for a limited time (starting 430 years after Abraham and until Christ): he does not think it is wrong as such, but it is no longer the final authority for those in Christ (even if they fulfil its core intention by walking in the Spirit). Romans brings out more this sense of the core intention of the law (‘the work of the law’, Romans 2.15; or ‘the just requirement of the law’, Romans 8.4): that indicates that believers do what the Law, at heart, was looking for. But that its final authority is broken even for Jews is clear in that, even in Romans, Paul can say that he is persuaded in the Lord Jesus that nothing is unclean in itself (Rom 14.14) and that ‘the Kingdom of God is not food and drink, but righteousness and peace and joy in the Holy Spirit’ (Rom 14.17). The Torah’s rules remain an honourable cultural tradition, which Paul wants the weak to be allowed to continue (Romans 14-15); but they also have to recognise that one can live to the Lord (God/Christ) in ignoring kosher rules, as well as in honouring them.

BEN: Don Carson and others of those who wrote in the volume entitled Variegated Nomism seem to be engaging in what I would call a rear-guard action to protect the old Calvinistic analysis of early Judaism, in particular that there were numerous advocates in early Judaism of ‘works righteousness’ which Paul is critiquing. They totally want to avoid the notion that Paul is in fact saying that the Mosaic covenant and not either legalism or works righteousness, is the real issue here. As you suggest, one of the main reasons for this whole approach is not just allegiance to a traditional Reformed analysis of Paul, but an attempt to perfect a variety of concepts conjured up by the word grace, all at once, or to mush them up together. Why do you think that people as different as Carson and Doug Campbell want to push this button?

JOHN: It is always tempting to push a concept to its logical extreme, and Christian theologians have for centuries enjoyed claiming that others have a defective understanding of grace because those others don’t perfect it in the way they think it should be. I read Carson as pushing all the Calvinist buttons (even in the language he uses), and Campbell as a natural-born radical who is influenced most by Barth but wants to push even Barthian perfections of grace to their nth degree. There is an attraction in being a ‘purist’ in these matters (others are then compromisers who don’t properly see the truth), and I guess Paul’s own polemics on this topic encourage people to think that the more they are polemical the more they are like Paul … But we sometimes apply Pauline polemics to topics he did not get hot under the collar about.

BEN: Two of the biggest contributions of your book, in my judgment are 1) demonstrating at some length the various ways ‘charis’ terminology was used in Paul’s world, and how differently it was used in a benefaction culture, than it is often used in the modern context when we talk about ‘giving with no thought of return’ and the like. What shocked me is how little the discussions of grace in Paul in the last century have even reflected a knowledge of this important contextual info for understanding Paul. And somehow the New Perspective folks, have to some degree pushed ‘grace’ to the margins of Paul’s discussion in Romans and elsewhere—- amazing! 2) I especially think your sixfold taxonomy is very helpful for sorting out which aspects of grace Paul is indeed perfecting (e.g. its priority) and which he is probably not perfecting. What happens if and when Protestant scholars especially realize they have been evaluating Paul far too much in light of their own historical theological traditions, and not enough in light of Paul’s own cultural context, both Greco-Roman and Jewish?

JOHN; The older books on grace (Moffatt) did show some knowledge of the ancient world, and Harrison’s recent book on grace in the Graeco-Roman world is a recovery and development of that tradition. But there was always the tendency to take Paul as the exception: others thought gifts required a return, but Paul believed in the unilateral or unconditional gift (in the sense of requiring no return), etc. I have tried to feed in important resources from the anthropology of gift, to expose and critique modern notions of gift, and to question how much these modern notions apply to Paul, and thus to approach Paul with a more open mind: which of the possible ways of perfecting divine grace did he employ and which did he not? As you will see from the second half of this book, I think the key perfection for Paul is incongruity (God gives in Christ without regard to worth), but this does not mean that the gift is also given with no thought of return. The disaggregation of the different perfections of gift is, for me, the key methodological work of this book, and I have had systematic theologians tell me that it would have saved an awful lot of controversy in Christian history if these distinctions had been made clear earlier …!

2015-10-13T19:32:58-04:00

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BEN: Dealing with Barth or Bultmann’s treatment of Paul is of course difficult in the span of just a few pages, but at least on a surface reading it would appear appropriate to say that Barth emphasizes Paul’s belief that special revelation is required for salvation, and therefore ‘natural theology’ based on general revelation in creation, if not impossible, at least can be said to be non-salvific. By contrast, Bultmann wants to analyze Paul starting with Paul’s anthropological terms, and the inner life and nature of human beings. Would this be a fair summary of their approaches, in your judgment?

JOHN: You are right that Barth was extremely suspicious of all forms of ‘natural theology’: we understand our own situation not by reasoning from what we can already perceive (of ourselves, or of nature), but from the revelation of God in Christ. Bultmann’s position was nuanced. He thought that for revelation to make sense at all it had to connect at some level to what we can perceive about ourselves, and thus the gospel presupposes some sense of the ontological constitution of the human (which he thought best analysed through the tools of existentialist philosophy), such as our possibility of having a relation to ourselves, and an understanding of ourselves. But we need the gospel to see what state we are really in (our ontic condition) – that is, the actual dysfuntions of our human rejection of God and thus our inauthentic existence.

BEN: On p. 136 you critique Sanders’ critique of Bultmann (e.g. he thinks Bultmann saw Paul’s thought as moving from plight to solution, and was wrong). Would it be nearer the mark to say Bultmann reasons from faith, and other human responses to God, back to the nature of grace and revelation, suggesting that human beings can only think about God starting with themselves? As Lewis once said ‘we cannot crawl one inch outside our mortal skin’ and thus theology has to begin with anthropology.

JOHN: Sanders mistook the fact that Bultmann starts with Paul’s anthropological terms as indicating that Bultmann read Paul as moving from a known human plight to a solution revealed in Christ. In fact, Bultmann is quite clear that the plight is only known from the solution, because only the message of the cross reveals (and judges) our self-reliance and our innate rebellion against God. Yes, this is what faith reveals, but Bultmann also insists that faith only arises in response to the preaching of the gospel, which is where the grace of Christ accosts and meets us. In talking about faith, Bultmann is reacting against the notion that first we learn ‘objective’ truths about God or Christ (or history, or Israel) and then we come to apply them to ourselves. Paul’s gospel is good news because it concerns us and in that sense he suggests that any talk about God in Paul is always talk about God-in-relation-to-us (“simultaneously an assertion about man”). In that sense, theology is always also anthropology (he would not want to put one or other as the starting point), but he would insist that faith recognises that it is God always who takes the initiative in reaching out to us in grace, and in that sense God has priority in salvation.

BEN: Barth and Bultmann seem to share the concern to undercut human hubris and any sort of idea that one’s relationship with God could involve human achievement, a sort of building of a tower of Babel all over again. This seems to be in part because they both affirm the Lutheran radical reading of the priority and incongruity of grace, as you would put it, as what allows humans to be saved or regain right relationship with God. BUT, Bultmann, unlike Barth, goes on to suggest that the predestinarian language of Paul cannot be taken literally as there has to be a non-compelled or non-predetermined human response to grace, however much grace has enabled that response. Right?

JOHN: Yes, in my terms they both agree about the priority and incongruity of grace (the latter is one of the hallmarks of dialectical theology), but Bultmann is extremely nervous about any perfection of the efficacy of grace, if by that is meant the determination of the human agent by God’s grace or God’s will. The logic is relatively simple: in what sense can one speak of ‘obedience’ (as in Paul’s phrase, ‘the obedience of faith’) if there is no element of choice in it? In fact, Barth will also be careful not to pit the agency of God against the agency of the believer (as one overruling the other), but develops ways of speaking of agency which has the free agency of believers founded in a reality created by God (with believers as covenant partners). John Webster has explored this very well in his Barth’s Ethics of Reonciliation (1995).

BEN: Another difference of Bultmann from the Augustinian heritage, and so to some degree a difference from Luther, is not only his theology of prevenient grace, but also his rejection of the notion that: 1) grace is singular (no says Bultmann it is the grace of the judge—hence forensic righteousness or right standing is the result), and 2) it is a grace that does indeed expect a return, it demands the obedience of faith (though of course that obedience is only possible when enabled by grace). Is this a right reading of Bultmann? What I find especially interesting is that, as much as Wesleyans and Arminians may not much like Bultmann’s historical minimalism when it comes to what we can and cannot know about the historical Jesus, interestingly Bultmann’s take on Paul’s theology in various ways sounds like John Wesley all over again, though I doubt Bultmann read Wesley!

JOHN: I also doubt Bultmann read Wesley, but he was certainly trying to refine and correct some tendencies in the Lutheran tradition. Like Schlatter, he stresses what Paul says about obedience, because for him faith itself is a kind of self-surrender to the verdict of God (who is thus, as you say, both judge and the giver of grace). The well-known danger in the Lutheran tradition is what Bonhoeffer called “cheap grace”: God gives and expects nothing in return. The best Lutheran theologians (including Luther himself) have tried to find ways to avoid that, but the tendency to what I call ‘non-circularity’ (and the fear of instituting a new kind of ‘law’) means that the Lutheran tradition is much more wary of speaking of obligation and obedience than those in the Calvinist and Arminian tradition (here these latter two actually agree with each other!). I find that a lot of evangelicals, when they read Bultmann on Paul, find his theology is actually very congenial (it preaches!), and Arminians such as yourself appreciate his resistance to some of the specifically Calvinist perfections of grace.

BEN; Famously, Kasemann did not like Bultmann’s anthropological and existential starting point for theology, as the apt quote you give on p. 142 demonstrates (‘the key question is not how humans relate to themselves, but to whom are they answerable’ ; or as Bob Dylan once put it—‘we all have to serve somebody, we were made that way’). What fascinates me about Kasemann is that he rightly, in my judgment, rejects the emphasis on individualism, and instead focuses on the question of collectivism when it comes to redemption, a collectivism that not only involves the salvation of individual humans, but the renewal of the cosmos too. In this he seems to be giving a much better reading of Pauline texts like Romans 8.1ff. In part this is because he saw Jewish thought, including Jewish apocalyptic as the mother of Pauline theology, as opposed to Gnosticism. Would you agree that Kasemann seems much more likely to give us a reading of Paul on target than Bultmann when it comes to these issues? Yet ironically both Bultmann (‘man doesn’t have a soma, he is a soma’) and Kasemann seem to miss the complexity of Paul’s theology of the body.

JOHN: Kasemann (hard to do the Umlaut in this forum!) rightly saw that Paul’s anthropology concerned primarily not our relation to ourselves, but our relation to what is outside ourselves, and in particular our relation of belonging or slavery (against modern Western versions of a natural individual freedom or autonomy). We are answerable first not to ourselves, or to other human beings, but to forces beyond ourselves: in Pauline terms, either the Lord (Jesus) or Sin and Death. This means Kasemann was also able to take the collective dimensions of Paul more seriously than Bultmann (his early work was on Paul’s ecclesiology and he kept working on that right through), although he could be very critical indeed of the church, and insisted on keeping a balanced attention to the individual, since faith cannot be exercised on our behalf by anyone else, or by any institution, and since the distribution of the gifts in the church indicate that individual difference is significant for the growth of the collective church. For Bultmann when Paul talks of soma he is talking about how we relate to ourselves; for Kasemann, he is talking of how we communicate with, and relate to, our environment and what is outside ourselves. I think Kasemann is nearer to Paul at this point, though Paul’s use of the term soma, like the term sarx, defies easy categorization.

BEN: There are points in Kasemann’s landmark commentary on Romans where he talks about God’s righteousness and God’s grace as power, such that one gets the sense he is repudiating the ‘simul Justus et peccator’ theology of Luther, and saying that grace can actually powerfully transform human nature. This comes out as well in some aspects of his reading of Romans 7 as not about the Christian life, but rather a Christian reading of the pre-Christian condition. Would this be a fair reading of Kasemann?

JOHN: Yes, for Kasemann the relation between gift and power is crucial: grace is both power over us (enlisting us in its service: ‘with the gift comes the Giver’ as Lord), and power in us (propelling us into service). He does see the latter as transformative, but he also has the deep and instinctive Lutheran concern to preserve the sense, right through the Christian life, that faith is a daily appropriation of a grace that we do not deserve and that does not correspond to our rights or privileges. So this transformation does not lead into perfection or sinlessness, in any moral sense, only into a deeper faith that draws, all the more consciously and fully, on a grace that disregards our human inabilities and imperfections.

BEN: Even in his most recent books (The Paul Debate, Paul and his Contemporary Interpreters), Tom Wright seems to continue to have an allergic reaction to Lou Martyn’s apocalyptic Paul, and behind that to Kasemann’s reading as well. I would surmise that this is largely because he wants in fact to do a continuous story reading of Paul and his view of salvation history, which includes the more Reformed reading that for Paul ultimately Israel=the church of Jew and Gentile in Christ. So he critiques the imprecise way Martyn and others use the term apocalyptic and related language, and calls it a muddle not well grounded in early Jewish thought. Yet Kasemann at least seems to have held to some sort of salvation history view, a kind of repeated incursion of grace view. Right? Why do you think Wright has such a reaction to Martyn and his kin? Is it perhaps because he wants to insist on the ‘one covenant in many administrations’ theology of Reformed theology?

JOHN: I do think Wright is influenced by a Reformed theology of covenant (it was the theological stable in which he was reared) and has several times said that we would understand Paul better from that perspective rather than from Luther’s. That is why he liked Cranfield’s commentary on Romans so much. I won’t speculate on why he finds Martyn’s work such a threat, but I find he grossly misrepresents Martyn at times, and attributes to him an anti-Judaism which is miles from Martyn’s real opinion and aims (as those of us who knew Martyn personally will testify). Salvation history can mean different things to different people (it is almost as loose a term as “apocalyptic” or, for that matter, “covenant”). For Kasemann it meant (against Bultmann) that God works through history (and not just in the individual’s present), though in such a way as always to justify the outsider and the sinner, not the pious and the righteous. For Martyn, it signals a sense of progression or development through human history, such that humans can be prepared or in a fit condition (historically or morally) to receive God’s grace; for this reason, he is allergic to the term! Because Martyn’s work is focused on Galatians, he insists on the discontinuity between the Abrahamic covenant/promise and the Mosaic law (Galatians 3). Romans is more conducive to a Reformed reading at this point, and it is a pity Martyn did not publish more on that letter. As you will see, I try to do justice to the differences and the similarities between the two letters in my readings of each letter later in this book.

2015-08-04T14:08:40-04:00

righto

In a candid moment, Tom reveals that Wayne Meek’s First Urban Christians provided something of a template for what he was trying to do in a major part of his Paul and the Faithfulness of God. He says this on pp. 260-61….
“One or two reviewers of my Paul and the Faithfulness of God have expressed surprise at the significant number of times I refer to Meeks’s book. There was a good reason. I envisaged Part II
of my book as corresponding, in a sense, to chapters 2—5 of The First Urban Christians, trying to map the worldview, not least the symbols, narratives and praxis, which Paul was inculcating. I envisaged Part III as corresponding to Meeks’s chapter 6, showing particularly how the ‘patterns of belief’ we find in Paul’s letters sustained the kind of community, and the
kind of worldview, we had discerned earlier on. Sharp eyes might have picked up that I began Part III with Paul’s reworked monotheism, just as Meeks did in his sixth chapter. Again, there was good reason. Looking back on the last generation of Anglophone Pauline scholarship, there remain
three great landmarks, Sanders, Martyn and Meeks; and the one I value most is Meeks.

“He saw with increasing clarity that when people had spoken of ‘historical’,
or ‘historical-critical’, study of the New Testament, they had often meant
the history of early Christian ideas as discerned on a hypothetical map of
religious history, a map moreover which was divided into two continents,
‘Judaism’ and ‘Hellenism’, with a significant ocean between them. This was
not ‘history’ in the sense that most historians understood it – the history,
that is, of actual communities, with their characteristic ways of life, their
social and cultural mores and morals, their challenges and hopes. Meeks
determined to plunge into that denser world…. Meeks determined early on, and has continued to insist on this point, that social history is not a matter of discovering large abstractions and
imposing them on the material. He has thus, notoriously, been persona non
grata with the ‘Context Group’.”

On p. 262, Tom quotes with approval Meek’s own judgment on the Context Group, and particularly on the quest to find one sociological key that unlocks the mysteries of early Christians. Meeks responds “There is no such key. Not the patron-client relation, not the honor-shame society, not status inconsistency, routinization of charisma, the dyadic personality, rational choice in a premarket economy, or group-grid dynamics. The constructs represented by some or even all of these metonyms and others like them may indeed help us to look from a new angle at some of the evidence at hand, or to discover evidence that we didn’t know was there. They remain, nevertheless, abstractions that can never substitute for deep and longterm immersion in the scattered and enigmatic traces left by the people of the first century. . . Putting the story together is finally more art than science – and the scientists I know are quick to acknowledge that there is much art in their science.” (QUOTED FROM THE 2ND EDITION OF FIRST URBAN 2002, p. xii).

Some of the things Wright agrees with Meeks about, and derives from his study of Meeks has to do with the unique features of the early Christian movement. For example, consider the following analysis by Tom….
“The ‘household’ was basic; the ‘voluntary association’ was common.
Both show considerable parallels with the Christian groups; both also
reveal considerable divergencies, of which the translocal character of the
group was again an obvious one. Likewise, the Christian groups saw themselves
as ‘exclusive and totalistic in a way that no club nor even any pagan
cultic association was’. Pauline converts underwent an ‘extraordinarily thoroughgoing
resocialization’, for which ‘the only convincing parallel in antiquity
was conversion to Judaism’. If, however, the Christian groups were in
one sense ‘exclusive’, they were in another sense ‘much more inclusive in
terms of social stratification and other social categories’ than the clubs or
associations would have been. Nobody else in Paul’s world was attempting
to found new communities in which social status counted for nothing. The
parallel with conversion to Judaism is significant in another way: the word
ekklēsia, though it has non-Jewish echoes as well, seems to have been used
by the Christians in such a way as to evoke the Septuagint translation of
qehal YHWH, the ‘assembly of the Lord’. This points again to the parallels
with the Jewish communities, which were simultaneously closed cultic communities
and members of a larger transnational entity…. But the culture of the early Christian groups we
glimpse in Paul’s letters was characterized, in a way that no other groups
were, by three things in particular: a set of beliefs, a new moral world, and
certain specific rituals. (We recall, once again, the way that ‘worldview’
functions: it holds together symbol, narrative, ethos, ritual and so on.)” (p. 266).

On p. 273 Tom asks himself why at points he finds Meek’s analysis insufficient or weak. He says this— “Why then do I find it less than fully convincing? Because though Meeks does indeed note the christological and eschatological interpretation of scripture, I do not think he gives sufficient
weight to the theme which, as I have argued elsewhere, drills down below
this. Scripture, for Paul, is not merely a miscellaneous, ahistorical source of
guidance. It is the earlier, and in some ways determinative, stage of the narrative
in which Paul believes that he and his communities are still living.
This narrative has indeed been broken in the Messiah’s crucifixion; but it
continues in its new cross-shaped form, and when Paul appeals (for
instance) to the exodus story in 1 Corinthians 10.1–13 he does so not simply
to pick out an example from long ago but in order to stress that the erstwhile
pagan converts in Corinth are part of the same, single family that was
once rescued from Egypt.”

This is where I personally find Wright least convincing. The example in 1 Cor. 10 has nothing to do with the Corinthians being told they belong to that story. It is about telling them that since we are talking about the same God, that same sort of behavior will produce the same sort of judgment. There is a big difference between using the OT as typology or moral example as Paul does here and suggesting a continuing family story. The Corinthians were never part of the Mosaic story or covenant. They were grafted into the patriarchal story and the Abrahamic covenant now fulfilled in Christ and in the new covenant.

Much of the rest of this chapter involves summarizing some of Meek’s key points, and making some minor corrections along the way. Here is how he sums up the analysis of Meeks contributions…

“What then has Wayne Meeks done for Pauline interpretation? Two
things in particular, I think. First, he has shifted the focus decisively from
‘history of religion’ to history, period – with a particular emphasis on social
history, but on that as falling within the larger ‘thick description’ of the
ancient Mediterranean world, and the particular cities in which Paul
founded churches. The question of ‘religion’ is included within that, but
Meeks, both in his 1983 work and in his important 2001 article, has stoutly
challenged the ideological construct which had taken ‘religion’ as its overall
subject and ‘Judaism and Hellenism’ as its particular binary opposition. The
fact that many works continue to be written as if this revolution had not
happened indicates well enough that the discipline still has much to learn
from him. At the same time, he has insisted, against continuing opposition,
that Paul’s communities did indeed have some decidedly distinctive features,
and that some of those features have their closest analogies with features
of the Diaspora Jewish communities. Once we get away from a false
religionsgeschichtliche opposition between ‘Judaism’ and ‘Hellenism’, the real
distinctives can stand out.

“Second, Meeks has placed the study of belief, in this case the beliefs which
Paul sought to inculcate in his communities, within the study of what I have
called ‘worldview’, the large clump which includes symbol, myth, ritual and
so on. He has demonstrated that, though one may indeed observe close correlations,
this is not reductionist in either direction, unless of course the
interpreter forces it to be so. He has repeatedly stressed Paul’s urgent plea
for the unity and holiness of the church, and indicated that the main correlate
of this is a Jewish-style monotheism reworked around Jesus as the Messiah.
Likewise, in line with Schweitzer and Wrede, and in parallel with the
so-called new perspective (though without apparently noticing any of this),
he has insisted that Paul’s language about justification is closely correlated
with the social reality of his Jew-plus-gentile communities, but he makes
this point without lapsing into the sort of reductionism some have observed
in Francis Watson’s 1986 monograph or in the ‘Context Group’. He has
likewise demonstrated that some key elements of Paul’s theology mean what
they mean within a missionary impulse which was seeking, not to snatch
people out of the world, but to generate a community which saw itself as the
vanguard of an entire new creation.” (pp. 282-83).

2015-08-03T15:50:14-04:00

righto

Chapter Four is entitled Life after Sanders, and here we begin to see the more radical side of the New Perspective on Paul, and why some traditional Reformed scholars have gotten their knickers all in a knot about it. Tom playfully sums up the situation as follows on p. 88:

“Nothing will ever be the same again. The new perspective on Paul – not that
there is any single thing which can now be called by that name, despite the
ambitious title of Jimmy Dunn’s collection of related articles – has burst in,
like the delightful Goldilocks, to disrupt the peaceful scene where the Three
Reformation Bears were planning to have an undisturbed breakfast. She has
sat on the chair of traditional justification-theology, and it now seems to be
broken (though they have called in the carpenters from Louisville, Sydney
and elsewhere to try to fix it). She has eaten the exegetical breakfast, scooping
up favourite texts and swallowing them whole. Now she is asleep in the
theological and religio-historical bed, claiming the private room of Pauline
studies as her own. And the Three Bears, quite understandably, are cross
about it. In some versions of the story, Goldilocks is chased away from the house,
never to be seen again, and peace can return. Part of the point of the present
book, though, is to place this nursery story (which, to be sure, carries its
own overtones in sociology and psychology, topics for which the Bears
never had much time) within a much larger set of stories in which the Bears
themselves will come under scrutiny for the terms of their tenancy. The
arrival of Goldilocks, though obviously an intruding nuisance, might then
be seen as an accident that had been waiting to happen, perhaps even the
necessary disturbance of a too-cosy household.”

It would appear that Dunn has been the real promoter of the new perspective. He thinks Sanders has Judaism mostly right but he has been highly critical of his analysis of Paul. Wright stresses that there is no uniform ‘new perspective’ but a variety of ‘new perspectives’ spurred on by the stimulus of Sander’s work. I think it’s right to recognize the diversity of new perspective views. And where I think wheels come off the new perspective train is in its interpretation of the Pauline phrase “works of the Law’ which simply cannot be reduced to the boundary defining rituals of Judaism, circumcision, keeping kosher, and sabbath observance, the rituals the practice of which separated Jews from Gentiles. What Paul means by the phrase includes these things for sure, but is not limited to these things. Nevertheless, what the phrase does NOT mean has been correctly assessment by Tom and Jimmy and others. Here is what Tom says about the matter on p. 92….

“Dunn’s solution was staring us in the face in the ancient Jewish evidence.
The ‘works’ of Torah to which Paul refers in Galatians and elsewhere, and
which he rejects as the key to justification, are not the ‘good moral works’
performed by the would-be self-help moralist whom we and many others
have thought of, with whatever historical inaccuracy, as ‘Pelagian’. They are
not the things someone might do in order to impress God. They are, quite
specifically, the things the Jew does, not in order to earn God’s favour but to
demonstrate it: specifically, to demonstrate that he or she really is a member
of God’s people. In the first century more or less everyone, whether Jew or
gentile, knew what those ‘works’ were: circumcision of male children, various
food taboos, and sabbath observance. These were particularly important
for Diaspora Jews, living outside from the holy land itself, for whom such
‘works’ marked them out from their pagan neighbours.”

What is missed in an analysis like this is that Paul’s critique of the Mosaic Law is part and parcel of his critique of the larger Mosaic covenant itself, which Paul says is NOT the covenant Christians are under. Indeed, in Galatians 4 he says that the Mosaic covenant was a temporal and temporary one until the time Messiah came to redeem those under the Mosaic Law (not just those keeping the boundary rituals) out from under the Law. Paul connections the new covenant with the Abrahamic not the Mosaic covenant, about which he says in 2 Corinthians that the ministry of Moses involves a fading glory, as part of an obsolescent covenant. In other words, Paul’s critique of ‘works of the law’ is part of a covenantal critique, which becomes a critique of any and all Reformed views that suggests either : 1) that there is only one covenant in many administrations and the Mosaic Law in some form continues to be the law of the new covenant; or 2) that we must read the Biblical story forward because Jew and Gentile in Christ should be seen as ‘Israel’, which is also not Paul’s view. His view is that Gentiles are being joined now to Jewish followers of Christ and that someday even those Jews who can still be called Israel will be joined to this new people of God when Christ returns and ‘all Israel is saved’. In other words, one must analyze the situation on the basis of the eschatological already and not yet, not on the basis of an assumption about the continuation of Israel’s story already in the church or the continuation of Mosaic covenant in the new one.

One of the areas of obvious disagreement within the new perspective scholars is over the issue of ‘the faith of Jesus Christ’ (pistis Christou), a phrase we find several places in Paul’s letters. Wright points out at length that Dunn strongly disagrees with Richard Hays on the pistis Christou debate. According to Hays, and Wright, the phrase is about God’s action in Christ, not about our faith in Christ, and so is about Christ’s faithfulness to do God’s will (not about his personal trust in or belief in Yahweh, though of course that would be implied. But the term faithfulness refers to action, including his obedience unto death on the cross—Phil. 2).

Wright suggests that the problem with Dunn’s reading of Paul is that he fails to see the narrative framework in which a phrase like pistis Christou operates, whereas Hays does see it.Wright says this failure to see the narrative framework is why Dunn rejects the extended exile argument of Wright as well. Tom puts it this way on p. 99— “the same post-Sanders world which is now doing its best to read Paul in terms not of a sharp polemic against ‘Jewish legalism’ (or whatever) but in terms of an essentially Jewish Apostle discovering,perhaps to his surprise, that the fresh revelation he believed had come from Israel’s God through Jesus Christ was the thing to which the scriptures had in fact been pointing to all along.” He then goes on to point out that Hays has come around to his view that Paul in texts like 1 Cor. 10 is suggesting not merely the the Corinthians might end up with the same fate as the wilderness wandering generation if they keep behaving as they are, but that Paul is saying that OT story is the earlier form of their own story because they are now part of Israel’s ongoing story.

Tom puts it this way: “Israel’s story is not somebody else’s history; rather, Paul addresses the Gentile Corinthians as though they have become part of Israel. They are invited to understand themselves now as descendants of the characters who appear in the pages of Scripture . . . It should
be noted that Paul is not trying to convince his Gentile readers to accept this identity
description as a novel claim; rather, he assumes their identification with Israel as a given
and tries to reshape their behavior in light of this identification.”

So Wright concludes…..
“Paul’s challenge to ex-pagan followers of Jesus the Messiah is not simply that they learn how to behave by lookingat examples from scripture. It is that they learn how to think of themselves as characters in a story, in The Story, the story of God and his people,
whose earlier chapters set out characteristic lessons which those who find
themselves in the later chapters must learn. But the overall point is this: they
are in the same story, not a different story which happens to be parallel to
another earlier one. Something drastic has happened to that story, something
which has burst in on it, turned it inside out, set the house on fire and
rebuilt it.” (p. 100).

My own observation is that Paul does say Gentiles are Abraham’s children. What he absolutely does not say or suggest is that they are Moses’ children or part of the Mosaic covenant story, which is a very different story than the Abraham covenant story. They can learn from the bad examples from the Mosaic covenant people and period, but they were never part of that story or covenant. Never. That story has a dead end in Christ who fulfilled that covenant and is the end of that law covenant (Rom. 10.4).

In my view, continuity of story is predicated on the assumption of continuity of covenant. This is a mistake Wright makes again and again and again.

2015-08-03T14:55:44-04:00

righto

Some time ago, a very fine NT scholar named Earle Ellis wrote a book entitled Paul and his Recent Interpreters. Now we have another one from the ever-flowing pen of Tom Wright (due out in America in Oct. 2015, already out in the U.K. and comprising some 384 pages). Of course the thing about a title like that is it’s always appropriate, because there is a never ending stream of Pauline interlocutors. In some years, Paul is more of a center of controversy than even Jesus in the scholarly world. Into this environment, Tom assays to assess some of the recent debates about Paul since E.P. Sander’s landmark work Paul and Palestinian Judaism (1977), focusing on major contributors to the debate.

It is an obvious truth that it is easier to tear down than it is to build up, to deconstruct than to construct. This book is not just an attempt to demolish arguments and scholarly trends with which Tom Wright disagrees, though there is plenty of rebuttal and refutation in this book. There is commendation along with the correction, and something of a history of the interpretation of Paul in the 20th century, sticking to major Anglephone contributors to ‘the Paul Debate’ in this new book.

The three primary trajectories in modern Pauline scholarship Tom intends to analyze are: 1) the new perspective on Paul, ala Sanders et al.; 2) the apocalyptic perspective ala Martyn, Gaventa etc.; and 3) the social scientific analysis of Paul ala Meeks, Horrell etc.

Tom ignores almost entirely the huge rhetorical discussion and analysis of Paul in various forms whether in the form of historical rhetorical criticism ala Betz, Mitchell, Witherington etc. or the more innovative approach of V. Robbins and his disciples. Though Tom admits, and the subtitle indicates, that he is only dealing with some of the recent trends and trend setters, the failure to deal with Paul’s rhetoric and his rhetorical interpreters speaks volumes about whether he sees that whole approach as a major trend or rather a small tributary not leading to any large stream of discussion. I would completely disagree with this view, if that’s what his silence is meant to suggest.

He admits his indebtedness to the much older analyses of Albert Schweitzer and quotes him regularly and approvingly. This volume by Wright began life as a survey of contemporary trends which was to be part of the introduction to Paul and the Faithfulness of God, only it became too large in and of itself. So Tom sees this current book as ‘like a moon circling its parent volume, and hopefully shedding some pleasant light on it’ (to paraphrase p. xviii ). He simply apologizes for not treating recent German work on Paul, but rather focuses purely on the Anglephone discussion, as he calls it. He sees this volume as a small scale map of the current Anglephone discussion, not a detailed or exhaustive one.

From the outset, one deduces that Tom methodologically is taking what could be called a rather traditional approach to his analysis, as he says on p. 8 that all serious students of Paul must attend to theology, history, exegesis, and application. What he does not mean is the old history of religions approach to Paul’s thought, for which he has strong criticism. For example on pp. 22-23 he says…

“These agendas have produced, among other things, the set of history of-
religion categories which we mentioned earlier in relation to F. C. Baur
(‘Jewish Christian’, ‘gentile Christian’, ‘enthusiast’ and ‘early catholic’),
which are still regularly employed and invoked. In particular, there is the
obvious but devastating mistake of imagining that once you have discovered
where an idea has come from you have discovered where it’s going to. Just
as, in lexicography, the etymology of a word does not necessarily provide a
reliable guide to current usage, so it is with beliefs and ideas. In particular,
just because something (an idea, a symbol, a story) is demonstrably ‘Jewish’,
that does not mean it has no critique of Judaism. In fact, one of the main
characteristics of Judaism from at least the time of the eighth-century
prophets onwards was critique from within, something a normal ‘history-of religions’
analysis has always found hard, if not impossible, to allow for. Thus, just as Baur, Bultmann, Bousset and others eagerly produced ‘hellenistic’ contexts for Paul’s ideas because they knew he was opposed to ‘works of the (Jewish) law’,W. D. Davies produced a would-be ‘Jewish’ Paul,
Paul among Jews and Gentiles? These formed the backbone, for instance, of Dunn.
Misleading categories produce misleading analyses….In particular, such a move assumes that the way to find the appropriate‘application’ of Paul’s letters to today’s world is first to discover the ‘right’ sort of ‘religion’ and then to attempt to reproduce it. This assumption cuts both ways. Some have assumed that the main thing about Paul is that he discovered and propagated a new sort of ‘religion’; others, indeed, that he gave up something called ‘religion’ and had something new, perhaps a ‘revelation’, instead (an antithesis favoured by some early twentieth century
theologians, and now retrieved by some ‘apocalyptic’ interpreters).”

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