New perspective

Scot McKnight writes about “The Difference the New Perspective Makes.”

The “New Perspective” here is the new perspective on Paul — the first-century Christian apostle and writer of much of the New Testament. The idea here, basically, is that our understanding of Paul was based on our understanding of first-century Judaism — and that understanding of first-century Judaism was wrong.

It was Very Wrong, actually. We’d been misunderstanding first-century Judaism — and therefore misreading Paul — for a whole bunch of reasons. The first century, after all, was a very long time ago and we’ve learned a lot more about the people and the religion of that time than we knew a generation ago. Recent generations of Christian scholars have also gotten a lot better at this thing called actually listening to Jews, and that has also remarkably improved our understanding of Judaism, past and present.

A big part of our problem, though, was that back during the Reformation, the Reformers were reacting to a calcified and in many ways corrupt European church and they wound up projecting a lot of that reaction back onto Paul. He became Paul the Reformer who was converted from his former life as Saul the medieval Catholic bishop, and first-century Judaism was recast as the embodiment of late-medieval Catholicism. They imagined that first-century Judaism was all about works righteousness instead of salvation by grace and so Paul was read as someone writing about a theological clash that coincidentally mirrored their own.

That’s the “old perspective,” and it turns out to have been wrong. The implications of that wrongness are fairly huge. Tectonic. And we’re just starting to sort them out.

That’s why I think of “the difference the New Perspective makes” as, roughly, this:

The old perspective was the foundation on which Reformed theology rested. Take away that foundation and it becomes unsettled. It becomes like poor Wile E. Coyote in that pregnant second in which he suddenly realizes there’s nothing holding him up anymore.

Scot McKnight excerpts a bit from an essay in a new collection on Ethical and Missional Implications of the New Perspective. The essay discusses the book of Ephesians, McKnight notes, “in a Jewish context in which Judaism is not understood as works righteousness over against which Christianity teaches election by grace.” That’s the new perspective. And when you put it as bluntly as McKnight does there, a lot of Christians will make the same face that poor Wile E. is making in the picture above.

We took a bit of a wrong turn and now we have to go back and take a different path. Problem is that it took us almost 500 years to notice that, so correcting our course may take awhile.