I have to read Sanders’ book by Wednesday and I’m struggling with grasping his arguments. I haven’t found Sanders’ writing to be the easiest to read (particularly for someone not familiar with all the historical scholarly arguments and counter-arguments about Paul), so I’m going to try to distill some of the core of his book here. Sanders thinks that Paul’s mission in his letters revolves around what it means to “get in and stay in” the Christian community. As such, his exclamations about the law are not theoretical postulations in some kind of existential vacuum, but “spring from and serve other convictions” (143). Those “other convictions,” those which Sanders believes are “central and identifiable,” can be seen as Paul’s surviving letters assume and argue:
[T]hat God had sent Jesus Christ to provide for the salvation of all; that salvation is thus available for all, whether Jew or Greek, on the same basis (‘faith in Christ,’ ‘dying with Christ’); that the Lord would soon return; that he, Paul, was called by God to be the apostle to the Gentiles; and that Christians should live in accordance with the will of God. (5)
Furthermore, Sanders continues, the “central characteristic of [Paul’s] thought” is the “christological interpretation of the triumph of God” (5). These central pieces of Paul’s “thought” must be distinguished from the “getting in and staying in” framework that motivates much of what he has written (or at least, what has survived of his writing). The terminology he uses for the transfer from “not being saved” to “being saved” is not necessarily part of his central “convictions,” but rather is the means by which he makes his arguments for diverse cicrcumstances.
What is Paul attacking when we read negative statements about the law in his letters? Paul is opposing the “standard Jewish view that accepting and living by the law is a sign and condition of favored status” (46). Instead, Paul believes that one becomes “righteous” through Christ’s death when one has faith in Christ.
What is wrong with the law, and thus with Judaism, is that it does not provide for God’s ultimate purpose, that of saving the entire world through faith in Christ, and without the privilege accorded to Jews through the promises, the covenants, and the law. (47)
And so, after an exegetical exploration, Sanders concludes that we can at least see a “limited rejection of the law” (48). The limitation to Paul’s attack on the law, however, is only when it is viewed as the means through which one enters the saved community, because that transfer for Paul can only be faith in Christ. In Sanders’ estimation, following certain regulations within the law itself is a matter of indifference (“neither circumcision nor uncircumcision counts for anything” [Gal 5:6; cf. 6:15; 1 Cor 7:19], etc.).
Paul nevertheless viewed the law as given by God, but had to reconcile this with his christological and soteriological conviction that “salvation is by faith in Christ for all” (144). Sanders argues that this conundrum “plagued him and led to some of the most difficult and tortured passages in the surviving correspondence” (143). He had to speak of the failure of the law to achieve salvation, but not attribute this failure to God who gave the law. Sanders states that Paul did not come to a “true, final, and unalterable view” to resolve this dilemma (145), as far as we can tell.
How do we reconcile the bad statements about the law with the good? Paul “makes no distinction between the law which does not righteous and to which Christians have died and the law which those in the Spirit fulfill” (145). Sanders’ “solution” to this problem is that they come out of different central convictions listed above: “One has to do with how people enter the body of those who will be saved, one with how they behave once in” (145).
If all this seems confusing, like there is no systematic glue holding together Paul’s thought on the law, it is because “there is no single unity which adequately accounts for every statement about the law” (147). And yet, Sanders does not want to say that Paul is just utterly inconsistent, but rather that, as has been pointed out, “Paul held a limited number of basic convictions which, when applied to different problems, led him to say different things about the law” (147). So Sanders says that Paul is “coherent,” but not “systematic” when it comes to his writings about the law.
I’m still working on the book, so I think I’ll stop there for now.
