E. P. Sanders' Paul, the Law, and the Jewish People
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.
The purpose of blogging?
Stephen C. Carlson reflected on his co-blog Hypotyposeis about why not to blog too much about pre-publication ideas. I had given it some thought too, though I don’t have a book in the works or anything. This quote here articulates some things that I have been thinking even as I try to figure out what kind of reflection I want to do here at kata ton biblon:
Sometimes to do an idea justice it requires a fuller treatment than a blog can conveniently provide. If I like the idea enough to think about publication, why should I make a bad first impression with a feeble blog posting? Also, as they say, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and sometimes a blog is better suited for making the claim than laying out the evidence. On the other hand, blogging it first might be a better to go if I am exploring a topic, perhaps for the first time, or chasing leads that may or may not go anywhere. In the second case, there may be more evidence than actual analysis, but in the process of playing with sources on the blog sometimes a publishable idea may pop up.
I can resonate that blogging is not particularly well-suited for “laying out the evidence.” That is something that I felt as I was trying to write my women in ministry paper on my blog. It just seemed like too much information and too hard to split into separate posts. So for that one, I found it easier to make it into a more coherent paper first and then convert some of it into blog posts after the fact. It is a little bit different, as I’m not planning on publishing it.
Being a grad student, though, I feel like blogging is a fantastic avenue to throw my thoughts out there into the great void, “chasing leads that may or may not go anywhere.” Because grad school is all about chasing things and not knowing where you’ll end up.
Quotes promoting the New Perspective on Paul
I’d just like to throw these out there for an idea of how NPP fans promote the NPP. The first is from The Paul Page, which is maintained by Mark M. Mattison. The second is an Anabaptist reviewer of John Toews’ commentary on Romans. They both make some pretty bold claims:
What is this new perspective? At its core is the recognition that Judaism is not a religion of self-righteousness whereby humankind seeks to merit salvation before God. Paul’s argument with the Judaizers was not about Christian grace versus Jewish legalism. His argument was rather about the status of Gentiles in the church. Paul’s doctrine of justification, therefore, had far more to do with Jewish-Gentile issues than with questions of the individual’s status before God.
This new perspective on Paul promises to help us:
* Better understand Paul and the early church;
* Reconcile contemporary biblical scholarship with theology;
* Build common ground between Catholics and Protestants;
* Improve dialogue between Christians and Jews; and
* Flesh out a theological foundation for social justice.
~ Mark M. Mattison, The Paul Page
Toews embraces “the New Perspective on Paul” (NP), which might be unknown to some readers. In contrast to traditional Protestant interpretations, NP places Paul squarely within first-century Judaism. From this perspective, Paul thinks in continuity with Judaism, rather than opposing it; teaches salvation by grace and obedience to the law, rather than pitting grace against law; focuses on corporate, rather than individual, salvation; and is theocentric, rather than anthropocentric, concerned primarily with defending the righteousness (faithfulness) of God, rather than explaining how sinners can be saved.
~Jerry D. Truex, review of John Toews, Romans, Direction 24.2 (2005): 292-5.
Looking for Legalism: The New Perspective on Paul and the Early Church
I am taking two courses this Winter that have so far had some interesting parallels, especially in regard to legalism. My “Paul and the Law” class is taught by Don Hagner, along with some very capable doctoral students giving presentations. It is an introduction for me into the New Perspective debate on Paul (I will refer to the New Perspective as the NPP and the Old Perspective as the OPP–Not to be confused with: “You down with OPP? Yeah, you know me”). I’ve had a vague sort of concept of it, but now I’m starting to learn some of the basics. The NPP is trying to say that the OPP is colored by a “Lutheran” understanding of Paul. That is, the OPP is allegedly reading too much of a Reformation-like “justification by faith” emphasis into Paul. Therefore, the OPP (typically consisting of more conservative Protestants) is projecting their negative attitude towards the Roman Catholic Church (at least as it was in the 16th Century) into their understanding of Second Temple and Rabbinic Judaism.
The NPP authors, as I understand, consist of something of a not well-defined historical trajectory including W. D. Davies to Krister Stendahl to E. P. Sanders to N. T. Wright to James Dunn. This group would instead argue that the primary issue in the Pauline corpus, particularly Galatians and Romans, is a reaction against a “national righteousness” consciousness or simply a “national pride” that hindered them from accepting Gentiles into their fold. Paul’s arguments on “justification by faith,” therefore, should be understood as part of the Jewish-Gentile debate and not the central core of his theology (if that can even be found!).
The OPP seeks to prove that Judaism was legalistic in the time of the NT. That way we can say that Paul was reacting against that legalism and not just a closed-minded “national identity.” Both sides use rabbinic literature to make their case, but it is notoriously difficult to determine what from rabbinic literature (Mishnah, Talmuds, Midrashim, etc.) backdates into the first century. If the rabbinic documents do lean on the legalistic side, maybe Judaism was reacting against a perceived libertarianism in Christianity. It is hard to know.
If so, it would be similar to the reaction of the early church towards the Docetic and Gnostic threats in the second century. In my class on “Early Church History,” taught by James Bradley, we are learning that though elements of “grace” can be found in the Apostolic Fathers, we see a distinct move towards legalism. Bradley suggests that this is a reaction to the perceived libertarianism in Gnosticism. If the NT documents are a reaction against legalism, can the established, orthodox church really be considered 100% orthodox when it has gone too far towards legalism? Then again, one of the complications here is that the early church does not have an established NT canon. So it is somewhat anachronistic to judge the early church against the standards of the NT documents as we understand them today.
Isn’t ironic that if the NT does indeed emphasize grace over a “covenantal nomism” that the church itself was drawn towards legalism not too long into its beginnings? The Reformation “Lutherans” no doubt saw themselves as recovering the biblical vision of grace after a much longer period of legalistic leanings had taken place. To me, though, it seems so much more messy than an either-or dichotomy. Looking at Paul (let alone the entire NT canon), even Galatians itself, we can see a concern for both grace and ethics. I wonder if it could be both the OPP and the NPP. It seems rather presumptuous for us to proclaim that there was only one characteristic of Second Temple Judaism that a Christian Jew (or Jewish Christian, as Hagner would say) like Paul is reacting against, and that we know what it is for sure.
I know that the major concern for OPP people is that it leads to a dual path for salvation for Jews and for Christians. Hagner is adamant that there is only one way. I think that starting with that theological presumption taints our reading of the material. It only proves the point for me that OPP followers are reading the NT with Luther & Augustine colored glasses. I think theology should come after our exegesis of the texts.
It should be interesting for me to think through the issue from the perspective of Anabaptism after a close reading of the relevant texts. Anabaptism has some history with legalism and my own predisposition, I think, would be for the NPP. After a brief search for articles relating directly to an Anabaptist perspective on the NPP, not much turned up. I did discover that John Toews’ commentary on Romans shares the NPP and two articles that rely on the NPP from an Anabaptist perspective can be found here and here. But I have to try not to make prejudgments here. If I do end up on the side of the NPP, I don’t want to get there uncritically.
By the way, for more on the New Perspective, check out The Paul Page.
Women 2: Opening the Discussion (Gal 3:28)
[Continuing the earlier discussion . . . ]
One of the most powerful, axiom-like single verses in the New Testament, Gal 3:28 certainly commands our attention for the biblical conversation:
There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus.
In Galatians, Paul is of course most interested in the “Jew or Greek” pair from the statement, though the “slave or free” theme receives some attention as well. Paul asserts that “neither circumcision nor uncircumcision count for anything” in Christ Jesus, but rather what matters is “faith working through love” (5:6) and “a new creation” (6:15). “You are no longer slaves,” he writes, “but a child” and an “heir, through God” (4:7). Again, “we are children, not of the slave but of the free woman” (4:31). This letter is about being truly free and not weighed down by “the curse of the law” (3:13).
But what of “male and female” (ἄρσεν καὶ θῆλυ)? Neither word occurs at any other point in the epistle. We can certainly see how there could be an issue of “freedom” in the case of men and women, but without any other mention of male-female relations, it seems oddly out of place. Paul is clearly not making a detailed argument here specifically for the equality of men and women, but a powerful statement nonetheless. There are only two other uses of this phrase in the NT (Matt 19:4; Mk 10:6), both direct references to the creation account. In the Greek version of the book of Genesis (from the Septuagint, also known as LXX), most significantly in the creation account, the same pair occurs 10 times (its only use in the LXX). God creates humanity in the image of God, “male and female” (ἄρσεν καὶ θῆλυ) God creates them (1:27; cf. 5:2). That Paul explicitly uses “and” (καὶ) for this pair in Gal 3:28, diverging from his use of “or” (οὐδὲ) in the other two, suggests that he is calling the reader’s memory to the creation account of Genesis.
But why? Clearly Paul does not desire to cancel out the “image of God” from humanity. What else could explain his use here? Some complementarians argue that since Paul is here referring to a creation ordinance, it does not have the same implications as the first two pairs. The first two relate to racial, ethnic, and social divisions that were not a part of God’s good creation and therefore can be challenged in the present social reality. “Male and female,” on the other hand, according to the traditionalists, only refers to a removal of distinction between the two in the realm of salvation. Of course, there is no distinction between men and women in salvation, they say, but this does not have social implications (cf. Scholer, 125). This argument stems from the traditionalist reading of Genesis 1-2 in which social distinctions between men and women are inherent in God’s creation itself (i.e., they are God’s intention).
Another traditionalist emphasis on this verse is highlighting its lack of functional meaning. There is no reference to any specific office of ministry in the context of Galatians. Furthermore, the traditionalists tend to count texts irrelevant to this discussion when they do not explicitly affirm a woman’s role in the office of either ἐπίσκοπος (overseer/bishop) or πρεσβύτερος (presbyter/elder). In this way, when the egalitarians point to principles found within texts such as Gal 3:28, the complementarians dismiss them from the “women in ministry” discussion since they do not have specific mention of predetermined ministerial positions (cf. Scholer, 124-5).
The problem with this last argument, however, is that the leadership offices of the church were far different in New Testament times than they are today. When we narrow our definitions by titles, we risk anachronistically reading our present day understandings of those titles into the biblical text. Instead, we should look to the themes and principles found in these biblical passages, while not neglecting their context, and apply them to our own contemporary situation.
The first argument (the appeal to creation-mandated social distinctions) must be addressed with an assessment of the opening chapters of Genesis themselves. That I will leave to my next post in this series.
Searchable Fathers
So it has been a while since I’ve hit the blog. I have to apologize to those who were awaiting my intended projects, particularly the one on women in ministry, which I still intend to do. But I just needed a mental break. Mostly I just focused on studying Greek. That and relaxing.
So I’m going to start back up here with one simple, but exciting observation. For those interested in NT studies and early church history, I have just noticed that Amazon has added the “Search Inside” feature for Ehrman’s edition of the Apostolic Fathers in the Loeb Classical Library. So we can search through both volumes one and two for Ehrman’s translation, not to mention view every page in the book, three pages at a time (and you can, of course, get around that by searching for the next page you’d like to read and go the next three pages, etc. . . . the things you learn as a graduate student). I doubt that the search can handle searching through the Greek, but at least its something! For example, if we search for “baptism” in the first volume, we find nine references, including this one from Second Clement: “As for those who do not keep the seal of their baptism, he says: ‘Their worm will not die nor their fire be extinguished; and they will be a spectacle for all to see.’” And Ehrman puts in a following footnote: “Isa 66:24; cf. Mark 9:44, 46, 48.” It’s always fun to find quotes from the Apostolic Fathers that mention worms. As a matter of fact, it says there are three references to worms in volume one of the Fathers.
Just a month ago, they didn’t even have an image of the cover (which I know because it was on my Christmas wish list). More interesting observations are on their way. I am sure you’ll wait with bated breath.
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Elsewhere . . .- Blog titles beginning with "A" to "Z" on your reader Mark Goodacre
- Of making many books there is no end Chris Brady
- Free Online: The Liddell-Scott Jones Lexicon S and C
- Does Higher Criticism Attempt to “Destroy the Bible”? II agathos
- Steven J. Friesen and the Identity of Satan’s Throne in Pergamum alan
- Does Higher Criticism Attempt to “Destroy the Bible”? agathos
- Bloomsbury buys Continuum Mark Goodacre
- Imperial America Peter J. Leithart
- C.F.D. Moule on the Birth of the New Testament d. miller
- Responding to Kostenberger (with comparisons to Marshall) Jeremiah
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