The so-called "New Perspective on Paul," given its name by the late James D. G. Dunn in a famous 1983 Rylands lecture at Manchester, was precipitated by E. P. Sanders's 1977 tome, Paul and Palestinian Judaism,* which forced New Testament scholars to (finally) take the literature and, hence, the nature of Second Temple Judaism seriously as a religion which, though "nomistic" in its concern for keeping the Torah, had a covenantal foundation in which law-keeping was the response to God's gracious initiative rather than a "legalistic" striving to "earn" a righteous status before God. The New Perspective, subsequently developed in different ways by scholars such as the aforementioned Dunn and N. T. Wright, also forced scholars to come to grips with the grain of truth in the old argument of William Wrede, articulated in his small 1904 work, Paulus, that "justification by faith" was, for Paul the Apostle, a Kampfeslehre ("polemical doctrine") developed in the context of his Gentile mission and intended to free these converts from the burden of Jewish custom.**
By thus switching the focus from "grace versus legalism" to salvation-history and the inclusion of the Gentiles in the people of God, the New Perspective implicitly took aim at what was thereby considered the "old" perspective, namely, the view of Paul developed by Martin Luther and John Calvin in the 16th century and subsequently championed, not only by conservative, confessionalist Protestants in the Lutheran and Reformed traditions, but also by the regnant stream of 20th century New Testament scholarship, dominated by Rudolf Bultmann and his successors in German academia, most notably the great Ernst Käsemann.*** Controversy subsequently raged in the academy throughout the decade of the 1990's and then, finally catching up as it were, in both Evangelical and Confessionalist Protestant circles in the decade of the 2000's, culminating in the debate between Wright and Southern Baptist Seminary Professor Tom Schreiner at the 2010 ETS annual conference in Atlanta. We now live in a "post-New Perspective" world in which both "old" and "new" perspectives compete with still other perspectives, not least the so-called "apocalyptic" school associated with such scholars as Douglas Campbell and Martinus de Boer.**** Nevertheless, the issues raised by the New Perspective, and indeed many conclusions associated with its leading scholars, remain influential.
My own connection with this discussion came in the form of my 1996 PhD dissertation on Paul's Letter to the Galatians,***** in which I argued that the so-called "old" and "new" perspectives were not mutually exclusive―indeed, that they were both correct, though at different levels: the New Perspective at the level of historical-critical exegesis, the Old Perspective at the level of theological contextualization, Lutheran and Reformed theological interpretations being necessary corollaries of what Paul wrote in his occasional responses to the situations in Galatia and Rome.
Michael Bird entered the fray during the height of the controversy over the New Perspective in Evangelical and Reformed circles with his 2007 work, The Saving Righteousness of God.****** When I first read the book the following year, I was delighted. Not only did he write with the express purpose of commending Wright's work to Reformed Christians; he also confirmed just about everything I had argued a decade before in my work at Dallas. In subsequent years Bird has been uncommonly prolific, writing both in the fields of New Testament (mostly in the Synoptic Gospels) and in exegetically-based Systematic Theology.******* Most recently he has collaborated with Wright in producing an enormously helpful, massive-yet-accessible, New Testament Introduction entitled The New Testament in Its World.********
It was while in Dallas promoting this work that Bird met with my old friend, Darrell Bock, and recorded this podcast in which they discussed the controversy behind the New Perspective and laid out the issues as clearly as can be done. The whole podcast is informative and worth watching. But, in closing, I would like to highlight a couple of sections especially worth one's attention:
(At 32:45) Bird: "Often I'm confronted with some rather zealous young seminary students who have been taught that the New Perspective is completely awful. And I'm usually able to disarm them by asking three simple questions. And the first question I ask them―you know that Paul says in Romans that "we believe a person is justified by faith apart from works of the Law." … I say, "What comes next? What's the opposite of justification by faith apart from works of the Law?" And they kind of think, uh, "We're justified by works or we're saved by our righteous deeds." The answer students usually give is personal, individual soteriology, how I get saved. Paul's answer is … "Or is God the God of the Jews only?" So the answer there is at least partly dealing with the issue that God's grace is limited to one particular people. So the issue is not just legalism. The issue is this national status of Israel and that God's grace is not restricted to them. The second text I love talking students through and that I take them to―I ask, "Was Christ cursed on the cross for us?" I say, "Why was Christ cursed on the cross?" We could say, "So we could be saved, that we could go to heaven." That's all great and true. But what does Paul say? Paul says the purpose of Christ's being cursed on the cross was so we could be redeemed and that the blessing of Abraham would come to the Gentiles … Paul's answer is redemptive-historical. And it's about bringing Gentiles into this Jewish family of faith, So for me that's another dimension I think we need to bring in and affirm in the New Perspective, that it is bringing in the discussion of ethnicity, the corporate element, the redemptive-historical element, that is usually missing.
(At 35:08) Bock: The gospel was always designed, even from the point of Genesis 12, that Abraham and his seed would be blessed for the redemption of the world. When we actually ask why Genesis 12 is where it is―It's come after eleven chapters of devolution as a result of sin, that shows mankind has an immense need that only God can fix. And Abraham is the solution, and the blessing of the world through the seed of Abraham is the solution that Genesis 12 deposits and posits as the solution coming down the road.
Bird: And that's what's being fulfilled in Paul's doctrine of justification by faith. This is the doctrine whereby God creates a new people with a new status and a new covenant as a foretaste of the new age. And that's what justification is when viewed as a comprehensive category; and it is … Paul's rationale to why we should have Jews and Gentiles, Greeks and barbarians, worship together. This is the reason no one is asked to sit at the back of the church bus, because we're all one in Christ Jesus. Because we're all in Christ, we all share the Spirit. And this transcends the various cultural, religious, and ethnic divides that have usually been what's defined who's in and who's out.
*E. P. Sanders, Paul and Palestinian Judaism: A Comparison Patterns of Religion (Philadelphia; Fortress, 1977).
**Cf. Wrede, Paul, trans. Edward Lumis (Boston: American Unitarian Association, 1908) 123, 127.
*** "The apostle's real adversary is the devout Jew, not only the mirror-image of his own past―though that, too―but as the reality of the religious man. The precise problem of the Jew was that he misunderstood the Law "as a summons to human achievement and therefore as a means to a righteousness of one's own." Ernst Käsemann, "Paul and Israel," in New Testament Questions of Today, trans. W. J. Montague (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1969) 184.
****Cf. N. T. Wright, Paul and His Recent Interpreters (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2015). For his treatment of the "Apocalyptic Paul" in its various forms, cf. 135-220.
*****James R McGahey, "'No One Is Justified by Works of the Law' (Galatians 2:16a): The Nature and Rationale of Paul's Polemic Against 'Works of the Law' in the Epistle to the Galatians," PhD diss, Dallas Theological Seminary, 1996.
******Michael F. Bird, The Saving Righteousness of God: Studies on Paul, Justification and the New Perspective (Milton Keynes: Paternoster, 2007).
*******Cf. esp. Bird, Evangelical Theology: A Biblical and Systematic Introduction, 2nd ed. (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2020).
********N. T. Wright and Michael F. Bird, The New Testament in Its World: An Introduction to the History, Literature, and Theology of the First Christians (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2019).
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