Paul, Judaism, and Justification: A Brief Response to Dan Wallace, Part 2

In a post last week I introduced the issue of the Apostle Paul's teaching on "justification" vis-à-vis the nature of the Second Temple Judaism against which it was (partially) polemically directed. The catalyst was a post in the blog of my friend Dan Wallace of Dallas Theological Seminary entitled "Paul and Justification by Faith: The Real Jewish Evidence." In his post Wallace cites the work of Preston Sprinkle (Ph.D., Aberdeen), a Biblical Studies Professor at Eternity Bible College in Simi Valley, California, who argues that Ed Sanders's famous revisionist view of Judaism ("covenantal nomism") presents a too-rosy picture of the "pattern of religion" in contrast to which the Apostle presented his gospel message. Wallace writes:

Entitled, “Way Outside the Box: Why Paul’s Doctrine of Justification Was Risky, Offensive, and Unparalleled in Early Judaism,” Sprinkle argued, like his title suggests, that “Paul’s assertion that ‘God justifies the wicked’ would have been seen as risky, offensive, and is actually unparalleled in the world of early Judaism—yes, even among the Dead Sea Scrolls.” What a bold statement! He backs it up with some impressive evidence, too. ...

Among his many points, Sprinkle notes that in the OT God did not justify wicked people, citing, inter alia, Exod 23.7 and Isa 5.23. In my class on the exegesis of Romans, which I have taught at Dallas Seminary for the past seven years, I have argued that these two texts are key to Paul’s thinking and that the Jews of his day would have realized this. Exodus 23.7 clearly involves legal language. It is this language which lies behind Paul’s points in Rom 3.23–24 and 4.4–5. ...

Sprinkle does not develop the points of contact between these two OT passages and Romans, but he does bring in other significant texts from Second Temple Judaism to show that the OT view has continuity into the time of Paul. In particular, he interacts with the Dead Sea Scrolls. Among the texts he discusses are CD 1.18–21; 4.6–7 (the Damascus Document), 4QMMT 26–32 (the Halakhic Letter), and 1QS 10–11 (Community Rule). It is this latter passage that is sometimes seen as in line with Paul’s view of justification. Sprinkle gives a penetrating analysis of the text, noting major differences that have been overlooked. In particular, Paul focuses on initial justification while 1QS focuses on final justification. It is a point not to be missed. Sprinkle began the section on 1QS by asking, “does Qumran anywhere affirm that God’s initial declaration of righteousness is unilateral—based on no measure of human goodness, obedience, or godly potential?” He answers with a resounding no.

In the conclusion to Sprinkle’s paper he states plainly: “The assertion that ‘Paul’s doctrine has exactly the same shape as that of MMT’ or other documents from Qumran, as N.T. Wright thinks, simply cannot be sustained.”

It will be interesting to see the responses to Sprinkle’s forthcoming book. The debate will surely continue for some time. Meanwhile, N. T. Wright is busy producing yet another work on Paul’s understanding of justification (Paul and the Faithfulness of God). Whether evangelicals need to jettison the old perspective on Paul in toto, as if the Reformation got it all wrong as Wright seems to affirm, is still an open question for many. But Sprinkle’s treatment of the Jewish materials will surely have to be wrestled with. Perhaps Luther and the Reformers got it right after all.

The issues involved in the discussion of the so-called "New Perspective on Paul" (the NPP) are exceedingly complex. I myself wrote my own doctoral dissertation on Paul's theology of justification in Galatians back in 1995 and, if anything, the heat of the debate has only escalated in the intervening years. Of one thing I am sure: scholars in the confessional Lutheran and Reformed traditions will never accept what Sanders said, and thus will never come to terms with the NPP. They simply have too much emotional capital invested in the traditional Protestant position to do so. Indeed, since such scholars are both capable and honorable, it is only this worldview-defining capital that could possibly explain their seemingly congenital inability to understand what scholars like N. T. Wright actually teach, and their consequent misrepresentation of these scholars' positions—which I have learned by bitter personal experience. For a long time I have planned to write a book on the issue, following the suggestion of my old external examiner, Steve Spencer. For now, however, I would like to point out a couple matters where I believe Sprinkle's work, not to mention that of other advocates of the "Old Perspective on Paul" (the OPP), needs nuancing and/or contextual modification.

First, as I tried to argue two decades ago, the concerns of the NPP are not incompatible with those of the OPP. Reformed writers from Carl Trueman to Guy Waters have acted as if proponents of the NPP repudiate the classic Protestant position on justification. This is simply preposterous, as Jimmy Dunn showed in a devastating response to Trueman's criticism. More recently, N. T. Wright has argued (most prominently in his recent book on Justification) from both Romans 3-4 and Ephesians 2 that the concerns of both the NPP and the OPP coalesce; indeed, the two actually depend on each other for their full force. As Wright puts it:

The problem of Genesis 11 (the fracturing of humanity) is the full outworking of the problem of Genesis 3 (sin), and the promise to Abraham is the answer to both together. Perspectives new and old sit comfortably side by side here, a pair of theological Siamese twins sharing a single heart (Justification, 97-98).

Wright and Dunn certainly do argue that "the Reformation got it ... wrong," as Wallace puts it. But their mistake was not in disputing medieval Catholicism's semi-Pelagian merit theology, nor even in using Paul's letters to the Galatians and the Romans as a weapon in their arsenal against it. As Wright says over and over again, Paul would certainly have agreed with Luther and Calvin that people cannot earn their salvation through the performance of meritorious works. But—and this is the main point—such a "Pelagian" view was not the position of Paul's opponents (real or hypothetical) in either Galatians or Romans.

This means, secondly, that the Reformers and their theological heirs have erred in confusing a legitimate application or contextualization of Paul's teaching with its historical meaning. This is most apparent in what is quite possibly the Apostle's earliest extant letter, Galatians. It is here that his famous antithesis between "justification by faith in Christ/the faithfulness of Christ" and "justification by works of the law" first appears. And he uses this contrast in opposition to Jewish-Christian "agitators" who insisted that Paul's Gentile converts must undergo circumcision so as to legitimize their standing as Abraham's children. Significantly, the fundamental contrast is articulated in what ostensibly was Paul's own response to the Apostle Peter's spineless withdrawal from table fellowship with uncircumcised Gentile Christians in Antioch. These "works" which implicitly were needed for "justification" were not meritorious bits of moral striving that putatively could be used to establish one's position before God. On the contrary, these "works of the law" were actions prescribed in the Torah that were designed, first and foremost, to distinguish the Jewish people from the Gentiles and mark them as God's covenant people. And this is precisely the way they were used by Paul's actual opponents in Galatia. In response to these "troublemakers," Paul provides a finely detailed scriptural argument in Galatians 3 in which he attempts to show why Gentile converts need not adopt such "works of the Torah." Later, Galatians 5:1-6, he goes further and argues that such converts must not do so. Such a declension, implying as it would that Christ's apocalyptic achievement on the cross was not sufficient in itself to justify, would be a fatal "fall" from grace and sever the person from the lifeline that is Christ himself. It goes without saying that Paul's opponents didn't draw these implications. But he did, and both Luther and Calvin were correct when they contextualized this message to apply it to the Christian legalists of their time. But they erred in misunderstanding the historical focus of the apostle's argument. Paul's teaching in Galatians leads to another, related observation.

Third, advocates of the OPP err in understanding Paul's teaching about justification in terms of the ordo salutis rather than the historia salutis. In other words, by understanding justification to be primarily an element of the sequential application of Christ's redemption to the individual sinner, they have both decontextualized it and transformed it into a timeless (or, better, trans-temporal) theological principle. Abraham, the centerpiece of Paul's argument in both Galatians 3 and Romans 4, has been understood in this tradition to be an example drawn from the Old Testament to prove that the Jews, who believed in "justification by works of the law," were mistaken. Justification, I have often heard it said, has always been by faith. Just as we are justified by faith in Christ, so Old Testament saints were justified by anticipating the coming Messiah and trusting in the coming sacrifice for sins he would offer. The facts that the Old Testament nowhere speaks to the issue of an individual's entrance into a state of being "saved," and that no such widespread anticipation of a messianic sin-bearer can be historically verified, don't deter such theologians. (As an aside, one of the great virtues of my father as a biblical interpreter was his recognition, based not least on the Gospels' portrait of the disciples, that such a picture of the hope of Old Testament saints is pure nonsense). But they should.

However, what close exegesis of both Galatians and Romans demonstrates is that Paul clearly presents his doctrine of justification by faith as the entail of the eschatological fulfillment of God's covenant with Abraham. This is especially transparent in Galatians 3:8: "And the Scripture, foreseeing that God would justify the Gentiles by faith, preached the gospel beforehand to Abraham, saying, 'In you shall all the nations be blessed'." This was not a timeless principle valid for the previous dispensation in which God's covenant people were defined by their physical descent from Abraham and marked out by their obedience to the Torah, not least by the physical sign of a circumcised foreskin. Indeed, this becomes clear in Galatians 3:10-14, where justification, as "the blessing of Abraham," is extended to the Gentiles by virtue of Christ's having redeemed Jewish believers ("us") by his vicarious bearing of the covenant curse on their behalf on the cross.

The same is true in Romans. This greatest of Pauline letters is usually understood, in keeping with Luther's quest to find a "gracious God," to articulate a gospel of individual salvation: both Gentiles (1:18-32) and Jews (2:1-3:9) are sinners who deserve God's wrathful condemnation and are incapable of "earning" salvation by their "works"; Christ died as a substitute in judgment for all, and hence all who exercise faith in Christ are "justified," declared to be "righteous" in God's cosmic law court. Now, there is truth in this analysis. But there are more than a few clues that Paul's main argument lies elsewhere: Paul's definition of his gospel message as pertaining to Christ's resurrection (1:4), his emphasis on being commissioned as the Apostle to the Gentiles (1:5-6), his emphasis—often thought by advocates of the OPP to be a digression—on God's faithfulness despite Israel's unfaithfulness (3:1-8), his initial reference to "justification" as the entail of the eschatological (note the temporal "but now" [nyni de] in 3:21) manifestation of God's saving covenant faithfulness ("the righteousness of God") in Christ's death (3:21-26), and especially his explicit statement that "justification by works of the law" would imply a limitation of justification to Jews (note the "or" [ē] introducing 3:29). Indeed, as Richard Hays has argued, "The driving question in Romans is not, 'How can I find a gracious God?' but 'How can we trust in this allegedly gracious God if he abandons his promises to Israel?'" (Echoes of Scripture in the Letters of Paul, 53). On such a reading, not only do the enigmatic chapters 9-11 come into their own, but the true nature of Paul's critique of Judaism is clarified. Their "boast"—the boast that is excluded by the "law of faith" (3:27), i.e., the Torah understood through the narratival hermeneutical grid laid bare in the apostle's recounting of the Abraham story in chapter 4—was not the crass boast of the moralist, but the boast of a people who had been given the Torah so they could be a light to the lawless Gentiles (2:17-20). But this boast was invalidated, not just in terms of individual Jews shown to be sinners in need of salvation, but by national unfaithfulness which had resulted in their experience of the covenantal curse of exile, as Paul's oft-misunderstood quotation of Isaiah 52:5 in Romans 2:24 clearly indicates.

In Paul's view, the Jews' mistake was in imagining that they could still relate to God by keeping the Torah, and that doing so would hasten the fulfillment of God's promise to the nation in Deuteronomy 30:1-3, 6:

When all these blessings and curses I have set before you come on you and you take them to heart wherever the Lord your God disperses you among the nations, and when you and your children return to the Lord your God and obey him with all your heart and with all your soul according to everything I command you today, then the Lord your God will restore your fortunes and have compassion on you and gather you again from all the nations where he scattered you ... The Lord your God will circumcise your hearts and the hearts of your descendants, so that you may love him with all your heart and with all your soul, and live.

Paul, however, believed that the promised circumcision of the heart had already occurred, and that Gentiles as well as Jews were now the recipients of it as beneficiaries of the already-inaugurated new covenant prophesied by Jeremiah (Rom 2:25-29). And thus God's promise to Abraham of a single, world-wide, sin-forgiven  family had come to fruition through Christ's death and resurrection—a family whose defining characteristic is not circumcision and Torah observance, but the very same faith Abraham demonstrated when he believed God's promise and "it was reckoned to him as righteousness" (Rom 4). The Jews' pride in being Abraham's children "according to the flesh" (Rom 4:1) is thus shown to be retardataire in view of God's faithfulness to his covenant promises to Abraham. What now matters is being children of the promise, the covenant people through whom God was centripetally reversing the centrifugal movement precipitated by the apostasy of Babel narrated in Genesis 11.

One cannot emphasize enough how scandalous this message was in Paul's day, and indeed still is to the Jewish people. According to Paul, God had fulfilled the promise of Deuteronomy 30, and with it the Abrahamic Covenant as well. Yet he had done so while the vast majority of Jewish people remained in unbelief, and not as a result of the people's repentance and obedience to the Torah which Deuteronomy said would precipitate it. This fact in itself should give pause to those who too quickly want to charge the Jews of Paul's day with "legalism." And it warrants our asking on what basis the Apostle made his audacious claim. These considerations lead us to a fourth point.

Fourth, inaugurated eschatology explains Paul's focus on "initial" justification instead of the standard Jewish concern with "final justification." Although it is always precarious to make sweeping generalizations about Jewish beliefs in the Second Temple period, one thing is certain: many, if not most, Jews of the period were eagerly anticipating God's intervention to bring about the promised eschatological kingdom, at which time the faithful people of God would be vindicated and the saints who had died would be raised from the dead to experience covenant fulfillment on the earth. This, not the individual hope for "going to heaven," is the context in which we must understand the Jewish belief in "justification by works of the law." In the lawcourt metaphor, God as the Judge "justifies" or "vindicates" the faithful. He pronounces in their favor or declares them to be in the right. And the criterion of this faithfulness was, of course, obedience to the covenant stipulations laid down in the Law—even Deuteronomy 30 clearly makes such obedience the necessary evidence of the "return" to Yahweh that would come before the promised final return from exile.

Sprinkle is one of a number of scholars who has argued that Sanders's portrayal of Second Temple Judaism is far too sanguine. And in this judgment he is no doubt correct. Jewish "nomism" (religion based on keeping the law) was not as monolithic as Sanders had supposed. Indeed, despite my own sympathies with Sanders's  work, years ago I argued that in key respects "legalism" was not an entirely inappropriate charge to bring against various segments of Second Temple Judaism (cf. my "No One Is Justified by Works of the Law," 326-27 n.11). Nevertheless, in large measure I would still argue that his primary thesis still stands for large swaths of Jewish belief. In particular, the context in which we must understand Jewish law-keeping—even when such observance is considered instrumental in attaining vindication at the final judgment (for example, the 1st century apocalyptic tract known as 4 Ezra)—is that of the covenant God made with Israel at Sinai and later in Moab before the people entered the promised land. It was keeping the law, of course, that demonstrated their commitment to Yahweh and faithfulness to their covenant responsibilities. Disobedience to Torah led to covenant curse and exile. Obedience would be the means by which God would renew the covenant and hasten the coming of the eschaton.

But Paul, as we have seen, will have none of it. In his view, "works of the law" cannot justify, both because such works would explicitly exclude Gentiles (3:29) and because the law can only reveal the sin of its subjects when they invariably break its rules (3:19-20). Justification by works of the law, then, not only excludes Gentiles; it excludes Jews as well. Instead, God is one who "justifies the ungodly" (4:5), a clear polemic against those Jews who were tempted to "explain" God's choice of Abraham either by some virtue found in the patriarchs or Israel's foreseen obedience to the Torah. It is also a deliberately scandalous assertion on Paul's part. The Torah itself forbids a judge to "justify the wicked" (Exod 23:7), and Sprinkle is correct to note that no Jew would have followed Paul in his contention. The reason for this is a simple one. The Jews consistently understood "justification" or "vindication" as a verdict pronounced at the last judgment.

Paul, however, characteristically brings this eschatological verdict forward into the present, and ties it to faith and to, as Luther rightly emphasized, to faith alone. Not only does this apply to Gentiles, but to Jews as well, who must exercise faith in Christ to be considered justified, sin-forgiven members of God's covenant people (Gal 2:15-16; Rom 3:22-23, 30) [As another aside, this fact speaks deafeningly against the views of such forebears of the NPP as William Wrede and Krister Stendahl, who considered "justification by faith" to be merely a theological expedient designed to place Gentiles on equal footing with Jews in the people of God.]

What accounts for Paul's innovation? In a word, the resurrection of Christ.  As Seyoon Kim argued three decades ago in a magisterial Manchester thesis, the Apostle's Damascus Road encounter with the risen Lord not only turned his life upside down, but also had a definitive, generative effect on his interpretation of Israel's scriptures and the course of salvation history. The resurrection of Christ, to Paul, was his installment as universal Lord in fulfillment of the Davidic promise of Psalm 2:7 (Rom 1:4). Believers in Christ, both Jews and Gentiles, are already accounted "righteous" because he "was delivered up for our trespasses and raised for our justification" (Rom 4:25). As Davidic Messiah and promised seed of Abraham, Jesus of Nazareth acted as a representative figure (nowhere made more explicit than in the marvelously profound Rom 5:12-21, where his achievement on the cross is set in contrast to the devastating sin of the first Adam). In his resurrection, God not only inaugurated the hoped for "age to come," bringing its promised blessings to bear already in the midst of the present age. The resurrection also marked God's faithfulness to his promises to Israel. Jesus, as the true Israelite, is now the one around whom the true people of God, the eschatological people of God promised to Abraham, drawn from "many nations," would be drawn. Faith in the crucified and resurrected Christ unites the believer with him. They are thereby reckoned to have died with him, and hence receive the benefits accruing from it. Likewise, they are reckoned to have been raised with him, and thereby share in the vindicating verdict ("justification") the resurrection signified.

Sprinkle is correct that this theological structure is a theological novum not shared by Paul's Jewish contemporaries. They indeed had no corresponding notion of an anticipatory, definitive present justification, let alone one open to Gentiles and mediated through faith alone. But this does not mean that their problem was an explicitly "legalistic" desire to merit justification through law-keeping. What Paul did was to categorically deny the soteriological significance of the Mosaic covenant in view of its eschatological supercession by the fulfillment of the Abrahamic, Davidic, and New Covenants. As the Apostle argued clearly in Galatians 3, the Torah, understood as the Mosaic covenant charter, had run its course and served its (negative) preparatory purpose, only to be made redundant by the Christ event. Henceforth, as Paul saw it, any attempt to relate to God on its basis was futile, misguided, and destined to bring upon the "worker" the "wrath" the Torah inevitably brings on the head of the law-breaker (e.g., Gal 3:10; Rom 4:15). In other words, Paul's critique of his Jewish contemporaries was rooted in eschatology.

Indeed, the Apostle retained an entirely Jewish belief in a final judgment in which the vindicating/acquitting verdict is issued in accordance with works (Rom 2:6-16). The extent to which this teaching is incomprehensible, if not offensive, to many proponents of the OPP is evident in the still-common belief that Paul's argument in these verses is hypothetical. Paul, such scholars argue, presents a general principle that he later claims is never realized in practice (Rom 3:9-20). Such an interpretation, however, is born less of exegesis than it is of theological expedience. Later in Romans 2, the Apostle clearly writes of such people when he speaks of those whose obedience demonstrates a circumcised heart and "reckons" them to be "circumcised," even if their foreskin remained intact. For Paul, the present verdict, pronounced on the basis of faith in Christ, is definitive, and will certainly be confirmed at the last assize when the lives of the presently justified are examined (cf. Rom 8:29-30, where all the presently "justified" are guaranteed to be ultimately "glorified"). The missing element here, of course, is the Holy Spirit, as the Apostle succinctly argues in Romans 8:1-4. Much more could be said here. Suffice it to say, however, that the Reformed theologian has nothing to fear from Paul's very Jewish belief in a final judgment, or indeed a final "justification," issued in accordance with "works."

The upshot of this survey is this: the NPP, or at least certain versions of it, is not incompatible with the primary concerns of the OPP. Indeed, far from being something to fear, the NPP provides the nuances necessary to save the valid concerns of the OPP from the potentially fatal charge of theological anachronism. I am indeed "favorably disposed" to the NPP, and I have paid dearly for that disposition. I am also, despite this fact, a Reformed theologian. But I am a Reformed theologian who remains committed to the historical-critical method. Indeed, it is only the historical method that can protect the Reformed faith from the ossification that inevitably occurs when its 16th and 17th century confessions are allowed to dictate what the text must mean. Classic Protestantism was marked by the slogan, ecclesia reformata, semper reformanda. The Reformed church must always be reforming as its understanding of God's Word advances. We do well if we take that admonition to heart.

Did God Cause the Ravens To Win the Super Bowl? (Or: Is God a PED for Christian Athletes?)

Considering the fact that my fortnightly weekend responsibilities at R. R. Donnelley precluded any experience of the "televisual feast" (to quote spoon salesman Mr. Hutchinson in one of my favorite Fawlty Towers episodes) provided by Super Bowl XLVII last night, I have spent my morning reading about the game which, as I should have expected, turned into a real barnburner following the embarrassing power outage that delayed proceedings for a half hour during the second half. What caught my attention above all were the postgame comments by retiring future Hall of Famer Ray Lewis. Lewis, in case any are still unaware, has recently become a somewhat famous and outspoken Christian athlete despite his chequered past (and present, in view of the somewhat amusing, if pathetic, reports about his using "deer antler spray" to recover speedily from a torn triceps muscle)(for my take on Lewis's conversion, see here). Lewis, like he did following the Ravens' earlier playoff victory over the Denver Broncos (see here), quoted Isaiah 54:17:

No weapon forged against you will prevail,
    and you will refute every tongue that accuses you.
This is the heritage of the servants of the Lord,
    and this is their vindication from me, declares the LORD.

The clear implication of Lewis's words was that God himself had a direct hand in the outcome of the game—indeed, that God would prevent Lewis's gridiron opponents from "prevailing" against him, thereby "vindicating" his faithfulness to the Lord. One's initial reaction to such a proclamation is one of bemused unbelief (indeed, almost nothing is capable of stunning me any longer). Are the Baltimore Ravens really "the servants of the Lord"? Are there no professing believers in Jesus on the Forty-Niners roster? Indeed, has Lewis, despite his good intentions, ever really enquired about the actual meaning of the Isaianic text in its historical and literary context?

To ask the question is to answer it, of course. Isaiah 54 comes near the end of a section of the Book of Isaiah (Isa 40-55) which was meant to console the Jewish people in the midst of exile. The prophet's message was a clear and simple one: God, in covenant faithfulness, would deliver Israel and Judah from their exile in a second, greater Exodus through the work of one called "the Servant of Yahweh," and establish a new covenant ("a covenant of peace" [54:10]; "an everlasting covenant" [55:3], explicitly identified as the fulfillment of his promises to David) with them that would extend its blessings to the nations as well. More to the point: God's faithful protection of the renewed people of God would not be in the cause of the people's own efforts to defeat their opponents. Rather, this is a promise to protect them (the heretofore "afflicted" [54:11]) from the onslaughts of attacking enemies, those whose attempts to "stir up strife" with them will result in the enemies' "fall" on their account (54:15).

Lewis, in other words, is mired in a hermeneutical morass of his own making. But it is a morass in which large segments of the American populace are foundering. A poll published on 29 January by the Public Religion Research Institute revealed the following highly interesting tidbits of information:

• 53% of all Americans believe that "God rewards athletes who have faith with good health and success." A startling 72% of Christians from racial minorities, and 67% of white Evangelicals expressed this belief.

• 27% of all Americans believe that "God plays a role in determining which team wins a sporting event." 40% of minority Christians as well as 38% of white Evangelicals assented to this proposition.

These results are simply staggering. I know I am both an urban Northeasterner and a holder of a terminal academic degree, both of which predispose me to a more negative response to such statements (as might be expected, respondents in the South and Midwest were much more amenable to them than those who lived in the Northeast and West Coast). Nevertheless ... are those who subscribe to such beliefs immune to both empirical evidence and proper methods of interpreting the Bible? For example, are believing athletes more successful than unbelieving ones? Among the greatest baseball players, which among these was known for their Christian commitment: Babe Ruth, Ty Cobb, Ted Williams, Joe DiMaggio, Willie Mays, Mickey Mantle, Pete Rose? Mantle only became a Christian long after his playing days were over, and died at the ripe old age of 63. Among all-time greats, I can only think of three who were widely known as Christians: Christy Mathewson (who likewise died young, at only 45), Honus Wagner, and Mariano Rivera. What about football players? Jim Brown, O. J. Simpson, Chuck Bednarik, Dick Butkus, Dan Marino, John Elway, Lawrence Taylor, Tom Brady. Granted, there have been prominent Christian football players, e.g., Bart Starr, Roger Staubach, Reggie White, Brian Dawkins. But the fact remains that there is no apparent correlation between one's success and longevity and the seriousness of their Christian commitment. It only gets worse when we turn to basketball: Bill Russell, Wilt Chamberlain, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar (can his remarkable longevity be ascribed to the blessing of Allah due to his conversion to Islam?), Magic Johnson, Larry Bird, Michael Jordan, Kobe Bryant, LeBron James. And hockey? Please. In other words, the silliness of correlating athletic success with faith commitment is self-evident.

How, then, do we account for the widespread perception among Christians that this correlation exists? In a word, the reading of the Bible—in particular, the Proverbs—through the grid of a presupposed, Western (if not particularly American) worldview, unencumbered by even elementary rules for how to interpret such literature. The so-called "health and wealth" message of such popular hucksters as Joel Osteen and Joyce Meyer is only the most extreme manifestation of this tendency to read uniquely American ideas about "success" and "blessing" into the Bible's message (all the while forgetting that America is not Israel living under the Sinai Covenant). But the tendency is there in the "average Christian reader" as well, who reads proverbs as promises rather than the nuggets of proverbial, generalized wisdom they are. I well remember, after a lecture on the Proverbs, one of my students coming after class to protest what I had said along these lines. "I prefer to read them," she said, "as promises." Well, she was entitled to her own opinion, but of course not all opinions are equally worthy of assent. Sadly, such Christians as she are guilty of the elementary error of failing to balance what the Proverbs say with the well-nigh deafening counterexamples provided by Job, the lament psalms, and (especially) Qoheleth's ruminations in the Book of Ecclesiastes. Most egregiously, such Christians ignore the clear teaching of both Paul and Jesus himself that suffering is one of the marks of the people of God in this era in which the kingdom of God and the so-called "messianic woes" coexist in tension with one another. Godliness is profitable, of course. But its profit lies in the spiritual arena, not on the fields, gymnasia, and rinks of athletic combat.

But does not the all-sovereign God play a role in the results of athletic contests? As I said last year in a post responding to the Tim Tebow phenomenon, "both 'Yes" and 'No.'" I am a card-carrying Calvinist, after all, who believes in the recondite doctrine known as the "decree of God," based on such texts as Ephesians 1:11. Nothing lies outside of God's all-encompassing foreknowledge and eternal plan. But this does not mean that God directly causes everything to happen. Nor does it entail that we can necessarily discern why things happen the way they do (for those who are interested, these matters are all bound up with the distinctively Reformed doctrine known as "concurrence"). Indeed, Martin Luther's opinion was of a piece with Calvin's on this matter, and the great Reformer often (most notably in his magisterial Bondage of the Will with reference to the doctrine of predestination) pointed to the principle enunciated in Deuteronomy 29:29:

The secret things belong to the LORD our God, but the things that are revealed belong to us and to our children forever, that we may do all the words of this law.

Luther (metaphorically on these occasions) nailed this one. To put it simply, even though the omniscient God both knew beforehand that the Ravens would win, and in a sense incorporated that in his all-encompassing plan, we cannot deduce that God unilaterally worked so as directly to bring about this victory. Nor can we infer any reasons why this victory occurred. This means, of course, that prayers by players or fans to the effect that their team would win are inappropriate and verge on the immature, if not infantile (and I say this not simply because such prayers of mine uttered in my youth for my own Philadelphia teams to win were so rarely answered in the way I had hoped!). In a world wracked with poverty, injustice, and war, Super Bowls, World Cups, Open Championships, and World Series competitions are ultimately unimportant matters. Better that we Christians start adopting God's priorities. If we are to pray—and I well remember my late teacher Clare Hitz's refrain that "we can always pray"—let us rather pray the way God would have us pray, as our Lord himself taught us in the Lord's Prayer (Matthew 6:9-13):

Our Father in heaven,
hallowed be your name,
 your kingdom come,
your will be done,
    on earth as it is in heaven.
 Give us today our daily bread.
 And forgive us our debts,
    as we also have forgiven our debtors.
 And lead us not into temptation,
    but deliver us from the evil one.

Mike Bird, N. T. Wright, and Thinking Christianly Rather Than "Rightly"

(photo@the gospelcoalition.com)

Mike Bird is one of the leading lights among younger New Testament scholars today. His works on Jesus (Are You the One Who Is To Come?: The Historical Jesus and the Messianic Question; Jesus Is the Christ: The Messianic Testimonies of the Gospels) and Paul (The Saving Righteousness of God: Studies on Paul, Justification, and the New Perspective; Introducing Paul: The Man, His Mission and His Message) are models of clear thinking on controversial, complex topics. For me, his work on the apostle Paul has been particularly salutary, demonstrating that one can indeed, despite disclaimers in certain quarters, be both a genuine Reformed theologian and, at the same time, "favorably disposed" to the insights of the so-called "New Perspective on Paul." He is also an engaging speaker, giving the lie to the stereotype that academically gifted people must exude dust and tedium from the lectern (his 2010 IBR response to N. T. Wright at Atlanta was a delightful case in point).

(photo@www.st-andrews.ac.uk)

Bird is also an Australian, and as such provides a needed corrective to the insular ways of thinking that hold most evangelical American Christians in their straightjacket. Like I, Bird simply cannot understand ("just don't get it") the thought process whereby conservative Christians in my country adhere to the right-wing political policies of the Republican Party with an almost confessional-like commitment (with reference to the notoriously right-wing Liberty University, see his comments here). One example is his (to me) eminently sensible advocacy of strict gun control measures (see here and here). Another is his mystification over conservative American Christians' lock-step opposition to universal healthcare coverage (see here). In this vein, in today's blog post he provides a link to an interview with N. T. Wright, in which Professor Wright explains, among other things, where, as an Englishman, he cannot comprehend the black-and-white polarities of American political discourse, and his agreements and disagreements with one of his earliest influences, the great Ulsterman C. S. Lewis. Wright's comments on healthcare, most of which are also cited by Bird, are worthy of being cited in full:

Well, what I’m doing is making a broad-brush point for readers. I’m not talking about Fox News in any detailed way and I’m not claiming that everything they tell you is wrong. I’m just referring to the well-known political viewpoint that comes through Fox News and I’m saying: We should be careful about listening to that point of view exclusively. There is a striking, radical polarization between your Left and Right that I have to say is really disturbing because it distorts so many issues. This Left-Right polarization forces people to say: We are all on this side now! We must check off every box on this slate! We must keep in line!

In your country, for example, there seem to be Christian political voices saying that you shouldn’t have a national healthcare system. To us, in Britain, this is virtually unthinkable. Every other developed country from Norway to New Zealand has healthcare for all of its citizens. We don’t understand all of this opposition to it over here in the U.S. And, we should remember: In the ancient world, there wasn’t any healthcare system. It was the Christians, very early on, who introduced the idea that we should care for people beyond the circle of our own kin. Christians taught that we should care for the poor and disadvantaged. Christians eventually organized hospitals. To hear people standing up in your political debate and saying—“If you are followers of Jesus, you must reject universal healthcare coverage!”—and that’s unthinkable to us. Those of us who are Christians in other parts of the world are saying: We can’t understand this political language. It’s not our value in our countries. It’s not even in keeping with traditional Christian teaching on caring for others. We can’t understand what we are hearing from some of your politicians on this point. Yet, over here, some Christians are saying that it’s part of the list of boxes we all should check off to keep in line.

Well, I have to say that Tom, as usual, nailed it. Even in my youth, trained by my evangelical subculture to assume the propriety of "conservative" political views, I could not understand why I should make such an assumption. Why, for instance, was Franklin Roosevelt (one of the two genuinely great American Presidents) derided by Christians who, one would have thought, would champion his advocacy for the nation's poor and key role in the defeat of Nazism? Why were support for the Vietnam War and Richard Nixon (!) considered nonnegotiables? I never received an adequate answer to my questions forty years ago. And I haven't received one in the intervening years. So I have adopted what I consider the only responsible course of action: use the brain God gave me to formulate an informed, distinctly Christian view on such matters, irrespective of what I was told I "should" believe. Not surprisingly, such views are often met with incomprehension, at best, and outright hostility, at worst, from many of my Christian brothers and sisters (for example, see my take on guns here and here).

The problem, as I see it, is a worldview one. For better or worse (usually worse), most American evangelical Christians have what can only be described as a conservative American worldview. And it is through that assumed, subconscious grid that they filter what they read from the Bible. And so they, in effect, become Christian Americans rather than, as they should be, American Christians. The most amusing example of this, in my experience, has been the way many Bible teachers and preachers, including my own beloved father—against the obvious contextual clues and Old Testament scriptural echoes—have explained away the earliest Christians' practice of "having all things together" (Acts 2, 4) as being misguided and inapplicable to today's church. But the phenomenon works itself out in a whole range of issues, from war to guns to healthcare. And the fact that evangelical Christians elsewhere, both in wealthy nations like the UK, Canada, and Australia and in the poverty-ravaged two-thirds world, disagree with them on such matters, bothers them not a bit. But it should. Americans, after all, are not always right.

Conservatism, per se, is not the issue. I myself am conservative in many ways, especially in matters where my more putatively "conservative" brothers and sisters are not. The issue is one of manifesting a faithfulness to biblical principles and standards of behavior. How is it that Christians, who believe humankind was created to be God's "image"—a matter which involves their wise stewardship and care for the earth and its creatures—continue to deny the overwhelming scientific evidence for climate change and defend the rights of polluters and industries whose sole purpose is to exploit the earth's resources? How is it that Christians are so vociferous in their support of capital punishment (even in cases where the standard of proof hardly satisfies the Torah's stringent requirements) and participation in war (despite the clear pacifistic example of the early Church)? How is it that Christians who so stridently—rightly, I might add—decry abortion on demand are just as adamant in their support of guns, whose only real purpose is to kill, and whose toll in human lives is one of the great scandals of modern America? Have they forgotten Jesus, who told the hot-headed Peter that "those who live by the sword will die by the sword"? How is it that Christians, who supposedly agree with Paul's dictum that "the love of money is the root of all sorts of evil," so adamantly fight to preserve an ever-more unregulated form of capitalism that results in the increasing concentration of wealth at the very top of the economic ladder? How is it that Christians, disciples of one who proclaimed blessing on the poor and who healed the sick without charge in demonstration of the Messianic Jubilee, consider it acceptable that quality healthcare is available only to those who can afford it? Do they really think it is Christian to consider the rights and profits of insurance corporations to be more important than the welfare of people less well off than they are?

I ask these questions with a heavy heart. Frankly, I do not see much of Christ in many of those who claim his matchless name. I see more Ayn Rand than Jesus, more Ronald Reagan than Saint Paul. Fundamentally, it is a matter of abject failure to obey Jesus' command to "love your neighbor as yourself." And at the heart, as always, is the toxic combination of self-righteousness and pride, topped with the cherry of materialistic selfishness. I am not a politician. And I am quite sure that neither political party in modern America has the answers that will usher in another golden age of American life. But there is one thing I know: Jesus is Lord, not Caesar, not Barack Obama. It is to him and to him alone that I pledge allegiance. And it is high time that many of his followers do the same and provide the prophetic witness this country so desperately needs.

Paul, Judaism, and Justification: A Brief Response to Dan Wallace, Part 1: Introducing the Issues

Nothing has energized the academic study of the Apostle Paul more in the past generation than the so-called "New Perspective on Paul" generated by E. P. Sanders's 1977 tome entitled Paul and Palestinian Judaism. Prior to that watershed publishing event, Pauline scholarship by and large had grown complacent in the imagined belief that the Protestant consensus built on Martin Luther's seminal interpretation of Galatians and Romans needed no substantial rethinking. This consensus involved two major propositions. First, justification by faith—the belief that people are "justified" or declared righteous before God through faith in Christ alone, apart from works—was the central driving force of Paul's thought. Second, as the foil against which the apostle was writing, Judaism was a "legalistic" religion, in which its adherents attempted to "earn" their "salvation" through the merit of their works. The fact that Judaism, thus conceived, bore remarkable similarities to the medieval Roman Catholicism against which the Reformers strove, was rarely reflected upon, other than to view it as a happy coincidence. Indeed, the historical particularity of Paul's argument with the Jews of his day was seen by many Lutheran scholars of the 20th century to be ultimately unimportant. Rudolf Bultmann, for example, in his attempt to wed Lutheranism with Heideggerian existentialism, understood the "Jew" to be representative of the homo religiosis who strove to undergird his or her own existence through achievement. Bultmann's student, Ernst Käsemann, in his valiant (and valid) effort to eradicate the understanding that the church is a community of "good people," argued that we must ask the question, "What does this Jewish nomism [i.e., a religion defined by keeping the Law] against which Paul taught really represent?" His point—and here he is not entirely mistaken—is that the church, in contradistinction to Second Temple Judaism, is a people defined by the truth that God justifies the ungodly (Romans 4:5).

After more than four centuries, the Lutheran (actually, Protestant) stream of scholarship had turned into a veritable Amazonian flow, impervious to both Jewish (Schechter, Montefiore, Schoeps, Sandmel) and Christian (Moore, Parkes) objections that its portrayal of Judaism was both prejudiced and inaccurate. It is a testament to Sanders's erudition (and, no doubt, to the cultural climate of the time) that he was able, with one mighty broadside, to alter the course of this stream, or at least to create a new stream in what has increasingly become something of an interpretive alluvial delta. What Sanders did was to revisit the beliefs of the broad spectrum of Second Temple and later Rabbinic Judaism by analyzing its primary texts on their own terms. His aim was explicit: "to destroy the view of Rabbinic Judaism which is still prevalent in much, perhaps most, New Testament scholarship" (p. 48). And he was, to a large extent, successful. Using the sociological categories of "getting in" and "staying in," Sanders proposed a view of Jewish belief he categorized, somewhat unhappily, with the ponderous designation "covenantal nomism." By this Sanders means:

... the view that one's place in God's plan is established on the basis of the covenant and that the covenant requires as the proper response of man his obedience to its commandments, while providing means of atonement for transgression. ... Obedience maintains one's position in the covenant, but it does not earn God's grace as such. (pp. 75, 420 [emphasis removed]).

The revolutionary significance of Sanders's proposal cannot be overestimated. By emphasizing the gracious, covenantal foundation of Jewish law-keeping, in one fell swoop he shifted the scholarly perception of the Jews' acknowledged nomism in a paradigmatic way. No longer would mainstream biblical scholarship understand Jewish law-keeping as a "legalistic"—indeed, to use terminology derived from later church history, a proto-Pelagian or, at least, semi-Pelagian—attempt to earn their standing before God. Instead, such obedience was, just as in the Book of Deuteronomy itself, understood to be their grateful response to prior grace and the means of maintaining the covenant status they had been granted antecedently by virtue of their physical descent from Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. And, if Sanders was correct, even partially so, this would necessarily have severe repercussions vis-à-vis the interpretation of Paul's letters to the Galatians and to the Romans, especially in regard to the understanding of his characteristic "doctrine" of justification by faith.

Sanders's ground-breaking work bore fruit almost immediately in what has been dubbed "The New Perspective on Paul." Despite the ubiquity of the designation, to speak of a "New Perspective" is somewhat misleading in light of the variety of perspectives covered under the term's umbrella. Sanders himself claimed that Paul, having found "salvation" in Christ, simply shifted religious systems when he rejected Jewish notions of covenant and election. Much more plausibly, scholars such as Jimmy Dunn and N. T. Wright (one could also add John Barclay, Bruce Longenecker, Richard Hays, Terence Donaldson, Douglas Campbell, Daniel Kirk, and countless others) argued that Paul's critique of his Jewish contemporaries came from a stance within Judaism. Despite the differences that mark each of these scholars' positions, their views all bear one mark of family resemblance: Paul's critique of Judaism and "Judaizing" Christianity is located primarily, not in the contrast between grace and legalism (i.e., the salvation of the individual), but in the contrast between universalism/inclusivism and particularism/ethnic exclusivism (i.e., the relation of Jews and Gentiles in the new covenant people of God).

Not surprisingly, response to Sanders's proposals has not been uniformly positive. After all, views with a pedigree such as that which the so-called "Old Perspective" has cannot die easily. And that is how it should be. It does not take a rocket scientist (or even a humble Ph.D. in New Testament) to see the consanguinity between the concerns of the New Perspective and certain trends in the thinking of dominant segments of contemporary Western culture. On the other hand, however, one should not underestimate the potentially worldview-shattering character of the New Perspective's proposals. For many who, like I, were raised in evangelical Protestantism, Paul's doctrine of justification by faith lies at the foundation of their religious identity, not only establishing their standing before God by grace alone, but also distinguishing them from other Christians, not least Roman Catholics, whose teachings they believe not only false but soteriologically dangerous. This is especially the case with confessional Christians in the Lutheran and Reformed traditions, which have enshrined the teachings of Luther and Calvin (and their successors) about justification in binding doctrinal formulas. One cannot help but think that the frequent misrepresentation of the positions of such men as Wright and Dunn, and in some cases the hysterical, vitriolic, fear-mongering response to them, derives, more often than not, from misunderstanding produced by the dissonance the New Perspective causes when its strains are heard against the backdrop of a presupposed-yet-unexamined Old Perspective melody. And when academic or ecclesiastical reputations and, in certain cases, posts are at stake, the temptation is all the greater. But I digress ...

Opposition to the New Perspective has come, not surprisingly, from scholars in the Lutheran (Martin Hengel, Peter Stuhlmacher), Evangelical (Mark Seifrid), and Reformed (Guy Watters) traditions. Most important, however, have been studies of Second Temple and Rabbinic Judaism in which Sanders's proposal of "covenantal nomism" has been challenged. Already in 1991 Timo Laato wrote his Paulus und das Judentum in which he argued that Paul's anthropology was considerably more pessimistic than that held by his Jewish contemporaries. In 1996 Friedrich Avemarie directly challenged Sanders with the publication of his Tora und Leben, in which he contends that "covenanatal nomism" is too simplistic. Yes, Judaism held to both covenantalism and nomism, but the two were held together in unresolved tension. "Salvation," Avemarie contended, was ultimately contingent upon obedience, and hence Paul need not be reinterpreted (on this, see also Simon Gathercole's Where Is Boasting?, from 2002, which likewise emphasizes the role played by keeping the Torah in the Jews' understanding of final justification). In 1998 Timo Eskola followed with his Theodicy & Predestination in Pauline Soteriology, in which he, in good Lutheran fashion, contrasted Paul's "monergism"—i.e., salvation by God's action alone—with the Jews' "synergism"—salvation involving a concurrence of divine and human action. Finally, in 2000, Mark Elliott wrote the most significant challenge to date. In his The Survivors of Israel, Elliott points to Jewish groups for whom neither nationalistic or individualistic portraits of Sanders-like "covenant theology" will do. For such groups, there was no irrevocable national election of Israel, and so the covenant could not unambiguously be the vehicle of "salvation." Covenant, and the salvation consequent upon it, were the sole reserve of the remnant, who were marked out precisely by their obedience to the Law.

It is here that a recent blog post by my old friend Dan Wallace, entitled "Paul and Justification by Faith: The Real Jewish Evidence," comes into play. In his post Wallace writes about a paper delivered by Preston Sprinkle at November's ETS convention in Milwaukee, which was an extract from his forthcoming book, Paul and Judaism Revisited. Wallace writes:

Entitled, “Way Outside the Box: Why Paul’s Doctrine of Justification Was Risky, Offensive, and Unparalleled in Early Judaism,” Sprinkle argued, like his title suggests, that “Paul’s assertion that ‘God justifies the wicked’ would have been seen as risky, offensive, and is actually unparalleled in the world of early Judaism—yes, even among the Dead Sea Scrolls.” What a bold statement! He backs it up with some impressive evidence, too. ...

Among his many points, Sprinkle notes that in the OT God did not justify wicked people, citing, inter alia, Exod 23.7 and Isa 5.23. In my class on the exegesis of Romans, which I have taught at Dallas Seminary for the past seven years, I have argued that these two texts are key to Paul’s thinking and that the Jews of his day would have realized this. Exodus 23.7 clearly involves legal language. It is this language which lies behind Paul’s points in Rom 3.23–24 and 4.4–5. ...

Sprinkle does not develop the points of contact between these two OT passages and Romans, but he does bring in other significant texts from Second Temple Judaism to show that the OT view has continuity into the time of Paul. In particular, he interacts with the Dead Sea Scrolls. Among the texts he discusses are CD 1.18–21; 4.6–7 (the Damascus Document), 4QMMT 26–32 (the Halakhic Letter), and 1QS 10–11 (Community Rule). It is this latter passage that is sometimes seen as in line with Paul’s view of justification. Sprinkle gives a penetrating analysis of the text, noting major differences that have been overlooked. In particular, Paul focuses on initial justification while 1QS focuses on final justification. It is a point not to be missed. Sprinkle began the section on 1QS by asking, “does Qumran anywhere affirm that God’s initial declaration of righteousness is unilateral—based on no measure of human goodness, obedience, or godly potential?” He answers with a resounding no.

In the conclusion to Sprinkle’s paper he states plainly: “The assertion that ‘Paul’s doctrine has exactly the same shape as that of MMT’ or other documents from Qumran, as N.T. Wright thinks, simply cannot be sustained.”

It will be interesting to see the responses to Sprinkle’s forthcoming book. The debate will surely continue for some time. Meanwhile, N. T. Wright is busy producing yet another work on Paul’s understanding of justification (Paul and the Faithfulness of God). Whether evangelicals need to jettison the old perspective on Paul in toto, as if the Reformation got it all wrong as Wright seems to affirm, is still an open question for many. But Sprinkle’s treatment of the Jewish materials will surely have to be wrestled with. Perhaps Luther and the Reformers got it right after all.

Perhaps the Reformers did get it right. Perhaps they didn't. Or, perhaps they both did and didn't get it right, but in different ways and at different levels of understanding. Indeed, the third of these options is what I have argued for two decades, dating back to my doctoral work at Dallas on Paul's letter to the Galatians. To argue in such a way, as I have learned from bitter personal experience, can be a professionally ruinous course of action. But, as Luther said at Worms, "I can do no other, for to go against conscience is neither right nor safe." I maintain that both Sanders's view of Judaism and the "Old Perspective" view of Paul lack appropriate nuance despite the large dose of truth that characterize both. In my next post I hope to show why I believe this to be the case.

The Forty Greatest Philadelphia Eagles of All Time: Part 6 (##1-3)

(photo@businessinsider.com)

Finally we come to the end of our countdown. The following three players are not only the greatest in team history. They are legends who rank among the very greatest players ever to play in the National Football League. [For my previous posts in this series, see here, here, here, here, and  here].


3. Chuck Bednarik (C, OLB, 1949-62)

(photo@philly.com)

Bednarik  celebrating after his famous hit of Frank Gifford, November 1960
(photo@nytimes.com)

Nothing can be said about Chuck Bednarik that hasn't already been said by countless others. The last "iron man" two-way player in NFL history, the 6'3", 233 pounder out of Bethlehem, Pa. and the University of Pennsylvania (!) is perhaps the single toughest player ever to stalk the gridiron. In his 14 years with the Eagles, "Concrete Charlie"—so-called because he sold concrete in the off-season as well as after practice!— missed only 3 games to injury, was named to 8 Pro Bowls, and was a 5-time 1st Team All Pro selection both at center (1950) and linebacker (1951-54), where his bone-jarring tackles became the stuff of legend. Most famous of all was his fumble-causing tackle of Giants' Hall of Famer Frank Gifford in November 1960, which preserved a 17-10 Eagles victory, propelling the team to the 1960 NFL championship. The clean hit knocked Gifford out and hospitalized Gifford for several days with both a deep brain concussion and, it was later learned, a "spinal concussion," the fracture of one of his neck vertebrae. As a result of the hit, Gifford had to miss the entire 1961 season. Bednarik's signature moment came, however, in the 1960 championship game against the Packers at Franklin Field on 26 December. Bednarik, at the age of 35, was on the field for every play from scrimmage as both a center and linebacker, the last time that ever was done in an NFL game. More importantly for Eagles fans, however, was his tackle of Packer Hall of Fame fullback Jim Taylor inside the Eagle 10 yard line on the game's final play, cementing the win in what has remained the last league championship won by the franchise. Bednarik is the only player to have spanned the last two Eagles championship victories (1949, 1960). In 1967 he was elected to the Pro Football Hall of Fame in his first year of eligibility, and in 1969 was named the NFL's all-time greatest center.

Now THAT is a football
player (photo@upenn.edu)

Bednarik with Hall of Famers Paul Hornung (l) and Jim Taylor (r)
after the 1960 championship game (photo@pennathletics.com)

2. Steve Van Buren (RB, 1944-51)

(photo@wn.com)

Van Buren with teammates Al Wistert (l) and Alex Wojciechowicz (r) in 1947

Steve Van Buren, a 200-pound, Honduran-born halfback out of LSU, is the greatest offensive player in Eagles history. When he died last summer here in Lancaster, I wrote the following in appreciation:

"Van Buren, with 5860 yards, ranks third on the Eagles all-time rushing list behind Wilbert Montgomery (6538) and Brian Westbrook (5995). ... As good as he was, however, Montgomery never did what Van Buren did: four league rushing titles (1945, 1947, 1948, 1949) and five first team all-pro selections (1944-45, 1947-49). He was the first player ever to lead the NFL in rushing three consecutive seasons (since done only by Jim Brown [twice], Earl Campbell, and Emmitt Smith). Van Buren was elected to the Pro Football Hall of Fame in 1965, and in 1994 was one of four halfbacks (the others being Walter Payton, Gale Sayers, and O. J. Simpson) named to the NFL's 75th Anniversary team.

Van Buren scoring the winning TD in the 1948 NFL Championship Game
at Shibe Park, Philadelphia, 19 December 1948 (photo@espn.go.com)

Van Buren shredding the Rams for  some of his 196 yards
in the Eagles' 14-0 victory in the NFL Championship
Game, 18 December 1949 (photo@examiner.com)

"But to Eagles fans, Van Buren is best known for his exploits in the team's first two championship games. The first, on 19 December 1948, was played in a driving blizzard in old Shibe Park in North Philadelphia. Van Buren had to walk, take a trolley and the subway from his home on Manoa Road in Havertown to the subway exit at Broad and Lehigh, and then walk seven blocks through the snow to get to the stadium. In the game Van Buren rushed 26 times for 98 yards, making up for quarterback Tommy Thompson's inability to pass due the inclement conditions (2-for-12 for only 7 yards!), and in the fourth quarter scored the game's only points with a five yard run into the end zone off tackle to give the Eagles a 7-0 win over the Chicago Cardinals. The following year Van Buren outdid himself, rushing for 196 yards on 31 carries to lead the Birds to a decisive 14-0 victory over the Rams in Los Angeles. This game marked the apex of Van Buren's career, as injuries limited his effectiveness the next two seasons, leading to his retirement, at the age of 32, prior to the 1952 season.


"To me, what always has endeared Van Buren was his humility, such a rare attribute in people with marked athletic prowess (see the fine article by Hall of Fame writer Ray Didinger here). When I see the preening and posing of players with but half of Van Buren's accomplishments in today's NFL, I can only shake my head with sadness in the recognition that Van Buren's tribe, though perhaps not yet extinct, is certainly an endangered species."






1. Reggie White (DE, 1985-92)

(photo@nflfilms.nfl.com)

Reginald Howard White, a 6'5", 291 pound left defensive end, is, with all due respect to Lawrence Taylor, the greatest defensive player ever to play in the National Football League (see this article by Jason Whitlock for corroboration). No player in league history ever possessed the lethal combination of size, strength, and speed (he was timed, early in his career, at 4.5 in the 40-yard dash). He simply could not be blocked one-on-one, and—in contrast to other famous defensive ends like Deacon Jones, Carl Eller, Bruce Smith, and Michael Strahan—was equally effective against the run and the pass.

(photo@bleacherreport.com)

The "Minister of Defense"—so-called because of his outspoken Christian faith and reputation for clean living—came to Philadelphia after two seasons with the Memphis Showboats of the USFL, and made his impact felt immediately, registering 31 sacks in 29 games with the Eagles in 1985-86. But it was in 1987 that White had what is arguably the greatest season ever for a defensive player in the NFL. During that strike-shortened season, White not only amassed a then-league record 21 sacks in only 12 games—Strahan's current record of 22.5 in 16 games in 2001 pales in comparison—but also forced four fumbles, returning one 70 yards for a TD against the Washington Redskins. The next season White once again led the league with 18 sacks, and for his career in Philadelphia amassed an incredible 124 in only 121 games. He served as the backbone of Buddy Ryan's famous "Gang Green" defense of the late '80s-early '90s, one of the great units in league history. White played a leading role in one of the most famous games in league history, the so-called "Body Bag Game" of 12 November 1990, in which the Eagles' defense knocked 8 Redskins out of the game with injuries, including both active quarterbacks, en route to a 28-14 "butt-kicking," as analyst Dan Dierdorf called it that night. White that night registered two sacks and intercepted a pass, returning it 33 yards. 

White making Redskins' quarterback Mark Rypien aware of his presence
(photo@sportsillustrated.cnn.com)

After the 1992 season, despite White's 14 sacks and key contribution in the Eagles' only playoff victory of the era (a sack of Saints' QB Bobby Hebert for a safety in the 4th quarter), brain-dead owner Norman Braman (derisively referred to as "the man in France" by coach Buddy Ryan) declared White "an old 31" and allowed him to sign with the Packers as a free agent. During his years with the Eagles, White made the Pro Bowl every year from 1986-92, was a consensus All Pro from 1986-91, and was named NFL Defensive Player of the Year in 1987. He registered double digits in sacks every year he played in Philadelphia.

(photo@sportsillustrated.cnn.com)

White, however, was far from done. He made the Pro Bowl in each of his first 6 seasons in Green Bay, earning All Pro honors in 1995 and 1998, after the latter of which he was, for a second time, named the NFL Defensive Player of the Year. But the undisputed highlight of his career came in Super Bowl XXXI after the 1996 season, when he set a Super Bowl record by recording 3 sacks against Patriots' QB Drew Bledsoe, propelling the Packers to a 35-21 victory. He finished his illustrious career after a lone season with the Carolina Panthers in 2000. He ended up with a then-record 198 career sacks in 232 games, which now ranks second only to Bruce Smith, who needed 47 more games than White to record the two sacks that separate the two greats. He was elected posthumously to the Pro Football Hall of Fame in 2006.

Ray Lewis, John Newton, and the Majesty of Grace

(photo@usatoday.com)

(photo@corkfpc.com)

When it comes to sports, I am a Baptist: I believe in a wall of separation between faith and football. Hence, unlike many of my Christian contemporaries, I was never tempted in my youth to support the Dallas Cowboys simply because of the outspoken faith of coach Tom Landry and quarterback Roger Staubach. More recently, I refused to jump on the Tim Tebow bandwagon and either ignore or deny his transparent quarterbacking inadequacies simply because of his squeaky clean evangelical Christian persona. When it comes to sports, my loyalties will forever lie with my hometown teams, whether it be the Phillies of Lenny Dykstra, the Sixers of Allen Iverson, or the Eagles of Terrell Owens or, more recently, DeSean Jackson.

But even such "Baptist" athletic supporters such as I can be inconsistent. And so, when the Baltimore Ravens—a franchise I have yet to forgive for abandoning Cleveland in 1996—reached the Super Bowl following the 2000 season, I fervently rooted against them, ostensibly for a "righteous" reason. And that reason? Their preeminent player, linebacker Ray Lewis, was involved in a fight in January 2000 that resulted in the stabbing deaths of two men. Though Lewis and two of his friends were indicted on murder and aggravated assault charges, later that year he was acquitted of these charges in exchange for a guilty plea to the misdemeanor crime of obstructing justice. No matter. To me (and to countless other moralists) Lewis was, and would continue to be, a "murderer" and unworthy of our support, notwithstanding his stature as—sorry, Dick Butkus—the greatest inside linebacker ever to play in the NFL.

Along the way, however, something strange happened. Lewis converted to Christianity (for the story, see the Sports Illustrated article here). And so, despite his criminal record, despite his six children from four different women (none of whom were his wife), Lewis is, whether his Christian critics like it or not, their brother in Christ. Indeed, after the Ravens' 24-9 playoff victory over the Colts earlier this month, Lewis sported a sleeveless t-shirt with Psalm 91 inscribed on it. And Sunday, after the Ravens defeated the Patriots to earn a trip to the Super Bowl, Lewis explicitly glorified God. Now to me, as a trained theologian (even, I might add, a Calvinist one), I wince when athletes like Tebow and Lewis speak as if God directly caused the victories of their teams. Nevertheless, their instincts as Christians are correct. God is to be glorified in all things, whatever the circumstances of life.

But I wonder whether America's vast evangelical population will gravitate to Lewis the way they did to Tebow last year (the nadir of such support, to me, was the frequent criticism of the Broncos for ditching Tebow in favor of future Hall of Famer Peyton Manning!). My hunch is that they won't, and for a very predictable reason: for all the lip service they give to the grace of God, they are still moralists at heart. They support Tebow because of his apparently spotless "testimony." But other people—be it Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Osama bin Laden, Bob Dylan, or Ray Lewis—are either too evil or morally compromised to deserve a "chance" to be "saved" from their sin. Only the relatively "good," be it Tebow or they themselves who are untainted by egregious sins, are implicitly "worthy" of grace. But such an attitude, even if embraced only subconsciously, ignores both prominent texts from Scripture and the experience of saints from the past.

You see, nobody can "deserve" grace. God's saving favor is unmerited. Indeed, it is, as my dad used to say, favor extended where wrath is deserved. So the Apostle Paul argues in Romans 1-3, especially in 3:10-18, where he offers what Richard Hays has called "a jackhammer indictment of human sinfulness" in a catena of scriptural quotations (Echoes of Scripture in the Letters of Paul [New Haven and London: Yale, 1989] 50). Quoting Psalm 14, Paul affirms that "there is no one who is righteous" and that "there is no one who seeks God." Indeed, even the Jews, who were privileged to possess the Torah, could not stand acquitted before the bar of God's just judgment, and so can only, like the godless Gentiles (1:18-32), be "justified" by God's grace through faith in Christ, whose sacrificial death was the definitive, "eschatological"  expression of God's saving justice and faithfulness (3:19-26). This means that none of us, whether a blatant infidel or dutiful product of a godly home, has a leg to stand on before God. We all need the grace enacted by God in the cross of Christ. Consequently, we have no grounds on which to begrudge the grace shown to such men as Lewis, no matter his chequered past. After all, Jesus himself shows that it is never too late to repent, as his encounter with the criminal crucified at his side (Luke 23) attests. And remember that this man was no petty "thief." He was a lēstēs, a revolutionary insurrectionist or guerrilla (what certain right wing Americans would consider a Jewish "patriot"). Yet, if the Lukan Jesus is to be believed, this man that very day would experience the bliss of Jesus' presence in "Paradise" while awaiting the resurrection promised in the Book of Daniel.

While reflecting on Lewis, I was reminded of one of the great heroes of British Christianity, John Newton (1725-1807). The story of Newton's life is a famous one. Raised in a Christian home by a godly mother, Newton abandoned the faith after his mother's death and eventually was conscripted into the Royal Navy. Eventually he deserted the Navy and found his way to Africa, via falling in with a Portuguese slave trader, with the express desire to "sin his fill." While in Africa he was, for a time, even a slave to slaves, being rescued by a British captain sent expressly by Newton's father on a search and rescue mission for him. Newton, ever the sinner, broke into the ship's supply of rum and got both himself and the crew drunk. When confronted by the captain, Newton wound up in the sea, only to be saved by harpoon. Later on that voyage to Scotland, a terrible storm off the coast of Donegal in Ireland caused the ship to begin to sink. While manning the pumps Newton recalled the Bible verses and songs taught to him by his mother, and his journey to conversion to authentic Christian faith began. Eventually, despite only two years of formal education, Newton became an Anglican minister, serving as curate at a small parish in Olney in Buckinghamshire and, later, as Rector of St. Mary Woolnoth, Lombard Street, London, where he served until his death. While at St. Mary's, Newton became friends with the young Parliamentarian William Wilberforce, and lived to see the implementation of the Slave Trade Act 1807 the latter championed.

Newton was a man gripped by the grace of God. He was saved by grace, and never got over it. And it was not a watered down version of grace that Newton championed, but the robust, Pauline, Calvinist doctrine known as irresistible grace:

We needed sovereign, irresistible grace to save us, or we would be lost forever!

Moreover, this is a grace that operates over the whole expanse of the believer's life:

I am not what I ought to be — ah, how imperfect and deficient! I am not what I wish to be — I abhor what is evil, and I would cleave to what is good! I am not what I hope to be — soon, soon shall I put off mortality, and with mortality all sin and imperfection. Yet, though I am not what I ought to be, nor what I wish to be, nor what I hope to be, I can truly say, I am not what I once was; a slave to sin and Satan; and I can heartily join with the apostle, and acknowledge, "By the grace of God I am what I am." (The Christian Spectator, vol. 3 [1821] 186)

Near the end of his life, he is said to have uttered the following words (a variation of which were memorably quoted by the great Albert Finney in his portrayal of Newton in the compelling 2006 film, Amazing Grace):

When I was young, I was sure of many things; now there are only two things of which I am sure: one is, that I am a miserable sinner; and the other, that Christ is an all-sufficient Saviour. He is well-taught who learns these two lessons. 

Most famous of all, however, is a hymn he wrote, originally entitled "Faith's Review and Expectation," more commonly known as "Amazing Grace:"

Amazing grace! (how sweet the sound)
That sav'd a wretch like me!
I once was lost, but now am found,
Was blind, but now I see. 

'Twas grace that taught my heart to fear,
And grace my fears reliev'd;
How precious did that grace appear,
The hour I first believ'd!

Thro' many dangers, toils and snares,
I have already come;
'Tis grace has brought me safe thus far,
And grace will lead me home.

The earth shall soon dissolve like snow,
The sun forbear to shine;
But God, who call'd me here below,
Will be forever mine.

These words never lose their power for all who, like I, am confronted day by day with the sin from whose power I am constantly being saved. Like John Newton, like Ray Lewis, so also Jimmy McGahey. Soli Deo Gloria!

I leave you with with a performance of Newton's "Amazing Grace" by the Royal Scots Dragoon Guards, one which warms both my Christian and my Celtic hearts.