Re-imagining Judaism
According to James Dunn, the first step towards the new perspective on Paul was the “new perspective on Second Temple Judaism” provided by EP Sanders.419 In Paul and Palestinian Judaism, Sanders presented evidence that Judaism was a “pattern of religion” substantially different from that represented by Paul. But, for all their differences, “on the point at which many have found the decisive contrast between Paul and Judaism — grace and works — Paul is in agreement with Palestinian Judaism”.420 Sanders describes the pattern of religion found in Second Temple Judaism as “covenantal nomism”. Within this framework, the individual did not need to earn salvation by performing good works. All Israelites had been elected already by God’s covenant. God had promised to maintain that election. The chosen people were bound to obedience as a condition of remaining part of the covenant family. “God rewards obedience and punishes transgression” on the part of his people but “the question of whether or not an individual was truly ‘in’ and would thus be ‘saved’ did not arise”. Obedience “simply keeps an individual in the group which is the recipient of God’s grace”. In other words, “obedience maintains one’s position in the covenant, but it does not earn God’s grace as such”.421 Works-righteousness was not, therefore, at the core of second-Temple Judaism. The old stereotypes of Jewish legalism were wrong.
In his view of Paul’s theology, however, Sanders did not deviate radically from Reformed orthodoxy. “In his letters,” Sanders concludes, Paul “appears as one who bases the explanations of his gospel, his theology, on the meaning of the death and resurrection of Jesus, not as one who has fitted the death and resurrection into a pre-existing [Jewish or Hellenic] scheme”.422 In other words, “Paul’s distance from Judaism came simply as a result of his personal experience rather than sustained theological reasoning from first principles”.423 Both NT Wright and James Dunn complained that Sanders’ “re-reading” of Paul has not “gone far enough”. Wright charges that Sanders “still seems to assume, with the old model, that ‘justification’ is a ‘transfer term’ describing ‘how people get saved’”.424 For Dunn, it remained unclear just what Paul was objecting to if the Judaism of his “day also gave such a place to divine election, atonement and forgiveness”. Sanders read Paul “too much in terms of the traditional Protestant view of Paul to which he was objecting”.425
Re-interpreting Paul
Instead, Dunn approached Paul’s letters using the modernist methodology of the historical critic. Paul’s “statements of justification by faith not works of the law” were addressed not to individual sinners in the sixteenth or the twentieth century but to his contemporaries. They grew out of “his mission to the Gentiles, and as a result of his understanding of the gospel being challenged by fellow Jews”. At “the heart of Paul’s theology” was “the conviction that the gospel of God’s righteousness is for all who believe, Gentile as well as Jew”. In that context, the covenantal nomism of Jewish Christians “was the main obstacle to the blessing of Abraham extending to Gentiles”. Paul’s attack on the works of the law was not directed at works-righteousness per se but at Jewish missionaries who insisted that the law on matters of food and circumcision must be applied to Gentile believers as a condition of membership in the church.426
Such practices were regarded widely in the Greco-Roman world “as both characteristic and distinctive of Jews as a race”. The Jews themselves treated such observances as “identity markers” which “functioned as badges of covenant membership”. If Paul’s mission were to succeed, it was vital that Jewish Christians come to understand that God’s justification no longer rests on covenantal nomism, that God’s grace no longer “extends only to those who wear the badge of the covenant”. He appealed to “the logic of justification by faith: what is of grace through faith cannot depend in any sense, in any degree on a particular ritual response”. In effect, justification by faith became “an alternative definition of the elect of God”. Faith in Jesus Christ was no longer just “one identity marker for the Jewish Christian alongside the other identity markers (circumcision, food laws, Sabbath);” it became “the primary identity marker which renders the others superfluous”.427
Dunn emphasizes that Paul was “not disparaging works in general or pressing a dichotomy between outward ritual done in the flesh and inward grace operative in the spirit”. It is only “works which betoken racial prerogative to which he objects, acts done in the flesh because faith in Christ is reckoned insufficient as the badge of covenant membership”. Paul declared that “with Christ’s coming God’s covenant purpose had reached its intended final stage in which the more fundamental identity marker (Abraham’s faith) reasserts its primacy over against the too narrowly nationalistic identity markers of circumcision, food laws and sabbath”. On Dunn’s reading, Paul presents the church “as existing to be the place where the separated peoples come together as one”. Indeed, for Dunn, the transcendence of ancient tribal loyalties in Paul’s mission to the Gentiles was “the climactic achievement of the gospel, the completion of God’s purposes from the beginning of time”.428 But were God’s purposes truly consummated in the multi-ethnic character of the first-century church?
Dunn’s answer to such questions owes less to the canons of historical criticism than to the rhetorical strategies of the political activist. He invokes the standard shibboleths of academic anti-racism, “[n]ot to mention the tragic ‘turning of the tables’ when Judaism’s separateness was horrifically overtaken by Christianity’s supersessionism and anti-semitism”. He urges fellow Christians to read Paul’s letters as if they were addressed to a twenty-first century audience of disingenuous white liberals. He piously disavows the view (held by whom is not clear) “that others can be respected and accepted only if they share the same tribal loyalty”.429 Paul is lifted out of the multiple story lines of the world in which he was a historical actor and dropped into our very different narrative context.
The Narrative Turn
In his fleeting reference to historic fulfilment of God’s covenant with Abraham, Dunn himself drew upon the implicit narrative underlying Paul’s attitudes toward faith and the works of the law. But neither Dunn nor Sanders did much to provide a narrative understanding of Paul. Other scholars have seen the need to re-situate Paul within his own first-century narrative of salvation history. In fact, Wright contends that the “narrative turn in Pauline exegesis is…one of the most significant developments within the world opened up by the ‘new perspective’”. Much of his work on Paul starts from the premise that “second-Temple Jews believed themselves to be actors within a real-life narrative”.430 In reading Paul’s letters, Wright regularly distinguishes “between the actual argument of the letter, which has its own rhetorical force, and the wider worldview and belief system on which Paul draws”. Paul’s worldview was set in a “narrative framework” which “had to do with the history of Israel; more specifically, with its state of continuing ‘exile’ (though it had returned from Babylon, it remained under Gentile lordship and the great promises of Isaiah and others remained unfulfilled”).431 According to Wright, Paul “is strongly affirming, even while he is radically reinterpreting the ancient Jewish tradition in which he already stood, of envisaging the story of God’s people as going back to, and being characterized by, the origin of the covenant in God’s promises to Abraham”.432
The covenant was a sign of God’s faithfulness towards his chosen people. Paul, according to Wright, emphasized that Abraham entered into covenant with God when he was still uncircumcised. It was by faith in the free grace of God that Abraham was justified. Since “Christians of all racial backgrounds, share this same faith, we will all, like Abraham, be reckoned as covenant members, on the basis of what the creator/covenant god has done in Jesus”. Set within the framework of covenant history, the “death of Jesus” according to Paul, “was the means whereby sin was condemned”. As “Israel’s representative, the Messiah takes on to himself the weight of heape
d-up Adamic sin which Torah had left hanging over Israel’s head”. Wright has Paul offering the resurrection of Jesus as “the guarantee that the Spirit…will also raise to life all those who are in Christ”. Israel’s rejection of Christ “is seen as the strange means whereby the whole people of the creator god can be saved”. And the “people of God” must include both Jews and Gentiles.433
Like Dunn, Wright is convinced that Paul’s critique of the Jewish Christians who insisted upon observance of Torah was aimed not at “Jewish legalism” but rather at “ethnocentric covenantalism”. For Paul, “justification” is not about “how people enter the covenant,” it is a “declaration that certain people are already within the covenant”. Wright shares Dunn’s view of justification by faith as an identity marker for Christians of any and all racial backgrounds. For Paul, “covenant membership now has, as its worldwide badge, not those ‘works’ which mark out Israel according to the flesh, but the faith which was Abraham’s faith: ‘belief in the god who justifies the ungodly, belief in the god who raises the dead’. The fulfilment of the covenant in Christ has as its result the creation of a multiethnic people”. At this point in the narrative, one wonders whether it is Paul or Wright himself who “has placed the quite proper Gentile rejection of an ethnic-based people of god…onto the larger plan of the divine covenant”. 434
Wright has argued consistently that “God’s establishment of the covenant…always envisaged a single worldwide family”. But that claim finds little support either in the biblical text or the historical record.
The Plot Thickens
When Paul calls Gentile Christians “fellow citizens with God’s people and members of God’s household” (Ephesains 2:19), he identified a small, politically powerless, first-century covenant community scattered throughout the Roman Empire. It was at best an embryonic “people of God” waiting for the creation itself “to be liberated from its bondage to decay and brought into the glorious freedom of the children of God”. He is awaiting the imminent birth of a new creation: “the whole creation has been groaning as in the pains of childbirth right up to the present time” (Romans 8:19–21). Wright refuses to acknowledge that Paul clearly expected the imminent parousia of the Lord; he would have us believe that the labour pains suffered by the old creation are still being felt by contemporary Christians who “sense the Spirit groaning within us”.435 Such an anachronistic exegesis hardly befits an impartial much less a faithful Christian practitioner of historical criticism.
Paul’s embryonic covenant community was not the final historical incarnation of the post-biblical people of God. Nor did it represent the final solution to the sins of the world. When Paul reminds his audience that Christ died “for us,” he is not speaking “to us”. He was addressing the righteous remnant of Old Covenant Israel in the certain knowledge that “not all who are descended from Israel are Israel” (Romans 9:6). This meant that faith was more than a badge of membership in a corporate body; for individuals, it was also the indispensable precondition to covenant membership. According to Tom Holland, “the early church saw the absolute need for personal repentance and faith. There is no suggestion that man automatically benefits from Christ representing sinners before God”. In Holland’s view, “Paul insists that there is a fundamental division in the human race,” two separate communities or covenantal bodies: the covenantal body of Christ and the covenantal body of Sin.436 The labour pains suffered by creation were produced by the cosmic war to the death between those two covenantal worlds.
Paul had no doubt that the war would end soon in the final victory of Christ. When finally Satan was crushed, the children of God would be delivered into the new heavens and the new earth. Holland takes a daring and unprecedented step among New Testament scholars when he interprets Pauline theology in light of Revelation. In doing so, he opens up a pathway out of the corner into which the new perspective on Paul has painted itself.
Wright hailed the narrative turn as a dramatic breakthrough in Pauline studies. But the turn to narrative was stillborn when Wright conceded that the end to the Bible story which Paul expected in his near future is still future for us two thousand years later. Wright certainly locates the beginning of the story in Genesis 15, in God’s covenant with Abram. But Wright declines to acknowledge either Paul’s credibility as a prophet or recognize “the nations” as the intended third-party beneficiaries of the promise made by God to Abraham. Holland’s methodology assumes that the various books of the New Testament canon should be read together as the expression of a narrative with a beginning and an end. But he does not recognize that the New Testament was completed before AD 70437 or that the apocalypse expected by Paul was in fact the end of the old heaven and the old earth as prophesied in Revelation. Holland is understandably reluctant to identify the Babylon of Revelation with Jerusalem, the city “where also their Lord was crucified”. (Rev 11:8)438 Nor is he keen to suggest that the body of Sin at war with the body of Christ was the “synagogue of Satan,” i.e. those “who claim to be Jews though they are not” (Rev 3:9). Only New Testament scholars embracing fulfilled covenant eschatology can resolve the otherwise insoluble puzzle inherent in a narrative reading of Paul’s letters which cannot tell us how the story he was telling ended.
If the destruction of the second-Temple system marked the end of the Bible story of Old Israel, one must interpret God’s eternal covenant with Abraham in a manner consistent with the historical experience of the church down to the present day. Wright never explores the implications of Genesis 22:18 for post-biblical church history. In that passage, God tells Abraham that “through your offspring all nations on earth will be blessed, because you have obeyed me”. Wright insists that God wanted to create a single, worldwide, multi-ethnic, multi-coloured family which had its prototype in the covenant community addressed by Paul. He imagines that family as a collective composed of generic human individuals whose Christian identity transcends the embodied reality of sex, race, and ethnicity. He simply whites out of mind the word “nations”. With Karl Barth, Wright shares “an amillennial eschatology of the new heaven and new earth without an intervening millennium of blessedness for all the world’s nations”.439 Accordingly, he is unable to recognize that the people of God have a continuing, post-biblical role to play in salvation history. If the hand of providence is still at work in human affairs, tribal and national loyalties must have a crucial role to play in establishing the kingdom of God on earth as it is in heaven.
Conclusion
Both Wright and James Dunn would do well to consider whether Acts 17: 26–27 can be reconciled with their proudly anti-nationalist, anti-racist, anti-anti-Semitic political theology of Christian universalism. In the Aeropagus Address, Paul affirms that national identity was created by God as the medium through which men “should seek the Lord, in the hope that they might grope for him and find him”. As things turned out, the early church applied that lesson to itself. Christians in late antiquity understood themselves as members of a new race (Greek: ethnos, genos, laos; Latin: genus, natio) of men. Even scholars with impeccably anti-racist credentials now recognize the importance of “ethnic reasoning” in the actual historical development of the people of God.440
During the first few centuries of the church’s history, therefore, the church became a single, worldwide, family of families drawn from a wide range of ethnicities. Following the collapse of the Roman Empire, however, the people of God began another stage in the execution of Christ’s Great Commission to “make disciples of all the nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit” (Matt 28:19). Over the next millennium, the church evolved into a confederal family of Christian nations.441 It seems, therefore, that the spirit and the letter of God’s covenant promises to Abraham were closer to fulfilment in the European Middle Ages than in the world of late antiquity as known to Paul.
Of course, the confederation of Christian nations once known as Christendom has long since disintegrated. Now the Bible
story of carnal, national Israel from its beginning to its end in AD 70 is over. But the Bible generally and the letters of Paul still provide both a warrant to every faithful Christian nation seeking to preserve and protect the kingdom of God and a warning to every nation which loses (or never had) faith in the man of sorrows. The Bible reveals an intimate relationship between the Jewish and the national questions. What is and ought to be the relationship between God and the nations? Is Jesus Christ the essential mediator of that relationship? What then ought to be the relationship between Christians and “those who call themselves Jews”? It is deeply troubling that so many New Testament scholars prefer to dodge such questions by taking refuge in an ahistorical, unrealistic, and unreciprocated spirit of ecumenical tolerance.442 One cannot but suspect that the collapse of Christian nationhood owes a great deal to the sort of sceptical relativism which (together with conspicuous displays of white Christian guilt) still figures so prominently in the new perspective on Paul.
8: Jesus as the Teacher of Israel in John 3:1–21
Introduction
This pericope begins in the dark of night when Jesus is visited by “a man of the Pharisees”. Although Nicodemus is “a member of the Jewish ruling council,” he addresses Jesus respectfully “as a teacher who has come from God,” noting his proven ability to perform miraculous signs. Jesus replies by declaring that “no-one can see the kingdom of God unless he is born again”. Nicodemus appears not to understand Jesus, expostulating: An old man “cannot enter a second time into his mother’s womb to be born!” (John 3:3). A notably one-sided dialogue then ensues between the two, dominated by a discourse by Jesus on the cosmic drama set in motion when the Son of Man comes from heaven to bring light into an earthly realm of darkness. The exchange places Jesus in the role of a teacher treating as a rather dim pupil a high-ranking individual who is himself styled “Israel’s teacher” (3:10).
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