DA Carson on the New Perspective
Lecture One
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Lecture One
o There are many new perspectives on Paul.
§ These have commonalities and are called together the “New Perspective on Paul.”
o Most suggest that the movement was non-intentionally kicked off by a 1963 article by Krister Stendahl called “The Introspective Conscious of the West” [actual title is “The Apostle Paul and the Introspective Conscience of the West”]
§ Since the Reformation, we have been afflicted with too much moral guilt.
§ We read that guilt into the NT and try to find a solution within the NT to address it.
§ But the NT does not seem to be as pre-occupied with guilt.
o The crucial beginning to the movement, however, was EP Sanders
§ His 1977 book – Paul and Palestinian Judaism – really kicked off this debate about Paul’s meaning.
· 450 pages
o 300+ on Second Temple Judaism
o the last 150 or so on Paul
· He challenges a Lutheran/Confessional Reformed/broad stream Evangelical consensus: the reconstruction of First Century Judaism by appealing to later sources.
· He claims after you strip out these late sources you do not find a massive legalistic religion in Judaism that our reading of Paul has taught us to find.
· Instead, what you find is “Covenantal Nomism”
o An approach to Law that is determined by a certain covenantal relationship.
o He claims that it covers all the branches of first century Judaism
o The main thrust of Covenantal Nomism is determined by eight points.
1. God
has chosen
2.
3. This
law implies both God’s promise to maintain his election of
4. and
5. God rewards obedience and punishes transgression (aka Deuteronomistic Theology)
6. The Law also provides for means of atonement.
· When there is transgression, there is a way to be reconciled to God which God has given.
7. This results in the maintenance and re-establishment of covenantal relationships.
8. All who are maintained in the covenant by obedience, atonement, and God’s mercy belong to the group that will be saved at the end.
· Sanders says that if this is the background that Paul is considering, then you cannot say that Paul is setting up Grace against Law.
o The Jews themselves saw themselves as chosen by Grace though maintained by a required covenantal obedience
o Pauline theology is similar.
· You are chosen by grace but Paul expects that believer’s faith will work out in obedience
· In one sense, then, Paul’s own theology is a form of covenantal nomism.
· The problem with Paul is that he does not use his own conversion as a paradigm for his own theology.
o in Romans you move from plight to solution.
· Problem is 1:18 – 3:20
· Solution: 3:21ff
o But this is not what happened in Paul’s own conversion.
·
Paul moves from realizing to Jesus is the answer
when he confronts him on the
· Now that he knows that Jesus is the answer, he’s got to figure out what the problem is.
· Though Romans works from plight to solution, in Paul’s own experience, in Sanders’ view, Paul moved from solution to plight.
o As a result, Paul developed a deepened theology of sin that went beyond the theology of sin of the Jews of the first century.
o This causes him to re-read Paul’s texts and when he cannot reconcile what Paul says with this, Sanders concludes that Paul has first century Judaism wrong.
o If you ask Sanders, “What is the difference between Paul and Judaism?” he says
· The heart of the change is not faith versus works or grace versus law, it is Christological: Jesus really is the Messiah. The Messiah had to die and rise again
·
o “Anything that appears sensitive to Jewish concerns after the odious atrocity of the Holocaust has got to find a certain kind of attractiveness.”
o “Suddenly, they’re just like us.”
o Another important figure in the New Perspective is James DG Dunn.
§ Dunn sees himself as a kind of new Adolf von Harnack.
· Harnack was attempting an entire history of early Christianity.
· Dunn’s early book on Christology begins with the assumption that first century Christian Jews could not have accepted the Deity of Christ and so that acknowledgment must have come late.
o No earlier than John’s Gospel which he dates no earlier than AD 90.
§ He was influenced by Sanders
§ If Sanders was right, then you still need to explain why the Christian Church separated from Judaism.
· He calls this “the parting of the ways.”
· It was not
o faith versus works
o grace versus law
o gospel versus merit theology
· Dunn claims that the heart of the issue for Paul was not legalism but a kind of nationalism.
o The parts of the law that Paul found most difficult were not the moral categories but what Dunn calls the boundary markers
· Sabbath laws
· Food Laws
· Circumcision
· the things that marked the Jews off from other people
· so in Galatians we see a large focus on food, circumcision
o Paul attacks this because he wants just one people – Jew and Gentile – a unified church
· To get a unified church, you’ve got to get rid of the boundary markers.
o So Paul is less interested in guilt and moral shame and much more interested in these boundary markers
· “Works of the Law” refer to these boundary markers
o In recent years, in response to critics who cited passages that tended against Dunn’s view, he has modified this position and broadened that sometimes “Works of the Law” sometimes isn’t referring to boundary markers
o DA Carson has been told that Dunn has written a 60 page response to Vol. 2 of Justification and Variegated Nomism
· Carson is told that the heart of Dunn’s response is that within Paul’s understanding of justification is some level of nationalism that Paul is confronting and that Carson et al have gone way over the top with a 1200 page tome.
· No one has any problem with this.
· Carson says this is called historical revisionism.
§ On NT Wright
· Tom Wright was at Oxford when DA Carson was at Cambridge
· They knew each other and would meet together
· At that time he was a traditional 5 point Calvinist and was an inerrantist.
· He now calls inerrancy “that stupid American doctrine.”
· He believes that Jesus had no consciousness of being God
· Probably his most influential book on matters Pauline is The Climax of the Covenant
§ NT Wright and Justification
· At the heart of his thinking on justification is this: The exile is not over.
o It’s not over when the first group of 43,000 went back to Jerusalem
o It’s not over when the temple is rebuilt
o Because the promises that God gives through the prophets regarding the end of the exile anticipates something far more spectacular, generous, and sweeping than what you see
o So the Jews in the first century considered themselves to still be under the exile.
o Jesus comes to end the exile
o The Deuteronimistic pattern of blessing and cursing (Dt. 28-30) had not been brought to completion.
o The people still waited for promises of restoration.
· For Paul, faith in Christ resolved that issue and satisfied Paul’s deepest longing.
o Paul came to believe that the exile ended in the death of the Messiah.
o The corporate guilt of the Covenant community had been paid by Christ and that ends the exile
o And by His resurrection he brings in the Gentiles as well.
o This creates a new covenant community.
o Jesus resurrection represents the ushering in of the nations to share in the blessings of the Covenant and the end of the exile. People are reconciled to God.
o Jesus directs our attention away from Torah, Temple, and kosher laws, etc. to Himself and He claims the constitute the locus of true Israel that has now come to the end of the exilic period.
· DA Carson says: “Tom Wright has the ability to see something that is partly true…and then he tends to get on his white horse and ride it off merrily in all directions.”
o As a result, texts that don’t seem to be talking about this get squeezed into the paradigm
· E.g. the Parable of the Prodigal Son - Lk. 15:11-32 – is seen as about the exile
· All of God’s victory is bound up in Jesus right now
o Tom Wright tends to downplay references in the Gospels to the Parousia or the End of the Age or
o So Jesus doesn’t ask for individual repentance in the ordinary sense that you and I have received, but rather he asks for a turning away
· from revolutionary zeal,
· from dependence upon the Temple, and
· from nationalism
· and turning to Jesus
o Faith becomes loyalty and trust in the leader – Jesus Himself
o The sinners are the “notoriously wicked” and even they are admitted
· Paul
o Justification for Paul is God’s declarative act to the effect that you are in the Covenant.
o (An Aside on the Protestant view of Justification
· Justification by Grace alone through faith alone was not invented at the time of the Reformation.
· Tom Oden’s A Justification Reader shows how widespread that thinking was in the Patristic Period (though it was not the only view)
· The Reformers were recovering something both Pauline and Patristic. They weren’t trying to invent something new)
o Two differences between that understanding of Justification and the common Protestant thought about the concept since the Reformation
· 1st Difference –
· Most see the declarative act of justification as taking place at the beginning of the individual’s Christian experience, then there is progressive sanctification.
o You are declared just before God because of Christ’s substitutionary death on your behalf.
o You are reconcilied to God
o God is satisfied by Jesus’ offering
o And as a result you are declared just before him.
· In Wright’s view, this declaration is an ongoing declaration.
o It has nothing in particular to do with the beginning of your Christian experience.
o It’s God’s ongoing declaration of your status before God
§ Because the exile has come to an end
§ Jesus has borne the sins of his people
o As these people are embraced before God they are declared to be in the Covenant too.
· 2nd Difference
· Justification is God’s declarative act not that you are just but that you are in the Covenant
o This went back to a view of Justification that had to do with Covenantal Loyalty rather than Justice.
o It’s roots go back to Ernst Kaseman and beyond.
o Wright does not deny that there is a sin issue that must be overcome and is overcome by the Cross
o DA Carson: “Thus justification becomes one step removed from dealing with sin and being declared just before God.”
o This has the effect of raising ecclesiology above soteriology
o But in the Reformed view, soteriology comes first and ecclesiology flows out of it.
o Wright would still say that his understanding of the total work of Christ includes the payment for sins achieved by the cross.
o Contra Wright, Carson points out that the dik word group is bound up with some concept of justice.
· There are pastoral implications to this discussion
o
Peter
Bolt once heard Wright give a lecture in Cambridge
some years ago called “Justification: Can We Finally Get It Right?”
o He asked Tom Wright this question:
· It’s the middle of the night and the phone rings.
· An old lady in your parish calls and lets you know that she only has a few mins to live and that she’s scared.
· You drive to her house.
· At her house the doctor tells you that she surely only has about 10 minutes to live.
· She asks you, “What must I do to be saved?”
· What do you say?
o Tom said, “That’s a good question; I’ll have to think about that.”
o You are not playing around with something peripheral but with something that’s near the heart of the gospel.
o Some more moderate folks – something of a subdivision of the New Perspective
§ Some do not consider them even to be within the New Perspective.
§ They argue that although you are justified by grace alone through faith alone at your conversion, there is, as it were, a kind of further justification that is required when you come to the final judgment
§ You must show not only that you trust Christ and Him alone but the works that have flown out of your salvation and are the product of Grace must serve not only as attesting evidence of the reality of salvation but in some sense as ground.
§ You are not only justified by the finished work of Christ but in some sense also by works.
· Not at conversion but when you stand before God on the last day.
· Your justification at that point is in some ways a justification of works.
· They would say that you can only do these works by the grace of God working in you.
o Carson points out that a decent Catholic would say the same thing.
§ The issue whether these works are only attesting works or if they somehow comprise any portion of the ground of your final justification.
§ These people will usually say that in the Old Testament God did not require perfection; He required broad stream covenantal faithfulness.
· So they understand that Romans 2 teaches that faithfulness to the Law was a live option and was achieved by some.
· Carson notes that this makes it very difficult to harmonize Romans 2 with Gal 3.
o To get a fine view of the whole field of the relationships between the Old and New Testaments and between Law and Grace, then read the essay by Stephen Westerholm in volume 2 of Justification and Variegated Nomism
o
If you’ve never read anything on this whole
debate, then read Westerholm’s Perspectives
Old and New on Paul
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